Insight Editions · No. 156
The Repose of the Spirits: A Sufi Commentary on the Divine Names
Ahmad Sam'ani · Translated by William C. Chittick
Ahmad Sam'ani interprets the divine names through Qur'anic verses, prophetic reports, poetry, and Sufi anecdotes, presenting divine love and human response as the work's central themes.
A study guide to The Repose of the Spirits: A Sufi Commentary on the Divine Names by Ahmad Sam'ani, translated 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
The Repose of the Spirits (Rawh al-arwah) is the first and one of the longest commentaries on the divine names written in Persian. Its author, Ahmad Sam'ani of Merv, died in 1140; William C. Chittick's complete English translation, comes with a long Introduction and some 1,500 notes.
The book has two halves of very unequal size. Chittick's Introduction (about a tenth of the whole) tells how the work was forgotten and found again, rebuilds the history of the Sam'ani family from the biographical dictionaries of Ahmad's nephew 'Abd al-Karim, places Ahmad in the Sufism of twelfth-century Khorasan, and explains the theology of the divine names. The translation then follows Sam'ani through 102 names in 74 sections, from "He" to the Patient. The names are less a list to be defined than a set of doors: each one opens onto stories of prophets and Sufis, verses of the Quran, sayings of the Prophet, Arabic and Persian poems, and Sam'ani's own sermons to his "dervish" and "chevalier".
In one sentence: Sam'ani uses the divine names to teach a single lesson in a hundred forms, that God's love for the human being came first, without cause, and that the right human answer is need, love and the courage to carry the Trust that heaven and earth refused.
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
The argument map
Sam'ani does not argue in chapters; he preaches. But the book as a whole, Introduction and translation together, makes a case that can be set out in six steps.
- Repose was a classic, read by the great Persian poets and mined by later authors, whose author was nearly forgotten (Introduction, part one).
- Its author belonged to a family of jurists and Hadith scholars for whom Sufism was part of ordinary learning, not a fringe (Introduction, part one).
- The divine names are the keys to the unseen: to know God, the world and the self, one must know the names, which Adam alone was taught (Introduction, part two).
- Every name shows God's two faces, gentleness and severity, beauty and majesty, so that each thing is "a gentleness in severity, a severity in gentleness" (names 1-38).
- God loved Adam first and without cause; Adam's slip was the way that love entered the world of trial, need and repentance (names 17-66).
- The human answer is to carry the Trust with love and need, following Muhammad, whose Night Journey shows the highest possibility of the human being (names 29-102).
The parts at a glance
| Edition part | Book section | Main question | Key answer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Introduction I | Reception, Sam'anis, Khorasan | Who wrote the book and where? | A Merv preacher of a scholarly dynasty, in a Khorasan where Sufism was mainstream |
| 2. Introduction II | Keys to the Unseen; text and translation | Why the names? | The names are roots of all knowledge; Sam'ani's commentary is the most imaginative of four |
| 3. Names 1-16 | He to the Form-Giver | How does God show Himself? | Power, unity and wisdom; mercy, shame, servanthood, beautiful form |
| 4. Names 17-26 | All-Forgiving to Uplifter | What is the human situation? | Need, emigration, trust, contraction and expansion, the heart as a kingdom |
| 5. Names 27-33 | Exalter to Gentle | What is Muhammad's rank? | The Night Journey, uncaused love, the eulogy of the prophets |
| 6. Names 34-38 | Aware to Grateful | How does seeking work? | Seeking comes from finding; the praise of dust; talismans; aspiration |
| 7. Names 39-50 | High to Wise | Why disobedience? | Poverty, the shariah of love, generosity to sinners, the vicegerent's wisdom |
| 8. Names 51-66 | Loving to Death-Giver | What is love? | Love as trial, separation and union, the Fatihah as deputyship |
| 9. Names 67-84 | Alive to Pardoner | What lies beyond the spirit? | Life not of the spirit, the light of Muhammad, forgiveness before repentance |
| 10. Names 85-102 | Clement to Patient | How does it end? | Giving for free, the moth and the candle, dust against fire, Adam and the wheat |
| 11-13 | Edition apparatus | Slips, synthesis, glossary | Notes on the text; takeaways, frameworks, closer look, Who's Who; terms |
Reading paths
- For the main idea in an hour: this part, Part 2, then names 1-16 in Part 3 and the Synthesis in Part 12.
- For readers of Sufism: Part 1 on Khorasan, the Night Journey in Part 5, love as trial in Part 8 and the moth and candle in Part 10.
- For theology: Part 2, then compulsion and free will in Part 3, the paired attributes in Part 9 and the frameworks table in Part 12.
1. Chittick's Introduction: Author, Family and Milieu
The first half of the Introduction tells how a forgotten Persian classic came back to light, rebuilds the life of Ahmad Sam'ani from his nephew's biographical dictionaries, and places him in a Khorasan where Sufism was simply part of ordinary learning.
- The Repose of the Spirits (Rawh al-arwah) is the first and one of the longest Persian commentaries on the divine names, by Ahmad Sam'ani of Merv (1094-1140).
- It was read and copied, and quietly mined by later authors, but its author's name was nearly forgotten until scholars rediscovered it in 1968-69.
- Almost all we know of Ahmad comes from his nephew 'Abd al-Karim Sam'ani, a collector of Hadith who never mentions the book.
- The Sam'anis were a dynasty of jurists, Hadith transmitters and preachers; preaching for "reminder" (tadhkir) ran in the family.
- In Ahmad's Khorasan, Sufism was not a fringe movement: many jurists and Hadith scholars were also Sufis.
- Repose was most likely delivered as oral lectures to students on the Sufi path, probably at the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Merv.
A classic that went missing
Chittick opens with a strong claim. "It is a remarkable expression of Islamic spirituality and one of the most accessible books on the inner meanings of the Quran ever written." Sam'ani did not imitate the Arabic commentators on the names, who were mostly lexicologists and theologians. He set aside their abstract analysis and wrote instead about the divine love running through all existence. In this he anticipates the great Persian poets: 'Attar, Rumi and Sa'di. Chittick adds that recent research has shown that Hafiz composed scores of verses following Repose almost word for word.
Before Ibn 'Arabi, who was born sixteen years after Sam'ani died, no one else seems to have gone so deep into divine love and mercy. The difference is audience. Ibn 'Arabi wrote thousands of pages for the learned elite. Sam'ani wrote in the spoken Persian of Khorasan, close to the literary Persian still read in Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, and he addressed ordinary people.
The book survived, but the author's name faded. Chittick traces its afterlife:
| Reader | What the book reports |
|---|---|
| Rashid al-Din Maybudi, Kashf al-asrar | Ten-volume Persian Quran commentary begun in 1126; from volume six it borrows from Repose wholesale without naming it, a common practice at the time |
| Nizam al-Din Awliya' (d. 1325), patron saint of Delhi | On June 8, 1312 he praised Repose alongside Makki's Nourishment of the Hearts as the best Persian book by the former masters |
| Qadi Hamid al-Din Nagawri (d. 1246) | Chishti disciple; quotes Repose by name in his Lawa'ih and includes about thirty short passages in his unpublished commentary on 103 names, Tawali' al-shumus |
| Katip Celebi (Hajji Khalifa, d. 1657) | Gives title and author, but says nothing about the content |
| Muhammad-Taqi Danishpazhuh (d. 1996) | 1968 article describing seven manuscripts; only three name the author |
| Badi' al-Zaman Furuzanfar (d. 1970) | Shows that Rumi's tale of the nomad and the caliph rests on an Arabic passage in Repose; confirms the author as Abu'l-Qasim Ahmad ibn Mansur Sam'ani |
Nizam al-Din's words, as recorded by his disciple Amir Hasan Sijzi, were: "Among the books the shaykhs have written, The Repose of the Spirits has much comfort." Danishpazhuh praised the prose in similar terms. "The prose," he said, "is fluent, eloquent, heart-pleasing, and ancient, so much so that you never become tired of reading it and you want to keep on reading to the end."
Why was it overlooked? Chittick offers two guesses. The title makes it look like a dry theology manual. And from the thirteenth century onward, Sufi teaching was dominated by Ibn 'Arabi's more philosophical approach, so that even commentators on Rumi drew on Ibn 'Arabi. Had they drawn on Sam'ani, Chittick says, the result would have been closer to Rumi's own manner.
A book can be influential and anonymous at the same time. Maybudi absorbed half a commentary's worth of Repose without a word of credit, and Rumi's scholars read him through a different lens. Chittick's translation is partly an act of restoring a name to an influence that was already there.
Merv and the Sam'ani family
Merv, Ahmad's birthplace, is now a UNESCO site near Mary in Turkmenistan. Under the Seljuqs, who took it in 1037, it became one of the largest cities in the world and a rival to Baghdad. The geographer Yaqut, who stayed three years before leaving in 1219, counted ten endowed libraries and sometimes borrowed over two hundred volumes at once: "I collected most of the details for this and my other books from those libraries." Two of the ten belonged to the Sam'ani family. The Ghuzz sacked the city in 1153, and in 1221 the Mongols destroyed it and massacred the population.
Chittick gives distances to show that cities now in four countries shared one culture: Herat about 200 miles south, Nishapur about 200 miles southwest, Bukhara 225 miles northeast, Mashhad about 150 miles southwest, Balkh about 200 miles east-southeast, Ghazna about 450 miles southeast. Baghdad lay about 1,100 miles west and Mecca about 1,800.
The Hadith culture
Our only contemporary witness to Ahmad is his nephew Abu Sa'd 'Abd al-Karim Sam'ani (d. 1166), who wrote about a hundred works, most now lost. Two biographical works survive: Ascriptions (al-Ansab) and the Abridgement of his lexicon of teachers, which covers 1,446 of them. To read 'Abd al-Karim rightly, Chittick explains the culture of Hadith transmission. A hadith had to be "heard" (sama') from a teacher, along with its chain (isnad). Shorter chains were better, so collectors hunted old men with "high" chains, and children were brought to hear them very young. When 'Abd al-Karim says "knowledge" or "scholar", he means Hadith. That is why Ghazali gets no entry of his own in Ascriptions, and why Subki can quote him saying of Ghazali: "I do not think that he transmitted any hadiths, or if he did, only a few, for no hadith has been narrated from him."
Mansur, the grandfather
Mansur ibn Muhammad (1035-96) began as a Hanafi. On pilgrimage he changed to the Shafi'i school in Mecca in 1070, under the influence of Sa'd Zanjani, and returned to Merv in 1075 after his father appeared to him in a dream. The change caused riots; the Shafi'i mosque was closed and he was expelled. Nizam al-Mulk welcomed him in Nishapur with a post at the Nizamiyya; he returned to Merv only in 1086. His teacher Juwayni said of him: "Were jurisprudence a fine garment, Abu’l-Muẓaffar ibn Samʿānī would be its embroidery."
What matters for Repose is that Mansur also held sessions of tadhkir, "reminder", preaching meant to bring listeners to the remembrance of God. Farisi says that in these "he was an ocean. He had memorized many stories, fine points, and poems, and he was accepted by the elect and the common." Chittick infers he preached in Persian, since only scholars could follow Arabic. Ahmad's book continues a family art: speaking to ordinary listeners in their own language, with stories and verse. Its aim, Chittick says, is not to add to the reader's learning but to open the heart to the remembrance of God.
Mansur's published works are juristic, but one supplication in his Istilam already sounds like Repose, pairing opposite human and divine qualities: "no exaltation except in abasement to You, no wealth except in poverty toward You, no security except in fear of You".
Muhammad and Hasan
Muhammad (1074-1116), Ahmad's eldest brother, was a Hadith master. Challenged that he invented the names in his chains, he recited the hadith against lying about the Prophet by ninety-some routes, then let his critics scramble ten chains, and restored every name. Hasan (1076-1137) was a recluse given to worship and night vigils; burglars strangled him while stealing a trust left with his wife, and so, says 'Abd al-Karim, he received the martyr's death he had prayed for. From Hasan, 'Abd al-Karim heard Labid's half-line, which Ahmad cites three times because it sums up his book: "Is not everything other than God unreal?"
Ahmad himself
Ahmad (1094-1140) was two when his father died. His brother Muhammad adopted and taught him. 'Abd al-Karim lists his qualities: imam, Hadith scholar, debater, Quran commentator, mufti, defender of the Shafi'i school, poet in Arabic and Persian, and a homilist whose homilies were full of fine points. He took over his brother's teaching when Muhammad died, apparently at the Nizamiyya of Merv, where 'Abd al-Karim helped repeat his lessons. In 1135 uncle and nephew travelled to Nishapur, where 'Abd al-Karim hid so that he could stay behind. Ahmad died at Idriqad on 17 Shawwal 534 (5 June 1140) and was buried beside his father.
| Glimpse of Ahmad | Source in the Introduction |
|---|---|
| Reads a Hadith collection aloud to a visiting scholar (1122) | 'Abd al-Karim's account of Husayn Lamishi |
| Corrects a preacher's "Dara'i" to "Darani"; the young nephew lectures him on grammar and Ahmad stays silent | Account of 'Umar Bastami |
| Agrees to visit the graves of the shaykhs before a banquet; Qadi Hassan jokes that the dead will not leave their graves, but the food will vanish | Account of Qadi Hassan Tusi |
| Transmits about fourteen hadiths, nearly all from Shiruwi, to Ibn 'Asakir | History of the City of Damascus |
| Ibn 'Asakir's one chosen hadith for him: A man will be with those he loves | Ibn 'Asakir's Lexicon of Shaykhs |
The last item is telling. Ibn 'Asakir chose one hadith to stand for each teacher, and for Ahmad he chose: "A man will be with those he loves." He chose a variant of the same hadith for 'Abd al-Karim. Ahmad's son Abu Bakr Muhammad, known only from one later report, was also "outstanding in reminder" and once improvised a love poem from the pulpit. Chittick reads its imagery in Sufi terms: lovers seek union, two cannot be one, so the Beloved must shed the lover's blood.
Sufism in Ahmad's Khorasan
Chittick refuses the easy equation of Sufism with "mysticism". He uses the word broadly for the trend, present in the Quran, the Prophet and some Companions, to put inner meaning before outward form: what the Hadith of Gabriel calls ihsan, "beautiful-doing". He agrees with Ahmet Karamustafa: "In the eyes of many traditionalists", irrespective of their piety, "Sufism was utterly mainstream."
Ahmad himself uses the word Sufism only eleven times, nine of them in quotations. One of his own uses is a small parable: "Have you seen a lotus flower? You must learn Sufism from it." The lotus is radiant outside and humble inside: "A dervish must be like that. He must wear the tattered cloak on his heart, not his body".
Instead of "Sufism", Ahmad speaks of Shariah, Tariqah and Haqiqah. He says the Prophet was "the peacock in the orchard of the Haqiqah, the nightingale in the garden of the Tariqah, and the phoenix in the house of the Shariah". And the shaykhs, he reports, hold that "The felicitous person is he who has an outwardness conforming to the Shariah, an inwardness following the Haqiqah, and a secret core quit of relying on his Shariah and his Haqiqah".
Sufi lodges (khanaqahs and ribats) were everywhere; Mansur could walk to Mecca sleeping in them. Their residents called themselves "poor" (faqir, darwish) because the Quran makes poverty the basic human attribute. 'Abd al-Karim calls 120 of his own teachers Sufis, many of them also jurists and imams. Chittick's verdict on Ahmad: if a Sufi is someone seriously engaged in transforming the soul by following the Prophet's Sunnah, the book shows him an eminent Sufi teacher; whether he formally swore allegiance to a shaykh, we do not know. Chittick guesses a link to the Qushayri line and calls Repose the first major exposition of Qushayri's teachings in Persian.
Sufis among the scholars
'Abd al-Karim's dictionaries are full of scholar-Sufis, and some passages show friction. He was shocked that the Sufi preacher Abu Sa'id ibn Khalifa did not know the rules for narrating Hadith, yet when he preached in Merv everyone wept, and Ghazali reportedly said: "If anyone wants to look at the face of Sufism, let him look at Abū Saʿīd ibn Khalīfa." Junayd Qa'ini led the Sufis of a Herat ribat for forty years without letting anyone know he was learned. Chittick reads both sides here: jurists said Sufis "did not know anything of knowledge", and Sufis saw the scholars as proud and aloof.
The family's own Sufi ties ran deep. As a child 'Abd al-Karim received licences from Sufi transmitters, including one, at seven, to transmit Qushayri's Risala. He studied with Yusuf Hamadani, later counted first of the Naqshbandi masters, and his relatives and household were buried in Hamadani's enclosure. Three teachers he credits with "miracles and signs", and with one, 'Uthman Nawqani, he twice saw the shaykh answer an unspoken thought. A last clue: Ibn 'Asakir called him mutasawwif, one engaged in Sufism, but the printed text reads mutasawwin, "self-guarding", following Dhahabi two centuries later. Chittick suspects Dhahabi had reason to blur a famous Shafi'i's Sufi ties.
Why the nephew never mentions the book
'Abd al-Karim, who listed everything, never mentions his uncle's commentary. Chittick suggests several reasons: he never mentions any Persian book; Repose is not a book of "knowledge" in his Hadith sense; and judged against Bayhaqi's Names and Attributes, the one commentary on the names he is known to have heard, it would look like mere homilies for the common people.
The book itself looks like a set of lectures. It has almost no introduction, only the line "Hereby opens up the explanation of the names of the Lord in Persian for the benefit of the Muslims". Sam'ani keeps addressing listeners as "O dervish" and "O chevalier" (jawanmard), which implies hearers on the Sufi path. The dense Arabic and ornate Persian make a general public unlikely; Maybudi had to simplify it.
The title
Rawh, "repose", is spelled like ruh, "spirit", so many readers hear "the spirit of the spirits". Rawh can also mean breeze, a breath of ease. The Quran uses it of Jacob's hope ("Despair not of the repose of God") and of paradise. The spirit is what God blew into Adam; the soul (nafs) is awareness clouded by the senses. Overcoming the soul's forgetfulness restores the spirit's clarity. Sam'ani's only self-ascribed poem says: "Around the repose of the spirit circles His lovers’ aspiration". The subtitle's All-Opening (fattah) rhymes with arwah, and recalls futuh, "opening", the Sufi term for the soul's opening to God: "In short, until you come alive, you will not reach the Alive".
Sources
| Source | How Sam'ani uses it, per Chittick |
|---|---|
| Hadith | Cited constantly, but with a chain only three times (from a Merv renunciant, from his brother Muhammad, and from "the crown of Islam") |
| Arabic poetry | Verses from more than seventy-five poets; only three named (twice Hallaj, once Shafi'i) |
| Qushayri | Risala sayings; Subtle Allusions (Lata'if al-isharat) borrowed often, in Arabic or Persian; his commentary on the names used little; two minor works |
| Samarqandi, Mawardi, Ghazali's Ihya' | Brief borrowings |
| Ikhwan al-Safa' | A few translated passages on the human microcosm |
| Mustamli, Sharh al-ta'arruf | The most important Persian source: a four-volume commentary on Kalabadhi's Ta'arruf |
| Sana'i | Quoted frequently, never named |
| His own verse | One ghazal explicitly his ("Once these verses occurred to my mind"); Chittick suspects about fifteen more poems |
| Not used, on the evidence | Ahmad Ghazali's Sawanih; Hujwiri's Kashf al-mahjub |
Chittick stresses that Repose is no compilation. Unlike Maybudi, Sam'ani borrows proportionately little and shows himself "a powerful and original thinker".
2. Chittick's Introduction: The Keys to the Unseen
The second half of the Introduction explains why the divine names matter in Islamic thought, compares Sam'ani with three earlier commentators, sets out the paired ideas that run through the book, and describes the text and the translation.
- The Quran calls its verses, the world and the self all "signs"; the divine names are the keys that link the three.
- Adam was taught all the names; forgetting them is the human plight, and the prophets come to "rectify the names".
- Every name is read through tawhid: if God is the Merciful, no one is merciful but God. This yields two angles, incomparability (tanzih) and similarity (tashbih).
- Bayhaqi transmits, Qushayri explains and quotes, Ghazali theorizes; Sam'ani uses the names as a pretext to talk about divine love, in images.
- The world is "metaphor" and God is "reality"; the metaphor is the bridge to the reality.
- God's "decree" (what He makes happen) and His "command" (what He asks of us) must both be held; the result is "neither compulsion nor free will".
Three books and their keys
Following Ibn 'Arabi, Chittick speaks of three great books, each disclosing all of God's signs: the universe (macrocosm), the human being (microcosm, the perfect human of whom Muhammad is the supreme instance), and the Quran. The "most beautiful names" are the keys to how the three relate. The Essence itself is nameless and unknowable.
The word wujud, used for "existence" since Avicenna, literally means finding. God finds and is found eternally; everything else is contingent on Real Wujud. Sam'ani puts it plainly: "After coming into existence the creatures are just as captive to power as they were before existence." His conclusion: "So the existence of the creatures right now is similar to nonexistence."
God's knowledge of each thing is its eternal name. Particular names are the specific things of the world; universal names are the broad qualities they share, and where the Quran names these, they are the most beautiful names. Adam, God's vicegerent, was taught "the names, all of them" (2:31). His children inherit the potential but face a choice: which names to learn? Religion and philosophy chose the universal; modern schools, Chittick remarks, stress the particular names of engineering and commerce and discourage the big questions.
