mysticism Archives - 3 Quarks Daily

by Gautam Pemmaraju

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.

– Emily Dickenson

The wise emperor of Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterful Memoirs Of Hadrian, says to his successor Marcus Aurelius that his frail, diseased body is fast approaching its demise. It is the evening of his life. Despite the “vague formulas of reassurance” that his loyal physician Hermogenes offers him in an attempt to mask the imminent end, the sage old man knows that he is sure to die of a dropsical heart. The time and place is uncertain, and he “no longer runs the risk of falling on the frontiers, struck down by a Caledonian axe or pierced by an arrow of the Parths…” but he does know that his days are numbered. His body, a faithful companion all these years, may well turn out to be “a sly beast who will end by devouring his master”. But what of the moment itself, Hadrian contemplates:

I shall die at Tibur or in Rome, or in Naples at the farthest, and a moment’s suffocation will settle the matter. Shall I be carried off by the tenth of these crises, or the hundredth? That is the only question. Like a traveler sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift towards evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death.

Often enough in literary descriptions we find familiar tropes: the inner light dims, an ethereal illumination brings in the uttara kshanam, a phrase used in literary Telugu to describe the dying moment. A most intriguing phrase if ever, it can be translated in numerous ways but the most literal one appears to me the most elegant. The moment exists ‘up there’, in some mystical northward quadrant, and as we approach it, it reveals itself. As we apprehend it, it embraces us. The Northern Moment is then the final one. It is the peak of earthly life. There is a wide fascination for the dying moment – how will it come to pass, in what circumstances, will it be filled with pain and suffering or under the comforting shroud of sleep, will it be in the presence of loved ones, or alone, on some forsaken highway? Will it be a ‘good death’ or a ‘bad death’? How indeed do we imagine our final moments?

By Namit Arora

Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam / Part 3: The Path of Reason

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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‘Mysticism is ultimately rooted in the original matrix of religious experience, which grows in turn out of man’s overwhelming awareness of God and his sense of nothingness without Him, and of the urgent need to subordinate reason and emotion to this experience.’ [1]

Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, first arose in Syria and Iraq in the 8th century CE. Arab conquerors, a century earlier, had taken Islam all over the Near East, which included lands with a long tradition of ascetic thought and eastern Christian monasticism—a tradition that valued religious poverty, contempt for worldly pleasures, and a secret world of virtue beyond that of obedience to law—no doubt encouraged by the fact that for three centuries, until after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, Christians in the Near East were a minority subject to suspicion and persecution by the pagan Romans.

But old habits die hard, and even as Islam spread, many new converts, beneath a slim veneer of their new faith, persisted with asceticism and detachment. What transformed asceticism into mysticism was something quite radical: an unabashed love of God. This transformation has been symbolically ascribed to a woman from Basra, Rabi’ah al-Adawiyah (d. 801?), among the first to articulate the mystic ideal of a disinterested love of God, as in her prayer below.

‘O God, if I worship Thee for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thy own sake, grudge me not Thy everlasting beauty.’ [2]

Many believers who were also drawn to rational philosophy found its objective accounts of God unsatisfactory. They yearned for a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the philosophers and the legalistic God of the theologians (the ulema). Early Islamic mystics, or Sufis, [3] thus evolved a more subjective notion of God: each of us can experience the divine differently; revelation is an event that unfolds deep within us; each of us, through our own effort, can reach out to the divine.

A systematic destruction of the ego (fana) and surrender of the self to God became central to the Sufi ideal: one who discards his ego to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. ‘Man becomes dead unto himself and alive unto God.’ [4] Many practiced celibacy as a mystic ideal, flouting the example of matrimony set by Muhammad himself. Scholars like Majid Fakhry have noted Hindu influences on ‘this bold concept of annihilation of the ego and the reabsorption of the human in the divine’ (many early mystics in Persia had Hindu teachers).

Tag: mysticism

The Northern Moment

Early Islam, Part 4: The Mystic Tide