216 No god but God
in the words of John’s Gospel, “the light shining in the darkness,
though the darkness does not overcome it” ( John 1:5); or to quote the
Gospel of Thomas, he is “the light which is before all things.”
Yet unlike Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels of John and Thomas,
Muhammad is not to be understood as “God made flesh.” “God is the
light of the heavens and the earth,” the Quran exclaims (24:35), mean-
ing, as al-Ghazali argues in his Niche of Lights, that the nur Muhammad
is, in reality, nothing more than the reflection of God’s light. Indeed,
Sufism often describes the relationship between God and Muhammad
in terms of the relationship between the sun and the moon, in that the
latter merely reflects the light of the former. The sun expresses power;
it is creative. The moon expresses beauty; it is responsive. Thus, accord-
ing to Inayat Khan, “the one who gives [God’s] Message gives God’s
Knowledge, not his own.... Just [as] the moon’s light is not its own.”
It is this unique impression of Muhammad that has led Sufis to refer
to the Prophet as dhikr Allah: “the remembrance of God,” though, as
we shall see, dhikr is a term with many meanings in Sufism.
As one would expect, Sufi beliefs often resulted in bitter, sometimes
violent persecution of their adherents at the hands of the religious
authorities who were deeply troubled by its antilaw, antiestablishment
ideals. The Sufis were rarely welcomed in the mosques and so were
forced to develop their own rituals and practices to assist them in
breaking down the separation between the individual and the Divine.
As a result, dhikr, as the physical act of remembering God, has
become the central ritual activity for all Sufis, though the actual form
and function of the dhikr varies drastically depending on the Order.
The most common form of dhikr is known as the “vocal dhikr,”
made popular through the rituals of the Qadiri Order, which exists
primarily in Syria, Turkey, Central Asia, and parts of Africa. The
Qadiri, who likely represent the first formally recognized tariqah in
Sufism, center their dhikr activities on rhythmic and repetitive invo-
cations of the shahadah or some other religious phrase. Often accom-
panied by strenuous breathing exercises and rapid movements of the
head and torso (the disciples are usually sitting in a circle), these invo-
cations are pronounced faster and faster until the phrase breaks down
into meaningless, monosyllabic exhalations of breath, which naturally