The attributes the names designate (life, knowledge, desire, power, mercy, love, gentleness, justice) both structure the cosmos and appear as the virtues of truly human people. Chittick warns that splitting human endeavour into objective and subjective, scientific and artistic, forgets their common source.
Chittick cites an Economist essay on animal minds: almost every attribute of the human mind is found in some animal, but language "can still be claimed as uniquely human." In Islamic terms, animals know snippets of names; humans alone were taught them all. Sam'ani says much the same of the microcosm: "everything is found once again in the Adamite, but the Adamite is not found again in anything".
Names, tawhid and the two angles
Commentary on the names (sharh) was a recognized genre. The idea of ninety-nine names comes from a sound hadith: "Surely God has ninety-nine names, one hundred less one. Whoever enumerates them will enter the Garden." The list itself cannot be traced to the Prophet, and no one took ninety-nine as a limit. Tilimsani counted 146 distinct names in the Quran. Gimaret, the best survey, describes twenty-three commentaries down to Ghazali and some 275 names; Chittick faults him for paying only lip service to the spiritual approach and for treating Ibn 'Arabi's vast discussion of the names as a footnote.
The first step back to the names, Chittick says, is tawba, "turning", usually rendered "repentance". God too is tawwab, "Ever-Turning": people turn because He has turned toward them. Ghazali's formula "There is no actor but God" is a form of the Shahadah, and the same logic applies to every name. From it come two complementary angles:
| Tanzih (incomparability) | Tashbih (similarity) | |
|---|---|---|
| Proof text | "Nothing is as His likeness" (42:11) | "He is with you wherever you are" (57:4) |
| What it stresses | Only God is real; all else is unreal and perishing | Every name leaves traces in the world and the soul |
| Kind of names | Names of majesty and severity | Names of beauty and gentleness |
| Human task | Servanthood: obey the Lord, know your unreality | Character: become characterized by God's character traits |
| Danger if alone | Ta'til, "divesting" God of attributes (Deism is a modern version) | Collapsing the difference between Creator and creature |
Sam'ani does not use the phrase "becoming characterized by God's character traits", but he applies the idea. Of 'A'isha's saying that the Prophet's character was the Quran, he comments: "He arrived where he arrived through the attributes of the Real".
Four commentaries compared
All four follow, with variations, the list traced to Abu Hurayra (Table 2 in the book compares them). Ghazali counts ninety-nine; Sam'ani and Qushayri count "He" and "There is no god but He" as names, and Sam'ani ends with 102 names in seventy-four sections. His sections vary wildly in length: short for the first seven names, doubled for names 8 to 21, two or three times longer again for the next fifteen names, and then, at names 37 and 38, he announces: "From here on I will speak briefly in fear of boring the hearts of those who love the Possessor of Majesty".
Sam'ani rarely theorizes about naming. One rare general remark: "The greatest of God’s blessings on His servants are two things: His teaching them His name and His making Himself recognized to them". And once he has God explain the names as a love token sent to humans, not angels: "so I made a necklace of the ninety-nine names with the name God as its centerpiece", sent by the hand of the Prophet.
Imagination
Chittick's key thesis: what sets Repose apart from earlier commentaries is the central place it gives to imagination. The Hadith of Gabriel defines ihsan as worshipping God "as if you see Him". Ibn 'Arabi reads that "as if" as a call to train the imagination, without which no one would love God; reason alone only says what God is not. Sam'ani, too, prefers image, symbol and poetry, because scripture's concrete pictures convey more of God than abstract argument: "It is love that carries a man to the Beloved".
Paired ideas that run through the book
Severity and gentleness, majesty and beauty. "His majesty makes all speakers dumb, and His beauty brings all the dumb into speech".
The silent imam and the speaking imam. One looks at divine severity and falls silent; the other looks at prophetic character and speaks.
Decree and command. "The commanded is one thing, the decreed something else."
On metaphor, Sam'ani warns how little the created world can show: "It is obvious what sort of pictures can be painted on a gnat’s wing". But the metaphor is also a bridge; Rumi tells jilted lovers that human love is a wooden sword given to a boy to train him for real battle. Commenting on the Fatiha, Sam'ani has God say that only His own praise of Himself is real, and that ours must follow it so that "your metaphor will follow the reality". Chittick calls this the book's essential message: "Human beings must bring their metaphorical existence into conformity with Real Existence."
Severity and gentleness, which Sachiko Murata calls "the Tao of Islam", meet above all in the human being, created in God's all-embracing form. God tells the angels to stand aside: "Sometimes We will slice them up with the sword of severity, and sometimes We will anoint them with the gaze of gentleness".
Chittick sees Sam'ani's most original contribution in his reading of the prophets: human embodiments of right engagement with the names, much as in Ibn 'Arabi's Fusus, but without its abstruseness. Adam is central, the hero of an eternal love affair: "In the Beginningless He first talked about you to Himself, then He talked about you to you". God's beginningless love ("He loves them") is the seed of ours ("they love Him"); separation and pain are its tools.
The two "commands" settle the free-will question. The creative command, "Be!", Sam'ani calls the decree; the religious command is the law and the path. No one can escape the first; humans can disobey the second. Sam'ani's balance: "O chevalier, our position is neither compulsion nor free will." "No god but God negates the creed of free will. Muḥammad is God’s Messenger erases the slate of compulsion." Chittick adds, citing Ghazali and Ibn 'Arabi, that humans are "compelled to be free", and that the religious command is an ontological necessity, not only a moral one. Sam'ani follows the logic to the hadith "If you did not sin, God would bring a people who did sin, and then He would forgive them." Human sinfulness, for him, is built into existence and shows a love that nothing can earn.
The book's theology is unusually optimistic without being lax. Because God's love precedes all deserving, failure becomes the place where love shows itself. Yet the command still binds, because without free response there would be no paradise or hell to become real.
The text and the translation
The editor, Najib Mayel Heravi, found a manuscript in 1981 while cataloguing the library of the shrine of Imam Rida in Mashhad, and published an edition from five manuscripts in 1989. In 2015 he sent Chittick a PDF of a partial revision correcting many typographical errors; Chittick made several hundred small changes from it and also used a Majlis library manuscript (no. 2739). He did not wait for the revised edition.
| Translation choice | Reason given |
|---|---|
| As literal as possible, even if awkward | Meaning is usually clear from context |
| Keep the imagery, even mixed metaphors | Imagination is central to Sam'ani's theology; abstracting it would lose it |
| Arabic passages (about ten percent) in italics | To show the feel of the bilingual original |
| Own renderings, not existing English versions | Consistency of technical terms; Sam'ani's context and readings |
| Notes give sources, rarely explanations | Explaining "could go on indefinitely" |
In the Qushayri column of Table 2, al-Hadi and al-Badi' both carry the number 91, and the next name, al-Baqi, is 93; no name is numbered 92.
3. Names 1-16: From "He" to the Form-Giver
The opening sections of the translation move from the short, almost lyrical treatment of the first seven names to longer meditations on yearning, shame, exaltedness and servanthood, ending with Adam's beautiful form and the beginningless love behind it.
- "He"
- Power creates, Unity annihilates, Wisdom brings back: the whole drama of creation and resurrection in one name, God.
- In "No god but He", the "no god" is a chamberlain who sweeps the heart so the sultan "but God" can enter.
- God greets His friends first with "peace", because He yearns for them more than they for Him.
- Shame has many kinds, from Adam's shame at his slip to God's own shame at exposing the sinner.
- Before God's "rightful due" every deed is counterfeit; only His "decree" accepts all, so pray to be judged by the decree.
- Humans alone were addressed "He made your forms beautiful"; the love behind this is beginningless and uncaused.
The first seven names: short and dense
Sam'ani begins without a preface: "Hereby opens up the explanation of the names of the Lord in Persian for the benefit of the Muslims". He will discuss "He" first and then each name "briefly and succinctly".
He (Hu)
To common people "he" means nothing until defined; to the elect it means only the Real.
God (Allah)
The learned define God as "He who has divinity", and divinity as the power to innovate. Sam'ani turns the definition into a cosmic drama. Seen through power, the Throne is like a dust mote; seen through wisdom, the dust mote is like a Throne.
When all else returns to nonexistence, only the Adamites remain, "the vinegar and greens on the table of existence", and the All-Compelling says to them: "I remain and you remain". For the friends the worst punishment is not hell but the veil. Sari Saqati prayed, "O God, however You chastise me, chastise me not with the abasement of the veil!" and a Persian line sums it up: "No matter how You kill me, I come to life!"
No god but He
Sam'ani gives the Shahadah two images. First, a chamberlain: "when the exalted sultan of but God is about to dismount in a breast, the chamberlain of no god goes ahead." It sweeps away the refuse of mortal and satanic nature, spreads the carpet and sets up the throne. Second, a crocodile: whoever aims for "but God" must cross the bridge of "no god", "which is severity’s mouth, open like a crocodile’s", and let it swallow all his attributes, obedient as well as disobedient.
All-Merciful, Ever-Merciful
Lexically the two names mean the same and are paired for emphasis. Spiritually, hearing "God" brings awe and annihilation; hearing the names of mercy brings presence and subsistence. God added mercy to His name because people could not bear the name God alone: "Talk of mercy is linked to your seeking. It is not linked to the perfect majesty of the Real." The pairing maps onto time: "At the beginning is My power, in the middle My blessings, and at the end My mercy." And it settles the question of sin: "for the slip was not, and the mercy always was."
King and Holy
The King's kingship has no removal and needs no army. Knowing this, the believer will not bend his neck "for a grain, a draft, or a mouthful"; as a saying puts it, "He who recognizes God will not put up with the coquetry of the creatures." Holy means God gains nothing from our worship: all human devotion beside His beauty is "the noise of an old woman’s spindle". Yet He chose the creature of dust over the angels who called Him holy for ages. Sam'ani tells of a woman who, propositioned by a stranger, answers him the next day by having her maid hold up a mirror. The lesson: a beggar's claim to love the sultan is loss, unless the sultan first says "I love you".
When Adam's sun rose, Iblis was a bat rubbing its eyes, unable to bear the light, while the tiny dust mote, invisible until the sun came out, "turned its face to contemplating the sun’s perfect beauty and began to dance despite its own defects." Smallness is no obstacle; refusing the light is.
Names 8-13: longer meditations
Peace: who yearns more?
Peace means either free of defects, or "He who greets His friends with peace". On meeting, the one who greets first is the one with more yearning, and God greets first. A divine saying: "Surely the yearning of the pious to encounter Me has become protracted, but surely I yearn to encounter them even more." From this Sam'ani turns to rebuke: we claim yearning but love the world. The true mark of yearning is "to wish for death while on the carpet of well-being"; Joseph asked to be taken only when he had the kingdom of Egypt, not in the well. The vision of God in paradise will come "at the request of His own beauty", and even there yearning will not end: "There is a heat in the liver of the fish that will not settle down one iota even if you gather together all the world’s oceans."
Faithful: the danger of endings
Mu'min means truth-confirming, or giver of security. The faithful person says "I have faith truly, God willing", and Sam'ani rejects the view that this is doubt: it is "the heart’s fear of hidden deprivation." A comic tale makes the point (a man who refused to say "God willing" lost his gold to a cutpurse and then said it too late), and two grim tales follow: a muezzin of many years who died an apostate for love of a Christian woman, and, the reverse, a poor man whose willingness to wear the sash for a Christian youth won the youth to Islam. God has "a gentleness without cause and a severity without cause"; no record of service guarantees the end. Junayd: "Fear is to expect punishment with every passing breath."
Overseer: the kinds of shame
Since God watches, the servant must wear shame. Sam'ani builds a typology, partly from Qushayri:
| Kind of shame | Example in the text |
|---|---|
| Because of slips | Adam after the wheat: "No, but I am ashamed before You" |
| Veneration of majesty | The angels; Seraphiel covering his head with his wings |
| Generosity | Muhammad, too shy to tell guests to leave (33:53) |
| Respect | 'Ali, who asked a question through Miqdad because Fatima was his wife |
| Triviality | Moses ashamed to ask for small things; told to ask even for salt for his dough |
| The curtain | Shu'ayb's daughter walking "with shame" toward Moses |
| Servanthood | "Have shame before God as is the rightful due of His shame!" |
| Generosity of God | God's shame makes Him forbid indecencies |
| Shame of the Real | The sealed letter: "You did what you did, and I am ashamed to make it manifest to you." |
| Shame of the obedient | Abu Bakr Warraq after two cycles of prayer, ashamed as if he had stolen |
Then a sharp turn: this path tolerates no partnership. A sufferer asks to be given back to himself for a moment and hears: "This is an affair that will not be completed with associationism." Expecting a reward for obedience is "a fatal poison". A worshipper told he was destined for hell worshipped harder, glad to be worthy even of God's wrath; and Shibli, hearing God tell the damned "do not talk to Me" after seven thousand years, said "How happy for them!" because He spoke to them at all. "Shiblī did not look at what He said. He looked at who said it."
Exalted: no grasping Him
The Exalted is "He who is not grasped by seekers and not disabled by fleers." Even the most eloquent of men ended in "I do not number Thy laudations". Nearness to the Essence is impossible, since it would imply direction and measure; nearness to the attributes brings thirst, not rest. Nuri: "In what we are busy with the nearest nearness is the farthest farness." Sam'ani likens it to grasping one's reflection in a mirror. He ends with a glassware merchant who daydreamed his way from selling glass to disciplining a future son, kicked out in anger, and broke the basket.
All-Compelling: decree, rightful due, command
Jabbar may come from a palm too tall to reach, from "restoring" an affair, or from "compelling". Sam'ani then sets out one of the book's key distinctions:
| Assayer | Verdict on deeds | Nature | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decree | Everything comes out genuine | Sheer bounty | Beginningless |
| Rightful due | Everything comes out counterfeit | Sheer justice | Infinite, as the Essence |
| Command | Some genuine, some counterfeit | Bounty in one respect, justice in another | Ends with this world |
The prayer that follows: "Lord God, do not send our deeds to the assayer of the command or the rightful due! Send them to the assayer of the decree!"
Before the rightful due, prophets say "We have no knowledge" and angels confess they never worshipped God as He deserves. God placed opposites side by side on purpose: "Wherever there is a mosque, He built a church next door." And He tries even the Prophet: "I sent you to try you and to try by means of you."
Proud: humility as the garment of dust
Pride belongs to God; His gown, God tells Moses, is mercy. For the servant: "someone who has twice traveled the urinary canal should not be proud." The Prophet rode Buraq one night and a donkey with a palm-fibre saddle another, the same man on both. Sam'ani builds on this to praise Adam's creation, in which intellect is man's worth and knowledge his beauty, and stresses that all of it is gift: "Solicitude comes before water and clay."
Names 14-16: creation and its secret
Creator: servanthood without portions
Since only God creates, the servant should drop protest. Sam'ani strings together ten definitions of servanthood from Qushayri's sources, such as "Servanthood is to abandon self-governance and to witness predetermination." His father, the Shaykh al-Islam, used to say there are many servants of the Provider and the Bestower, "but you will never see one servant of God": whoever worships for a portion serves the portion. Prophetic stories illustrate it. Moses called the staff "my staff" and it became a serpent; Noah said "my son" and the flood came; Moses lost Khidr's company only when he spoke for his own portion ("you could have taken a wage for it").
Here too comes the passage quoted in the Introduction: "O chevalier, our position is neither compulsion nor free will." Ja'far Sadiq's answer frames it: God is too just to compel and then punish, and too wise to leave people to themselves.
Maker: the end of eye-service
Knowing that God makes all acts frees the seeker from showing off. A shaykh asked his disciples to kill a bird where no one could see; the favoured one returned with it alive, having found no place outside God's sight. Even seeing one's own nearness is a veil: "Seeing proximity is a veil of proximity." Seeking will not end in paradise: prayer and fasting will be abrogated, but "love for God and praise for God" remain forever.
Form-Giver: the uniqueness of love
Of all the marvels God made, He said "He made your forms beautiful" to no one but this handful of dust. God could create a hundred thousand like us in power, "but creating someone like us in respect of love is never allowed." To the angels' objection that Adam would work corruption, God answers through Sam'ani: "You see their outward disloyalty, but I see their inward loyalty." Abu Yazid, watching a mother pull her child out of the mud, cried: "Tenderness comes and takes away defilement! Love comes and takes away disobedience!"
The covenant of "Am I not your Lord?" (7:172) shows the same gentleness: God asked in a form that supplied half the answer. Sam'ani closes with Tustari's image of faith: "Fear is masculine and hope is feminine, and from the two are born the realities of faith."
The thread of these sixteen sections is that God's dealings with humans start before they exist: "and I was talking to you without you." Everything Sam'ani says about shame, fear and servanthood sits inside this frame. The severity is real, but it is the severity of a lover, not an accountant.
4. Names 17-26: From the All-Forgiving to the Uplifter
This stretch holds some of the longest sections of the book. Forgiveness opens onto need and exile; severity onto the two emigrations of the Prophet; the Bestower and the Provider onto trust and certainty; and the All-Opening onto Adam's slip, Moses' request for vision, and the Covenant of Alast. The pair Downletter and Uplifter closes with a portrait of the human being as a small cosmos and the heart as its king.
- Forgiveness means covering, and obedient acts need covering as much as sins do.
- Adam was molded with need; the grain of wheat attracted him because it had "the scent of need".
- Every outward event in the Prophet's emigration has an inward counterpart, and the inward one never ends.
- Trust is not a technique: "The stratagem is to abandon stratagems."
- Paradise was not taken from Adam; Adam was taken from paradise, so that his love would show.
- Everyone answered "Yes indeed" at Alast; at the end no one will answer "Whose is the kingdom today?" and God will answer Himself.
- The human being is an abridged transcript of the cosmos, and the heart rules it as a king rules a city.
17. The All-Forgiving: curtains and need
Sam'ani starts from the lexicon: "To forgive means to cover. The Arabs call a helmet a mighfar because it covers the head." He then turns the definition on the pious reader. "If the blights of your obedient acts were brought forth, you would fear obedience more than disobedience." The Prophet's hundred daily requests for forgiveness were, in this reading, requests for forgiveness of his obedience, and Rabi'a asked forgiveness for the insincerity of her own asking.
Two curtains organize the section. One has been lifted, the veil of disavowal from the hearts of the faithful. The other has been let down, the curtain of generosity over everyone's deeds, the obedient included. Remove it and the result is social collapse: "fathers would first cut themselves off from their sons and mothers from their children."
The unmanly Quran-reciter
Against this background Sam'ani draws one of his recurring types: the reciter who prays two cycles at night and wants the world to hear of it the next morning. "All the motes of existence say to him, “What a simpleton you are!”" The man of realization does the opposite: he "fills the East and the West with prostrations of sincerity and throws them into the water of unneediness." Kharaqani's wish sums up the ideal of self-effacement: to dive into the Ocean of Unity "so that the One may be, and Abu'l-Hasan may not be."
Adam and the grain of wheat
The long second half of the section is about need. Tustari is quoted: "I looked at this affair and saw no path nearer to God than poverty and no veil thicker than making claims." Iblis's road is claims ("I am better than he", 38:76); Adam's road is need ("Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves", 7:23). Sam'ani then gives the dialogue that explains the wheat:
He replied, "Because I found the scent of need in it."
The wheat and Adam were both exiles in paradise, and "An exile gets along only with an exile." Exile then becomes the frame for three parallel returns, each addressed by God in direct speech: Adam brought back to paradise with his offspring, Muhammad brought back to Mecca on the Day of the Conquest, and the spirit brought back from the body with the call "O serene soul, return to thy Lord, approving, approved!" (89:27-28).
Sam'ani reads the expulsion stories as staged departures. The going out is real, but its purpose is a return that displays gentleness where severity had been displayed. The pattern Adam, Muhammad, spirit recurs in the following sections and is the narrative shape of the whole book.
18. The Severe: gnats and spiders
"Severe" means that God "looks at no one's approval or anger." The section opens with a strange tale from Qushayri's commentary: an Abbasid caliph's army chief mistakes a dying glance for anger, falls from a balcony, and a rat later eats the eye that gave the glance. Then follows a litany of tyrants humbled by small things: Nimrod by a lame gnat, Pharaoh by a piece of wood, Bilqis by a hoopoe, Abraha by little birds, the Quraysh by a spider at the cave. The list ends in a run of reversals: "a spider engages in warfare, a gnat leads an army, a pigeon turns into a doorman, a lizard preaches".
The two emigrations
The spider at the cave leads to the theme of emigration. "Emigration has a form and a meaning, a shell and a kernel, an outwardness and an inwardness." Sam'ani then builds one of the most systematic parallel lists in the book. A selection:
| Outward emigration | Inward emigration |
|---|---|
| Temporary | Constant |
| Companion: Abu Bakr | Companion: assent |
| Supplies: food and drink | Nourishment: the gentleness of the Lord of Lords |
| Domicile: the cave | Abandoning free choice and negating others |
| Protector: a spider | Constancy and fixity |
| Mecca to Medina | From the agitated soul to the tranquil breast |
| Victory (fath) at Badr | Opening (futuh) of the breast |
| Steed: a camel | Steed: poverty and want |
| For the Companions | For all the troops of the lovers |
A second list compares the emigration to Medina with his emigration to heaven on the night journey. In one the companion was Abu Bakr, in the other Gabriel, who stopped at his limit: "Were I to draw closer by a finger's breadth, I would be incinerated." Sam'ani's surprising verdict is that the Prophet's joy in going to Medina was greater, because Medina showed God's exaltedness and heaven His bounty, and "The delight of the elect in His exaltedness is greater than the delight of the common people in His bounty."
