Insight Editions · No. 169
Sufism: A Beginner's Guide
William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick presents Sufism as Islam’s inner dimension, examining its spiritual path, traditions, selfhood, remembrance, love, dance, beatitude, and understanding of divine presence.
A study guide to Sufism: A Beginner's Guide by William C. Chittick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
William C. Chittick's Sufism: A Beginner's Guide (Oneworld) is a short book built from ten rewritten essays. It refuses to define Sufism, and instead points at its reality from ten directions, letting Arabic and Persian texts, from the Koran to Jami, speak in Chittick's own translations.
In one sentence: Sufism, for Chittick, is the inner dimension of Islam, "doing the beautiful", and every theme in the book (the path, the tradition, the self, remembrance, love, dance, beatitude, Adam's fall and the veil) is the same Shahadah, "no god but God", read as negation of the self and affirmation of God's presence.
The argument
Chapter map
| Ch. | Book title (pp.) | Core claim | Main voices | Here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Sufi path (1-21) | Sufism is ihsan, the third dimension of Islam; theory and practice follow the Shahadah | Bushanji, Gibb, Rumi, Hallaj | Part 1 |
| 2 | The Sufi tradition (22-38) | Sufism as Islam's living spirit; sobriety and intoxication; modern fortunes | Ghazali, Junayd, Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Rumi | Part 2 |
| 3 | Name and reality (39-48) | Gnosis by transformation; three stages; love's mutuality | Bastami, Abu Bakr | Part 2 |
| 4 | Self-help (49-62) | The self is undefinable; cultivate it by prophetic guidance | Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Walker Percy | Part 3 |
| 5 | The remembrance of God (63-73) | Dhikr is the heart of Sufi practice | Ibn Ata'illah, Razi, Rabi'a | Part 3 |
| 6 | The way of love (74-90) | All love is God's love; poverty and pain | Ibn Arabi, Rumi | Part 4 |
| 7 | The never-ending dance (91-120) | Creation, ascent and union as dance to God's "Be" | Jami, Iraqi, Qunawi, Rumi | Part 5 |
| 8 | Images of beatitude (121-140) | Seeing God now in everyday life | Baha Walad | Part 6 |
| 9 | The fall of Adam (141-177) | Adam's slip as proof of God's love | Sam'ani | Part 7 |
| 10 | The paradox of the veil (178-200) | Veils are never lifted, yet the veil is the face | Niffari, Ibn Arabi, Hafiz | Part 8 |
1. The Sufi Path
The preface and opening chapter set the frame for the whole book: Sufism is a name for the third and deepest dimension of Islam, "doing the beautiful", and its theory and practice both grow out of the testimony "no god but God".
- A tenth-century saying sets the theme: Sufism was once a reality without a name and is now a name without a reality.
- Labels such as "mysticism" or "spirituality" are too broad and too narrow at once; the word "Sufism" itself owes its modern prominence to British Orientalists.
- The Hadith of Gabriel divides Islam into submission (islam), faith (iman) and doing the beautiful (ihsan); jurists took the first, theologians the second, Sufis the third.
- Body, tongue and heart are the matching human domains: right doing, right thinking, right seeing.
- Mercy and wrath mix in creation like yin and yang, but God's mercy takes precedence; the Sharia's stern face hides that mercy.
- Every thing has a "western face" that veils God and an "eastern face" that shows Him.
- Practice follows the Shahadah too: the ego is the "god" to be negated, remembrance of God is the means, and union is the goal.
The preface: a middle way
Chittick says he first studied Sufism "more than thirty years ago as an undergraduate", when hardly anyone knew the name. Now Rumi is recited by celebrities and people learn "Sufi dancing" in health clubs, yet the surge of books has "added to the confusion". Academic studies are too technical for beginners, and books by enthusiasts and teachers speak only for particular modern branches. His aim is to steer "a middle way between academic obscurity and enthusiast advocacy", to give a relatively large amount of translation, and to let the tradition speak for itself. He takes as mentor Jami (d. 1492), who claimed for himself no role but "the post of translator".
A note on sources explains the two languages behind the book. Arabic is the Semitic language fixed by the Koran; Persian is Indo-European, shaped in the ninth and tenth centuries under Arabic influence, and the home of the poets Sana'i, Nizami, Attar, Rumi, Sa'di and Hafiz. The quotations run from the Koran and the Hadith down to Jami in the fifteenth century. Diacritics are dropped, Koranic verses are italicized inside quoted passages, and "All translations are my own."
A name without a reality
The book opens with Ali ibn Ahmad of Bushanj in eastern Persia, who complained more than a thousand years ago: "Today," he said, speaking Arabic, "Sufism is a name without a reality, but it used to be a reality without a name." Chittick returns to this saying in the last line of his final chapter, so it is worth keeping in mind throughout.
He refuses the easy step of swapping one name for another. "Mysticism", "esoterism" and "spirituality" are "both far too broad and far too narrow", and they let people file Sufism away. A family resemblance with Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Yoga, Vedanta or Zen may be suggested, but it does not bring us closer. Even the Arabic word was disputed. Following Carl Ernst, Chittick notes that the term's modern prominence came from British Orientalists who wanted a label for the attractive sides of Islamic civilization that would avoid the stereotypes of Islam, stereotypes they had often spread themselves. He will use the word only because it "seems less inadequate than the alternatives", and he will offer "a series of pointers at the moon".
Three dimensions of Islam
Many in the West admire Sufism while despising Islam, and many modern Muslims agree that Sufism is alien to Islam. H. A. R. Gibb observed that such Muslims see Sufism as a "survival of superstitions" or a deviation from "true Islam", attitudes that seem bent on "eliminating the expression of authentic religious experience". Against both views, the Sufis have always claimed to speak for "the heart and marrow of the Islamic tradition".
The key text is the Hadith of Gabriel. A stranger questions the Prophet, who later tells his companions it was Gabriel come to teach them their religion. The answers define three things:
| Dimension | Prophet's definition | Human domain | Discipline | Perfection of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Submission (islam) | Shahadah, prayer, alms tax, Ramadan fast, pilgrimage | Body, limbs | Jurisprudence (Sharia) | Acts: right doing |
| Faith (iman) | God, angels, scriptures, messengers, Last Day, the measuring out | Tongue, mind | Kalam, philosophy, theoretical Sufism | Understanding: right thinking |
| Doing the beautiful (ihsan) | "worship God as if you see Him, for even if you do not see Him, He sees you" | Heart | Sufism | Self: right seeing |
The jurists limit themselves to the Sharia and the theologians to creed, so "we would be wasting our time if we read their books looking for an explanation" of doing the beautiful. The Sufis take ihsan as their own domain, and this is why they see themselves as fully Muslim rather than as an add-on. Chittick likens the Sharia to Islam's body, faith to its mind, and the third dimension to the transformation of the self into harmony "with the ground of all being".
A second hadith confirms the pattern: "Faith," he said, "is to acknowledge with the heart, to voice with the tongue, and to act with the limbs." Heart, tongue and limbs are ranked: the heart is aware before the mind thinks, just as it is alive before the body acts. The Sufis like to quote the Prophet's prayer, "O God, show us things as they are." Things as they are are seen "with the core of the heart", and right seeing then "will then radiate forth and permeate every pore of the body".
The Shahadah and the hidden garden
The dual Shahadah, "There is no god but God" and "Muhammad is His messenger", is the key to all three domains. It is the first pillar, it defines the content of faith, and it tells us what human beings are, since the human image of God "cannot be understood apart from the object that it reflects". Islam has no priesthood and no church, so it has "a special affinity for diversity of expression". Within that diversity doing the beautiful remained "an intangible inner sanctum". Chittick calls those who gave it social expression "Sufis", while admitting that many who took the name fell short and many who lived the ideal refused the name. Sufism in this sense is "an invisible spiritual presence that animates all authentic expressions of Islam".
Unity shows itself as multiplicity. Many Sufis reduce all plurality to two attributes, beauty and majesty, mercy and wrath, gentleness and severity, whose traces mix like the yin-yang symbol. Rumi: "This world is the house of God's severity". Yet the two are not equal with God: a prophetic saying gives mercy precedence over wrath. The stern face of the Sharia shows majesty, but "lurking beneath its surface is the promise of the precedent mercy". Love enters here. For Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the mercy that gives rise to the universe is existence itself, and the Hidden Treasure saying makes the same point in terms of love: "I was a Hidden Treasure," God says, "so I loved to be known. Hence I created the creatures that I might be known." Mercy flows one way, love flows both ways: we cannot have mercy on God, but we can love Him, and human love closes the gap.
Chittick's image for why Westerners love Sufism and fear Islam: a first look at Islam feels like being set down outside the austere walls of "a city that smells of death", while Sufism opens the gardens hidden behind the walls of traditional houses. But the walls protect the garden from desert winds and strangers' eyes; the garden is "the reason for the walls' existence". The image warns against taking the garden without the walls, a point the later chapters press against modern "deracinated Sufism".
Sufi theory: signs and veils
The first Shahadah discerns the Real from the unreal. Its negation ("no god") "denies the inherent reality of the world and the self"; its affirmation ("but God") affirms the ultimacy of the divine. One master reads "Everything is perishing but His face" (28:88) in the present tense: God did not say "will perish". The Prophet's saying "God was, and nothing was with Him" received Junayd's (d. 910) addition, "And He is now as He was." Ibn Arabi remarked that the addition was unnecessary, because "was" said of the Eternal covers all tenses.
