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  Today, Sufism is a living religion within the Islamic tradition and the Ulema. While it diligently professes the fundamental belief of Islam that there is one God and that Muhammad is his last prophet, any scrutiny of its history will yield a wealth of allusions and influences from other religions and beliefs.

  Elliot Miller in his definitive book, Sufism and the Mystical Muslims (Foreword, 1986) says: “Sufism has always been more open to outside influence than other forms of Islam. In addition to early influences from Christianity, one can find elements of Zoroastrianism, Neoplatonism, Hinduism and other diverse traditions.”

  One of the historical figures of Sufism, Prince Dara Shikoh (d.1619), the eldest son of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, was a Sufi of the Qadriyya order. He regarded himself as a devout Muslim and scholar and devoted part of his tragic life to translating Hindu scriptural texts—the Bhagvad Gita and the Upanishads—from Sanskrit to Persian. Dara Shikoh believed the Upanishads to be the “hidden books” to which the Koran refers. He wrote that “they contain the essence of unity and they are secrets which have to be kept hidden.” His study of Hindu philosophy led him to believe that Sufism and Advaita Vedanta, the essential philosophy of the Upanishads and the Bhagvad Gita, are the same.

  Dara Shikoh’s testimony is perhaps the strongest recognition of this common mystical ground—the foundation of the spiritual belief in the oneness of God, the human soul and all the universal manifestations of energy. He was an Indian prince, cruelly executed by his younger brother Aurangzeb, a fundamentalist Muslim who killed him as much to seize the throne as for what he considered his un-Islamic beliefs.

  It is probably from the inception or revelation of Islam that the Sufi tradition took upon itself the idealization of the relationship between the master and disciple. Prophet Muhammad had four devoted disciples, among them Salman the Persian, who would have brought Zoroastrian beliefs with him as part of his devotion to the prophet of God, a God recognized equally singly by Zoroastrians as Ahura Mazda (who, according to the twentieth-century Sufi Inayat Khan, contributes the “hu” in the mystic invocation “Allah-hu”). These disciples, like those of Jesus (Issah, in Rumi’s texts), imbibed the teachings and went forth to spread them. The master–disciple relationship in Sufism of the sheikh and the murid, the learner, is much closer in spirit and practice to the prescribed relationship of the guru and the chela in Hindu tradition.

  The sheikh is not simply the repository of a passedon wisdom. In him, the murid sees a light that he must acquire through knowledge, through meditation, through the purging of his desires and consciousness, and through his deeds. “Light upon light!” And the Sufi desires to become a part of “it” through the realization that he always was.

  For other orders, acceptance of the five pillars of Islam, obedience of the Sharia and in some cases ritual observance, such as purdah or hijab, are necessary and sufficient practices to include one as a Muslim. For the Sufi these are the minimal garb of the Muslim, the outer and even hollow, unfulfilling forms. The essence of Sufi devotion is the spiritual awakening, the realization, the cleansing, the enlightenment, the oneness—the light. All ritual or practice, which may take the form of whirling dances, of subservience, of devotion to a master; all learning, all association with a master must lead to That.

  In the pronouncements of Sufi masters, whatever the apologists and missionaries of fundamentalist and scholastic Islam may say, there are the truths and epiphanies of other mystical religions. Sufism is in truth a universal religion of the spirit which adopted the disciplines of Islam and used its dynamism to disseminate itself. In essence Sufism is, as Advaita Vedanta is, monist and pantheistic. Within the discipline and the revelation of Islam, in which it has chosen to reside and has developed and been disseminated, it cannot adopt the pantheism that gives deities several forms and names and worships them in temples with altars and graven images, but it embraces all forms of devotion.

  Ibn ‘Arabi, a Sufi mystic of the same century as Rumi, reviled as a heretic by some and honored as a supreme master by others, says:

  My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christians, and a temple for idols and the pilgrims to the Ka’ba and the tables of Torah, and the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and faith.

