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Annihilation in the Messenger of God: The Development of a Sufi Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Valerie J. Hoffman
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Extract

Scholars have long noted that the Prophet Muhammad assumed increasing importance in Sufi thought and practice over the centuries. For Sufis, belief in Muhammad's perfection often went beyond the standard affirmation of his immunity from error, and sometimes went so far as the assertions of the Spanish Arab Qadi ʿIyad (d. 1149/50) that Muhammad had assumed all the qualities embodied in the Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God. Belief in Muhammad as a primordial cosmic light of divine origin is documented as early as the 8th to 9th centuries, and reached its fullest exposition in the works of Ibn ʿArabi (1165-1240) and his successors. Popular devotion to the Prophet in the form of poetry in his honor and celebrations of his birthday is documented at least as early as the 13th century.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , August 1999 , pp. 351 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

NOTES

Author's Note: Consultation of the Bibliothèque Nationale's manuscript of Al-Kamālāt al-ilāhiyya fiʾl-sifāt al-muhammadiyya was enabled by a visiting scholarship from the ficole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a grant from the Research Board at the University of Illinois.

1 Abū ʾl-Fadl Qādī ʿlyād ibn Mūsā al-Yahsābī al-Sabtī, Kitāb al-shifāʾ bi ta ʿrifal-mustafā (The Book of Healing by Acquainting [the Reader[ with the Chosen One) (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʾIImiyya, 1979), 2 volumes in 1.Google Scholar

2 For example, the Qurʾan commentary by Muqātil (d. 767), a Zaydi Shici: Nwyia, Paul, Exégèse coranique et langage mystique, Recherches de l'lnstitut de Lettres Orientales, vol. 49 (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1970), 95.Google Scholar Among the Sunnis, the doctrine of the Muhammadan light was first expounded by the Sufi Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 896): Bowering, Gerhard, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qurʾanic Hermeneutics of the Sufi Sahl at-Tustari (d. 283/896) (New York: de Gruyter, 1980).Google Scholar

3 al-Jazālī, Muhammad ibn Sulaymān, Dalāʾil al-khayrāt via shawāriq al-anwār fi dhikr al-salāt ʿalā ʾl-nabl al-mukhtār (Proofs of the Good Things and the Radiance of Lights in the Recollection of Blessing the Chosen Prophet), ms. no. 377 (Marrakesh: Ben Yāsuf Library).Google Scholar

4 Padwick, Constance E., Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer Manuals in Common Use (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1961), xviii, 149.Google Scholar

5 Katz, Jonathan G., Dreams, Sufism and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of Muhammad al-Zawawi (Leiden, New York, Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1996), xx.Google Scholar

6 There has been a great deal of disagreement as to the date of death of al-Jili, ranging from 1402/3, as indicated on some of the published editions of Al-lnsān al-kāmil (The Perfect Man), to 1428, the date provided by Carl Brockelmann in his Geschichte der arabischen Literatur. I rely on information from Michel Chodkiewicz, who, in a letter dated 23 May 1995, wrote that the India office manuscript of Ghunyat arbāb al-samāʿ (Sufficiency of the Masters of Audition) by al-Jili states (f. 295b) that al-Jili's son wrote at the end of a manuscript of Al-Insān al-kāmil that his father died in Jumāda II 811 (November 1408 A.D.). Although Louis Massignon says that he saw al-Jili's tomb in Baghdad (Receuil des iextes inédits concernant l'histoire de la mystique en pays d'lslam [Paris, 1929[, 148, n. 2), Chodkiewicz writes that al-Jili is buried in Zabid next to his shaykh, al-Jabartī, and that a recent letter from Yemen indicates that his tomb is still visited.Google Scholar

7 ʿArabī, Ibn, Al-Futūhat al-makkiyya (Beirut: Dār Sādir, 1966), 1:134–35, 144–45.Google Scholar

8 ʿl-Dīn ibn al-ʾArabī, Muhyī (Ibn ʾArabī), Fusūs al-hikam (Bezels of Wisdom), ed. Abū sup;l-Aʿlī ʾAffifi (Beirut: Dīr al-Kitīb al-ʾArabi, 1966), 2 vols., 1:49.Google Scholar

9 Chittick, William C., The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi's Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 21.Google Scholar

10 Ibn ʿArabi, Al-Futuhat al-makkiyya, 1:134–35, 150, and frequently throughout the text.

11 Ibid., 3:251.

12 Ibid., 4:184.

13 Dhikr, “remembrance” of God, is a Qurʾanic term (33:41, 29:45, and many other verses) that normally denotes, in the Sufi context, ritualized recitation or recollection of the Names of God, though here Ibn ʿArabi is encouraging the recitation of blessings on the Prophet as one's personal dhikr. Sufi shaykhs must give each disciple a particular dhikr suitable for him or her to perform in private devotions.