The second Shahadah adds a secondary discernment. The Koran calls its verses and the things of the world by the same word, "signs" (ayat), so the universe is also God's book. Each thing therefore has two faces: a "western face", where the sun has set, and an "eastern face", where it shines in full. Most people see only the western face, and for them "Wherever you turn, there is the face of God" (2:115) is a dead letter. Prophets and great Sufis see the eastern face.
Only human beings took up the Trust that heavens, earth and mountains refused (33:72). To the objection that no one ever made such a choice, the Sufis reply that every volitional act accepts the human condition. Rumi mocks the excuse of the busy breadwinner: "You have an escape from God", he says, but not from food. The difference between the general Islamic and the Sufi perspective "does not lie in principles, but rather in a certain self-conscious application of principles". Imitation (taqlid) is not enough; one must realize the Real (tahaqquq).
Sufi practice: negation, remembrance, union
Practice rests on islam and iman and aims at worshipping God "as if" one sees Him, until the "as if" falls away. Ali said, "I would not worship a Lord whom I do not see." The false god to be negated is the ego; Rumi: "The mother of all idols is your own ego." The central exercise is dhikr, which means both remembering and mentioning God, so the means of remembrance is the divine name, which "fills up the mind and consciousness, leaving no room for remembrance of others". The insight behind it: awareness is the basic human reality, and its content makes us who we are.
If you think of roses, you are a rosegarden, if you think of thorns, you're fuel for the furnace.
The goal is union, the actualization of the divine image. Then the Sufi can say with Hallaj (d. 922) "I am the Real", not as a boast but as the sun showing its rays. Rumi explains that Hallaj "naughted himself": to say "You are God and I am the servant" still affirms one's own existence, and even "He is the Real" is duality, for there can be no He without an I. his words were "the words of the Real". The path ends where it began, in the Shahadah: "no god" takes away impermanent things, "but God" leaves what truly is.
2. The Sufi Tradition and the Name
Chapters 2 and 3 sketch Sufism as a historical tradition: its word, its masters and orders, its balance of sobriety and intoxication, its modern fortunes, and the gap between naming a thing and knowing it.
- Sufism is "the interiorization and intensification of Islamic faith and practice"; sufi most likely first meant "one who wears wool".
- It cuts across Sunni and Shi'ite, region, class and family; the orders only became prominent around the twelfth century.
- Ghazali's title "Giving Life to the Sciences of the Religion" sums up Sufism's self-image as Islam's living spirit.
- Kalam stressed God's distance (tanzih) through reason; the Sufis stressed His nearness (tashbih) through imagination.
- Sobriety and intoxication are two necessary poles; losing either breaks the tradition.
- Modern reformers made Sufism a scapegoat for "backwardness"; Western Sufism ranges from Guenon and Schuon to New Age synthesis.
- Ma'rifa, knowledge of self that is knowledge of God, is gained by transformation, not books.
- Three stages: false sobriety, intoxication, and "sobriety after drunkenness", which match annihilation and subsistence.
Wool, masters and orders
Modern scholars think sufi first meant "one who wears wool", a name for ascetics in coarse garments in the eighth century. By the ninth century some adopted the gerund tasawwuf, "being a Sufi", though they also called themselves knowers, ascetics, renouncers and poor men. Because the derivation was unclear, the word "took on the aura of a proper name". The interests were not new: the reality, as Bushanji said, was there from the beginning.
Sufis stress "inwardness over outwardness, contemplation over action, spiritual development over legalism, and cultivation of the soul over social interaction". Being a Sufi has nothing to do with the Sunni/Shi'ite split, ethnicity, region (from Senegal and Albania to China and Indonesia) or class. Sufism is tied to popular religion yet produced Islam's most elite writing; it is often set against the jurists, yet some jurists were Sufis and the state often supported both.
Ghazali (d. 1111) gave a nutshell description in the title of his Ihya' ulum ad-din, "Giving Life to the Sciences of the Religion". Chittick develops the image of a tree: the Koran is root, the Sunnah stem, and three branches grow out of them.
Historically Sufism lives on two levels. On the first, the Sufis' own concern, it has no history, being an invisible presence. On the second it shows itself in people and institutions, which W. C. Smith called "faith" and "cumulative tradition", or in Bushanji's terms the reality and the name. Sufi writers therefore wrote hagiography, not history; their Muslim opponents seized on every excess of popular movements to claim that this was Sufism's true nature. The great teachers themselves judged Sufism by the Koran, Sunnah and consensus of the ulama'. The shaykh transmits teaching and blessing (baraka) through a chain (silsila) back to the Prophet, by a handclasp modelled on the oath at Hudaybiyya, and his concern is to shape the disciple's character. Hence Ibn Arabi's definition of Sufism as "assuming the character traits of God", and the attention given to stations (maqamat) and states (ahwal).
Reason and imagination, distance and nearness
Kalam used reason and the Greek heritage, fastened on verses of transcendence, and explained away verses of nearness by forced interpretation. Gibb again: the developed systems "substituted for the vivid personal relation between God and man presented by the Koran an abstract and depersonalized discussion of logical concepts". From the eleventh or twelfth century the Sufi strand that stressed nearness, compassion and love became predominant. Its faculty was "imagination" (khayal), the soul's ability to perceive God's presence in all things, strengthened through the "as if" of ihsan until it becomes "unveiling" (kashf). Ibn Arabi insists all the same that reason is needed to tell divine, angelic, psychic and satanic inrushes apart.
| Rational way | Imaginal way | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical holders | Kalam authorities, jurists | Sufis |
| View of God | Incomparable (tanzih), distant | Similar (tashbih), near |
| Sees mostly | Multiplicity, difference | Unity, presence |
| Inner state | Sobriety (sahw): awe, contraction, fear | Intoxication (sukr): expansion, hope, intimacy |
| Divine names answered | Majesty, glory, might, wrath | Compassion, love, beauty, gentleness |
| Natural medium | Prose | Poetry |
| Classic figure | Junayd; Ibn Arabi's prose | Hallaj; Rumi's verse |
| Failure mode when alone | Legalism, "fundamentalism" | Sectarianism, deracinated Sufism |
Drunken Sufis tend to declare union and de-emphasize the Sharia; sober Sufis keep the courtesy (adab) of servanthood. Those who, in Ibn Arabi's phrase, "see with both eyes" keep both in balance. Chittick adds a sharp observation: authors who ignored rational norms were not necessarily drunk, since "if they had been, they would hardly have put pen on paper". Hallaj and Junayd are the classic contrast, and so are Ibn Arabi and Rumi, though Rumi was learned and Ibn Arabi a lover and poet; Corbin placed both among the fidèles d'amour. For the tradition to stay whole it needs both: "If sobriety is lost, so also is rationality", and if drunkenness is lost, so also are religious experience, love and ihsan.
Sufism in the modern world
Modernizing Muslims made Sufism the scapegoat through which they explained Islam's "backwardness". Western observers long saw these reformers as Islam's hope; now, Chittick says, the rabid modernists look "naive, though certainly dangerous". Sufi teachers meanwhile kept reviving the heritage by addressing what they take as the root disorder, "forgetfulness of God"; he cites Abd al-Qadir Jaza'iri (d. 1883), the Algerian fighter who spent his Syrian exile reviving Ibn Arabi. In the West, Inayat Khan brought "drunken" Sufism, Rene Guenon (Shaykh Abd al-Wahid, d. Cairo 1951) a sober version for French intellectuals. Chittick then places contemporary authors on the same spectrum.
| Author | Where Chittick places him |
|---|---|
| Frithjof Schuon | Extreme stress on discernment; universal "esoterism"; insists on exoteric observance |
| Martin Lings (Abu Bakr Siraj ed-Din) | Intellectually rigorous, grounded in Islamic texts |
| Seyyed Hossein Nasr | Discernment more than love; no Sufism without the Sharia |
| Muzaffer Ozak (Cerrahi) | Sharia-oriented, more love than discernment |
| Nazim al-Qubrusi (Naqshbandi) | Warm, love-centred, often on the Shariite basis |
| Javad Nurbakhsh (Ni'matallahi) | Excellent anthologies; intoxication, oneness of being; little on the Sharia |
| Guru Bawa Muhaiyaddeen | Furthest toward love and intoxication; synthesis with Hindu teachings |
Name and reality: gnosis
Chapter 3 turns from the name to the thing. A classical term for what Chittick calls Sufism is ma'rifa (or irfan), "gnosis", glossed by the saying "He who knows [arafa] himself knows his Lord." This knowledge "cannot be found in books"; it lies in the heart under the dross of ignorance and forgetfulness. Most Sufi writings remain unpublished, and most great Sufis did not write, so the literature is itself only "the name of a much deeper and broader reality".
Kalam and philosophy seek ilm through reason; the Sufis seek ma'rifa by purifying the heart, citing "Be wary of God, and God will teach you" (2:282). Abu Yazid Bastami told the scholars: "You take your knowledge dead from the dead, but I take my knowledge from the Living who does not die." Hence the love of poetry and of paradox: God is "both nothing and everything". Abu Bakr's saying became a Sufi watchword: "Incapacity to perceive is perception."
