Baqa:
Literally, ‘remaining’, ‘subsisting’. It is the final stage of a mystic
who has been annihilated (
fana‘
) in God and lives in Him and through Him.
Bast:
An expansion of the soul experienced in joy. The word is derived
from the divine name
al-Basit
,The Expander, or HeWho Gives Joy. In Sufism
bast
is a term for an expanding state of the soul when the heart experiences
a state of well-being.
Chilla:
Literally: ‘40 days’, or a period of 40 days spent in continuous
fasting and spiritual exercises.
Dairah:
Literally:‘a circle’; a small mystic center of like-minded persons.
Darwish:
A mendicant; the term is used in the sense of a member of a
religious fraternity. The Arabic word is
faqir
.
Dhikr:
Remembrence of God, an invocation of God’s name.According
to a
hadith
, “For everything there is a polish that takes away rust, and the
polish of the heart is the remembrance of God.” In Sufism,
dhikr
prepares
the ground for meditation and is one of the central duties of every mystic.
Sufism attaches greatest importance to
dhikr
in the attainment of spiritual
realization.The Qur’an has this to say on the subject, “And the remembrance
of God is greatest.” There are different types of
dhikr
:
dhikr
jali
– loud
repetition;
dhikr qalbi
– silent repetition within the heart;
dhikr ‘aini
– state
when the
dhikr
permeates man’s whole being.
Fana:
Literally, ‘extinction’. In Sufism it means to die to the world and
to subsist in God alone.This state of subsisting in God is called
baqa‘
and is
the end of the Sufi journey.
Faqr:
Literally, ‘poverty.’ In Sufism, it means emptying the soul of the
ego’s false ‘reality’ to make way for the realization of God.
Faqir:
Literally, ‘the poor’; a Sufi mendicant, a disciple who embraces
the way of poverty as a means of realizing God.
Farz:
Sing.
farz
, pl.
faraiz
, meaning ‘that which is obligatory’, ‘a duty’.A
term used for those rules and ordinances of religion, which are enjoined by