14 Ibn ʾArabi, Al-Futūhāt al-makkiyya, 4:184.

15 Ibid.

16 Qāb qawsayn was published by Yūsuf al-Nabhānī in his Jawāhir al-bihār fi fadāʾ il al-nabi almukhtār (The Gems of the Seas in the Virtues of the Chosen Prophet) (Cairo: Mustafā al-Bābi al-Halabī and Sons, 1966).Google Scholar It was re-published in Tabriʾat al-dhimma fi nush al-umma wa tadhikrat ūliʾl-albāb li ʾl-sayr ilā ʾl-sawāb (Discharging the Duty to Counsel the Nation and a Reminder for Those with Pure Hearts to Travel the Right Path) by the controversial Sudanese shaykh of the Burhāniyya, Muhammad ʿUthmān al-Burhanl (d. 1983) (Khartoum: Burhāniyya Dasāqiyya Shādhiliyya Order, 1974?). The latter book became the object of a vitriolic press campaign in Egypt in 1976 and has been banned in that country, allegedly for teaching heterodox doctrines deemed inconsistent with Sunni Islam, especially ideas concerning the Muhammadan Reality and the cosmic stature of the Prophet and his family. However, there is nothing original in the book at all. It reproduces verbatim texts from Ibn ʿArabi, al-Jili, Suyuti, and others, which demonstrate the superiority of the Prophet and his family and the veneration due them. It appears that the campaign against the Burhaniyya might have had political or economic motives, although it is also possible that the doctrines disseminated in the book were thought to be appropriate for advanced Sufis, but not for public consumption. On the contents of this book and the criticism of it in the Egyptian press, see Hoffman, Valerie J., Sufism, Mystics, and Saints in Modern Egypt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), chap. 10. Al-Nabhani says that he used manuscripts of al-Jili's work from Cairo and Medina, and that he also bought another copy from a bookseller who came from Aleppo. Muhammad ʿUthman simply reprinted Nabhani's version of the text.Google Scholar

17 I read a manuscript of this text at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Other copies exist in Cairo, Damascus, and Rabat, among other places.

18 This is generally said to be a hadith qudsi, but it is not found in books of hadith. See William, C. Chittick's notation in Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 201, line 60.2.Google Scholar

19 Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. no. 13386, f. 169b.

20 When I delivered an earlier version of this paper at the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society Symposium, Berkeley, November 1994, John Mercer commented, in the symposium's closing remarks, on the irony of “adorning” oneself by “stripping.”

21 Bibliotheque Nationale, ms. no. 13386, f. 217a.

22 Qāb qawsayn, in Nabhānā, Jawāhir al-bihār, 4:228.

23 A Qurʾanic phrase (2:256, 31:22) of ambiguous reference.

24 Qāb qawsayn, in Nabhānī, Jawāhir al-bihār, 4:218. Although I have translated the quote as if al-Jili were talking to one individual, many of the words are in the plural. Al-Jili moves freely between the sinAnnihilation in the Messenger of God 367 gular and the plural, and I felt that keeping the translation in the singular better conveyed the meaning and sense of intimacy contained in his writing. The last phrase, “looking at their Lord,” which grammatically does not fit with what precedes it, is taken from Qurʾan 75:23: “On that day faces will be radiant, looking at their Lord.” The Qur'anic context refers to the Last Day, and the faces are those of the righteous, but al-Jili uses the same phrase to refer to what is commonly called mushāhada, “witnessing” in mystical experience the divine realities.

25 Ibid., 227.

26 Ibid., 231.

27 Ibid., 232.

28 Ibid., 236.

29 Ibid., 237–38.

30 Ibid., 239.

31 Young manliness” (in contrast to the pre-Islamic ethic of muruwwa, “manliness”) or “chivalry,” usually a word referring to a code of Sufi ethics. Qushayri applies this word in his Risāla to the annihilation of the ego, for the fatā (“young man”) in the Qurʾan is Abraham, crusher of the idols, and the idol of every human being is his own soul or ego: Abū ʾl-Qāsim ʿAbd al-Karim al-Qushayrī, Al-Risāla ʾlqushayriyya fi ʿilm al-tasawwuf (The Treatise of al-Qushayrl on the Science of Sufism) (Cairo: Maktabat Muhammad CA1I Subayh, n.d.), 177.Google Scholar

