Bisṭamī

Although Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭamī did not author any written works, his spoken words concerning fanāʾ and tawḥīd were so shocking and memorable that they were to form the subject of numerous commentaries in the years following his death.Footnote ¹⁸ One of Bisṭamī's most famous statements is the following:

This statement embodies in succinct form some of the ambiguities inherent in speaking of self-annihilation and union, particularly as formulated by Bisṭamī. Rather than providing us with straightforward answers as to Bisṭamī's position, it raises questions as to the very ontological status of the seeking self vis-à-vis the sought (or Sought) it was, ostensibly, out to clarify. Thus, the initial declaration by the divinity that his creation “would love to seek” the creature Bisṭamī, posed as it is in the conditional, leaves undisclosed both whether creation actually does so seek him, and whether such a seeking would be loved by the creator himself. Bisṭamī's response, moreover, repeatedly undermines itself by both affirming duality (in speaking of ‘me’ and ‘your’) and denying it (in proposing, precisely, that distinctions such as that between ‘my’ and ‘your’ be undone in unity, (single) subjectivity, and oneness). The apophatic nature of Bisṭamī's statement finds its most intense expression at the very end where, the tawḥīd having been enacted (at least hypothetically) and the ‘I’ of Bisṭamī transformed into the one and only ‘I’ of Allāh, that very ‘I’ disappears in fanāʾ, leaving us to wonder whether the self of Bisṭamī has disappeared into the self of Allāh, or whether only the that remains, shorn of all selfhood whatsoever.

In commenting on this saying, Abū Naṣr al-Ṣarrāj (d. 988) (in whose book it has been transmitted) cites the following highly important ḥadīth-i qodsī or extra-Qurʾānic divine saying:

This ḥadīth was to play a pivotal role in the Sufi understanding of fanāʾ and tawḥīd. In it too we see an ambiguity as to the existential status of the annihilated self. Though the divine ‘I’ has taken over all the attributes of the human self, yet that very self persists in nonetheless being the one through whom these very attributes are actualised. Thus, though Allāh is the eye, ear, tongue, and hand, yet the servant remains the one who sees, hears, speaks, and grasps. We will see below that this state may correspond to what Bisṭamī's near contemporary Junayd termed the fanāʾ of one's attributes (al- fanāʾ al-ṣifāt) but, for the moment, suffice it to say that Bisṭamī, at least in the passage cited, proposes a highly apophatic vision of self-annihilation and union. Though the nafs is noughted, yet it remains as the one in whom it vanished. Perhaps Bisṭamī here foreshadows the views of Junayd, for whom the attainment of true union was signalled not by the annihilation of oneself in God of fanāʾ, but by the abiding of oneself in God of the baqāʾ consequent upon it (a notion that came to be known as al- baqāʾ baʿd al- fanāʾ: self-abiding after self-annihilation).Footnote ²¹

Junayd

Abū l-Qāsem al-Junayd not only commented upon Bisṭamī's statements but also composed his own works, among which is found the treatise entitled simply Tawḥīd.Footnote ²² In it, Junayd proposes three kinds of fanāʾ. In the first, one passes from one's attributes, qualities and dispositions. Next, one passes away from cognisance of such passing away (in what Bisṭamī had already called fanāʾ al- fanāʾ).Footnote ²³ Finally, however, “you both pass away and abide, and are found truly existent in your passing away”.Footnote ²⁴ Immediately prior to this three-fold elaboration of fanāʾ towards final integration with baqāʾ, Junayd writes:

Another passage of the same work may help us shed light on Junayd's meaning. He says:

We thus see that Junayd proposes a dynamic notion of fanāʾ, whereby one stage succeeds upon another in spiralling fluctuations between annihilation and abiding. After having passed through successive stages of self-annihilation, in which the self has been stripped of its own qualities, self-consciousness, and being, the now not-self abides in its unity with the one abider. In enacting this union, the not-self is restored to itself, not only in that it drowns in the undifferentiated ocean of its origin, but also in that it realises its own differentiated identity as a water-drop.Footnote ²⁷ Junayd is unsatisfied with the ‘intoxicated’ states typical of Bisṭamī, in which one loses sight of one's pronomial referent in a heady haze of apophatic inter-identification.Footnote ²⁸ Rather, Junayd advocates a further stage, in which one sobers up into the “clarity of waking”, in which one is able, once more, to abide in one's own self-identity, though only as transformed into the one self-abiding identity that is reality (al-Ḥaqq).

