The Concept of Walâya

One of the most fundamental dimensions of Walâya is beautifully summarized in the following hadîth qudsî:

(God said:) "For Me, the most blessed of My friends1 is the person of faith who is unburdened (by possessions), who takes pleasure in prayer, who carries out well his devotion to his Lord and eagerly serves Him in secret. He is concealed among the people; no one points him out. His sustenance is barely sufficient, and he is content with that.... His death comes quickly, there are few mourners, and his estate is small."2

Now the living presence of the "Friend of God" or walî (pl. awliyâ'), in one manifestation or another--whether it be Muhammad and his Family or certain Companions, any of the earlier prophets, the Shiite Imams, or the many pious Muslims who have come to be recognized posthumously as "saints"--has for centuries been a central focus of popular religious and devotional life in much of the Islamic world.3 But the true walî, as this hadîth stresses, is most often publicly "invisible" in this life, outwardly indistinguishable from many other normally devout Muslim men and women. And even after death, for those awliyâ' whose mission of sanctity or "proximity" to God (walâya) has become more widely recognized, the mysterious reality of their ongoing influence likewise remains invisible to most people, revealing itself directly only at the appropriate moments in individual, highly personalized means of contact: through dreams, visions, intuitions and spiritual acts of Grace (karamât) or special blessings that only appear to "those with the eyes to see."

Thus this famous hadîth suggests two basic considerations that should be kept in mind whenever one encounters the written works usually associated with Islamic "mysticism". The first point is that with rare exceptions such texts were not originally meant to be studied by themselves. Usually they were understood, by their author and audience alike, to be only secondary or accessory means to their aim (and often their source): the awliyâ'--taken in the broadest sense, including the prophets and Imams--and the gradual realization of that spiritual condition of walâya, or "closeness to God", embodied in such individuals.4 The second, closely related point is that such "mystical" writings in their original context--and especially those works written in languages other than classical Arabic--were often quite inseparable from the whole range of "popular" religion, from the faith so diversely lived and practiced by the mass of the Muslim population (in contrast to the versions represented by the Arabic traditional religious sciences and the claims of their learned urban male interpreters). In fact in many regions of the Muslim world that faith was originally spread and inculcated almost entirely by such popular "mystical" writings and their even more widespread oral equivalents, or rather above all by the saints and other religious teachers who conveyed (and often created) both that literature and the music and other forms of spiritual practice that typically accompanied it.

If one keeps both those essential points in mind, it is easy to understand the practical and historical reasons behind the profusion of personalities and spiritual methods, symbols, practices, and beliefs that one discovers already in the lives of the classical exemplars of Islamic mysticism in Baghdad and Khorasan in the 3rd century (A.H.). But those same considerations also help us to appreciate the deep sense of disillusionment and failure, of something gone profoundly wrong, whenever the spiritual dimension of Islam has come to be identified with any particular, exclusive set of such historical forms.5 That recurrent realization was summed up in the frequently echoed response of the Khurasani mystic al-Qûshanjî (d. 348/959) to a disciple's naive
question "What is Sufism (tasawwuf)?":

"(Today it's) a name without reality; but it used to be a reality without a name."6

Whether name or reality, the unavoidable problem for students of religion is that there is still so little accessible literature that one can rely on to provide either of these essential contexts for understanding the wider religious functions and meaning of the many written--and the far more extensive unwritten--forms and expressions of Islamic mysticism.

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1 awliyâ'î (singular walî): i.e., those who are "close to" God, probably alluding to the famous Qur'ânic verses 10:62-64:"...the friends of God, they have no fear and they do not grieve...theirs is the Good News in this lower life and in the next (life)...that is the Tremendous Attainment".. The same Arabic term--which also carries significant connotations of "protector", "guardian" and even "governor"--also appears as one of the more frequent Names of God (at 2:257; 3:68; 45:19; etc.). In most branches of Shiite thought it is one of the many Qur'anic terms taken as references to the spiritual function of the Imams, while in later Sufism--most elaborately in the thought of Ibn cArabî and his successors--the term is usually understood to refer to the particular spiritual state of proximity to God (walâya) shared by the divine Messengers, prophets (anbiyâ') and saints, besides the different spiritual functions that distinguish each of those members of the spiritual hierarchy.

2 This hadîth is included, with minor variations, in the canonical collections of Tirmidhî,
Ibn Mâja, and Ibn Hanbal.

3 Throughout this short paper it should be kept in mind that the English word "saint" (and its equivalents in other Christian contexts) is quite inadequate to convey either the centrality or the fluidity of the implicit associations and spiritual connections which are typically perceived in
Islamic devotional contexts. This is particularly true in prayers at a specific shrine, or within a given Sufi path - between the divine al-Walî and the wide spectrum of human and spiritual exemplars or “theophanies" (mazâhir) that are typically available to each individual Muslim or local community. And even within Islamic religious scholarship, the learned theological explanations of these central popular devotional practices (in terms of functions like wasîla,
shifâca, wilâya, and the like) usually depend on drawing firm distinctions and conceptual boundaries that scarcely reflect the intimate spiritual realities of actual prayer and devotional life.

4 While the different actual roles of various types of mystical writings and their interplay with oral traditions and teaching in pre-modern contexts are discussed in more detail below, we should add that many of the same points are also relevant to the transmission of many other (non-"mystical") forms of Islamic tradition and learning, including especially the oral transmission of hadîth, which continued for centuries beyond the more limited domain of their usage within the narrower sphere of Islamic law (fiqh).

5 A typical sign of this phenomenon recurring in different contexts throughout Islamic history is the characteristic progressive socio-linguistic devaluation of technical terms once used to refer to "mystics" as soon as the practices or institutions connected with those forms of spirituality have become popularly "corrupted" (from the perspective of different elites).

6 The dictum is repeated in two of the most famous Persian works on Sufism, Hujwîrî's (d. ca. 465/1071) Kashf al-Mahjûb (tr. R.A. Nicholson, London, 1911, p. 44, where the name is given as Fûshanjî), and Jâmî's (d. 1492) biographical dictionary, Nafahât al-'Uns (ed. M. Tawhîdîpûr, Tehran, 1336 h.s./1957, pp. 255-56), apparently based on a more direct account in the earlier Arabic Tabaqât of Sulamî (d. 412/1021).