misharogov on Nostr: One of the most famous conversion stories in early Sufism is that of Fuḍayl ibn ...

One of the most famous conversion stories in early Sufism is that of Fuḍayl ibn ʿIyāḍ. He was a highwayman, albeit a magnanimous one, between the cities of Abiward and Sarakhs. One day, on the way to his beloved, he happened to hear a verse from the Koran and immediately gave up banditry, thereafter devoting himself to the study of the Prophetic tradition in Kufa. He died in Mecca in 803. Fuḍayl is a typical representative of early orthodox asceticism, “and when he died, sadness was taken away from the world” (Q 9). This sadness is reflected in many of his sayings. He disliked the company of people, and in words reminiscent of his contemporary Rābiʿa, the woman saint, he said: “When night comes I am happy that I am alone, without separation, with God, and when morning comes I get distressed because I detest the view of those people who enter and disturb my solitude” (T 1:31). Although Fuḍayl was married, he considered family life one of the greatest obstacles on the way to God; he was seen smiling only once in thirty years—when his son died. This event was, for him, a sign of divine grace: “When God loves His servant, He afflicts him, and when He loves him very much He takes hold of him and leaves for him neither family nor wealth” (G 4:282). (The feeling of happiness at the death of family members was not unknown among medieval Christian mystics either, as the story of Angela di Foligno shows).12 Even Jalāluddīn Rūmī wrote, quite without feeling, in a verse of his Mathnawī: “The death of his children was for him like sweetmeat” (M 3:1927); and the indifference of some Indo-Muslim Chishtī saints of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the death of family members is well known. On the other hand, many of the great Sufis and founders of mystical fraternities were married and had large families—Aḥmad-i Jām had forty-two children (N 357), and ʿAbduʾl-Qādir Gīlānī had forty-nine sons. Yet so rare is it to find any approval of happy family life in Sufi sayings that one is quite unprepared for the exception one meets in Mīr Dard, the saint of Delhi in the eighteenth century, who exclaimed in one of his books: “I love my wife and my children dearly.”13 Among the early ascetics, a preference for celibacy was common in spite of the Prophet’s example of married life and his advice to raise a family. But, as Dārānī says, “the sweetness of adoration and undisturbed surrender of the heart which the single man can feel the married man can never experience” (G 2:22). The restlessness caused by marriage, the distraction from God, has often been described by the Sufis (N 217), and the sorrows of family life might be regarded as “punishment for the execution of legally permitted lusts” (N 185). Fuḍayl’s elder contemporary, Ibrāhīm ibn Adham (d. circa 790), whom he met at Mecca, expressed such a notion in a striking sentence often quoted in Sufi poetry and prose: “When a man marries he embarks on a ship, and when a child is born he suffers shipwreck” (L 199).

— Annemarie Shimmel