SavioursOfIslamicSpirit-Volume3 ... - WordPress.com

UNITY OF BEING VERSUS X'NITY OF MANIFESTATION 247Opposition to Existential UnityOne might ask that if Existential Unity was an inter*mtdiary stage traversed by innumerable mystics in every age,many of whom lingered on at that stage, and only a fewwere helped by the grace of God to go beyond it to thehigher level of the Unity of Manifestation, then what waswrong with it ? Why did the Mujaddid criticize it so vehementlyand why did he insist on the affirmation as well assuperiority of the Unity of Manifestation ?The reason is that a good number of mystics among theadherents of the Unity of Being, some of whom were evencontemporaries of the Mujaddid, had taken the doctrine asa means of achieving freedom from religious observances andlegalistic morality prescribed by the sharvah. Such mysticshad been led astray by the misconception that since everythingwas a fragment of the Ultimate Reality or was the Realityitself, there was no reason to discriminate between truth anduntruth, faith and infidelity. They thought that the shcaVahwas for the common, uninitiated folk while the Unity of Beingconstituted a higher principle meant for the elects, the mysticsand the gnostics, who were to establish contact with the sourceand being of the Supreme Reality. In the tenth centuryIndia, when the Mujaddid was passing through his formativestages of intellectual and spiritual perfection, the whole countrywas resounding with songs eulogizing the doctrine of Unityof Being, placing faith on a par with infidelity and sometimeseven preferring the latter to the former.1 Innumerable versespraising infidelity were then familiar tunes with the masseswho took them as oracles of self-evident truth. In one suchverse the proposition presented was that :Belief and infidelity are bosom friends,One who has'nt infidelity has no faith.1. The famous Urdu poet of the thirteenth century, Mirz5 Ghalib gave(Continued on the nest pagq)