¹ Van den Bos, Matthijs, Mystic Regimes: Sufism and the State in Iran, from the Qajar Era to the Islamic Republic (Leiden: Brill 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ISBN 90-04-12815-8, viii+286pp.

² The Art of Spiritual Flight: Farid al-Din ‘Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition, edited by Lewisohn, Leonard and Shackle, Christopher (London, 2006)Google Scholar.

³ See the article on “arīa” in EI², vol. 10, 243–257 by multiple authors.

⁴ Bos seems here to be influenced by the perspectivist theories of Clifford Geertz's symbolic anthropology (his “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973))Google Scholar, whose vocabulary when applied to the study of Sufism, as Vincent Cornell has pointed out, ultimately “poisons the well against spiritual realities and strips religion of its claim to truth,” rendering “the academic study of sainthood all but impossible.” Vincent Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin, TX, 1998), xli. For a detailed critique of Geertz's approach, see Asad, Talal, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD, 1993), 27–54Google Scholar.

⁵ Kulliyāt-i Ash‘ār-i Shāh Ni‘matu’llāh Valī, ed. by Nūrbakhsh, Javād (Tehran, 1361/1982), no. 11, p. 5Google Scholar.

⁶ “We'll never trade the kingdom of spiritual poverty for the world; we'll never sell one cup of wine for ten score kings” (Mā sal ānat-i faqr bi-‘ālam nafarūshīm / yik jām-i sharābī bi-du ad jam nafarūshīm), ibid., no. 1177, p. 541.

⁷ Pādisāh u pādishāhī, mā u darvīshī-yi mā / ‘āqilān u āshināyān, mā u bīkhwīshī-yi mā, ibid., p. 13.

⁸ Cf. Bos's remark: “the Ne‘matollāhī regime assumed state-like properties in its conceptions of self as a parallel power” (p. 112).

⁹ Thus we read: “In the Islamic Republic and the Pahlavi period, Sufi experience differed because (different) religious urge was subject to different constraint” (sic, p. 4), and introducing somebody called Fabian, he says: “one ought to abandon the view that sees performance as ‘enactment’ (of texts) and treat it instead as ‘event’ and ‘action’” (p. 4).

¹⁰ On which see Lewisohn, Leonard, “Persian Sufism in the Contemporary West: Reflections on the Ni‘matullahi Diaspora,” in Sufism in the West, ed. by Malik, Jamal and Hinnells, John (London, 2006), 49–70Google Scholar.

¹¹ From Suhrawardī’s “Lughāt-i mūrān,” in Majmū’a-yi Mu annafāt-i Shaykh Ishrāq (Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī), ed. by S. H. Nasr (Tehran, 1380/2001), with an introduction by Henry Corbin, vol. 3, pp. 302–305.

¹² Cf. Wolfgang Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief (Peru, IL, 1984), chapter 2.

¹³ “In the experience of fanā’ the sufi participates in the real life, as his sense of independent existence vanishes and he realizes the truth that he exists entirely by God … The experience does not destroy the personal identity (rasm) of the Sufi; on the contrary, it strengthens it by making him realize his rootedness in God.” Ansari, M. A. H., “The Doctrine of One Actor: Junayd's View of Tawhid,” The Muslim World (1983): 46Google Scholar.

¹⁴ A similar no less foolish but far more scholarly parody of Corbin's phenomenology was advanced by Steven Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, 1999); on which see Maria Subtelny's revealing riposte: “History and Religion: The Fallacy of Metaphysical Questions (A Review Article),” Iranian Studies, 36, no. 1 (2003): 91–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Corbin, following the lead of a number of Sufi thinkers, discriminated between horizontal and vertical time, or linear time vs. the time of the soul, or external vs. internal history (zamān āfāqī va anfusī). In the Sufi tradition, while the corporeal senses may experience a portion of the timeless vision of the heart and soul (cf. Rūmı¯, Mathnawı¯-yi ma'nawı¯, ed. R.A. Nicholson (Rprt: Tehran, 1363/1984), this does not necessarily negate the reality of linear temporality.

