1 Theoretical Frameworks for Studying Sufi Cosmology
This volume examines Sufi teachings about the origin, development, and final destination of the cosmos, the various realms that constitute it, and the fate of humankind in this cosmological order. Sufi cosmology is understood here to include notions of space as well as of time. In other words, Sufi cosmological thinking describes the major spatial dimensions of the cosmos, in particular, its division into the sublunar world of the here-and-now (al-dunyā) and the various imagined celestial and transcendent spheres of the otherworld (al-ākhira). It also reflects on the cosmos’ origin in time, the meaning of the present, and the events of the end of time.
Sufi cosmological thought is rooted in the experience of Muslim mystical seekers, who map their spiritual and soteriological concerns onto the cosmic space-time continuum, often in striking, original ways. In this volume, cosmology is approached from the vantage point of ascetically and mystically minded individuals with a view to understanding how and why they create, maintain, and transmit to others their visions of the cosmos and its structural units. It is useful to relate this approach to the broader “spatial turn” in the humanities and to the spatial study of religion in particular (Knott). While much of the academic work inspired by this “spatial turn” has focused on concrete architectural and urban spaces, the imagined cosmologies of religious communities also fall within this category. As a popular textbook on the spatial study of religion puts it, “imagined spaces … represent a crucial part of adherents’ worldviews in a cosmographic sense,” because they signify, in spatial terms, the ultimate parameters of the individual’s destiny in this world and the world to come (Stump, 345–6). It is precisely this ultimate character of religious cosmologies that makes their study so compelling.
In the spatial study of religion, one can discern two basic modes of inquiry. The first focuses on the meaning-making and orientational function of space; the second emphasizes that space is a function of cultural, social, and political capital, that is, of power. Concerning the former, meaning-making aspect, Charles Long has memorably declared that religion is “orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with one’s place in the world” (Long, 7). In a similar vein, Marshall Hodgson, a colleague of Long’s at the University of Chicago, described Islam as “a life-orientational experience … focused on the role of a person in an environment felt as cosmos” (Hodgson, 1:362 [italics in the original]). Cosmology is the intellectual conceptualization of this “environment felt as cosmos.” As such, it fulfils a dual function: it provides a sense of personal and communal belonging in the world but also a possible direction for change. It affords an anchor-point in space as well as a spatial telos for human existence. It expresses a view of history, of how the present is positioned between the past and the future, while also furnishing a vision of how to transcend time.
These twin aspects of “dwelling” and “crossing” are at the core of Thomas Tweed’s spatial theory of religion. Religious cosmologies, Tweed argues, help their adherents to find a home in the cosmos. However, they “are not only about being in place but also about moving across” (Tweed, 123). They offer “representations of the ultimate horizon and the means of crossing it,” thereby promising to transport adherents to a different realm of existence, while also transforming them spiritually (Tweed, 151–2). Approaching our topic from Tweed’s vantage point, we can identify examples of Sufi traditions of spiritual homemaking in this world, as well as excellent studies of this phenomenon. Thus, Samer Akkach eloquently describes how in the Akbarian tradition, derived from the Andalusian mystical thinker Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), everything in the cosmos is “carefully positioned” in a “holistic conception” of the universe, reflected in a meticulously conceived analogy between the human body, architecture, and the cosmos. This perception of the universe, according to Akkach, manifests itself in a specific “spatial sensibility” that he attributes to Sufi Islam in the pre-modern epoch (Akkach, xxi). As Hellmut Ritter has observed, “fully developed monism is to a certain extent static” (Ritter, 631). Indeed: if, as the Arabic axiom has it, “there is nothing in existence except God” (laysa fī l-wujūd illā llāh), there is no need to cross an “ultimate horizon” to find Him. In Ritter’s formulations (that he, in his turn, derives from his Sufi sources), the world is variously conceived as “God’s light,” “the talisman by which He is known and experienced,” “His changing robe,” “His shadow and reflection,” or “one drop from the ocean of Being” (Ritter, 625–7).
At the same time, the notion that the world of the here-and-now is distant from God, that it is ephemeral and something that should be discarded or left behind, also resonates strongly throughout the centuries of Sufi thought. For many Sufi thinkers, the idea is central that the pious wayfarers (Arab. sālikūn, sing. sālik) journey through space and time, upwards and inwards, towards a more advanced spiritual state and greater knowledge. Thus, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728) declared that the world is but a bridge that one should cross, not a building site to construct one’s house on. Likewise, in ʿAṭṭār’s (d. 627/1230) opinion, the world is a caravanserai, into which one enters through one gate and which one exits through another (Ritter, 47). In other words, while Sufis are anxious to emphasize God’s immanence, they are, at the same time, heavily invested in the concept of “crossing.” Sufi cosmology serves them as a spiritual-intellectual navigation map, or, to use Tweed’s term, a teleography.
