Spiritual Authority of the Awliya in the Shi‘i and Sufi Traditions

I have done a little bit of exploration into these titles and stations that were used for the Awliya', and again, we find that the certain titles that have been used for the Awliya', such as 'Abdaal' or 'Awtaad', the 'substitutes' or 'tent pegs', as it is translated, can be found in the works of the Imams of Ahlul Bayt aleyhum al-salam or their progeny as well. So again, these terms are not exclusive to the Sunni Sufi tradition. They are appearing quite early on in produced Du'as and Ziyarats in the Ithna-Ashari tradition as well.

So just to go back to the stations of the Awliya'. So we find that Hakim Tirmidhi, who travelled from Khorasan, went down to Makkah, came back from Makkah and went up to Iraq. After he comes to Iraq, he then produces this book on Wilaaya, and he is also then writing about the great stations of these Awliya'. So he says that they had grades, he calls these grades 'darajaat'. And he says when one of them dies, God replaces him with a Wali of the same status.

Similar doctrine can be found in the Imams' teaching. Imam Al-Sadiq, 'aleyhi al-salam, says: 'Ali, alayhi al-salam, was a man of knowledge, and knowledge is inherited, and a man of knowledge never dies unless another one remains after him who knows his knowledge'. Imam Ridha, alayhi al-salam, confirms this by explicitly using the term Imam to say that when one Imam dies, another one is divinely appointed.

Hakim Tirmidhi, a major figure in the establishment of Sufi doctrines, was born between 820 and 824, just a few years after the birth of Muhammad al-Taqi, alayhi al-salam, the ninth Imam. This is another thing we find that really, a lot more work needs to be done on this, is that when we are looking at these histories of the emergence of Sufism, there is very little work, comparative work, that is done to see what was going on with the emergence of this tradition in relation to the Imams. Because they were parallel, they were side by side. And actually when you start to join up the dots, 'Okay- this was this Imamah, and this was this particular figure', then a whole lot of other questions come up: where did he stand politically? 'Okay - that was meant to be the Imam of his time, and so what was he doing? What was his position with regard to the Imam of the time?' Especially someone such as Hakim Tirmidhi, who is writing on Wilaaya.

So he died in 892, approximately 20 years after the martyrdom of the eleventh Imam, alayhi al-salam, who, it is said, notified 40 reliable Shi'ias as to whom would be the twelfth Imam's representative. He informed them that they would not see him again, and commanded them to obey Uthman ibn Sa'eed. So we have got this number 40 - 40 people being appointed or given some particular initiation or information. This becomes a status of the Awliya', in this hierarchy of Awliya', and yet we find also in the Imami tradition, according to the sources, that the eleventh Imam again appointed 40 reliable people. At the age of twenty-seven, sometime after al-Mutawakill had the tenth Imam, Imam al-Naqi, alayhi al-salam, brought from Madina to Baghdad, Tirmidhi made his Hajj, travelling from Tirmidh, Khorasan to Basra and then onto Makkah.

He then went back to Basra in search of traditions. After his tawba in Makkah, he returned to Iraq and went in search of books, according to his account, for knowledge. However, according to his account, he remained bewildered 'until the teachings of the people of knowledge of God reached my ears'. And he calls these people Ahlul Ma'rifa. So he comes across these Ahlul Ma'rifa, who have stopped him from being bewildered. But he does not say who these Ahlul Ma'rifa are, apart from one person he mentions, which is Muhasabi. You could find an account of Muhasabi in Michael Sell's book - it is not 'Early Sufism', something like that. But it is by Michael Sell, he is the editor and he has got a chapter on Muhasabi and Muhasabi's method as one of the early Awliya'.