Qushayrī

In contrast to the inter-penetration—be it drunken or sober—of identity/identities and concomitant self-annihilation/self-abiding espoused by the likes of Bisṭamī and Junayd, the doxographer ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn Hawāzin al-Qushayrī is concerned to maintain the orthodox separation between oneself and the One Self, and consequently adopts a more ‘rational’ approach to fanāʾ and tawḥīd.Footnote ²⁹ For Qushayrī, who typically refers to Allāh as al-Ḥaqq (the Real), there can ultimately be only one abiding Reality, to which creation aspires but which it can never actually reach. As he puts it, “No created being attains union with him”,Footnote ³⁰ for no created being possesses the existential force, the real being (wujūd), required to truly abide. As he puts it elsewhere, “What he [the servant] has passed away from could not truly have existed in the first place”.Footnote ³¹ In other words, ‘that which passes away (fānin)’ can never ‘find a way to that which abides (bāqin)’. It is for this reason that, as Qushayrī cites Abū ʿAlī Daqqāq (d. 1015) saying, “Wujūd entails the extinction of the servant”Footnote ³² or, in the words of Qushayrī himself, “the appearance of the real, Most Praised, is the disappearance of the creature”.Footnote ³³ This, of course, can never amount to any actually existential annihilation, for there never was and never can be any other Being but God. Fanāʾ, for Qushayrī, is thus a realisation in the epistemological sense of the term; the realisation, that is, of the eternal reality of the being of the One Being. Passing away is but the passing away of ignorance, a process concomitant with the raising to consciousness of an ontological truth or reality which always was and will be the case. As Qushayrī puts it: “His [the servant's] passing away from himself and from creatures occurs through the cessation of his perception of himself and of creatures… Whoever passes away from his ignorance endures through his knowledge”.Footnote ³⁴ Thus, tawḥīd (union) can only ever be an epistemological recognition of the permanent ontological state of waḥdah (unity). To use Plato's image: the sun was always shining, but we—benighted in the ignorance of the cave—saw it not.

ʿAṭṭār

The Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār Nayshābūrī also deals at length with the notion of fanāʾ and tawḥīd throughout his epic mathnavī poems.Footnote ³⁵ In the following verses, ʿAṭṭār appears to agree with Junayd in asserting that the Sufi is able to attain the abiding self-identity of baqāʾ only through having extinguished himself in the self-annihilation of fanāʾ. He writes:

And:

This process continues until all remnants of self (be it in self-annihilation or self-abiding) are lost:

Although, as we have seen, ʿAṭṭār does posit a baqāʾ following on from fanāʾ, these last lines suggest a progressively more intense self-annihilation, without any subsequent ‘clarity of waking’ as espoused by Junayd. Indeed, ʿAṭṭār's poetry is replete with tales involving the figure of the ‘divine fool’ (dīvāneh)Footnote ³⁹ who, freed from the constricting bonds of sober ratiocination, is able to enter into a state of ‘bewilderment’ (ḥayrat or taḥayyor) wherein he loses himself in the utter intoxication of sheer divinity:

In the context of lines such as this, Leonard Lewisohn has stated that:

However, rather than leading to any ‘understanding’ wherein one would be able to discern any ‘underlying unity’, ʿAṭṭār's verses point out that it is precisely in the confusion embodied in the ambiguous state between opposites that true tawḥīd—the loss of both oneness and plurality—is found. Indeed, our very vocabulary pushes us toward seeking some end to the spiritual quest, for implied in the very terms ‘seeking’ and ‘quest’ are the teleological ends for which these are said to be undertaken, just as ‘understanding’ is implicitly privileged over ‘ignorance’. ʿAṭṭār's fools reject precisely such an understanding, an outcome—they would say—of merely intellectual (ʿaqlī) thinking. Rather, they ‘keep going in ease’, wandering lost in the liberty of what never can be lost nor found.