  There is, in the Sufi spiritual vocabulary, the lover Laila who literally stands for “night” but is divine reality. She is a metaphor and in Sufi pronouncements takes the form of an illusory deity: “Seekest thou Laila, when she is manifest within thee? Thou deemest her to be other, but she is not other than thou.”5

  The quest is all. No orthodoxy or doctrine of the jurists ought to stand in its way. Mahmud Shabistari in his work Gulshan-i Raz (The Mystic Rose Garden) declares: “What is a mosque, what is a synagogue, what is a fire-temple? ‘I’ and ‘you’ are the veils the devil casts between them. But lift the veils and with them disappears the bonds of sects and creeds that imprison us.”

  5. Muhammad al-Harraq d. 1845.

  At various times and through the realizations and teachings of various masters, Sufism has declared its debt to creeds and religions other than Islam and sought out and celebrated the common human spiritual quest.

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  Early Islam, rooted in a mystical act of revelation to the Prophet, was nevertheless a new discipline to the polytheistic and pagan tribes of Arabia, its first adherents. In its rapid expansion through military conquest, it became the ideologically orienting force of a new and dynamic nation. Its geographical expansion brought it into contact with other nations, creeds and beliefs, which it sought by persuasion or force to convert. The militaristic, strategic and political considerations of conquest and the governance of the converted; the hubris of armies fired by the new messianic ideology of conquest; the material wealth that was suddenly at the disposal of men from a nomadic and sparse ancestry and tradition overtook and obscured the possible spiritual interpretations of Islam. Its disciplinary and juridical aspects came to the fore in these years.

  Perhaps Ali and his predominantly Shia followers, recent converts from decadent Zoroastrianism, sowed the seeds of the quest. Sufism became the interpretation that rushed in to fill the spiritual vacuum of early Islam.

  What is indisputable is that the Sufis and their mystical interpretation of Islam do not see Islam as a qualifying extension of the Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition. Their beliefs are closer to pantheistic and monist Vedanta and also Buddhism. They looked East.6

  Sufis to this day continue to claim that they are the real Muslims and that the Koran and the Hadith—the acts and sayings of the Prophet—have sanctified their belief and the legitimacy of their yearning. Their opponents within Islam characterize them as heretics and kafirs, “unbelievers.” They in their turn, when matters come to a head, declare that the Wahabi and so-called fundamentalists are Muslims only by their own assertion and by political fact.

  The pronounced identification of Sufism with Advaita Vedanta or with Buddhism is not uncommon in the Indian subcontinent but is not a generally accepted Sufi tenet because there is no central universal Sufi authority and there has been no politicization of this spiritualist Islamic tendency. Wahabism, in contrast, has since the 1920s been adopted as the religion of the Saudi Arabian state and has recruited adherents wherever petro-dollars can buy, or spread, influence.

  6. To simplify several thousand years of religion and philosophy: Monotheism believes there is only one God, an unknowable quantity from whom we are separated, and Monism believes that there is only one reality of which we are a part and with which we can ultimately be united—the same substance, a drop separated from an ocean by the veil of consciousness.

  After the terrorist declaration of 9/11, various Muslim voices have been raised in opposition to this act of mass murder. A world united by television and the internet wants to know who has declared war on whom and why. Islam has, as never before, been challeng
ed to declare to a globalized world its spiritual, political, military, economic and social objectives.

  The arguments for and against the use of terror, as indeed the arguments deployed by Western foreign policy apologists and their opponents, are outside the scope of an introduction to a book of translated verse. Suffice it to say, “moderate” Islam has not found, has not been bold enough, or has not been given the platform to express its profound, theologically argued and absolute Islamic opposition to the heretical faction of wanton murder.

  The several orders of Islam that disdain to overtly call themselves Sufi, because the label carries connotations of pollution from the pure tradition, are today the potential proponents of a great world religion whose name has been hijacked by political heretics.

