1 Introduction

Little is known about the life of Rabbi Baḥya ibn Paquda, author of the Duties of the Heart (Farāʾiḍ al-qulÅ«b), one the most influential works of spirituality produced in Jewish history. Of the few details available to us, we gather that he was a dayan or judge of the rabbinical court in Andalusia in the eleventh century during its golden age. His near contemporaries included such luminaries of medieval Jewish culture as Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. ca. 450/1058) and Judah Halevi (d. 535/1141). We also know that Baḥya lived in the prosperous northern city of Saragossa, an artistic and intellectual hub of Islamic Spain. Following the collapse of the caliphate of Cordoba in 1013 and its eventual dissolution, several Jewish families moved north to regions that were still under Muslim rule. Toledo and Saragossa were among them, and it is possible Baḥya’s family may have migrated to the latter, a kingdom-city or “ṭāʾifa-kingdom” about three hundred kilometers west of Barcelona.² While the precise details about his birth and travels (if any) remain a matter of speculation for the modern historian,³ we may locate the period of his scholarly activity to the years between 1050 and 1090.⁴ No other work of Baḥya⁵ has come down to us.⁶

Originally authored in Judeo-Arabic, the Kitāb al-Hidāya ilā farāʾiḍ al-qulÅ«b or Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, seamlessly weaves together strands of theology, philosophy, scriptural exegesis, law, psychology and virtue ethics into a singular work with the principal aim of guiding the human soul into the proximity of God. Translated in 1161 by the physician-scholar Judah ibn Tibbon (d. 585/1190) as Ḥōvōt ha-Levāvōt, it was among the first of many Judeo-Arabic writings rendered into Hebrew for a generation no longer as proficient in Arabic as its predecessors as well as those living outside of Islamic lands.⁷ Diana Lobel’s remark that “few Hebrew books have gone through as many printings” testifies to its widespread popularity.⁸ The book would go on to have a significant impact on Spanish and Palestinian Kabbalists, various circles of Jewish pietists in Egypt and the broader Middle-East, as well as Central European Hasidism, not to mention Jewish Peripatetics such as Moses Maimonides (d. 601/1204) who drew on its negative theology in their own disquisitions on the nature of the Godhead.⁹ Translated into many of the vernacular languages of the world’s Jewish communities, from Spanish, Portuguese and Yiddish to German, French and English, its continuing popularity almost a millennium after it first appeared, gleaned through a simple internet search, highlights the timelessness of the text.¹⁰

One of the reasons for the widespread appeal of the Farāʾiḍ—felt almost immediately after its original composition—was because it filled in the author’s own day a “didactic vacuum in Jewish, inner devotional life,” particularly with respect to areas neglected within the rabbinic tradition.¹¹ In this regard Baḥya felt he was being innovative in so far as he was introducing a previously ignored “science of hearts” (Ê¿ilm al-qulÅ«b) into the spiritual life of his community.¹² By drawing attention to “duties of the heart” which should accompany and complement the “duties of the limbs,” he sought to infuse Jewish religiosity with an essential life-giving sap that would make the formal, external devotions more acceptable to God. Indeed, the novelty of such an approach, one which went beyond simply the common place division of “intentions” and “acts,” lay in the fact that the very title of the work had no precedent in Jewish writing.¹³ The unique vocabulary and accompanying ideas of the Farāʾiḍ did, however, have their precursors in the Islamic tradition, particularly in early ascetico-mystic and Sufi literature with which Baḥya was deeply familiar. The contrast between the farāʾiḍ al-jawāriḥ (duties of the limbs) and farāʾiḍ al-qulÅ«b (duties of the heart), for example, which permeates the text was drawn, without question, from the books of one of the earliest moral psychologists of Islam, al-Hārith al-Muḥāsibi (d. 243/857), who makes use of this distinction in his extensive corpus. Indeed, it is present in the very title of one of his works, the Questions Concerning Actions by way of the Limbs and the Heart (Masāʾil fÄ« aÊ¿māl al-jawāriḥ wa-l-qulÅ«b).¹⁴ In his Book of Counsels, he also speaks of “the recognition of confirmed duties for the heart and the limbs (maÊ¿rifat al-farāʾiḍ al-muʾakkada Ê¿alā l-qulÅ«b wa-l-jawāriḥ).”¹⁵ The distinction is also present in the Nourishment of the Heart of AbÅ« Ṭālib al-MakkÄ« (d. 386/996), a work from which (as we shall see below) Baḥya almost certainly culled some of his source materials.

There is no real debate among Baḥya scholars regarding the extent and scope of the Farāʾiḍ’s debt to Sufi and early Muslim literature. The question centers rather around who precisely Baḥya was drawing from. The difficulties in pin-pointing his Islamic sources are understandable when it comes to the Hebrew edition of the text, particularly in light of Paul Fenton’s remark that the “Islamic character of the book was greatly obliterated when it was later translated and mostly read in the Hebrew version.”¹⁶ The lexicon of the Islamic religious sciences which Baḥya freely employed in the original, including his occasional use of Quranic phrases (generally overlooked in Baḥya scholarship¹⁷), were all more or less lost in translation. The fate of the Hebrew version of the Farāʾiḍ, however, was not as extreme as the Hebrew translation of Averroes’s Decisive Treatise (Faá¹£l al-maqāl), since the Islamic references of the latter were either replaced with biblical equivalents or simply removed.¹⁸ With that said, the original Arabic of the Farāʾiḍ presents its own unique set of challenges when it comes to retracing sources. This is because Baḥya intentionally avoided citing Muslim personalities by name, even though he frequently cited their words, guided no doubt by an entirely reasonable desire to thwart any criticisms that might be leveled against him by his co-religionists for his use of extra-Judaic Islamic material. In the words of the late biblical scholar Menahem Mansoor,

