The Light of Knowledge=نورالعلوم
Subtitle: ABU’L-ḤASAN ḴARAQĀNĪ, ʿALĪ B. AḤMAD B. JAʿFAR B. SALMĀN (352-425/963-1033)
Publisher: thouerh Publication
Published: Sep.2017
Place of publication: Iran.Tehran.
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 260
Description: ABU’L-ḤASAN ḴARAQĀNĪ, ʿALĪ B. AḤMAD B. JAʿFAR B. SALMĀN (352-425/963-1033)

The description of the mystical terms and expressions of the Book of Nur al-ulum; the words attributed to Abul Hasan Kharqani (352-425.H)
Table of contents: title: ABU’L-ḤASAN; title: ḴARAQĀNĪ; title: ABU’L-ḤASAN ḴARAQĀNĪ, ʿALĪ B. AḤMAD B. JAʿFAR B. SALMĀN (352-425/963-1033), Sufi shaikh of Ḵaraqān, some 20 km north of Basṭām in Khorasan. His shrine, with a recent gravestone but ancient adjoining mosque, overlooks the present-day village. Already celebrated in his own lifetime, Ḵaraqānī is said to receive illustrious visitors such as Sultan Maḥmūd of Ḡazna and Ebn Sīnā. Although many traditions pointing to his greatness as a saint are clearly legendary, there can be no doubt he was a mystic of exceptional genius; his presence left a strong impression on such different Sufi personalities as Abū Saʿīd b. Abi’l-Ḵayr (d. 440/1049), Abu’l-Qāsem Qošayrī (d. 465/1072), and especially ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī (d. 481/1089). Anṣārī considered Ḵaraqānī one of the greatest spiritual masters of the time, though he knew him as a man of little formal learning. His Arabic was reportedly poor, and his dicta are often quoted in his local Persian dialect. To call him an illiterate village saint is to overstate the point, but he was certainly of humble social origin. He was married to a woman who is traditionally portrayed as a quarrelsome Xanthippe. One of his sons seems to have been murdered under dubious circumstances; another one appears after Ḵaraqānī’s death among the followers of Abū Saʿīd b. Abi’l-Ḵayr.; title: Ḵaraqānī’s affiliation with organized Sufism remains somewhat obscure. Anṣārī intimates that Abu’l-ʿAbbās Qaṣṣāb Āmolī, the great Sufi teacher of Ṭabarestān who is known as one of the masters of Abū Saʿīd, regarded Ḵaraqānī as his real successor; but according to Abū Saʿīd’s family tradition, Āmolī took a neutral position in a theoretical dispute between Ḵaraqānī and Abū ʿAbdallāh Dāstānī of Basṭām (d. 417/1026). The latter appears also in Ḵaraqānī legends as a sort of rival saint; since Dāstānī was well-known as šayḵ al-mašāyeḵ and learned keeper of the traditions concerning Abū Yazīd Basṭāmī, this rivalry may reflect the fact that Ḵaraqānī regarded himself as the real disciple of Abū Yazīd, or rather, as an Abū Yazīd redivivus. Many of his sayings are indeed reminiscent of the great Basṭāmī, and Ḵaraqānī biographies make it a point to show that his Sufi master was the “spirituality” of Abū Yazīd (the so-called owaysī relationship of a disciple to his immaterial master). By virtue of this relationship, Ḵaraqānī figures in the spiritual genealogy of the Naqšbandīya order as the link between Abū Yazīd (d. 261/874 or earlier) and Abū ʿAlī Fārmadī (d. 477/1084-85). On the other hand, Yaḥyā Sohravardī traces Ḵaraqānī’s (and Āmolī’s?) spiritual descent via Ḥallāǰ to Abū Yazīd, and from there to the esoteric ḵosravānīyūn of pre-Islamic Iran, which is of course not to be taken in the sense of an ordinary ṭarīqa line. The identification of any concrete disciple-master relationship was perhaps not as important to Ḵaraqānī himself as it was to some of his followers. He seems to have tended toward the Malāmatīya tradition of Khorasan, and his habit of calling himself ǰovānmard rather than ṣūfī would seem to indicate that he had no great respect for institutionalized Sufism. In fact, he made it quite clear that he had no master (ostād) but God, and that for him to be a real Sufi meant to be free in the deepest sense, i.e., not to be attached to “being there” at all.; title: Basically, he followed the way of classical Islamic asceticism. He frequently called attention to the imminence of death and the Last Day, and he emphasized the virtue of weeping. His feeling for man’s radical inadequacy vis-à-vis God is evident in the following saying: “The litany (werd, less likely dard) of the ǰovānmardān is a grief (andūh) greater than the two worlds; they want to think of God but are unable to do it adequately.” Yet this grief was compensated, for those able to bear it, by a moment of “joy with God (šādī, nafas bā Ḥaqq) more precious than all divine worship.” Thus the realization of inadequacy turned into its very opposite; and this is where Ḵaraqānī meets his great model, Abū Yazīd. Recalling Abū Yazīd’s meʿrāǰ experience, he was certain that he had made the same ecstatic journey beyond the worlds “to the place where no creature could follow.” Though he was aware that to travel “with one step from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven” meant really nothing before God’s infinity, the experience made him conscious of an extraordinary spiritual power of the ǰovānmard. Seeing himself as the axis mundi, he felt that his head was the heavenly throne, that his feet were beneath the earth, and that his two hands were East and West. He also said, pointing to his particular kind of cosmic consciousness: “When my tongue was opened in the experience of God’s oneness (tawḥīd), I saw the skies and earth perform ritual circumambulation around me, but the people were unaware of it.” Most characteristically, however, he described himself in the following words: “I am neither worshipper, nor scholar, nor Sufi: My God, you are One, so by that Oneness of yours, I am One!”