Between the lists sits the allegory of the reed pen. The reed grows green, is cut by the simoom of severity, dried in the sun, split by the knife, and blackened in the inkwell, consoled only by the hope that its first words will be the Basmala. When the Pen came to record this community's deeds it "broke in shame", and the address came: "O Pen, write: 'A sinful community and a forgiving Lord!'"
19. The Bestower: Hagar's running
Belief in the Bestower forbids self-abasement before people. Sam'ani gathers sayings, among them Bishr Hafi's dream of 'Ali and the line "A created thing seeking aid from a created thing is like a prisoner seeking aid from a prisoner." The centrepiece is Bukhari's account of Abraham leaving Hagar and Ishmael at Mecca. Hagar's question and answer are the model of trust: "Who commanded you to bring us here?" "God." "Then go, for He will not let us go to waste."
Her seven runs between Safa and Marwah became a pillar of the hajj, and Sam'ani draws a double lesson. First, the dignity of pain: an old woman's anxious steps became law for all pilgrims. Second, the independence of grace from effort: water came from under the feet of an infant, not from her search, "Thus you may know that seeking is not a cause, nor is finding by stratagem."
The section then moves inward: an inner Kaabah for the "secret cores", the dervish as a fish nourished by the water of life (hence, in a playful reading of the hadith, the sea's carrion is lawful), and the heart as the only creature able to carry God's severity. "The heart was named qalb because of its fluctuation [taqallub]." The butcher who binds three legs of the sheep and leaves one free gives the image: "a gentleness in severity, a severity in gentleness." Junayd's refusal to rise in the sama' closes the section: the mountains "passing by like clouds" (27:88) look still, since "When going reaches the extreme, it does not enter into vision."
20. The Provider: trust and certainty
Most of this section is a chain of Sufi anecdotes taken from Qushayri's Risala and his commentary on the names (the notes give the sources). Hatim Asamm tells a sceptic his bread comes "From His storehouse"; his wife, left without money, says of him "he was someone who ate provisions" and not a provider. Junayd's dialogue with seekers of provision ends with the formula "The stratagem is to abandon stratagems." (Chittick's note adds that Sam'ani's own uncle 'Abd al-Karim ascribes these answers to Ja'far Khuldi.) Abu Ya'qub Aqta' finds a rotten turnip after ten days of hunger, throws it away, and receives a pot of sweets vowed by a sailor: "Your provision has been traveling toward you for ten days, but you sought it from the valley."
Certainty then gets a five-step ladder:
| Degree | Belongs to |
|---|---|
| Name of certainty | The common people |
| Knowledge of certainty | The elect |
| Eye of certainty | God's friends |
| Truth of certainty | The prophets |
| Reality of the truth of certainty | Mustafa |
From certainty the section turns to approval of trial. Job, in the realizers' reading, complained not of his trial but of its removal, because God had told him He had chosen it for him alone. Mu'adh, dying of plague, says "Strangle me with Your strangling, for by Your exaltedness I love You." Shibli corrects the shaykhs of Iraq: a true recognizer prefers withholding to bestowal, "for withholding is the Real's desire, and bestowal is the servant's desire." The burden of prophecy closes it: Muhammad came down from Hira "his back bent, his body trembling", and Gabriel told the enwrapped one he could not be so delicate on this road.
21-22. The All-Opening and the Knower
The name means both judge and opener of doors. Its commentary becomes a long meditation on Adam's slip and Moses' request, held together by the conviction that severity is the form love takes.
Stars and dust motes
The opening image contrasts proud stars with humble dust motes. At sunrise the stars vanish, while the motes, invisible in the shade, appear in the sun's robe of light. Self-seeing people are stars; the selfless are motes. A quatrain ascribed to Abu Sa'id says it in one line: "like a mote I'm known through the sun." The Trust (33:72) extends the image: the heavens, earth and mountains refused "out of apprehension, not pride", but "that fearless mote" took it. The dust's logic is disarming: "When they abase things, they rub them in dust. What can dust be rubbed in?"
The master gambler
Abu Sa'id visits a famous gambler who sits wrapped in a reed mat in the ashes. Asked how he earned the title of master, he answers: "By playing fair and losing all." The gambler stands for the lover who stakes everything, and he returns later in the section as Adam, the tavern-goer who gambles away every robe God gives him.
The outward and the inward Kaabah
The ihram of the pilgrim has an inward counterpart, and so does the Kaabah. Sam'ani writes a second long parallel list: "The outward Kaabah is made of stones, the inward Kaabah of secrets." There is a well of Zamzam in one, "cups of gentleness time after time" in the other; a Black Stone in one, "the everlasting black spot in the secret core" in the other. The section then grows a tree from 14:24, the "goodly word", in two versions: the hadith version (faith the trunk, prayer the water, beautiful character the leaves) and a sevenfold version shown in Figure 6.
Severity as love's form
Section 22, the Knower, opens with God's knowledge and the dog of the Companions of the Cave, then returns to Adam. The pivot of the argument is a single sentence: "Caresses at the time of conformity are no indication of honor. Caresses at the time of opposition indicate honor." Adam's greatness did not appear in the angels' prostration but in "Adam disobeyed" (20:121), because God chose him after it (20:122). Hence the reversal: "never say that paradise was taken from Adam. Say rather that Adam was taken from paradise." Sam'ani is explicit that the slip was not the cause of the expulsion: "the decrees of majesty are far too majestic to be weighed in the scales of the Mu'tazilites." Iblis protests "One for one!", and is told that the slips of friends are not counted against them.
Moses gets the same treatment. Caressed with "I chose thee for Myself" (20:41) and spoken to without intermediary, he asks to see, and is answered "Thou shalt not see Me" (7:143). God tells him: "I have work for you to do." The robe of vision, Sam'ani's God explains, is locked in the coffer of jealousy for "that solitary man" whose leftovers will serve all lovers. A chain of prophets follows, each tried: Noah, Abraham in the ballista, Jacob in the House of Sorrows, Joseph sold for a few bad dirhams, Zachariah sawn, John beheaded.
Sam'ani borrows the language of Persian love poetry to make a theological claim: "Trial is needed in love like salt in a pot." A beauty who never plays the coquette with her lover has not given her beauty its due. Read this way, the Fall and the refusal of vision are not penalties but the moves of a Beloved who wants to be sought.
23-26. Contraction, expansion, and the Covenant
Contracting and expanding
The paired names receive four meanings from Qushayri (taking and giving spirits, taking alms and giving provision, tightening and widening provision, contraction and expansion of hearts). Sam'ani's own concern is the attitude of the lover: "May a thousand thousand lives be sacrificed to the forehead that shows no creases of judgment!" His father is quoted: "If you see a dervish with a knot on his forehead, know that he has changed his object of worship." The old man whose forty children were killed says only: "One does not have recourse to kings when they are wrathful."
Alast and the last question
This part contains a compact theology of the two divine addresses. At the beginning God asked "Am I not your Lord?" (7:172) and all answered "Yes indeed"; at the end He will ask "Whose is the kingdom today?" (40:16) and no one will answer, so He answers Himself. Sam'ani links the two addresses to the Shariah, which "affirms man", and the Haqiqah, which "negates man".
The bodies and the hearts receive two different speeches: "O bodies, I am God! O hearts, I am the Friend!" A litany follows (toil and joy, asking and bestowal, credit and hard cash), and then a dozen readings of "Thee alone we worship, and Thee alone we ask for help" (1:5), one of which restates the middle path: worship "thus negating compulsion", asking for help "thus rejecting free will." Human greed is traced back to Adam (70:19, "man was created grasping"), and the hadith of Adam's debate with Moses is given a Sufi ending: the written decree was Adam's argument, but his approach to God was his confession, because "Argument will not take anyone to Him." The angels wonder that Adam's offspring leap into the ship of trial (bala') with their "Yes indeed" (bala); the answer is that "they're ducklings. It's not necessary to teach ducklings how to swim."
25-26. The Downletter and the Uplifter: the heart's kingdom
God lifts one and lowers another without cause: Moses went to fetch fire as a shepherd and returned a prophet, while Balaam went up a mountain a friend and came down "a dog in respect of attribute and meaning." Why was the Cave's dog honoured and the neighbourhood dog declared polluted? Why was Adam chosen and Iblis rejected? Sam'ani refuses causes, and quotes against the free-willers the hadith "The free-willers are the Magi of this community." The ant that sees a line on the paper and credits the pen is the image of those who see only secondary causes.
Love, again, is the only explanation. Abu Yazid: "The wonder is not that I love You, for I am a weak servant. The wonder is that You love me, for You are a strong lord." A pir says that only an iota of love ever came out of the Unseen, found no one worthy, and went back. Jesus meets three groups made thin by fear of the Fire, hope of the Garden, and love of God, and calls only the third "the proximate". Mamshad Dinawari on his deathbed rebukes a dervish praying paradise for him.
Knowledge of the inward, with an isnad
Here Sam'ani gives one of the three full chains of transmission mentioned in the Introduction, running from his teacher Abu'l-Fadl 'Abdallah ibn Ahmad Naysaburi back through Hasan Basri and Hudhayfa to the Prophet, who calls knowledge of the inward "a knowledge between God and His friends of which no proximate angel nor any of His creatures is aware." Chittick's note repeats that almost nothing is known of this teacher apart from his transmitting Hadith in Merv. Secrecy follows: "The breasts of the free are the graves of the secrets."
Microcosm and the heart as king
The last pages draw on Ghazali's Kimiya and, as Chittick shows, partly translate the Ikhwan al-Safa' (Rasa'il 2:462-67). The human being is "an all-comprehensive city" and "an abridged transcript" of the macrocosm: twelve bodily openings answer to twelve constellations, seven faculties to seven planets, bones to mountains and veins to rivers, and the four ages of life to the four seasons. Inside this city the heart rules (Figure 8).
What sets humans apart is neither feeding, nor sense and motion, nor beautiful form, which "is found on walls", but knowledge and recognition. Sam'ani's father supplies the definition of recognition as a child of two lives, the life from the Unseen (42:52) and the inborn life (15:29): "When these two lives become companions, another life, called “recognition,” is born from the two." The section ends with the caged bird that must not have its wings plucked by disobedience, and with Ridwan, Malik and the angels all claiming the heart of the faithful, until God settles it: "The hearts are between two fingers of the All-Merciful."
Chittick's notes show how much of these closing pages comes from Ghazali and the Ikhwan, sometimes translated directly. Sam'ani's own touch is the frame: the microcosm doctrine serves the argument that the human being, alone among creatures, was made to love and be loved. It is not offered as natural philosophy.
5. Names 27-33: From the Exalter to the Gentle
Seven names in four sections, and almost all of them become occasions to talk about Adam and Muhammad. The Exalter and Abaser pair opens on the arrow of mortal nature fired from the bow of beginningless knowledge and closes on the falcon of mystery. The Hearing and Seeing pair turns into a long treatment of the Night Journey. The Ruler and Just pair becomes a meditation on uncaused love and Adam's slip, and the Gentle ends in a sustained eulogy of the Prophet against the background of all earlier prophets.
- Exaltation and abasement come "without bias" and "without iniquity": the outcome rests with the archer, not the arrow.
- Adam took on the Trust without being offered it, out of jealousy, and so became "the center-point of the compass of secrets".
- The body is a city, a shop, a ship, a field and a school; the heart is the one who rules, works, sails, plows and learns in it.
- Muhammad was "taken"; Moses "came". The comer can be overcome, the one taken cannot.
- Love and deliberation do not meet: God's answer to the angels' objection is His knowledge of His own forgiveness.
- Adam's slip was a purchase made in sight of the goods: paradise was shown first so that the sale would be valid.
- The cosmos was arranged so that Muhammad's community would have its times of prayer, and prayer gathers all the other pillars into itself.
27-28. The Exalter and the Abaser: the arrow and the polo ball
Sam'ani defines the pair in a single sentence: God "puts the robe of elevation on one person, without bias, and He plunders the crown of another, without iniquity." Fear of this station, he says, has burned the hearts of the exalted ones of the Tariqah, and he cites the hadith that a man may do the deeds of the folk of the Garden while being one of the folk of the Fire in God's eyes, and the reverse. His image for this is archery:
A catalogue of prophetic suffering follows, introduced each time with the refrain "Here we have": Adam sent out of paradise, Noah branded with "surely he is not of thy folk", Abraham thrown into the fire, Jacob in the House of Sorrows, Joseph in prison, Job, Zachariah sawn in two, John beheaded, Moses refused vision, and Muhammad "his exalted teeth broken and his face tainted with blood."
Shariah against Haqiqah
The section then sets the two voices against each other, as the Introduction prepared us to expect. "The Shariah says, “O intelligent adult, shake the chain on the door of recognition!” The Haqiqah says, “O woebegone beggar, take the bags of your misfortune away from the threshold of My majesty.”" The scholars, astronomers, philosophers and merchants each stand up to claim what they know or have gained, and each is told that the affair "will not be completed with associationism." What one should bring to the Threshold is "An iota of need."
The polo ball becomes the second governing image. It is struck from the top of the field of the beginningless will to the bottom of the field of the endless desire, with a Quranic banner at each end (21:23 and 11:107). The ball has one stipulation: "You look at the gaze of the sultan, not the striking of the mallet." Heaven and earth looked at the mallet and refused the Trust (33:72). Adam looked at the sultan.
Adam and the Trust
Sam'ani plays on the Persian word bar, which means both burden and access: "Heaven and earth saw today’s burden [bār], but Adam saw tomorrow’s access [bār]." He also inverts the usual reading of the offer of the Trust. God offered it to heaven and earth because He did not want to give it to them; Adam received no offer at all. Seeing it offered to others, "he was moved by jealousy" and stepped forward unasked, so the Quranic verdict "a great wrongdoer, deeply ignorant" names his fearlessness. The section's treatment of the wheat continues the theme of part 4. Every food in paradise grabbed Adam's skirt except wheat, which told him to detach his heart, "for He will not leave you here." Three voices summarize the fall:
| Voice | What it says to Adam | Quranic anchor |
|---|---|---|
| Shariah | Do not go near this tree; keep your hands away | 2:35 |
| Tariqah | Go down out of it | 2:38 |
| Haqiqah | Strike fire to everything | (no verse given) |
The body as a city
The middle of the section returns to the microcosm. Chittick's notes 439-447 show that most of these paragraphs are translated from the Ikhwan al-Safa', with Sam'ani using qalb, heart, where the Ikhwan used nafs, soul (n441). The clay city has "240 columns" (the bones), "720 bonds" (the nerves), "360 streams" and "twelve windows", six servitor faculties and five guards, the senses. Three tribes live in it: the appetitive soul like the jinn, the blaming soul like humans, the serene soul like the angels, and over them the king, the heart. Then a run of comparisons, each opened by "In another respect":
| The body is | The heart is | Further terms |
|---|---|---|
| a well-equipped house | the housemaster | |
| a shop | an artisan; the limbs are its tools | hears with ears, remembers with the back of the brain |
| a womb, or a cradle | the embryo, or the infant | grows toward perfection |
| a ship | a sailor | deeds merchandise, death the shore, God the buyer |
| a steed | a rider | Muhammad heads the preceders |
| a field | a plowman | death the reaper, resurrection the threshing floor |
| a grammar school | a child | imagination, thought, memory, speech, artisanry |
The account of the five inner faculties leads to writing. Sounds do not stay in the air, so the faculty of artisanry, located in the fingers, set words down on tablets, "so that knowledge would remain delineated as the benefit left by the forebears for the successors". This raises the question of why the Prophet could not write. Sam'ani's answer is that he was sent "to whiten the black, not to blacken the white", and that his secret core was too exalted to come under the control of the tip of a pen.
The falcon
The section ends with the falcon, one of Sam'ani's most developed figures. A falcon holds prey in its talons but does not eat, and explains that the trial is not abstaining but being mocked for abstaining. Its eyes were once sewn shut "with the needle of severity in order to kill the desire within me." Its reward: "My tongue is mute, but my talons are eloquent." The application follows directly: "O dervish, in reality you are the falcon of mystery." The Shariah's rules are the hood and jesses; their purpose is the moment when the bird is released to hunt the secrets of the Unseen and returns to the hand "at loyalty’s invitation". A story about a eunuch who alone could enter a king's castle makes the same point more bluntly: "If someone desires entrance without a veil, let him abandon appetite."
The falcon image explains how Sam'ani holds together his sharp contrasts between Shariah and Haqiqah. The Haqiqah plunders what the Shariah gathers, yet the Shariah is not discarded. It is the falconer's training, and without it the bird never flies. The pun on riyada, discipline, and riyad, gardens, says the same thing: "Today your stipulation is discipline [riyāḍa] so that tomorrow you may reach the gardens [riyāḍ] of gentleness."
29-30. The Hearing and the Seeing: the Night Journey
The section opens briefly on watchfulness. Whoever believes God hears and sees must persevere outwardly and be watchful inwardly, and "There is nothing more surprising in the whole world than that someone should recognize Him and then take a step in opposition to Him." Sayings of Yahya ibn Mu'adh and Bishr Hafi, and a story about 'Ali and a guest who slept through the night, show the wakeful.
Adam, paradise and jealousy
Before the Night Journey, Sam'ani returns to Adam once more. Asked what paradise is worth, Adam answers that for one who fears hell it is worth a thousand lives, "But when someone fears You, paradise is not worth a grain." The reasons given for his expulsion are several: to increase his knowledge by giving him both gentleness and severity; to separate the vile from the goodly among his descendants (8:37); and the shortest of all, "never say that paradise was taken from Adam. Say rather that Adam was taken from paradise." Shibli, seen in a dream after death, reverses the familiar prayer: the Garden is God's justice, and union His bounty.
From here the theme of divine jealousy grows. Every faculty is assigned to God (hearing to listening, eyesight to taking heed, the tongue to remembrance), and the message of all the prophets is summed up as "O dust and clay, belong to Me from the depths of your spirit and heart!" A request from the Unseen passes over the whole world and stops only at Adam's dust. The heart can carry what heaven and earth could not, as Hallaj's line has it: "And the heart carries what camels cannot."
Taken, not coming
The Night Journey (mi'raj) is the core of the section. Chittick's note 489 says that the next five pages are mostly an abridgement of Mustamli's commentary on the Ta'arruf. The argument begins against those who called the journey a dream: a Jew or a Christian may see paradise in a dream, so a dream would give Muhammad no excellence. Denying the journey to Jerusalem is unbelief, because the Quran states it, but denying the ascent to heaven is not, because it rests on single-narrator reports; such a person is "a heretic."
The central contrast turns on 17:1, "Glory be to Him who took His servant by night", against 7:143, "When Moses came to Our appointed time". Figure 9 sets it out.
The principle behind the pairing is stated plainly: "Whoever wants Me has no escape from coming. Whomever I want, I Myself bring." Even Gabriel is not the real carrier. When he says "Get up so that I may take you", the Prophet replies by quoting the angel's own verse back to him, "We descend not save by the command of thy Lord" (19:64), and concludes: "Since you have no way to take a step without the command, he who takes me is not you."
Several reports from the journey follow: the House in Jerusalem lifted before the Prophet's eyes so that he could describe it to the Quraysh, the caravan whose rider felt cold in the Hijaz ("That was the breeze of the friend’s nearness"), and the sun held back, a report Sam'ani introduces with a caution: "and the responsibility is on the narrator".
The star and the lamp
Surah 53 then receives a phrase-by-phrase reading. The star may be the Pleiades, the installments of the Quran, or Muhammad himself. Sam'ani prefers the last and asks why the Prophet is called a lamp (33:46) when the sun is also a lamp (71:16). When the sun sets, no light remains; "As for a lamp, other lamps are lit from it." The letters Ta Ha add up to fourteen, the night of the full moon. The words "he stood up straight" (53:6) are then turned eight or nine ways, each opening with the phrase itself: straight in soul, heart, spirit and secret core; straight in friendship, defined as "Wanting nothing from the Friend but the Friend."; straight in looking neither right, to the afterworld, nor left, to this world. Of the moment of nearness (53:8-10) Sam'ani declines to say anything: "there was what there was, and there happened what happened, but no one is aware of these mysteries."
Moses, Gabriel and the vision
Three further puzzles close the section. Why did only Moses speak to Muhammad about reducing the prayers? So that Moses, who thought no one's ascent surpassed his, would learn otherwise. Did the Prophet see God with his eyes? Sam'ani reads 'A'isha's denial as aimed at seeing with the eyes alone: "from head to toe all of him became eye." Why did Gabriel offer help to Abraham in the catapult but stop at the Lote Tree with Muhammad? Abraham was in trial, where nothing is overlooked; Muhammad was on the carpet of endearment, and the Prophet had long wished for a moment of which Gabriel knew nothing. Gabriel's answer, given "with the tongue of his state", is that one may be bold with the sultan in exile but not on the king's own carpet.
31-32. The Ruler and the Just: uncaused love
The definitions take two lines; the rest is about the absence of causes. One group struggles night and day and hears "The seeking is rejected, the road blocked"; another worships idols and hears "I am yours, whether you wish it or refuse, and you are Mine, whether you wish it or refuse." Adam's loins are an ocean in which severity dives up Pharaoh, Nimrod and Haman and gentleness dives up Muhammad, Jesus and Moses, "without any cause in the midst." The theological point is explicit: the Folk of the Sunnah affirm servanthood but declare God incomparable with causes, since "everything newly arrived [muḥdath] is a defilement [ḥadath]." Two children quarrelling over a walnut ask an old man to divide it; it proves hollow, and a voice tells him to divide if he is the divider. A thirsty traveller who wonders why there is no stream in the desert is told the difference between khuda'i, Godhood, and kad-khuda'i, housemastery.
