Some Brief Signposts on Sufism

Sufism focuses on developing a lived and experiential relationship with the divine Law. Rather than a codified divine Law solely bounded up in a book that must be cognized, understood and respected, Sufis consider the divine Law to be alive in a spiritual ecosystem that spans the entire Cosmos. 

Everyone has a unique and personal path of co-creation of one’s life in view of Allah, this path is spiritually bankrupt without spiritual and relegious practices, without reliance on the Quran, Hadiths and Sunna to guide one’s spiritual development. 

In that respect, Sufism focuses on developing the proper akhlak or volitional character that are conducive to salam and Islam. In actively (rather than passively) developing one’s heart through spiritual and relational practices, this process faciliates recognizing the Reality of God everywhere we go. 

Sufism supposes that every person can and ought to undergo the same spiritually transformative path layed out by the lives of the Prophets, including the last Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Much how Buddhists believe everyone can be a Boddhisatva, Sufis also believe all muslims can attain spiritual liberty or conciousness of God. Most Sufis considered the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to be the first Sufi. In striving for proximity to God, awareness and practice in recognizing the ‘Face of God’, the Prophet layed down the path of practicing Sufis. The ‘Face of God’ means alot of things I’ll get to, but for now its fruitful to note that dhikr is remembrance not solely of our constructed image of God we have in our imaginations, but also, remembering and recognizing God all around us, within us and all other living beings, in the animate and inanimate alike, within and apart from the Cosmos. 

The ancient Greek and medieval Islamic traditions that preceded the Sufis considered one of God’s Names or qualities to be 'nous' and the other the ‘Good’. Long story, but let’s consider nous to be the proclivity of the Mind of God to structure the cosmos, the stars and planets, the trees and human life, in accordance with reason. There is reason in the natural, historical and moral design of the world in so far as there’s order in the universe, tendencies for harmony, unity in the world, unique purposes each existent plays in maintaining balance. Things make sense to us by means of mathematical formalisms, that capture with accuracy some physical (even spiritual) laws in the Universe. This suggests there is rational design behind the creation and sustenance of the cosmos. This Nous as the rational aspect of God’s inception of Creation means little however, without Love. The nuances of this discussion are really cool, but for now let’s just pose that seeing the Face of God in the world is seeing the world as the Mind of God designed it. As the Sufis would stress however, we can only see the Face of God if we also see the world in light of the Love of God’s Heart that went into this world’s design. Beauty is only apparent to Loving hearts. 

Sufis consider that one of the main forces motivating the organizational principles of the natural world we take part in, aside from reason and ‘the Good’, is Love. If we wish to live in line with these principles of nature, we would in turn have to live in line with the mandates of love. Sufism finds love at the core of Islam. Most Sufis acknowledge that this core is the same core of most other faiths who capture an impression of the Same God we all worship. Ibn Arabi compared all the faiths of humanity as stars that brighten the night with God’s Light, the brightest for Arabi however, was Islam which he compared to the Sun. 

There are three stages in classical Sufism although two notes are worth mentioning. First these stages aren’t doctrines or ‘levels’ or ‘embodied’ stages of enlightenment per say. They’re not uniformly applicable, everyone experiences their paths deeply personally and each stage, or ‘station' as ‘Arabi calls them, expresses itself differently in every person. All Sufis have the same tools, but express these lessons in different forms. 

1. Butterfly sees smoke  —-------------  علم اليقين  

2. Butterfly sees the flame, feels the heat —---------  عين اليقين

3. Butterfly flys through the flame —--------- حق اليقين

Second, Ibn Arabi offered additional stages he named

1. Earth of Symbols 

2. Proximity of Gifts 

3. Station of No-Station 

Sufism is built on a close study but honestly liberal yet faithful speculation and exploration of Hadiths and Quran. I don’t say liberal to position Sufism relative to other more conservative sects, in fact if we take liberal to mean departure from the word of God and the Sunna, Sufism is far less liberal than conservative theologians who entertain more seriously the political or social transformations of Islam. Instead I mean that while Sufis were traditionally more observant to the spiritual and religious practices laid out by the Prophet PBUH than other sects, they also drew on a wide set of traditions in developing Sufi thought. The Sufi thinkers, muslim philosophers and theologians of the 10th century Arab world were exposed to a wide range of theological, metaphysical and spiritual traditions that most regarded as valid representations of the Singular Reality of God. Although they certainly disagreed with other traditions, and gave Islam the benefit of final abrogation and inviolable authority over the spiritual ‘pole’ of human history, they nevertheless considered a wide set of traditions. To put it in context, many Sufis and muslim thinkers were students of Aristotle, Plato, early Buddhism, ancient Egyptian, Syriac, Iraqi and Indus spiritual and intellectual traditions. 