Bahya specifically identifies his sources only when they are Jewish or when they stem from Greek philosophy. Yet he quotes Islamic sources anonymously. It will not do simply to accuse Bahya of plagiarism, for in his time there was no moral objection to borrowing ideas. The only feasible explanation seems to be that sometimes Bahya refuses to reveal his sources in order to make his work seem more Jewish than it really is. In this way, he was able to avoid offending those Jews to whom the use of non-Jewish sources was anathema.¹⁹

While the question of what precisely renders one text more “Jewish” than another (or for that matter, more “Islamic”)²⁰ remains open to debate, and aside from the fact that Mansoor’s observation seems to ignore the deep theological, legal, and mystical affinities between Judaism and Islam which allowed Baḥya to so easily make use of Islamic material in a work intended for a Jewish audience without betraying his own tradition—affinities which served as the structural basis for the creation of a medieval Judeo-Islamic tradition²¹â€”his insight into the underlying motivations behind Baḥya’s selective strategy of revealing some sources and concealing others is accurate. But despite his desire to hide some of his sources, the Sufi tenor of large portions of the work is, as already noted, undeniable. Even though “Bahya never openly admits to his free and expansive borrowing from Sufi lore,” writes Sara Sviri, “for any student of early Sufi literature Bahya’s use of Sufi material is totally transparent, whether in his use of themes and anecdotes, terminology and imagery, or in the very structure of the book.”²² Baḥya himself sought to pre-empt any criticism that might have been levelled against him for his use of Islamic material through his citation of the Talmudic proverb, “whoso pronounces a word of wisdom is to called a wise man.” There would have been no inconsistency, in Bahya’s own mind, in his reliance on the wisdom of Muslims, going back, as we shall see below, even to the figure of the Prophet Muhammad.²³

As far as this structure of the book is concerned, the Duties is divided into ten chapters or “gates” (abwāb) representing ascending stages of the seeker’s journey to God. In a general sense, they correspond to the well-known states (aḥwāl) and stations (maqāmāt) common to Sufi texts, each of which corresponds to a virtue or quality which the soul must internalize to enter the divine presence.²⁴ There would be no real use in trying to find a strict correspondence between Baḥya’s order and that of any other text, since within Sufi literature there is no set schema with respect to which qualities must be internalized first, due in large part to the interrelated nature of the virtues. This would explain the vast range of schematizations reflected in the sequence of chapters found in the classical literature of Islamic mysticism. As far as the order of chapters is concerned, for Baḥya the journey begins with ikhlāṣ al-tawḥīd, which is to say a pure, sincere and undefiled acknowledgement of divine unity, with all that it entails. The title of Baḥya’s opening chapter cannot but help call to mind sÅ«rat al-ikhlāṣ or the 112^th chapter of the Quran entitled ikhlāṣ,²⁵ which offers a succinct description of the transcendent unity of God, equivalent to a concise, tightly bound scriptural creed. Progressing through such gates²⁶ as trust in God (tawakkul),²⁷ self-accounting or introspective examination (muḥāsaba),²⁸ sincerity in one’s actions (ikhlāṣ)²⁹ and humility (tawāḍuÊ¿),³⁰ the journey ends with love of God (maḥabba)³¹ to which Baḥya devotes a concluding chapter. By ending, like Makkī’s does in his inquiry into the stations in the Nourishment, with a section on maḥabba, Bahya underscores the supreme nature of the experience of intimacy with the divine reality. As in the case of many other Sufi texts devoted to muʿāmala or praxis, Baḥya neither stresses self-effacement in God nor does he blur the ontological distinction between the human being and her Creator.³² Unlike many of these Sufi texts, however, he does not confine himself to the examination of moral and ethical themes; often he probes into more strictly theological and philosophical matters (particularly in the earlier sections of the book), and even legal issues that are of relevance. The wedding of ethics and mystical metaphysics, of Ê¿ilm al-muʿāmala (“the knowledge of practice”) and Ê¿ilm al-mukāshafa (“the knowledge of unveiling”)—a feature particularly of later Sufi tradition—is more or less absent in Baḥya, whose ethical ideas are woven into the fabric of a distinct Baḥyan theology.³³

2 Baḥya on Sin, Repentance, and the Return to God

For the remainder of the article we shall now turn to briefly examine the seventh chapter of the Farāʾiḍ which addresses the subject of sin, atonement, and repentance (Arabic = tawba; Hebrew = teshuvah) with the purpose of identifying some of the Sufi material he may have consulted, either directly or indirectly, and whose traces are found both in the pithy aphorisms he cites—often prefaced by an anonymous qÄ«la (literally “it has been said”)—as well as the thematic contents of his work.³⁴ Since we do not have precise knowledge of the range of Sufi texts that were available in Andalusia while he was writing,³⁵ a certain element of speculation will guide our reconstruction. What follows is not meant to serve as an exhaustive study of his chapter, which, subdivided into ten sections, offers a rich and complex exploration into the nature of sin, religious obligation, the duties of the heart, the justice and mercy of God, and of course repentance and atonement. Rather, our aim is to offer a cursory overview of some of the salient points of intersection between the Farāʾiḍ and earlier articulations of Islamic ascetico-mystical³⁶ and Sufi piety.

