7 - A Vision at the Utmost Boundary

Summary

Introduction

There is no dearth of scholarship on Muhammad's night journey and ascension, to the extent that it is quite challenging to write something that has not yet been said. Sufi understandings of the vision of God in relation to Muhammad's ascension (miʿrāj), however, are still underexplored and worthy of further in-depth study. This is what is intended with this chapter. Through a detailed reading and discussion of the commentaries by our main authors on verses related to the vision during Muhammad's night journey (isrāʾ), we hope to shed new light on how Sufi authors understood this vision, and how this relates to conventional understandings of the vision during the isrāʾ and miʿrāj in Islamic tradition.

In most Islamic literature that deals with the isrāʾ and miʿrāj, descriptions of Paradise and Hell play a prominent role and are even arguably the most important aspect of the ascension narratives. However, in our Sufi Qurʾan commentaries this theme is strikingly absent. Sufi exegesis of the miʿrāj-related verses shows the same disregard for the otherworld that we observed in Chapter 3. Only the Qurʾanic passages that the authors could interpret in relation to the themes of nearness and vision come to the fore. The journey to Paradise and Hell was not worth mentioning for Sufi exegetes: only the journey to God mattered to them. In Sufism, the miʿrāj has traditionally functioned as a model for instruction to attain this nearness to and vision of God. The likes of al-Basṭāmī, al-Sulamī and al-Qushayrī produced and collected texts that gave a mystical twist to Muhammad's ascent.

In our analysis, we focus on one particular aspect of the miʿrāj narrative: the vision of God. Böwering has distinguished four main motifs relating to the vision of God in the ascension narrative, each related to a different early Sufi authority. The first two motifs are reminiscent of what we have encountered in the analysis of Moses's request for the vision. The first motif is the vision during the ascension as a foretaste of the vision in the hereafter, which Böwering relates to al-Wāsiṭī (d. 320/932). The second motif considers the vision during the ascension not as a foretaste of the world to come, but rather as the recapturing of the primordial vision of God at the Day of the Covenant. Böwering relates this to Sahl al-Tustarī.