Sometime in the seventh century, a stranger walked into a gathering in Medina. His clothes were a startling white, and his hair was jet black. There was no dust on him from any road, and yet nobody in the room knew who he was. He sat down in front of the Prophet Muhammad, close enough that their knees touched, and began asking questions. What is submission? What is faith? And then the question that a small group of seekers would one day build their entire lives around: what is ihsan, excellence in faith?
The answer came in a single sentence.
“Worship God as though you see Him, and if you cannot see Him, know that He sees you.”
When the stranger left, the Prophet told his companions that it was the angel Gabriel who came to teach them their religion.
For most who heard it, the third answer remained a beautiful sentence. For a few, it became a way of life. In time they came to be called Sufis, after the rough wool, suf, that many of them wore.
The Sufis believed that the one thing standing between a person and God is the self.
NAFS · the self
The part of us that is proud, anxious, and always counting what it’s owed. The Sufis called it a veil.
They spent their lives thinning that veil, and their main practice for it was remarkably simple.
DHIKR · remembrance
A name of God, repeated in time with the breath, until it sinks from the tongue into the heart.
Over years, remembering stops being something you do and becomes the place you live. And at the end of that road waits the thing every Sufi longed for.
KASHF · unveiling
The moment the veil lifts and the heart finally sees. Nothing in the world has changed. Only the one looking at it has.
Spirituality woven into ordinary life
Sufis did not leave ordinary life behind. They prayed, worked hard, and raised families. What they added was a way of living. They stayed close to a teacher and chose their friends with care. They served strangers. They answered harm with patience.
By the 11th century, some Sufis felt this way of life was fading. The scholar Hujwiri recorded the words of an older master, who said that Sufism was once a reality without a name and had now become a name without a reality.
The three masters in this essay are what that reality looked like.
Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra: Ikhlas (Sincerity)
“I will not serve God like a laborer in expectation of my wages.”
— Rabia saying, as rendered by Idries Shah
Rabia al-Adawiyya lived in Basra in the eighth century–more than 1,200 years ago. Most of what we know about her comes from accounts written long after her death, but they agree on one thing: she was among the first Sufis to speak of the relationship with God as love.
Her best-known story has her walking through Basra with a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When asked what she was doing, she said she meant to burn paradise and put out the fires of hell so that people would worship God for Himself alone, not out of fear or for reward.
The Sufis call this ikhlas, sincerity. The word comes from an Arabic root meaning to purify, and it describes acting for God alone, with nothing else mixed in. Once, when asked whether she hated Satan, Rabia said her love for God left no room in her heart for hatred. For her, sincerity shaped not only why we worship but what the heart makes room for.
Legend holds that she was sold into slavery as a child and spent her early years working without pay and choice. When she was finally freed, she did not seek wages. She devoted her nights to prayer. One of those prayers has come down to us:
Rabia al-Adawiyya: “O my Lord, the stars are shining and the eyes of men are closed, and kings have shut their doors, and every lover is alone with his beloved, and here am I alone with Thee.”
–Translated by Margaret Smith
She had once worked for nothing because she had no choice. Free at last, she chose to love for nothing. When love expects a return, it can always be disappointed. When it expects nothing, there is nothing left to take from it.
For Rabia, sincerity meant one simple thing: Let what you do and why you do it be the same. Pray because you love. Help because someone needs it. Work because the work deserves your best. There is a lightness in living this way when there is nothing left to perform. And when we stop performing for one another, the people around us become what they were meant to be: companions.
Jalaluddin Rumi of Konya: Suhbat (Companionship)
Before he became a poet, Rumi was a scholar. In Konya he taught law and theology, delivered sermons, and was respected for his learning. By every conventional measure, his life was complete.
Far away, a dervish named Shams of Tabriz had been praying for one thing. He wandered constantly, travelling from Tabriz to Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo, so often that people called him Parandeh, the Flier. All the while, he was searching for someone who could bear the full weight of the ma’rifa, the inner knowledge of God, that he carried. In his discourses, he recalled begging God for the company of His saints. Then, in a dream, an answer came: He would be given the companionship of one.
“Where is he?” Shams asked. The next night, he was told, “In Anatolia,” in what is now Turkey.
Legend says they first crossed paths in Damascus, around 1228. Rumi was 21, a young scholar still years away from the man he would become. Shams recognized him at once. And in that same moment, he heard, “It is still not time.”
So Shams did the hardest thing a seeker can do. He walked away from the answer to his own prayer and waited 16 years. Later, he summed up that long wait in a single sentence:
“Affairs are in pawn to their times.”
– Shams of Tabriz, Maqalat, translated by William C. Chittick in Me and Rumi.
In 1244, the time came. Shams arrived in Konya, and the two finally met. What passed between them that day, no one can say for certain. The old accounts don’t even agree on which of the two was more overcome. What they do agree on is that neither man walked away the same.
After that, the two were rarely apart. For a long time they withdrew from the world, talking, sitting in silence, and praying. Rumi stopped teaching. The scholar who had known so many answers was learning, for the first time, how to ask.
