Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 251
experience the “unity of God” at the term of a series of highly
articulated stages of personal striving, marked at its more advanced
levels by the dispensation of certain equally well defined
graces from God. From these authors one can elicit some generalized
notions about the structure of the Sufi “way” (tariqa), as it
had come to be called. Their treatment is rarely theoretical, however,
since the works in question generally illustrate their points
rather than argue or explain them.
The path to perfection began, of course, with a “conversion,” a
turning through repentance from the ways of the world toward a
consciousness of God. This was, by common consent, the first of
the “stations” (maqamat), and was followed by a series of similar
stages: scrupulosity of conscience with regard to moral action, selfrestraint
from even legitimate pleasures, voluntary poverty, patience,
abandonment to God, and, finally, the most perfect station,
that of divine complaisance, where the striver is in perfect conformity
with God’s will.
These stations are the fruits of the mystic’s own exertions and
are akin to the steps along the Christians’ via purgativa. But once
they are achieved, the Sufi’s further spiritual progress depends not
so much on personal effort as on the benevolent and gracious
mercy of God, who bestows the various “states” (ahwal) on the
soul. Here too the way is carefully mapped. The Sufi theoreticians
distinguished between the states of love, fear, hope, longing, intimacy,
tranquillity, contemplation, and certainty. These were by
their very nature transitory, as was the culmination of the Sufi’s
striving and the terminus of the way, unification with God.
The Sufi’s transport was a transient state, a brief exaltation into
the presence of God. For some it was a unique and almost random
event, but it is clear that in Islam many pious souls aspired to this
state and they took well-defined and even scholastic steps to attain
it. The convert to Sufism was regarded as a mere novice and was
placed under the direction of a sheikh already accomplished in the
spiritual life. At first that elder may simply have been a skilled and
experienced director of souls, but eventually that ideal was replaced,
as it was in Eastern Christianity, by the notion of a charismatic
guide, a “spiritual father” who possessed the gift of divine