¹⁵ On which, see Böwering, G., “Ideas of Time in Persian Sufism,” in The Heritage of Sufism, ed. by Lewisohn, L. (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar, vol. I: Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi (700–1300), 199ff.

¹⁶ Corbin in fact specifically addresses the problem of the periodization of the history of Muslim philosophy, underlining that it is wrong to impose that the occidental categorization of Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modernity on Islamic philosophy, stating that other categories, specifically Islamic, must be employed. See his En Islam iranien (Paris, 1971), I: xiii. abāabā’ī, of course, was by no means apolitical in his philosophy, as Hamid Dabashi has shown in his Theology of Discontent: the Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, 316ff.

¹⁷ Corbin was virulently opposed to historicism, but did favor and support historical studies, underlining that “une humanité qui renoncerait aux études historiques, serait une humanité frappée d'annésie collective.” En Islam iranien, I: xvi.

¹⁸ His references to Corbin's ideas take the form of telegraphic statements, as on pp. 34–35, where his hermeneutical phenomenology is summarized and critiqued in only six sentences and two notes.

¹⁹ Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion, 155.

²⁰ See Lewisohn, L., “Sufism and Theology in the Confessions of ā'in al-Dīn Turka Ifahānī (d. 830/1437),” in Sufism and Theology, ed. by Shihadeh, A. (Edinburgh, 2007), 63–82;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lewisohn, L., “In Quest of Annihilation: Imaginalization and Mystical Death in the Tamhīdāt of ‘Ayn al-Quāt Hamadhānī,” in The Heritage of Sufism, vol. I: Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi, ed. by Lewisohn, L. (Oxford, 1999), 285–336Google Scholar.

²¹ See L. Lewisohn, “Sufism and the School of Isfahan: Tasawwuf and ‘Irfan in Late Safavid Iran (‘Abd al-Razzāq Lāhījī and Fay-i Kāshānī on the Relation of Taawwuf, ikmat and ‘Irfān,” in The Heritage of Sufism, vol. III: Late Classical Persianate Sufism: the Safavid and Mughal Period, ed. by Lewisohn, L. and Morgan, D. (Oxford, 1999), 63–134Google Scholar.

²² As the great literary historian Dhabīu'llāh afā (Tārīkh-i adabiyāt-i Īrān, II, 13th edition (Tehran, 1373 A.Hsh./1994), V/1: 170) points out: “The tinpot sect of Safavid Sufis who flourished during the uprising and expansion of power and under the rule of Shāh Isma‘īl and his son Shāh Tahmāsp were devoid of all of the disciplines of classical Sufism; not only were they unaware of the higher ideals of Sufism, they had only a vulgarized apprehension of the existence of such ideals, their understanding being based on popular, watered-down beliefs followed without any deeper awareness. Since they followed the arīqat of their own shaykhs in such an ignorant manner, no wonder that they readily condemned all other intellectual movements besides their own as heretical, and endeavoured to eliminate everyone else … These pseudo-Sufi Turkish Qizilbāsh, from the time that Sulān Junayd and Sulān Haydar had decked them out in coats of mail and stripped them of their dervish robes, forging their pious strings of beads into sabres and spears … were in reality, no longer Sufis, although we can see, incredible as it appears, that they still insisted on calling themselves Sufis.”

²³ For a fuller coverage of Muammad Shāh's relation to Sufism see Leonard Lewisohn, “An Introduction to the History of Modern Persian Sufism,” a two-part study in The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, “Part I: The Ni‘matu’llāhī Order: Persecution, Revival and Schism,” 61, no. 3 (October 1998): 448f.

²⁴ Bos reads the name as Chahārdahī, as if the said individual were the “fourteenth” of something or other, whereas he comes from a complex of four villages, “chahār dih” in Iran's Caspian Sea province of Gilan.

