remembrance of Your name, or that freedom from all else whichYou have
vouchsafed to me, when I meditate on the greatness of Your glory.”
He held that a true Sufi is one who covets nothing of this world, nothing
of the next, and devotes himself entirely to God.
6
He once said of himself
that he had left the world to the seekers of the world and the hereafter to the
seekers of the hereafter. For himself, he had chosen the remembrance of
God in this world and the beautific vision of the next.”
The practice of the early Sufis
By the time of Hasan Basri, Rabia Basri and Ibrahim ibn Adham (8
th
and
9
th
centruryAD) asceticismhad become the dominant feature of a movement,
which later came to be called Sufism.The Sufis wanted to withdraw from the
world and devote all their time to worshipping God. They were convinced
that, in order to focus their attention on this spiritual path, it was essential
for them to isolate themselves from the world. This was possible only by
limiting their necessities to the bare minimum.All the time they had at their
disposal was to be spent in performing supererogatory prayers, fasting, etc.
They took extra care to spend their day in the sincere remembrance of God.
In this they departed very little from the path of earning God’s pleasure as
shown by the Qu’ran and Hadith.
The point of departure between a Sufi-believer and a non-Sufi believer
was that the Sufi believed in retiring from the world and spending his time
in the worship of God, while the stand of the non-Sufi believer was that,
after performing obligatory forms of worship, he must engage himself in
other social duties as well. If these worldly duties were performed in
6
Hujwiri, Kashaf al Mahjub, tr. R.N.Nicholson, p. 217