32 Qāb qawsayn, in NabhānI, Jawāhir al-bihār, 4:239.

33 “Annihilation in the shaykh” (fanāʾfi ʾl-shaykh) is based on the idea that the shaykh is the most perfect manifestation of the Prophet available to the disciple, and the Prophet is in turn the most perfect manifestation of God. Disciples who visualize their shaykh in meditation and love him deeply may attain to such a deep identification with the shaykh as to achieve “annihilation” of their own egos in him. In so doing, the disciple acquires some of the spiritual realizations of the shaykh, which ultimately leads the disciple into the presence of the Prophet, as he sees the Prophet through his shaykh. It is not certain when this practice developed, although Annemarie Schimmel cites the phrase fanāʾ fi ʾl-shaykh from a poem by Farld al-DIn ʿAttār (d. 1220). The Naqshbandiyya consider tawajjuh, concentration upon the shaykh, as necessary for the successful performance of dhikr. Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 237.Google Scholar

34 According to Aditya Behl, who presented a paper titled, “Yoga in Sufi Circles: The Shattaris of Mughal India,” at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, November 1993. The text in question is called Jam-i jihān nāma and has not been published.

35 This is a point made by James Winston Morris in “Ibn ʿArabi and His Interpreters, Part II (Conclusion): Influences and Interpretations,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 107, 1 (1987): 101–19; see esp. 109, concerning al-Jili's commentary on Ibn ʿArabi's Risalat al-Anwar: “What is remarkable about that commentary, in comparison with the works by authors discussed earlier in this section, is its consistent, unmistakable reference to direct experience of the realities in question, not just as a premise of the discussion, but as its very raison d'ʾtre. Al-Jili, like Ibn ʿArabi and unlike so many of his other commentators, is careful here to raise questions of ‘theory’ or intellectual explanation as they naturally arise within the context and ultimate aim of spiritual realization—not as they are generated by extraneous apologetic concerns, or by an internal intellectual dialectic taken as an end in itself.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Talk by Arthur, F. Buehler at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, November 1993.Google Scholar

37 Bernd Radtke is currently involved in translating Al-Ibriz into English and has written two articles on the book: “Zwischen Traditionalismus und Intellektualismus: Geistesgeschichtliche und historiografische Bemerkungen zum Ibriz des al-Lamati, Ahmad b. Al-Mubarak,” Built on Solid Rock: Studies in Honour of Professor Ebbe Egede Knudsen on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, April 11, 1997, ed. Wardini, Elie (Oslo, 1997), 240–42,Google Scholar and “Ibriziana: Themes and Sources of a Seminal Sufi Work,” Sudanic Africa 7 (1996): 113–58.Google Scholar

38 According to Michel Chodkiewicz, Un Océan sans rivage: Ibn Arabic le livre et la loi (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), 30–31.Google Scholar

39 Wird (pl. awrād) is a prayer or litany that must be given to a Sufi disciple by his master for daily recitation and is thought to be the key to enlightenment. Dhikr is part of the individual Sufi's daily wird.

40 Borno was a kingdom in what is today northeastern Nigeria and northern Cameroon, south of Lake Chad.

41 Al-Ibrīz (Beirut: Dār al-fikr, n.d.), 13–16.

42 Although in earlier Sufi and philosophical works dhāt means “essence,” and must still mean that with respect to God, who does not have a body, it is clear from the context of the text that in this case dhāt means the physical body. Fritz Meier previously noted this use of the word dhāt in “Eine Auferstehung Mohammeds bei Suyuti,” Der Islam 62 (1985): 46, n. 81.Google Scholar

43 Al-Ibrīz, 511

44 Ibid., 172–73.

45 Ibid., 518.

46 Rahman, Fazlur, Islam, 2nd ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 206.Google Scholar

47 Gibb, H. A. R., Mohammedanism, 2nd ed. (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 117.Google Scholar

48 Trimingham, J. Spencer, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 106.Google Scholar

49 Voll, John Obert, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982), 55.Google Scholar

50 Katz, Dreams, Sufism and Sainthood, xx.

51 O'Fahey, R. S. and Radtke, Bernd, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” Der Islam 70, no. 1 (1993): 52–87.Google Scholar This article contains a thorough summary of recent debates about neo-Sufism and addresses all aspects of its definition, not only the metaphysical doctrines considered here. The summary of the major characteristics of neo-Sufism is on p. 57, and is based on Trimingham, Sufi Orders, 106–7; Martin, B. G., Muslim Brotherhoods in 19th-century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 71–72, 108; and Voll, Islam, 55–59, 65–67, 76–79, 103–4, 134–36.Google Scholar

52 Abun-Nasr, Jamil M., The Tijaniyya: A Sufi Order in the Modern World (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965), 29–40, 57.Google Scholar

53 Although this term describes Ibn ʿArabi's doctrine, it originates not with him, but with his disciple and son-in-law, Sadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 1274). On the various ways of looking at the meaning of wahdat al-wujūd, usually translated as “oneness of being,” see Chittick, The Sufi Path, 3, 6–8.