  The Sufi tradition has lived and flourished within Islam from the time of Salman, the Persian apostle of the Prophet, through the wars and martyrdom of Ali, through the conquests and annexations of lands and traditions by Islam and the yearnings and evolution of spiritual thought, to today. Fourteen hundred years of these conflicting traditions and the orders they generated have brought no resolution. There was in the past no urgent or terminal need for a resolution. Sufi Islam developed from the time of Ali in parallel to the literal, juridical, materialist, rationalist Islam that Ghazali, the Hujjat al-Islam, (translated as the “Argument” or the “Proof ” or the “Word” of Islam), resolved through his genius, the yearnings of the spirit of Muslims with the ritualistic religion that prevailed.

  Ghazali’s works and pronunciations have been subsequently seen as a metaphysically diplomatic triumph, amalgamating the obligations of action and belief of prescriptive Islam with a spiritual dimension and goal for the believer, as part of Sufi Islam.

  Baha ud-Din, Rumi’s father, couldn’t have been aware of the cautious view of future historians. He saw Ghazali as a master and a revolutionary within the tradition of which he was a student. He embraced the Sufi premise, even though he remained an exponent and philosophical advisor to the court of Balkh.

  Though Ghazali is historically credited with reconciling juridical Islam with the Sufi tendencies, earning for himself the title of supreme interpreter, his admirer and direct disciple, Baha ud-Din, came into sharp conflict with the jurists and scholars of the court.

  By 1208, when Rumi was one year old, Baha was publicly challenging the rationalists, who interpreted the Koran and the Hadith through methods derived from the Platonic tradition. He maintained, following Ghazali’s teachings and interpretations, that there was another way. Baha was engaged in an open debate in the royal court of King Muhammad, the shah of Khwarezm, for a fresh interpretation of the precepts of Islam.

  He singled out as a debating opponent and made an enemy of the king’s tutor and courtier, an eminent philosopher called Fakhruddin Razi.

  It may have been Razi who engineered Baha’s downfall, withdrawal and exile from Balkh, which eventually led to the rise of his son Rumi at Konya.

  In all his verse, Rumi exhibits and acknowledges his debt to Ghazali and to another poet of the twelfth century. In Book III of the Mathnawi, Rumi retells a story of the men of Hind, who are led to an elephant in a darkened environment with only their sense of touch with which to feel and define it. The first character in the story touches its trunk and thinks the elephant’s nature is that of a pipe, another touches its ear and mistakes the elephant for a fan and so on. Before Rumi, the same story was told by both Ghazali and Sana’I, but they made the characters blind, whereas Rumi says they were taken into a place of darkness.

  The difference is essential. The darkness is a metaphor for a pagan environment, the pre-enlightened state, and where there is darkness, there can possibly be light, but saving five miracles, those blind men are condemned to their ignorance. Rumi’s version, unlike the earlier ones, allows for redemption.

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  The twelfth century saw a renaissance of Sufism all through the Muslim world. The final mystical elevation or epiphany of Rumi himself, in the following century, is said to have been inspired by a question that was put to him by his last mentor and inspiration concerning Bayazid al-Bastami, known as the Sage of Khorassan.

  The most important philosopher of Sufism after Ghazali was probably Ibn ‘Arabi, who was born in Muslim Spain in Murcia in 1165, forty-two years before Rumi. Ibn ‘Arabi studied Islam and its tenets in Seville, and in Cordova he met Averroes, the scholastic Muslim interpreter of Aristotle. Ibn ‘Arabi was by now an influential Sufi figure in the world of Islam and traveled through the Muslim territories lecturing and preaching. He settled in Cairo in his forties. Cairo had become at the time a center of intellectual Muslim influence, and ‘Arabi came into conflict with the jurists, who condemned him as a heretic and threatened to end his life.

  He was indicted and condemned and had to flee Cairo, taking refuge in Mecca. He eventually set out for Anatolia and arriving in Konya, acquired as a disciple Sadr ud-Din al-Qunawi, who, after ‘Arabi had moved on from Konya to Damascus, became an associate of the young Rumi and served as his imam during the daily prayers.

  It was through Qunawi that the intimate doctrines of ‘Arabi were conveyed to Rumi, who acknowledges the debt and, according to some, uses this inheritance and builds the greatest edifice of Sufi Islam from its base.

