He even went to the extent of saying that the heart of a sincere Muslim
was the home of God. One who broke a Muslim’s heart destroyed the
house of God. He believed that the
nafs
(ego) was the real source of all
evil, so Muslims were duty-bound to wage a war against the baser sides of
human nature; the real war was to be waged not against non-Muslims but
against the heretical
nafs
(ego).
Shaykh Sharafuddin believed in the necessity of ascetic exercises for the
development of the spiritual self. He maintained that the performance of
these exercises endowed devotees with supernatural powers, which in turn
enabled them to receive divine inspiration. He explained in one of his letters
that
tajrid
or solitude meant complete severance from all worldly things,
and entailed giving away everything one possessed. He explained
tafrid,
or
renunciation, as breaking away from oneself. This meant an absence of
concern for the future and total freedom from all anxiety. He said that
there were two aspects of ‘solitude’: one was external separation from the
world, and the other was an internal separation in which the heart was
purified of any thoughts other than those of God.
He believed that the observance of the
shariah
was essential for the
spiritual life of a
salik,
for the teachings enshrined in the
shariah
were based
on divine revelation. Firstly, one had to believe in divine unity and, secondly,
in obedience to God.
He believed in the notion that the purification of clothes at prayer times
had a symbolic meaning: that is, the cleansing of the human heart of the
impurities of human weaknesses.And this is what was highlighted in the path
of the
tariqa
. Similarly, the performance of ablutions before prayers denoted
the importance of remaining in a permanent state of cleanliness. Facing
the
qibla
at prayer times amounted to directing prayers from the heart to