54 O'Fahey, , Enigmatic Saint, 102–3, 209.Google Scholar

55 For a strong argument regarding Ibn ʿArabī's pervasive influence on Sufi thought, see Chodkiewicz, Un Océan sans rivage, 17–37.

56 O'Fahey and Radtke, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” 71–73.

57 O'Fahey, Enigmatic Saint, 130–42.

58 al-Sanūsi, Ahmad al-Sharīf, Al-Anwār al-qudsiyya fi muqaddamāt al-tariqa l-sanūsiyya (Istanbul: Matbacat ʿAmira, 1920-1923), 5.Google Scholar

59 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 4. Given the previously discussed use of the term dhāt in the meaning of body, it is not clear whether “body” would not have been preferable to “essence” in Evans-Pritchard's translation.Google Scholar

60 Handbook on Cyrenaica, pt. 10 (Cairo, 1943), 29; cited in Ziadeh, Nicola A., Sanusiyah: A Study of a Revivalist Movement in Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1958), 88.Google Scholar

61 For example, Ahmad Sidqī al-Dajjānī says that the Sanusis believed in the possibility of union (itlihād) with the Prophet and aimed to achieve that. “They do not go beyond that goal to believe in the possibility of union with God, as some of the other Sufi orders have done”: Al-Dajjāni, , Al-Haraka ʾlsanūsiyya (Beirut: Dār Lubnūn, 1967), 247. Nicola Ziadeh reports similarly in Sanusiyah, 87.Google Scholar

62 Jong, F. de, Turuq and Turuq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 151–52, n. 120.Google Scholar

63 Ziadeh, Sanusiyah, 87–88.Google Scholar

64 Majmūʿatu ʾl-wird al-kablr, trans. Padwick, Muslim Devotions, 151.

65 Al-Fayd wa ʾl-madad min hadrat al-rasūl al-sanad, trans. Padwick, Muslim Devotions, 150.

66 O'Fahey and Radtke, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” 70.

67 O'Fahey, Enigmatic Saint, 202.

68 Vincent Cornell suggests that the Jazuliyya brotherhood, “in their creation of the concept of the ‘Muhammadan method’ (al-tarīqa ʾl-muhammadiyya), their advocacy of the Sharifian ideology of political rule, and their systematic attempts at transforming the nature of social relations in the regions where they lived … may have been the first truly ‘neo-Sufi’ movement in the history of Islam”: Vincent Cornell, “Mirrors of Prophethood: The Evolving Image of the Spiritual Master in the Western Maghrib from the Origins of Sufism to the End of the Sixteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1989), 30.Google Scholar

69 Alexander Knysh, “Ibn ʿArabi in the Yemen: His Admirers and Detractors,” Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society 10 (1992): 49. Knysh appears to be quite critical of al-Jili, saying that he advocated abandoning ascetic exercises and meditation in favor of obtaining knowledge from the writings of Ibn ʿArabi. The passage Knysh quotes, however, appears to indicate that the writings of Ibn ʿArabi were a more reliable guide to knowledge than any insights a novice might be able to obtain on his own. As Knysh puts it, “Al-Shaykh al-Akbar's works may be used as a kind of short-cut, leading the novice directly to a greater conceptual clarity, and, in the long run, to a spiritual and intellectual perfection.” What appears to be implied is that the individual disciple cannot hope to arrive through his own efforts at the depth of wisdom Ibn ʿArabi obtained, and these were already available in Ibn ʿArabi's writings. It does not appear to me that al-Jili is advocating abdicating spiritual exercises or personal insight. Indeed, that characterization appears to be refuted by the fact that al-Jili's own writings represent modifications of Ibn ʿArabi's doctrine based on his own mystical experiences, as Najāh Mahmūd al-Ghunaymi demonstrates in Al-Manūzir alilāhiyya li Dl-Shaykh ʿAbd al-Karlm al-Jili (“The Divine Visions” by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Karim al-Jili) (Cairo: Dār al-Manār, 1987). James Morris also writes, “Jill proceeds to develop the same broad themes (metaphysics, cosmology, spiritual psychology, etc.) [as his predecessors in the ”school“ of Ibn ʿArabī and Qūnawī[, but with an originality and independence which is consistently grounded-like Ibn ʿArabī's—in his own spiritual insight and experience”: Morris, “Ibn ʿArabi and His Interpreters,” 108.Google Scholar

70 Hoffman, , Sufism, Mystics, and Saints, 64–65, 140–41.Google Scholar