So Tirmidhi mentions Muhasabi as one of his teachers, but does not really mention anyone else. According to his own claims, Tirmidhi's claims, the rest of his knowledge appears to come from dreams. Overlooking the fact that Tirmidhi was in Iraq during the eleventh Imam's imprisonment in the north at Samarrah, Ahmet Karamustafa concludes that since Tirmidhi does not appear to have spent time in lower Iraq, although as can be seen, Tirmidhi himself says that he passed through Basra, or he was not with the Sufis of Baghdad, then he must have developed his thought by himself. So Ahmet Karamustafa, is a Turkish contemporary scholar writing on Sufism. You can find his books, accounts of the history of Sufism. And so he has come to the conclusion that because Tirmidhi apparently was not in southern Iraq, maybe where a lot of the Shi'a were, then he must have come up with his doctrines on his own.Even though the records say that already there probably would have been Shi'a in the north because the eleventh Imam was imprisoned in the north as well.

Okay, so Tirmidhi is meant to have come up with these doctrines on his own, but he was aware enough of the Imami school and its doctrines to write polemical treatises against the rawaafidh. So he knows about these Imami doctrines, he is writing treatises against the rawaafidh. But he has come up with his own book on Wilaya, and our contemporary historians of Sufism are saying, 'Well, he came up with this doctrine on his own'.

As mentioned above, many Shi'i doctrines and concepts can be found in Sufi works without any attributions given. For example, since Tirmidhi is silent about the origin of his knowledge, he is credited with the visionary conception of the states and stations through which the soul passes in order to attain the station of Wilaya, apparently using terms that are not found among other Sufis. So this is another thing, when you are reading contemporary works on the history of Sufism, you will find that some scholars are saying that this person was the first person to come up with this term, this person came up with it by themselves, because they have not actually investigated the works with the Imams of Ahlul Bayt, aleyhum as-salam.

As an example, in Tirmidhi's usage, 'manaazil' correspond more or less to the Ahwal al-Maqaamaat of the classical books of Sufism, meaning halting stations. So we have these stations and states that the soul passes through in order to attain ma'rifa. These are usually called Ahwaal al-Maqaamaat. But Tirmidhi uses the term 'manzil'. So we can see that Imam Zainul Abideen, as an example, uses the term 'manzil' some 150, 200 years earlier than Tirmidhi. In the first Du'a of al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiya, he says, Praise belongs to God. A praise through which He will illuminate for us the shadows of the inter-world, the barzakh, ease for us the path of resurrection, and raise up our stations - manaazilina - as the standing places of the witnesses.

Imam al-Sadiq, alayhi al-salam, approximately 100 years before Tirmidhi uses 'manzil'. He says the Imams are the station, manzil, of the Messanger of Allah, except that they are not prophets. Tirmidhi, incidentally, replicates this teaching with regard to the Awliya'. It says in his Siraat al-Awliya', which has been translated into English, "The student asked him, 'And what is the description of the friend who possesses the Imamat of the friendship with God as well as the leadership and the seal of friendship with God?' He replies, 'He is very close in rank to the prophets. In fact, he has almost attained their status.'" So Tirmidhi is saying the Awliya'of Allah are of a similar rank to a prophet, just as Imam al-Sadiq, 'alayhi al-salam, has said the Imams are of a similar rank to the Prophet.

So this is just one instance of terminology, concepts, and doctrines migrating from works and words of the Imams, to the works and words of pioneering Sufis who wrote works against the rawaafidh.

I will just skip ahead over some of these doctrines, as we are running out of time. There is just something that I will highlight at the end. So what we find happening is, in a nutshell, is that we have this concept of Wilaya developing among the Imams and their followers and the scholars who follow them. Around the 9th century, in the minor occultation, we find that Wilaya, this idea of Wilaya starts to spread in Sunni circles and is used as the foundation of Sufism, and we have this idea of Awliya'u Allah being the guardians of humanity, the guardians of right guidance, it is obligatory to follow them. And then we find another twist, which is that this idea of Wilaya in the Sunni Sufi tradition gets incorporated back into the Shi'i tradition. So I will just conclude with this example.