As we have noted above, the second mode of approaching the issue of religious space and time, real or imagined, stresses the factor of power, namely, how space and time are configured to reproduce asymmetric relationships of authority, influence, and control, regardless of whether these relationships obtain between or within religious communities. In line with this approach, the authors of the present volume describe and analyze the nexus between cosmological and this-worldly hierarchies, in particular, how the process of building a hierarchy of realms of existence often implies the parallel construction of a hierarchy of knowledge and of knowers here and now. Cosmology, in this view, is a discourse that not only enables but also coerces individuals and their communities to locate themselves in time and in space. As Jonathan Z. Smith and other scholars of religion have reminded us, cosmological spaces are human not divine work. It is people’s ritual practices and meaning-making efforts that produce the sacred, thereby opening up a possibility for transition from quotidian to sacred space (Smith, 98, 101). Any religious identity, including Sufi, results not only from how one situates oneself in relation to the cosmos, but also from how one is situated in the cosmos by others. This being-situated is the work of Sufi institutions, broadly understood as “the setting[s] in which Sufis experience and consider their mystical life in relation to the societies in which they are embedded” (Papas, 13).
The present handbook of Sufi cosmology, which is part of Brill’s Handbooks of Sufi Studies, is therefore a natural segue from its predecessor, the Handbook of Sufi Institutions edited by Alexandre Papas. Whereas the latter focuses on the quotidian aspects of Sufi life in Muslim and non-Muslim societies, the present volume explores the imaginative and theoretical underpinnings of the Sufi universe. Being accepted and occasionally revered by their societies, fed, housed, and clad, was not enough for the majority of Sufis. Their leaders have been hard at work infusing everyday existence of Sufi communities (as well as their own personal lives) with a higher or even transcendent significance—because human beings, especially spiritual and pious ones, such as Sufis, follow in the footsteps of Christian ascetics-mystics by not living “by bread alone” (Gospel of Matthew, 4:4), convinced as they are that “life is more than food, and the body more than clothes” (Gospel of Luke, 12:23). By severing themselves from the good things and comforts of this life, they seek a far greater spiritual reward in the higher reaches of existence adjacent to God’s heavenly presence (Nicholson, 36–9).
The task of giving a loftier sense to human life and transposing it to a superior and transcendent plane implies the construction of a parallel universe filled with supernatural beings, allusive and elusive events, and symbols accessible to visitors through dreams and veridical visions. The constant interplay of this imaginary universe and its empirical counterpart reflects the Weltanschauung and self-perception of the mystically minded men and women of a given epoch in a given location.
2 Genealogical and Comparative Aspects
As the chapters of this book demonstrate, Sufis constructed their cosmologies not from scratch but with the building blocks that they had inherited from their civilizational and religious predecessors, especially ancient Greeks, Romans, and Persians, as well as their fellow “people of the book,” the Jews and Christians of the Middle East. There are also important parallels between ancient Zoroastrian cosmology and Sufi cosmologies. According to the Pahlavi Bundahishn, a text from the Sassanian period with traces of older, Avestan teachings, in the first of three ages of the cosmos, the highest deity Ohrmazd dwelt on high, in the realm of pure light, whereas his nemesis Ahriman resided in the dark depths of the earth. Then Ahriman began to wage war on the luminous world, which led to an admixture of light and darkness, goodness and evil. This titanic struggle ushered in the age of human history in which we live. At the end of the period of trials caused by this admixture, however, the separation of evil from good will take place, and the renovation (Pahl. frashegird) of the cosmos will begin, while time will come to an end. In the Bundahishn, one also finds a motif that later proved central to Sufi cosmology, namely, the macrocosm/microcosm analogy. The earth, the Bundahishn states, was created “in the semblance of a man” (Kreyenbroek). It should be noted, however, that the idea of the universe as a giant replica of the human being is also present in Greek thought (e.g., Democritus of Abdera, d. c. 370 BCE), from where it may have reached Muslim authors such as the Brethren of Purity (writing around the fourth/tenth century). Zoroastrian eschatology also shows significant overlap with Muslim teachings, including the idea of the punishment of the grave, the interim state between death and resurrection (barzakh), the embodiment of good and bad deeds as personae in the afterlife, the bridge of judgment (ṣirāṭ), the scales of good and bad deeds (mīzān), and more (Akbar; Halevi; Lange).