Near the opening of his discussion, the rabbi sets out to define the māhiyya of tawba.³⁷ The use of the word in a such a context appears somewhat peculiar, since the technical term is used largely in a philosophical and not typically Sufi context to describe the “what-ness” or “what-it-is-ness” of a thing. Derived from the question mā hiya? (“what is it?”), it is conventionally translated into English as “quiddity” or “essence.”³⁸ Baḥya’s use of the term may reflect here his own synthetic approach, which integrates and unifies various sub-traditions into a single work, ranging from philosophy and theology to ethics and psychology. It may also underscore his attempt to define, as precisely as possible, with a kind of technical precision common to much of Arabic philosophy, what exactly we have in mind when we speak about tawba.³⁹ With that said, Baḥya’s terminology here is not entirely without precedent in the literature of Islamic moral psychology either, and it seems quite likely he was also drawing from and developing the language of MuḥāsibÄ«, in whose writings we often find inquiries into a subject prefaced by a question posed by an interlocutor, such as “inform me about the intellect, what is it (mā huwa)?” or “inform me about truthfulness (á¹£idq), what is it (mā huwa)”?⁴⁰

Baḥya then turns to outline the māhÄ«ya of repentance by opening his definition with the stipulation that tawba involves “setting the self aright (al-iná¹£ilāḥ) for the obedience to God, after having abandoned it.”⁴¹ The word that is used here, iná¹£ilāḥ, which might also be translated in this context as “putting the self in order,” is the verbal noun of the seventh form of the trilateral Arabic root á¹£-l-ḥ (= “to be good,” “right” or “in order”),⁴² and calls to mind the frequent Quranic use of words drawn from the same á¹£-l-ḥ root in the context of repentance. In fact, alongside istighfār or “seeking forgiveness” there is no concept that is as frequently coupled in Muslim scripture with tawba as iá¹£lāḥ, namely “setting things aright.”⁴³ This is because the Quran repeatedly emphasizes (like much of the rabbinic tradition) rectifying past wrongs as a defining feature of the restorative process brought about through repentance. And so we encounter such passages in Muslim scripture as “except such of them as repent, set things right (aá¹£laḥū), and make manifest the truth” (Q 2:160); or “except those who repent, set things aright (aá¹£laḥū) and hold fast to God” (Q 4:146); or “and if they repent and set things aright (aá¹£laḥā) then let them be” (Q 4:16); or “whoso of you does wrong in ignorance, then repents and sets things aright (aá¹£laḥa), (know that for such a person) Lo! He is Oft-forgiving, Oft-Merciful” (Q 6:54). In Baḥya’s definition we encounter what can be described as the percolation of the Quranic language of repentance into his own writing, mediated through his Muslim sources—the kind of language the uniquely Islamic features of which are lost in translation. But the reason he is able to so easily make use of this nomenclature to begin with is because of the overlapping conceptualizations of repentance found in Judaism and Islam rooted at least partially in the semantics of the idea itself: both the words tawba and teshuvah mean, in their most elemental sense, to “turn” or “return.”⁴⁴ The spatial metaphor employed in these religious concepts places the accent not on the emotional element of remorse, but on an act of reorientation, and in the case of the Islamic and Judaic traditions, involves concrete steps the penitent person must take to ameliorate and undo past wrongs as part of rectifying past wrongs.⁴⁵ One is reminded of the saying of the early Sufi who captured the spatial metaphor inherent in the semantics of not only tawba but also teshuvah when he poetically declared, “repentance is that you be unto God a face without a back, just as you were previously unto him a back without a face.”⁴⁶ This is not to say that regret does not play a role in repentance (indeed, it is central as we shall now see below), but the emphasis is nevertheless placed on actual measures required of the penitent person to reveal the sincerity of his desire to return to God, and this requires more than mere sentiment.

A few pages later, Baḥya proceeds to outline four essential elements of repentance, which he lists as “contrition (nadam) over what has transpired of one’s sins,” “abandoning and uprooting (al-tark wa-l-iqlāʿ) them,” “confessing and seeking forgiveness for them,” and finally “safeguarding the self so as not to return to them, neither through one’s heart nor limbs,” the last of which amounts to what he refers to earlier as an Ê¿azm or resolution never to return to what one has left behind.⁴⁷ While his four-fold list does not appear to find a neat, one-to-one equivalent in early Islamic source material, it is close enough to the range of lists provided in the texts to allow us to see that while working within another tradition, he is nevertheless drawing from the reservoir of the Sufis. In SulamÄ« (d. 412/1021), to take but one example, we find a saying attributed to Junayd (d. 298/910) where he declares that

the penitent does not realize the reality of repentance until four qualities come together in him: first, undoing the heart’s inclination to persist in the sin through regret; second, intense struggle (mujāhada) against sin for the remainder of one’s life; third, a sound resolution (Ê¿azm) never to return to the sin; and fourth, amending wrongs to others so as to be free from responsibility towards them.⁴⁸

QushayrÄ« (d. 465/1072) in his Risāla (Treatise) provides a more succinct threefold list in the opening to his chapter on repentance which draws its authority from “those versed in the fundamentals of religion from the people of the Sunna (arbāb al-uṣūl min ahl al-sunna),” the conditions of which include “remorse (nadam) for the violations that have been committed, an immediate abandonment (tark) of the slip, and a firm resolution (Ê¿azm) never to return to similar acts of disobedience.’”⁴⁹ Interestingly, all three of them—nadam, tark and Ê¿azm—appear in Baḥya, and Junayd’s requirement of struggling against the sin and amending wrongs perpetrated against others is also presented later in the rabbi’s chapter as a critical component to the completion and perfection of the repentance demanded by God.