Ibn al-ʿArabī

In the foregoing discussions of Bisṭamī, Junayd, Qushayrī, and ʿAṭṭār, I have been obliged, in the space provided, to offer but glimpses of synecdoche in but a handful of passages of what are in fact great expanses of thought and feeling. In turning now to the writings of Muḥyiddīn Ibn al-ʿArabī, I am even more keenly aware of the insufficiency of the exposition that follows in giving voice to the vast vistas of spiritual attainment on offer in his body of work. This is so not only owing to the sheer size of his corpus, (which vastly exceeds those of the other writers under consideration), but also due to his conception of the divine names, which William Chittick, his foremost Western interpreter, designates “the single most important concept to be found in Ibn al-ʿArabī's works”.Footnote ⁴² Since, in Ibn al-ʿArabī's world, “Each creature is a word (kalimah) of God”,Footnote ⁴³ each creature manifests a different aspect of the one reality. As such, there are as many levels of reality as there are beings, which implies that any one truth is true only on that level of divine manifestation, even though all such manifestations/truths/realities/names are but so many expressions of the One.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus it is that Ibn al-ʿArabī seems to contradict himself when taken out of context. In context, he is but formulating the particular truth valid for that particular divine name.Footnote ⁴⁵ For my summary purposes, this presents something of a challenge for, in order to convey anything approximating the complete view of the Shaykh, I would need to be constantly qualifying my statements, backtracking and reformulating them in the light of further truth-manifestations. In order to avoid this, I will focus on but one particular theme (that of the fundamental ambiguity of being) and wistfully discard, here above all, any pretence to comprehensiveness.

Speaking with the voice of Allāh, Ibn al-ʿArabī addresses creation thus:

This state of being both-this-and-that is referred to by the Shaykh in myriad ways throughout his writings. Thus, to give but two examples, he says that “every entity qualified by existence is it/not it… He/not He… limited… not limited… seen… not seen”, and that one who has attained to gnostic ‘tasting’ (dhawq) “is not He, yet he is He”.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is statements such as these that have led commentators such as Chittick to speak of the existential situation of beings as being fundamentally ambiguous, between absolute nonexistence and absolute existence: “all things are neither/nor, both/and, but never either/or”.Footnote ⁴⁸

This ambiguous ontological situation holds several implications for the spiritual quest culminating in tawḥīd. Firstly, Ibn al-ʿArabī maintains that the ‘perfect man’ (al-insān al-kāmil), who has attained to complete vision of all levels of reality, must ‘see with both eyes’. It is by so doing that he realises the dual nature of being: “Ontologically speaking, one eye sees Being and the other perceives nothingness. Through the two eyes working together, man perceives that he himself and the cosmos are He/not-He”.Footnote ⁴⁹ Furthermore, it is by thus simultaneously seeing the individuality of each thing as self-abiding in its own unique identity and the universality of all things in the self-annihilation of their sum total before the One that the perfect man attains to the All-Comprehensive Name (al-ism al-jāmiʿ) of ‘Allāh’: “Just as Allāh designates nothing specific, but rather everything, Being and all its attributes—so also perfect man is nothing specific, since he is all things”.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, finally, the perfect man is he who is neither lost in self-annihilation in the one, nor found in self-abiding in oneness. In allowing each name to find its proper place in the equilibrium of the All-Comprehensive Name, he appears “totally ordinary”,Footnote ⁵¹ yet brings together the sum total of all ontological possibilities. Surely this is a fitting end for the mystic's unending spiritual seeking?

