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Le califat de yazid ier. 1909-21


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9, 31, cf. v. 34) reproaches the Jews and Christians with having ‘taken their rabbis and monks for lords’. This is really the role that the Shi‘a reserves for its ‘infallible and impeccable’ Imams, the putative sources of blessings and of enlightening grace. There is no place in the Islamic system for confession. Forgive­ness of sins is obtained automatically by the canonical

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punishments, ‘hudud Allah’, stipulated in the Qoran in cases of specific transgressions: adultery, larceny, drunkenness, etc., in a word, by faith and the repent­ance of the guilty. The profession of faith, ‘shahada’, preserves the sinner from the eternal punishment of hell (v. p. 52). Ghazali counsels sinners to exercise examination of conscience, contrition and firm resolu­tion, and finally, to confess their sins before Allah.

The ministers, devoted to the service of the mosques, have no need, then, of any special training. It is enough for them to know their obligations and be capable of fulfilling them; for example, to have an adequate knowledge of Arabic. Certain subordinate function­aries whose duty it is to utter from the minaret the summons to daily prayers, or, to be more exact, to announce them, are called muezzins (mu'adhdhin). Sheikhs or Imams are appointed to certain mosques or religious orders, and the heads of the Sufi fraternities are likewise called Sheikhs. No position confers on its holder the exclusive right to lead at prayer, a right which is democratically shared among all the Faithful. This leadership may be taken by no matter what believer, if he is a good Muslim and is sufficiently acquainted with the modalities of worship. Thus, circumcision can be performed by the first barber who comes along.

Qadis and Imams sometimes preside at marriages. They act in their capacity of privileged witnesses or by virtue of delegation from the civil authority with a view to legalizing the matrimonial contract, and not on the ground of any right inherent in their office, which is devoid of all spiritual character. The Qadi only intervenes ex officio when the bride has no relative (wali) to represent her. She may not marry a non-Muslim (Qoran 2, 220). In the case of a man it is lawful to take a wife of a Scripturary persuasion; a

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concession which has been contested by certain schools (v. p. 89). The essence of Islamic marriage, in which no ritual blessing occurs, consists in the exchange of a promise between the contracting parties sanctioned by the presence of two witnesses and by the payment of a dowry (mahr, sadaq) to the wife. So we come once more to the conclusion that there exists no Church in Islam, no sacerdotal hierarchy and no central See acting at once as director and preserver.

THE CALIPHATE. It is on behalf of the Caliphate that ingenious Orientalists have attempted to claim this centralizing mission. Instead of asking what Islam thinks in the matter, they have begun by assimilating the structure of the Muslim world to that of Christianity, and of the Ottoman Caliphate to the Roman Pontifi­cate. This assimilation led them logically to endow the former with jurisdiction and spiritual supremacy over all Islam.

It was reserved to certain European statesmen to give consistency to this fantastic conception, to the extent of introducing it in the redaction of international treaties of which the first in date was that of Kut­chuk-Kainardji (1774). In order to render acceptable to Muslim opinion the cession imposed on Turkey of provinces populated by Muslims, it occurred to European diplomats to distinguish between the dual authority of the Sultan, the spiritual and the temporal. All troubles would be avoided, the scruples of the believers would be quieted if in the provinces detached from the Sultanate the spiritual power of the Caliph should continue to be maintained, in token of which he would appoint the heads of the Islamic magistracy there and his name would be mentioned in the Friday khutba. That is the myth which enabled the former Sultan ‘Abdulhamid to organize his pan-Islamic agita­tion and to pose as the official protector of all Islam.

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It would have been difficult to invent a theory more directly contrary to the teaching of Islam and also to the interests of Europe, which countenanced it to its cost. Never has Sunni orthodoxy confused the Caliph with a Christian hierarch, Pope or Patriarch. Far from attributing to him spiritual prerogatives, it even denies him all doctrinal authority, including the power, conceded to the lowliest of the ‘ulema, of giving a fatwa. The problem of the Caliphate has caused the gravest schisms in the bosom of Islam. Certain Muslim authorities, having allowed themselves to be too powerfully impressed by the memory of these disagreements, have yielded to the temptation to speak of the Caliphate as they would of a matter of dogma. But for them, too, the Caliph ‘always has been and still is nothing more than the advance sentinel, watching at the door of Islam’ (Dr. Perron), not a Pontiff, but the lay defender of the Shari'a. They regard him as the mandatory of the community, whose duty it is to maintain intact the rules prescribed by the Qoran and, by its sanction, to recall the Faithful pub­licly to the respect due to the Canon Law. Thus the Czar in the old organization of the Russian Church and the King of England in the Anglican Church.

