No one can approach the subject of this chapter—the state of the mystic who has reached his journey’s end—without feeling that all symbolical descriptions of union with God and theories concerning its nature are little better than leaps in the dark. How shall we form any conception of that which is declared to be ineffable by those who have actually experienced it? I can only reply that the same difficulty confronts us in dealing with all mystical phenomena, though it appears less formidable at lower levels, and that the poet’s counsel of silence has not prevented him from interpreting the deepest mysteries of Sūfism with unrivalled insight and power.

Whatever terms may be used to describe it, the unitive state is the culmination of the simplifying process by which the soul is gradually isolated from all that is foreign to itself, from all that is not God. Unlike Nirvāṇa, which is merely the cessation of individuality, fanā, the passing-away of the Sūfī from his phenomenal existence, involves baqā, the continuance of his real existence. He who dies to self lives in God, and fanā, the consummation of this death, marks the attainment of baqā, or union with the divine life. Deification, in short, is the Moslem mystic’s ultima Thule.

In the early part of the tenth century Husayn ibn Mansūr, known to fame as al-Hallāj (the wool-carder), was barbarously done to death at Baghdād. His execution seems to have been dictated by political motives, but with these we are not concerned. Amongst the crowd assembled round the scaffold, a few, perhaps, believed him to be what he said he was; the rest witnessed with exultation or stern approval the punishment of a blasphemous heretic. He had uttered in two words a sentence which Islam has, on the whole, forgiven but has never forgotten: “Ana ’l-Haqq”—“I am God.”

The recently published researches of M. Louis Massignon[21] make it possible, for the first time, to indicate the meaning which Hallāj himself attached to this celebrated formula, and to assert definitely that it does not agree with the more orthodox interpretations offered at a later epoch by Sūfīs belonging to various schools. According to Hallāj, man is essentially divine. God created Adam in His own image. He projected from Himself that image of His eternal love, that He might behold Himself as in a mirror. Hence He bade the angels worship Adam (Kor. 2. 32), in whom, as in Jesus, He became incarnate.

Since the ‘humanity’ (nāsūt) of God comprises the whole bodily and spiritual nature of man, the ‘divinity’ (lāhūt) of God cannot unite with that nature except by means of an incarnation or, to adopt the term employed by Massignon, an infusion (hulūl) of the divine Spirit, such as takes place when the human spirit enters the body.[22] Thus Hallāj says in one of his poems:

This doctrine of personal deification, in the peculiar form which was impressed upon it by Hallāj, is obviously akin to the central doctrine of Christianity, and therefore, from the Moslem standpoint, a heresy of the worst kind. It survived unadulterated only amongst his immediate followers. The Hulūlīs, i.e. those who believe in incarnation, are repudiated by Sūfīs in general quite as vehemently as by orthodox Moslems. But while the former have unhesitatingly condemned the doctrine of hulūl, they have also done their best to clear Hallāj from the suspicion of having taught it. Three main lines of defence are followed: (1) Hallāj did not sin against the Truth, but he was justly punished in so far as he committed a grave offence against the Law. He “betrayed the secret of his Lord” by proclaiming to all and sundry the supreme mystery which ought to be reserved for the elect. (2) Hallāj spoke under the intoxicating influence of ecstasy. He imagined himself to be united with the divine essence, when in fact he was only united with one of the divine attributes. (3) Hallāj meant to declare that there is no essential difference or separation between God and His creatures, inasmuch as the divine unity includes all being. A man who has entirely passed away from his phenomenal self exists quâ his real self, which is God.

It was not Hallāj who cried “Ana ’l-Haqq,” but God Himself, speaking, as it were, by the mouth of the selfless Hallāj, just as He spoke to Moses through the medium of the burning bush (Kor. 20. 8-14).

The last explanation, which converts Ana ’l-Haqq into an impersonal monistic axiom, is accepted by most Sūfīs as representing the true Hallājian teaching. In a magnificent ode Jalāluddīn Rūmī describes how the One Light shines in myriad forms through the whole universe, and how the One Essence, remaining ever the same, clothes itself from age to age in the prophets and saints who are its witnesses to mankind.