The Sufis call this suhbat companionship: the belief that we become the company we keep and that the right companion can carry us further than any amount of study. Rumi put it in one of his ghazals:
Dilaa nazd-e kase benshin ke oo az dil khabar daarad
Ba zer-e aan darakhte rau ke oo gul-haa-e tar daarad
O heart, sit only with someone who understands the heart. Go stand beneath the tree that bears fresh flowers.
– Rumi, Divan-e Shams, ghazal 563
Not everyone understood. Rumi’s students resented the stranger who had taken their teacher from them, and before long, Shams left Konya. Rumi was heartbroken. He sent his own son, Sultan Walad, to bring Shams back, and for a while Shams returned.
Shams later suggested that his leaving had a purpose. Rumi, he said, needed to be cooked by separation. And he was. The fire Rumi had once only taught about was now inside him, and it never went out.
Then, around 1248, Shams disappeared for good. No one knows for certain what happened to him. At first, Rumi searched, then stopped, as he found Shams somewhere else: within himself. He named his great collection of ghazals after his friend and master, the Divan-e Shams, and felt that much of what he wrote afterward was Shams speaking through him.
This is what true companionship asked of Rumi: the humility to be taught, faith in the one teaching, and a love that could survive absence.
Maulvi hargiz na shud Maula-e Rum
Taa ghulaam-e Shams-e Tabrizi na shud
The Maulvi never became the Master of Rum until he became the servant of Shams of Tabriz.
— a couplet sung in the qawwali tradition
Most of us have known someone like that, or are still waiting for them: a teacher, a friend, someone who sees what we could become before we do. Shams’s story offers a quiet comfort. The right companion cannot be found by force. They arrive when we are ready to receive them. Until then, our work is to become someone worth meeting. Over time, the company we keep shapes the way we treat everyone else.
Saadi of Shiraz: Adab (Conduct)
Bani Adam a’za-ye yekdigarand
Ke dar aafarinesh ze yek goharand
Human beings are limbs of one another, made from a single essence.
– Saadi, Gulistan
Saadi left Shiraz when he was young, and by his own telling he was gone for almost thirty years. These were the years the Mongols swept through the Persian world, and he lived through them on the road. When he finally came home, he had a lifetime of stories, and he put them into two books, the Bustan (the Orchard) and the Gulistan (the Rose Garden).
Early in the Gulistan, there is a lump of clay. A friend hands it to Saadi in a bathhouse, and it smells so sweet that he asks whether it is musk. The clay says no. It was just ordinary earth, but it had spent some time sitting next to a rose, and some of the rose had stayed with it.
Rumi showed us that we become the company we keep. Saadi takes it one step further and asks how we then carry ourselves among other people. His word for this is adab. People usually translate it as manners, but that undersells it. Adab is what the inside of a person looks like from the outside: the courtesy, gratitude, restraint and humility that come from a heart in the right place. There’s an old Sufi saying that the whole of Sufism is adab.
Saadi mostly taught it through stories about himself, though some of them have probably grown in the telling. Once, he walked into the mosque at Kufa feeling bitter because he had no shoes. Then he saw a man there who had no feet.
Another story goes back to his childhood. He stayed up the whole night praying beside his father while everyone else in the house slept. In the morning, rather pleased with himself, he told his father that not one of them had gotten up to pray and that they slept as if they were dead. His father said, gently, that it would have been better if Saadi had slept too, instead of staying up to find fault with everyone else.
Be grateful for what you have, and don’t let your own goodness make you look down on anyone. For Saadi, that was most of what adab meant.
Underneath it all was the belief in the lines at the top of this section. They go on:
Cho uzwe ba dard aawarad rozgaar
Digar uzw-haa raa namaanad qaraar
Tu kaz mehnat-e deegaraan be-ghami
Nashaayad ke naamat nehand aadami
When life brings pain to one limb, the others cannot rest. If you feel nothing for the suffering of others, you do not deserve to be called human.
– Saadi, Gulistan
More than seven hundred years later, these lines were woven into a carpet that now hangs at the United Nations in New York.
For Saadi, good conduct was simply love showing up in small ways: in how we talk to someone who can do nothing for us, or how we reply when someone is rude. That is where adab lives.
While we are still here
Rabia loved without asking to be paid. Rumi found the friend he never knew he was waiting for and then lost him. Saadi spent a lifetime being gentle with people who could give him nothing back. They lived centuries ago, in cities most of us will never see, and still they ask the same thing of us: love now, love without keeping accounts, and love the people in front of you before time takes them or takes you.
None of this asks us to leave our lives. It asks us to live them differently. To call the parent, we keep putting it off. To forgive the friend we have been punishing in silence. To be kind to the stranger who will never know our name.
And these three were never the whole story. The Divine was never confined to Basra, Konya, or Shiraz. Wherever a heart is willing to empty itself, there is room for Him, and wherever there is room for Him, His lovers appear. In those same centuries, in other lands, under other skies, others were walking the same road and singing of the same Beloved in tongues of their own.
For part 2 of this article, come back here on October 13.
Agrim Verma can be contacted at agrim.works@gmail.com
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