210 No god but God
As those who have completed the Way, Sufi Pirs are venerated as
saints. The anniversaries of their deaths are holy days (termed urs,
Persian for “weddings,” because in dying and leaving this world, the
Pir is finally united with God). Their tombs are pilgrimage sites—
especially for impoverished Muslims for whom the Hajj is unfeasi-
ble—where devotees gather with their oaths, petitions, and appeals
for intercession. So great is the Pir’s spiritual power—his baraka—that
merely touching his tomb can heal a sick man of his illness or impart
fertility to a barren woman. As with the majority of Sufi activities,
these tombs are completely egalitarian with regard to sex, ethnicity,
and even faith. Particularly in the Indian subcontinent, it is not
unusual for Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims to congregate in
nearly equal numbers inside the mausoleums of Sufi saints.
By the sheer power of their spiritual charisma, the Pirs gather dis-
ciples in order to impart to them the esoteric knowledge Sufis call
erfan. Like the Greek term gnosis, erfan refers to a heightened level of
knowing in which one is able to intuit ultimate reality. However, erfan
is a nonintellectual, nonrational knowing that, in the words of Shah
Angha, the forty-second Pir of the Oveyssi Order, can be achieved
only “through self-discipline and purification, in which case there is
no need to become involved in the method of reasoning.” Because the
intellect cannot fathom the divine mystery, the Sufis believe that true
understanding of the nature of the universe and humanity’s place in it
can be achieved only when reason has been abandoned for love.
Of all the principles that the Sufi disciple must integrate into his
life, none is more important than the principle of love. Love is the
foundation of Sufism. It is the language through which Sufism is most
perfectly expressed and the sole avenue through which its ideals can
be understood. The experience of love represents the most universal
station on the Sufi Way, for it is love—not theology and certainly not
the law—that engenders knowledge of God.
According to the Sufis, God’s very essence—God’s substance—is
love. Love is the agent of creation. Sufism does not allow for the con-
cept of creation ex nihilo because, before there was anything, there was
love: that is, God loving God’s self in a primordial state of unity. It was
only when God desired to express this love to an “other” that human-