Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine 209hardt. In more familiar terms, the qalb is equivalent to the traditional
Western notion of the soul as the driving force of the intellect.
An individual enters the final stages of the Way when the nafs
begins to release its grip on the qalb, thus allowing the ruh—which is
present in all humanity, but is cloaked in the veil of the self—to absorb
the qalb as though it were a drop of dew plunged into a vast, endless
sea. When this occurs, the individual achieves fana: ecstatic, intoxicat-
ing self-annihilation. This is the final station along the Sufi Way. It is
here, at the end of the journey, when the individual has been stripped
of his ego, that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit and achieves
unity with the Divine.
Although the actual number of stations along the Way varies
depending on the tradition (Attar’s Order, for instance, acknowledged
seven of them), Sufis are adamant that the steps must be taken one at a
time. As Rumi wrote, “before you can drink the fifth cup, you must
have drunk the first four, each of them delicious.” Furthermore, each
station must be completed under the strict supervision of a Pir; only
someone who has himself finished the journey can lead others along
the path. “Do not travel through these stations without the company
of a perfect master,” warned the glorious Sufi poet Hafiz. “There is
darkness. Beware of the danger of getting lost!”
The Pir is the “Sublime Elixir,” the one who transmutes “the cop-
per of seekers’ hearts into pure gold, and cleanses their being,” to
quote the Sufi scholar Javad Nurbakhsh. Like the hoopoe, the Pir
demands perfect submission from his disciples, who pledge him their
loyalty in the form of a bay’ah, the oath of allegiance traditionally
given to a Shaykh or a Caliph. Yet the Pir enjoys far greater authority
than any Shaykh or Caliph ever could, for he is “the friend of God.”
The Pir is not just a spiritual guide; he is “the eyes through which God
regards the world.” In much of Sufi poetry the Pir is referred to as
“the cosmic pole,” or qutb: the axis around which the spiritual energy
of the universe rotates. This concept is brought vividly to life by the
famed Turkish Sufi Order of Whirling Darvishes, who perform a spir-
itual, trance-inducing dance in which disciples mimic the movement
of the cosmos by spinning in place, sometimes for hours at a time,
while simultaneously orbiting the Pir, who becomes the center of
their constructed universe.