Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 247
in the Arabic word tawakkul, or “trust in God.” It meant placing
oneself completely in the hands of God, “like a corpse in the hands
of its washer,” a phrase and a notion not very different from Ignatius
of Loyola’s advice to his Jesuit companions to be “much like
a corpse” when it came to the will of God, that is, to have no
desires of one’s own. A Sufi who had achieved this was in fact a
“mendicant” (faqir), literally “a poor man,” or a “child of the
moment” (ibn al-waqt), according to another dramatic phrase.
The early Sufis strove to be indifferent not in the manner of Stoic
apatheia, a state of being immune to affect and that required an
active regimen; rather, they were careless of them, as careless as
“the birds of the air” or the “lilies of the field,” Jesus’ own exemplars
of God’s providing the wherewithal for his creation.
We know little besides some biographical details about the earliest
Muslim Sufis, but we can observe almost immediately the differences
and similarities between them and their Christian monastic
contemporaries, of whom they must generally have been well
aware. There was no Muslim flight to the wilderness; their ancestors
had just recently come in from the wildernesses of Arabia. The
cities of the new Islamic empire were filled not with pagans and
paganism, as the Roman Empire was in early Christian times, but
with Jews, Christians, and Muslims of their own faith. Sufis by and
large remained in the cities: their “flight” was personal and interior.
Nor did their practices of self-denial have the fiery ascetic
edge so notable in the Christian holy men and women of the Middle
East. Muslim Sufis practiced asceticism, to be sure, occasionally
of a severe type, but it was always more occasional, more
temporary, and more self-forgiving than its Christian counterpart.
One reason may be that it passed far more quickly from an end to
a means. Sufi asceticism found its mystic vocation far more quickly
than did the Christian version of self-denial.
The Sufi Way
There are numerous scholastic tracts in Arabic on the theory and
practice of Sufism (tasawwuf ), on Muslim ascetical and mystical