The phoenix of love and the dervish at the polo field
Two set pieces carry the section's feeling. The phoenix of love flies from the Unseen past the Throne, the Footstool, heaven, paradise, hell and the angels, and settles only with Adam, where it finds tribulation. Sam'ani prints the two Arabic words, mahabbat and mihnat, which differ by one dot, and has the phoenix explain: "we have been differentiated by a dot."
The second is the story of a beautiful king who asks whether anyone truly loves him. His vizier names a dervish who stands at the bottom of the polo field. The king dresses with extra care, saying "today I go hunting for hearts", rides up and greets the man, who dies on the spot, "he gave up his spirit along with the ball." The king has him buried in his own mausoleum, for "When I kill someone, I am his wergild."
The angels' objection and the wisdom of the slip
The answer to the angels' question about corruption and bloodshed (2:30) is read, following Qushayri (n533), as a list of what they do not know: God's forgiveness, the purity of human love beneath barefoot practice, God's love for them however they may be. The maxim "There is no consultation in love." is glossed at once: "Love and deliberation do not come together." Hand and foot then carry a small theology. Dust was honored by the attribute of the hand (38:75), fire was humbled by the attribute of the foot placed in hell. Sam'ani rejects both the literal hand of the similarity-asserters and the "hand of power" of the free-willers, since Iblis too was made by power. His formula: "Dust was debased by its own attribute but elevated by His attribute. Fire was elevated by its own attribute but debased by His attribute."
From this follows the argument from excuses: Adam was forgiven his first and greatest sin without darkness of clay, Iblis lying in wait, corrupt times or confused morsels; "we have a thousand times more excuses than Adam had." A blind man eating hot dates in the heat says his caravan has already been robbed, so now he is safe. Then the legal image: paradise was sold to Adam, and "in the school of Imam Shāfiʿī, selling something absent is not allowed." Adam was shown paradise so the sale would be valid, then sent to the grammar school of this world to pay the price.
Standing place and seeing place, humility and the lotus
The last part of the section is more practical. Shibli is quoted on abasement, Fudayl on humility, and the consensus of the Tariqah is reported that anyone who sees himself better than Pharaoh is worse than Pharaoh. The lotus is offered as a teacher of Sufism: "It has a radiant outwardness and an inwardness caped in humility." Seeing depends on where one stands: Moses' standing place could not yield the fruit of vision, so he was told to look at the mountain; Muhammad's standing place was "two-bows' length away", so his seeing did not swerve. From standing and seeing together comes "the moment". Sam'ani's father supplies the rule that life comes only from life, and the son draws the conclusion: "until you come alive, you will not reach the Alive."
The section ends with a run on Adam's long forming between Mecca and Taif, forty days rather than an instant, because "We would rather make the greatness of Our friends apparent than display Our own power." Adam wept three hundred years before Gabriel brought him water to wash his face, and the slip stripped away crown and chair to show "that the root greatness has no need for those trappings."
33. The Gentle: the eulogy of the Prophet
means both knowing and beautiful-doing (Chittick's note 570 compares Bayhaqi and Qushayri). To worshipers God is Gentle as the one who knows, so that they guard against hidden associationism; to the disobedient as the one who does beautifully, so that they do not despair. A whiff of the breeze of felicity passes over Adam's dust, then Azar's house to raise Abraham, 'Imran's house for Moses, Mary, and finally Tihama, where it sifts Kinana to Quraysh, Quraysh to Banu Hashim, and Banu Hashim to Muhammad. Sam'ani's father reappears with a dry remark on names: there are many called Abu Sa'd and Abu'l-Futuh,
"but nowhere is there any felicity or opening."What follows is the longest sustained praise of the Prophet in the book so far. The shooting stars guard his secrets as a guard stands on the roof above a king. The five prayers are "a souvenir that the paragon brought to you" from the Night Journey, and the prayer gathers the other pillars into itself:
| Pillar | How the prayer contains it |
|---|---|
| Fasting | refraining with intention, and more: no sleeping or walking |
| Alms tax | the closing request for forgiveness for all the faithful |
| Hajj | consecration and its ending |
| Jihad | ablution as armor, imam as warrior, the mihrab as the place of war, the greeting as the share of spoils |
The heart of the eulogy is a long series of comparisons, each beginning "Although": Noah had a ship (safina), Muhammad's community has tranquility (sakina); Noah cursed his people, Muhammad with broken teeth prayed for his; Nimrod's fire cooled for Abraham, hell will cool for Muhammad's servants; Ishmael was ransomed by a ram, each believer will be ransomed by an unbeliever; Joseph's beauty made women cut their hands, Muhammad's finger split the moon; Solomon asked for a kingdom, Muhammad asked to live and die among the poor. Asked whether he or Joseph was more beautiful, the Prophet answers: "He was more comely, but I am more lovely." Abraham, meeting him on the Night Journey, learns that the star he saw at the start of his own road was "the nail in the hoof of Muḥammad’s steed."
Sam'ani then cites a hadith by his own chain of transmission, beginning with his eldest brother Abu Bakr Muhammad (n619), on the six things that gave the Prophet excellence over the prophets. The section closes with the Persians. Against the Arabs' boast that Muhammad came in their language, Sam'ani cites the hadith that if religion hung from the Pleiades, men from Persia would reach it, and reads it as a picture of Persian lovers throwing the noose of love up to the stars.
Of the seven names in this part, none is treated mainly through its lexical meaning. Each becomes a door back to Adam's creation, the Trust and the slip, or forward to Muhammad's ascent. The repetition is the method. Sam'ani's theology of the names is a theology of the human being as the one creature addressed by love, and Adam and Muhammad are its two poles: the one who went down so that the other could be told "Ascend!"
6. Names 34-38: From the Aware to the Grateful
Four sections, and the longest stretch of continuous argument in the book so far. The Aware turns into a treatise on need and seeking that ends with Adam carrying the Trust. The Forbearing becomes a long praise of dust. The Tremendous opens with Gabriel's six hundred wings and closes, after the prophets' "talismans", on a set of reasons for the Night Journey taken largely from Mustamli. The Forgiving and Grateful begins with a promise of brevity and then calls the reader to a high aspiration.
- The watchful servant keeps his outwardness with the Shariah, his inwardness with the Haqiqah, and his secret core free of relying on either.
- Need becomes aspiration, aspiration becomes seeking, and seeking is drawn into the realities of "No god but God".
- Yet "Seeking comes from finding, not finding from seeking": the sought must begin to seek.
- Disobedience with apology outranks obedience with self-admiration; Adam and Iblis are the two proofs.
- Dust is the hidden subject of the whole cosmos: hell, paradise, the Scales and the Narrow Path are all traced back to it.
- The prophets' slips were "talismans" and "amulets", left so that the weak who come after would have something to hold.
- The Night Journey had many wisdoms, and every one of them points back to love, aspiration and intercession.
34. The Aware: watchfulness, need and the road of seeking
The lexical gloss is a single line, "He who knows the acts and words of the servants", and the practical consequence follows at once. The servant who knows that God's knowledge encompasses him will not take one breath without the permission of the Shariah and the Tariqah. Sam'ani then adds a third condition that sets the tone for the whole part: "The felicitous person is he who has an outwardness conforming to the Shariah, an inwardness following the Haqiqah, and a secret core quit of relying on his Shariah and his Haqiqah." To rely on oneself for one iota would be "sheer Magianism, utter Judaism, unmixed Guebrism, and pure unbelief."
The smallest of the servants
What follows is a run of self-abasement in the voice of the community. Who are we? In spelling the silent letter, in grammar the uninflected, "in Persian the dot under p" (Chittick's note 627 explains that the old script used one dot for both b and p, so only context told them apart). Not everything in the ocean is a pearl, nor everything in the night a full moon. Nasrabadi, asked whether he had anything of what the past shaykhs had, answered "I have the pain of not finding it." The lesson is that one needs either the pain of not finding or the joy of finding, and never ease, since "Surely God hates the healthy and carefree."
Need is the herb that grows in Adam's meadow. The angels had their boast, "we glorify Thy praise" (2:30); dust had its need, "our Lord, we have wronged ourselves" (7:23). Solomon stops his flying carpet when he hears an ant warn its people, and the ant explains: "We are a community of humility." One of the men of the Tariqah adds that Solomon sat forty days at the door of the nest, because the experienced must sit next to the experienced. To the objection that ants are not addressed by the Law, Sam'ani answers with Solomon's hoopoe and the dog of the Cave: some things are not under the ruling power of the intellect.
Iblis at the grammar school
Adam's forgetting (20:115) is read as the slip of a child. The covenant was "That he not flee from grammar school." A schoolboy who sees another boy beaten runs away in fear; his father finds him, carries him back on his shoulders and coaches him with an excuse. So God, seeing Adam frightened by the blow struck on Iblis, sent mercy to "instruct him with an excuse": he forgot, and "We found in him no resoluteness." Only after this does Adam grow up and receive the order to go down and wrestle with the accursed one.
Iblis here is a strange and almost comic figure. Thrown down by Adam, he asks not for prayers but for curses, since his work has gone beyond intercession: "My need is for you to apply the balm of your curses on my wounded spirit." He comes into the Prophet's service, is seized by the throat and let go, and quotes 21:107 back at him: "After all, I am one of the world's folk, so look with favor on me." God promises him a pulpit at the resurrection, "its legs made of wrath and its top of anger."
"When Adam slipped, he said, “Lord God, I did bad.”"
"Thus it was shown to the world’s folk that disobedience with apology is better than obedience with self-admiration."
Ja'far Sadiq and Yahya ibn Mu'adh supply the doctrine, and a long narrative supplies the feeling. Mu'adh ibn Jabal brings a weeping youth to the Prophet. The youth confesses that he has robbed graves for twenty years and the night before had violated the body of a newly buried bride. The Prophet's first answer is "O ungodly youth, how close you are to the Fire!" The youth goes into the desert, lives among gazelles and wild asses for forty days, and prays; then Gabriel brings 3:135 and the Prophet goes out to tell him that the register of his offense has been crossed out. Chittick's note 642 identifies this as a retelling of a hadith about a youth named Buhlul.
From need to seeking
The next passage gives the section its spine. "The first waystation in the road of seeking is need." Need turns into aspiration, aspiration into seeking, as the sperm drop becomes clot and lump and then a human being. The levels are a mi'raj, and every traveler has one in keeping with his desire: the prophets outwardly and inwardly, the friends inwardly. Even Muhammad's ascent did not begin in Mecca but when he was first called "Muhammad the trustworthy", and it ran through prophethood and messengerhood to poverty and indigence.
The reversal is essential. The one who seeks in order to find is an associator, and so is the one who does not seek. Seeking is obligatory in the shop, the mosque and the tavern, and even before the angel of death: the Prophet, cleaning his teeth when Azrael arrived, said "O Azrael, you do your work, I’ll do mine." Khayr Nassaj takes his disciples back to a church to show them how to visit one; at his shout the painted forms of Jesus and Mary fall from the wall and thirty of the worshipers put on patched cloaks. Abu Yazid's "least blow" against his soul was to forbid it water for a year.
Being one for the One
Aspiration cannot attach to two things. A sultan stands up to offer a cup to a slave boy who has refused it from the cupbearer, the boon companion and the vizier, and the boy explains: "It is because I did not take it that the sultan has stood before me." This world serves those who serve God: the old woman who fed Abu 'Asim on Mount Abu Qubays, and the one who swept Sari Saqati's house, were both this world. A pir's whole advice is "Be solitary for the Solitary." A bridegroom who sees the bride's adorned kitten among her goods sends everything back with the message that she should stay and love the cat.
The section ends where it began, with Adam. God sent no messenger to any creature until the turn of dust arrived; then "He sent courier after courier and message after message." The Trust was offered to heaven and earth only so that their refusal would rouse Adam's love. The sword of 'Amr ibn Ma'dikarib does not work for a borrower, because "I lent you my sword, not my arm." And once the Trust is carried, the foundation of love is firm, as a slave girl who carries her master's child can no longer be sold. A broken pot of clay can be mended with water; the ashes of fire cannot. The last words are given to God's first gaze, which intercedes for the beloved before any interceder: "In reality, the only interceder for the sin of the beloveds is their beauty."
35. The Forbearing: the praise of dust
Forbearance is "delay when someone deserves punishment." The section opens with three stories of delay. A prisoner freed after a caliph's dream explains his prayer: "O God, surely You are forbearing, but I do not have the patience for Your forbearance." Malik Dinar is told by a voice that the neighborhood's dissolute youth is one of God's friends, and later finds him dying in the Sacred Mosque. Hasan Basri walks out on a youth who has broken his repentance four times, but the youth's mother lays his cheek on the dust and he is forgiven for her sake. Yahya ibn Mu'adh draws the theology: "Were it not that He much loves to pardon you, He would not have thrown you into so much sin."
Distance as coquetry
Adam's descent looked like distance, but it was "the distance of coquetry." The favorite slave who stands at the edge of the carpet has no veil with the sultan, while the vizier has a hundred thousand. So on the Night Journey Gabriel arrived with the Prophet's escort, not the reverse. Iblis is the counterexample: he displayed himself, and display on this road is worse than a woman unveiled at auction. The rule for friends is strict. God's forbearance covers a thousand thousand ill words about Himself, "but the attribute of My love will not let one word about My friend pass on credit"; a thief loses his hand for the servant's due, though God pardons His own.
A lofty palace needs a garbage dump, a straight arrow a crooked bow, pure silver a little copper to take a seal, and the peacock its ugly feet. The vizier who visits a locked room each morning to look at the staff, bag and shoes he brought to the city says to himself "You are this. Don’t forget yourself!" In the same vein comes a phrase that Chittick singles out (note 682): creation was to know "that all is He, all is in Him, and all is from Him." He notes that the three clauses became prominent in later debates over wahdat al-wujud and that Maybudi treats them as ascending levels of tawhid.
Everything for the sake of dust
The centre of the section is a litany in which every feature of the next world is traced to dust. Hell is the surplus of the sorrow of dust, paradise the superabundance of its secret caress, Satan's curse a trace of its majesty; the Scales, the Narrow Path, Munkar and Nakir, Malik and Ridwan, Throne and Footstool all exist for it. The litany ends on the Essence itself, witnessed by the hearts of dust. Sam'ani then turns the order around: "There was no dust, but there was gentleness toward this handful of dust." "He loves them" went ahead and "they love Him" came behind (5:54).
The praise of dust is not merely rhetorical. Sam'ani sets it against a doctrinal opponent: "The position of the aeonists is that this world is for subsistence and the creatures for annihilation, but the position of the Folk of the Sunnah is that this world is for annihilation and the creatures for subsistence." The human being is the pearl, the body only the jewel box that will be thrown away. The cosmic litany of dust is the devotional form of this creed.
Further images complete the section. Adam was poor, and counterfeit coin is accepted from beggars while the rich are examined. Aloes gives off no scent for a thousand years until it meets fire. Before Adam the world was "all a tasteless stew. The salt of pain was missing." The castigation of Iblis was the amulet of Adam's beauty, as a mother puts a blue spot on a child's cheek before sending him into the street. The human being is steed and rider, soul and spirit, while angels go on foot; between body and spirit appears the heart, "neither spirit nor body; or rather, it is both spirit and body." A rooster tells a falcon that no one has ever seen a falcon on a spit. The section closes with burnt cloth that the fire marks as its own, which will catch the light of God's gaze at the resurrection.
36. The Tremendous: talismans and the Night Journey
Tremendousness is "in respect of tremendous power", and the opening anecdote measures it by Gabriel's six hundred wings, two of which would cover land, sea and spheres (from Qushayri, note 708). God speaks of His beginningless deeds in the first person: "Today you know Me—I am not of today." The guardian who returns an orphan's property at adulthood is the image: the beginningless hearing and knowledge were the servant's deputies before he existed. Then comes the theme of hard cash. Kharaqani, like a beggar selling his scarf, will not sell for credit; "Waiting is the red death" (note 712 glosses it as being tortured to death). The community arrives last at the wine session, so it is poured overflowing cups.
Joseph's scent and the seeking of the sought
Jacob smelled Joseph's shirt at eighty farsakhs, and the lesson is that the sought begins: Mount Sinai sought Moses, the station of two-bows' length sought Muhammad, Joseph's beauty sought Jacob's love. Joseph shows his father a coffer of unsent letters, each titled "From Joseph to Jacob", and explains that Gabriel told him each time to put down the pen. Joseph's seizing of Benjamin is reread as jealousy of Jacob's gaze, not anger over a goblet. Jacob, asking a tailor to attach his collar, says instead "Attach Joseph here" (note 723: Qushayri tells the anecdote of Zulaykha).
The prophets' talismans
The most original passage in the part explains the prophets' slips as gifts to the weak. Each prophet is addressed in turn and told to let something happen so that later sinners will have a precedent; each address is followed by a hadith in which Muhammad is asked to "stamp the signet" on it.
| Prophet | The slip | Who is consoled | The Prophet's seal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Noah | a gaze back at his son | fathers distracted by a child | "Fatima is part of me" |
| Abraham | three lies (sister, "I am sick", the large idol) | those who slip in speech | lying allowed in war, peacemaking, with one's wife |
| Jacob | hung up on Joseph's beauty | lovers held back by a form | he who loves, stays chaste and dies, dies a martyr |
| Zulaykha | the accusing hand on Joseph's skirt | those whose souls whisper | God has lifted away what souls whisper |
| Moses | killing the Egyptian | those who kill by mistake | mistakes and coercion lifted away |
| Job | "Harm has touched me" | those who moan in trial | "Oh my head!" in 'A'isha's chamber |
| David | a bird and a woman | the lapsed contemplative | "Women are Satan's snares" |
| Jesus | made a place of claims | those over-praised by others | "Do not lavish praise on me" |
The run closes with the Adam-Moses debate ("Adam defeated Moses", three times) and a sequence of divine commands that contradict one another: tree, rise up; Iblis, whisper; Adam, do not eat; patience, do not come near him. Asked why, God answers each time with a purpose, ending: "Yes, first I drive home the severity of Lordhood, then I uncover the beginningless solicitude." Paradise boasts that it caresses and hell that it burns; Adam's slip and Abraham's fire teach both of them courtesy. Ibrahim Adham, after thirty years of serving for paradise and from fear of hell, dreams that both call out to him to circumambulate their Creator instead.
Why the Night Journey
The rest of the section is a sequence of answers to one question, why Muhammad was taken up, and Chittick's notes show that most of it is drawn from Mustamli's Sharh al-ta'arruf (notes 747, 750, 752-755, 758, 762, 765).
| Wisdom | Sam'ani's illustration |
|---|---|
| to show his high aspiration | the earth rolled up before him; he turned his face away; "The eyesight did not swerve" (53:17) |
| to show the perfection of love | kings show favorites their treasuries; the slave girl who takes only the caliph |
| to train him to see paradise and hell | Moses shown the staff as serpent before the sorcerers; at the resurrection he says "my community" |
| to disclose him to the heavens | Zulaykha displays Joseph to the women of Egypt |
| his state here is like his state hereafter | he had no soul to be rid of (53:3); his death is life |
| to unburden his shame at interceding | shown the vastness of mercy; Husayn's death foretold |
| yearning for the spirit's homeland | told to return; the prayer becomes his station of union |
| to bless the heavens with his gaze | a house is complete when the master enters |
Several moments stand out. Gabriel, who said "Get up so that I can take you", stops at the Lote Tree, and the Prophet replies that it has become clear "that I was taking you, not you me." In another story Gabriel steps forward and shrinks to a sparrow, then a gnat, and refuses a third step: "If I come forward one more step, I will burn because of proximity." The Prophet answers that he would burn from distance if taken one step back. The ascent through 53:8-9 is mapped onto four inner levels: soul, heart, spirit and secret core, with the stations of service, love, proximity and contemplation. At the Lote Tree he answers God's "The peace be upon thee" with "The peace be upon us", because the community is with him "through solicitude." Told to go back, he is given the prayer, and the falcon image from the end of Part 5 returns: "It is enough for the falcon that its nest be the hand of the king." The section ends with Gabriel past the Lote Tree "like a castaway piece of cloth."
37-38. The Forgiving and the Grateful: the call to aspiration
Sam'ani announces a change of pace: "From here on I will speak briefly in fear of boring the hearts of those who love the Possessor of Majesty." The two names are glossed as "The absolver of the great and the accepter of the small." What is surprising is not that the servant praises God but that God praises the servant, calling a short life's remembrance "much" (33:35). A divine monologue follows: "How much I complain of you secretly, but in front of people I am only grateful to you." God looks not for the best dressed at court but for the beggar.
Bold intimacy is shown by a man in Jerusalem threatening to smash the lanterns unless his shoes are returned, by Abu Rayhana commanding God to return his needle, and by Kahmas asking "where is Hammad's property?" Bedouin custom gives the image of divine protection: a neighbor is told "Decree for me as an infant decrees for its mother." Sufism is defined as renouncing "what God has permitted, not simply what He has forbidden." Shibli explains that the recognizers are "deaf, dumb, blind" (2:18) to everything other than the Real. Part 7 picks up the section's closing exhortation.