In the Qurʾān, there are echoes of Zoroastrian notions, but Qurʾānic cosmology is rooted more clearly in ancient Near Eastern traditions and in the biblical literature, while also introducing a novel stress on the entanglement of history and eternity, this world and the next (Lange, 67–70; Neuwirth). The Qurʾān pictures the cosmos as an enormous tent, built on the flat earth. The roof of this cosmic tent is the firmament, which rests on mountains, serving as pegs (awtād, Q 78:8). One ascends to the firmament by ladders (Q 70:3) or using sky-ropes (asbāb al-samawāt, Q 40:36) that hold the tent in place. God’s Throne (ʿarsh, Q 9:129, 2:255) and His High Council (al-malāʾ al-aʿlā, Q 37:6–10) are located above the firmament, past the gates of heaven (Q 7:40). In general, however, the Qurʾān does not include cosmogonic or cosmological sections as detailed or coherent as the ones found in the two Genesis reports in the Bible. The Qurʾān, rather, expects its audience to be already familiar with the story of God’s creation of the world in six days (mentioned in Q 7:54, 50:38), the division of the universe into the seven heavens (Q 41:11–12, 67:3) and the seven layers of the earth (Q 65:12), and the waters surrounding the world that are held back by a barrier (barzakh, Q 55:19–20). Far more important for Sufi cosmology is the cosmogonic myth of the primordial covenant between God and humankind, the moment of “Am I not?” (a-last, Q 7:172), discussed in several chapters of this volume.
In the formative period of Islam, cosmological thought developed along two axes, the first deriving from the Greek philosophical-scientific tradition, the other depending more directly on the biblical-Qurʾānic model. This dicephalic Muslim tradition of cosmology is mirrored in the history of Late Antique Christian thought. For example, Christian thinkers in the Alexandrian tradition, such as Jacob of Edessa (d. 708) and Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286), taught that before the creation of the sensible world, God created spiritual beings, that is, the angels—a theory of “double creation” that goes back to Origen of Alexandria (d. c. 253) and his notion of preexisting spiritual intelligences (Gr.
Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy, especially its theory of the stepped emanation of the universe from a transcendent source of life and goodness, has proved to be a particularly suitable building block for Sufi cosmologies. This is not to say that Platonism and its Hellenistic interpretations were the only game in town, so to speak, but they have definitely fascinated the Sufi intellectual elites both in Sunnī and Shīʿī societies until today (Knysh, 124–36; Sedgwick, 30–47). Using Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas, Sufi thinkers have created a multilayered universe that, on the one hand, features parallels between the structure of the cosmos and the composition of the human body (the macrocosm-microcosm analogy, see above), and, on the other, mirrors the Sufi hierarchy of possessors of the divinely revealed knowledge and insight accessible only to God’s elect. Endowed with the superhumanly developed faculty of imagination, Sufi knowers (ʿārifūn) claim to be able to reach the highest levels of this multilevel universe or even undertake a spiritually enriching otherworldly journey similar to the one that Q 17:1 attributes to the Prophet Muḥammad. After an audience with the spirits of the prophets and saints, who inhabit these higher circles of existence, these spiritual travelers are said to return to their earthly life suffused with a new, divinely bestowed knowledge (maʿrifa) and wisdom (ḥikma) to share it piecemeal with their followers or to commit it to writing, thereby contributing to the growth and elaboration of Sufi cosmology, gnoseology, and soteriology.
3 Major Themes and Units of This Volume
The chapters of this volume discuss Sufi thinking about the cosmos under three rubrics: first, cosmogony and eschatology (i.e., asking and answering the questions “where do we come from?” and “where do we go?”); secondly, conceptualizations of the world of here-below (i.e., asking and answering the question “where are we now?”); and, thirdly, visualizations of various cosmological realms of being, their hierarchy and mutual relationships (i.e., asking and answering the question “where are we in relation to other times and places?”).