‘The hidden’ and infallible Imam of the Shi'as is no more than a caricature of this concept, inspired by a profound sense of unity. The Sunni Caliph has no legislative power at all; this is vested in the Shari'a in the same way as the judicial power in the body of ulema. He is Vicar of the Prophet, but in temporal matters alone. Having only an executive power, he has to maintain the cohesion of Islam within and to secure its defence and expansion without. In the absence of spiritual weapons he can only assume this role by recourse to the sword, and the fiqh, in reserving to him the principal mission of the jehad (v. p. 62),

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has decided that he must take the offensive if need be;—it could not compel him to be the passive guardian of a trust which he would be powerless to defend. This is what damns in advance all attempts of Muslim reformists and modernists to establish a Caliphate without a full command of sovereign authority.

In these days the most moderate among the orthodox Muslims see in the Caliphate the unique and permanent instrument of validation for canonical institutions: prayer, sentences of the courts, etc. They forget to tell us what judgments should be passed on the validity of prayers offered during the anarchical periods when Islam knew no Caliph at all and others when it num­bered several. After first of all stripping the Caliph of Stambul of the Sultanate, the Kemalists of Angora simply decreed the suppression of the Caliphate.

The most recent thesis, also the most radical, has been developed by the Egyptian Qadi, ‘Ali ‘Abdarraziq, in his book Islam and the Bases of Sovereignty,’Al-Islam wa usul al-hukm’ (Cairo, 1925, several editions). These are its leading ideas: The Muslim religion is to cut itself off completely from every form of govern­ment, leaving this question to the free choice of the believers. Unknown to the Qoran, which has not made the slightest allusion to it, the Caliphate has no founda­tion at all in Islamic dogma. It is the manuals of the fiqh that have created ambiguity on the subject. The Shari'a, which is exclusively religious legislation, does not imply any necessary connexion with political sovereignty. The canonical tribunals cannot claim any religious competence; the Qadis are wholly indistinguishable from the civil judges. Muhammad's mission was purely religious and never aimed at founding any kind of government, and Islam, therefore, offers nothing but a spiritual legislation, a rule of faith and a moral discipline, without any sort of

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relation to an external power charged with the duty of ensuring its execution.

All these propositions have been condemned by the supreme council of ‘ulema at the university of Al-Azhar, Cairo. The agitation round the problem of the Caliphate continues, and in order to resolve it, a proposal has been made to call together a world-congress of Islam.

VI
ASCETICISM AND MYSTICISM OF ISLAM
THE Shari'a does not legislate for the conscience. A social discipline, a sort of higher law, it confines its ambition to gathering all the faithful round the rites and observances of the Islamic community, without troubling to enter into the details of their inner life. Fidelity to the Shari'a is neverthe­less supposed to be the way of spiritual perfection. To doubt this would be to question its character of revealed legislation. It is difficult to imagine a more precise antinomy than exists between this conception and that which gave birth to Sufism.

THE QORAN AND ASCETICISM. Undoubtedly, the mystical sense ‘cannot be the sole prerogative of a race, a language, a nation’ (Massignon). The Qoran purports to be nothing more than the redaction, for the use of the Arabs, of the great revelation which gave birth to the monotheistic religions. Several of its verses are merely transcriptions and reminiscences from the Scriptures altered in precisely the same degree as its prophetic legends. Many of them inculcate vigorously the fear of God and of His judgments, which is at the base of all sane asceticism. Other Qoranic passages stress the value of intention in the moral and religious life.