Considering that all three of Qushayrī’s conditions are included by Baḥya, it is worth noting that while QushayrÄ« was based in the Eastern lands of Islam, his treatise did eventually find its way to Andalusia since we know that Ibn al-Ê¿ArabÄ« (d. 638/1240), who was born and raised in Muslim Spain, studied the book assiduously in his youth at the hands one of his teachers, becoming so proficient in its contents and lexicon that he was given the surname “al-QushayrÄ«.”⁵⁰ Precisely how early the Risāla (Treatise)—the “most authoritative handbook of Sufism in the 15^th/11^th century in Nishapur, and beyond,”⁵¹ and completed in 1045/6⁵² (before Baḥya composed his book)—reached Andalusia, of this we cannot be certain. But there is no reason to preclude the possibility that the author of the Farāʾiḍ had access to it.⁵³ With that said, none of the sayings in Qushayrī’s chapter on repentance appear in Baḥya, nor are there any distinctive thematic intersections other than we might expect in a general treatment of repentance.⁵⁴ The same, however, cannot be said when we compare the section on tawba in Baḥya’s Farāʾiḍ al-qulÅ«b with that of Makkī’s QÅ«t al-qulÅ«b,⁵⁵ a work that was authored in the later part of the tenth century and which we also know was read and studied in Andalusia.⁵⁶ While the precise period when it became available, remains, like the Risāla, uncertain, we do know that Ibn Barrajān (d. 536/1141) and others were familiar with it in the early part of 12^th century.⁵⁷ Some examples to illustrate its apparent influence on the dayan are in order. As part of his discussion on the impediments to repentance which forms the eighth subsection of his chapter, Baḥya delves into the danger of trivializing one’s sins and failing to recognize their corrosive effect on the soul, not to mention (as he explains in another section) the punishment that is their due as part of God’s “Promise and Threat” (al-waÊ¿d wa-l waÊ¿Ä«d)⁵⁸—an expression common to Islamic theology. Here he quotes an anonymous saying to emphasize what he has in mind: “It has been said, ‘Look not at the insignificance of what you have done, but look rather at the magnificence of the One against whose command you have sinned.’”⁵⁹ MakkÄ«, in an analogous inquiry in the Nourishment cites two close variants, the first of whose source he identifies. He writes,

It has been said, ‘trivializing a sin is itself a major sin.’ […] And Bilāl b. SaÊ¿d said, ‘Look not at the insignificance of the offense, but look instead against whom you have sinned.’⁶⁰ And it has come to us through a report that God revealed to one His friends ..., ‘Look not at the insignificance of the offence but look at the greatness of the One you face on its account.’⁶¹

While neither of the sayings are repeated verbatim in Baḥya, they are close enough to suggest that he may simply have been rephrasing them with some poetic license of his own, for literary purposes, or simply recalling them incorrectly from memory. Indeed, it is not uncommon in Sufi texts to come across variations of a single aphorism, or the same aphorism attributed to different figures. Sufi authors were, after all, generally more concerned with inspiring and elevating their readers than with historical precision, a fact which would explain the use of weak hadiths in ethically oriented as opposed to legal and theological works, as well as the hagiographical embellishment of the lives of the saints. The fact that the audience of the Duties would have likely comprised readers who were not deeply familiar with the Sufi tradition itself, might also have given him a greater measure of liberty to edit Sufi aphorisms. To this we should also note that Baḥya “may have modified terms and sentences” from his Arabic sources to suit the literary conventions of Judeo-Arabic in which he was writing.⁶²

Closer to the end of his chapter, Baḥya touches on a question explored in some detail in Sufi literature centring around the relation between the sinner who immediately repents and the one who remains free from wrongdoing altogether. Which of the two is superior in God’s eyes? Baḥya’s answer avoids the simplistic dichotomization that might ensue from inclining towards one or the other. Instead, his argument is nuanced: it depends on the nature of the sin as well as the scope and extent of the transformation brought about by the ensuing repentance. In some scenarios, the undefiled person is superior to the penitent; in others, the penitent is superior to the sinless; and in yet others, they are equal. As for those who are guilty of minor breaches of positive commandments or mitzvōt, and then sincerely repent by fulfilling all its conditions, they stand on an equal footing with those who refrained from the sin to begin with. He concludes his brief remarks about those who fall into this category with the following words, “and regarding such a person it has been said, ‘he who repents from sin is like one who never sinned.”⁶³ The saying—a canonical hadith⁶⁴—appears word-for-word in MakkÄ« not once but twice in separate contexts in his chapter on tawba.⁶⁵ Considering the tradition is not found in the sections on repentance in other early Sufi manuals, such as those of Kharrāz (d. 286/899),⁶⁶ AbÅ« Naá¹£r al-Sarrāj (d. 378/988),⁶⁷ AbÅ« Bakr al-KalābādhÄ« (d. ca. 380–385/990–995),⁶⁸ QushayrÄ«, AbÅ« Khalaf al-ṬabarÄ« (d. ca. 470/1077),⁶⁹ nor for that matter even in Muḥāsibī’s short treatise on repentance,⁷⁰ the temptation to ascribe the source to MakkÄ« is, at least in this particular instance, difficult to resist. While the hadith does appear in the chapters on repentance in the TahdhÄ«b al-asrār of KhargÅ«shÄ« (d. 406/1015 or 407/1016),⁷¹ and the Kitāb al-bayāḍ wa-l-sawād of SÄ«rjānÄ« (d. ca. 470/1077),⁷² there is no evidence to suggest Baḥya might have consulted them, nor do we have any knowledge of either of these works being read in Andalusia in the 11^th century.⁷³

