PRACTICALSUFISM
The Sufi’s transport was, like the mystical experience of the Christian and the Jew,
a transient state, a brief exaltation into the presence of God. For some, it was a
unique and almost random event, but it is clear that in Islam many pious souls
aspired to this state, and they took well-defined and even scholastic steps to attain it.
The “convert” to Sufism was regarded as a mere novice and was placed under the
direction of a shaykhalready accomplished in the spiritual life. At first that elder may
have simply been a skilled and experienced director of souls, but eventually that
ideal was replaced, as it was in Eastern Christianity, by the notion of a charismatic
guide, a “spiritual father” who possessed the gift of divine grace (baraka). For the
Muslim, no less than the Christian, progress through the “stations” began as a jihâd,
a struggle against one’s worldly inclinations that reflected the ascetic tradition of the
earliest Sufism. The shaykhled him through the “stations” by means of exercises like
the examination of conscience, meditation, and the constant repetition of the name of
God. Obedience was expected to be prompt and total.
The spiritual terrain that led from asceticism to the very presence of God was as
carefully mapped by Sufi theoreticians as it was by Christian mystical theologians. As
already noted, the Muslim masters formalized the Sufi path to the Absolute into a
series of “stations,” or stages of ascetical practice and self-control that were followed
in the more experienced and advanced Sufi by the “states” through which God’s
grace rather than the Sufi’s exertions guided the now purified soul upward toward
union with Himself. This well-charted landscape seems brightly lit and schematic, and
it is far more suggestive of theory rather than practice. The preserved Sufi biogra-
phies’ spiritual paths are far more erratic, however, the Muslim attestations of actual
mystical experiences are of a darker, more painful, and at the same time, more
ecstatic quality than the handbooks would lead us to expect.
The closest we come to the sense of actual experience of God is in the great body
of Sufi poetry, much of it in Persian, which has charmed, edified and inspired many
Muslims and perhaps has startled and even shocked almost as many more. To
experience God is to experience the ultimate Other. In Christianity, the person of
Jesus builds a human bridge between the finite and the Absolute, but there is no
such inviting passage in either Judaism or Islam. Jewish mystics by and large
turned prudently aside at that final moment, but Muslim mystics have been far more
daring in facing the experience and attempting to describe, if not explain, the ineffa-
ble.