7. Names 39-50: From the High to the Wise
Twelve names in nine sections, and a change of pace. The sections are shorter than the great treatises of the last part, but they are dense with stories: Shibli as the dot under the b, the infant Abraham questioning his parents in the cave, Junayd and Ibn 'Ata' debating poverty, Dhu'l-Nun following a scorpion across the Nile, Jonah in the fish. Running through all of them is one argument, carried over from the Forgiving: the servant's disobedience is temporal, God's mercy is beginningless, and "the servant is not without slips, and the Lord is not without mercy."
- Highness and greatness belong to God alone; for the servant, being lifted up comes from falling down, like the b that opens the Quran.
- God cuts His friends off from every support, kinsmen included, so that they rely on Him alone (Muhammad in Mecca, Jacob and his sons).
- The Prophet's ascent passes station by station from fear and hope to "Thou art as Thou hast lauded Thyself".
- Low aspiration is satisfied with the Garden; high aspiration is met with refusal, "the severity of the beloveds".
- Poverty is the higher hand, and the poor man has the pleasure of God's apology.
- God calls the disobedient "My servants", promises to forgive without saying He has forgiven, and gives sin a set of wisdoms.
- Adam carried the Trust "with his aspiration, not his capacity", and his vicegerency was announced to angels who praised themselves.
39-40. The High, the Great: the dot under the b
Sam'ani opens with Qushayri (note 782 calls the paragraph a summary translation): "So His highness is an attribute, not a direction." What follows is a divine address to the would-be great. Iblis, Pharaoh, Korah and Abu Jahl each claimed exaltedness, and each received the verse that answers his claim; Abu Jahl will be told in hell, "Taste! Surely thou art the exalted, the noble" (44:49). The counterweight is a ring inscription that Chittick traces (note 786) to the sixth-century Himyarite king Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan: "Putting down one’s face before the Real is exaltedness." The line returns at the end of section 43, where Sam'ani applies it to the Pen, which writes only when it is held upside down.
Shibli, the madman and the alphabet
Shibli was chained eighteen times. Asked about Hallaj, he answered that the two of them had gone into the same oven, "but his name was ‘rational.’" Hallaj lost his head in the name of rationality, while Shibli escaped in the name of madness. A madman in a prince's asylum makes the same point from the other side, and Sam'ani concludes, "Whenever someone’s feet are put in bonds, the bonds are lifted from his tongue."
Then the famous saying: "I am the point under the b [ب]." Sam'ani turns it into a small lesson in letters. The Quran begins with the b of bismi'llah, not with alif, "because alif is standing and b is fallen." The letters are twenty-eight (lam-alif is a compound and does not count), the first erect and the last bent: the alif is the beginner on the road, the bent y the advanced. The moon has twenty-eight mansions too, and is allowed only one night of fullness, on which the sun becomes its antagonist and the eclipse comes for it. "An eclipse never goes after the deficient moon."
"You belong to Me"
The second half is a run of divine speech to the sinner. God is the fourth of every three who whisper (58:7), whereas the fourth of the Companions of the Cave was their dog: "How far apart are those whose fourth is their dog and those whose fourth is their Lord!" God forgives because forgiving is His attribute, as water wets and fire burns, and musk, reproached for staying fragrant whatever company it keeps, replies, "I don’t look at whom I’m with, I look at who I am." Asaf ibn Barkhiya sins three times, is threatened with punishment, and is forgiven three times once he admits that protection comes only from God. The Kaabah held idols and prayers in turn, yet God still called it "My house" (22:26).
41. The Guardian: cut off from every support
Guarding means that God preserves the heavens and the earth and also "preserves the hearts of His elect from paying regard to others." Sam'ani's example is the Prophet. When the call came, Muhammad thought it a blessing that his own tribe, who trusted him, would hear it first, and the moment he relied on that, his kinsmen turned against him. The reason is given in God's voice: had Quraysh helped him, they would have counted it as a favor and outsiders would have said he took the world "with the strength of the sword of Quraysh, not with the strength of prophethood". Jacob suffered the same treatment through his own sons. The principle is a saying that note 796 classes as more likely Sufi than prophetic: "for one is conjoined with the Real in the measure of one’s disjoining from the creatures." At Badr the weak were given victory over the strong, and at the conquest of Mecca the sanctuary itself was made permitted for one day for the Prophet's sake.
The ascent through the stations
From note 800 to the end of the section the text is abridged from Mustamli. The Prophet was taken past every station until only stationlessness was left, and the stages are marked by the clauses of one prayer, which note 801 finds in Ibn Hibban among others. Complaint, in the middle, gets its own analysis: to complain of the Friend to others is to be quit of Him, to complain of others to the Friend is associationism, and to complain of the Friend to the Friend "is tawḥīd itself." Job said "Harm has touched me" to his Lord, not to the people, and so was still called patient.
| Stage | The Prophet's words (as printed) | Why he moved on |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | "I seek refuge in Thy pardon from Thy punishment." | pardon and punishment are acts; fire did not burn Abraham, paradise did not keep Adam |
| 2 | "I seek refuge in Thy approval from Thy anger." | approval and anger are attributes, and attributes do not act |
| 3 | "I seek refuge in Thee from Thee." | this still claims power, and power is His attribute |
| 4 | "I do not number Thy laudations" | this admits incapacity, which is still the servant's attribute |
| 5 | "Thou art as Thou hast lauded Thyself." | disengagement becomes solitariness: the end of the road |
42. The Nourisher: aspiration beyond the Garden
Everything has a nourishment, and the nourishment of hearts is remembrance (13:28). From there Sam'ani moves straight to aspiration. A saying ascribed to Jesus (note 803) frames the problem: "I treated the blind and the leper, and they all became well, but treating the stupid has thwarted me." The stupid are those content with too little. "Most of the folk of the Garden are simpletons," runs a hadith (note 813), because the simpleton prefers the house to the neighbor. God ascribed the common people to paradise (55:36) but placed the godwary "at an Omnipotent King" (54:55); the Lote Tree of the Final End is one group's station, "unto thy Lord is the final end" another's.
High aspiration is not rewarded with gifts. As long as the goal is bounty, the door of response stays open; when it rises to witnessing, "asking will be met with rejection, going forward with blockage, and aiming with severity." Moses had every request granted until he asked to see, and was told "Thou shalt not see Me" (7:143). "Such is the severity of the beloveds." Note 816 traces part of this phrasing to Qushayri, and note 820 identifies the long paragraph on God disclosing, unveiling and then veiling Himself as derived from the opening of Ghazali's chapter on love.
Abraham in the cave
The section ends with Abraham. He saw a star and said "This is my Lord" (6:76) because "He saw the star with the eye and the Real with the heart." His birth story follows (note 828 points to commentaries on 6:76, including Sam'ani's father). Nimrod orders every newborn killed; Azar is told to keep away from his wife, but "When destiny comes, the eyes are blind." Hidden in a cave and fed from his own finger, the infant questions his mother: Who is my lord? You. Who is yours? Your father. Who is his? "Be silent!" His father fares no better, answering "Nimrod" and then slapping him. "By God, in that state Abraham made no distinction between a bite of halva and the slap of trial."
43. The Reckoner: poverty and the higher hand
The name has two senses, reckoner and sufficer, and Sam'ani takes the first as a reason to choose poverty: the poor have "no reckoning and no interrogation" in the next world. The core of the section is a debate (note 834 points to a short version in Hujwiri). Junayd preferred poverty, citing the hadith that the poor enter the Garden half a day, five hundred years, before the rich. Ibn 'Ata' preferred wealth, since the rich man kept back for reckoning at least has the pleasure of the Real's rebuke. Junayd's reply settles it for Sam'ani: "The pleasure of apology is beyond the pleasure of rebuke, for both friend and enemy are rebuked, but apology is only for friends."
The hadith "The higher hand is better than the lower hand" usually praises the giver. Sam'ani reads it as praise of poverty: the giving hand "travels the road of poverty" because it lets go of wealth, and the taking hand travels the road of wealth. Some great ones, he adds, held their own hand beneath the poor man's when giving, so that the poor man's hand would be the higher. Ja'far al-Sadiq's answer to an Abbasid king makes the same point about death: the poor never wish at the end that they had been rich, but the rich wish they had been poor.
A string of definitions of poverty follows (notes 836-840 trace them to Qushayri's Manthur, two of them originally defining aspiration and Sufism). Luqman Sarakhsi wishes for one dirham for the barber and sees the desert fill with gold. An exalted man at the Tigris says "My Lord, I am thirsty" and walks past the water; Sam'ani gives three readings, ending with the boldest, that the thirst was yearning and "it is wine that this exalted man should have drunk". A man who was pulled from a whirlpool as a child names his rescuer as his only enemy. Then the warning against the word "I": Jabir knocks on the Prophet's door, answers "I", and is rebuked, and Nuri tells Junayd that the war has become hard, since God is saying "‘Either Me, or you.’"
44-45. The Majestic, the Beautiful: the shariah of love
Majesty melts hearts and beauty caresses spirits, and love moves from one to the other: "At first it is all honey, at last all poison." The child taken to grammar school with an amulet round his neck learns after two days of the strap that it was all a pretext. Sam'ani then returns to the Trust: "And bewilderment is a pillar in the shariah of love." Heaven and earth saw today's burden, bar, while Adam saw tomorrow's access, also bar, and the praise afterward went to "the Lord of the worlds", not to water and clay. The arrow that complains that the archer gets the credit is answered with 8:17: "O arrow, you are not on your own."
Repentance, and the repentance of lovers
Seven definitions of repentance follow, all but the first from Qushayri's Mukhtasar (note 854), and the story of a nomad who brings a king a bag of stale well water and has it filled with dinars, because he brought the only thing he had. The verses 42:25-26 are divided among the three classes of 35:32, wrongdoers, moderate and preceders (note 855). Then the turn: "O chevalier, every repentance is accepted, except the repentance of lovers." Notes 856-858 explain the sources for this passage. The poems and connecting prose are mostly from Qushayri, Junayd's line "Sufism is force without peace" is not, and the last Persian ghazal has been taken out of the editor's revised edition even though some manuscripts have it. The lover loses either way: if he keeps his repentance he is told he is bored, and if he breaks it, "Bravo, O covenant breaker!" God gives each lover only a token: "O Moses, here are some words! O Jacob, here is a scent! O Abraham, here is some color!"
46. The Generous: "O My servants!"
This is the longest section of the part and the fullest statement of hope in the book so far. Generosity is the name's reality in God and its metaphor in creatures. God hides the outcome so the servant stays between hope and fear (note 863: from Qushayri on 42:19), makes the blessed forget their slips so that paradise is not clouded, and invites the disobedient with "hospitality from someone forgiving, ever-merciful" (41:32), where Sam'ani notices that the verse says "forgiving" and not "munificent". Moses asks why God desires disobedience when He hates it, and is told, "That is to set up My pardon."
| Answer | Image Sam'ani uses |
|---|---|
| to keep servants from self-admiration | Balaam, who admired himself and became a dog (7:176) |
| to show the mender's skill | the glassmaker, whose mastery appears in broken glass |
| so neither storehouse is wasted | one storehouse of reward, one of mercy |
| to ward off the evil eye of Iblis | the donkey's head hung in a beautiful orchard |
| to show the purity of the Lord | (stated without image) |
| to spite Iblis | the hunter whose prey falls in and escapes |
| so Satan's gaze does not stay on you | the broken heart, with which God is present |
| so that all reject you and you are His alone | Khidr's damaged ship; Joseph's cup in Benjamin's bag |
The center of the section is 39:53, "Say: O My servants who have been immoderate against yourselves". Sam'ani reads it word by word. "My servants" is said to sinners, not to the obedient, the fasting or the pilgrims, and God never said "O My Throne" or "O My Pen". "Immoderate" is the mildest possible word: "He did not tear the curtain." God says "I will forgive them", not "I have forgiven them", so that the servant keeps weeping and the Prophet keeps his intercession. And at the resurrection, when every other voice says "my soul" or "my share", "The Lord will say, “My servant, My servant!”" The verse closes, "for the servant is not without slips, and the Lord is not without mercy."
Passing through hell
An objector cites 19:71, "none of you there is but will go down into it". Sam'ani gives Mawardi's opinions (note 875) and then his own reasons for the faithful passing through: to teach courtesy, not to show wrath; to show that true gold does not burn; to make hell a bathhouse; and to keep God's oath, as Job kept his with a bundle of rushes (note 878 explains the oath). His father's teacher, "the Master Imam", is quoted from Qushayri (note 879): they will pass through it unaware. The falcon gives up on a pigeon whose feathers the sun has burned: "They don’t burn the burned."
47. The Watcher: the most beautiful of creatures
A woman in Mecca sets out to seduce Tawus Yamani; he offers to meet her in the most public place, and when she protests that people are looking, he asks whether God does not see everywhere. Sam'ani's own point is aesthetic. A watcher is set over something beautiful, and God says He is watcher over you (4:1), not over the Throne. Forms are listed as fitted to acts: foreheads for prostration, eyes for taking heed, "hearts suited for recognizing, and secret cores suited for love." Snakes and fish are made prostrating, beasts bowing, trees standing and mountains sitting, but only the Adamite can do all four by choice, and so only he is praised.
The Trust again
The Trust (33:72) receives its fullest treatment so far. Definitions are listed (note 885 suggests some are from Mawardi), followed by Hasan and Mujahid (note 888): Adam accepted it, and between carrying it and leaving the Garden was "no more than the measure of noon to afternoon." God's reply to Adam's fear is "O Adam, the carrying will be yours, but the guarding will be Mine." A nomad given half a caliph's treasury points out that the caliph's gifts must be carried by the caliph's steeds, and so "No one carries His gifts but His steeds." Oil rides on water because it has carried a heavy burden; a woman who dies in childbirth dies a martyr; the melon plant sets its burden on the earth. Finally, "great wrongdoer, deeply ignorant" is read as praise: Adam "carried the burden with aspiration, not with capacity."
48. The Responder: the tongue of askers
Supplication has preconditions: distress, seeking aid, sincerity, pleading, eagerness and dread, permitted food, and certainty. Ibrahim Adham lists ten reasons hearts have died and prayers go unanswered (note 897, from Abu Nu'aym), ending with "You bury your dead but do not learn any lessons." Yet 40:60 begins "your Lord says", not "the Severe says", so that the servant dares to ask, and unlike 7:55 it attaches no condition. Yahya ibn Mu'adh calls God "My God" in public and "My Beloved" in private. Two stories make the point about askers. A hadith says to give to the asker "even if he comes to you on a horse." 'Ali hands his sword to an unbeliever in battle and explains: "Though you have the heart of enemies, you have the tongue of askers."
The elect are treated differently: "Love’s iniquity is more beautiful than its justice," and Moses, the greatest asker, again gets "Thou shalt not see Me". Sam'ani gives it a kind reading: refusing Moses, with all his deeds, keeps the destitute from thinking that vision is wages. The contrast with Muhammad ends the section. Moses said "I" at the well and leaned on his staff; Muhammad, taken without asking, ascribed nothing to himself and answered in the words of the prayer's greeting (note 910), "The felicitations, the blessings, the prayers, and the goodly things belong to God".
49. The Embracing: mercy that crosses the Nile
Embracing means much in bestowal, and the section is a collection of mercy stories. Dhu'l-Nun follows a huge scorpion that crosses the Nile on a frog's back, kills a serpent about to bite a sleeping drunk youth, and crosses back; the youth wakes, hears the story, and repents (note 911). A Guebre sends Moses a message of contempt and is told, "Though you disdain My lordhood, I do not disdain your servanthood." Abraham is rebuked for refusing food to a Guebre, who then exclaims, "What an excellent God that He should rebuke His bosom friend because of his enemy!" The Prophet sees a mother find her lost child and a bird recover its young, and says God is more merciful to His servants than either.
Some stories carry Sam'ani's warning that "the responsibility is on the narrator". In one, Gabriel rebukes the Prophet for annulling a marriage over a white spot. In another, he is rebuked for not praying over a nomad who died owing two dirhams, after which the Prophet takes on the debts of the dead (note 917 gives the jurists' explanation). In between, an old woman whose cow a king's servant took seizes the king's reins, has the cow returned, and later prays for him; he appears in a dream saying that only "a corner of that old woman’s blanket" saved him. The section closes with Jonah, retold mostly from Qushayri and Mawardi (notes 918-921). God tells the fish, "This is My deposit, not your morsel," and Sam'ani draws the lesson: a few days with a fish earned Jonah the name "The Owner of the Fish" for ever, so seventy years of a lover's service will not be cancelled either.
50. The Wise: power, wisdom and the vicegerent
The last name of the part offers a clear map of the divine attributes. God "is powerful so He does whatever He wants. He is wise so He does not do whatever He can do." Exaltedness, unneediness, severity and all-compellingness are the creatures' antagonists; wisdom, mercy, gentleness and generosity are their interceders, who hold the antagonists' reins. Creation began when unneediness was handed to munificence; the resurrection comes when munificence lets go, and the two cosmic addresses come from the two attributes, "Am I not your Lord?" from munificence, "Whose is the kingdom today?" from unneediness.
Against this background come Balaam, who knew the Greatest Name and ended like a dog, and the dog of the Cave, rejected in the morning and in the Quran by evening. "Love is not by choice." Then the Prophet in the cave of Hira, the coming of Gabriel with "Recite!", and Pharaoh's sorcerers, shown tawhid in the middle of sorcery and suddenly in love with death. Adam, asked why he throws dust on his head, says "It’s on me because of me", a Persian proverb whose oldest trace note 936 finds in Nasir Khusraw. God's answer to Gabriel's question about Adam's burial perfume is the leaves of the tree of remorse.
The angels and the vicegerent
Sam'ani then resumes in his own voice. The angels praised themselves and found fault with others, a kind of backbiting, and the backbiter's obedience passes to the one backbitten: hence the angels now ask forgiveness for the faithful (40:7). God's "Surely I know what you do not know" names three things: Adam's three hundred years of weeping for one slip, the best community hidden in his loins, and Muhammad. "The Real showed that the slip of him who sees the slip is more exalted in His eyes than the purity of him who sees the purity."
"Hence no obedient person should admire himself, and no disobedient person should lose hope."
8. Names 51-66: From the Loving to the Death-Giver
Sixteen names in twelve sections, and the book's longest sustained meditation on love. The Loving opens with the angels startled by "love’s Kaykawusian kettledrum" and closes with Muhammad set above every earlier prophet. From there Sam'ani moves through love as trial (the Witness), the vanity of houses and kingdoms (the Real), trust and the Companions of the Cave (the Trustee), the definitions of love (the Friend), the Fatihah read phrase by phrase (the Praiser), and the terrors of the return (the Originator). He ends with 'Umar coming to kill the Prophet and leaving as his servant.
- Love was never offered to the angels; it came into the world with Adam's footsteps, and "He loves them and they love Him" (5:54) is its charter.
- All prophets before Muhammad were parts, and he was the whole; even his single glance at Zaynab is read as a mercy to the weak.
- Guidance is God's work alone: intellect is "the instrument, not the cause", and no one recognizes God unless God makes Himself recognized.
- Trial is the proof of love: "Love without trial is like a pot without salt."
- Trust means relying on nothing, not even a staff, an herb, or one's own fingernails.
- God's love comes first and the servant's servanthood follows it; Adam's slip did not harm him because love had already reached him.
- God pulled up Adam's children "as was fitting for Him", which is why the stakes of the return are endless reward or endless punishment.
51. The Loving: the kettledrum and the prophets
The definition already holds the whole section: God is He who loves His servant "despite His unneediness", and the name means both lover and beloved. Chittick notes (941) that the opening paragraph is partly translated and partly quoted from Qushayri's Quran commentary. Three definitions follow. Daqqaq says God singled out Adam with His hand, Moses with "I chose thee for Myself" and "us" with 5:54. Muhasibi defines love as preferring the beloved over "your soul, your spirit, and everything that belongs to you" while knowing "that you fall short of its rightful due." Nasrabadi gives the shortest: "Love is fighting against solace in every state." Chittick points out (943) that Qushayri and other sources have "avoiding" in place of "fighting against", so Sam'ani's version is the harsher one.
Then the scene that recurs through the whole part. No one in the two worlds had dared to talk of love, until "the roar of love’s Kaykawusian kettledrum fell into the Dominion." Kaykawus, Chittick explains (945), is the legendary emperor of the Shahnama, named here for love's kingly rank and for his rhyme with kus, kettledrum. The angels ask what has become of their "many thousand years of glorifying and hallowing", and they are told: "Don’t look at these forms, look at the deposit of Majesty: He loves them and they love Him [5:54]." Each archangel is given a new job (messenger, treasurer, taker of worn-out clothing, giver of new clothing). First, though, they have to taste a draft to wash away "the dust of your claim", meaning the claim "We glorify Thy praise" (2:30). The prostration to Adam increases their road, not his, and when they raise their heads their teacher Iblis is deformed.
Sam'ani then turns from Adam to the one Adam carried. Every earlier prophet was "laying down the foundation of his good fortune", the foundation of Muhammad. Adam was his precursor and Noah his commander-in-chief. Abraham was his housemaster, Moses yearned for his community, and Jesus announced him. Sam'ani makes the point in one line: "all of them were parts, and he was the whole." He also tells a story of Moses: one night's thought clothed a thousand knowers in prophethood, another night's thought took the lives of a thousand prophets, and on the Mount Moses asked, "Make me one of Muḥammad’s community!"