The stages are tied to 55:26-27: everything on earth is undergoing annihilation, "but there subsists the face of your Lord, Possessor of Majesty and Generous Giving". Majesty annihilates; generous giving bestows a new subsistence. Subsistence is real and annihilation is not, because annihilation "is the negation of something that never truly was". The true Sufi is "inwardly drunk with God and outwardly sober with the world".
Love's charter is 3:31: "Say [O Muhammad!]: 'If you love God, follow me, and then God will love you'". Following the Sunnah is how love proves itself and wins reciprocity. The hadith of the supererogatory works ends with God saying that when He loves His servant, "I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he grasps, and his foot with which he walks." The problem is not God's nearness to us but our nearness to Him, which we cannot see.
Finally, the "sobriety of names". God taught Adam "the names, all of them" (2:31); naming brings distance and differentiation, while the lover drowned in unity cannot tell himself from God. Later generations, finding love harder, named what the first Muslims had simply lived. "The name", the chapter ends, is perishing and of no account; "The reality, however, is everything."
3. Self-Help and the Remembrance of God
Chapter 4 argues that the human self cannot be defined and can only be cultivated with guidance; chapter 5 shows how remembrance (dhikr), the Koran's own name for that guidance, became the core of Sufi practice.
- Tazkiyat an-nafs means both purifying and augmenting the self; "cultivation of the soul" is the better translation.
- Everything has a nafs; what is peculiar to the human nafs is that it has no specific quality.
- We cannot ask "What is the self?", only "Who am I?", and the self is renewed at every breath.
- Each thing has a face toward itself (nonexistent) and a face toward God (existent); the true self is the face that subsists.
- Prophecy exists because people cannot know what is good for an endless self; modern "self-help" is self-ignorance.
- Dhikr means remembering and mentioning; the Koran uses the term about 270 times and the Sufis make it incumbent.
- The Shahadah is "the best dhikr", though some prefer the single name Allah.
- Group sessions are secondary; silent, persevering remembrance with each breath leads to the goal.
Cultivating the self
Chapter 4 opens with a hadith that sums up the Sufi view of the world: "This world is accursed", except the remembrance of God. As west, the world is accursed; as east, it is "a joyful song of remembrance". The path's classic definition is tazkiyat an-nafs, from 91:7-10, which Chittick renders "with some hesitation": prosperous is he who purifies the soul, and failed is he who buries it.
"Purify" misleads. Tazkiya means both to cleanse and to increase, and is used of planting seeds and raising cattle. The planter neither purifies nor augments the seed, but puts it where it can thrive. Tazkiya therefore names a single process of clearing and growth, and the better translation, Chittick suggests, is "cultivation of the soul".
| Sense of tazkiya | What it does | Image |
|---|---|---|
| Purification | Rids the self of what God does not like | Clearing alien matter from the seed |
| Augmentation | Lets the self grow in stature with God's help | Earth, water, sunlight |
| Cultivation (both at once) | Opens the self to God's bounty so it brings out its potential | The farmer who sets the seed where it can thrive |
The self that cannot be defined
Nafs appears almost three hundred times in the Koran, often as a plain reflexive. Jesus says to God, "know what is in my self, but I do not know what is in Your self" (5:116). "Soul" invites us to reify, as if the soul were a thing like the body; scientific thinking, Chittick says, "by its nature, is near-sighted". In Arabic it would be silly to ask whether humans have a nafs, since everything has one. The real question is how the human nafs differs. A Persian proverb for wasted effort is "reciting Yasin into the ear of a donkey": recite the Koran to a human and it may help, "but a donkey will never stop being an ass". The answer is paradoxical: the specific quality of the human nafs is that "in its deepest reality, it has no specific quality". The Koran uses "the nafs" without a referent only for humans, which shows that indefiniteness is the human mark.
Chittick enlists Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, a parody of the self-help shelf whose writers and readers have no idea what the self is that they try to help. So we cannot ask "What is the self?"; we have to ask "Who am I?" Each "I" is unfolding and every human knows it has not drawn its last breath (nafas, spelled like nafs). Each choice specifies the self a little, and we answer for it. Hence the aphorism "The Sufi is the child of the moment", and the name "the folk of the breaths" (ahl al-anfas). In Ash'arite terms, the self of each moment is God's renewed creation.
The subsistent face
Annihilation and subsistence apply to every moment: the self perishes and the face of God subsists. "Our true and proper self is no self at all", that is, no self of our own; our true self is "the face of God that looks upon us at each instant". 28:88 can also be read "Everything is perishing but its face", with the same upshot. Ghazali in The Niche of Lights explains that each thing has two faces, and that considered in itself anything other than God "is sheer nonexistence", existing only "through the face toward its Giver of Existence". So no self perishes, but people stand at different levels, matched by the Sufi triad of selves.
God taught Adam all the names, so the human self holds potentially infinite knowledge, the basis of fitra. Since creation is in effect infinite, the names will be actualized forever: this is the bliss of paradise. Hell also gives awareness, but awareness of one's own stupidities is painful. Ibn Arabi even says God keeps people in hell out of mercy, since in paradise they would be embarrassed before God and the prophets. Nor does "He who knows his self knows his Lord" promise complete knowledge. Ibn Arabi: God turned us over to ourselves "only because He knew that we do not perceive and we do not know the reality of ourselves", and so we learn that we are "even more incapable of knowing Him".
Prophetic knowledge versus self-help
The sending of prophets proves that people cannot know themselves: even doctors change their minds about the body. Prophets tell people what is good for a self that has a beginning and no end. They teach "not so much who they are as who they are not". In the Sufi reading, the belief that we need no prophetic help is "the fatal defect of the modern world", and modern learning is "nothing but ignorance of the self masquerading as knowledge". Defining the self in biological, psychological, economic, ideological or even "Islamist terms" buries it, and Chittick links these failures to the "historically unprecedented blood-letting of the twentieth century". He retranslates the verse at the end: "Prosperous is he who cultivates it, and failed has he who buries it."
Remembrance in Koran and Hadith
The Koran calls itself "remembrance" and "reminder" over forty times: Adam's children keep forgetting, and only remembrance cures it.
| Question | Answer in chapter 5 | Principle of faith |
|---|---|---|
| What is remembered? | God, named by the Shahadah and the Koran's names | Tawhid |
| Why remember? | God commands it; happiness depends on it | Return to God (compulsory and voluntary) |
| How? | By imitating the Prophet, whose Sunnah models remembrance | Prophecy |
Dhikr has never meant "a vague or general recollection of God's presence"; it requires a revealed name. To be forgotten by God is the Fire: "Today We forget you, even as you forgot the encounter of this your day" (45:34). Ibn Ata'illah (d. 1309) held that every act of worship disappears at the Mustering except remembrance, tawhid and praise. "Remember Me, and I will remember you" (2:152) is a concrete practice for the love verse 3:31. Hadiths add: "Let your tongue stay moist with the remembrance of God." God says "I am with My servant when he remembers Me." Litanies (awrad, ahzab) followed, one of them, the "Great Coat of Mail", using one thousand names of God.
Dhikr among the Sufis
The jurists could not impose dhikr, because it concerns intention more than outward acts; they made it incumbent only in the forms of Koran recitation and prayer and recommended the rest. The Sufis stand out by treating remembrance of the names, as taught by a shaykh, as incumbent. Muhammad Parsa (d. 1420): "The root of being a Muslim is 'No god but God,' words that are identical with remembrance." Full remembrance actualizes the fitra; perfection is "assuming the traits of the divine names", and since Allah is the all-comprehensive name, the summit is ta'alluh, "deiformity".
The Shahadah is "the best dhikr". Najm ad-Din Razi describes how the attachment to other than God "is gradually cut with the scissors of no god". Others prefer the single name: Ibn Arabi's master Abu'l-Abbas Uryabi reasoned that with "No god but God" one might die "in the frightful distance of negation", but with God alone only "in the intimacy of affirmation". Specific names suit specific stages, never without a master's talqin: al-ghani for those seeking disengagement, al-mannan only for those beyond egocentric need. Yet benefits should not be sought, as in Rabi'a's prayer:
Some spoke of transcending dhikr. An-Nuri (d. 907): "the annihilation of the rememberer in the Remembered." Ibn Arabi: "There is no remembrance along with witnessing." Qunawi (d. 1274) asks the traveller to abandon all remembrance. But Ibn Arabi has the last word: "Remembrance is more excellent than abandoning it, for one can only abandon it during witnessing, and witnessing cannot be achieved in an absolute sense."
Classifications abound: tongue, heart and secret (sirr); loud and silent; reserved and ecstatic, from the music of the Mawlawiyya to groups allowing only recitation. Group sessions are secondary. Chittick closes with Sa'di (d. 1292), who is "not speaking metaphorically" when he says each breath counts as two blessings. It is silent, persevering remembrance, in gratitude for each breath and within the Sunnah, that reaches the goal.
4. The Way of Love
Chapter 6 reads love through its two great masters, Ibn Arabi the theoretician and Rumi the poet: love as God's motive for creating, as the hidden content of every human desire, and as a religion of pain, poverty and union.
- Activity, love and knowledge were all present from the start; the neat historical schemes and Hindu yoga parallels have only heuristic value.
- God's love comes first: "He loves them, and they love Him" (5:54).
- Love cannot be defined, only described; it is "drinking without quenching".
- God's love to be known is the motive of creation and keeps the cosmos in flux.
- All love is love for God veiled by its objects; "None loves God but God".