Part 1 explores cosmogony, that is, theories about the coming-into-existence of the world, and of its human inhabitants. This section includes conceptualizations of the aforementioned “primordial covenant” between God and humankind (mīthāq, or the moment of a-last, Q 7:172). It also examines paradigmatic cosmogonic myths salient in the Sufi tradition, such as God’s division of created beings into different classes (angels, jinn, humans, animals, plants) and the respective existential realms that they populate. In this context, the question of which entity God created first is particularly topical. In later Sufi thought, focused as it was on the figure of the Prophet as the exemplary worshipper, this primordial entity was often identified as the “Muḥammadan Reality” (ḥaqīqa Muḥammadiyya) or the “Muḥammadan Light” (nūr Muḥammadī). In this way, the popular veneration of the Prophet acquired a cosmogonic dimension.
The second section of Part 1 deals with Sufi views of history and general notions of time and space. In Ashʿarī-Māturīdī theology (kalām), the dominant stream of theological thought in the Sunnī world, time is conceived as a series of disparate instants, each brought into being by God, who has complete control over the universe (Böwering; Griffel, 124–7). This idea is also central to Sufi thought (Ritter, 616), and the notion that the eternal God creates, and is present in, every moment also undergirds Sufi conceptualizations of the present moment (waqt) as a never-ending now experienced differently by different mystics. However, God is also the master of the final, eschatological Hour (al-sāʿa, see Q 7:187). Sufi authors have developed several modes of conceptualizing the events of the grave, of the resurrection on Judgement Day, and of paradise and hell. As the chapters in the third and final section of Part 1 demonstrate, opinions were divided over more than one issue, including the question whether the true reality (ḥaqīqa) of the afterlife is corporeal, immaterial, imaginal, or all of these things combined, and whether the moment of “returning” to God happens before or after death. The ability to experience death before death is attributed to God’s elect servants (al-khāṣṣa; al-awliyāʾ), in accordance with the widely cited Sufi injunction to “die before you die” (mūtū qabla an tamūtū). Their followers see them as the ones who have spiritually died in respect to this world, while physically remaining in it.
Part 2 focuses on Sufi understandings of the world of the here-and-now. It begins by asking how notions of world-renunciation in early Sufism are related to ascetic self-effacement and self-mortification, and how they evolved across the centuries. Early Islamic renunciation of the world (al-zuhd fī l-dunyā) implied not merely an ascetic practice of abstention from its comforts, but also an inward attitude that belittled or denigrated the world, while at the same time curtailing the renunciant’s hope (qiṣar al-amal) for better things and, ultimately, even renouncing renunciation itself (al-zuhd fī l-zuhd). Next to the more extreme varieties of zuhd, however, there also emerged a “mild asceticism” (Hurvitz), which opened the door for less uncompromising but pious individuals to join the circle of Sufi fellowship.
Part 2 of the volume also addresses Sufi reflections on God’s manifestations (maẓāhir) and self-disclosures (tajalliyyāt) in the spiritual and material realms of sensible existence, in accordance with the oft-cited divine saying (ḥadīth qudsī): “I was a hidden treasure, so I wanted to be known; therefore I created the world so that I might be known.” Sufi thought taps into a rich Qurʾānic theology of divine “signs” (āyāt) that reveal themselves to human observers in the natural world (Abrahamov). In the most encompassing, monistic variant of this theme, Sufis claim to be able to see all of nature as being engaged in constant praise of its creator—with obvious ecological consequences for modern environmental thought. These positive Sufi evaluations of the created world have facilitated the development of Sufi sacred topographies, usually with the sanctuary (ḥaram) of Mecca at the cosmological center of the world, and the myriad Sufi shrines in the Muslim world functioning as the ḥaram’s local instantiations.
However, it is also, and importantly, the presence of the saints, both alive and dead, that makes these shrines “places of manifestation” (maẓāhir) of divine grace (baraka). The world, in other words, is infused with divine grace by virtue of the corporeal presence in it of the Sufi friends of God (awliyāʾ). This idea is expressed in another variant of the “hidden treasure” tradition: “I was a hidden treasure, so I wanted to be known; therefore I created the human beings and the jinn so that they know Me.” Thus, in certain strands of Sufi thought, the entire natural world incessantly bears witness to God’s power and glory. However, certain places on the earth offer privileged access to God and His beneficial grace. In a similar vein, Sufi authors state that God’s attributes can reveal themselves in any human being, thereby fulfilling his or her potential to be a “perfect human being” (insān kāmil)—a notion intimately related to the micro-macrocosm theory. Like the privileged sites of divine presence, such as Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, certain divinely chosen individuals serve as embodiments, par excellence, of God’s presence and conduits of His grace to His servants. Unlike physical shrines and temples, they are capable of moving, thereby spreading this presence and grace far and wide. In sum, the Sufi view of the world of the here-and-now is predicated not only on the belief in God’s presence in sacred spaces, but also on the devotion shown to Sufi saints by ordinary believers who see in them God’s human representatives.