As far as some of thematic affinities go, near the very end of his chapter, in its ninth subsection, Baḥya delves into the nature of sins for which one must repent, dividing them into two general categories: sins against God and sins against His creatures. The former may involve a denial of God’s existence (al-kufr bi-llāh), unsound beliefs (al-iÊ¿tiqādāt al-sūʾ), as well as violating duties of the heart and the limbs which do not involve others. Baḥya notes that despite the gravity of disobedience to one’s Creator, sins against others, particularly injustice (al-ẓulm ilā l-nās), whether it be with respect to bodies, wealth (amwāl), or reputations (aÊ¿rāḍ), are more difficult to atone. This is because they may require concrete acts of restitution that are not easily obtainable or simply impossible, either because the victims live in faraway places or because they are no longer alive (li-fawt al-maẓlÅ«m), not to mention any other number of reasons that would make the steps required for atonement difficult.⁷⁴ Remarkably, MakkÄ« too addresses these very same issues at the end of his chapter on repentance. While he does not structure his analysis in the same format of Baḥya, he does distinguish, like him, between sins against God and others (mā kāna bayna al-Ê¿abd wa-bayna mawlāhu), the latter of which may include damaging reputations (shatm al-aÊ¿rāḍ), theft (akhdh al-amwāl), and other such injustices. MakkÄ« also explains that while sins against God alone can be easily forgiven, sins against others cannot because they too may require tangible measures of restitution and the forgiveness of the injured party. Citing a tradition about the afterlife, he writes that the sin which is easily forgiven is one which involves an offence against God alone; the sin which is never forgiven entails shirk or co-partnering another with God; and finally, the sin which is never left unaccounted for or let go of (lā yutrak) involves being called to account by God’s servants (maẓālim al-Ê¿ibād).⁷⁵ The thematic overlaps between Baḥya and MakkÄ«, all the way down to their examples of sins, as well as where the inquiry is situated in relation to the broader analysis of repentance (at the end of chapter)—not to mention subtle similarities in language and style— furnish us with further evidence that Baḥya, while not repeating or quoting MakkÄ« verbatim, nevertheless seems to have synthesized, developed and recast some of the features of his bāb al-tawba into his own chapter, but creatively so and as an independent thinker with his own unique aims and audience in mind.

The evidence for a MakkÄ«an influence seems to be further confirmed when Baḥya brings up the necessity, as part of the process of repentance, of leaving behind not only what God has prohibited but also what he has allowed, particularly when it involves doubtful matters that might inadvertently lead to sin. Naturally, part of the goal here is to remain faithful to the rabbinic dictum of building a fence around the Torah. To emphasize the concern, Baḥya cites an unnamed authority who said about the righteous, “they used to avoid seventy categories of the permissible⁷⁶ out of fear of falling into a single category of the impermissible.”⁷⁷ The saying, with slight variation, appears in MakkÄ«, with a shift from third to first person (“we use to leave behind seventy categories of the permissible out of fear of falling into a single category of the permissible”).⁷⁸ The quote appears not as we might expect in his treatment of repentance, but no less reasonably, near the very end of the Nourishment, in the 47^th chapter on trade, merchantry, and earning a livelihood. It is also present in the Treatise of QushayrÄ« in the chapter where we would most expect to find it, in his bāb al-waraÊ¿, on scrupulousness, with the only difference (apart, once again, from an inconsequential rephrasing),⁷⁹ that the words are now retraced to AbÅ« Bakr, the first caliph.⁸⁰ While Baḥya may well have culled it from both the QÅ«t and the Risāla, this should not detract from the fact that the imprint of the former is still more pronounced (conceptually, stylistically, and structurally) in the Duties.

Baḥya’s debt to MuḥāsibÄ« is more transparent, and its traces are as evident in his chapter on repentance as they are in other parts of the book. Near the very end of his inquiry into tawba, the Jewish sage affectionately exhorts his reader with the words, “take account of yourself, my brother! (fa ḥāsib yā akhÄ« nafsaka!).”⁸¹ This he does in much the same way that MuḥāsibÄ« often did. In his Treatise for the Direction-Seekers (Risālat al-mustarshidÄ«n), for example, near the opening he gives the same counsel (“ḥāsib nafsaka!”) basing his advice on the famous words of the second caliph Ê¿Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb which he immediately quotes afterwards, “take yourselves to account before you are taken to account.”⁸² As is well-known to students of early Islamic piety, this quality of muḥāsaba (“self-accounting” or “introspective self-examination”) was such a defining feature Muḥāsibī’s own practice, his appellation was said to have derived from his own cultivation of the habit.⁸³ And it was precisely this sustained process of the introspective examination of conscience that led MuḥāsibÄ« to develop a complex mystical psychology which explored both the duties and the sins of the heart—a psychology which would leave an indelible mark on Baḥya’s own thought.⁸⁴ Although Baḥya devotes an independent chapter to muḥāsaba, his desire to help the spiritual aspirant interiorize his conscience, in a sustained fashion, is discernible throughout the pages of the Farāʾiḍ.⁸⁵ Through an interrupted regimen of muḥāsaba, his hope, like MuḥāsibÄ«, is for the seeker to become acutely conscious of the inner movements (ḥarakāt) of the heart, discern the motivations of outward behaviour, cut off the promptings of sin from their places of origin, and purify the self so that one is sufficiently prepared to meet God in the ākhira, the world to the come.

While MuḥāsibÄ« composed numerous works in which he explored repentance, his most sustained analysis of the subject is to be found in the Iḥkām al-tawba (Establishing Repentance),⁸⁶ still in manuscript form,⁸⁷ the traces of which are discernible in Baḥya. In the seventh subsection of his chapter on repentance, Baḥya examines the obstacles which stand in its way. Here he delves into the danger of iá¹£rār, “persisting in sins,” arguing that it is among the greatest impediment to tawba. To quote his own words, “the most serious obstacle is to persist in the sin (al-iá¹£rār Ê¿alā l-maÊ¿á¹£iya) and to postpone abandoning it (al-taʾakhkhur Ê¿an al-iqlāʿ Ê¿anhā). In such a case, repentance is not sound. It has been said, ‘there is no minor sin if one persists [in it] and there is no major sin if one seeks forgiveness (lā á¹£aghÄ«ra fi l-maʿāṣī maÊ¿a l-iá¹£rār wa lā kabÄ«ra fÄ«hā maÊ¿a al-istighfār).’”⁸⁸ An abridged version of this saying appears in Muḩāsibī’s text, and is attributed, once again, to Ê¿Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb. It reads lā á¹£aghÄ«ra maÊ¿a l-iá¹£rār wa lā kabÄ«ra maÊ¿a l-istighfār. The only difference is that in Baḥya version the words fi-l maʿāṣī and fihā have been interjected as minor points of clarification.