Universal Person, Insan Al-Kabir and Insan Al-Saghir

God relates to two kinds of existents in Creation, who relate to one another in a very specific order of emanation from God. Insan Al-Kabir is the first existent, it's the Cosmos considered to be a living organism composed of all kinds of living beings, constituting the whole. Insan al-Saghir is a human generally, but the Universal Person specifically, is the person who clearly reflects the light of God and a peculiar map of the Cosmos that Ibn Arabi describes. They reflect what is above, below. There is sooo much more to this but I’ll leave it for another post. 

Transcendance and Immanence 

This is probably the most important part of Sufi thought. I included an excerpt from a paper I wrote that captures this: 

"Let’s consider the analogy between Love, the Beloved, and the Lover on one hand, and God’s Essence and Light, God as they’re loved apart from Creation, and the loving Worshiper on the other. Ibn Arabi employs a unique metaphysical and theological notion of God that can be quite revealing, namely the Unity of Being or Existence. Although he never used the term himself, Ibn Arabi’s students compiled and named his account of the nature of the God-Cosmos-Human relation the Unity of Existence or wahdat al-wujûd. God for Arabi is both transcendent and immanent (and a third mode that would require too wide a diversion). For ‘Arabi it wasn’t sufficient to claim the unity of God within itself, ‘there is no God but God’, it would be more proper to supplement the claim with God’s Names (See figure 2), that there is ‘no Reality but the Real’ or ‘there is no Love but the Loving’. For Ibn Arabi, there is no existence apart from God, including humans and animals, trees and rivers. A believer holds “two visions” (nazar) of the Real. The first vision of the divine Law is as the transcendence of God; if you see a book and say it is not God, you thereby qualify God, limit Them, imply a duality between creation and Creator, and thus imply a reality distinct from the singular Reality of God. In the second vision, the immanence of God suggests that the book is God, now we have restricted God to this particular book, we have qualified Them in time and place knowing full well God is the incorporeal, eternal, and necessary Being on which material Creation depends. A healthy faith respects both paradoxical visions, that God is both outside of time and place, and in time and place, all of creation and none of creation, both the Ever-Living and the Sustainer. Traditionally, the transcendence of God implies that God is creatively productive at two points from the perspective of an inhabitant in Creation, as the First Cause for creation and the continuous preservation of existence, and as the Final Cause, wherever the cosmos takes its final Breath. Ibn Arabi’s view is that the One isn’t only one in Themselves, but with Creation as well, which brings Arabi to conceive of God as immanent in the Cosmos as well. Not only do we come from the One and return to the One, but we’re also enveloped in a unified Spirit of the One in our passage through material creation. Now that we’ve cleared that concept let's review the analogy. The notion of a Unity of Being allows us to claim that “there is no Love but the Loving. From the Real’s perspective, there is no real distinction between the Love, the Beloved, and the Lover. ‘Seeking to unite’ with the Beloved, is a process Ibn Arabi describes as developing one’s capacity and authenticity of love, one’s akhlaq, or volitional character on the path of the divine Law. At this perspective or degree of clarity, he holds that the Lover’s act of loving God, is really the self-disclosure of God’s spirit, given that Love is the sustaining force that animates the cosmos and this act of Love. This loving is also an expression of God’s Loving Essence, Being-itself, and the mediating force that holds the cosmos together as Empedocles suggested. The recipient, source, and medium of expression of this Love is the Beloved, as they stand apart from the corporeal world, in-themselves, the ‘luminous’ Reality. All Love is borrowed from God, received from God, expressed through God, and expressed towards God. 

A curious notion that is helpfully clarified by noting that this in actuality, is a perspective of the second vision ‘Arabi describes, ‘the self-subsisting Reality’ as they stand apart from the corporeal world. ‘Arabi’s view is not unlike that of Hindus in the Advaita Vedanta that Brahman, the immutable and ultimate consciousness of Reality, is one and the same as its Creation that is dependent on the Reality much how a dream is dependent for existence on its Dreamer. In addition, much like Arabi, the Vedas make synonymous Brahman, the progenitor and pure consciousness of Reality, and the internal spirit, the highest self, named atman from the Sanskrit root for breath, or rûh for ‘Arabi. Ibn Arabi’s first vision is for the Hindus that of Saguna Brahman, or God in Their instantiated form with their empirical qualities. The second vision is that of Nirguna Brahman, God as They exist apart from Creation, without form, qualities and incomprehensible to participants in space-time. Ibn Arabi differs from the Hindus however, in taking our experiences in the material world to be nevertheless real; just that these experiences of the divided world of material relations and the matter itself that is sensed, take root in the One Reality and Light of God that transcends division, and have no existence apart from the Real. The collapse of Beloved, Love and Lover, into the singular Reality of Love, thus belongs to the perspective of Nirguna Brahman who remains incomprehensible to the limited experiences of finite beings. Our view of things is individuated, embodied and relative to our place in history, limited to the sensible world of lived experiences within whom we have agency, moral responsibility and duties of love. Nevertheless, Arabi considers this corporeal world to be very much real, and our Love a true drop in the “two seas”, the sea of the corporeal world and the sea of the spiritual Reality, seperated by what ‘Arabi calls a necessary barzakh. "