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Shathiyat: The Utterances of the Intoxicated

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Shathiyat: The Utterances of the Intoxicated

Bayazid is the pattern of the opposite temperament to Junayd's. What survives of him is a set of sayings called shathiyat, ecstatic utterances, and they are startling by design. Glory be to me, how great is my majesty. Under my garment there is nothing but God. I sloughed off my self as a snake sloughs its skin, and then I looked, and I was he.

The technical defence of such speech was worked out because of him. The claim is that in the state these words come from, the speaker is not present: what is heard is not a man's assertion about himself but the divine speaking through a vacancy. On that reading the utterances are not blasphemy and are not autobiography either, and the correct treatment of them is to record them and decline to argue. The tenth century writer Sarraj built exactly that defence, and later Persian tradition treated Bayazid as the type of the drunken mystic against whom the sober school defined itself.

He is also credited with an ascent narrative, a mi'raj of his own modelled on the Prophet's night journey, in which he rises through the heavens, is offered kingdoms and refuses them, and finally finds that the bird he has become is flying in a field of eternity that has no edge. The image had a long life. Attar retold it, and the Persian poets after him used the vocabulary of drunkenness for mystical experience largely because Bayazid had made it available.

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