The Mystics’ No-Self

Having surveyed some of the most sophisticated and celebrated accounts of (non-)selfhood in Islamic mysticism, in this final portion of the article I want to apply their insights to the rather disparate sphere of interreligious relations.Footnote ⁵² In order to do so, I need first to draw one general conclusion as to the nature of selfhood from the internally varied positions of Bisṭamī, Junayd, Qushayrī, ʿAṭṭār, and Ibn al-ʿArabī. This is by no means an easy task given the intricacies into which our Sufis have delved. What is there, after all, linking the drunken ontological ambiguities of Bisṭamī, for whom the self appears to remain as the one and only Self only insofar as it has been apophatically noughted; the dynamically dialectical fanāʾ of sober Junayd, for whom the self passes through ever-deeper levels of annihilation only to find itself finally annihilated into self-abiding; the collapsing of tawḥīd into waḥdah, union into unity, of Qushayrī, for whom no-self can really be in the Being of the One Self; the self-annihilation from self-annihilation of ʿAṭṭār, for whom the bewilderment of the divine fool issues in the abjuration of both self-identity and other-difference; or the simultaneously neither/nor and both/and selfhood of Ibn al-ʿArabī, for whom the self may best be characterised as He/not He? Well, I propose that one denominator common to all of these accounts is the abnegation of individual selfhood in the face of what is taken to be the one true reality. To put it in terms analogous to the Islamic shahādah to which I referred earlier, there is no creature (lā ʾilāha) but the Creator (ʾillā llāh). Or, to use the formulation of Gerhard Böwering,

In fact, we can discern two distinct ontological positions here, though the distinction will not affect the vision of interreligious relations entailed by either of them. On the one hand, the weaker claim is that one is undone in union with the One, where ‘one’ in the lower case denotes an individual existent independent of what turns out to be the one and only reality—that denoted by ‘One’ in the upper case. That is, one's being is unbeinged, one's very existence is rendered non-existent when united with the only real Being. Or, to put it yet another way, what was a plurality of beings is rendered a unity in union with Being. The stronger claim, on the other hand, is that no such union (tawḥīd) really takes place because unity (waḥdah) was and remains the only ontological fact. That is, there was and is no one to be noughted into the One, no being to be unbeinged, for there only ever was the One Being. What merely appeared to be a plurality of existents turns out to be illusory insofar as they are rightly seen to be but metaphysically insubstantial manifestations of God. Naturally, where precisely to plot each of our mystics on this twofold schema is difficult, for every one of them, with the likely exception of Qushayrī, expresses a position that in some way melds the two—a melding hardly inconsistent with the matter of metaphysical melding itself at play, of course.

Regardless of which particular flavour of this ultimate annihilation of the mystic in her or his very identification with the ultimate reality we adopt, it is very much worth observing that it is not limited to Islam, but constitutes a consistently repeated feature in mysticisms the world over, be they monotheistic, polytheistic, or non-theistic. I am not to be taken to be espousing a form of perennialism in so saying, for not only does the meagre textual evidence I have presented here not justify such universalisation, but I am also all-too-aware of the differing conceptions of the various terms under discussion utilised by mystics trained in different traditions.Footnote ⁵⁴ Besides which, this is not the place to attempt a typology of the world's mysticisms. Rather, I am concerned to underline what I take to be a hitherto unappreciated and significant implication of such general mystical conceptions of selfhood for the study of interreligious relations. This is, that regardless of which particular mode of interreligious relationality one favours (on which more in a moment), all three of the standard types of interreligious relations discussed in relevant scholarly literature take for granted the substantiality of the self, be this conceived as the unified individual religious adherent or the collective of such individuals as the community of adherents. This makes perfect sense given the pragmatic aims of much of the scholarship on religious pluralism, which “has come to represent a powerful ideal meant to resolve the question of how to get along in a conflict-ridden world”.Footnote ⁵⁵ But it nevertheless ignores a strand of religiosity that is both immensely authoritative and enduringly productive within not only Islam but well beyond.