²⁵ Sayrī dar ta awwuf is—contrary to its title's declared meaning “A Survey of Sufism”—a diatribe against Sufism and its adherents. Its approach is polemical rather than objective, and its judgments are personal, often to the point of being vitriolic—full of wild assertions and unsubstantiated assertions about, and attacks upon, almost all the various contemporary Sufi masters in Iran. (Not to mention the fact that it is poorly punctuated and sparsely annotated). For instance, on p. 135 of the text Chahārdihī makes the wild accusation that the poetry of Javād Nūrbakhsh and ādiq ‘Anqā was all plagiarized from the works of Fara Hamadānī, which is not only completely false, but vicious slander. On p. 138, Chahārdihī has the gall to criticize the fact that Iranian Sufis use the Mathnawī of Rūmī “to ornament their Orders,” a plainly ridiculous quibble, since all the great Persian Shi'ite theosophers (not to mention Sufis), from Mullā adrā to Sabzavarī, have used the Mathnawī to “ornament,” illustrate and underpin the conceptual basis of their thought.

²⁶ Thus in the next chapter, on pp. 97–108, there appear 25 references within the space of 60 notes to Sayrī dar ta awwuf.

²⁷ See Lewisohn, “An Introduction,” 449ff., which comes to opposite conclusions.

²⁸ Discussed in Lewisohn, “An Introduction,” 450f.

²⁹ In his edited Authority and Political Culture in Shi‘ism (Albany, NY, 1988), 80ff., S. A. Arjomand underlines the fact that the Safavids inherited and preserved intact most of the political institutions of Sunni Iran, and in particular notes that the notion of kingship remained completely intact down to the rule of the Qājārs, who “legitimized kingship … as authority pertaining to the temporal sphere.” (p. 90)

³⁰ Arjomand, Authority and Political Culture in Shi‘ism, 93.

³¹ As Mangol Bayat (“Anti-Sufism in Qajar Iran,” in Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, ed. by de Jong, Frederick and Radtke, Bernd (Leiden, 1999), 627CrossRefGoogle Scholar) underlines, both the Shi'ite Sufi ‘urafā’ and the cleric-hukamā' “shared in common the conception of a specially gifted individual, endowed with a semi-divine qualification to unveil, in an evolutionary fashion, the esoteric meaning of the holy texts.”

³² Kulliyāt-i Ash‘ār-i Shāh Ni‘matu’llāh, p. 412, no. 900; trans. Terry Graham, “Shāh Ni‘matu’llāh Vali: Founder of the Ni‘matu’llāhī Sufi Order, in The Heritage of Sufism, I: The Legacy of Mediæval Persian Sufism, ed. by Lewisohn, L. (Oxford, 1999), 183Google Scholar.

³³ The right-wing Kayhān and Jumhūrī-yi Islāmī newspapers feature anti-Sufi editorials and articles on a weekly basis.

³⁴ See in particular: http://www.Gonabadie-news.blogspot.com; http://www.soltanalishahi.blogspot.com.

³⁵ Three websites founded by pro-regime writers based in Qum dedicated to attacking Sufism in contemporary Iran are: http://www.kherghe.blogfa.com; http://www.zirekherghe.blogfa.com/ and http://www.kajkool.blogspot.com/. Another website frequently featuring attacks on the Ni‘matu’llahi Gunabadī Order is http://www.gonabad110.com/. The key websites of notoriously bigoted right-wing ayatollahs, such as Nūrī Hamadānī, āj Shaykh Javād Tabrīzī, Fāil Langarānī, afī Gulpāyigānī, and Makārim Shīrāzī, all of whom have issued fatwas over the past decade declaring Sufism blasphemy and Sufis heretics, which contain much material inciting hatred and the persecution of Sufis in Iran, are:

1. 1.

   1. Makārim Shīrāzī, see http://www.makaremshirazi.org/persian/ and http://www.amiralmomenin.net/persian/modules.php?name=es&p=2&id=122.

2. 2.

   2. Fāil Langarānī, see http://www.lankarani.org/far.

3. 3.