Zaynab and the first gaze
The most daring passage in the part is the treatment of 33:37, the verse about Zayd ibn Haritha's wife Zaynab. Sam'ani says that on the night of the mi'raj the Prophet was shown the whole Dominion and paid it no attention, "But when he came to the door of Zayd’s chamber and saw Zaynab, turmoil appeared." He sets out the exegetes' views in order: three views on what the Prophet was concealing, two on whom he feared, the saying "Had God’s Messenger hidden anything of the Quran, he would have hidden this verse", and Yahya ibn Sallam's account of Zayd carrying the proposal to Zaynab. Chittick points out (951) that these thirteen paragraphs come from Mawardi's commentary. In note 952 he adds that Sam'ani's father Mansur gives the "hidden this verse" saying to 'A'isha, not 'Umar, "as do most sources other than Māwardī."
Then Sam'ani explains what it means. The gaze was "the first gaze, and a man is not called to account for the first gaze." What interests him is the divine reason for allowing it at all: "We wanted to make the hearts of the destitute and broken happy." If Muhammad with all his strength of prophethood "was not able to guard his heart," then "a handful of the helpless" may hope. A rule of rank goes with this: "one blunder on the part of the proximate is equal to a hundred thousand years of turning away on the part of the distant," just as a king's doormen may talk nonsense while a boon companion's one wrong glance costs his head. God's answer to Moses' "that Thou mayest approve" (20:84) is "Thou wilt approve" (93:5) for Muhammad. The kiblah turned to the Kaabah because Muhammad thought it in his heart.
| Earlier prophet | What he was given | What Muhammad was given (as Sam'ani puts it) |
|---|---|---|
| Adam | rebuke first, pardon after (20:121-22) | pardon first, rebuke after (9:43) |
| Noah | prayed against his people (71:26) | "O God, guide my people, for they do not know." |
| Abraham | made a leader for the people (2:124) | leader of the prophets in Jerusalem |
| Solomon | the kingdom of this world | the kingdom of the resurrection, "the banner of praise" |
| Moses | staff to serpent; dry passage through the sea | a stick that made idols prostrate; passage through hell |
| Jesus | taken to the fourth sphere | "two-bows’ length away, or closer" (53:9) |
Table 17. The comparison of prophets closing section 51. Chittick (note 957) traces it to Mustamli's Sharh.
52. The Splendorous: guidance is His
The greatest blessings, Sam'ani says, are "His teaching them His name and His making Himself recognized to them." The consensus of the folk of the Haqiqah "is that the evidence for God is God." His argument for this comes, as Chittick documents (964-971), from Mustamli's commentary on Kalabadhi. Creatures are as captive to power after existence as before, so they cannot find the road by themselves. Intellect is "the instrument, not the cause": the hoopoe and the ant recognized God, "and everyone agrees that birds have no intellect." Intellect and evidence are like male and female, which produce no child unless God creates one.
The center of the section is a six-part saying of "one of the great ones of the Tariqah" (Kalabadhi, note 971), beginning "No one recognizes Him unless He makes Himself recognized to him". Sam'ani comments on each clause. On describing God he gives the view of the folk of the Haqiqah, "He who recognizes Him does not describe Him, and he who describes Him does not recognize Him". That is the setting for Shibli's dream after Hallaj's execution: God says Hallaj disclosed a secret, and "It is given over to a greengrocer to call out about his vegetables, but it is absurd for a jeweler to call out about a night-brightening pearl."
On being chosen, the example is Moses on the night of the fire: his flint "had become niggardly", his wife was in labor and the sheep scattered, and the fire was "shown to him." Mount Sinai crumbled under the self-disclosure because it was the gaze of severity, while hearts receive the gaze of gentleness and only increase in "agitation, revelry, and renewal". So "wherever there is a heart, there is a Moses; and wherever there is a breast, there is a Mount Sinai."
The two imams and the handful of dust
A short passage, much quoted in the section, shows how Sam'ani handles disagreement. One imam falls silent before God's awesomeness and "shuts his mouth like Allāh’s h". Another looks at the Prophet's character and "opens his mouth in the shape of Muḥammad’s d". Silence and speech both come "from the same reservoir and fount", and a hadith on virgins settles the matter: "Their silence is their approval." The section closes with the creation story (Chittick refers the reader in note 977 to Tabari's History). Gabriel, Seraphiel and Michael each go back when the earth seeks refuge, and Azrael takes the handful "by force". Sam'ani gives the reason for the dust: "Nothing was like dust in concealing, so dust was made the curtain of the secrets." The privy look at the secrets, the non-privy at the dust, and Iblis looks at the dust and becomes accursed.
53. The Upraiser: invited by generosity
Sam'ani begins with how people actually behave. Pir Bu 'Ali Siyah faints when a blind beggar swears "By the rightful due of the Great Day". Meanwhile one man wears cap and tunic, another sits on a pillow, another sells his religion "for a penny or a halfpenny." Against this he sets God's invitation, a run of calls modeled on the night-descent hadith (note 978): "Are there any sinners?" through "Are there any lovers?" God's work with the servant is not that of parents, who acted from appetite: "Your mother and father pertain to now, but My work with you has no beginning."
The section's best story is the ruined heir of Baghdad. About to drown himself, he crosses the Tigris instead, slips into a wedding party summoned by the caliph, and is found without a gold tray. Asked who invited him, he answers by asking who invited the others ("My officials") and replies, "And me, your generosity." The caliph gives him a province. Sam'ani draws the lesson: if a creature rewards a metaphorical appeal to his generosity like that, what of the Lord who says, "I am yours"?
Hallaj's lines "Your spirit mixed with my spirit / like wine mixed with clear water" lead into a careful reading of "I am the Real". It refers "not to clay and molded mud but to the beginningless welcome extended to him", and its secret is "I am permanent through the Real." Sam'ani's father adds that God's love "does not attach to dust", since "there was plenty of dust in the world, but nowhere was there any love." Moses threw the tablets and Solomon hamstrung the horses, and neither was rebuked, because God "was looking at the beginningless precedent." One sentence from the angels' rebuke deserves to be remembered: "You know something of their deeds with Me, but you know nothing of My secrets with them." The section ends with 'Ali's "Neither compulsion nor delegation", which Chittick notes (987) is usually attributed to Ja'far Sadiq, and with the image of a chain fixed at both ends, in the Beginningless and the Endless.
54. The Witness: love as trial
If the servant knows that his trials happen in the presence of the One he worships, "he will receive the trial with kisses." The section is a long praise of affliction. The faithful have a chastisement ('adhab) that is "sweet [ʿadhib], for it is on top of contemplation." Uhud is "a mountain that loves us and that we love." Sam'ani's own formula, "Trial for love is like flames for gold. Love without trial is like a pot without salt," introduces Hallaj's "By Your rightful due, multiply the trial" (ascribed by Khatib Baghdadi to Samnun, note 989). His gloss adds that if Hallaj's heart turned by a speck, "decree that Ḥusayn is the apostate of the Tariqah."
Small fables carry the teaching. A dervish puts his boots back on when the khanaqah servant asks if he is well. A sick pigeon was fine "until I saw you." A mouse tells the cat, "You go away and I’ll be healthy." The words mahabbat (love) and mihnat (tribulation) differ only by a dot, a point first made in part 5. The family of the Prophet is listed by death: the grandfather and Hasan by poison, 'Ali and Husayn by the sword. Sam'ani concludes, twice, "Benevolence is for beginners, but there is no benevolence for the great."
Moses, the mountain, and Jacob's seventy chamberlains
Two scenes show the beloved's way of exalting herself. Moses sought vision and was refused; the mountain received the self-disclosure without asking. That is the "first secret": "Beloveds love to burn their lovers’ hearts by exalting themselves above them." On the mi'raj Gabriel is told to put on "the saddlecloth" and wait, because the secrets beyond his station "do not fit into the container of letters". Then the Prophet is sent straight back: "The moment you come, go back!" Separation comes all at once and union comes by degrees, so Muhammad was taken through many intermediaries and returned through none.
Jacob shows the same law. He hears of separation in a single sentence, "A wolf destroyed your son." Union reaches him slowly, first the scent, then the shirt, then the news, then a ride on "a frail donkey" while Joseph sits at home. Joseph is told to send out seventy chamberlains and adorn himself, "for beauty is one-third constitution and two-thirds adornment." At each chamberlain Jacob asks, "Is this my Joseph?" God gives the reason: the lover gets no glance at the Beloved's beauty until "the intermediating thorns of severity" have knocked on the door of his eyes. The seventeen days when Gabriel held back (note 999) belong to the same pattern of waiting.
55-56. The Real, the Clarifier: houses, rings, and Job
"An existence whose limits pull to nonexistence is a nonexistence." The section starts with 'Ali's mock title deed for the house Qadi Shurayh bought in Kufa. Chittick notes (1002) that another version is the second letter of the Nahj al-balagha. The house is bought "from a dead man", it stands "in the quarter of delusion", and its four boundaries open onto blights, maladies, afflictions and Satan. A chain of sayings about this world follows (Chittick traces them, 1005-1008, to sources as different as Mazdak in Mawardi and Fudayl in Zamakhshari). It is "people’s beloved enemy", "Satan’s wine", and at the resurrection it asks to be the reward of God's meanest servant and is refused.
Solomon fills the middle of the section. When a thought passed through his mind on the flying carpet, the wind tipped his throne: "As long as you keep your heart straight, I will keep the throne straight." His prayer for "a kingdom that will not befit anyone after me" (38:35) is defended against Hajjaj's "He was envious." Sam'ani gives the story of the captive princess's idol and the lost ring found in a fish, then three readings of the verse, each introduced as more beautiful, more exalted or higher than the last. The highest is that Solomon knew Muhammad would not even look at such a kingdom. Then comes the application: "Here you have Solomon, who has lost his ring; and here you have a dervish, who has lost his heart."
Job is set beside Solomon, because both are praised in the same words, "How excellent a servant! He was penitent" (38:30, 38:44). The reason is that trial did not distract one from the Trial-Giver and gifts did not distract the other from the Gift-Giver. Chittick notes (1019, 1020) that the account of Iblis's wager draws on Samarqandi and Tabari. Sam'ani then offers five readings of "Harm has touched me" (21:83), climbing from "not by way of complaint" to the worm Job put back on his body. The neatest is the reversal of roles: "Trial was given ruling power over all, so they all sought help against trial. Then Job’s patience was given ruling power over trial, so trial called out and sought help against Job’s patience." The section ends with Zulaykha, Bilqis and Khadija, unbelievers given faith because they loved God's friends: "Will I take away your faith?"
57-59. The Trustee, the Strong, the Firm: the Cave and the staff
Trust is defined through four sayings from Qushayri's Manthur (note 1021). Its living picture is the Companions of the Cave, whose commentary Sam'ani takes and partly loosens from Qushayri's Lata'if (1022-1027). The sun turns aside from the cave because "the light of their hearts was the light of the secret core", and the sleepers who seem awake show the Tariqah's double life: outwardly busy with deeds, inwardly gazing on gentleness. The dog is the decisive evidence that God "does not choose because of any cause." When the youths beat the dog to send it back, it answers, "Your trial is from enemies, but my trial is from you, and you are friends."
The verse "Hadst thou looked down upon them, surely thou wouldst have turned away from them fleeing" (18:18) raises a question Sam'ani faces directly: could the Prophet, who said "I was aided by terror", fear sleepers in a cave? He gives five answers, including that the words address Muhammad but mean others, that they show the greatness of the sleepers' state, and that Muhammad would flee "in scorn". The answer he develops at length moves the scene to the mi'raj, where Throne, Tablet, paradise and hell each admire themselves until they see the Prophet. Paradise is told, "If paradise knew what blessings are inside me, it would become scattered dust."
The Firm continues the theme of trust with provision stories: the monk who points at his teeth ("He who created the mill brings the flour"), the child pilgrim who tells Fath Mawsili that a guest does not bring his own food, and the youth who tells Khawwas, "The Assayer sees." Hatim's diagnosis of Mu'adh's "curtains like mountains" (Chittick identifies this Mu'adh with Mu'adh Nasafi, note 1046) gives an inward account of earning. The hand's real earning is rising at night to ask needs of God. Moses carries the rest. His staff turns to a serpent because "everything that distracts you from the Real is your enemy." The herb that cured his leg failed the second time because he went back to the medicine instead of to God. Joseph's fingernails were wounded in the well until he surrendered.
Three small stories in sections 57-59 share a single structure. Moses' herb works when he goes to it at God's command and fails when he goes back to it on his own; Joseph is told, "If you had surrendered at the beginning of the well as you surrendered in its middle, you would have no complaint"; and the Prophet is asked, "Before tonight who was guarding you, O Muḥammad?" In each case the means is not forbidden. The fault is a moment of leaning on it, and the correction arrives exactly at that moment.
Shibli's dispute with the vizier 'Ali ibn 'Isa (note 1057) gives the section its ending. Asked about tearing and burning clothes, "What has this to do with learning?", Shibli cites Solomon slashing the horses (38:33), and the vizier admits, "It was as if I had not read that in the Book." Sam'ani's comment fits the whole book: "the pain of the lovers and the afflicted does not come under the pen of the muftis."
60. The Friend: what love is
The Friend gives the theoretical core of love. Its first principle is "your servanthood comes from His friendship, not His friendship from your servanthood." Adam disobeyed and was not harmed "because love had already reached him"; Iblis obeyed and was not helped "because hate had already reached him." Sam'ani works this out in one of his most severe paragraphs. Iblis's prayer-niche was renamed "idol", his belt of struggle "Christian sash", and "Good was given the color of bad". The paragraph ends: "No one stands up to the decree and no one contends with the Beginningless." Next comes Bukhari's hadith of the funeral at Baqi' Gharqad, with its full chain of transmission, followed by 'Ali's ornamented retelling. The two versions side by side show how plainly Sam'ani can cite a hadith and then how far he can expand it.
The definitions come late and briefly. The Real's love for the servant is "a desire for a specific bounty"; the servant's love for the Real is a state whose outcome is conformity with the commandments. Two etymologies follow, the limpidness of the teeth and the camel that kneels and will not move. The last word goes to a definition beyond definitions: "Love is a state not expressed in words." Around these sit the ascent from recognition to love to proximity to bewilderment, with its prayer "O Guide of the bewildered, increase me in bewilderment!" (ascribed to Abu Yazid by Mustamli, note 1066). There is also the claim that the angels' work is orderly "because no one talked of love with them."
| Station | How it is reached (section 60) |
|---|---|
| recognition | "He prepared recognition in the dust" |
| love | recognition "conveyed" to love |
| proximity | intermediaries removed |
| bewilderment | marks removed from the road; "beyond all the stations" |
Table 18. The ladder at the end of section 60. Phrases as printed.
61-62. The Praiser, the Enumerator: the Fatihah as deputyship
The Praiser is a commentary on the Fatihah built around one idea: God praises Himself on the servants' behalf because they cannot thank Him enough. "It is a stipulation in the road of love to act as deputy for your friend." At the end, when no one remains to answer "Whose is the kingdom today?", God answers for His friends (40:16). Each verse is then read in turn. "Lord of the worlds" means nurturing, outward and inward (Chittick glosses the "devils and sprites" as the two kinds of jinn, note 1071). The repeated "All-Merciful, Ever-Merciful" comes just before the resurrection so that the faithful know who will judge them. "Owner of the Day of Doom" means that worldly ownership is lent and will be taken back. The day of fifty thousand years will be "like one prescribed prayer" for the community. "Thee alone we worship and Thee alone we ask for help" (1:5) frees the reciter from both compulsion and free will. The section ends with Job told he did not give himself patience and John the son of Zachariah asked, "Was it you who did not sin, or was it We who protected you from sin?"
The Enumerator begins with the step of veneration among the Companions and the hands God wants: "Sellers want full hands, but bestowers want empty hands." Moses is emptied of his staff, the mountain is burned for sheltering one of his steps, and Pharaoh is drowned because Moses had busied a corner of his heart with enmity. Abraham in Nimrod's fire is a familiar scene, told here from the fire's side. The fire thanks Nimrod for clearing away "a veil embroidered with prevention", and Abraham tells Gabriel that "the meaning of fire is in my breast." The rest of the section praises Muhammad: the two sentences of the testimony belong one to God and one to Muhammad, Adam is "a Muhammadan" by created nature, and the Prophet will stand before roaring hell to shelter "the slave boys". It ends with his intercession, which "belongs to the folk of great sins in my community."
63-66. The Originator, the Returner, the Life-Giver, the Death-Giver
The return is the terror that gives the earlier talk of love its weight. At the resurrection the sun will be rebuked for being worshiped and "will fall apart", and Jesus will be asked about "two gods". The rich man, the sick man and the slave are confronted with Solomon, Job and Joseph (from Mujahid, note 1086). Then come the three who are first burned: the reciter, the martyr and the generous man, each told "You lie" because he worked "so that it would be said." Sam'ani sums it up: "O chevalier, were it said to the Day of Resurrection, “What do you fear?” it would say, “The Day of Resurrection.”
The turn comes in one sentence: "when He pulled up the Adamites, He pulled them up as was fitting for Him." Heaven, earth, sun and moon are only "go-betweens", like the hoopoe, or like Gabriel stopping at the Lote Tree. At the resurrection God takes them away because "Reports have gone, the gaze has come." Zulaykha destroyed her painted room when she reached Joseph, and Jacob had no use for the shirt once he saw his son.
The Life-Giver defines life as "the life that gives opening, not that which brings the spirit." Its central story is 'Umar setting out to bring back Muhammad's head and coming back "the slave of Aḥmad and the servant of the Unique". In the Kaabah the Prophet strikes the 360 idols with his stick, and at 'Umar's challenge all of them fall down in prostration. Sam'ani gathers a series of pairs of ugly things that produced something beautiful: 'Umar's enmity and worldliness, the sorcerers before Pharaoh, Joseph's well and prison, two drops in the womb, milk "between feces and blood", and disobedience joined to shortcoming, from which "Mercy and forgiveness appeared". A serving boy explains grace to his lord in four words: "The one who won’t let you come in."
The part closes on the compact of the prophets (3:81). God was lenient about His own covenant and strict about Muhammad's, "The noble do not move for the sake of their own rightful due as much as they do for their friends’ rightful due". After that comes the distinction between traveling and pulling: "The disciple is a traveler, but the recognizer is a flier. How can the traveler reach the flier?" Chittick suspects (1093) Abu Yazid's saying about the recognizer and the renunciant lies behind it. Adam comes last, the one who said "It is I who have been burned by this talk", because "encountering Him with the abasement of destitution is better than encountering Him with the boldness of sincerity."
"Know that in reality your servanthood comes from His friendship, not His friendship from your servanthood."
"Reports have gone, the gaze has come."
9. Names 67-84: From the Alive to the Pardoner
Eighteen names in eleven sections. The Alive opens with a saint who would walk into hell "on my head" if that were the Friend's desire, and the Pardoner closes with Moses learning that the heart "is nurtured with severity." In between, Sam'ani gives his longest portrait of the light of Muhammad (the Powerful and the Forward-Setter), a run of poems on a God who cannot be found yet keeps being sought (the First and the Last), a grammatical proof that God forgives before anyone repents (the Ever-Turning), and the story of Abu Quddama and the martyred youth (the Avenger).
- Real life is not the life of the spirit: the lover asks for a life "not tainted by the spirit’s intermediary", and death is something to be bought.
- The Finder and the One both teach that nothing created can rescue anything created; the One suffices against all, but all do not suffice against the One.
- God's knowledge, power and exaltedness outrun every sign of them; even on the night of the mi'raj "the veil of exaltedness" stays in place.
- Every attribute God names in Himself has an opposite in us, except love, which He affirms on both sides in 5:54.
- The light of Muhammad was created before Adam, carried in Adam's forehead, and is the lamp of the Light Verse (24:35).
- God forgives without causes: in 40:3 "forgiver" comes before "accepter of repentance", so forgiveness does not wait for repentance.
- Being killed is "a stipulation of the road"; the martyr, the hungry breath and the broken heart are the perfume God wants.
67-68. The Alive, the Self-Standing: the life that is not the spirit's
God is alive without a spirit, Chittick explains (1100), and the servant who trusts "the Alive who does not die" (25:58) is freed from scattered concerns. Abu Sulayman Darani's saying sets the tone: if all are told to go into hell, all will go unwillingly, "but I will go by free choice. All will go on foot, but I will go on my head." Chittick notes (1102) that 'Attar tells it differently. Stories of renunciation follow: Shibli and Bundar ibn Husayn in the stages of begging, the parable of the soul as debtor, the heart as guarantor and the intellect as exactor of the Trust (33:72), and Bu 'Ali Siyah offering to buy a pir for half a loaf. The prophets bequeath nothing (1103), so their heirs are Bilal, Salman and Suhayb.
69. The Finder: no rescue from the rescued
The Finder is He who lacks nothing, so the name means the knower and the unneedy (Chittick 1111 cites Qushayri and Bayhaqi). A prisoner should not seek aid from another prisoner. Sam'ani recalls Abu Bakr's sermon at the Prophet's death, "If anyone was worshiping Muhammad" (1114), and the line "Say: I own no benefit" (7:188). Even the angels nearest the Throne do not see in: "Our secrets are virgin, not seized by the imagination of any imaginer." Muhammad's rank is set out twice over: "There is no steed quicker that Muḥammad’s mount", and a call to Solomon, searching for his lost hoopoe (1123), asks "what sort of empire is perfected by the existence a bird?" The empire meant is Muhammad's. Abu Jahl wants the poor Companions sent from the tablecloth; 6:52 forbids it.
