Religion is more than community worship and the observance of fasting and feasting. It is more than pilgrimage, hagiography, and God-talk. It involves more than routine rites and rituals, sacraments and singing. Every religious tradition has a mystical dimension also. Indeed mystics often serve as media between the practitioner and the larger Whole, for their experiences and utterances constitute the sacred texts and substance of religions. Mystics are in the realm of religion what practicing scientists are in the world of science.
One mystic tradition in Islam is known as tasawwuf or Sufism. Some Muslims regard it as un-Islamic, perhaps because it had its origins after Islam’s encounter with the Hindu world. But there are also Islamic scholars who argue that Sufism is very much part of Islam. More importantly, there have been great practitioners of Sufism who have written profound poetry that can justly be called mystical. Consider Muhammad bin ‘ali bin ‘arabia, born in Moorish Andalusia in 1165. He studied Aristotle and Plato which infused him with a spirit of inquiry. He was born a Muslim and he rubbed shoulders with Christians and Jews. He understood what some ancient Hindu seers had proclaimed: that one may attain the Divine by following different paths.
Like other saints bin ‘ali bin ‘arabia, felt there was a call for him from the Beyond. It is said that one evening while regaling with friends in a pleasure house in Seville, he heard a voice which said that he was meant for something grander. He had a vision of the three great prophets of the Abrahamic traditions: Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. The experience was too profound to be ignored. Indeed, it transformed his life. He was convinced that all the prophets had the same divine experience.
Bin ‘ali bin ‘arabia, continued to study and learn from various masters, including an elderly woman by the name of Fatimah who developed great affection for him. He traveled widely, and wrote scores of books, theological and philosophical reflections mostly. “Some works I wrote at the command of God, sent to me in sleep or through a mystical revelation,” he said. He also has a collection of poems to his credit, called Interpreter of Desires. These are love poems, some bordering on the erotic. But, like the works of Jayadeva in the Hindu world, they were symbolic of intense love for the Divine: a matter he had to explain to his shocked readers.
He affirmed, like other mystics before and since, that God is pure Being, not amenable to logic and interpretations, but experience. He proclaimed, again like other mystics, that spiritual experience is different from philosophical analysis. The ground of all existence is the Divine. Commentators on bin arabi, unfamiliar with more ancient Hindu visions, have sometimes said that this is a unique Semitic insight. Further, like the Buddha, bin arabi said that every one of us, knowingly or unknowingly, is on a path of discovery, indeed that each must choose one’s own path for realization. This, he contended, is the core of the spiritual quest. He wrote:
“O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames. My heart has become capable of every form:
a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba, and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur’an. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.”
This was a bit too much for a lot of his co-religionists. So his works were banned in many Islamic countries. This was a consequence of regarding alien modes of worship as anathema: a corollary to the conviction that one’s theological system alone has the Key to the Kingdom.
Spurts of Thought 