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SUFISM AND MYSTICISM 19

‘evoke and prefigure can, and alone can, loosen the

knot of microcosmic individuation—the egocentric illu-

i td R
sion, as the Vedantists would say—since only the Truth

in its universal and supra-mental reality can consume
its opposite without leaving of it any residue. By com-

parison_with this radical negation of the “I”’ (nafs) e}ny

means which spring from the will alone, such as as-

ceticism _(az-zuhd) can play only a preparatory and

ancillary part.! It may be added that it is for this
reason that such means never acquired in Sufism the
almost absolute importance they had, for instance, for
certain Christian monks ; and this is true even in cases
where they were in fact very strictly practised in one or
another tariqah.

A Sufi symbolism which has the advantage of lying
outside the realm of any psychological analysis will
serve to sum up what has just been said. The picture it
gives is this : The Spirit (ar-Ruh) and the soul (an-nafs)
engage in battle for the possession of their common son
the heart (al-qalb). By ar-Ruh is here to be understood
the intellectual principle which transcends the individual

| nature? and by an-nafs the psyche, the centrifugal tend-

encies of which determine the diffuse and inconstant
domain of the “I”. As for al-qalb, the heart, this repre-

1. Sufis see in the body not only the soil which nourishes the passions but

| also its spiritually posmve aspect which is that of a picture or resume of the

cosmos. In Sufi writings the expression the “temple”’ (haykal) will be found to
designate the body. Muhyi-d-Din ibn ‘Arabi in the chapter on Moses in his
Fusus al-Hikam compares it to ‘‘the ark where dwells the Peace (Sak:nah) of
the Lord.”

2. The word r#zh can also have a more particnlar meaning, that of *“‘vital

! spirit.> This is the sense in which it is most frequeatly used in cosmology.