Another theme in the Farāʾiḍ is of the necessity of following transgressions—outward or inward, against God or others—with corresponding acts of piety. In the first faá¹£l or section of the chapter, he is explicit that the tāʾib (i.e., the “returner” or “repenter”) must undo the harm of his sin, without delay, and in a manner that is fÄ« ḍiddihi, “contrary to it” (the notion of ḍidd, pl. aḍḍād, being essential here).⁸⁹ Near the end of the chapter, in the ninth section, he returns to the subject. “It is necessary that the tawba for the sin,” he declares, “be of the same kind which he committed—if possible.”⁹⁰ If wrongdoings involve breaches of the duties of the heart, such as malice, rancor, or envy towards another, then one must desire good for them, free the self of ill-will, and seek forgiveness. And if they entail breaches of the duties of the limbs, such as consuming what God has made unlawful, or negligence in what He has prohibited, then, in like manner, one is obliged to undertake virtuous acts that correspond in kind, through an oppositional relation to the sin for which atonement is sought. This feature of Baḥya’s thinking about sin was highlighted by Moshe Stern when he observed that for the Jewish sage “the act of penitence should match the offence,” adding,

[the] violation by omission of a positive precept should be repented by diligence in performing that same precept. On violation, however, of a negative precept by commission the act of contrition would be the persistent pursuit of like but opposite valued behavior.⁹¹

The very same idea appears prominently in Muḥāsibī’s Iḥkām al-tawba, where he is explicit that “sins are atoned by their opposites.”⁹² Thus, if one severed ties of kinship, he must strive to reunite them; if he took the life of another without just cause, he should free slaves; if he fell into fornication (zināʾ), he should arrange for the marriages of the poor; if he consumed alcohol, he should charitably distribute pure and wholesome drink (sharāb á¹­ayyib ṭāhir); and if he spoke ill of a person behind their back, then he must now laude and praise them to restore their honor.⁹³ Through such corresponding kaffārāt (acts of restitution and atonement), the penitent must strive to reverse and undo the effects of his sins, as much as he can. At the heart of the concern lies the Quranic doctrine of iá¹£lāḥ, of setting matters aright, noted in passing above, which must accompany the regenerative and healing process of repentance. It was due to this principle of correspondence that, according to MuḥāsibÄ«, the Prophet instructed his companion Muʿādh b. Jabal to turn to God through “a secret repentance for secret sins and an open repentance for open sins.”⁹⁴ In another work, MuḥāsibÄ« develops the idea further when he argues that if the penitent replaces foul friends with virtuous ones, a concern for this world with a concern for the next, and frivolous speech with contemplative silence and the incantation of the Quran, the “lights of obedience will subjugate his passions,” enabling him to overcome his propensity to disobey God.⁹⁵ This is because the causes of sin have been replaced by their aḍḍād, their “contraries.”⁹⁶ The desire to safeguard this principle of correspondence is also present in MakkÄ«, where, in the context of a commentary on Q 4:146 (“except those who repent, set things aright, and hold fast to God”), he writes,

it is necessary that the repentance of every God-servant entail what is contrary to his sin (ḍidd maʿāṣīhi)—few good deeds for a few evil ones, many good deeds for many evil ones. Thus, the penitent acts contrary (ḍidd) to his previous iniquities.⁹⁷

Only then will he fall into the ranks of the muá¹£liḥīn, the people of iá¹£lāḥ, lauded in Q 7:170.⁹⁸ This is why he states, “the God-servant is not a tāʾib unless he is a muá¹£liḥ, and he is not a muá¹£liḥ unless he engages in ṣāliḥāt,” that is to say, in works of iá¹£lāḥ.⁹⁹

Baḥya is adamant that tawba entails a comprehensive regimen which begins with a total reorientation of one’s life. It requires supererogatory fasts during the day (al-tanafful bi-á¹£iyām fi-l nahār), night prayers (al-á¹£alāt fi-l layl), and an internal severing of ties from the world.¹⁰⁰ This should be accompanied by contrition (nadam), brokenness of heart (inkisār qalbihi), fear (khawf), continues weeping (bakāʾ), and pleas for divine forgiveness (istighfār).¹⁰¹ Moreover, it is not enough to turn away from the sin which is the object of tawba, since the penitent must “abandon all that God has prohibited.”¹⁰² Baḥya returns to the subject later in the chapter, stating, “another factor that invalidates one’s repentance is for the penitent to repent from some of his sins while he persists in others.”¹⁰³ These same elements appear in Muḥāsibī’s Iḥkām al-tawba. In the opening of the treatise, he states that from the among the signs of repentance are eating little, weeping over the self, extensive pleas for forgiveness (á¹­Å«l al-istighfār), and copious prayer and fasting.”¹⁰⁴ Shortly thereafter, he declares that the tāʾib cannot be characterized by tawba in its true sense so long as he repents from one or even a few sins: he must firmly resolve in his heart “never to return to those sins (for which he seeks divine pardon), as well as others (gharyihā).”¹⁰⁵ The condition is also present in MakkÄ«, though he is less stringent regarding its requirement.¹⁰⁶ Behind the stipulation in Baḥya and MuḥāsibÄ«, and less so in MakkÄ«, lies a fear that without a complete turning of heart, an all-encompassing metanoia (“change of mind”), its diseases will grow, eventually leading to spiritual death, the full consequences of which will only be experienced in the world to come. This is why Ibn Ê¿Abbās, according to MuḥāsibÄ«, declared that many will appear on the final judgement, having deluded themselves that they had sufficiently atoned for their wrongs, only to realize, when it is too late, they failed to fulfill the most rudimentary obligations of tawba.¹⁰⁷