- Love needs discernment: faulty knowledge "thinks that lightning is the sun".
- The religion of love runs on pain and poverty (faqr), the root of the words fakir and dervish.
From fear to love, and its masters
Historians tell a story of Sufism moving from asceticism and fear to love and then to gnosis, and some match these with karma, bhakti and jnana yoga. Chittick grants the heuristic value but holds that activity, love and knowledge were there from the earliest times. Islam could be called karma yoga for its Sharia, or jnana yoga for the value it places on knowledge, "Nonetheless, Sufism gives a certain pride of place to love."
The hierarchy of love is set by 5:54, "He loves them, and they love Him". People could not love God if He did not already love them; the Hidden Treasure says the same. From the eleventh to thirteenth centuries a detailed psychology of love appears: Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126) and his Sawanih, his disciple Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani (d. 1131), Ahmad Sam'ani (d. 1140), perhaps the most original though "almost completely unknown to modern scholars", and Attar (d. 1221).
| Ibn Arabi | Rumi | |
|---|---|---|
| Born, died | Murcia, Spain; died Damascus 1240 | Born in present-day Afghanistan; settled in Konya; died 1273 |
| Language | Arabic | Persian |
| Output | More than five hundred prose works; about twenty thousand verses | About sixty-five thousand verses; three short prose works |
| Reputation | Greatest Sufi theoretician; linked to wahdat al-wujud | Greatest spiritual poet of the Persianate world |
| Mode | Theory, explanation | Practice, reminder, image |
Love's creativity
Ibn Arabi: love "has no definition through which its essence can be known"; those who define it have not known it, and those who claim to be quenched have not known it, "for love is drinking without quenching". Rumi: "What is it to be a lover? To have perfect thirst."
God already knew Himself in eternity, so the knowledge He loved to gain through creation was temporal knowledge. Ibn Arabi draws a parallel with marital union for the sake of children: God "turned His desire toward the things while they were in the state of nonexistence", said Be!, and they came to be. Reading "And He is with you wherever you are" (57:4), he adds that God's love "has no first point", because He loved the creatures even as objects of His knowledge before they existed. Rumi glosses the Hidden Treasure through mercy and wrath: God is not a king for whom one herald suffices; if all the atoms of the universe were His heralds, "they would fall short and be incapable of making Him known". He also loves the divine saying to Muhammad, "But for you, I would not have created the heavenly spheres."
The true beloved
Since God never stops loving, He never stops creating, and the universe is in perpetual flux. Ibn Arabi cites "God is beautiful and He loves beauty": God loves the cosmos, beauty is lovable, so "the whole cosmos loves God". Rumi sees the same love pairing male and female "so the world may subsist through their union". But most creatures do not recognize that their loves externalize God's love. Hence Ibn Arabi's "None loves God but God" and "There is no lover and no beloved but God." In realized love, the soul "knows that none loves Him but He. He is the lover and the beloved, the seeker and the sought."
Rumi's ghazal "It is incumbent on lovers to seek the Friend" makes the same point in practice: "He himself does the seeking, and we are like shadows." Ibn Arabi: "None but God is loved in the existent things." Every worshipper imagines divinity in what he worships, and every lover is veiled by Zaynab, Su'ad, Hind, Layla, money and position. "The gnostics never hear a verse, a riddle, a panegyric, or a love poem that is not about God, hidden beyond the veil of forms." Rumi's prose agrees: all desires are desires for God, and after death people will "see all things face to face".
Love is a veil until its object is known. Rumi calls the beauty of others "gold-plated": when the gold returns to its mine, the counterfeit copper is disgraced, "and even more ashamed is its lover". So love depends on knowledge: love turns copper to gold, "But this love results from knowledge", while faulty knowledge loves inanimate things and mistakes lightning for the sun. Ibn Arabi names the end: beyond "natural" and "spiritual" love lies "divine" love, whose mark is "love for all beings in every domain". Rumi: love is the flame that burns away all but the everlasting Beloved, slaying "other than God" with the sword of "no god".
The religion of love
The precondition for love is "the ability to see straight", which means acknowledging that we do not know who we are. Savoured inadequacy becomes longing, which Rumi calls "pain": "Whoever is more awake has greater pain, whoever is more aware has a paler face." The Koran calls human nothingness poverty (faqr), a far commoner word for the Sufi way than tasawwuf; fakir and dervish both mean "poor man". The proof text is 35:15, "you are the poor toward God". Ibn Arabi: "Poverty is an affair that is inherent in everything other than God." Rumi: poverty is not for hardship, "it is because nothing exists but God." "Sufism is poverty toward God."
Without pain, the journey never begins: "First You empty the lovers at the hand of separation, then You fill them with gold to the tops of their heads!" Rumi's ghazals live in the dialectic of separation and union. In one, aloes and candles must burn to be any good, and the slain prey cries "For God's sake, kill me again!" It ends: "too much speaking keeps the meanings hidden."
Chittick deliberately stops explaining and gives three of Rumi's ghazals with no commentary, noting that Persian pronouns have no gender and there are no capitals, so the question of a divine or human beloved is set aside: "For lovers, the issue does not arise." The poems: love that makes "Plato and Avicenna go mad", catching lion, elephant and hair alike; the youth who would become a lover, "water with oil, outwardly joined, inwardly separate"; and the refrain poem "Like this", ending with Shams ad-Din of Tabriz. The editor follows suit and does not paraphrase them further.
5. The Never-Ending Dance
Chapter 7 takes a student's quip that Sufism is dancing and shows that she had it almost right: creation is a dance to God's word "Be", the soul's ascent is a dance back, and the perfect dance with God never ends.
- Dance has played a minor role in Sufi practice, but the texts use it to point at Sufism's reality.
- "All are He" is a rhetorical wake-up call, not pantheism; in our present state it is even truer that "None are He".
- God is the sun, the names are its rays, the creatures are its colours; humans alone are made "upon His form" and can show all the names.
- Things come to be by "hearing" (sama') God's "Be"; Sufi audition remembers that first hearing at the Covenant of Alast.
- The perfect human being is the third and greatest of God's books, a microcosm and a mirror.
- The soul rises from mineral to plant to animal to human and beyond; there is a compulsory return and a voluntary one.
- Music and dance are ambiguous and not for everyone; the true dance is in the heart.
- At the end of the path is bewilderment and endless renewal: "Sama' is a bird that flies from God to God."
A student's definition
At Stony Brook, a student told Chittick: "Oh, Sufism," she said, "that's dancing, isn't it?" He chuckled, then "thought that she had it just about right". The West met the whirling dervishes through travellers' tales, and modern teachers have found eager dancers, yet dance mattered little in Sufism except in the Mawlawiyya. The Sufi method is to take things back to God, so the chapter looks for dance's divine archetype.
The divine names: sun, rays, colours
Jami's quatrain with the refrain "all are He", heard in Persian at least since Abdullah Ansari (d. 1089), can look like "a kind of simple-minded pantheism". Chittick says Sufis like Jami were "far too sophisticated" for that, and never forgot that in our present situation it is even more true that "None are He." To relate the many to the One, Muslim thinkers use the divine names.
The names are the jewels of the Hidden Treasure and, for Ibn Arabi, the "storehouses" of 15:21. Rumi: "The world is foam, God's attributes the ocean". Ibn Arabi: "In reality," there is "nothing in existence but His names", and those who exist through something else "are in fact nonexistent". We see only light, coloured by the absence of other colours. Human beings differ from other creatures because each of us, made upon the form of God, can display all the names as a coherent and integrated whole.
Primordial audition
There are three books of signs: the Koran, the cosmos and the soul. But "Koran" means "recitation": signs are heard as well as seen. God creates by saying "Be!" (16:40), and speech needs breath; Ibn Arabi calls the creative Spirit "the Breath of the All-merciful". "Because of this love to be known, God breathed, and the Breath became manifest." Since His words are never spent, "He will never cease being a Creator."
Things in the unseen storehouses hear (sama') the command "Be" and obey. The same word means listening to music. By the end of the ninth century some Sufis practised audition, usually with dancing; most jurists and many Sufis thought it broke the Sharia, but its defenders saw it as a way to stir remembrance. Ibn Arabi did not encourage it among his followers, yet explained it: true sama' remembers the primordial "Be" (kun) that brought about "being" (kawn), and the Folk of Sama' perceive in the singer's words "God's word Be to a thing before it comes to be." Rumi: "The wind dances because of the spheres, the trees because of the wind." We heard a marvellous song in nonexistence and danced into the world; the beat is so steady that most of us never notice it.
Iraqi (d. 1289) puts it in prose: the melody of Be woke the lover from nonexistence, "and from that ecstasy [wajd] he found existence [wujud]". The Covenant of Alast, "Am I not your Lord?" (7:172), is the first music. Even Junayd, pillar of sobriety, explained audition's power by it: the spirits were immersed in the enjoyment of those words, and "When they hear the Audition in this world, they enter into movement and agitation." Rumi, "the leader of Sufism's drunken rowdies", teases timid initiates still "caught up with arranging your shoes and turban".