   3. Nūrī Hamadānī, see http://www.noorihamedani.com; http://www.aftabnews.ir/vdchwmn23xnxz.html; http://www.hawzahnews.ir/showdata.aspx?dataid=2484.

4. 4.

   4. afī Gulpāyigānī, see http://www.saafi.net/.

³⁶ See Lewisohn, Leonard, “The Way of Tawakkul: The Ideal of ‘Trust in God’ in Classical Persian Sufism,” Islamic Culture, LXXIII, no. 2 (1999): 27–62Google Scholar.

³⁷ For first-hand eyewitness accounts given to the authors by members of this branch with a good account of the tragedy, see http://www.geocities.com/latifsalam786/qom_events.htm. Ayatollah Montazeri's critique of the tragedy is given on the BBC Persian Service website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/story/2006/02/060220_mqom-gonabadi-montazeri.shtml. For the Gunabadi Order's website in the West and other articles about this tragedy, see http://www.icchome.org.

³⁸ The background, history and various details underlying this assault on the Persian Sufis discussed are analyzed by news-sites and other links in English and Persian at: http://www.majzob.com; http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/20071112_Sufi_site_attacked_in_Iran.html; http://www.30morgh-121.blogfa.com; http://www.soofee.blogfa.com; http://www.darvishan.info; http://www.Gonabadie-news.blogspot.com; http://www.soltanalishahi.blogspot.com;

³⁹ As famously exposed in Elwell-Sutton, L. P., “Sufism and Pseudo-Sufism,” Encounter, XLIV, no. 5 (May 1975): 9–17Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Lewisohn, “An Introduction,” Part I: 439.

⁴¹ Lewisohn, “Persian Sufism in the Contemporary West,” 63f.

⁴² Hoffman, V., Sufism, Mystics and Saints in Modern Egypt (Columbia, SC, 1995)Google Scholar

⁴³ See Jong, Frederick de and Radtke, Bernd eds., Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics (Leiden, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where a number of articles dissect this dichotomy.

⁴⁴ A good summary of the dichotomy is given by Mangol Bayat, “Anti-Sufism in Qajar Iran,” in Islamic Mysticism Contested, ed. by Jong and Radtke, 624–638. Twice, Van der Bos touches on the basic dichotomy between nomocentric juridical Islam and eros-oriented Sufi Islam: once when a dervish whom he interviews assures him (p. 217) that “mystics and jurists do not understand each other's languages” and again (p. 218), when he speaks of the “wide distribution of these dichotomies in Iranian culture.” But having almost no background in the study of philosophical ‘irfān, theoretical ikmat, or in the doctrines and history of classical ta awwuf, such statements pass unnoticed and remain at the level of private musings (e.g. his discussion of this dichotomy on pp. 217–218), or are oddly considered to be evidence of the Sufis’ “negation of civil society” (p. 218).

⁴⁵ The opposition of fundamentalist clerics to Sufism was the subject of a comprehensive article in the Iranian Weekly News Magazine: Shahrvand-i imrūz: hafta-nāma-yi ta līlī-yi sarāsarī dar zamīnahā-yi iqti ādī, ijtimā'ī va varzishī, 2, no. 28 (Āzar 1386/9 December 2007): 49–54, which features fascinating views with the current Gunabadī master Dr Nūr ‘Alī Tābanda, and the famous Gunabadī Sufi professor of philosophy Dr Shahrām Pāzūkī, then analyzes the fatwas delivered by four bigoted ayatollahs (afī Gulpāyigānī, Mukārim Shīrāzī, Nūrī Hamadānī, and Fāil Lankarānī—who declare all Sufis to be heretics!), as well as providing interviews with several other prominent anti-Sufi ayatollahs in Iran.

⁴⁶ Even in his bowl-more-scalding-hot-than-its-broth apology for Khomeini's thought, Emad Bazzi—”The Relationship Between Mysticism and Politics in the Personality of Ayatollah Khomeini” (PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2002), 28, n. 28—had the ken to note this, confessing that Khomeini, despite his veneration for the ‘Irfān-i na arī of Ayatollah Shāhābādī, was “vehemently opposed to Sufism in its social manifestation.”