These texts, considered by the Believer as inspired and duly recited and meditated on by him, might
111

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end in attempts at ‘interiorization’, and gradually raise him, as we shall see in the case of Ghazali, to a condition of mental prayer. But as a whole the Qoran appears little adapted to stir the inward and truly spiritual emotions. It knows nothing of the downfall of human nature and nowhere does it declare war on the old man in order to put on the new. The necessity for this struggle, axiomatic in Christian asceticism, and no less the dogma of the original fall, seem to Mus­lim orthodoxy illusions of the devil, ‘talbis iblis’. This lack of inner life, the predominance of the juridic element in official Islam, could not satisfy all consciences, nor, above all, suit the Muslim neophytes, deserters from earlier monotheisms. From their former religious education they had retained the memory of another ideal, as it were a nostalgia for spiritual perfection and ascent. These finer spirits were not long in finding themselves cramped within a rigid dogmatism devoid of liturgical splendour; a religion of warriors and shepherds, suited to the patriarchal society of Arabia before the Hijra. The outward formalism of the Shari'a, the legislation meticulously elaborated by the orthodox schools, took no account of the spiritual ‘sensibility and tenderness’ that the Qoran has praised (57, 27) in Christians. ‘In what way,’ asks Ghazali, ‘do discussions on divorce and on buying and selling prepare the believer for the beyond?’

The ruthless Hanbalite polemicist, Ibn Taimiyya, goes so far as to contest the very principle of ‘the virtue of poverty’, invoked by the Sufis as an impor­tant condition of spiritual perfection. He finds no mention of it in the Qoran. This collection only speaks of ‘zuhd’, which does not imply actual sur­render of worldly goods but only mental detachment from them. In the ‘poverty’ of the Sufis Ibn Taim­iyya will see nothing but a most blameworthy imitation

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of Christianity. Like him, the interpreters of strict orthodoxy admit only the observance of the legal pre­scriptions. Outside of this path, marked out by ‘the pious ancestors’, they recognize neither moral ascent nor religious progress. It is remarkable that the oldest sects, the Kharijites, and all the factions of imamism, are definitely opposed to Sufism. The same hostility may be observed among the Wahhabis, who profess to restore primitive Islam. Does this agreement not indicate that in Islam mysticism is a foreign impor­tation?

In a hundred places the Qoran sets up as an ideal trust in God, absolute submission to the will of Him whom it proclaims the Merciful. On the other hand, its monotheism has placed Allah very high, far removed from weak humanity. It proscribes the Gospel appellation of ‘Father which art in Heaven’. Between the Creator and His creature it admits no possibility of reciprocity. Love implies the idea of giving and receiving. The Sunni theodicy, therefore, distrusts and regards as meaningless the concept of ‘the love of God’ and still more that of union—‘wisal’—with Him. The vocable ‘mahabba’, marking the consummation of love and of divine union, appears odious in its eyes. It will admit therein nothing but a physical attraction and tolerates only those words that imply desire, appetite—such as ‘shauq’. In face of the denegations of the ulema , Ghazali was forced to prove at length the possibility of the divine love whose effects he studied in the faithful soul.

Thus between God and man there is no direct and regular communication. Every effort to lessen the distance which separates them appears tainted by ‘shirk’, a move in the direction of polytheism. The soul, in its struggle to gain salvation, cannot rely on
the aid of any intermediary. In the most idealized

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portraits of the Sira and the hadith Muhammad is never shown except as the instrument of revelation. Even then he did not receive the trust direct, but through the ministrations of an angel.

SUFISM. In opposition to such rigid theories, some Believers, like Hasan al-Basri (†728) and Ibrahim ibn Adham (†777), felt the need to lessen this distance. They sought to approach the Divinity more nearly by means other than fidelity to external practices and the path of legal justice. These Faithful aspired to a per­sonal and more intense experience of the religious truths which should aid the gradual ascent of the soul to God. These tendencies, ill-satisfied in official Islam, gave birth to the mystical discipline, ‘tasawwuf ’,or Sufism.

This term derives from ‘Suf’, wool, because the earlier Sufis affected a dress of serge or woollen stuff in imitation of the Christian monks. Synonymous with Sufi is the word ‘faqir’, poor, and the Persian dervish, meaning a beggar. Both allude to the detach­ment from the world professed by the mystics. In north-west Africa, they are more generally called marabouts, from ‘murabit’, an ascetic living in a ‘ribat’. This name was given to the small forts erected along the frontiers, as well as to the outskirts of the urban centres where the first Sufi adepts, lovers of solitude, settled for choice.

CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE. The Qoran (5, 85) extols the humility of the monks. It praises (57, 27) monas­ticism, ‘rahbaniyya’, a mode of life which they have ‘spontaneously embraced so that they may win the favour of Allah’. This is a veiled allusion to the path of the Gospel precepts of which no other echo is to be found in the Qoran. The Suras commend the prac­tice of prayer and even of night prayer, no doubt in imitation of the nocturnal offices in use in Christian

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monasteries. Mingled with the eschatological concep­tions which characterize the beginnings of the Mekkan period are to be found ascetic reflections on the vanity of worldly possessions and the fitness of weaning the heart from them.

Without ever going as far as si vis perfectus esse, or counsels of voluntary poverty, these observations, which always preserve a rhetorical tone, grow gradually milder until they disappear completely after the Hijra. Islam then accentuates its political and conquering character. If previously it had extolled the social duty of sharing with the poor and needy of the com­munity, at Medina it proclaims the necessity of sacri­ficing worldly possessions for the Holy War. Unlike the Gospel, the Qoran nowhere distinguishes between the way of commandment and that of counsel. Chris­tianity has an unquestionable influence on the begin­nings of Sufism, which claims nothing less than to introduce into Islam the way of counsel. It may be divined in the name of ‘rahib’, monk, given to the early Muslim ascetics, and also in the tendency of certain amongst them to profess to walk in the foot-steps of Christ and even to place Him, in His dual capacity of ascetic and prophet, above Muhammad.



Sufism had its birth in Syria and Egypt, the cradles and primitive seats of monachism. It borrowed a part of its technical vocabulary from the Syriac language. In the second century of the Hijra we find no trace of organization amongst Muslim ascetics. They live in isolation without any common bonds or doctrine. Theory did not make its appearance until the following century. Satisfied with having found the path of perfection for themselves, and with showing the road to those who came to consult them, they were far more concerned with good works than with theories.

Various names are applied to them by the general

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public. They are the ‘qurra’, reciters, devoted to preserving the text of the Qoran and of teaching it to the ignorant masses; also the ‘bakka’un’, weepers, and the ‘qussas’, popular preachers. Among the last-mentioned, a certain number are attached to the staff of armies in the field. There they discharge functions remotely resembling those of almoners. They appeal to the emotions by eschatological descriptions and arguments. They are responsible for the introduction into the collections of the hadith of narratives tinged with asceticism.

Out of their nameless crowd there arise in the third century A.H. certain personalities: Antaki (†835), Bishr al-Hafi (†841), Muhasibi (†857), Sari as-Saqati (†870), Tirmidhi (†895), amongst whom can be traced a first outline of mystical doctrine. With their contemporary, Abu Yazid Bistami (†875), this doctrine is already degenerating into pantheism; a peril averted by the prudence of Junaid (†911), one of the masters of Hallaj. From the fourth century of the Hijra onwards traces of a common life and legislation can be found among the Sufis; as in the case of those Muslim hermits encountered by the Syrian geographer, Maqdisi in Syria in the mountains of Lebanon and Jaulan.

'Allah wisheth you ease, but wishes not your dis­comfort,’ proclaims the Qoran (2, 181; 22, 77). ‘Eat, enjoy,’ he says again (passim), ‘the good things that Allah has bestowed on you.’ In return for their docility to the Prophet, he promises to believers ‘vic­tory over the enemy as well as the spolia opima (Qoran 48, 18, 19). Sufism proclaimed its preference for the narrow way; it marked a reaction against the materialistic and worldly trend which men claimed to justify by these verses and, with the aid of the hadith, by the Prophet's example and practice. ‘Follow my Sunna’ (tradition), he is reputed to have said,

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‘I drink, I eat, I marry.’ All these hadith are far from being authentic. Several have been spread abroad by the opponents of Sufism to quiet the conscience of the worldly and also as a counterblast to the exagger­ated traits of austerity that the ‘qussas have intro­duced into the portrait of the Prophet. As noted above (p. 71), the schools continue to fight among themselves with the aid of multitudes of traditions. For example, in order to discredit Sufism, certain traditionists portray Muhammad as loathing woollen garments.

