The Nomadic Alternative – Page 185

Sufi ideal recalls the verse of Ecclesiastes (12.7), "Then shall

the dust return to earth as it was and the spirit return unto God who gave it." One old dervish, asked his age, affirmed he was four years old. For seventy years he had struggled to be reborn; for the remaining four he had lived in the ecstasy of enlightenment. The ultimate death of the body merely proved his admission to the life eternal and his funeral was a festival of joy. About Ya'za, a craggy Mediaeval Moroccan saint, followed an errant life of prayer and did everything expected of a dervish. He fed on foraged roots, took a lion as companion, lived to a great age and rejoiced in the intelligent love immanent in all levels of creation. Wandering (siyaha), he said, detached his soul and re-established the primordial harmony.

The axis of the spiritual migration winds up a "steep ascent allowing no peace or rest". The traveller must live in a perpetual present, heedless of the future. "In the vocabulary of the Way", said Rumi, "you do not find the word tomorrow." Barbs and "hooks for the unwary" block the path. "Truth and falsehood are mixed. Good and bad coin have been put into the traveller's purse." But as he advances, he is gradually illumined. And the Sufis were more practical in their instructions for enlightenment than to rely on exhortations or moral codes, and concentrated on the physical as well as the mental condition of the traveller. The Sufi must board a vehicle bound for the deathless death, scheduled to arrive only after a highly uncomfortable journey. The most reliable means of transport was Poverty, which answered the sura of the Koran - "and the servants of the merciful are those who walk meekly on this earth". For Poverty of itself assumes the dissolution of attachments to things and predicates a life of perpetual wandering.

The traveller stalks God with his leg muscles, and he cannot mount the vehicle of Poverty unless he travels light. In the words of the Sufi manual, the Kashf al-Mahjub, the corpulent rich are "veiled from Poverty". Poverty is wealth in God. "God has exalted it and made it the special attribute of the poor." Voluntary withdrawal