Now, if we are to adopt an emic perspective according to which the formulations of exemplary adherents of a given religious tradition (in this case those of Islam) are taken seriously at their word (and not at our deformative reformulation of it in accordance with our own, typically substantialist, naïvely ontologically realist, presuppositions), then we must own that the reification of what, to them, is strictly-speaking, ultimately or always, a non-entity (the individual and, by extension, the communal self) invalidates the standard models of interreligious relations (re)cited and (re)affirmed by scholars, students, practitioners, and public figures alike.Footnote ⁵⁶ In order to do justice to this claim, I must at least briefly delineate the models to which I refer: pluralism, exclusivism, and inclusivism.

Interreligious Relations and Ultimate Irreligiosity

Pluralism is most closely associated with the figure of John Hick, and for present purposes may be summarised in Hick's own words as the position that

In other words, the idea here is that the various religions are equally valid mundane expressions of the one supra-mundane reality. To this may be contrasted the two other positions, which both take one religion to be superior to others. (This has in actual fact typically been taken to be Christianity on the part of scholarly defenders, but I will generalise from that particular case here). Exclusivism I define as the position that one religion (that is, one's own) is uniquely (that is, exclusively) right (where ‘right’ may mean ‘metaphysically real’, ‘epistemologically true’, ‘soteriologically efficacious’, or some other such designator depending on context). Inclusivism likewise takes one religion to be superior (in any of the senses just mentioned) but admits that other religions may be accounted valid means toward the realisation of the one ultimately true religion's ends. Or, to put it in the words of Harold Netland, “exclusivism holds that true religious claims are found only among the teachings of one's own religion, whereas inclusivism maintains that it is possible that both one's own and other religions teach truth”.Footnote ⁵⁸

My claim is that none of these three models of interreligious relations is applicable to religious adherents of any stripe if these are taken according to the mystical understanding of selfhood I have outlined based on Islamic sources. For all three—pluralism, exclusivism and inclusivism—presuppose a substantially existent religious adherent on the base of which interreligious relations may be built, as it were, on their competing architectural plans. Without substantially existent individuals as such, there are no individuals identifying as adherents of individual religions, therefore no communities comprised of such individuals, and thus no relations between them and others—be these conceived in pluralist, exclusivist, or inclusivist terms. But for mystics such as Bisṭamī, Junayd, Qushayrī, ʿAṭṭār and Ibn al-ʿArabī, the point, the very teleological end, of religiosity is the undoing, as it were, of religiosity. For one hitherto unappreciated consequence of the annihilation (or the nihility) of selfhood, of the identification (or the identity) of self with Self, being with Being, one with One, as per these and like-minded mystics, is that to self-identify as a Muslim is precisely to fail at being a Muslim, and all the more so the more fully one self-identifies as such. One cannot self-identify as a Muslim, after all, if one does not identify as a self at all. On such a schema, then, the true Muslim is no Muslim at all; rather, s/he is not-s/he, or to adopt the even more precise formulation of Ibn al-ʿArabī, s/he is not-S/He: S/he has realised (epistemically and/or ontologically) the absence of a self with whom to identify at all in the very union/unity of self with Self. In the words of Corbin's gloss to Ibn al-ʿArabī cited above, the “determinate and individualised being” has been united with/realised preternal (azalī) and posternal (abadī) union with “the Divine in its totality”.Footnote ⁵⁹ As such, the true adherent (be s/he nominally, conventionally, adherent of any one religion), is one who, having traversed the spiritual path, the ṭarīqah of jihād al-nafs, no longer has (or better: is) any substance with which to ad-here, with which to be-long.