⁴⁷ Cf. Rūmī's Mathnawī, ed. Nicholson, IV: 1704.

⁴⁸ See Rashīd al-Dīn Maybudi, Kashf al-asrār wa ‘uddat al-abrār, ed. by ‘Alī Aghar ikmat. Tehran, 1952-60), IV: 60–61; ‘Aār, Tadhkirat al-awliyā’, ed. by Isti‘lāmī, M., 3rd ed. (Tehran, 1365/1986), 349–350Google Scholar; Abū āhir Khānaqāhī, Guzīda dar akhlāq va ta awwuf, ed. by Īraj Afshār (Tehran, 1347 A.Hsh./1969), 74.

⁴⁹ On which, see Shah-Kazemi, Reza, “Recollecting the Spirit of Jihād,” in Islam, Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition, ed. by Lumbard, Joseph (Bloomington, IN, 2004), 121–142Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ See, e.g. Rūmī, Mathnawī, ed. Nicholson, V: 3850ff.

⁵¹ Later on, at p. 217, n. 32, the author mistakes this verse by Rūmī: “whom they taught the secrets of Truth, they instructed by sewing his mouth”—commonly cited by Persian Sufis of various orders to explain the necessity for secrecy of Sufi initiation and other rites, paraphrases it in English, before speculating that it derived from “the Ahl-i aqq repertoire.” The verse in question is Har ki rā asrār-i kār āmūkhtand / mur kardand u dahānash dūkhtand (Rumi, Mathnawī, ed. Nicholson, V: 2240; some other editions in lieu of asrār-i kār read asrār-i aqq, which is the reading given by Bos).

⁵² Sa‘dī, Būstān, in Kulliyāt-i Sa‘dī, ed. by Muammad ‘Alī Furūghī (Tehran, 1363/1984), 225, l. 11

⁵³ See Lewisohn, Leonard, “Bayazid Bistami,” in The Encyclopædia of Religion, ed. by Jones, Lindsay, 2nd edition (New York, 2005), II: 955–957Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ See Abū Sa‘īd ibn Abī'l-Khayr, Asrār al-tawīd fī maqāmāt al-Shaykh Abū Sa‘īd, ed. by M. R. Shafī‘ī-Kadkanī (Tehran, 1376/1997), I, p. 210: 20–24. The point here is that service, whether to one's fellow man or to one's spiritual master (cf. Bos's mentioning this on p. 179) is (i) a means of self-purification, insofar as it allows one to distance oneself from egocentric activity and gain nearness to God (on this type of khidmat, see Rūmī, ed. Nicholson, Mathnawī, VI: 845), and (ii) it brings benefit to one's neighbors in accordance with several of the Prophet's injunctions always cited by the Persian Sufis, among which can be cited: “The best of men are those who confer benefits upon them.” Ahādith-i Mathnawī, ed. Furūzānfar, Badī' al-Zamān (Tehran, 1361/1982), no. 600Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ The social role of Sufis in Persian society is expressed through the vast Sufi javānmardī literature and doctrines, which advocated the interdependence of public ethics and private spirituality, and held that the chevalier must be a Sufi, and the Sufi cannot be a Sufi unless he behaves with chivalry. See Muammad Ja'far Majūb, “Chivalry and Early Persian Sufism, in Lewisohn, L. (ed.) The Heritage of Sufism, vol. I: Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi (700–1300), (Oxford, 1999), pp. 549–581Google Scholar. Although seriously understudied, futuwwat is by no means an extinct tradition in contemporary Sufism in Iran today. Many of the finest classical Persian texts were published in Rasā'il-i Javānmardān, ed. M. arrāf (Tehran & Paris, 1973) and in Muammad Ja'far Majūb, Ā'īn-i javāmardī yā futuwwat (New York, 2000). The tradition was analyzed by Henry Corbin, “Juvénilité et chevalerie en Islam iranien,” in Corbin, L'Homme et Son Ange (Paris, 1983), 207–260.