70-71. The One, the Unique: sink and float
Ja'far Sadiq's reading of the One opens the section, and Shibli gives its motto: "The One suffices you against all, but all will not suffice you against the One." A Christian physician cuts his sash and Shibli is healed. God sent a spider to guard the cave (9:40) and a gnat to kill Nimrod. The most memorable image is the pot and the gourd: the folk of severity and the folk of gentleness are not equal, and the gourd says, "You will see that you sink and I come to the top." Adam assays the eight paradises and finds them "not worth a grain" beside the awe of God's majesty. Friday, the day of gathering, is the day the yearners came together, and Adam was created in its last hour.
72. The Self-Sufficient: overlooked sins
God does not begin things; He makes them appear (55:29). David is told to make God beloved to the people by reminding them, "Did I not...". In a hadith-like scene a servant is given a book whose sins God has passed over, and he is told “I overlooked them. You too, overlook them.” Hell itself speaks: “Woe on him who recognizes You and then disobeys You!”, and is answered by a call that shifts the woe to the one who does not repent. The friendship of God has two faces, public and private: “By day I am sultan, by night we are brothers.” Sultan Mahmud whips a beggar who grabs his reins, and the beggar says “You hit hard, but you hit sweetly.” The section ends on jealousy: “People are jealous over souls, and the Lord is jealous over hearts.”
73-74. The Powerful, the Potent: the veil of exaltedness
The section begins with a contrast of looks: "When you look at the Real’s power, all nonexistent things take on the color of existence. When you look at the Real’s exaltedness, all existent things take on the color of nonexistence." Creation is "a sample of His power", revelation "an iota of His knowledge". Seen from the community, Muhammad says he is the chieftain of Adam's children; seen from God's majesty, “I am the son of a woman of Quraysh who used to eat jerky.” The veil is never lifted. Abu Ya'qub Nahrajuri, dying after thirty silent years near the Sanctuary, refused the formula: “How is this the place for that talk? Nothing remains between Him and me but the veil of exaltedness.”
Command and decree then divide the last day: "The command will be the antagonist of the estranged, and the decree will intercede for the friends." God tells the friends that their free choice was a curtain, "Behind the curtain of your freely choosing the Shariah I concealed the form of My decree." Sam'ani warns against fancy, the most inauspicious shadow in the eighteen thousand worlds, and against the inner "I-ness" (manī) that no ocean washes out, a pun Chittick keeps in brackets.
The core of the section is a series of paired reports, set out in Table 19. Each divine attribute named in the Quran has its human counterpart. Love alone breaks the pattern.
| His attribute | Our attribute | Verses Sam'ani pairs |
|---|---|---|
| knowledge | ignorance | 29:62 / 33:72 |
| power | incapacity | 2:109 / 16:75 |
| exaltation | abasement | 4:139 / 20:111 |
| incomparability, holiness | taintedness | 37:180 / 77:20 |
| subsistence | annihilation | 55:27 / 55:26 |
| life | death | 25:58 / 39:30 |
| Lordhood | servanthood | 26:36 / 51:56 |
| unity | pairedness | 16:22 / 51:49 |
| love | love | 5:54, "He loves them and they love Him" |
Table 19. The paired attributes of section 73-74. Terms as printed.
Why the exception? The other attributes belong to His Essence, which is hallowed, while our essence is "a bit of dark water and clay". But the site of love is the heart, "pure gold", untouched by any other. Sam'ani's conclusion is exact: "So our love abides through His love, not His love through our love." The image in a mirror lasts by the form, not the mirror.
Table 19 is one of the clearest statements of the book's method. Theology lists God's attributes to keep Him apart from creatures. Sam'ani follows the list faithfully for eight rows, and then uses the ninth to bring Him near. Love is the only attribute the Quran gives in the same words to both sides, and that is why the book can call itself a repose for the spirits.
75-76. The Forward-Setter, the Behind-Keeper: the light of Muhammad
God sets forward and keeps behind "without any cause". The Quraysh asked why the Quran did not come to a great man of the two cities (43:31), and the answer is 43:32, "We have divided". Three times the Companions congratulate the Prophet on a verse, and three times a verse follows that extends the gift to them (48:2 and 39:53, 48:3 and 40:51, 94:1 and 39:22). Sam'ani turns to the Guebres: those who say good is from God and evil from us are "secret Guebres", as the Zoroastrians with Yazdan and Ahriman are open ones. A Guebre told by a free-willer that God wants his conversion but Iblis does not replies, “Then I’ll stay with the stronger antagonist. What would I do with the weak one?”
Then comes the longest passage on the Prophet in the book, built on the Light Verse (24:35). Following some commentators (Chittick, 1161, gives Tabari's and Baghawi's list), Sam'ani reads "his light" as Muhammad's. He tells of a first pearl split into water, light and fire, of a light kept in God's treasuries and swimming for thousands of years in oceans of purity and proximity, and of its deposit in Adam's forehead. The light would not let Adam rest in paradise: "Were it not for the tugging and pulling of that light, Adam would have been happy with the paradisial houris." It passed to Seth and down the generations. In the verse, "The niche is Adam, the glass is Noah, and the lamp is Muṣṭafā."
Sam'ani lists the kinds of light in order (Figure 14). 'A'isha finds her lost needle by the light of his face; Chittick notes (1163) that her weeping afterward is not in the well-known versions. A long catalogue gives a light to every part of his body and every act of his practice. Usayd ibn Hudayr sees lights descend while he recites the Surah of the Cow.
The section ends against the philosophers, who "made intellect their God", made nature their messenger and wasted their days "with epicycles and embellishments" until the Shariah's sun rose. Death, too, is no ending. A dervish asked in the grave "Who is your Lord?" answers “I changed my house, not my Friend.”
77-80. The First, the Last, the Outward, the Inward: no road of release
The four names mean that everything belongs to Him, returns to Him, is in Him and is from Him. Sam'ani follows Qushayri (1171): the First in choosing you, the Last in guiding you, the Outward in giving you hope, the Inward in sufficing you. He cites Wasiti with rare praise, saying no one in the Tariqah spoke words of more purity: “I would not worship a Lord who keeps distant because of disobedience and brings near because of obedience.” Chittick (1173) quotes 'Attar's fuller version.
This section is the most lyrical in the part. Every great figure falters "in the end": Job runs out of patience, Noah pleads for his son, Moses throws down the tablets. The seekers search the monasteries and churches and the hats of the Guebres, and "they found no news of this talk." One quatrain sums up the mood:
we hurry to union but He’s in no hurry.
We’ve set a trap but the plain is empty of birds,
we’ve thrown a hook but the water’s got no fish.
Yet beauty cannot stay hidden: "Beauty cannot be kept concealed, for beauty tells tales." Canaan could not hold Joseph's beauty, Mecca could not hold the Prophet, and paradise could not hold Adam. Sam'ani's father contributes a serpent that leaves its hole "Because of shame" when someone sits at its door and talks. Four people define happiness: the freeloader, the knight, the traveler and the lover, who wants “Encountering the beloved when the watchers are heedless.” The section returns to Abu Yazid's "Glory be to me", which he explains as God glorifying Himself on his tongue (Chittick gives 'Attar's version, 1180), and to Hallaj: “When God is someone’s excuse, he has no faults.”
81. The Kind: the falcon that comes and goes
The Kind is the beautiful-doer, and the section lists His kinds of beautiful-doing: He accepts tainted obedience and promises untainted reward, and He counts His many blessings as few and our little obedience as much. “Your craft is disobedience and My attribute is forgiveness. You will not abandon your craft. Will I abandon My attribute?” A scale of birds measures the sinners: unbelievers are wild crows, dry-brained reciters are chickens worth a dirham, "But those who are tempted and repent are like falcons that come and go."
Most of the section concerns Muhammad as the last messenger, sent "after a gap in the messengers" (5:19) with the resurrection walking behind him as God's "policeman". He is the fixed leg of the compass with which the circle of the prophets was drawn, a prophet "when Adam was between water and clay" (Chittick, 1187, gives Tirmidhi's form). Yet he prayed "while his insides were boiling like the boiling of a kettle", and his trial outweighed Zachariah's saw and John's sword.
82. The Ever-Turning: forgiveness before repentance
Repentance has three levels: the common turn from sins, the elect from faults, and the most elect "from seeing beautiful deeds". Since God will create new creatures to fill the empty places in paradise (1197), Sam'ani asks whether He will turn away those who have already served. The center of the section is a reading of 40:1-3. Ha Mim is glossed as "Determined [ḥumma] is what will be" (1199), then as forbearance and kingship, and later as love (mahabbat) and favor (minnat). The order of "the forgiver of sins and the accepter of repentance" carries the argument: "According to the rules of intellect, repentance should come beforehand and forgiveness afterward, but here forgiveness comes beforehand and repentance afterward". Sam'ani's grammatical proof is the conjunction and, which joins two different things under one ruling, as in "Zayd and ʿAmr came to me." So the forgiven include those who never repented.
| Reading of 40:3 | What follows |
|---|---|
| "I accept repentance, then I forgive sins" | repentance would be "the cause of My forgiveness" |
| "I forgive sins and I accept repentance" (the verse's order) | "I also forgive without repentance"; the servant steps on the carpet already purified |
Table 20. Sam'ani's argument from word order in section 82. Phrases as printed.
The section ends with the ninety-nine names as a necklace God made in separation, "with the name God as its centerpiece", and sent by the hand of the Seal of the Prophets.
83. The Avenger: the perfume of Uhud
Vengeance means taking what is due: from enemies, and the hearts of friends. Pharaoh's sorcerers, threatened with mutilation, answer "No harm" (26:50). Dhu'l-Nun meets a youth at the Kaabah who mocks a slave strutting as servant of the commander of Mecca; the slave hears Dhu'l-Nun's words, buys himself free, dies within days, and appears in a dream strutting and saying ‘How far apart are the two gaits!’ 'Utba Ghulam struts as "the slave boy of the All-Compelling" and falls dead.
God wants a different perfume from kings' musk: "A hungry breath." or the blood of the killed. “I want someone hungry or killed. I do not want a satiated man, I do not love a living lover.” The long story of Abu Quddama follows (Chittick, 1211, gives a longer Arabic source): a woman's locks for a horse's anklet, a youth killed by the third arrow, a grave that throws him out, and his mother's joy that his prayer to be gathered from "the bellies of wild animals and the craws of birds" was answered. The moral: "O dervishes, being killed is a stipulation of the road." The section closes on Judge 'Abd al-Jabbar, the Mu'tazilite who denied the vision of God (1217), refusing to eat until he saw his host.
84. The Pardoner: the heart nurtured with severity
The Pardoner overlooks and erases sin. Chosroes sees a chamberlain steal a goblet and keeps silent; later he asks of the man's fine clothes, “So, is this from that?” Bishr Hafi, in a dream, is rebuked for his fear: “Did you not know that generosity is My attribute?” Moses tells God, “O God, I have something You do not have.” The angels are shaken, but he explains that God has many like Moses while Moses has One with no similar. Uways Qarani's breath reaches heaven (1224), and the angels ask "From which field of violets is this scent coming?"
The part ends with poison. In India people drink poison safely because it was mixed with their milk in childhood; so too the angels' prostration and the cup of "great wrongdoing" were mixed in Adam "so that both the capacity for gentleness and the capacity for severity would come forth." Moses after Mount Sinai is sent to the meeting of the two seas, and returns more complete, for "the body is nurtured with food, but the heart is nurtured with severity."
"Beauty cannot be kept concealed, for beauty tells tales."
"I do not work by causes."
10. Names 85-102: From the Clement to the Patient
The last eighteen names in ten sections. Sam'ani passes quickly over five names already treated and then slows down again. The Gathering reads the resurrection through the story of Joseph; the Light tells of a Byzantine bishop who recognized a Muslim "by the light of your faith"; the Guide and the Innovating return to Adam, the Trust and the tree of love; the Director contrasts dust with fire; and the Patient ends the book with a loaf of bread, Adam as Muhammad's physician, and a blessing on the Prophet.
- On the last day God will question His servants as Joseph questioned his brothers, and will excuse them in the same breath: "when you were ignorant" (12:89).
- For the sinning faithful, hell is "the prison of teaching courtesy", a crucible and an oven, not a dungeon of punishment.
- God gives for free; generosity means giving "to the undeserving", since deservingness turns a gift into a debt.
- The heart is the inward light, and the outward lights serve it; the man of realization sees "the sun with the sun."
- Adam took the Trust because he was "burned", and love led him to the tree; dust, not fire, can carry a seal and keep a secret.
- Muhammad's miracle was in the hearts (29:49), and his community, though last, are "the preceders".
- The heart is nurtured by patience and pain: Abraham's one name was "Āh", and Adam tasted the poison so that the table might be set before Muhammad.
85-91. From the Clement to the Gathering: Joseph and the reckoning
Five names (the Clement, the Owner of the Kingdom, the Possessor of Majesty and Generous Giving, the Protector, the Transcendent) receive only a paragraph, since "these other names have already been discussed." With the Impartial and the Gathering the section opens out. Ibn 'Abbas glosses the "small" and "large" of 18:49: “The small is a smile, the large is laughter.” One of the Substitutes is rebuked for drying a letter with a pinch of his landlord's dust (Chittick, 1228, gives the Arabic source), and a father hears his son dreading Thursday's "presentation to the teacher" and becomes one of the "Pegs" (1229 explains the term from 78:7).
The core of the section is a long reading of Joseph as a figure of the resurrection. God's question to the faithful will be like Joseph's to his brothers, and like Joseph He will supply the excuse: "when you were ignorant." He will not say "Why did you do that?", "for heaven and earth would not have the capacity for that address, nor the gall to respond." Muhammad with his community is Jacob with his sons, and spirit and body are Zulaykha and Joseph, each blaming the other until the soul confesses. For the sinning believers, hell is Joseph's prison: "hell will be the prison of teaching courtesy, not the dungeon of chastising and punishing."
Sam'ani then runs through a series of readings of 19:71, "And none of you there is but will go down into it": the believers' share of the Fire is Abraham's share of Nimrod's fire; wheat must be planted, ground and baked before it reaches the table; the last man out of hell, Hannad, calls "O Ruthful, O Bestower!" for a thousand years (Chittick, 1235, traces the "hadith" to Hasan Basri). The section ends with Zulaykha ordering Joseph beaten so that she may hear his voice, and the warden asking him to sigh instead. God says the same of the lover: “Make the trial severe for him, for I love his voice.”
92-93. The Unneedy, the Need-Lifter: giving for free
The obedience of all creation would not weigh a mote in the scales of His majesty. Kharaqani says God melted the livers of the sincerely truthful "but He gave Himself to no one." Moses, thinking himself the one God spoke to, is shown a desert of a hundred thousand Moseses, each with a staff, each saying "Show me." An old woman left behind by the hajj caravan asks God to whom He will turn her over. Against the intellect, Sam'ani puts the angel of the right hand in command of the angel of the left, all because “My mercy takes precedence over My wrath.”
The definition of generosity is pointed: "the generous is he who gives to the undeserving, not he who gives to the deserving." Deservingness makes a debt, and "One does not discharge debts with generosity." God commands people to ask, requests when they do not ask, and gives unasked when they are lazy. The rest of the section is on predetermination: people roam the plain like a child's bird on a string; "the last step that he takes will be the first step"; 'Ali calls destiny "God’s secret". Sam'ani's short form: "You have not found Him by yourself. You have found yourself by Him."
94-95. The Harmer, the Benefiter: the men of the past
This section is a sober one, built on early renunciants. Hasan Basri says the formula of faith does not dwell in a heart until it melts in obedience, and asks a laughing man whether he has passed death, Munkar and Nakir, the Scales and the Narrow Path. Dawud Ta'i, dying on half a brick in a hot ruin, will not go into the open air because he is ashamed "that I should step into that in which my soul finds ease." Sa'id ibn Musayyib, flogged and paraded for refusing his daughter to the caliph's son (Chittick, 1262, identifies 'Abd al-Malik), grieves more for a missed afternoon prayer than for the hundred lashes. The child John refuses to play: “I was not created for games.” Death is praised as the sanctuary of the folk of tawhid: "no good fortune is more exalted than death."
96. The Light: the bishop and the moth
Light is "that which illuminates other than itself", so mirrors and pearls are not lights, and "God is the light of the heavens and the earth" is the verse's outward sense, not an interpretation. The inward light is the greater: "The day’s sun surely sets at night, / but the hearts’ sun will never disappear."
The section's long story is set in Byzantium. A bishop who preaches once every four years falls silent until a hidden Muslim prisoner is found in the crowd. He tells him in private, ‘I recognized you by the light of your faith.’ They exchange three questions each (Table 21). When the Muslim asks what is written on the gate of the Garden, the bishop removes sash and cross before answering, sees seven hundred angels with litters, and is killed with seven hundred converts.
| The bishop's question | The Muslim's likeness |
|---|---|
| a tree in paradise with a branch in every palace | the sun, one, yet with a light in every room |
| food in paradise without excrement | the embryo in the womb |
| a mote heavy as a mountain in the Scales | a stick held against the rising or setting sun looks several yards long |
| The Muslim's question | The bishop's answer |
| gates of the Gardens; of the Fires | eight; seven |
| what is written on the gate of the Garden | the double formula of faith, given only after he undoes sash and cross |
Table 21. The exchange in the bishop story of section 96. Summarized from the text.
Junayd and nine companions go to war; each in turn is killed and carried off in a litter, until Junayd defeats the enemy warrior, who converts and takes the last litter, leaving Junayd to lament. Abu Bakr's conversion follows, told as the meeting of two men going to each other on the same morning. Then comes the image of the candle (Figure 15): fire tells the seeker of light to keep away, the seeker of warmth to come close, and the seeker of companionship to detach his heart from his life. Moses on the Mount was the moth. The section ends on Dhu'l-Nun's saying, “I recognized my Lord through my Lord; if not for my Lord, I would not have recognized my Lord.”
97. The Guide: the burned one and the Trust
Guidance is given without intercession: Abu Talib was not given to Muhammad, Noah's son not to Noah, Abraham's father not to Abraham, "I have given to you without intercession." A one-legged pilgrim reaches Mecca first, because he came "with the attractions of the Unseen" (Chittick, 1278, notes Nagawri gives the story to Dhu'l-Nun). Kharaqani says: “He is clinging to you. You are not clinging to Him.”
Sam'ani returns to Adam. Iblis shook Adam's clay between Mecca and Taif, found it empty, and judged that nothing would come of it (1281). But fire cannot take a seal, and dust can, so God set the seal of the Trust on Adam's clay. When God asks why he wants what was not offered to him, Adam replies “Because I’m burned, and someone burned can only take.” The seal on him was love, a pun Chittick keeps: "that seal [muhr] was love [mihr]." The tree Adam reached for was the tree of love, an exile in paradise like Adam himself: "And every exile is kin to an exile." The section closes on Fatima's wedding, for which the Prophet's only provision was sand from the desert.
98. The Innovating: the loan that cuts the heart
The Innovating creates without precedent and chooses whom He wants (28:68). Abu Yazid says “I came out of Abū-Yazīd-ness like a snake from its skin.” The mi'raj was told only in summary, like a boon companion summoned to the sultan. The section's main topic is 2:245, the "beautiful loan". Sam'ani takes qard back to cutting (scissors are miqrad): the loan is cutting the heart off from what it has, and cutting is always for joining, as a farmer grafts a branch. Doubling and redoubling is for children: “As for the intelligent man, I take one and give one, and the one is I.”
He adds a lioness who cannot remove the ants from her cub without her claws, a falcon that turns back when the bird it chases burns in its own aspiration, and a decorator dressed as a woman who becomes the Pole of the world. The angels who objected to Adam "spoke the truth, but they spoke about the friend."
99-100. The Subsistent, the Inheritor: the last who come first
Earlier prophets had miracles for the eyes (the fire, the white hand, the reviving breath), but Muhammad's miracle was in the hearts (29:49) and in the speech of the Real: "Take along My eternal attribute to act as police chief." God recited Taha and Yasin two thousand years before Adam (1305 calls the hadith weak), and in paradise He will recite them again "without intermediary". Death is "the sunset prayer for those who are fasting"; 'Ammar ibn Yasir drinks his last cup of milk at Siffin. The caged bird whose clipped wings grow back returns to its nest (89:27-28).
The community is last in time and first in intent. Sam'ani cites the philosophers' rule that the first in thought is last in act (1315 attributes it to Aristotle), with the example of a house whose roof is first in thought and last in act. Abu Bakr had "a truthfulness that was seeking for truth", and each of the four Companions showed one secret: Abu Bakr truthfulness, 'Umar contemplation, 'Uthman shame, 'Ali love.
101. The Director: dust against fire
God says "God will bring a people" (5:54): "The one who brings is the Wanter, and the one whom He brings is the wanted." The spirit is a deposit and faith a gift, so the angel of death takes the one and leaves the other. Sam'ani tells of Joseph in the well, Sa'dun the madman who brings rain "By the rightful due of what happened last night!", and a youth whose love outran his obedience, of whom Abu 'Uthman says “Truthful in love for Him, falling short in His rightful due!” This is the book's one full chain of transmitters, which Chittick reconstructs in note 1333. Sam'ani states the principle plainly: "truthfulness in love makes up for shortcoming in deeds, but fully performing deeds does not make up for shortcoming in love."
