SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 107
a set of rules? Because I'm not feeling it. Is there nothing more to Islam?"
Instructions from God on high were all very well, but some people longed
to experience God as a palpable living presence right now, right down
here. What they wanted from the revelations was transformation and
transcendence.
A few of these people began to experiment with spiritual exercises that
went way beyond the requirements of duty. They read the Qur'an inces-
santly or spent hours reciting the names of Allah. In Baghdad, for exam-
ple, there was a man named al-Junayd who habitually performed four
hundred units of the Muslim prayer ritual after work every day. In reac-
tion, perhaps, to the luxurious lifestyles of Muslim elite, some of these
seekers embraced voluntary poverty, living on bread and water, dispensing
with furniture, and wearing simple garments made of rough, uncarded
wool, which is called sufin Arabic, for which reason people began to call
these people Sufis.
They professed no new creed, these Sufis. They were not out to launch
another sect. Sure, they opposed worldly ambition and corruption and
greed, but so did every Muslim, in theory. The Sufis differed from the oth-
ers only in saying, "How do you purify your heart? Whatever the exactly
correct gestures and litanies may be, how do you actually get immersed in
Allah to the exclusion of all else?"
They began to work out techniques for eliminating distractions and
cravings not just from prayer but from life. Some spoke of engaging in
spiritual warfare against their own meanest tendencies. Harking back to a
hadith in which Mohammed distinguished between a "greater" and a
"lesser" jihad, they declared that the internal struggle to expunge the ego
was the real jihad, the greater jihad. {The lesser jihad they identified as the
struggle against external enemies of the community.)
Gradually a buzz got started about these eccentrics-that some of them
had broken through the barriers of the material world to a direct experi-
ence of Allah.
In Basra, for example, lived the poet Rabia al-Basri, whose life is now
laced with legend. Born in the last years ofUmayyad rule, she was a young
woman when the Abbasids took over. As a little girl, she had been travel-
ing somewhere with her family when bandits hit the caravan. They killed
her parents and sold Rabia into slavery. That's how she ended up in Basra