Philosophies of Happiness by Diana Lobel

Author:Diana Lobel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

The tenth-century Sufi-influenced thinker Ibn Sīna (Avicenna) already expressed this Sufi theme of the soul as mirror to the divine. He writes that at the end of the spiritual journey, the soul of the knower of God (al-’ārif) becomes “a polished mirror facing the Truth … At this level, he sees both himself and the Truth. He still hesitates between them; but then, becoming oblivious to himself, he is aware only of the Sacred Presence, or if he is at all aware of himself, it is only as one who gazes on the Truth. It is then that true union (wuṣūl) is achieved.”84

ʿAṭṭār likewise reflects the motif of looking back and forth between the Truth and creation until they merge. In the prose translation of Ritter: “When they looked at the Simurgh, that Simurgh was actually the thirty birds who’d travelled the path. If they looked at themselves, then the thirty birds were that other Simurgh. And if they looked at both at the same time, then both were one Simurgh. They’re given this answer: ‘This kingly presence is like a sun-bright mirror. Whoever comes here sees himself in it.… You’ve come here as si murgh (thirty birds) and appeared as thirty birds in the mirror.’”85

We find in ʿAṭṭār’s poem reflection of two culminating moments of the Sufi path: fanā’ (annihilation) and baqā’ (eternal abiding). ʿAṭṭār avoids the controversial terms union (ittiḥād) or worse still incarnation (ḥulūl). He is more comfortable with the term istighrāq, being immersed or engrossed in God:86

Dispersed to nothingness until once more

You find in Me the selves you were before.87

The ego dissolves, but we discover that the same beings we were remain—present now from God’s point of view. The self is reinstated, but as a mirror of the divine; beings are in one sense exactly what they were before, but experience themselves from the divine rather than the limited human point of view. Having taken on the divine qualities, the self returns to the world as a living witness to the Beloved. This motif is expressed in the story of the death of al-Ḥallāj, the famed “martyr of love,” who was killed for some of his statements made in ecstasy, such as “I am the Truth! (anā al-ḥaqq), the Truth being a name for God:88

Ḥallāj’s corpse was burnt and when the flame

Subsided, to the pyre a sufi came

Who stirred the ashes with his staff and said:

Where has the cry “I am the Truth” now fled?89

Even the Sufi al-Ḥallāj, who declares he is the Truth, dissolves, only to be rediscovered as a divine essence—a shadow merged in the divine sun. Where has the cry “I am the Truth” now fled? Where is the Ḥallāj we once knew? However, the dissolution in the silence of the Simorgh is not the end of the story; annihilation or extinction (fanā’) is followed by permanence after extinction (al-baqā’ ba’d al-fanā’; Ritter, 652):

A hundred thousand centuries went by,

And then those birds, who were content to die,

To vanish in annihilation, saw

Their Selves had

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