- Karen Armstrong
the source of all being. The mystical journey was simply a re-
turn to what is truly natural to humanity, a doctrine very sim-
ilar to that held by Buddhists. Sufism remained a fringe
movement during the first Abbasid period, but later Sufi mas-
ters would build on Junayd's system and create an esoteric
movement which, unlike the others we have considered,
would captivate the majority of Muslims.
Even though they all claimed to be devout, committed
Muslims, the esoterics had all changed the religion of the
Prophet. Muhammad would have been startled by the doc-
trines of the Faylasufs, and Ali would almost certainly not
have recognized the ideas and myths of the Shiis, who de-
clared themselves to be his partisans. But, despite the convic-
tions of many of the faithful in any tradition, who are
convinced that religion never changes and that their beliefs
and practices are identical with those of the founders of their
faith, religion must change in order to survive. Muslim re-
formers would find the esoteric forms of Islam inauthentic,
and would try to get back to the purity of the first ummah, be-
fore it was corrupted by these later accretions. But it is never
possible to go back in time. Any "reformation," however con-
servative its intention, is always a new departure, and an adap-
tation of the faith to the particular challenges of the reformer's
own time. Unless a tradition has within it the flexibility to de-
velop and grow, it will die. Islam proved that it had this cre-
ative capacity. It could appeal at a profound level to men and
women who lived in conditions that were quite different from
the desperate, brutal era of the Prophet. They could see
meaning in the Quran that went far beyond the literal sense of
the words, and which transcended the circumstances of the
original revelations. The Quran became a force in their lives
that gave them intimations of the sacred, and which enabled
them to build fresh spiritualities of great power and insight.
The Muslims of the ninth and tenth centuries had moved