While such an ultimate disavowal of any and all belief positions/identity markers may be found, mutatis mutandis, in the formulations of mystic-metaphysicians not only within Islam but across various religious traditions,Footnote ⁶⁰ among the thinkers under study here it is Ibn al-ʿArabī who elaborates this notion of a ‘station of no station’ (maqām lā maqām) most clearly and comprehensively.Footnote ⁶¹ For Ibn al-ʿArabī, “No one worships anyone but himself”,Footnote ⁶² but since “knowledge of God is knowledge of self”,Footnote ⁶³ and the self truly known is known to be nothing other than the “One Being”,Footnote ⁶⁴ in reality “nothing is worshiped in itself except God”.Footnote ⁶⁵ Now, God cannot be bound in any way, but a “belief is [precisely] a knotting, a tying, a binding”.Footnote ⁶⁶ This leads Ibn al-ʿArabī to the radical conclusion that “The gnostic believes in every belief”.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, “Because the perfect gnostic is not defined by any specific attribute… he is able to believe in every belief”.Footnote ⁶⁸ Having completely denuded himself of personal attributes (in perfect consummation of what I referred to earlier as al- fanāʾ al-ṣifāt), and thereby fully identified himself with the All (al-kull),Footnote ⁶⁹ “The perfect gnostic recognizes Him in every form in which He discloses Himself and in every form in which He descends”.Footnote ⁷⁰ After all, “He who frees Him from every delimitation never denies Him. On the contrary, he acknowledges Him in every form”.Footnote ⁷¹ Such a one, liberated from any and all particular beliefs, “believes in every belief concerning Him. He recognises Him in faith, in proofs, and in heresy (ilḥād), since ilḥād is to deviate from one specific belief to another specific belief”.Footnote ⁷² In this final statement we find the endpoint of Ibn al-ʿArabī's position, according to which heresy, the very rejection of ‘true’ belief, is identified not with the affirmation of any particular ‘false’ belief, but rather with the affirmation of any particular belief at all. To be a believer of any single belief (and a fortiori of any belief system such as a religion) is precisely to show oneself to be a non-believer, a heretic. The only belief position adequate to ‘all-inclusive Being’ (wujūd ʿāmm)Footnote ⁷³ is one that foregoes any one belief position, accepts no one (none) but all.Footnote ⁷⁴

Now, critics may point out that, though this may be the end of the spiritual quest, practically no-one attains to such mystical heights, and that my point is therefore irrelevant to interreligious relations as these play out on the ground. They may also press the point that, though mystics such as Ibn al-ʿArabī may themselves have espoused such abolition of identification as the ultimate end of Muslimhood, yet they nevertheless did self-identify as Muslim, as opposed to identifying as adherents of any other religion. Finally, critics may accuse me of smuggling in a form of pluralism by the back door insofar as my claim may be construed as implying that mystics stemming from diverse religious traditions ultimately attain to what turns out to be the one true reality shared among them all. To these points I would respond as follows.

Firstly, I would reiterate that mystics such as those I have treated are typically taken as exemplary figures within their respective religious traditions. In the case of those I have drawn upon directly in the foregoing, their works continue to be read, their ideas continue to be discussed and debated in homes, universities and madrasahs spanning the Islamic world (and beyond), and their lavishly endowed tombs continue to be pilgrimage destinations. Nor are they atypical in this regard. As such, I have referred to them as ‘exemplary’ precisely in the denotative sense of the word, to refer to the fact that they constitute spiritual heroes,Footnote ⁷⁵ role models for those many who strive toward emulating their accomplishments. As archetypal epitomes of religious achievement, mystics play an important role in embodying the very paradigms according to which less able religionists structure their relationships to their own religion and religiosity. The mystics’ authority is undiminished by the fact of their supremacy; indeed, if anything they are looked up to all the more devotedly precisely insofar as their status is taken to be perfectly unattainable. If we are to discount mystics, then, as models according to which ordinary religious adherents learn what it means to fulfil the mandate of their religion, then we will be forced a fortiori to dismiss non-mystic religious authority figures such as muftis, imams, and ayatollahs from interreligious discourse, precisely insofar as these latter derive their religious authority from the extent to which they partially embody spiritual ideals perfected by mystics.Footnote ⁷⁶

My response to the second criticism follows naturally from my response to the first: it is precisely to the extent that mystics are taken to embody the highest ideals of their religion that they are accounted mystics. But the attainment of the mystical state is, as mystics themselves aver repeatedly, neither easy nor constant. Rather, these paradigms of religiosity too demonstrate significant variations among their individual states, not least owing to the exigencies of the terrestrial life to which they are still, prior to bodily death, albeit reluctantly, attached. The accepted distinction among Sufis between fluctuating spiritual states (aḥvāl; sg. ḥāl) and relatively constant spiritual stations (maqāmāt; sg. maqām) is testament to their awareness of the difference between momentary and lasting attainments. Besides which, as finders and traversers of the road that ultimately, as per their own pronouncements, leads to where “the road [is] lost” (as per ʿAṭṭār's verse cited above), they are all the more aware of the need to find and traverse a path—and to do that, one (that is, the individual adherent) must identify and identify with one such path (that is, a particular religion). There is no contradiction here, just as there is no contradiction in using the water's current to arrive at the water's shore. What this means for our purposes is that the ideal of what I would call ‘ultimate irreligiosity’ remains as the end goal of these mystics’ religious striving, and cannot therefore be discounted simply on account of their only occasionally living up to its absolute demand.Footnote ⁷⁷

From Negative Theontology to Omnilogue

Finally, it behoves me to respond to what I have identified as the third potential criticism of my argument by explaining how my account differs from pluralism. I admit that the textual evidence, both among those thinkers studied here and others, evidently allows, even encourages, an interpretation according to which Sufis’ “understanding of religion and religions can serve as a guide toward a genuinely pluralistic Muslim theology of religions in our increasingly pluralistic world”.Footnote ⁷⁸ After all, if on the analysis I have presented every religious adherent turns out to be traversing a path (ṭarīqah) that leads to her ultimate undoing in and/as identification with its one and only end much as ʿAṭṭār's ‘thirty birds’ (sī morgh) turn out to be traversing a series of valleys that lead to their ultimate undoing in and/as identification with the one and only Sīmorgh, then this begins to sound rather reminiscent of the idea that all religions are but diverse approaches towards a common Ultimate “the standard presentation of the pluralistic hypothesis [calls] ‘the Real’”Footnote ⁷⁹ (ḥaqīqa). Moreover, the “distinction between the Real in itself… and the Real as phenomenally experienced by us humans… [a] distinction [which] is fundamental to the pluralistic hypothesis”,Footnote ⁸⁰ finds clear analogues in the thought of a Sufi such as Ibn al-ʿArabī, who distinguishes in like manner between “God in Himself and God in His self-disclosure”.Footnote ⁸¹

However, I would consider it to be a superficial reading of my argument that would appear to entail a form of pluralism, even if this were to be in a form modified in line with the mystical strands of religiosity I have been exploring. One immediate reason for this is that, while “Within the rich tradition of Islamic mysticism one… finds a number of statements pointing in a pluralist direction”, nevertheless, “This”—as Schmidt-Leukel (whom I quote) himself immediately qualifies—“does not imply that they actually were pluralist. It rather appears that they were usually inclusivists with pluralist inclinations”.Footnote ⁸² More substantively (and of more direct relevance to the specific argument this article is making), I would repudiate the identification of (my reading of) these mystics’ ultimate position as pluralistic on the same grounds as I would repudiate them being accounted exclusivist or inclusivist; that is, that any and all of these necessitate the presence at base of an individual adherent of one religion relating to an individual adherent of another. But as I have been at pains to point out, this very basis upon which interreligious relations on the individual, communal, societal, civilisational, and even global scale has been predicated is precisely what the mystics under study here abjure. I have belaboured this point precisely because it is so counter-intuitive. But of course, if the esoteric utterings of mystic sages run not counter to common sense, then I am at a loss to see what does.

