Reading Ruzbihan

Ruzbihan Baqli (1128-1209) lived in Shiraz in Fars in southwestern Iran at a time when the Seljuk Turks had become Muslim and supported the Sunni caliphate and created alliances between the ulama (religious scholars) and Sufis. During his lifetime Iran was ruled by Seljuks, Salghurid and Mongol govenors. Ruzbihan preached in the principal mosque in Shiraz for most of his life.

Within a hundred years after his death, Ruzbihan's tomb was a major pilgrimage center.

Historically, Ruzbihan, born in Fasa, was educated in Sufism at the ribat of the Banu Salbih family (Ernest, p. 2). While there he had a vision that caused him to close up his business as a grocer (thus the name Baqli, Grocer) and wander in the desert for three years. Then in 1144 "he joined the Sufis, serving them, learning their discipline, and studying and memorizing the Qur'an." (Ernst, Ruzbihan 1996, p. 2)

Then Ruzbihan was a student of three Sufi masters:

Jamaluddin Abi al-Wafa’ ibn Khalil al-Fasa’i (named by Ruzbihan in his diaries).
Sirajuddin Mahmaud ibn al-Khalifa (also of the Banu Salbih and the Kazaruni lineage of Persian Sufism) and
Abu as-Safa’ al-Wasita.

The library at the ribat of Banu Salbih offered Ruzbihan access to the writings of Hallaj and through him the ecstatic (sukr tradition of Sufism. Ruzbihan's bearing and appearance was charismatic and magnetic and beaming with love. Ruzbihan prized beauty and saw God as 'Ishq the powerfully passionate love of divine attraction. God is a name derived from the root word for "ravishing" ("walah" ) and not the root of a god ("alaha")

Ruzbihan mentions less than a handful of teachers.

Ruzbihan never mentions Sirajuddin or the Kaszaruni lineage. Ruzbihan also studied hadith, in particular the Masabih.

He may have been a murid of the following shaykhs as well:

Jagir Kurdi
Qiwam al-Din Suhrawardi

Ruzbihan’s biographer Shamsuddin jmaintains that Abu al-Safa conferred upon Ruzbihan the cloak of initiation.

In 1165 Ruzbihan established a ribat in Shiraz.

THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION: RUZBIHAN'S COMMENTARY

Ruzbihan Baqli wrote that his mystical Qur’an commentary was “the unveiling of the brides of the elucidation.” Ruzbihan writes about divine realms as very direct immediate and unimediated experiences. The moment of experience is an unveiling, and not just any unveiling, but the unveiling of a bride: it is a decisive moment.

Ruzbihan grew up in a non-religious family and had a number of spiritual experiences as a child. But he considered the experience he had at age fifteen to be the first “unveiling” (kashf ).

A text can work as a representation or a text can enshrine a rhetoric of mysticism that mystifies. One aspect of mystification includes the human being's encounter with death. For many people in the world a text stands at the intersection between people's lives and their experience of the comprehensive ultimate unified reality. In some traditions the text has to take the place of the temple and its rituals. The text sometimes replaces the temple as the ultimate immortality symbol. In this text, our hero, Khidr, is an immortal teacher. Maybe he's even an immortal prophet. In addition to being immortal, he teaches Moses by involve him in case-study problem-solving learning situations. Whether the lesson was taught and learned might also be fruitful.

But this text transmits a narrative about a teaching transmission that transcends Moses' system of ethics -- even if that system is divinely derived/ This story provides the ultimate attack on fundamentalism. Moses is right in each case if you "go by the book." But if, like Khidr, you follow the muse of intuition and of listening to the music of God's heart.

The musical metaphor is impprtant because the social scientists who have written about narratives that involve death and evoke the question of one's own death create mortality salience inductions have thought about Art and the Artist. They have presented the Artist as the hero and art as the comic heroic immortality project.