Part 3 of this volume focuses more closely on the cosmological hierarchy of God’s friends (saints) and spiritual beings. The chapters in the first section of Part 3 deal with Sufi traditions of dividing the cosmos into levels of different degrees of proximity to God. They discuss, among other things, the widely held and used division of the cosmos into the realm of dominion (mulk), angelic realm (malakūt), and realm of divine omnipotence (jabarūt). This section also includes less widespread versions of this division, such as those that include the realm of human nature (nāsūt) and the realm of divinity (lāhūt), brought to prominence by al-Ḥallāj (d. 309/922) and a few other Sufis. With Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), whose name looms large throughout this volume, the original Sufi doctrine of various levels of existence (marātib al-wujūd) becomes increasingly complex. Later Sufi writers add more and more details to this classic multilayered model so that, in the end, its Neoplatonic origins grow increasingly obscure due to the creative use by later authors of Islamic concepts and terminology. However, these origins are still visible to a perceptive and erudite observer.
The chapters in the second section of Part 3 shift the focus to how Sufi thought came to depict human beings as travelers through these various levels and realms of existence. Their journeys happen not only involuntarily, after their death, but also, as some Sufi authors insist, by the Sufi’s deliberate effort in this life as well. The modalities and ultimate extent of such cosmic “crossings” have been hotly debated in Sufi and Islamic thought. The grand model of spiritual progress, for Sufis, is the Prophet’s ascension to the presence of God, his miʿrāj. To what extent could his journey be emulated, Sufis wondered. In an effort to answer this delicate question, Sufis came to postulate the existence of a third, interstitial world between the material sublunar realm and the spiritual domain of divine presence. Commonly called the World of Image (ʿālam al-mithāl), Ibn al-ʿArabī and his followers (al-akbariyya) also used the Qurʾānic term “isthmus” (al-barzakh, Q 23:99–100, 25:53, 55:99) to designate this semi-material and semi-spiritual realm. Access to it, as many Sufi authors have maintained, is made possible by means of the human faculty of imagination (khayāl), which is a distinguishing feature of spiritually advanced Sufi visionaries. Because, according to Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Akbariyya, the material world is itself a product of God’s “creative imagination,” we have a beautiful image of the human imagination unfolding within the divine one. This meeting of the two imaginations constitutes a unique, and fascinating, feature of the Akbarian Weltanschauung (Chittick, 112–24).
Let us now return to our initial question as to what constitutes Sufi cosmology. Without much hesitation, we can define it as mystical metaphysics, because it explains how God relates to, and interacts with, the sublunar world inhabited by human beings. However, Sufi cosmology is also a religious anthropology of sorts, because it enables Sufis to position themselves in the divinely designed cosmo-eschatological scheme of things and, in so doing, to find a spiritual home therein. Access to this lofty space is limited to Sufi friends of God and, through their spiritual powers, also to their followers. Sufi cosmology is also strongly soteriological, because it invites crossings from this world (al-dunyā) to the otherworld (al-ākhira), from the World of Witnessing (ʿālam al-shahāda) to the World of the Unseen (ʿālam al-ghayb), and from the knowledge of externals (ʿilm al-ẓāhir) to the knowledge of the inner meaning of reality (ʿilm al-bāṭin), which eludes the uninitiated. Such crossings are conceived by Sufi cosmologists to be possible not only after death, but also voluntarily and imaginatively during a Sufi’s earthly life. This perception of the world reveals Sufism’s abiding tendency toward interiorization and spiritualization of reality. The outer cosmos is reflected and finds its most vivid and authentic realization in the inner cosmos of the soul. Cosmic crossings, therefore, happen by preference on the inside of the human being. They are performed in this world wittingly or unwittingly by Sufi travelers. The terms and images by which these crossings are described by Sufi authors are derived from the Qurʾān but can also be traced back conceptually to earlier philosophical traditions, especially Neoplatonism, as well as to the cosmologies of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and other religious communities of the Near East and beyond. In Sufi cosmologies, the examples of the Prophet and God’s elect friends (saints) encourage human beings to rise and attain to the higher and richer levels of existence and knowledge of God and His creation. Simultaneously, Sufi cosmologies assert the spiritual and worldly authority of the Prophet and the saints as guides of ordinary believers toward the coveted goal of salvation and eternal bliss.
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