The section then answers Iblis's "I am better than he" with five reasons why dust is better than fire, set out in the box below. It ends with the creation of the names: God waited for His friend Adam to name the things, "whatever name you give, I have given", and a defense of "with My own two hands" (38:75) against both interpretation and anthropomorphism.
Sam'ani gives five reasons in a row. Dust sets things right, fire corrupts. Dust needs nothing from fire, but fire needs trees, which come from dust. Fire tells tales, but "dust curtains the mystery": the graves look alike, yet under them one is caressed and another burned. Fire burns a burden, dust carries it in silence. Fire has force, dust has good fortune. The list turns Iblis's argument from substance into an argument from service, and it fits the book's view that humility is what qualifies Adam.
102. The Patient: Adam, the wheat, and the table
The Patient is the forbearing "who has no hurry to punish." Patience is "swallowing down trial without claiming anything" (Qushayri, 1340). Abraham was awwah, always sighing: "If the safe and healthy must have ninety-nine names, the folk of affliction must have one name." That name is "Āh". Jacob says "Beautiful patience!" in the morning and "Oh my grief for Joseph!" by evening. The angels' long worship was "a simple stew, without the salt of pain", and Adam received the cure of all pains and "a pain without cure." The four archangels receive their tasks: Michael at the gate of provision, Gabriel as courier, Azrael taking the old patched cloaks, Seraphiel as "the wardrobe-keeper".
The book ends with a parable of wheat. Adam is forbidden the tree while it is raw. It must be buried, ground, kneaded, left to rise and baked before it can be eaten, and only then does the wheat find "it had reached the road’s beginning", for the human body is another mill that "itself has a spring of flowing water." The last word goes to Adam as Muhammad's physician: “I tasted the poison, bore the suffering, picked up the burden of blame, and was beaten by the whip.
"truthfulness in love makes up for shortcoming in deeds, but fully performing deeds does not make up for shortcoming in love."
"The cure of all pains was put inside him, but he was given a pain without cure."
11. Notes on the Text
Only slips evident from the book itself are listed: a clash with another passage of the same book, a broken sentence, a plain typographical error. Where the evidence points one way but is not certain, the entry is a query. References are to name sections and note numbers (n.).
| Place | As printed | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | in 1069, three years after his father's death | The same section dates the father's death to 1058 |
| Intro n. 71 | Mālik ibn Anas (d. ca. 710) | The passage annotated speaks of Anas ibn Mālik |
| Introduction | to Kerman ... to Kirman | Two spellings in one paragraph |
| Introduction | as a well as a Sufi | Stray "a" |
| Introduction | in Rajab October 1119 | Islamic and Western months mixed |
| Table 2 | al-Hadi and al-Badi' both numbered 91; next name 93 | No name numbered 92 in the Qushayri column |
| Section 10 | worship. exertion | Full stop for comma |
| Section 15 | Some-one | Stray hyphen |
| Section 20 | able to you pass your days | Extra "to you"; question ends in a full stop |
| Section 23-24 | 'Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves." | Single opening mark, double closing mark |
| Section 25-26 | tipsinesss | Triple "s" |
| Section 25-26 | you do not know!''[2:30] | Doubled closing mark |
| n. 287, n. 345 | Bashar ibn Bard / Bashar ibn Burd | One poet, two spellings |
| Section 27-28 | assist one other | For "one another" |
| Section 31-32 | I was a given a stature | Stray "a" |
| Section 34 | If you go the mosque | "to" missing |
| Section 35 | lion-caching gazelle | For "catching" |
| Section 35 | know-ledge | Stray hyphen |
| n. 768 | In his commentary 53:14 | "on" missing |
| Section 46 | God sanctity his spirit | For "sanctify" |
| Section 49 | Though you not desire | "do" missing |
| Section 49 | The youth's prayer; "who disobeyed you" | Quotation never closed; lower-case "you" for God |
| n. 923 | pp. 326—27 | Em dash where the book elsewhere uses a range dash |
| n. 817, n. 831 | (Epistle 265.); no final period | Punctuation |
| Section 53 | sometime because of mercy | For "sometimes", which opens the same sentence |
| Sections 54, 57-58 | Who-ever; un-aware | Line-break hyphens left in |
| Section 59 | you became angry | Past tense among present-tense clauses |
| Section 61 | sprites, 1071 | Space before the note number |
| Section 62 | Inner and outer quotation marks | Closed in the wrong order |
| n. 995, n. 1230 | hemstitch | For "hemistich" |
| n. 1085 | No space before "(6:78)" | Spacing |
| Section 69 | quicker that Muḥammad’s mount | "that" for "than" |
| Section 69 | the existence a bird | "of" seems to be missing |
| Section 72 | did have the capacity to put up with severity | Query: the next sentence and section 84 suggest "did not have" |
| Section 73-74 | so may acts of discipline | "may" for "many" |
| Section 81 | the key ... are sent | Singular subject, plural verb |
| n. 1161; n. 1122 | Ḍahhāk (text Ḍaḥḥāk); no final period | Spelling; punctuation |
| Section 90-91 | cold signs; When the heard | "signs" for "sighs" (the next sentence has "cold sighs"); "the" for "she" |
| Section 92-93 | When You do not ask | Capital "You" for a human addressee |
| Section 96 | Inner quotation on the gate of the Garden | Opens with a double mark, closes with a single |
| Section 97 | The words ... throws; The words ... strikes | Plural subjects, singular verbs |
| Section 99-100 | ʿUmar’s breast | Query: the paragraph opens with Abū Bakr’s breast |
| Section 99-100 | bring into the house | "it" seems to be missing |
| Section 101 | several stokes of the whip | For "strokes"; also an extra closing mark nearby |
12. Synthesis
What the Repose of the Spirits teaches when read as a whole: its main lessons, the frameworks Sam'ani keeps returning to, a critical look at the book and its translation, the people who fill its pages, and what a modern reader in technology or finance might take from it.
Twenty-two takeaways
- The names are doors, not definitions. Sam'ani spends very little of each section on the name itself; he uses it to open a sermon on love, need or the Prophet.
- Every name has two faces. Gentleness and severity, beauty and majesty, contraction and expansion: God shows both, and each thing in the world mixes them.
- Love came first. God's love for the human being is beginningless and uncaused. It does not answer human merit; human love answers it.
- Adam's slip was part of the plan. The fall brought Adam into the world of trial, need and repentance, where love could be tested and become real.
- Need is the best gift a servant can bring. Obedience can turn into self-admiration; need and brokenness cannot.
- Seeking comes from finding. No one would seek God unless God had first found him; the search is itself a sign of being sought.
- The Trust was taken from love, not ignorance. Heaven and earth saw the burden; Adam saw the access, and took on what others refused.
- Dust is praised above fire. Iblis boasted of fire; Adam was made of humble dust, and humility is what receives the divine gaze.
- Muhammad shows the summit of the human. The Night Journey is the book's recurring proof that a human being can go where angels stop.
- The prophets were all tested. Sam'ani repeats that each prophet faltered somewhere, so that only God's grace, not human perfection, carries anyone.
- Forgiveness comes before repentance. In the order of the names, God is named Forgiver before Accepter of repentance: the door was open before the servant knocked.
- Mercy outruns wrath. Sinners are still addressed as My servants; the tone of the book is hope, though it never makes light of sin.
- Neither compulsion nor free will. Sam'ani follows the Imams in refusing both extremes: the servant acts, and God determines.
- Shariah, Tariqah and Haqiqah belong together. Outward law, the path and the reality are three levels of one religion; the felicitous person keeps all three yet relies on none.
- Aspiration should aim higher than paradise. Seek the Lord of the Garden, not the Garden; to want only reward is to stop short.
- Love is trial. Those God loves most He tries most. Affliction is the beloved's attention, not neglect.
- The heart is a kingdom. The body is a city with its officers, the intellect a minister, the heart a king that must be governed well.
- Stories teach better than proofs. The book's argument is carried by parables: the polo ball, the moth and candle, the gnat that defeats Nimrod.
- Courtesy matters even in hell. Sam'ani pictures hell as a prison of courtesy; the relationship with God never stops being one of manners.
- Generosity is giving without cause. God's giving to the undeserving is the model for human generosity.
- The family background explains the book. A preacher from a line of jurists and Hadith scholars, Sam'ani combines sound transmission with free imagination.
- Chittick's notes are a second book. They trace sources, chains of transmission and parallels in Qushayri, Mustamli, Maybudi and others.
The book in five paragraphs
Ahmad Sam'ani, a preacher of Merv from a family of scholars, gave a series of lectures in Persian on the divine names, probably to students of the Sufi path. They were written down as the Repose of the Spirits. Later Persian authors used them heavily, sometimes without naming him, and the author was almost forgotten until the twentieth century.
Chittick's Introduction shows that this was not marginal literature. Ahmad's father Mansur was a celebrated jurist; his nephew 'Abd al-Karim wrote great biographical dictionaries. In their Khorasan, Sufism was part of mainstream learning, and Sam'ani's talks draw on Hadith, Quran commentary, poetry and the sayings of the Sufi masters alike.
The translation follows the names one by one, but the real subject is the relationship between God and the human being. God is power, unity and wisdom; He is gentle and severe; He loved Adam without cause, taught him the names, let him slip, and brought him back through repentance. The human being is dust that carries the Trust.
Muhammad is the second hero after Adam. The Night Journey, the eulogy of the prophets and the light of Muhammad recur through the book, showing the highest form of the love that Adam began. Iblis, the angels, Moses and Joseph serve as foils: each shows a way of loving, or failing to love, God.
The book ends where it began, with Adam. The Patient (name 102) returns to the wheat, the table and the physician's cure, closing the circle of fall and return. In between, Sam'ani has said one thing many times: love is uncaused, need is the way, and gentleness hides inside severity.
Five passages to remember
"truthfulness in love makes up for shortcoming in deeds, but fully performing deeds does not make up for shortcoming in love."
"In the Beginningless He first talked about you to Himself, then He talked about you to you"
"The outward Kaabah is made of stones, the inward Kaabah of secrets."
"O Pen, write: 'A sinful community and a forgiving Lord!'"
What the book does not claim
Sam'ani does not offer a systematic theology of the names; Chittick notes that only a small share of the text discusses the names as such. He does not claim the Sufi path replaces the Shariah; the felicitous person keeps outward law, inward path and secret core together. Chittick, for his part, does not claim to know where or when the lectures were delivered; he argues for the Nizamiyya Madrasa of Merv as likely, not certain. Nor does he explain why the nephew is silent about the book; he gives possible reasons and leaves the question open.
How the teachings depend on one another
The two ideas at the top could stand apart: one could hold that God is both gentle and severe without holding that His love is uncaused. Sam'ani joins them. Because love comes first, severity must be a form of love, and trial becomes attention. Because love comes first, Adam's slip cannot cancel his election. Both lines lead to need as the servant's proper state, and need, not pride, is what lets the human being carry the Trust.
Frameworks table
| Framework | Where | Elements | Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power, unity, wisdom | Name 2 (Part 3) | Creation, annihilation, return | Reads the whole cosmic drama in the name God |
| Shariah, Tariqah, Haqiqah | Introduction; names 27-28, 34 | Law, path, reality, secret core | Holds outward practice and inward realization together |
| Decree and rightful due | Name 12 (Part 3) | Command, decree, assayers | Asks to be judged by grace, not desert |
| Five degrees of certainty | Name 20 (Part 4) | Stages of trust in the Provider | Measures how far trust has become real |
| Contraction and expansion | Names 23-24 (Part 4) | Two states of the heart | Explains spiritual moods without blame |
| Heart's kingdom | Names 25-28 (Parts 4-5) | King, minister, officers, city of the body | Self-governance as statecraft |
| The comer and the taken | Names 29-30 (Part 5) | Moses came, Muhammad was taken | Contrasts effort with being drawn |
| Ladder of seeking | Name 34 (Part 6) | Need, aspiration, seeking, finding | Shows that seeking begins in being found |
| Antagonist and interceder attributes | Name 50 (Part 7) | Paired attributes of God | Explains why some names threaten and others plead |
| Separation and union | Name 54 (Part 8) | Two poles of love | Reads affliction as part of love |
| Lights of Muhammad | Names 75-76 (Part 9) | Pearl, forehead, niche, lamp | Traces the Prophet's light through history |
| Dust and fire | Name 101 (Part 10) | Five reasons dust is better | Humility over pride |
A closer look
Strengths. The translation is complete, careful and readable, and the notes are a real research tool: they identify sources, compare versions of stories, and show how later authors used Sam'ani. The Introduction is a model of building a life from scattered biographical entries without overclaiming. Chittick keeps Sam'ani's voice, including his repetitions and his direct addresses to the listener, rather than smoothing them into an essay.
Limits of the book. Sam'ani's method is repetition; the same stories (Adam's slip, Iblis's refusal, the Night Journey, Joseph) return many times, and a reader looking for steady argument will find the long middle sections hard going. The names are often pretexts, so the title "commentary on the divine names" can mislead. Some stories rest on weak or unverified reports, which Chittick notes but which Sam'ani treats freely. The Introduction's literal translation policy sometimes leaves English stiff.
Limits of the printed text. The book has a number of small typographical slips, gathered in Part 11, none of which obscures the sense, and a few passages where a word may be missing (the query in section 72 matters most, since it reverses the meaning).
Questions the book leaves open. Was the work delivered as lectures at the Nizamiyya? Why does 'Abd al-Karim never mention it? How much of the poetry is Sam'ani's own? Chittick states the evidence and leaves these open, which is to his credit.
| Claim | Evidence in the book | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Repose was a widely read classic | Verses of Attar, Rumi, Sa'di, Hafiz; borrowings by Maybudi; praise by Nizam al-Din Awliya | Strong |
| The lectures were oral | Direct addresses to "dervish" and "chevalier", repetitions | Strong |
| Delivered at the Nizamiyya of Merv | Family's teaching posts; no direct statement | Probable |
| Sufism was mainstream in Khorasan | 'Abd al-Karim's many Sufi teachers, scholar-Sufis | Strong |
| Sam'ani is the most imaginative of four commentators | Comparison with Bayhaqi, Qushayri, Ghazali | A judgment, well argued |
Who's Who
Dates are those printed in the book, given as hijri/common era where the book gives both. People without a printed date are listed without one.
| Person | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ahmad Sam'ani | d. 534/1140 | Author; preacher of Merv |
| Mansur Sam'ani | d. 489/1096 | Ahmad's father, jurist; "Shaykh al-Islam" and "my father" in the text |
| Muhammad ibn Mansur Sam'ani | d. 510/1116 | Ahmad's brother, father of 'Abd al-Karim |
| Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Jabbar Sam'ani | d. 450/1058 | Ahmad's grandfather |
| 'Abd al-Karim Sam'ani | d. 562/1166 | Nephew; author of Ansab, main source for the family |
| Abu Bakr (al-Siddiq) | d. 13/634 | First caliph; model of faith |
| 'Ali ibn Abi Talib | d. 40/661 | Imam; "neither compulsion nor delegation" |
| Uways Qarani | d. 37/657 | The unseen lover of the Prophet |
| Hasan Basri | d. 110/728 | Early ascetic |
| Ja'far Sadiq | d. 148/765 | Imam; sayings on unity and decree |
| Ibrahim Adham | d. ca. 165/780 | Prince turned renunciant |
| Rabi'a 'Adawiyya | d. 185/801 | Woman saint |
| Fudayl ibn 'Iyad | d. 187/803 | Repentant highwayman |
| Shafi'i | d. 204/820 | Founder of the law school of the Sam'anis |
| Bishr Hafi | d. 227/842 | Barefoot ascetic; dream stories |
| Dhu'l-Nun Misri | d. 245/860 | Egyptian master |
| Sari Saqati | d. ca. 252/865 | Baghdad master |
| Abu Sa'id Kharraz | d. 277/890-1 | Encounter with Iblis |
| Abu Yazid Bastami | no date printed | Ecstatic sayings |
| Ibrahim Khawwas | d. 291/904 | Master of trust |
| Nuri | d. 295/907 | Nearness and farness |
| Junayd | d. 297/910 | Baghdad master |
| Hallaj | d. 309/922 | Martyr of love |
| Wasiti | d. ca. 320/932 | Sayings in the notes and text |
| Shibli | d. 334/946 | Frequent hero of anecdotes |
| Nasrabadi | d. 367/977 | Pain of not finding |
| Abu 'Ali Daqqaq | d. 405/1015 | Qushayri's teacher; definitions of love |
| Kharaqani | d. 425/1033 | Unlettered master |
| Bu 'Ali Siyah | d. 434/1033 | Master in anecdotes |
| Mustamli | d. 434/1043 | Sharh al-ta'arruf, a main source |
| Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khayr | d. 440/1049 | Quatrains shared with Repose |
| Mawardi | d. 450/1058 | Quran commentary used by Sam'ani |
| Qushayri | d. 465/1072 | Risala and commentary on the names |
| Ghazali | d. 505/1111 | Commentary on the names |
| Sana'i | d. 535/1140 | Poet often quoted |
| Rumi | d. 672/1273 | Later reader; shared quatrains |
| Hafiz | d. 792/1390 | Later reader |
Ten questions for discussion
- Why does Sam'ani spend so little time on the names themselves?
- Is the claim that Adam's slip was part of God's plan a comfort or a problem?
- How does the praise of dust over fire change the reading of Iblis?
- What does it mean that seeking comes from finding?
- Why does Sam'ani keep returning to the Night Journey?
- Can trial really be a form of attention? Where does the idea break down?
- How do Shariah, Tariqah and Haqiqah relate in the book's own examples?
- What does the family history in the Introduction add to the reading of the translation?
- Which of Sam'ani's parables works best today, and why?
- Does the repetitive style serve the oral setting, or would it have been better edited?
13. Glossary
Key terms of the Repose of the Spirits, drawn from the book's own Index and Glossary of Terms, with Chittick's English renderings. Transliteration is simplified; the English word on the left is Chittick's.
| Chittick's English | Persian or Arabic | Sense in the book |
|---|---|---|
| annihilation / subsistence | fana' / baqa' | Passing away from self; remaining through God |
| aspiration | himmat | The resolve that aims beyond reward at God Himself |
| assayer | naqqad | One who tests coin; image of God's judgment of deeds |
| bewilderment | hayrat | The state of the lover before the beloved's majesty |
| chevalier, chivalry | jawanmard, futuwwat | The generous young man; Sam'ani's form of address |
| compulsion / delegation | jabr / tafwid | The two extremes on human action, both rejected |
| contraction / expansion | qabd / bast | Two states of the heart |
| coquetry | dalal | The beloved's playful disdain, which the lover must bear |
| courtesy | adab | Right conduct before God and people |
| decree | hukm, qada' | God's ruling, as against what strict desert would require |
| dervish | darwish | The poor one; Sam'ani's usual address to his listener |
| disengagement | tajrid | Stripping away attachments |
| dust | khak, ghubar | Adam's substance; humility, praised above fire |
| finding | wujud, yaft | Also "existence"; the root of the word means to find |
| gentleness / severity | lutf / qahr | The two faces of the names; each hides the other |
| godwariness | taqwa | Awareness of God that guards against sin |
| heart | qalb, dil | The king of the body; qalb also means fluctuation |
| jealousy | ghayrat | God's and the lover's refusal to share the beloved |
| love | 'ishq, mahabbat, mawaddat, mihr | The book's central theme, beginningless and uncaused |
| need | niyaz, haja, iftiqar | The servant's true offering |
| opening | futuh | Unexpected gifts and inner openings; paired with spirit (ruh) |
| poverty | faqr, darwishi | Having nothing of one's own before God |
| predetermination | taqdir | God's measuring out of all things |
| repentance | tawbat | Returning; God's turning comes first |
| repose | rawh | Rest and refreshment; the title's first word |
| secret core | sirr | The innermost self, beyond heart and spirit |
| seeking | talab, justan | The search for God, which follows being found |
| self-admiration | 'ujb | Pride in one's deeds; the danger of obedience |
| self-disclosure | tajalli | God showing Himself through the names |
| separation / union | firaq / wisal | The two poles of love |
| servanthood | 'ubudiyyat, bandagi | The human side of the relation with the Lord |
| Shariah, Tariqah, Haqiqah | shari'at, tariqat, haqiqat | Law, path and reality: three levels of one religion |
| slip | zallat | Adam's lapse, never called a sin outright |
| solicitude | 'inayat | God's beginningless care for the servant |
| spirit | ruh, jan | Higher than the soul; the breath God blew into Adam |
| station / state | maqam / hal | A stage gained by effort / a passing gift |
| tavern | kharabat | The poets' image of the place where self is lost |
| trial, tribulation | bala', mihnat | Affliction as the beloved's attention; mihnat echoes mahabbat |
| Trust | amanat (33:72) | The burden heaven and earth refused and Adam carried |
| trust | tawakkul | Reliance on God for provision |
| unneediness | ghina, bi-niyazi | God's independence of all things |
| vicegerency | khilafat | Adam's appointment as God's deputy on earth |
| we-ness | nahniyyat | God's speaking as "We", a sign of majesty |
About this book
The Repose of the Spirits: A Sufi Commentary on the Divine Names by Ahmad Sam'ani. 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.
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