One of the concerns Baḥya raises closer to the end of his treatment, in the eighth subsection of the chapter, revolves around the spiritual benefits of wrongdoings in so far as they help prevent the sinner from succumbing to the dangers of pride and self-admiration. This is why he emphasizes the need to never lose sight of one’s past mistakes, “for sin is the means through which humility is obtained, and one exerts himself to fulfill the rights of God.” To that effect, he quotes the words of “one of the righteous (baʿḍ al-ṣāliḥīn)” to a disciple, who said, “If you were without sin, I would fear for you what is greater than sin.” When asked what could be more detrimental, he replied, “self-admiration (Ê¿ujb) and ostentation (riyāʾ).”¹⁰⁸ The saying turns out to be a hadith of the Prophet, albeit with minor rewording,¹⁰⁹ cited by MakkÄ« in his chapter on hope,¹¹⁰ and one of many on the subject that would have been utilized by MuḥāsibÄ« to highlight the poisons of Ê¿ujb and riyāʾ within his broader aim of developing an Islamic moral psychology—among the earliest in Muslim intellectual history.

While MuḥāsibÄ« touches on Ê¿ujb, riyāʾ, and kibr (pride) in passing in the Iḥkām al-tawba, particularly within the context of sins of the heart, a more detailed examination of these “mortal vices” (muhlikāt) appears in what may have been his most famous work, al-Riʿāya li-ḥuqÅ«q Allāh (Observing the Rights of God). In the relatively lengthy section on Ê¿ujb, he explains how important it is to be continuously mindful of one’s own moral and religious failings, since an awareness of how far one falls short of the religious and moral ideal serves as an armor against feelings of self-importance and self-admiration. Conversely, those afflicted with spiritual pride typically fail to recognize their faults, not because of freedom from sin but because they remain oblivious to the full extent to which their souls are plagued by vice. This leads MuḥāsibÄ« to state that among the factors which contribute to a misplaced sense of pride is a blindness to the depth and scope of one’s wrongs, alongside a trivialization of those very faults of which one might be aware (recall the words of ‘Umar above). In fact, one of the qualities of those afflicted by such pride is the belief that their piety is a gift to God, that they do Him a favor through their obedience. But the truth, for MuḥāsibÄ«, is that no one is without blemish, this being the meaning of the Quranic verse, “Do not ascribe purity to yourselves” (Q 53:32). In his commentary on the passage, he quotes an earlier authority who confessed, “I would much rather spend the night asleep and wake up remorseful (for having missed the night prayer), than to have spent it in prayer only to be full of conceit in the morning.”¹¹¹ In later Islamic history, the sentiment found in the hadith which Baḥya cites with approval would be famously captured in the terse aphorism of Ibn Ê¿Aṭāʾ Allāh (d. 709/1309), “A sin that bequeaths you lowliness and spiritual poverty is far better for you than worship that bequeaths you self-importance and pride.”¹¹²

In the final and tenth subsection of his chapter, Baḥya reminds the reader of the brevity of life and the inevitability of final judgement, encouraging him to turn to God in repentance while there is still yet time. He insists that despite the seemingly unsurmountable obstacles which stand in the way of tawba, he should neither lose hope nor despair. So long as the tāʾib sincerely tries, exerting himself as much as he can within the scope of his power, “He will make a way out for him (yajÊ¿al lahu makhraj^an).”¹¹³ The expression is drawn, word-forword, from the Quran, where the God-fearing, the people of taqwā, are assured of divine help (Q 65:2). Bahỵa’s uses it to encourage the penitent to have trust in God’s aid and to recognize it may come from unexpected corners. Thus, the tāʾib might receive money through an unanticipated channel, enabling him to return the unlawfully acquired wealth of another; or the heart of a person against whom an injustice was done will easily soften, so that feelings of anger, hurt and rage are replaced by clemency, affection, and love. It might also involve finding the victim of a past mistake so their forgiveness can be sought in person.¹¹⁴ In other words, the unseen forces that direct our lives, and which we experience on a regular basis, will come to the assistance of the genuinely penitent. This is what Bạhya intends to teach the reader through his use of the well-known Quranic expression: it is to assure the tāʾib his efforts are neither lost not spent in vain, provided he takes the initiative to repent, return to God, and atone for his crimes and misdemeanors of the past.