  By the age of thirty-four, Rumi of Konya in Anatolia was a respected teacher of Islam, albeit an opponent of the Jurists and an acknowledged disciple of Ghazali and of his own father. He had a following and a steady stream of disciples and students and led the life of a respected savant. It was then that an incident transformed his life and purpose. He was already deep into an understanding of Sufi thought and insights, but his meeting with one Shams, a mysterious mystic from the town of Tabriz, struck him as an epiphany, as the bolt of lightning and the voice of Issah had struck Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.

  The story is told of how Rumi was lecturing his students when a stranger, dressed in a tattered black cloak, came and joined the audience. He sat inconspicuously as the lecture progressed. There was a pile of books kept beside Rumi, and all at once the stranger pointed at the books and asked, “What are those?”

  Rumi, probably annoyed at being interrupted, replied with some sarcasm, “The likes of you won’t know!” He resumed his lecture, and almost immediately the books caught fire, causing Rumi to shout in consternation, “What’s going on? How did this happen?”

  Pat came the reply from the stranger: ‘The likes of you won’t know.” The stranger walked out as the disciples put out the fire. Rumi followed the stranger and caught up with him in the streets.

  All reports of the incident say that the conversation that ensued between the stranger and Rumi was not and could not have been recorded. Rumi invited the stranger to his house, and the two of them remained closeted for forty days in discussion and communion. Again, no record of this debate, which changed Rumi’s life unutterably, is available.

  The meaning of this parable is feasible of interpretation only in the philosophical context of Sufism. The stranger asks the first question pointing to the books both as mundane objects and as repositories of conceptual, grammatized knowledge. The answer is contemptuous, sarcastic even—only a fool doesn’t know what a pile of books is, and it is obvious that the same fool is unlikely to have any acquaintance with the knowledge contained therein. The knowing and not knowing is about knowledge itself. And then the mysterious conflagration and Rumi, perturbed by this event without an apparent cause, an event outside the realm of rational investigation, asks what it is. His question “How did this happen?” or even as we would say colloquially, “What the hell is going on?” to which the stranger answers that it is the professor who “doesn’t and can’t know.” There is more to know than that contained within the books or in pure logic and discourse. Knowledge is mystical, and the spontaneous combustion of the books, works of philosophical reason, is in itself symbolic.

  An instinctive evaluation of the meaning and significance of the
incident humbled Rumi and impelled him to follow the stranger into the street.

  Another story of their first encounter tells us that Shams steps forward in the street as Rumi is passing by on a mule and grabs the mule’s bridle. To the astonishment of the students and disciples following Rumi on foot, the stranger addresses a question to Rumi:

  “Tell me, was Muhammad the greater servant of God or Bayazid of Bastam?”

  Without hesitation Rumi says, ‘Muhammad was incomparably the greater.”

  “Then,” replies Shams, “how is it that Muhammad said, ‘We have not known thee oh God, as thou rightly shouldst be known,’ whereas Bayazid said: ‘Glory unto me! How very great is my Glory?’”

  On hearing this question Rumi faints.

  The words of Bayazid were endowed with the Sufi identification with God, the oneness that is the goal of the quest, whereas the humbler supplication of the Prophet betrayed a distance from Him.

  Naturally, Rumi fainted at the very audacity of the perception, and when he recovered he took the mysterious questioner home.

  Those same forty days passed in communion.

  Rumi emerged from the closeted session a changed man.

  The academic, the professor, the lecturer and preacher was no more. The inheritor of his father’s title of “king of scholars” was now a disciple of the stranger, Shams-e Tabrizi, the man from the Persian city, who, it is said, had left his native town to travel the world in search of a soul destined for enlightenment.

  Had he found such a soul in Rumi? Whether Shams’s quest ended with the discovery of Rumi, one does not know, but Jalal ad-Din was transformed entirely. He abandoned lecturing and began a ritual of devotion to his “lover,” in whom, as his disciples, family and associates observed, he had discerned some mystical light, power and attraction. Here was the enlightened one, the one who knew, the one who could lead him to that ecstasy and union with the oneness of things that the Sufis call Allah.