By the end of the 3rd century Sufi mysticism was fast becoming an organized system, with rules of discipline and devotion which the novice was bound to learn from his spiritual director, to whose guidance he submitted himself absolutely, as to one regarded as being in intimate communion with God. At the head of these directors stood a mysterious personage called the Qutb (Axis) ; on the hierarchy of saints over which he presided the whole order of the universe was believed to depend. During the next two hundred years (A.D. 900-1100), various manuals of theory and practice were compiled : the Kitab al Lumat by Abil Nasr al-Sarraj, the Qiit al-Qulub by Abu Talib al-Makki, the Risala of Qushayri, the Persian Kashf al-Mahjfib by 'Ali ibn al-Hujwiri, and the famous Ihya by Ghazal'. They all expatiate on the discipline of the soul and describe the process of purgation which it must undergo before entering on the contemplative life. The traveller journeying towards God passes through a series of ascending "stations"; in the oldest extant treatise these are : repentance, (2) abstinence, (3) renunciation, (4) poverty, (5) patience, (6) trust in God, (7) acquiescence in the will of God. After the "stations" comes a parallel scale of "states" of spiritual feeling (ahwal), such as fear, hope, love, etc., leading up to con templation (mushahadat) and intuition (yaqin). It only remained to provide Sufism with a metaphysical basis, and to reconcile it with orthodox Islam. The double task was finally accomplished by Ghazali (q.v.). He made Islamic theology mystical, and since his time the revelation (kashf) of the mystic has taken its place beside tradition (naql) and reason (taql) as a source and fundamental principle of the faith.
The Sufis comprise many shades of opinion—from asceticism and quietism to pantheism. The pantheistic type which prevails in Persia throws the transcendental and visionary aspects of Sufiism into undue relief, as in the sayings attributed to Bayazid (d. A.D. e.g., "I am the winedrinker and the wine and the cup bearer"; "I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, '0 Thou I.' " The peculiar imagery which distinguishes the poetry of the Persian Sufis was developed by Abu Said ibn Abi'l-Khayr (d. A.D. 1049) in his quatrains which express the relation between God and the soul by glowing and fantastic alle gories of earthly love, beauty and intoxication. Henceforward, the great poets of Persia, with few exceptions, adopt this symbolic language. The whole doctrine of Persian Sufiism is expounded in the celebrated Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rurni (q.v.) but in a discursive and unscientific manner; its leading principles may be stated briefly as follows God is the sole reality (al-Haqq) and is above all names and definitions. He is not only absolute Being, but also absolute
Good, and therefore absolute Beauty. It is the nature of beauty to desire manifestation; the phenomenal universe is the result of this desire, according to the famous Tradition in which God says, "I was a hidden treasure, and I desired to be known, so I created the creatures in order that I might be known." As things can be known only through their opposites, Being can only be known through Not-being, wherein as in a mirror Being is re flected; and this reflection is the phenomenal universe, which accordingly has no more reality than a shadow cast by the sun.
The Sufi theosophy as it appears in Persian and Turkish poetry tends to abolish the distinction between good and evil— the latter is nothing but an aspect of not-being and has no real existence—and it leads to the deification of the hierophant who can say, like Husain b. Mansur al-Hallaj, "I am the Truth." Sufi fraternities, living in a convent under the direction of a shaykh, became widely spread before A.D. I ioo and gave rise to Dervish orders, most of which indulge in the practice of exciting ecstasy by music, dancing, drugs and various kinds of hypnotic suggestion (see DERVISH).