Human perfection: the third book
All things know and glorify God by existing; Ibn Arabi says nothing was created "unless living and rationally speaking". But human knowledge of all the names does not come automatically; it needs free will, which is the meaning of the Trust accepted at Alast. Adam's divine form "did not allow him to reject the Trust". The perfect human being (insan kamil) realizes the all-comprehensive name Allah: "Thus the human being, though small in body, contains all the meanings." Ghazali calls Adam "an abridged transcription of the world". Ibn Arabi calls the perfect human "an isthmus between the Real and the cosmos, a raised-up mirror".
| Book | What it shows | Can it know itself? |
|---|---|---|
| The Koran | God's signs as recited speech | No |
| The cosmos | The names dispersed across creatures | No |
| The human self | All names gathered in one form | Yes: the only self-aware book |
Qunawi writes to a young disciple that the perfect human being "is a book that comprehends all the divine and cosmic books", and quotes verses ascribed to Ali: "Your cure is within you, but you do not know", you suppose you are a small body, "but the greatest world unfolds within you." He tells how, in the battle after Uthman's slaying, A'isha's party raised the Koran on a spear and Ali said: "O people! I am the speaking Book of God, but that is the silent Book of God! Attack them and leave them not!" Qunawi's conclusion: "Your knowledge of yourself is your knowledge of the Book."
The ascent of the soul
Rumi: "For a time you were the elements, for a time an animal. Now you have been a spirit, so become the Beloved!" Life, death and resurrection are stages of one growth (22:5). From nonexistence the soul descends through Alast to the womb, furthest from the Origin, then ascends: the two "arcs" of the Circle of Existence.
The return is compulsory for all (3:83) and voluntary for humans alone, who are addressed by prophets and carry the Trust. Hence two perfections: the "natural" one, ending in death and the meeting with God, and the one gained only by cultivating the soul. Spirit is light, body is clay, and the soul is born where they meet, like colours where light meets darkness. The fetus passes from mineral to plant to animal; only near puberty, when intelligence and speech appear, does a person deserve to be called human, "though provisionally". "In fact we all remain less than human until we achieve the full realization of the divine names within ourselves." People return to the names whose traces they actualized: Avenger and Compassionate demand opposite things of the same object.
Those who cannot wait obey "Die before you die!" Rumi:
I died as an animal and became a man. Why should I fear? When did I ever become less through dying?
Qunawi pictures the gnostic discarding at each sphere the part of himself acquired there on the way down, obeying 4:58 on returning trusts to their owners. At the name God he stands in the precedent names of mercy, the "point of equilibrium"; all degrees of felicity and wretchedness are measured by distance from that centre.
Music of the spheres, and its dangers
Remembrance is the means. Rumi: "Where your aspiration lies, that you will become". Music recalls Alast: "We were all parts of Adam, we heard those melodies in paradise." Najm ad-Din Razi: the soul hearing sweet measured song "tastes the address of Alast" and tries to break the cage of the body, and "Dancing" and states are that agitation. Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209) describes the gnostic's spirit that "almost flies from the human makeup". Razi again: dancing is "to jump out from the two worlds". For Rumi the true dance is in the heart: "Men dance in their own blood." The dance of the Men, "the true Sufis, whether they be men or women", cannot be seen with the eyes.
Sufis never prescribed music and dance for all. Dhu'n-Nun al-Misri (d. 861): "Whoever hears it through the Real finds the road to the Real, and whoever hears it through the self falls into heresy." Ruzbihan: for some audition is "a seduction, because they are incomplete"; and of the delirious who dance and tear their clothes, "What nonsense!" Jami, poet of the Unity of Being, is just as scornful: "The imperfect dance toward imperfection", and their dancing "weakens their bellies and backs."
Dancing with God
Attar's Language of the Birds sends the birds to the Phoenix across seven valleys: aspiration, love, knowledge, independence, unity, bewilderment and annihilation; other Sufis counted ten, forty, a hundred or a thousand stages. Chittick offers only "a glimpse of the effect of its wine": Attar's drunken ghazal; Rumi's "No-place", ending with Shams of Tabriz asked who he is and answering "I'm you, I'm you, I'm you."; and the tavern turned upside down, "fallen down drunk in the lane of Alast".
The perfect, having reached God, begin "the never-ending journey in God and with God". Ibn Arabi notes that the Koran says "He is with you wherever you are" (57:4), not that we are with Him; the perfect are always with Him and accompany names, prophets and angels on their journeys. The end is bewilderment, "not the bewilderment of being lost, but the bewilderment of having found all and everything in an endless outpouring". Ibn Arabi: "Guidance" is to be led to bewilderment, and "movement is life. There is no rest, no death, only existence, nothing of nonexistence." In paradise renewal keeps boredom away. Iraqi has the last word: "The song will never cease, nor the dance come to an end, for all eternity, because the Beloved is infinite." "Pay attention", he adds: the singer and the listener are one.
6. Images of Beatitude: Baha Walad
Chapter 8 is a reader's introduction to the Ma'arif of Baha Walad (d. 1230), Rumi's father: a prose diary of meeting God in the small details of everyday life, translated here at length.
- Ma'arif is a first-person record of encounters with God, the single most important literary influence on Rumi after the Koran and Hadith.
- Against Kalam, Baha Walad holds that the faithful already see God; "Glory be to God" means God is seen everywhere.
- The houris and gardens of paradise are states of seeing God, available now "in ready coin".
- His visions rise from remembering the Arabic name Allah: "The tongue is the key to the heart."
- God makes even nonexistence lovable, and all intimacy is God's act.
- Love cannot be one-sided: "One hand will never clap."
The book and its author
Baha Walad was a preacher and scholar in Balkh who fled the approaching Mongols with his family and ended in Konya as "sultan of the learned." Arberry called Ma'arif a "precious record" and translated about five percent of it. Its rare feature is intimate first-person speech. The only comparable work Chittick knows, Ruzbihan Baqli's Kashif al-asrar, leaves a sense of God's otherness and of the author's privileges, "In contrast, Baha Walad invites his readers to share in his vision of the holiness and luminosity of all creation." It is not systematic, but a series of meditations, each starting from a verse, hadith or memory. Rumi is said to have read it constantly before Shams came, and after Shams vanished the book's imagery seemed to break into "tumult, rhythm, and meter".
The vision of God now
Kalam says the vision (ru'ya) of God waits for paradise; Baha Walad says the faithful already see Him. "Glory be to Thee" denies the defect that creatures imagine, that they cannot see God: "Without seeing, knowing You is impossible." And: "It seems that unbelief is not to see You, and Islam is to see You." When a shaykh objected that those busy with houris here will be busy with them there, he answered that the houris and gardens of the Koran "consist of the states of seeing God". Seen this way, "you will find all the houris, palaces, and sweetnesses of paradise in ready coin. You will find God."
Vision happens at the level of "thought", which Rumi identifies with "imagination", so the visionary mind overflows with images. Thought is a spring God causes to bubble up, sweet or salty, and Baha Walad says "I keep on looking at God to see which sort of water He will give to the body's earth." His thoughts appear as ants, birds on ropes held by God, a hundred thousand flowers opened one inside another.
Remembering God
Baha Walad uses the Arabic allah where Persian would normally say khuda, probably because his visions occur within remembrance of the name. In Chapter 98 he meditates on All-merciful and Compassionate, glossed as Bestowing and Kind, seeing bestowal "in the shape of an essence compounded of white pearls", then says "God is greater" over beauty, power and knowledge. "The tongue is the key to the heart." Remembrance is the east wind bringing news of the Beloved and turning the dead body into gardens. Mount Sinai fell to pieces when it became aware of love (7:143): "utter the remembrance of God so much that you see God."
| Formula or name | Baha Walad's reading |
|---|---|
| Glory be to Thee (2:32) | Not distance but presence: whatever you love, God says it is here "without defect" |
| All-merciful, Compassionate | Bestowal and kindness, felt as white pearls and warmth |
| God is greater | Said over every beauty, power and knowledge |
| Life-giver, Death-giver (10:26) | Life is the coming of happiness; death its going |
| Praise belongs to God (1:2) | Awareness that God works in all one's parts |
| Footstool Verse (2:255) | Each phrase a reason for intimacy with the Living |
| Thou-ness (tu'i) | The world met as God's presence in the second person |
He turns even guilt into evidence of love. Prison need not make the believer sad, like "Joseph the Sincere in prison"; bitterness over sin shows faith, and "Your love for God is proof of God's love for you". In Chapter 88 he leaves his aching body and sees God "standing behind nonexistence and making nonexistence encompass all things"; God has "made this infinite nonexistence into a beloved".
Disclosures of God
Kalam stressed transcendence so far that it often denied that humans can love God; the Sufis agreed about the transcendent God and added that the immanent God disclosing Himself is the object of love. In Chapter 89 God answers his doubt about intimacy between creature and Creator: "Intimacy is My act." Reading the Footstool Verse, he asks "Are you then the beloved that you should now be sleeping?" In the next chapter God tells him "drink from Me without end, like a bee from flowers, so that all your parts may become honey." His thoughts circle God like brides around a bridegroom, children around a young father, sparrows around the one who feeds them. Dhikr, Chittick sums up, "is an alchemy that transmutes perception and awareness into utter joy."
Baha Walad sees brick ovens where the inside face is white, the middle red, the outside black, and reads them as love's stages: first the heartbroken soul is black in face, then red with states and ecstasy, then white and unchanging, "like the light of Moses, the light of Muhammad, and others among the prophets." In the same chapter he distinguishes formal learning, "cut off halfway down the road", from knowledge of the realities; and when appetite stirs at dawn he concludes that this too is God's moving, to be met first by remembering God.
