100 Gino Schallenbergh
his comments on the chapters that were most likely to suggest a
monist reading, Ibn al-Qayyim resisted to the tenets of the monist
doctrine and pointed out where al-Anṣārī’s incautious formulations
left the likes of al-Tilimsānī all opportunity to misuse them for their
own designs. At the same time Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya directed
his critique to the more traditional strands in Sufism and their use
of a specific terminology that in his view had little in common with
Islamic teachings.^17 It is clear that any remote suggestion of monism
was rejected by Ibn al-Qayyim and that partial or absolute unifi-
cation with the Divine (the second type of monism proposing the
total unification of all essence with its Divine source) are unaccept-
able. In the case of contemplative unification, by which the mystic
is subjected to the loss of sensitive awareness in the experience of an
ecstatic state, Ibn al-Qayyim seems to hesitate. In many passages of
the Madārij al-sālikīn he takes a mild position on the experimental
phenomenon of ecstatic states. He imputed the loss of conscience
in spiritual sensation to the imperfection of the worshipper’s soul
in moments when he is deeply impressed by a divine truth or when
he is visited by a spiritual state (ḥāl). With regard to the spiritual
states itself, Ibn al-Qayyim did not deny the possibility of its occur-
rence but in most cases adopts Ibn Taymiyya’s observation that the
spiritual states are most often not genuine and induced by demons
or produced by the troubled state of mind of mystics who deprived
themselves of all God-given means that sustain a normal balanced
life. What stands above discussion for Ibn al-Qayyim is that loss of
conscience and ecstatic states are by no means prerogatives of a mys-
tic elite or markers of a special status. Rather are they signs of weak-
ness and do they indicate an imperfection of the soul. The ecstatic
utterances (shaṭaḥāt) are treated in the same way; when grotesque
religious statements are made in a spiritual state, they are excusable
for both Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim, but only if they are
revoked after recovery of the senses.
17 Three such terms that figure high in the Manāzil al-sāʾirīn are annihilation
(fanāʾ), intoxication (sukr), ecstasy (wajd), see Schallenbergh, Intoxication and
Ecstasy, pp. 466–474.
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