⁵⁶ Bateson, M.C. et al., “afā-yi Bāin: A Study of the Interrelations of a Set of Ideal Character Types,” in Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies, ed. by Brown, John and Itzkowitz, Norman (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 257–273Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ See Lewisohn, Leonard, “An Introduction to the History of Modern Persian Sufism, Part II: A Socio-cultural profile of Sufism, from the Dhahabī Revival to the Present Day,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (BSOAS), 62, no. 1 (1999): 54–57Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ See Jean During's exhaustive treatment of this in his Musique et mystique dans les traditions de l'Iran (Paris and Téhéran, 1989), 5: 527–532Google Scholar. See also my “The Sacred Music of Islam: Samā' in the Persian Sufi Tradition,” The British Journal of Ethnomusicology, VI (1997): 1–33Google Scholar. On dhikr and selflessness, see Schimmel, Annemarie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, NC, 1975), 172ffGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ See Jean During's insightful discussion of the difference between profane and sacred Sufi musical “performance”: “What is Sufi Music?,” in The Heritage of Sufism, vol. II: The Legacy of Mediæval Persian Sufism (1150–1500), ed. by L. Lewisohn (Oxford, 1999), 282–287. For a more elaborate treatment of the same, see also During, Jean, Musique et Extase: L'audition mystique dans la tradition soufie (Paris, 1988), 58ffGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ See Gilbert Rouget's discussion of dhikr and samā' in his Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession, trans. by Biebuyck, B. (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar, chapter 7.

⁶¹ See Furūzānfar, Aādīth-i Mathnawī (Tehran, 1361 A.Hsh./1982), 5.

⁶² This passage in question is from his Fīhi mā fīhi, trans. by Nicholson, R. A., Rumi: Poet and Mystic (London 1978), 92Google Scholar. For excellent discussions of the relationship between dhikr and namāz, see ‘Azīz Nasafī, Kashf al-aqā’iq, ed. by Amad Mahdawī Dāmghānī (Tehran, 1344 A.Hsh./1965), 132–134; Abū af ‘Umar Suhrawardī, ‘Awārif al-ma’ārif, trans. into Persian by Abū Manūr ‘Abd al-Mu'min Ifahānī, ed. by Qāsim Anārī (Tehran, 1364 A.Hsh./1985), 134–136.

⁶³ Cf. the classic study by Blochet, M. E., “Études sur l’Ésoterisme Musulman,” Journal Asiatique, Series 19/Vol. 19 (1902): 489–531Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Said Arjomand, Amir, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Iman: Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shi‘ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (Chicago, 1984), 132–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Nor is any mention made of the fundamental differences in typology between Persian Sufis' esoteric hierarchy and the dogmatic hierocratic authority of the fuqahā', a difference reflected in Persian Sufi poetic imagery with its strict dichotomization between two entirely contrary spiritual types and religious loci: zāhid vs. ‘arif, ‘āqil vs. ‘āshīq, masjid vs. maykhāna, etc.

⁶⁶ ‘Alī Hujwīrī (Jullābī), Kashf al-majūb, ed. by D. Zhukovski (Repr. Tehran, 1336 A.Hsh/1957), 47, l. 4.

⁶⁷ Abū’l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī, Tarjuma-yi Risāla-yi Qushayriyya, ed. by Badi' al-Zamān Furūzānfar (Tehran, 1379/2000), p. 473: 17–18. For an excellent overview of the earliest Sufi manuals on adab, see Meier, Fritz, “A Book of Etiquette for Sufis,” in Meier, Fritz, Essays on Islamic Mysticism and Piety, trans. by O'Kane, John (Leiden, 1999), 49–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁸ Thus Rūmī assails the functional use of adab for political advancement and characterizes those whose proper comportment is for the sake of public conformity or in pursuit of outward (āhir) social status, as “the blind (kūrān)”—see Mathnawī, ed. Nicholson, II: 3219–22. It is surprising that despite his references to Meier and Trimingham (pp. 242–243), Bos still labored under the misconception that the formulation of these rules were politically motivated. Such an idea simply is not evidenced from any of the classical sources.

