Spirituality

With the disappearance of traditional Islamic scholars from the Ummah, two very different pictures of Tasawwuf emerge today.


The very first thing a Sufi, as a man of religious learning knows is that the Shariah and Aqida of Islam are above every human being. Whoever does not know this will never be a Sufi, except in the orientalist sense of the word—like someone standing in front of the stock exchange in an expensive suit with a briefcase to convince people he is a stockbroker. A real stockbroker is something else.


Because this distinction is ignored today by otherwise well-meaning Muslims, it is often forgotten that the ulama who have criticised Sufis, such as Ibn al-Jawzi in his Talbis Iblis [The Devil’s deception], or Ibn Taymiya in places in his Fatawa, or Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, were not criticising Tasawwuf as an ancillary discipline to the Shariah. The proof of this is Ibn al-Jawzi’s five-volume Sifat al-safwa, which contains the biographies of the very same Sufis mentioned in al-Qushayri’s famous Tasawwuf manual, al-Risala al-Qushayriyya. Ibn Taymiya considered himself a Sufi of the Qadiri order, and volumes 10 and 11 of his 37-volume Majmu‘ al-fatawa are devoted to Tasawwuf. And Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya wrote his three-volume Madarij al-salikin, a detailed commentary on Abdullah al-Ansari al-Harawi’s tract on the spiritual stations of the Sufi path, Manazil al-sa’irin. These works show that their authors’ criticisms were not directed at Tasawwuf as such, but rather at specific groups of their times, and they should be understood for what they are.  As in other Islamic sciences, mistakes historically did occur in Tasawwuf, most of them stemming from not recognising the primacy of Shari ‘ah and ‘Aqida above all else. Tasawwuf was accepted as an essential part of the Islamic religion by the ulama of this Ummah. The proof of this is all the famous scholars of Shari‘ah sciences who had the higher education of Tasawwuf, among them, Ibn ‘Abidin, al-Razi, Ahmad Sirhindi, Zakariyya al-Ansari, al-‘Izz ibn ‘Abd al-Salam, Ibn Daqiq al-‘Eid and Ibn Hajar al-Haytami,. Among the Sufis whose missionary work Islamised entire regions are such men as the founder of the Sanusiyya order, Muhammad ‘Ali Sanusi, whose efforts and jihad from 1807 to 1859 consolidated Islam as the religion of people from the Libyan Desert to sub-Saharan Africa and the Shadhili Sheikh Muhammad Ma‘ruf and Qadiri Sheikh Uways al-Barawi, whose efforts spread Islam westward and inland from the East African Coast. It is plain from the examples of such men what kind of Muslims have been Sufis; namely, all kinds, right across the board—and that Tasawwuf did not prevent them from serving Islam in any way they could.


To summarize everything, I have said: In looking first at Tasawwuf and Shariah, we found that many Quranic verses and Sahih Hadiths oblige the Muslim to eliminate haram inner states as arrogance, envy, and fear of anyone besides Allah and on the other hand, to acquire such obligatory inner states as mercy, love of one’s fellow Muslims, presence of mind in prayer, and love of the Prophet (Pbuh). We then turned to the level of Iman, and found that though the ‘Aqida of Muslims is that Allah alone has any effect in this world, keeping this in mind in every day life is a function of a Muslim’s yaqin, his certainty. And we found that Tasawwuf, as an ancillary discipline to ‘Aqida, emphasizes the systematic increase of this certainty through both mudhakara, ‘teaching tenets of faith’ and dhikr, ‘the remembrance of Allah,’ in accordance with the words of the Prophet (Pbuh) about Ihsan that “it is worship Allah as though you see Him.”


To return to the starting point, with the disappearance of traditional Islamic scholars from the Ummah, two very different pictures of Tasawwuf emerge today. If we read books written after the dismantling of the traditional fabric of Islam by colonial powers in the last century, we find the big hoax-Islam without spirituality and Shariah without Tasawwuf. But if we read the classical works of Islamic scholarship, we learn that Tasawwuf has been a Shariah science like Tafsir, Hadith, or any other, throughout the history of Islam. The Prophet (Pbuh) said: “Truly, Allah does not look at your outward forms and wealth, but rather at your hearts and your works” (Sahih Muslim, 4.1389: hadith 2564). And this is the brightest hope that Islam can offer a modern world darkened by materialism and nihilism.. 

(To be concluded)