The Sufis were forced to pay an exaggerated deference to the Prophet and to Ali in order to keep on good terms with the orthodox, but since they believed God to be the source of all creeds they could not reasonably place one above another; nay more, since they taught that any man who practised a particular religion had failed to free himself from duality and to reach perfect union with God, they must have held Mahommadanism in like contempt with all other faiths. “When thou and I remain not (when man is completely united with God), what matters the Ka'ba and the Synagogue and the Monastery?”* That is, what difference is there between the religion of Mahommadan, Jew, and Christian? “One night,” says Ferideddin Attar in a beautiful allegory, “the angel Gabriel was seated on the branches of a tree in the Garden of Paradise, and he heard God pronounce a word of assent. ‘At this moment,’ thought the angel, ‘some man is invoking God. I know not who he is; but this I know, that he must be a notable servant of the Lord, one whose soul is dead to evil and whose spirit lives.’ Then Gabriel desired to know who this man could be, but in the seven zones he found him not. He traversed the land and the sea and found him not in mountain or in plain. Therefore he hastened back to the presence of God, and again he heard him give a favourable answer to the same prayers. Again he set forth and sought through the world, yet he saw not the servant of God. ‘Oh Lord,’ he cried, ‘show me the path that leads to him upon whom thy favours fall!’ ‘Go to the Land of Rome,’ God answered, ‘and in a certain monastery thou shalt find him.’ Thither fled Gabriel, and found him whom he sought, and lo! he was worship­ping an idol. When he returned, Gabriel opened his lips and said, ‘Oh Master, draw aside for me the veil from this secret: why fulfillest thou the prayers of one who invokes an idol in a monastery?’ And God replied, ‘His spirit is darkened and he knows not that he has missed the way; but since he errs from ignorance, I pardon his fault: my mercy is extended to him, and I allow him to enter into the highest place.’”

In the language of religious mysticism, God is not only the Creator and Ruler of the world, he is also the Essentially Beautiful and the True Beloved. Love, of which the divine being is at once the source and the object, plays a large part in Sufi writings, a part which it is difficult, and sometimes unwise, to distinguish from an exaggerated expression of the human affections. Jami describes Pure Being, before it had been manifested in Creation, “singing of love unto itself in a wordless melody,”* and in the same strain Hafiz sings of “the Imperial Beauty which is for ever playing the game of love with itself.” Like the echo of a Greek voice falls Jami's doctrine of human love: “Avert not thy face from an earthly beloved, since even this may serve to raise thee to the love of the True.” It is almost possible to read in the Persian poem the words of the wise Diotima to Socrates: “He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and has learnt to see the Beautiful in true order and succes­sion, when he comes towards the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wonderful beauty, not growing or decaying, waxing or waning … he who, under the influence of true love, rising upward from these things begins to see that beauty, is not far from the end.”

The Sufis had no difficulty in finding in the Koran texts in support of their teaching. When Mahom-mad exclaims, “There are times when neither cherubim nor prophet are equal unto me!” the Sufis declare that he alludes to moments of ecstatic union with God; and his account of the victory of Bedr—“Thou didst not slay them, but God slew them, and thou didst not shoot when thou didst shoot, but God shot”—they take as a proof of the Prophet's belief in the essential oneness of God and man.* The whole book is twisted after this fashion into agreement with their views.

Beautiful and spiritual as some of these doctrines are, they can hardly be said to form an adequate guide to conduct. The Sufis, however, are regarded in the East as men leading a virtuous and pure life. Even the etymology of their name points to the same conclusion: Sufi comes from an Arabic word signi­fying wool, and indicates that they were accustomed to clothe themselves in simple woollen garments. They occupy in the East much the same position that Madame Guyon and the Jansenists occupied in the West, and they teach the same doctrine of quietism, which, while it lends to its followers the virtues of exaggerated submission, saps the root of a faith that is manifested in works. So far as the Sufis are striving earnestly after union with God, they are saved from the logical consequences of their doctrines: “Their ear is strained to catch the sounds of the lute, their eyes are fixed upon the cup, their bosoms are filled with the desire of this world and of the world to come.”* And in the same spirit Hafiz sings: “Though the wind of discord shake the two worlds, mine eyes are fixed upon the road from whence cometh my Friend.” The idealism of the Sufis led them to deny the morality of all actions, but they restricted the consequences of their principles to the adepts who had attained to perfect union with God, and even for them the moments of ecstasy are few. Most Sufis are good and religious men, holding it their duty to conform outwardly, and no discredit to use all artifices to conceal from the orthodox the beliefs which they cherish in their heart, but holding also that the practice of the Mahommadan religion, to the rites of which they have attached symbolic meanings, is the only way to the perfection to which they aspire. Nevertheless, Count Gobineau is of opinion that quietism is the great curse of the East. “The dominant characteristic of Sufiism,” he says, “is to unite by a weak chain of doctrine, ideas the significance of which is very different, so different that there is in reality but one connecting link between them, and that link is a quietism adapted to them all, a passive disposition of spirit which surrounds with a nimbus of inert sentiment all con­ceptions of God, of man, and of the universe. It is this quietism, and not Islam, which is the running sore of all Oriental countries.”

Unfortunately, as he points out, the conditions of Oriental life are such as to enforce rather than to control a disposition to mysticism. The poets found ready to their hand a mass of vague and beautiful thought eminently suited to imaginative treatment; whether they believed in it or not they used it, and thereby popularised it, delighting, as only an Oriental can, in the necessity of veiling it with exquisite symbolism, and throwing round it a cloud of charming phrases. These phrases caught and held the Oriental ear; and the Oriental mind is faithful to a formula once accepted. Moreover, when a man looked about him and saw the vicissi­tudes of mortal existence—nowhere more marked than in the East—how conqueror succeeded con­queror and empire empire, how the humble was exalted and the mighty thrown from his seat, how swift was the vengeance of God in sweeping pesti­lence and resistless famine, and how unsparing the forces of nature, he turned to a philosophy which taught that all earthly things were alike vain—virtue and patriotism and the love of wife and child, power and beauty and the bold part played in a hopeless fight; he remembered what he had learnt from poets and story-tellers—“Behold the world is as the shadow of a cloud and a dream of the night.”