Samad and Dahar

Sufis have always taken life and time seriously. They transcend temporal relations without making them unreal or less real, but essential el...

Sufis have always taken life and time seriously. They transcend temporal relations without making them unreal or less real, but essential elements of total reality. However, man8217;s role in their estimation can be understood only in relation to time al-zaman and place al-makan which came into existence with the world itself as compared to the Time that knows no beginning and end. The relative time, being intrinsically fleeting in the strictest Koranic sense, therefore, assumes significance only when we use it for our own eternal good. What therefore dominates the consciousness of the Sufis is the idea of the life and time that is eternal.

But eternity cannot be achieved without the grace of the Eternal Samad which in the Koran, means the changelessness. Dahar denotes the relation of the changelessness to that which changes. The Koran nowhere asserts that Allah is Time Himself. However, what must be emphasised is the Koranic verse urging man to reflect on his own creation in a Time or relationship of long duration when he was unremembered. What we are able to comprehend through reflection on our puny existence vis-a-vis Dahar is the Reality of supernal significance. The Creator hints at the Time that is endlessly long with an endless beginning and an endless end.

A Sufi, through self-realisation, in the process of 8216;becoming8217;, becomes conscious of the limits of his duration on this planet. The very fact that this world is a contingency vis-a-vis the changelessness of the Samad in the totality of His Dahar necessitates the distinction between the finite and the Infinite. One is a matter of space in 8216;fleeting time8217; and the Other of an empty space in Infinity; one of change and other of changelessness.

True, living in the temporal world is always synonymous with unending changes of varied nature concerning our bodily development and decay, thought and social behaviour; but spiritual evolution is ultimately something beyond the transience of our mundane existence. Our yearning for being spiritual can neither be imagined nor comprehended within the confines of a mental activity obsessed with mere ordinariness of our daily life in the physical time. Living spiritually, in the final analysis, signifies man8217;s primordial urge to understand his own tiny existence vis-a-vis the Time that connects our past, present and future in the eternity of our descent on this planet from the Unseen and our ultimate return to the Unseen. It is against such a background that a Sufi, while traversing the Sufi Path, actually transcends both space and time in the hope of experiencing the Infinite.

The writer is a professor at Kashmir University, Srinagar