Kashf al-Maḥjūb

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A man writes in a city he was carried to against his will, his library left behind in Ghazna, and he opens by complaining that thieves have twice stolen his earlier books and scratched his name off the title page. So he writes his name into the body of the new work, again and again, so that no one can take it from him. The book is the Kashf al-Maḥjūb, the “Unveiling of the Veiled,” and the precaution worked: it is the one treatise of al-Hujwīrī that survived, the oldest formal exposition of Sufism composed in the Persian language.

The shrine of al-Hujwiri, author of the Kashf al-Maḥjūb, at Data Darbar in Lahore — Muhammad Imran Khan, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The titles he gave it carry the argument in miniature. Kashf is unveiling, and maḥjūb is the thing veiled. Nicholson, in 1911, rendered the phrase as “The Revelation of the Veiled,” and the author himself, in the opening pages, says he chose the name so that the title “should proclaim its contents to persons of insight.” Knowledge of God lies behind a succession of veils; the book means to lift them, one by one, in order. It is a manual and a polemic at once — part survey of a discipline, part defense of the right way to walk it.

A book made on commission

The Kashf al-Maḥjūb belongs to the later years of al-Hujwīrī’s life, written at least in part during his residence in Lahore, where he died sometime between 1072 and 1077. The Persian scholar Valentin Zhukovsky, who would later prepare the critical text, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica both place the composition at Lahore not long before the author’s death, around 1074. It was written to order. A fellow townsman, one Abū Saʿīd al-Hujwīrī, had put a question to him, and the book is the answer, expanded into a system.

The question is preserved verbatim at the head of the introduction, and it sets the agenda for everything that follows: explain the true meaning of the path, the nature of the “stations” (maqāmāt), the doctrines and sayings of the masters, the mystical allegories, the nature of divine love and “why the intellect is unable to reach the essence thereof.” The author answers as a teacher answering a pupil. He says so plainly — that with a beginner one must go into detail, offering definitions and explanations rather than aphorisms — and the method holds across the whole book. Before stating his own view on a disputed point he sets out the current opinions and refutes the ones he finds wanting, then enlivens the argument with what he had seen on the road: a debate at Merv, a debtor’s bad season in Iraq, the saints’ tombs he had visited from Syria to the country beyond the Oxus.

The complaint about theft is not a flourish. In the introduction he records, with evident hurt, that a man borrowed his collected poems — of which there was no other copy — kept the manuscript, struck out the author’s name, and circulated it as his own; and that a “shallow pretender” had done the same to Minhāj al-Dīn, a treatise on the method of Sufism. Both works are lost. So are the half-dozen others he names in passing: a dīwān, a book on the patched frocks of the dervishes, a youthful treatise on annihilation and subsistence (fanā and baqā), commentaries on the sayings of al-Ḥallāj, a book on the divine unity. The Kashf al-Maḥjūb is the sole survivor of a working library, and it survived in part because its author had learned to sign his sentences.

He wrote, by his own diagnosis, into a vacuum. The science of Sufism, he says at the outset, had become “obsolete, especially in this country” — the eastern edge of the Muslim world, where the learned mistook their lusts for the Law and called skepticism purity. He runs a withering list: pride they call honor and learning, hypocrisy they call fear of God, neglect of the Prophet’s Law they call the mystic Path. True spirituality, he writes, had grown “as rare as the Philosopher’s Stone.” The book is a corrective written in a season the author judged corrupt — a recovery of a discipline he believed half-forgotten and half-counterfeit.

The architecture of the unveiling

The structure is deliberate, and the title governs it. Before any veil is lifted the book lays foundations: chapters affirming knowledge as the ground of everything (the believer’s intention, al-Hujwīrī insists, citing the Prophet, is better than his deed), then poverty (faqr), the wearing of the patched frock (muraqqaʿa), and the dangerous discipline of self-blame (malāmat). A long central section is biographical — a catalog of the masters arranged in generations. It runs from the Companions of the Prophet and the “People of the Veranda” (ahl-i ṣuffa), the destitute devotees who lodged in the Prophet’s mosque and renounced any livelihood, through the imams of the early generations and the great Sufis “of recent times,” down to the author’s own contemporaries and a brief survey of the Sufis country by country.

Then comes the chapter that most struck the work’s modern editor. The fourteenth, “Concerning the Doctrines held by the different sects of Sufis,” enumerates twelve mystical schools and assigns to each its special doctrine — ten he accepts, two he condemns. Nicholson judged al-Hujwīrī the first writer to do this; only one of the schools, the Malāmatīs, is noticed in earlier books, and the later references to the others probably rest on his authority. The schools may be partly his own systematizing — he tends, the editor allowed, to confuse a founder’s doctrine with his own view of the matter at issue — but the impulse is unmistakable: to map the field, to make the diffuse oral discipline legible as a structure.