⁶⁹ Ādāb al-murīdīn Arabic text with Persian translation by ‘Umar ibn Muammad ibn Amad Shirakān, ed. by N. Māyil Haravī (Tehran, 1363/1984). See Ian Netton, “The Breath of Felicity: Adab, Awāl, Maqāmāt and Abū Najīb al-Suhrawardī,” in The Heritage of Sufism, ed. by Lewisohn, I: 457–482

⁷⁰ Milson, M., A Sufi Rule for Novices: Kitāb Ādāb al-murīdīn of Abū Najīb al Suhrawardī (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 17Google Scholar.

⁷¹ For example, some the following manuals written by Persian Sufis that concern Adab: Anārī, Mukhtaar fī ādāb a-ūfiyya, ed. by Beaurecueil, Laugier de, in Bulletin de l'institut français d'archéologie orientale, 59 (1960): 203–240Google Scholar; Abū alib Muammad ibn ‘Alī, Qut al-qulūb fī mu’āmalāt al-mabūb wa waf arīq al-murīd ilā maqām at-tawīd, 4 vols. (Cairo, 1351/1932); Abū Nar ‘Abdullāh ibn ‘Alī al-Sarrāj, Kitāb al-luma’ fi at-taawwuf, ed. by R. A. Nicholson (Leiden, 1914); Abū af ‘Umar al-Suhrawardī, ‘Awārif al-ma’ārif (Beirut, 1966); ‘Alī b. ‘Uthmān al-Hujwīrī, Kashf al-majūb, ed. by V. A. Zhukovsky (Tehran, 1336 A.H.sh./1957), trans. by A. Nicholson (London, 1936); Sulamī, Kitāb adab al-uba wa-usn al-’ushra, ed. by M. J. Kister (Jerusalem, 1954) and Sulamī, Jawāmi' ādāb a-ūfiyya, ed. by E. Kohlberg (Jerusalem, 1976). Also see Ira M. Lapidus, “Knowledge, Virtue and Action: The Classical Conception of Adab in Islam,” in Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. by Barbara Metcalf (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 38–61. For a good overview of the main sources on Sufi adab, see G. Böwering, ‘The Adab Literature of Classical Sufism,” in Moral Conduct and Authority, ed. by Metcalf, 62–71.

⁷² Ay dil, bi arīq-i ‘āshiqī rāh yakī’st/Dar kishvar-i ‘ishq banda u shāh yakī’st/Tā tark-i daw-rangī nakunī dar rah-i ‘ishq/Vāqif nashawī ki Ni’mat Allāh yakī’st. In Kulliyāt…, p. 876, Quatrain 51.

⁷³ Bateson et al., “afā-yi Bāin,” 273.

⁷⁴ That is why Bāyazīd Basāmī explained that one must negate oneself to perceive “Reality” (aqīqat). “What folly to think divine Unity (tawīd) can be apprehended while still possessed by dualistic self-consciousness (dugānigī).” ‘Abd al-Ramān Jāmī, Nafaāt al-uns min aarāt al-quds, ed. by Mamūd ‘Ābidī (Tehran, 1370 A.Hsh/1991), 55. It is for this reason that Sufis have said that “as long as one perceives things from a dualistic perspective, one is just a Magian” (Ibrāhīm Khawwā, ibid., 138).

⁷⁵ Kay-Kāvūs ibn Iskandar b. Qābūs, Qābūs-nāma, ed. by Ghulām-usayn Yūsufī (Tehran, 1352/1973), 252.

⁷⁶ A saying of Abū Sa'īd al-'Arābī, in Jāmī, Nafaāt, 227.

⁷⁷ Kulliyyāt-i Shams yā Dīvān- kabīr, ed. by B. Furūzānfar (Tehran, 1336/1957), I, ghazal 332, v. 3603.