A last chapter shows the world as God's "Thou-ness" (tu'i): on waking, "I see the whole world as God's Thou-ness", like a bridegroom who finds the bride beside him. The doors of paradise are God's attributes, one opened in each kind of worldly happiness. And love must be mutual: "As long as God does not love me, how can I love God? Love from one side is impossible."
7. The Fall of Adam: Sam'ani
Chapter 9 shows Sufi theology at its boldest. Through Ahmad Sam'ani's Persian commentary on the divine names, Adam's slip becomes a felix culpa: the proof of God's love, the birth of human love, and the source of human dignity.
- Kalam gives a God who is "only Majesty, never Emmanuel"; Sufi imaginal theology shaped how most Muslims actually saw God.
- Sam'ani (d. 1140) wrote Rawh al-arwah, the first detailed Persian commentary on the divine names, unpublished until 1989.
- Adam stands for every human being; Eve plays no special role and the fault cannot be pinned on her.
- Adam had to come down to learn the names of majesty and wrath; he was made for vicegerency on earth anyway.
- Only in love does the Koran speak of mutuality: "He loves them, and they love Him".
- Adam's high aspiration sold the eight paradises for a grain of wheat.
- Need and humility, not purity, make Adam greater than the self-satisfied angels.
- Without sinners God could not be the Forgiver: "the servant is not without sins, and the Lord is not without mercy".
Majesty and Emmanuel
Western scholarship has treated Kalam as normative, so Pope John Paul II could write that the God of the Koran is "ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel". Chittick replies that "few Muslims would recognize the Pope's depiction": Kalam touched few lives, while Sufism shaped every level of society. "Reason knows absence, but imagination tastes presence." Lovers want the beloved in mind, and abstractions "do not fan the fire of love". Many Sufis read the Koran as a love letter, and the fall of Adam is a case in point. Muslims never stressed the fall as much as Christians, which is why Islam has no original sin, but many saw it as God's anger; Sam'ani writes against them.
Sam'ani and his book
Ahmad Sam'ani died in 1140, five years before Baha Walad was born and twenty-five before Ibn Arabi. He came from an illustrious Shafi'ite family of Marv; his nephew Abd al-Karim (d. 1166-67), author of al-Ansab, called him an eloquent preacher, good debater and fine poet. Rawh al-arwah, more than six hundred pages, was ignored until its 1989 edition. Daniel Gimaret counts twenty-three Arabic commentaries on the names up to Ghazali; Sam'ani's seems the first detailed one in Persian, treating 101 names under seventy-four headings. Chittick ranks him "one of the truly great prose writers of the Persian language", whose prose "is often more poetical than his poetry", written to be read aloud. He is not making sin a virtue in a society where the Sharia was taken for granted, but asking about motive: one must act from love for God, not fear of hell or hope of paradise.
The story as Sam'ani reads it
"Adam" means the archetypal human (7:11). Sam'ani almost never mentions Eve, not because women do not matter, but because he asks what it means to be human. If the fault were hers alone, he "would no doubt give her a much more elevated position than she already has", since sinning is what makes humans special.
| Koranic event | Verse | Sam'ani's emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| God announces a vicegerent; angels object | 2:30 | "I know what you do not know": My forgiveness, My love |
| Adam taught all the names; angels cannot name them | 2:31-33 | Paradise taught only the names of beauty |
| Angels prostrate; Iblis refuses, fire over clay | 2:34, 7:12 | Clay is humble and was lifted by God's "hand" |
| Clay kneaded forty days; spirit blown in | hadith; cf. 32:9 | Unique attention: other things got only "Be" |
| The Trust carried; "very ignorant, a great wrongdoer" | 33:72 | Adam looked at the Beloved, not his incapacity |
| Covenant of Alast | 7:172 | The cradle of the covenant, "forty years" |
| The tree (wheat); "Adam disobeyed" | 20:121 | A "slip" (zillat): the tree of affliction is the tree of affection |
| "Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves" | 7:23 | Need against Iblis's claim |
| Forgiven and chosen | 20:122, 3:33 | Caresses in opposition prove honour |
| "Fall down out of it" | 2:38 | Into the "workshop of seeking" |
Creation, vicegerency and the two houses
In paradise Adam knew only the names of mercy; he had to come down to the house of severity. "Adam was still a child, so God brought him into the path of caresses. The path of children is one thing, the furnace of heroes something else." Since God is infinite, each child of Adam must know the names in a unique way, so hell too requires human existence. God tells Adam He has two houses, one entrusted to Ridwan and one to Malik, and "If We were to let you stay in the Garden, Our attribute of severity would not be satisfied." Spirit and clay mirror gentleness and severity; without clay Adam would have been an angel. And the slip was not the cause: "Even if we suppose that he had not slipped, he still would have been brought into this world." Ibn Abbas: "God had taken him out of the Garden before putting him into it." God promises to bring him back with all his children.
Love: the one mutual attribute
Sam'ani lines up the Koran's oppositions: His knowledge and our ignorance, His power and our incapacity, His subsistence and our annihilation, His unity and our pairedness. "However, when He gave news of love, just as He affirmed love for Himself, so also He affirmed love for us" (5:54). The other attributes appear in the muddy human essence, but love's site is the heart, "pure gold": "So, our love abides through His love, not His love through our love."
Before Adam, creation was "a tasteless stew. The salt of pain was missing." God created other things as the Strong, "but He created you in respect of being the Friend." Adam disobeyed at God's instigation, because without disobedience he would not realize the attributes of distance that make him a lover. The heavens, earth and mountains, "children of only six days", refused the Trust; Adam, like a polo-ball told to look at "the gaze of the sultan, not at the striking of the stick", took it up.
Aspiration, poverty, humility
The lover's mark is high aspiration (himma), turning from everything, paradise included. "They gave the eight paradises to Adam the chosen. He sold them for one grain of wheat." Asked what paradise was worth, Adam replied that for one who fears hell it is worth a thousand lives, "But for someone who fears You, paradise is not worth a grain." Looking over paradise he found no grief and no love: "Oil and water don't mix." Sam'ani turns to the reader: something your father sold for one grain of wheat, "why would you want to settle down there?"
Love grows from need (niyaz), "a fire in the heart, a pain in the breast, and dust on the face." Tustari: "I saw no path that takes nearer than need, and no veil thicker than making claims." Iblis said "I am better than he"; Adam said "Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves". The angels auctioned their glorification, stamped with "we-ness"; Adam had no capital but need. Aloes gives no scent until burned. Humility sees all good as God's and all evil as one's own. A palace needs a garbage pit, a straight arrow a crooked bow, and the peacock that spreads its feathers is embarrassed by its feet: "That black spot of ignorance is the peacock's foot that always stays with you." "God showed Adam that the slip of him who sees the slip is better in His eyes than the purity of him who sees the purity."
| Angels | Iblis | Adam | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Made of | No appetite, no darkness | Fire: rises, claims greatness | Earth and water: humble, submissive |
| Saying | "We glorify You in praise" | "I am better than he" | "Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves" |
| Sees | Own purity | Own superiority; Adam's clay surface | Own indigence |
| God's attribute shown | None special: they prostrate | The "foot": put down | The "hand": lifted up |
| Outcome | Prostrators | Everlasting separation | Object of prostration; forgiven, chosen |
Forgiveness
Without sinners, how could God be the Forgiver? God tells the angels: "You hold fast to your own sinlessness, but they hold fast to My mercy." Sam'ani shows that every great prophet has some fault, so that weak people will not despair, and cites the hadith that if people did not sin, God would bring a people who sin so that He could forgive them. He stages the drama as God directing every actor: the tree, appetite, Iblis, Eve and Adam, each told its part, "We want to make evident the secret of love." To the angels' objection God answers in effect, "You know their disobedience, but I know My forgiveness." Iblis's obedience was accidental and his nature disobedient; humanity's disobedience is accidental and its nature, from earth, obedient. And since the first and greatest sin was pardoned, "we have a thousand times more excuses than Adam had." A blind man in the Hijaz eats hot food in the heat because his caravan has already been robbed: "The caravan is secure once it has been waylaid."
Commenting on "O My servants who have been immoderate against yourselves, do not despair of God's mercy" (39:53), Sam'ani lists reasons for the test of disobedience: it prevents pride, shows the glassmaker's skill in mending, keeps both storehouses of reward and forgiveness in use, wards off the evil eye like a donkey's head in an orchard, and singles the servant out for God as Khidr damaged the ship. God says "I will forgive", not "I have forgiven", so the servant stays between hope and fear. He calls the disobedient "O My servants", a title given to neither Throne nor Pen. Moses learns that mercy "is a gift, not an earning". The chapter ends with the "secret": Adam's greatness did not appear in the angels' prostration, "It appeared in Adam disobeyed [20:121]." "Caresses in the time of opposition are the proof of honor." And: if God had not wanted to accept Adam with all his defects, "He would not have created him with all those defects".
8. The Paradox of the Veil
The last chapter gathers the book's threads into one paradox: God is hidden by exactly what makes Him visible. Veils are everywhere and can never be lifted, yet for those who see, the veil is the face.
- "All veils are He. Yet, none are He": things are not God, but God is present in them.
- Kashf, "unveiling", comes from a Koranic verb meaning "remove"; at death "We have removed from you your covering" (50:22).
- Light itself is a veil: "God has seventy veils of light and darkness."