Only after the foundations, the lives, and the schools does the book arrive at its formal heart: a sequence of eleven “uncoverings,” each lifting a single veil. The order is itself the teaching. First the gnosis of God (maʿrifat Allāh); then unification (tawḥīd); then faith, purification, prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage, companionship; then the Sufis’ own technical vocabulary; and last of all, audition (samāʿ). The arrangement sets inner knowledge and outer act in one graded order — the five pillars of Islamic practice woven into the same ladder as gnosis and unification — so that the revealed Law and the mystical path appear not as two ascents but as one. This is the book’s structural argument, made by the table of contents before it is made by any sentence: the path does not leave the Law behind; it is the Law seen from inside.

The opening definition of unveiling shows how seriously the author takes his own title. Kashf, he writes, is “destruction of the veiled object,” the way the near destroys the far. He distinguishes two veils. One, the “veil of covering” (ḥijāb-i raynī), is seated in a man’s very essence and seals the heart so that truth and falsehood look the same; this veil is never lifted. The other, the “veil of clouding” (ḥijāb-i ghaynī), sits only in the attributes — a rust on a mirror that polishing can remove. The book, he says, is written for hearts of the second kind, mirrors dimmed but not made of stone, “in order that the veil may be lifted from them by the blessing of reading it.” One cannot make a mirror out of a stone, he adds, “though many polishers assemble to try their skill on it.” The treatise knows its limits before it begins.

The lexicon and the law

Two of the eleven chapters do work the rest of the book depends on. The tenth veil — “explaining their phraseology and the definitions of their terms” — is one of the earliest connected attempts in Persian to fix the technical vocabulary of the Sufis: the difference between a “station” earned and a “state” given, the sense of intoxication and sobriety, presence and absence, annihilation and subsistence, the rest of the terms a reader needs in order to follow the masters’ sayings without mistaking metaphor for doctrine. Much of the later Persian and Indian Sufi lexicon can be traced to settlements first written down here.

The chapters on the first two veils, gnosis and unification, are where the discipline shows its deepest grain — and where the book’s apophatic nerve runs closest to the surface. Knowledge of God, the author argues, is not the conclusion of a proof. Reason is at most a means, never the cause; demonstration is already a turning toward something other than God, while gnosis turns away from all that is not God. He presses the point to its edge: gnosis involves the negation of whatever reason affirms, for whatever notion of God reason can frame, God in reality is other than that. To infer God’s existence from intellectual proofs is tashbīh, likening Him to creatures; to deny it on the same grounds is taʿṭīl, stripping Him bare. The Essence lies beyond reason’s reach, so that the perfection of knowing is to know one cannot know — gnosis, in al-Shiblī’s phrase, is continual amazement.

Emperor Jahangir preferring a Sufi shaikh to kings, a Mughal painting by Bichitr (c. 1615–1618) expressing the authority granted to the masters of the path — Bichitr, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Yet the unsaying never empties into silence. It is disciplined at every turn by the Law and by the revealed Names, the same dialectic that lives inside the Muslim confession itself, the denial that turns at once into an exception. The veil falls not into a void but toward prayer, poverty, and obedience. This is why, on the celebrated and dangerous question of whether the human self can be merged and extinguished in God, al-Hujwīrī holds firm. He compares annihilation to burning by fire, which transmutes the quality of all things to its own quality but leaves their essence unchanged: the self is consumed in attribute, not abolished in substance. He honors the “intoxicated” masters of the earlier age — Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī among them — without making intoxication the measure. With his teacher he follows the “sober” line that runs back through al-Shiblī to al-Junayd of Baghdad: ecstasy is acknowledged, recorded, and kept under the authority of knowledge and the revealed Law. He defends al-Ḥallāj against the charge of sorcery and reads his most scandalous sayings as pantheistic only in appearance — and still pronounces the doctrines themselves unsound. The sympathy is real; the verdict is sober.

The eleventh veil: the discipline of listening

The book ends with its most contested subject, and the placement is not accidental. Audition — samāʿ, the hearing of recited Qurʾān, of poetry, of voices and melodies — is the practice through which ecstasy most easily slips its discipline, and the author has been promising the reader a full treatment “in the proper place” since the early chapters. When he reaches it, he refuses to issue a permission. The whole approach is one of careful adjudication, never a method for inducing rapture.