It is particularly evident from the last hadith quoted that these laxist maxims aimed above all things at the exclusion of monastic celibacy. ‘We will have no monachism in Islam—its monachism is the Holy War.’ ‘Celibates are brothers of the Devil.’ ‘Two prostrations by a married Muslim are worth more than seventy by a celibate.’ Against these anticipated protestations, attributed to Muhammad, the fact remains that Sufism began by borrowing from Christian mysticism a number of practices to which it found no parallel in its own surroundings, practices designed to sweeten the liturgi­cal relations of the soul with God: recollection, solitary meditations, prolonged vigils, recitation of Qoranic passages, and of litanies, dhikr. It did not hesitate to borrow other elements of asceticism, hardly com­patible with the spirit of Islam, such as the necessity for a ‘murshid, Sheikh’, or spiritual director.

‘This world is not a permanent abiding-place. Penitence and no less the memory of our sins should wean us from it. We should bewail them, and expiate them by fasting, prayer and surrender of our worldly goods to the poor.’ In imitation of the Christian ascetics, the fear of the Judgment and of the account to be rendered, the gift of tears—tears that the ancient Arabs regarded as a weakness unworthy

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of man—became the signs, the distinctive charismas of the great mystics or Sufis, those at least that are claimed by their biographies. All are called ‘bakka’un’, weepers. Sufism extols the love of Allah, a love emotional and tender, not merely dictated by gratitude and desire to please the Supreme Good, as it was imagined by Ghazali, ever dominated by speculation even in the outpourings of his mysticism. The ‘ulema for their part admit only the love of submission, ‘ta‘a’, of resignation, ‘sabr’, to the divine commands, where the servant, ‘abd, retains nothing but the sense of his own weakness. For this conception, which vigor­ously excludes the idea of son, the Sufis seek to sub­stitute the equivalent of the Gospel vos dixi amicos. Their new ideal of spiritual life was destined to make proselytes in the Muslim world. It conquered certain theological circles which were lamenting the worldli­ness and formalism into which official Islam tended more and more to lapse.

INFLUENCE OF GHAZALI (†IIII). Ghazali became the most illustrious and congenial exponent of this ten­dency. His prestige contributed powerfully to procure the approbation of ijma‘ for the principles whence sprang tassawwuf, the practice of which soon degen­erated in the Sufi fraternities. Theologian, jurist and philosopher, Ghazali, after passing through all the experiences of ascetic life, sought to face in all its amplitude the problem of mysticism as it confronts Muslim orthodoxy. His thesis, a loyal attempt at conciliation between the Shari'a and Sufism, presents undeniable affinities with the theories of Christian asceticism. These two characteristics constitute its incontestable originality.

Like the Christian ascetics, Ghazali supposes the existence of the three paths: purgative, illumination and union. The practice of the first enables the soul

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to cast off its imperfections. Then opens before it the mystic road, at the end of which it will reach the stages, ‘maqamat’, of perfection and union with God. Ghazali places, then, at the beginning of his mystical pedagogy, the necessity for repentance in order to attain the most absolute purity of heart. Mystical illumination depends on this condition. This illumina­tion (ilham) procures on the eternal truths a more absolute certainty than that obtained by the discursive workings of philosophic or theological speculation. Ghazali distinguishes between mortal sins, ‘kaba’ir’, and ‘little’ or venial sins. If he avoids all strict classification, it is because he does not find the texts of the Qoran or Sunna—his two leading authorities—sufficiently explicit on the subject of a penitential canon.

He unhesitatingly recommends the rendering of the manifestation of conscience to the ‘Sheikh’ or director. The disciple must submit himself to such penances and trials as his spiritual father may judge fit to impose for the healing of his moral infirmities. In this opening of conscience which comprises the avowal of faults, nothing is really lacking except sacerdotal absolution to recall, point by point, the sacramental confession in use among Christians. Ghazali recommends and describes the daily examination of conscience with a precision unsurpassed by St. Ignatius Loyola. Directly he rises, the faithful must take care to form his intention, to make his firm resolution for the day and to provide against occasions of fall. When night comes he must subject himself to a detailed examination, ‘muhasaba’, of the acts of the day. Ghazali advises the use of a note-book, ‘jarida’; this will enable him to write down and compare the results of each particular examination. If he finds himself at fault, the ascetic must inflict penance on himself; he ‘will chide

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his soul', drawing inspiration from supernatural themes, such as may provoke contrition for his faults.