- Early authors classify veils: four (Mustamli), two (Hujwiri's rust and clouding), seven (Maybudi), and knowledge as a veil (Ghazali).
- For Niffari and Ibn Arabi everything is a veil, the self is the veil of veils, and only God's guidance helps.
- Veils are never lifted; guidance moves us from the far veil to the near veil.
- Seeking is itself the veil, the veil is the face, and the name is the reality: Bushanji's saying comes full circle.
Seen in the curtain
"The fall of Adam is the veil on the face of love." The universe is a veil, and so is everything in it, but all veils are ladles pouring God's attributes into our cups. In the last analysis, "All veils are He." "Yet, none are He." The thing is not God and yet, at the same time, it is. "The true sun will always rise exactly where it has set." Jami's beloved laughs that unlike the beauties of this world, "in the curtain I'm seen, but without it I'm hidden." All the dialectic of Sufism, affirming and denying, drunk and sober, "all of this is the face appearing in veils".
The Koran uses kashf as a verb fourteen times, usually of God removing harm or chastisement. The key verse addresses the newly dead soul: "therefore We have removed from you your covering, and your sight today is piercing" (50:22). Hence the Sufi quest for voluntary death, supported by "Die before you die" and the Gospel saying about being born twice (John 3:3).
The barrier, and light as veil
Sarraj (d. 988): "The veil is any barrier that bars the intending seeker from what is intended and sought." On the vision of God, the Ash'arites allowed it in the next world and the Mu'tazilites denied it; "the more rigorously Muslim thinkers applied rational principles, the more firmly they denied the possibility of seeing God." The Sufis held that God is seen by the unveiled heart, so the annihilated self sees Him here and now. Yet the texts are subtler than that. The Koran's veil verses include 42:51, where God speaks to a mortal only by revelation or "from behind a veil". The hadith says God has seventy veils of light and darkness, whose removal would let the glories of His face burn away all that creatures see. Light, which lets us see, is itself a veil, and Light is a name of God. Asked whether he saw God in his ascent, the Prophet said: "He is a light. How could I see Him?"
Early classifications of veils
| Author | Scheme | Key point |
|---|---|---|
| Kalabadhi (d. 990) | Praise of the Sufis | "Their lights tore apart the veils" |
| Mustamli (d. 1042-43) | Four: this world, the self, people, Satan | The self is the veil of the Real; everything that busies the servant with other than the Real is a veil |
| Hujwiri (d. 1072-73) | Two: rust (essence) and clouding (attributes) | Rust is never lifted, clouding can be; a stone cannot become a mirror, but a rusty mirror can be filed |
| Maybudi (finished 1126) | Seven: reason, knowledge, heart, self, sense perception, desire, will | The self is "the greatest veil and the enemy of the religion" |
| Ghazali | Knowledge as veil | The heart is a pool fed by five streams of the senses; dig until limpid water rises from within |
Bastami said that if the Real veiled him in paradise for the glance of an eye, he would scream so much "that the denizens of hell will feel compassion for me." Ghazali defends the Sufi saying that knowledge veils: the man who learns the Sunni creed and its proofs and believes there is nothing beyond it can never know the truth, "for the belief learned by the common people is the mold of truth, not the truth itself."
Niffari and Ibn Arabi
Niffari (d. around 970) records God's words directly; Arberry translated two of his works in 1935. Ibn Arabi calls such visionary interviews "mutual waystations" (munazala) and gives seventy-eight chapters of the Futuhat to them, but each with a single short saying and long explanation. Chittick draws three points from Niffari.
First, everything is a veil, including unveilings and revelation, because none is God in Himself. Niffari: "your veil is what I unveil, just as your veil is what I curtain." Ibn Arabi: "There is nothing in existence but veils hung down." God alone is Necessary Being; things are possible (mumkin), and were the veils lifted, possibility itself would be lifted. "Hence vision is through the veil, and inescapably so." People see only images; the universe is "a single infinite veil over the one divine Face", and since "People are asleep", they are dreamers who "will never cease being dreamers".
Second, the self is the veil of veils. Niffari: "Your veil is yourself, and it is the veil of veils." The finite can never see the Infinite as the Infinite sees Itself. Ibn Arabi: "God has made you identical with His curtain over you." And "There is no escape from the curtain, for there is no escape from you."
Third, only God's guidance delivers, and even it does not remove the veils. They are the occasions (asbab) God set up; the strongest is the Sharia, "the cord of God" (3:103), carrying a light for the darknesses. "So, wish not for that which cannot be wished for! Instead, ask God to sprinkle something of that light on your essence." Even "obliteration" removes only reliance on the occasions, not the occasions. Niffari's chain of veils ends: "My veils that can be communicated are but a speck of My veils that cannot be communicated." Knowledge is the subtlest case: "A knowledge in which you see Me is the path to Me, and a knowledge in which you do not see Me is the captivating veil." True knowledge is not unveiling but "the lifting of the far veils so that they may be replaced by the near veils", or the recognition of the veils for what they are.
The veil as face
From the complementary standpoint of similarity (tashbih), the "but God" of the Shahadah, every veil is a form of God's face. In Arabic a thing's face (wajh) is its reality and self; other faces are disclosures of the divine face. "Here, then, we have the paradox: God is hidden by exactly what makes Him visible." Ibn Arabi: "Thus the Real becomes manifest by being veiled", and "No eye witnesses anything other than He, and no veils are lifted from Him." Seeking itself is the veil. Niffari hears: "O My servant! I have entrusted My veil to your seeking for Me." Ibn Arabi: "Nothing hides Him but His manifestation", and "what you seek in the nonmanifest domain is manifest, so do not weary yourself."
Abu Bakr's "Incapacity to perceive is perception" returns: not knowing is knowledge, and the veil is the face. "The negation is the affirmation." Chittick then closes the circle he opened on page 1. Sufism today is a name without a reality, because we keep naming while the reality eludes us; yet it used to be a reality without a name, "because we used to be in the embrace of the Beloved, drunk with Alast." Bushanji points both to the veiling names and to "the once and future union with the Beloved". The last words go to Hafiz (d. 1389), "the Tongue of the Unseen":
She's witnessed everywhere, but she's never shown her face.
9. Slips in the Printed Book
A list of small errors visible in the printed text itself: punctuation, spacing, capitalization, internal inconsistencies. Nothing here depends on outside sources; items that would need outside checking (dates, places, references) are left alone.
The PDF used is the publisher's digital file (it carries printer's crop marks), so these readings reflect the printed page and not a scanning error; one was also checked against the page image.
| # | Ch. | Slip |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ch. 1 | p. 18, Rumi's excuse passage: "I'm so busy providing for wife and children, opens a quotation that is never closed before the next one opens. |
| 2 | Ch. 1 | p. 17: In their case. God has answered the prayer: a full stop where the sentence plainly continues. |
| 3 | Ch. 2-3 | p. 25: "to worship God as if you see him." has a lower-case "him", where every other citation of the hadith in the book capitalizes "Him". |
| 4 | Ch. 2-3 | p. 32: Real and unreal, truth and falsehood, right and wrong. stands as a verbless fragment after "between Creator and creature", apparently meant as a continuation of that list. |
| 5 | Ch. 4-5 | p. 55: will ever come to an end.The difference: no space after the full stop. |
| 6 | Ch. 4-5 | p. 67: they become the model for Sun gatherings: "Sun" where the context requires "Sufi". |
| 7 | Ch. 4-5 | p. 67: 3:31 is quoted as "Say: If you love God, follow me, and God will love you'", with a stray closing single quote and no opening one, and worded differently from the same verse on p. 45 ("and then God will love you"). |
| 8 | Ch. 4-5 | p. 68: when God is called. He answers, and when asked. He gives.: full stops inside a sentence that continues. |
| 9 | Ch. 6 | p. 76 against p. 35: Rumi's verse output is about sixty-five thousand verses here but over 70,000 verses in chapter 2. |
| 10 | Ch. 6 | p. 78: to make all his attributes manifest: lower-case "his" for God, against the book's usual "His". |
| 11 | Ch. 6 | p. 80: the cosmos is the loci wherein He becomes manifest: plural "loci" with singular verb. |
| 12 | Ch. 7 | p. 98, Jami's ghazal: In reality. It played love with Itself: a full stop inside the line (checked against the page image). |
| 13 | Ch. 7 | p. 103: On the contrary. He created them alone, and creation also see its form in him: a stop where a comma is expected, and a plural verb with "creation". |
| # | Ch. | Slip |
|---|---|---|
| 14 | Ch. 7 | p. 105: In the same way God says. Say:: a full stop before the quoted verse where a colon or comma is expected. |
| 15 | Ch. 7 | p. 113: The speed in which the brilliance of the attributes fall give it the attribute of rejoicing: verbs agree with "attributes" rather than "speed" and "brilliance". |
| 16 | Ch. 8 | p. 128: his attributes alone are present: lower-case "his" for God in Chittick's own prose. |
| 17 | Ch. 8 | p. 128: 7:143 printed as disclosed Himself to the mountain. He made it crumble to dust: a stop inside the verse. |
| 18 | Ch. 8 | p. 135: under My wing."All of this: no space after the closing quotation mark. |
| 19 | Ch. 9 | p. 146: According to a hadith. God kneaded and After having kneaded Adam's clay. God blew: stops where commas are needed. |
| 20 | Ch. 9 | p. 152: [He loves them, and they love him]: lower-case "him" for God, against "He loves them, and they love Him" elsewhere in the chapter. |
| 21 | Ch. 9 | p. 165: The angels were saying. We call You holy; p. 168: from earth. His own generosity: the same stop-for-comma pattern. |
| 22 | Ch. 9 | p. 172: Verily I am God [20:14]. He said to us: the sentence beginning "Even though" is broken by a stop. |
| 23 | Ch. 9 | p. 174: "My servant. My servant!" and have no boundary. My pardon no measure: stops breaking a parallel series. |
| 24 | Ch. 9 | p. 175: One more passage from the "The Refreshment of the Spirits": doubled "the". |
| 25 | Ch. 10 | p. 180: he can be seen with the bodily eye in the next world: lower-case "he" for God. |
| 26 | Ch. 10 | p. 196: By guiding people on the path. God does not do away with the veils and What he does do: a stop breaking the sentence, and lower-case "he" for God. |
| 27 | Ch. 10 | Note 27 to chapter 10 reads Mawaqif 55-30 (with a dash), where every other Mawaqif reference uses a colon (e.g. Mawaqif 31:1-3); note 13 to chapter 9 reads Rawh 2.23, a stop where the other Rawh references give plain page numbers. |
Several things look odd but cannot be judged from the book alone, so they are not listed: the spelling of some place names, the death dates given for individual Sufis, the publishers and places in the notes, and the count of names in Sam'ani's book.
