In the Sufi tradition, longing (shawq) is a state (hal, plural ahwal) experienced along the mystic path (tariq). The mystic path is the inner journey of a wayfarer (salik) in search of God. In Sufism, the mystical journey starts with the awakening in the seeker’s heart (qalb) of a perturbing need to find the divine as a living reality and to attain His nearness at all cost. In the light of this awakening, the seeker (murid, talib) senses God as beloved (habib, mahbub) and as the sole object and purpose of his/her existence. Love for this remote, glorious, and supreme Being draws the wayfarer farther on his/her arduous journey. Love is the energy that fuels the mystical journey, and without love the seeker cannot sustain the demands and hardships of the journey.
God the Beloved appears at times close and intimate—as indicated by the Qur’anic verse, “We are nearer to him than his jugular vein” (50:16). This state on the Sufi path is named proximity (qurb) and intimacy (uns). Often, however, God is felt as inaccessible and absent. Sufi vocabulary calls the polar state of proximity-remoteness bu’d. There are Sufis who by temperament and disposition are prone to the rapturous feelings that arise from states of nearness. But to many the love of God often seems unrequited. In the search of Him whom the heart desires, many a lover wander in pain and desolation “in the wilderness of loneliness,” to use a Sufi idiom.
The sense of the Beloved’s remoteness and absence breeds longing which is often felt as a consuming fire. Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, a tenth-century Sufi author, whose The topic of Scintillating Lights (Kitab al-luma’) is one of the earliest compilations of Sufi lore, cites the following dicta: “Longing is the state of the worshipper for whom, due to his yearning to meet his beloved, existence has become loathsome. One of the Sufis was asked: what is longing? He said: the agitation of the heart when it remembers its beloved. Another Sufi said: Longing is a fire that God ignites within the hearts of His friends in order that it burn up in them all thought, all desire, all obstruction and all neediness.”
Some well-known Sufi figures, notably al-Hallaj—executed in Baghdad in 922—have been named “martyrs of love,” a title that highlights the uncompromising nature of their longing. To describe the intensity of such longing, al-Hallaj tells the story of the moth who, in its desire to experience the essence of fire at first hand, throws itself into it until completely consumed: “The moth hovers round the lamp. The light of the lamp is the knowledge of truth, its warmth is the truth of truth, arriving at it is the truth of all truths. The moth is not contented with the light and warmth of the lamp. It throws its whole being into it. Its fellow-kind moths wait for the moth to return, for they want it to convey to them the knowledge it had gained from first sight; but the moth has become a no-thing, it has dispersed in all directions, it now exists formless, bodiless, nameless, featureless—in what sense, then, or in what mode can it return to its fellow kind?” (Husain 1994).
The desolation caused by the intensity and lengthy duration of a search in the state of longing is expressed in many Sufi tales and poetic verses. The following verses were penned by Sumnun, a contemporary of al-Hallaj, who was nicknamed “the lover” (al-muhibb):
I had a heart within which was my life; in my tribulations I lost my heart.
Lord, return the heart to my bosom
For my chest has withered from searching for it
Save me—as long as I have a breathing soul, For you are the savior and in you is solace.
As alluded to in the Parable of the Moth, the ultimate goal of the Sufi lover’s journey is annihilation in God (fana’fi-llah). This mystical state seldom signifies physical death but rather the death of the ego—the lower-self (nafs)— and the merging of the heart, which has become devoid of all desires and wants, with the divine Beloved. Longing, therefore, is one of the mystical states on the Sufi path that herald the unio mystica, the mystical union with God.
An aspect of longing is the surfacing to memory of a primordial event experienced, according to the Sufi tradition, by the human soul in the proximity of God before it came into being in the physical world. According to a Sufi myth based upon a Quranic verse (7:172), God made a covenant (mithaq) with the souls of all human beings while they were still atoms in the loins of Adam. In this covenant a relationship based on two principles was established between God and humankind: The universal affirmation by all mankind of God’s Lordship (rububiyya)—an affirmation that must never be denied or avoided—and the witnessing of God’s innate nearness to the human soul. It is this state of primordial nearness that the awakened hearts of men and women desire to relive and for which, vis-a-vis their isolated and desolate existence in this world, they long.
This Sufi myth echoes the notion, prevalent in many ancient systems—as in Platonism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism—of the soul’s exile from its heavenly abode and its descent into this lower world. Consequently, it echoes also the desire of a few awakened souls to take the upward journey back and to ascend, via states and stages (ahwal wa-maqamat), to the primordial home in the vicinity of God.