Dervishes dancing in audition (samāʿ) while musicians play, a Persian miniature from the Majālis al-ʿushshāq, Shiraz, c. 1560 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He grounds the chapter in a theory of the senses — hearing, he argues, is superior to sight in the domain of religious obligation, since the entire Law reaches the believer through what is heard — and then divides every listener into two classes: those who hear the spiritual meaning and those who hear only the material sound. The same sound works on each according to what he already is. “Listening to sweet sounds,” he writes, “produces an effervescence of the substance moulded in Man: true if the substance be true, false if the substance be false.” Audition is like the sun, which shines on all things but burns one, illumines another, dissolves a third. He gathers the masters’ sayings to fix the verdict’s edges: Dhu ‘l-Nūn’s warning that those who listen spiritually attain God while those who listen sensually fall into heresy; al-Shiblī’s that audition is “outwardly a temptation and inwardly an admonition”; Abū ʿAlī Rūdbārī’s weary wish to be rid of it entirely. Pressed at Merv by a scholar who had written a tract declaring music lawful, al-Hujwīrī gives the formula that governs the chapter: its lawfulness “depends on circumstances and cannot be asserted absolutely” — lawful if the effect on the mind is lawful, unlawful if the effect is unlawful. The condemnation falls not on music but on the imitators who “took up the form but neglecting the spirit,” mistaking the adepts’ rapture for sensual license. The discipline of listening, in this telling, is the whole art; the listening itself is only an occasion.

Reception and afterlife

The Kashf al-Maḥjūb did what its author had hoped a signed book would do: it stayed in his name and in circulation. Its companion at the head of the systematic literature of Sufism is the Arabic Risāla of al-Qushayrī, composed at Nishapur in the same generation — al-Hujwīrī seems to have known him personally and renders passages of the Risāla into Persian. The two stand together, the one in Arabic, the other the first of its kind in Persian. Behind both lies the earlier Arabic Kitāb al-Lumaʿ of Abū Naṣr al-Sarrāj, the oldest specimen of the genre, on which al-Hujwīrī partly modeled his arrangement and which he had read closely; but his chief source, as he and his editor agree, was the living oral tradition of the masters he had met.

What made the book endure was its balance: comprehensive without being partisan, moderate in judgment, broad enough to hold the whole field — a manual a beginner could read and a master could trust. Across the Persianate world it became a foundational text, drawn on by later writers as a standard early source for the history and vocabulary of the discipline; the biographical chapters preserved sayings that would otherwise have scattered, and Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s later Tadhkirat al-Awliyāʾ leans on its account of the schools. Its sober, law-abiding vision of the path fed directly into the great Persian flowering that followed in ʿAṭṭār and Rūmī, and it traveled into India with the orders. The Chishtī tradition holds, from inside its own devotion, that the order’s founder kept vigil at al-Hujwīrī’s Lahore tomb on his way into the subcontinent and left a couplet hailing the buried author as the bestower of treasure — Dātā Ganj Bakhsh — a name that fixed itself to the shrine and never came off. The book and the grave thus passed into the same afterlife: a treatise on approaching the veiled God by knowledge and discipline, written by a man whose tomb became one of the great pilgrimage sites of South Asia.

The Data Darbar complex in Lahore, grown around al-Hujwiri’s grave into one of the largest Sufi shrines in South Asia — Meemjee, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Persian text was lithographed at Lahore in the nineteenth century — an inaccurate edition, especially in the spelling of names — before Valentin Zhukovsky of St. Petersburg prepared the critical recension that scholars still cite. The work entered English in 1911, when Reynold A. Nicholson published The Kashf al-Maḥjúb: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Ṣúfiism as the seventeenth volume of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, collating the Lahore print against manuscripts in the India Office and the British Museum. The full translation is hosted chapter by chapter, from the affirmation of knowledge through the eleventh veil on audition; a public-domain reissue of the same version is available through Project Gutenberg, and a concise scholarly account of the man and the book stands in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Nicholson, who would go on to edit and translate Rūmī’s Mathnawī, called it in his preface “the most ancient and celebrated Persian treatise” of its kind — and nearly a thousand years after a displaced scholar signed his name into every chapter to keep it, his name is still on the book.

→ In the library: al-Hujwīrī — The Kashf al-Maḥjúb (Nicholson, 1911)

→ Related: Al Hujwiri · Sufism · Islamic Sufism · Gnosis · Al Ghazali · Junayd Of Baghdad · Al Qushayri · Abu Yazid Al Bistami · Apophatic Theology · Ecstasy · Mysticism · Asceticism · Chishti Sufism · Qawwali Sufi Sama · Rumi · Islam · Arthur Edward Waite