Bayazid Bistami

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.

Bayazid names a teacher called Abu Ali al-Sindi, from whom, he says, he learned the science of annihilation, and to whom in exchange he taught the obligatory duties of Islam. The name means the man from Sind, in the Indus valley, and that one detail has carried a very large scholarly argument.

The proposal, argued most fully in the middle of the twentieth century, is that the doctrine of annihilation in Bayazid's mouth is not a development of anything already in Islamic ascetic piety but an import: that Vedantic non dualism reached him through this teacher, and that his utterances are recognisably the Upanishadic identification of the self with the absolute in Arabic dress. The parallels adduced are genuine and in places close.

The objections are equally serious. Sind was under Muslim rule and Abu Ali may simply have been a Muslim from that province with no Vedantic training at all; the language of annihilation can be derived from Quranic material without external help; and the argument has been criticised as a case of finding what one already believed was there. No decisive evidence has appeared either way, and the atlas records the question as disputed rather than choosing. It is a good example of a problem in the history of religions that is entirely tractable in principle, and where the surviving evidence is simply too thin to settle it.