I read a book many years ago by a woman whose name is Annamarie Schimmel, she is a great Islamic scholar who taught at Harvard. It was a book about Sufism, and there was a line in the book that was from around the 12th century that was, “Sufism used to be a way of being. Now, at best, it is a philosophy.” We need to understand this because it is critical to understanding this path. Sufism is about becoming. It is not about talking about things. It is not about explaining things. It is about being a certain way.
Many of us were fortunate enough to have had an exalted teacher for 14 years, and in that time, when we were with him, we saw what it was that he was talking about. We understood what it meant to become an insān kāmil, a true human being, because he was the example of a true human being. There were phrases that we heard that we began to try to understand, like, “To die before death is the Sufi way of life.” What does this mean? Any separation between ourselves and anyone else is a separation between ourselves and God. What does this mean? How do we incorporate this into our being? How do we become that?
Sufism in the early days used to have what they called dargas, which were monasteries for people who wanted to follow the path. These people actually separated themselves from the community to try and work on themselves to become the way that the teacher was, to become like the teacher, to learn what he was talking about. What separated the teacher from regular people? What was the difference about my teacher, M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, than the students? Why did people come to see him? Well, there were a lot of reasons, but once we were in his presence, it was evident that he was very different than everyone else that we had ever met, he was detached from this world in a way that we had never seen before. He interacted with us as if he did not have the burdens of family, culture, or societies’ upbringing and the rules and regulations that we have all grown up with. He acted in a way as if these things did not burden him, or were not involved with him. But, what we did learn was that there was kindness there that was beyond normal kindness, that was difficult to explain. There was a love there that was so overwhelming that it was difficult to put into words. There was a peace that came over us that was not available anywhere else, and immediately up one entering into his presence, it is as if the molecules in the air changed, and everything was different.