What is immortality? One thing we know about immortality is that everyone has had one time or another thought about the question of what it would be like. Some realize that unless everyone was immortal you would be lonely watching your friends die and aching from all the pains you had acquired in your body. At least immortality manifests in the legacy, heritage, inheritance, contribution, mnonuments and landmarks of life. So one is a courageous hero who is an artist at heart, an artist of life.

And Khidr is an artist. He is like the hero and the artist in an elite station and has an elite status (khass). Ruzbihan is quick to bring this up that this verse shows verifies that there are special saints God has chosen. In the case of Khidr, God has chosaen to give him compassion and inner wisdom. So Khidr has mastered the art of showing compassion and living and teaching wisdom.

This story brings us face-to-face with the harsh realities of the master-disciple relationship where domination and control are coupled with problems of transference and disobedience.
Khid as a being ands as a teacher stands multiplty as an immortality symbol in another immortality symbol (the Qur'an as a synechdoche or metonymy of God.) Tese two immortality symbols are units of communication, narration and inner reflection in an immortality ideology called Islam.

Now the tangible teaching transmission steps forth as a significant immortality symbol in an immortality ideology of Sufism that teaches that the Prophet taught “Die before you die.” And like Plato, Ruzbihan’s ultimate immortality symbol is love, ‘ishq. Passionate love is a metaphor of God. So God is love, Beauty and lived truth, haqq. Like Bestami, ‘Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadani, and al-Hallaj, Ruzbihan stands out among ecstatics. Ruzbihan is the master of all the ecstatics. Ruzbihan practices the sub rosa face-to-face and eye-to-eye gazing into the windows of the soul. God is love, not just love, but passionate love. Using an alternative etymology, Ruzbihan asserts that the root of the name of God Allah is not as most grammarians maintain, “a-l-h,” but the root for the word “to ravish as beautiful,” “w-l-h.”

Writing onj 18.65a Ruzbihan clearly asserts that the privileged class to which Khidr and Muhammad belong is the rank of "servants." Ruzbihan gives special emphasis to the mastery in servitude. These people of the secret and of the secret of the secret know the secret of servitude, Khidr is the pre-eminently selected servant among all of God's servants: ('Ibad al-'ibadana). He is so special that the folk people and Alexander Romance writers will take to calling him an immortal being. Then the people of Palestine, Lebasnon and Turkey will hybridize him with St. George and Elijah as messianic heroes without decisive political power. Muslims know the uniqueness of this story which is pubically proclaimed from Friday mosque loud speakers that typically include in the morning's readings, the eighteenth chapter, the Sura of the Cave from which this story comes. From the Alexander Romances we get iconographic illustrations and the story that he derved as Alexander's cook, deputy and ambassador. He was to Alexander what Hanuman was to Rama. In support of Alexander's mission to get the water of eternal life, Khidr first found it, drank it and brought Alexander back only to find that the water had moved.

“And he found a servant from among Our servants.” (18.65a)
In this there is a hidden indication that God, Glorified be He, has certain selected [khawassan] servants. They are those whom He selected for gnosis (ma‘rifa) from the sciences of Lordship (‘ulum al-rububiya), the secrets of unicity, the realities of wisdom and subtle graces of His angelic and majestic realms (malakutihi wa jabarutihi) that He reserves for himself. They [these selected ones (khawass)] are the people of the unseen, [the people of] the unseen of the unseen, [the people of] the secret, and [the people of] the secret of the secret. [They are] the ones whom Allah has concealed in His concealment, veiled from His own creation out of compassion (shafaqa) for them due to the secret of God that they display. They are the servants in reality (haqiqa), those who reached the reality of servanthood, in the sense that Allah made their servanthood parallel (muhadhiyan) to His Lordship (rububiyatihi). Otherwise all [of His servants] are His servants from the viewpoint of creation, but they are servants in reality from the perspective of gnosis (ma‘rifa).
Were it not for that pure characteristic (al-khassiya al-mahda), [i.e., that they are servants in truth] he [the Prophet Muhammad] (upon him be peace) would not have said, “I am indeed the servant -- la ilaha illa Allah. I am the servant in Truth, and no other.” What honor is more honorable for Khidr (upon him be peace) than this distinction that [Allah] called him a “servant.” And who in reality can be His servant? Were it not for His sufficient compassion (law la rahmatahu al-kafiya) which proceeds from pre-eternity (azal) to His servants? Otherwise it would not have been permissible for His servant to say “I am your servant,” for He [Allah] transcends (munazzah) the need to have the temporal (hadathan) truly serve Him.