Indeed, in closing I would like to make one final proposal based on such mystical pronouncements as I have been considering. The study of interreligious relations is intimately wedded to the study of interreligious dialogue, in the sense that the study of how religions have related and do relate has often, if not always, been undertaken so as to further understanding of how religions may come to more meaningfully engage in ecumenical dialogue.Footnote ⁸³ On my understanding of the mystical texts I have studied here, the dialogical model is exposed as inadequate insofar as it presupposes on the discursive level what has already been rejected on the metaphysical one: a speaker. What Böwering refers to as “the mixing of human and divine consciousness in mystic speech uttered in the experience of fanāʾ and baqāʾ”Footnote ⁸⁴ entails that the basis upon which any dialogue must proceed—two individual speakers—is not the case, for the speaker has, depending on which model of union/unity we are adopting, been in all senses silenced and/or found to have ever been silent. This is not, or not merely, an Islamic form of ‘negative theology’, but what may be called a ‘negative ontology’ insofar as the ontological status of the mystical subject has been negated, or seen to be at bottom negative, nil, in the face of the one and only Real.Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, given that for Ibn al-ʿArabī “the Real enters into creation, and creation enters into the Real”,Footnote ⁸⁶ we may well go so far as to speak here of what I would call ‘negative theontology’, for just as any given ‘he’ has been rendered ‘not-he’ in divine identification, so ‘He’ has been rendered ‘not-He’ in its mirror image.Footnote ⁸⁷

Rather than dialogue (or monologue, or polylogue), then, we may posit here what I would perhaps call ‘polyglot monologue’—in the sense that the mystics hypothetically communicating, ‘loguing’, do so here each in the ‘language’ of her or his own religious tradition (hence ‘polyglot’), though their very voice turns out to be nothing other than that of the One Speaker (hence ‘monologue’). I said that I would ‘perhaps’ call this a polyglot monologue, for although this terminology goes some way toward mitigating the metaphysically substantialist presuppositions informing ‘dialogue’ as standardly understood, nevertheless I feel this may too easily be misinterpreted as amounting to a form of naïve pluralism such as that I have already rejected as inconsistent with mystical self-annihilation/self-nihility. Instead, then, I will propose to call this a model of ‘omnilogue’.

In omnilogue, the one and only All-Comprehensive Name (al-ism al-jāmiʿ) of Allāh speaks Itself to Itself; a speech encompassing all words (and recall that “Each creature is a word (kalimah) of God”),Footnote ⁸⁸ yet for all that only ever, preternally and posternally, saying One. This unity, however, is not the utterly transcendent ‘Unity of the One’ (aḥadiyyat al-aḥad) but the ‘Unity of Manyness’ (aḥadiyyat al-kathra)Footnote ⁸⁹ within which—as which—‘the Breath of the All-Merciful’ (nafas al-raḥmān)Footnote ⁹⁰ “assumes the form of all the existent things in the cosmos”.Footnote ⁹¹ Now, ‘all the existent things in the cosmos’ include—are—the infinite names by which the “name of the name”Footnote ⁹² is manifested in—as—the cosmos, meaning that in omnilogue the human speaker, what I may call the ‘nil-yet-name’, “calls with every tongue”.Footnote ⁹³ This in turn means that, far from embodying a form of interreligious relations abstracted from ‘real world’ interactions, a mystical conception of selflessness and the omnilogical discourse it entails enables a model of interreligious relationality that obviates the charge of relativism that plagues standard dialogical models,Footnote ⁹⁴ insofar as it fully supports the soteriological telos of diverse religious traditions. It also facilitates the harmonisation of interreligious relationalities typically considered particularly, if not inveterately, problematic, such as that between a theistic tradition such as Islam and a non-theistic one such as Buddhism,Footnote ⁹⁵ insofar as it assumes a ‘non-self’ position consonant with (if not, of course, identical in) both. And finally, omnilogue models a mode of what appears to be inter-relationality that turns out in the final analysis to be a mode of intra-relationality, insofar as the speakers, howsoever nominally manifold, ultimately find themselves existentially folded within the one and only ‘Oneness of Being’ (waḥdat al-wujūd).Footnote ⁹⁶ This precludes both inclusivistic and exclusivistic claims to superiority just as it transcends criticisms of pluralistic relativity. Besides, if seeing one's other to be nothing other than one's own self(lessness) is not a propitious orientation toward relating harmoniously, what is?