Mystics and Saints of Islam

Mullah Shah was born A.D. 1584, in the village of Erkesa in Badakshan, a mountainous and inaccessible country to the north of the Indian Caucasus. His family, which was of Mongo...

Avicenna, now best known as a philosopher, was perhaps better known in the middle ages as a kind of magician owing to the mastery of medical science. His father was a native of...

Fariduddin Attar was born in the village of Kerken near Nishapur in Khorassan, A.D. 1119 under the Sultan Sandjar. Some years after his birth his father removed to Schadbakh, wh...

The moral law proclaimed by Moses three thousand years ago agrees with that which governs men to-day, irrespective of their various stages of culture; the moral precepts of a Bu...

Al Ghazzali is one of the deepest thinkers, greatest theologians and profoundest moralists of Islam. In all Muhammadan lands he is celebrated both as an apologist of orthodoxy a...

Jalaluddin Rumi has been called by Professor Ethé (in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_) "the greatest pantheistic writer of all ages." However that may be, he is certainly the grea...

Mansur Hallaj ("the cotton-comber"), a Persian, of Zoroastrian lineage, was a pupil of Junaid of Bagdad, a more sober-minded Sufi than his contemporary Bayazid Bastami. Mansur h...

Ibrahim Ben Adham was originally Prince of the city of Balkh, and had control of the riches of many provinces. One night when he was in bed he heard a sound of footsteps on the...

Hasan Basri was born in Arabia at Medina, where his mother had been brought as a captive and sold to Omm Salma, one of the wives of the Prophet. Arrived at man's estate, and hav...

One of the last representatives of the mystical school of Islam is Sharani, who wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century. In his time Egypt had just been conquered by the Tu...

Rabia, the daughter of Ismail, a woman celebrated for her holy life, and a native of Basra, belonged to the tribe of Adi. Al Qushairi says in his treatise on Sufism, "She used t...

Bayazid Bastami, whose grandfather was a Zoroastrian converted to Islam, was distinguished for his piety while still a child. His mother used to send him regularly to the mosque...

Ibn Khalliqan, the historian, calls Zu'n Nun "the first person of his age for learning, devotion and communion with the Divinity." His father, who was a native of Nubia, was a s...

Habib Ajami was a rich usurer of Basra, and used to spend most of his time going about and collecting the money which was due to him. He used also to insist on being paid for th...

In the beginning of his career Fudhayl ben Ayaz was a highwayman, and used to pitch his tent on the plains between Merv and Abiwerd. He had collected many other robbers round hi...

Very few remains in writing, except their Persian poems, have come down to us from the older Pantheistic mystics. In the Kingdom of the Caliphs heretical books were suppressed b...