As has been seen from studying the available ahadith, the Imams recognize the Awliya' because through their jihad al-nafs they have attained the station of yaqeen and annihilated their selves in the attributes of divine reality. Through their victory over their selves and through their wayfaring, they merit to be held as teachers, and as people to be followed.

In 'The Kernel of the Kernel', such a theory seems to have inadvertently been attached to the Imams themselves. So the standard Sufi pattern is that we go through the jihad al-nafs, which consists of certain stations, and you progressively get higher, you overcome your lower nafs, the attributes of your lower nafs, and you attain yaqeen. And then we find Tehrani writing about - not Agha Tehrani but another Tehrani, writing with regard to Imam Ali Zainul Abideen, alayhi al-salam, where he says, and this is in 'The Kernel of the Kernel' where he says: 'Those religious leaders and spiritual guides, may God's greetings be upon them all, had passed beyond the stages of wayfaring towards God, had entered into His sanctuary, and subsequently had attained the station of subsistence after annihilation, maqaam ba'dal fanaa'. Passing through and of course, beyond the stages of wayfaring entails first having to overcome al-nafs al-ammara bil-soo', the soul that the commands to evil. Nor could any Imam have attained the station of baqaa', for such a situation implies that he was not at that station previously. Obedience to an Imam is not obligatory because he has struggled through all of the precarious stages of the nafs and has subsequently attained the station of baqaa'. Obedience is obligatory because he has always been and always will be at this station. Aba Abdillah, alayhi assalam, said: The Hujjah was there before the creatures, is there together with the creatures, and will be there after the creatures.

So obedience to the Wali, on the other hand, may be recommended based on the fact that he has attained victory after struggling through all the stages of the nafs. According to Shi'i doctrine, the ma'soomeen were created as such in the realm of pre-existence. A questioner asked Imam al-Husayn, 'What were you before the creation of Adam?' And he replied, 'We were silhouettes of light revolving around the throne of All -Merciful, and we taught praise, the formula of unicity and glorification to the angels.'

This idea has found its way into the doctrines of the Tijani order, which are based upon the works of Ibn Arabi, where it is said the seal of the saints was a saint and informed of his sanctity when Adam was between water and clay. Basically to say that all other saints that come after this saint that was created in the realm of pre-existence, take their sanctity from him. So, the seal of the saints was created as the seal of the saints in the realm of pre-existence, when Adam was between water and clay, and all other Awliya' that come after him have taken their Wilaya from the khatm al-Awliya', or the seal of the saints.

The reversal in status is clear in examining the above text. Tehrani, a Shi'i, has implied that the Imam must go through all the stages of the jihad al-nafs, in order to fulfill the conditions of Wilaya. While Ahmed Tijani, a Sunni, has made it clear that the khatmal Awliya', who he believed himself was (it is a whole other topic on Awliya' believing themselves to be khatmal Awliya'), was created as such in the realm of pre-existence.

So we have a reversal here. 20th century Shi'i scholars saying the Imams have gone through all the stages, the jihad al-nafs, they have attained this station, and this is why we are following them. And Sunni Sufis saying that, well, actually, our Awliya' were created as such in the realm of pre-existence, they always were there and they always will be that.

So in conclusion, it may be seen that the Sunni Sufi tradition appropriated for itself certain dimensions of authority that in the Shi'i tradition, were reserved exclusively for the Imams. And they attach them to the Awliya'. Awliya', who often did not recognize the Imams' walaaya. In the Shi'i tradition, the Awliya' were those who had indeed attained a level of perfection and the Imams thus recommended seeking them and keeping company with them.

However, these Awliya' have not been given any absolute authority over the Shi'is. What appears to have happened, however, is that with the gradual adoption of Sunni Sufism into the Shi'i tradition, certain doctrines with regard to the authority of the Awliya' have likewise been adopted, including that of the Wali's spiritual authority over the Shi'i, and the Wali as the only way towards annihilation in the divine names or attributes. What this spiritual authority means in practice, however, remains undefined.