10. Synthesis
The book's ideas gathered: takeaways, frameworks, a closer look, the people, and some connections to present-day work.
Twenty takeaways
- Sufism resists definition. "Mysticism" or "spirituality" are too broad and too narrow; the reality is pointed at, not captured.
- Name versus reality frames the whole book, from Bushanji on page 1 to the veil on page 200.
- Islam has three dimensions: submission, faith, doing the beautiful; Sufism claims the third.
- Body, tongue, heart map onto right doing, right thinking, right seeing.
- Mercy precedes wrath. The Sharia's stern face hides mercy, and all returns to mercy.
- Every thing has two faces, a western face that veils and an eastern face that shows God.
- Sobriety and intoxication are both needed; the highest stage is sobriety after intoxication.
- Reason sees distance, imagination tastes presence; Ibn Arabi wants "both eyes".
- Gnosis comes by transformation, not books.
- The human self has no fixed quality; ask "Who am I?", not "What is the self?"
- Cultivation, not mere purification, is the sense of tazkiya.
- Self-knowledge needs guidance; the belief that we need no help is, in the Sufi reading, modernity's fatal defect.
- Remembrance is the central practice, and the Shahadah its best formula.
- God's love comes first; human love answers it.
- All love is love for God under veils; discernment tells gold from gold plate.
- Poverty (faqr) is the Sufi name for need, and pain is the start of the journey.
- Creation is a dance to God's "Be"; audition remembers the Covenant of Alast.
- The human is the third and only self-aware book, a microcosm made upon God's form.
- Adam's slip proves love: need beats purity, and forgiveness needs sinners.
- Veils are never lifted, but guidance moves us from far veils to near ones, until the veil is seen as the face.
Frameworks at a glance
| Framework | Terms | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| Three dimensions of Islam | islam, iman, ihsan | 1 |
| Three domains of faith | heart, tongue, limbs | 1 |
| Two faces of things | western (veil), eastern (sign) | 1, 4 |
| Two poles | tanzih/tashbih; sobriety/intoxication; reason/imagination | 2 |
| Three stages | false sobriety, intoxication, sobriety after | 3 |
| Annihilation and subsistence | fana', baqa' (55:26-27) | 3, 4, 7 |
| Three selves | ammara, lawwama, mutma'inna | 4 |
| What, why, how of dhikr | tawhid, return, prophecy | 5 |
| Three books | Koran, cosmos, soul | 7 |
| Two arcs | descent, ascent; compulsory and voluntary return | 7 |
| Kinds of veil | four (Mustamli), two (Hujwiri), seven (Maybudi) | 10 |
| Far and near veil | ignorance; light seen through veils | 10 |
A closer look
- Strengths. The book lets primary texts speak at length, much of it newly translated (Baha Walad, Sam'ani, Niffari), and its central frame, the Hadith of Gabriel, makes Sufism intelligible from inside Islam rather than as a foreign graft.
- A chosen canon. Quotations stop with Jami in the fifteenth century, as the note on sources admits. Modern Sufism gets a few pages, and orders, saints' shrines and social history very little. The book is about the "reality", and the "name" side is thin by design.
- Sympathy over neutrality. Chittick says he seeks a middle way between scholars and enthusiasts, but the book argues for the Sufi self-understanding. Kalam often appears as a foil, and modern science and "self-help" are judged, in the Sufi reading he presents, very harshly.
- The Sam'ani risk. Reading the fall as felix culpa could seem to excuse sin; Chittick answers that Sam'ani wrote where the Sharia's force was assumed, and the point is motive, not license.
- Uneven parts. As rewritten essays, chapters 8 and 9 are mostly long translations, and chapter 10 returns to themes from chapter 1; repetition is part of the method but is noticeable.
- Small slips. Twenty-seven printed slips (Part 9) are minor and never change the argument.
Who's Who
| Person | Date as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ali ibn Ahmad Bushanji | "more than a thousand years ago" | Name without a reality |
| Abu Yazid Bastami | ninth century | "Knowledge from the Living" |
| Dhu'n-Nun al-Misri | d. 861 | Audition through the Real or the self |
| an-Nuri | d. 907 | Annihilation in the Remembered |
| Junayd | d. 910 | Sober master; "He is now as He was" |
| Hallaj | d. 922 | "I am the Real" |
| Niffari | d. around 970 | God's sayings on the veil |
| Sarraj; Kalabadhi | d. 988; d. 990 | Early manuals, veil definitions |
| Mustamli | d. 1042-43 | Four veils |
| Hujwiri | d. 1072 (p. 36), 1072-73 (p. 184) | Rust and clouding |
| Abdullah Ansari | d. 1089 | "All are He" refrain |
| Ghazali | d. 1111 | Giving Life to the Sciences; Niche of Lights |
| Ahmad Ghazali; Ayn al-Qudat | d. 1126; d. 1131 | Psychology of love |
| Maybudi | commentary finished 1126 | Seven veils |
| Person | Date as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ahmad Sam'ani | d. 1140 | Adam's fall as love |
| Ruzbihan Baqli | d. 1209 | Intoxicated prose; audition |
| Attar | d. 1221 | Seven valleys |
| Baha Walad | d. 1230 | Ma'arif |
| Ibn Arabi | d. 1240 | Greatest theoretician |
| Najm ad-Din Razi | d. 1256 | Scissors of "no god"; Alast |
| Rumi | d. 1273 | Greatest poet of love |
| Qunawi; Iraqi | d. 1274; d. 1289 | Book of the self; endless dance |
| Sa'di; Ibn Ata'illah | d. 1292; d. 1309 | Breath; dhikr treatise |
| Izz ad-Din Kashani | d. 1334-35 | "Perishing" in the present |
| Hafiz | d. 1389 | Last words of the book |
| Muhammad Parsa; Jami | d. 1420; d. 1492 | Root of Islam; "post of translator" |
| Abd al-Qadir Jaza'iri | d. 1883 | Reviver of Ibn Arabi in exile |
| Rene Guenon | died in Cairo in 1951 | Sober Sufism in France |
Glossary
Terms as the book glosses them.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| adab | Courtesy of the servant toward the Lord |
| Alast | The covenant "Am I not your Lord?" (7:172); the first music |
| asbab | Occasions, secondary causes; for Ibn Arabi, veils |
| baqa' / fana' | Subsistence / annihilation |
| baraka | Blessing transmitted at initiation |
| dhikr | Remembrance and mention of God, by His names |
| du'a' | Supplication, free petitionary prayer |
| faqr | Poverty, need toward God; hence fakir, dervish |
| fitra | Original human disposition, made in God's image |
| ghafla | Heedlessness, forgetfulness |
| himma | High aspiration |
| ihsan | Doing the beautiful: worship "as if you see Him" |
| iman / islam | Faith / submission |
| insan kamil | Perfect human being |
| kashf | Unveiling; from a Koranic verb "remove" |
| khayal | Imagination, the faculty that perceives God's presence |
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| ma'rifa, irfan | Gnosis: knowledge of self that is knowledge of God |
| maqamat / ahwal | Stations / states on the path |
| nafs | Self or soul; reflexive "self" |
| sama' | Hearing; audition, listening to music |
| Shahadah | Testimony "no god but God", "Muhammad is His messenger" |
| silsila | Chain of transmission to the Prophet |
| sukr / sahw | Intoxication / sobriety |
| tahaqquq / taqlid | Realization / imitation |
| tajalli | Self-disclosure (from 7:143) |
| tanzih / tashbih | Incomparability / similarity of God |
| tariqa | Order, path |
| tasawwuf | "Being a Sufi", Sufism |
| tawhid | Assertion of God's unity |
| tazkiyat an-nafs | Cultivation (purification and growth) of the soul |
| wahdat al-wujud | Unity of Being, linked with Ibn Arabi |
| wajd / wujud | Ecstasy / existence |
| zillat | Slip: Sam'ani's word for Adam's sin |
About this book
Sufism: A Beginner's Guide by William C. Chittick. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions