6 AN INTRODUCTION TO SUFI DOCTRINE

everything that forms an integral part of the spiritual
method of Sufism is constantly and of necessity drawn
out of the Quran and from the teaching of the Prophet.

Orientalists who uphold the thesis of a non-Moslem
origin of Sufism generally make much of the fact that
in the first centuries of Islam Sufi doctrine does not
appear with all the metaphysical developments found in
later times. Now in so far as this point is valid for an
esoteric tradition—a tradition, that is, which is therefore
mainly transmitted by oral instruction—it proves the
very contrary of what they try to maintain. The first
Sufis expressed themselves in a language very close
to that of the Quran and their concise and synthetic
expressions, already imply all the essentials of the
doctrine. If, at a later stage, the doctrine became more
explicit and was further elaborated this is something
perfectly normal to which parallels can be found in
every spiritual tradition. Doctrine grows, not so much
by the addition of new knowledge, as by the need to
refute errors and to reanimate a diminishing power of
intuition.

Moreover, since doctrinal truths are susceptible of
limitless development and since the Islamic civilisation
had absorbed certain pre-Islamic inheritances, Sufi
masters could, in their oral or written teaching, make
use of ideas borrowed from those inheritances provided
they were adequate for expressing those truths which
had to be made accessible to the intellectually gifted
men of their age and which were already implicit in
strictly Sufic symbolism in a succinct form. Such, for