Another example of the use of Quranic idiom can be found in Baḥya’s description of the telos of repentance. What the tāʾib is ideally striving for is not just God’s forgiveness but His riḍā, i.e., His “good-pleasure.” Our Jewish sage is explicit that the desire is for “arrival (wuṣūl) at the good-pleasure (riḍāʾ) of his Lord.”¹¹⁵ A few lines earlier, he makes use of the elative form of the verbal noun, writing, “have mercy on yourself so you may arrive at the supreme good-pleasure (riḍwān) of your Lord.”¹¹⁶ The wuṣūl or “arrival” is not to a state of extinction in God, or annihilation of self, but to an encounter with divine riḍāʾ and riḍwān. The significance of this is underscored by the importance of the terms (and other derivatives of the r-ḍ-y root) in the ethical, theological, and eschatological landscape of the Quran. After all, the revelation of Islam presents the reciprocal relation of riḍāʾ between God and the human being as the final and penultimate state of the tranquil soul (al-nafs al-muá¹­maʾinna) at the moment of death (Q 89:27-28).¹¹⁷ “Return to you lord,” we read in Q 89:27-28, “rāḍiyat^an marḍiyya,” which is to say, “well-pleased (with God) and well-pleasing (to God).” Similarly, in the sÅ«ra or chapter on repentance, after describing the sensorial delights of Paradise, the Quran asserts, but “the riḍwān of God is greatest” (Q 9:72). This would lead the medieval exegete Fakhr al-DÄ«n al-RāzÄ« (d. 606/1209) to explain that its primacy is due to the simple reason that the physical pleasures of the afterlife involve the body, while riḍwān pertains to the rapturous bliss of the spirit or rūḥ (due to the composite nature of the human being after the bodily resurrection). And since there can be no commensurability between the enjoyments of the senses, on the one hand, and the soul’s reception of God’s final satisfaction and good-pleasure, on the other, it logically follows that the latter is infinitely greater than the former.¹¹⁸ In addition, we should note that in the same way the Quran places the riḍwān of God above the material comforts of Paradise, it ranks the muqarrabÄ«n, “those brought close” or “those made proximate (to God),” above all others (Q 56:11, 88). This is why they are “the foremost” (al-sābiqÅ«n) (Q 56:10), forming a spiritual elite with a rank above and beyond “the people of the right” (aṣḥāb al-yamÄ«n), a broad, general category to designate the saved (Q 56:27, 38). In other words, in the eschatological scheme of the Quran, the soul’s qurba or proximity to God is intimately bound to His riḍwān. This is relevant to our purposes since Baḥya also identifies the telos of the spiritual life as one proximity to God (al-taqarrub ilā llāh),¹¹⁹ and interchangeably so with His ṛidā, assuring the reader that the doors of tawba will remain open as long as one truly yearns for such intimacy and takes the necessary steps to reach it.¹²⁰

An analysis of the percolation of the nomenclature of the Quran into the Farāʾiḍ, of which numerous other examples could be offered,¹²¹ lies outside the parameters of our present inquiry, even though it would form a rich study its own right. There is no reason to presume Baḥya drew on this language directly (although it remains possible). The most likely scenario is that it entered through the writings of the early Sufis with whom he was so profoundly familiar, individuals of intense piety and devotion who had internalized the language of the Scripture of their faith through their own intimate relationship with it. This relation was so critical that Louis Massignon went so far as to argue that the “constant recitation, meditation, and practice” of the Quran was the “source of Islamic mysticism, at its beginning and throughout its growth.”¹²² The sentiment would be echoed years later by Annemarie Schimmel, when she observed that the “words of the Koran have formed the cornerstone of all mystical doctrines [in Islam],” before going on to provide some key examples.¹²³ It was only natural, therefore, that the imprint of this language would have made itself present in the Judeo-Arabic in which Baḥya composed the Duties, a penetrating and profoundly insightful work of moral and mystical psychology through which his legacy would be permanently established in Jewish thinking, almost immediately after its composition. The imprint would be almost entirely lost, however, in the translations of the text into the numerous languages of the world’s Jewish communities through which its fame would be established.

3 Conclusion

The Farāʾiḍ stands as a fitting illustration of the cultural symbiosis that allowed for the creation of a Judeo-Islamic tradition in the medieval Islamicate world. The juridical and theological affinities the two faiths shared between conceptions of sin, repentance, and atonement, which set them apart from Christianity, centered as the later was on a doctrine of redemption through the blood of a divinely incarnated Christ, allowed Baḥya to make extensive use of Muslim sources with relative ease in his analysis of tawba. In other words, the Judeo-Islamic nexus allowed for particularly useful exchanges around questions centering on the moral and religious frailties of a human being unmarked by original sin,¹²⁴ the reconciliation of the self with its Creator in the wake of wrongdoing, the mechanisms in place for attempting to secure God’s forgiveness, and the complex relation between human and divine agency—exchanges that would not have been as easily possible in the Judeo-Christian or Islamo-Christian¹²⁵ nexus around similar questions, due to differing points of intersection. That the flow from Islam into Judaism in the medieval period was not simply unidirectional is illustrated by the extensive use of the Isrā’īliyyāt or “tales of the Israelites,” in not just uniquely Sufi but the broader pietistic and devotional literature of Islam, to offer but one example.

Diana Lobel observed of the Farāʾiḍ that it was “[w]ritten in the manner of a Sufi devotional manual.”¹²⁶ And Elisha Russ-Fishbane described it as “bearing the deep imprint of Sufi pietism.”¹²⁷ As we have seen, it was all this and more, inflected not only by the conceptual features of early Muslim ascetico-mysticism, but also hadiths and the nomenclature and vocabulary of the Quran. Early Baḥya scholarship speculated that one of the main influences on our Jewish sage was GhazālÄ« (d. 505/1111). Later, it became evident Baḥya and GhazālÄ« were drawing on shared Islamic material. One of these reservoirs, as demonstrated in subsequent studies, was the MuḥāsibÄ«an corpus. While the precise scope and extent of this debt remain to be unearthed, the recent work of Omer Michaelis, marked by a sensitivity to the realm of human “interiority,”¹²⁸ has shed considerable light on this area. Our comparative analysis of Baḥya’s chapter on tawba with the Berlin manuscript of Muḥāsibī’s Iḥkām al-tawba has, we hope, further contributed to our understanding of this debt. Less explored has been Baḥya’s use of MakkÄ«. As we have also shown, the likelihood that he was both inspired by and drew from the QÅ«t al-qulÅ«b, a seminal influence on GhazālÄ« (along with MuḥāsibÄ«), is almost certain. His use of QushayrÄ« seems less definitive.

It is hoped that this modest contribution to Baḥya scholarship will advance our knowledge of the interreligious exchanges and symbiotic relationship between medieval Jews and Muslims that allowed for the formation and development of a Judeo-Islamic tradition that survived for centuries until the advent of modernity, colonialism, and the reconfiguration of geopolitical, cultural, and religious alliances in the wake of the second world war. The tradition was not one of syncretism but “creative symbiosis,” and in the words of one scholar, was “parallel to and no less real—perhaps in fact even more real—than that of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”¹²⁹