According to Ghazali the spiritual life finds its most substantial food in meditation, ‘tafakkur’. To it are applied the three powers of the soul: memory, intelli­gence, will. This exercise begins with what the Christian ascetics have called ‘the composition of place’. The text of the Qoran and the hadith furnished the material. It is the meditator's business to fit it to the state of his soul. He must avoid losing himself in theological or merely pious speculations. The essential is to arrive at practical resolutions and to ‘derive benefit’ from them. Novices should begin by meditating on the ultimate aims and on the virtues to be acquired. As to contemplation on the divine perfections, this should be reserved for the most advanced. Ghazali cautiously advises them not to choose the divine essence as a subject for contemplation if they wish to avoid illusions and even doubts concerning the faith. Let them be content to discover its reflection in created things. Ghazali has likewise dealt with the subject of ecstasy. He regards it as a gratuitous charisma; he exhorts the faithful, however, to prepare for it by mental orisons, fasting, silence, retreat, and even by music or a spiritual concert, sama'; a more delicate expedient to which we shall have occasion to return. He admits the reality of the soul's mystic communion with God. But contrary to the pantheistic reveries of certain Sufis, he strenuously denies that the personality of the enraptured mystic can be annihilated to the point of absorption in that of God. He gives warning that certain abnormal phenomena, following on the mystical trance, wajd, are not necessarily a proof of moral perfection, just as he frankly admits that he, personally, has not reached the state of illuminative

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ecstasy, a fact which he attributes to the arid influence of his early philosophical studies.

In order to demonstrate fully the influence of Chris­tianity on the evolution of this theory of mysticism it is necessary to emphasize the constant appeals made by the author to Christ and the authority of the Gospels. It is evident that he has been at pains to consult them; he habitually quotes from the text in use among the Christians, while the other Sufis appear to have known only the logia and the pseudo-evangelical sayings, preserved in the hadith. It was his familiarity with Christian mysticism which doubtless inspired the avowal that ‘Christianity would be the absolute expression of truth were it not for its dogma of the Trinity and its denial of the divine mission of Muhammad’.

This was more than enough to win for him the undying hatred of an Ibn Taimiyya and the Hanbalites. The Wahhabis have put his books on the Index. Their hostility has not prevented Islam from regarding Ghazali as one of those ‘mujaddid’, revivers of religion, who appear at the dawn of every century. In him they recognize the authority of an ‘absolute mujtahid (v. p. 109). This is a tribute paid to his profound knowledge of the Islamic sciences, as well as to his unremitting care for orthodoxy and his fidelity to legal observances, which he succeeded in reconciling with aspirations towards a more intense inner life.

OTHER INFLUENCES. From the second century A.H., when the movement of external conquest began to slow down, the intellectual centres of Islam came into contact with the Aramaic peoples. It was these people, both Christian and Jewish, who revealed Greek philosophy to them, or, more exactly, initiated them into oriental philosophic syncretism. Muslim asceticism borrowed from it Neo-platonic, Gnostic

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and even Manichæan themes. Later, when Sufism penetrated into Central Asia, subjects of Buddhist origin as well as practices in favour among the Indian Yogis were added to these borrowings. Amongst others we may note fana. This is the annihilation of the self, the passing away of human personality ending in baqa, continuance or abiding in Allah. With the orthodox Ghazali, fana, the concomitant of ecstasy, causes organic anæsthesia in the subject and suspends momentarily the exercise of free-will.

The first interpretation goes much further. The unity of God—thus argue its partisans—implies the absorption of the creature. The latter cannot exist outside His Essence; otherwise it would constitute a principle eternally distinct, a veritable divinity opposed to the divinity. The Sufis claim to support this doctrine by the Qoran (

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