Once, I laughed at Sufis

A perennial feature of classical Sufi manuals like Imam Al Qushayri's Principles of Sufism or Imam al-Jilani's The Secret of Secrets is the sheer number of anecdotes they quote. I remember trying to read these books many years ago and coming away with a vague sense of disbelief. Sufis taming lions in the wilderness; Sufis traveling very long distances in impossibly short times; Sufi masters reading the minds of their students, etc. I did not come away with anything positive. It was not until later that I realized the real reason for this.

After putting away the Sufi manuals, I turned to a range of other Islamic topics like history, jurisprudence and theology. Compared to Sufism, these were almost secular in content. I devoured the books, two at a time, until I came to a point when new books on the subject no longer had anything new to say. I must clarify that whatever knowledge I gleaned from those books are only a layman's understanding of them, and not a specialist's.

I still had the Sufi manuals in my bookshelves, though, and because I was getting bored with the 'secular' subjects, returned to the al-Qushayri and al-Jilani I had dismissed. This time, remarkably enough, I began to absorb every word. The mental cringe I felt before had vanished. Emerging so soon after my spell with dry topics, this new direction felt like I was slipping into a lake of deliciously cool water.

The first thing that leapt out at me was the difference in writing style between classical (not exclusively Sufi) and modern authors. A contemporary work finds it necessary to explain every little thing, the better to bludgeon its point across. Sufi works, on the other hand, attempt to persuade, often by saying as little as possible.

Al-Qushayri and al-Jilani bother less with exposition than with molding the soul for the next anecdote you just know is waiting for you around the flip of a page. Thus, just as it is necessary to break the surface of the lake once in the while for a breath of air; a Sufi manual virtually demands that you put it down quite frequently to think about what you have just read. I don't know how common this is amongst readers, but it happens every single time I peruse Sufi books.

My modest grounding in history, jurisprudence and theology were important factors in understanding the intensely spiritual works. The stories I had scoffed at earlier began to make sense in light of the deep, almost self-immolating love that their protagonists felt for their Lord, the Creator of all the Heavens, and the Prophet Muhammad, Last Messenger to Mankind. Islamic spirituality is less defined by love of God, which even non-Muslims may hold in abundant quantities, but by love of God's noble Prophet.

This spiritual and mystical trend had not spared even the acknowledged masters of the Islam's 'drier' subjects. Imam Buhkahri, for example, had been inspired to embark on his quest to compile what is now known as the most canonical collection of Hadith (Prophetic traditions) after dreaming one night that he stood in front of the Prophet with a fan in his hand [1]. This he understood to mean that he had been bestowed with a duty to fan away doubts and impurity from the Sunna of the Prophet. Imam al-Ashari, whom I discussed in "The Unquenchable Thirst for Knowledge", had also repented of his ultra-rationalist doctrines and went on to establish the fundamentals of the Ashari theological school after dreaming of the Prophet [2].

In fact, no great scholar in the entire course of Islamic history was completely free from the "chains" of mysticism. Ibn Taymiyah, whose intellectual lineage is today popularized by groups who condemn Sufis as deviants had been himself a 'cloak-toting' member of a Sufi fraternity.

I suppose you are looking for a point to this whole post. I started out the first paragraph not knowing how this would end, but I suppose that I do have a point to make at this juncture. My own experience with Sufi works reveal that no person can approach the path of true spirituality without first anchoring the heart, mind and soul to the fundamentals of Islam. The lack of these things would at the very least, render some kind of aversion to those works, and at the worst, lead you down a path of confused spirituality that so many new-age cults profit from.

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Notes:
[1] Hashim Kamali, Hadith Methodology, pg 51
[2] Ahmad Roy Jackson, Fifty Key Figures in Islam