There is a scene in the French film, Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran, in which Moise, a Jewish boy, holds up the Quran and confesses: “I don’t understand anything.” To which his friend, a Muslim, answers: “When you want to learn, you don’t pick up a book. You talk to someone.”
Similarly, it is easy for people to lose their way when approaching Sufism, the spiritual strain of Islam. Because, like any other framework of thought, Sufism has its own set of vocabulary which must first be learnt.
The language of Sufism is contained within meaning and form, or what the timeless teacher, Maulana Rumi (d. 1273) calls mana and sura. The meaning is inward, the form is outward.
We are well attuned to our physical senses. They inform us about the external environment- the form, so to speak. When our hand moves across a candle flame, we feel heat. When we look upon the sun, we are not only overwhelmed with its brightness, but by the pain of staring at it too long. The experiences that are received through these physical senses are immediate, tangible and easily decipherable. Indeed, most of them are instinctive, requiring nothing more than a healthy, functioning body.
But the quest of Sufism is to link between meaning and form; inward and outward; mana and sura. It is thus no surprise that amongst all forms of literary expression, the ancient masters of Sufism chose poetry to impart the truths of their transcendent discipline. Poetry, and in some cases, song and calligraphy, were the most appropriate vehicles to convey the message of inwardness. These modes did not only appeal to the eyes or ears, but to the creative mind as as well.
The reflective power of poetry rings especially true for Semitic scripts like Arabic, Hebrew and Persian.
There is no ‘back’ and ‘front’ in a script. Arabs, Aramaeans, Persians and Jews write from right to left; from the right hand toward the heart. Europeans write from left to right; from the heart outward to mankind. Japanese and Chinese write from the heavenly to the earthly…1.
Maulana Rumi’s concept of mana is the exegesis of life itself; for the aim is to ’see’ God wherever we turn our eyes.
…so wherever you turn, the Face of God is there 2.
Seeing God does not literally refer to actual sight of the Divine, but to an acquisition of a certainty so absolute, one is able to discern Divine Providence everywhere. According to Imam al-Ghazali:
This is a state which can be realized through ‘taste’ by those who follow the path of the Sufis 3.
Moreover, the erudite scholar described the state as a condition of innate awareness, in which the spiritual aspirant is able to:
…perceive angels and the spirits of prophets, and hear from them voices, and derive from them benefits. Their state then proceeds from the witnessing of forms and likenesses to levels of perception which transcend the boundaries of speech.
Without an understanding of this transcendental framework, a person is likely to reject wholesale a tradition which has always been intimately connected with the highest grades of scholars. Towering figures like Imam al-Nawawi (d. 1278), Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and even the controversial Shaykh Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328) had not only been masters of the exoteric sciences like Hadith, Fiqh and Kalam, but also of the esoteric sciences.
In the modern context, the lack of genuine knowledge in Sufism has led directly to outright misunderstanding. This has been directly exacerbated by orientalist literature on Islam and its relationship to Sufism. According to the German scholar Annemarie Schimmel, European interest in Sufism only began in the 19th century and was often infused with the bias that Islam was too backward a religion to have fostered a rich and genuine tradition of spiritualism 4.
The modern preoccupation is a series of encounters with the corporeal and seldom delves into the inner meaning of objects and events. World-weary individuals lose the function of optimism, and view time as a grinding, linear passage. Modern society celebrates a culture of empiricism- the theory that knowledge arises from tangible experience- but in many societies, people constantly mistake literalism for empiricism. Both, however, are symptoms of an extreme devotion to the outward form. The innate mana is altogether despised.
And what has that done for society as a whole? In the Muslim world; not much. The relentless culture of modernism has had two important fallouts. On one side of the spectrum, it has dumped religious faith. On the other end, it has narrowed it. The terrorist attacks on New York in 2001 are the most visible face of the latter. But if the tumultuous history of Christianity in Europe is any indication, Islam might well be heading down a similar path, with it ending up as an irrelevant metaphor.
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