So how does this set of values shape his exegesis of the Qur’an, especially around the master-disciple relationship in the story of the Green Man, Khidr.

Like Plato, Ruzbihan adheres to the call of Beauty in its many forms. Ruzbihan is known for the shaid bazi and nazar practices of Sufism, but one alos sees that his way of writing about it matches the terms of Plato.

Unveiling is a metaphor for Sufi Qur’an exegesis.

In his first sermon, Ruzbihan addressed the congregation of the ‘Atiq mosque in Shiraz on whether a daughter can show herself in public.

“Although you advise her and forbid her, let her show herself! She should not listen these words of yours or accept this advice, for she is beautiful, for beauty has no rest until love becomes joined to it.” (Ernest, p. 4)

He may also have added: “Love and beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from each other.

Version circulated that hearing these words, a man fainted and that Ruzbihan was cutting open hearts. Ruzbihan is a figure of radiant presence and endowed with ecstatic charisma and magnetism. He has experienced an essential union with God. In the text we will read, Ruzbihan discusses death and immortality.

Ruzbihan described God as passionate love (‘ishq). Ruzbihan stands among the most prominent proponents of passionate love. Ibn ‘Arabi writes that stories about Ruzbihan were still told in Mecca of the female singer he fell passionately in love with. Ruzbihan realized he had transferred his love of God to the singer. Ruzbihan explicitly identified and admitted transference. He turned in his cloak to the Sufis. In the end, she became ashamed and began to serve him.

The Qur’an narrates a story of a mediator who is an immortal who God directly transmitted compassion and wisdom to. His name is al-Khidr the Green Man. His gift of compassion and inner wisdom sets him apart from Moses’ level of learning. Moses learning is instruction, Khidr’s transmission is ta’dib, training. This living is an art, an adab. Like art, the pedagogy includes an active learning and immersion method. The dynamics of the mentoring relationship share dynamics of training in an art, in this case the art of spiritual living, Sufism. And this teacher al-Khidr is immortal. Al-Khidr symbolizes the triumph over the terror of death.

“The creative person becomes then in art, literature and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a ne way of triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread dof the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it.” (Becker, Denial of Death, p. 220)

Khidr represents a possibility of symbolic or spiritual transcendence over death. With the transmission of compassion from God, he overcomes terror, which is fundamentally related to death. Khidr conveys wisdom which is a synechdoche or metonymy of immortality. And the general consensus is that Khidr is an immortal being who acquired his immortality on his journey with Alexander the Great in search of the immortal transforming elixir of eternal life.

In the Qur’an’s story about Khidr, each episode involves danger, death or demise. As we dig deeper in the story we find that the entire story is pervaded by symbols and events of death: danger, war, orphans, legacies. This story and its protagonist provide a powerful confrontation with our own death and mortality. The pedagogy involves the kind of active learning and problem solving that can only be transmitted. Rebbe once said he learned everything he needed to know about the Torah by watching his teacher tie his shoe.

Since Moses already lives in a reality that takes God’s word to be a metonymy or synechdoche of its immortal eternal and infinite author, this new protagonist, al-Khidr also stands in as a synechdoche or metonymy of God. He is immortal.The book, the story, the star, all stand for God, serve as immortality symbols. And the main thread is the theme of training one in what Evelyn Underhill calls “the art of union with reality.”