Although in Western and Central Asia—where the Persian kings were regarded by their subjects as gods, and where the doctrines of incarnation, anthropomorphism, and metempsychosis are indigenous—the idea of the God-man was neither so unfamiliar nor unnatural as to shock the public conscience very profoundly, Hallāj had formulated that idea in such a way that no mysticism calling itself Mohammedan could tolerate, much less adopt it. To assert that the divine and human natures may be interfused and commingled,[24] would have been to deny the principle of unity on which Islam is based. The subsequent history of Sūfism shows how deification was identified with unification. The antithesis—God, Man—melted away in the pantheistic theory which has been explained above.[25] There is no real existence apart from God. Man is an emanation or a reflexion or a mode of Absolute Being. What he thinks of as individuality is in truth not-being; it cannot be separated or united, for it does not exist. Man is God, yet with a difference. According to Ibn al-ʿArabī,[26] the eternal and the phenomenal are two complementary aspects of the One, each of which is necessary to the other. The creatures are the external manifestation of the Creator, and Man is God’s consciousness (sirr) as revealed in creation. But since Man, owing to the limitations of his mind, cannot think all objects of thought simultaneously, and therefore expresses only a part of the divine consciousness, he is not entitled to say Ana ’l-Haqq, “I am God.” He is a reality, but not the Reality. We shall see that other Sūfīs—Jalāluddīn Rūmī, for example—in their ecstatic moments, at any rate, ignore this rather subtle distinction.

The statement that in realising the nonentity of his individual self the Sūfī realises his essential oneness with God, sums up the Mohammedan theory of deification in terms with which my readers are now familiar. I will endeavour to show what more precise meaning may be assigned to it, partly in my own words and partly by means of illustrative extracts from various authors.

Several aspects of fanā have already been distinguished.[27] The highest of these—the passing-away in the divine essence—is fully described by Niffarī, who employs instead of fanā and fānī (self-naughted) the terms waqfat, signifying cessation from search, and wāqif, i.e. one who desists from seeking and passes away in the Object Sought. Here are some of the chief points that occur in the text and commentary.

Waqfat is luminous: it expels the dark thoughts of ‘otherness,’ just as light banishes darkness; it changes the phenomenal values of all existent things into their real and eternal values.

Hence the wāqif transcends time and place. “He enters every house and it contains him not; he drinks from every well but is not satisfied; then he reaches Me, and I am his home, and his abode is with Me”—that is to say, he comprehends all the divine attributes and embraces all mystical experiences. He is not satisfied with the names (attributes), but seeks the Named. He contemplates the essence of God and finds it identical with his own. He does not pray. Prayer is from man to God, but in waqfat there is nothing but God.

The wāqif leaves not a rack behind him, nor any heir except God. When even the phenomenon of waqfat has disappeared from his consciousness, he becomes the very Light. Then his praise of God proceeds from God, and his knowledge is God’s knowledge, who beholds Himself alone as He was in the beginning.

We need not expect to discover how this essentialisation, substitution, or transmutation is effected. It is the grand paradox of Sūfism—the Magnum Opus wrought somehow in created man by a Being whose nature is eternally devoid of the least taint of creatureliness. As I have remarked above, the change, however it may be conceived, does not involve infusion of the divine essence (hulūl) or identification of the divine and human natures (ittihād). Both these doctrines are generally condemned. Abū Nasr al-Sarrāj criticises them in two passages of his Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, as follows:

In the second passage he makes use of a similar argument in order to refute the doctrine of ittihād.

Hujwīrī characterises as absurd the belief that passing-away (fanā) signifies loss of essence and destruction of corporeal substance, and that ‘abiding’ (baqā) indicates the indwelling of God in man. Real passing-away from anything, he says, implies consciousness of its imperfection and absence of desire for it. Whoever passes away from his own perishable will abides in the everlasting will of God, but human attributes cannot become divine attributes or vice versa.

In another part of his work Hujwīrī defines ‘union’ (jamʿ) as concentration of thought upon the desired object. Thus Majnūn, the Orlando Furioso of Islam, concentrated his thoughts on Laylā, so that he saw only her in the whole world, and all created things assumed the form of Laylā in his eyes. Some one came to the cell of Bāyazīd and asked, “Is Bāyazīd here?” He answered, “Is any one here but God?” The principle in all such cases, Hujwīrī adds, is the same, namely:

Then he quotes these verses of Hallāj:

The enraptured Sūfī who has passed beyond the illusion of subject and object and broken through to the Oneness can either deny that he is anything or affirm that he is all things. As an example of ‘the negative way,’ take the opening lines of an ode by Jalāluddīn which I have rendered into verse, imitating the metrical form of the Persian as closely as the genius of our language will permit:

The following poem, also by Jalāluddīn, expresses the positive aspect of the cosmic consciousness:

What Jalāluddīn utters in a moment of ecstatic vision Henry More describes as a past experience:

For some Sūfīs, absorption in the ecstasy of fanā is the end of their pilgrimage. Thenceforth no relation exists between them and the world. Nothing of themselves is left in them; as individuals, they are dead. Immersed in Unity, they know neither law nor religion nor any form of phenomenal being. But those God-intoxicated devotees who never return to sobriety have fallen short of the highest perfection. The full circle of deification must comprehend both the inward and outward aspects of Deity—the One and the Many, the Truth and the Law. It is not enough to escape from all that is creaturely, without entering into the eternal life of God the Creator as manifested in His works. To abide in God (baqā) after having passed-away from selfhood (fanā) is the mark of the Perfect Man, who not only journeys to God, i.e. passes from plurality to unity, but in and with God, i.e. continuing in the unitive state, he returns with God to the phenomenal world from which he set out, and manifests unity in plurality. In this descent

ʿAfīfuddīn Tilimsānī, in his commentary on Niffarī, describes four mystical journeys:

The first begins with gnosis and ends with complete passing-away (fanā).

The second begins at the moment when passing-away is succeeded by ‘abiding’ (baqā).

He who has attained to this station journeys in the Real, by the Real, to the Real, and he then is a reality (haqq).[29] Thus travelling onward, he arrives at the station of the Qutb,[30] which is the station of Perfect Manhood. He becomes the centre of the spiritual universe, so that every point and limit reached by individual human beings is equally distant from his station, whether they be near or far; since all stations revolve round his, and in relation to the Qutb there is no difference between nearness and farness. To one who has gained this supreme position, knowledge and gnosis and passing-away are as rivers of his ocean, whereby he replenishes whomsoever he will. He has the right to guide others to God, and seeks permission to do so from none but himself. Before the gate of Apostleship was closed,[31] he would have deserved the title of Apostle, but in our day his due title is Director of Souls, and he is a blessing to those who invoke his aid, because he comprehends the innate capacities of all mankind and, like a camel-driver, speeds every one to his home.

In the third journey this Perfect Man turns his attention to God’s creatures, either as an Apostle or as a Spiritual Director (Sheykh), and reveals himself to those who would fain be released from their faculties, to each according to his degree: to the adherent of positive religion as a theologian; to the contemplative, who has not yet enjoyed full contemplation, as a gnostic; to the gnostic as one who has entirely passed-away from individuality (wāqif); to the wāqif as a Qutb. He is the horizon of every mystical station and transcends the furthest range of experience known to each grade of seekers.

The fourth journey is usually associated with physical death. The Prophet was referring to it when he cried on his deathbed, “I choose the highest companions.” In this journey, to judge from the obscure verses in which ʿAfīfuddīn describes it, the Perfect Man, having been invested with all the divine attributes, becomes, so to speak, the mirror which displays God to Himself.

The light in the soul, the eye by which it sees, and the object of its vision, all are One.

We have followed the Sūfī in his quest of Reality to a point where language fails. His progress will seldom be so smooth and unbroken as it appears in these pages. The proverbial headache after intoxication supplies a parallel to the periods of intense aridity and acute suffering that sometimes fill the interval between lower and higher states of ecstasy. Descriptions of this experience—the Dark Night of the Soul, as it is called by Christian authors—may be found in almost any biography of Mohammedan saints. Thus Jāmī relates in his Nafahāt al-Uns that a certain dervish, a disciple of the famous Shihābuddīn Suhrawardī,

Does personality survive in the ultimate union with God? If personality means a conscious existence distinct, though not separate, from God, the majority of advanced Moslem mystics say “No!” As the rain-drop absorbed in the ocean is not annihilated but ceases to exist individually, so the disembodied soul becomes indistinguishable from the universal Deity. It is true that when Sūfī writers translate mystical union into terms of love and marriage, they do not, indeed they cannot, expunge the notion of personality, but such metaphorical phrases are not necessarily inconsistent with a pantheism which excludes all difference. To be united, here and now, with the World-Soul is the utmost imaginable bliss for souls that love each other on earth.

Strange as it may seem to our Western egoism, the prospect of sharing in the general, impersonal immortality of the human soul kindles in the Sūfī an enthusiasm as deep and triumphant as that of the most ardent believer in a personal life continuing beyond the grave. Jalāluddīn, after describing the evolution of man in the material world and anticipating his further growth in the spiritual universe, utters a heartfelt prayer—for what?—for self-annihilation in the ocean of the Godhead.