Didactics of Blame and Tactics to Tame : Al-Sulamī’s ʿUyūb al-Nafs wa-Mudāwātuhā

A distinctive feature of Sufism (taṣawwuf), in its formative period, is a vision of religious growth as a path or a journey. A believer travels along the path toward God making progress along the way. The ethics of the Sufi master Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) express this general trend, with varying points of emphasis across his literary corpus. This chapter will concentrate on al-Sulamī’s treatise ʿUyūb al-Nafs wa-Mudāwātuhā (“The Maladies of the Soul and Their Remedies”), a brief Arabic text that stands in dynamic tension with the remainder of al-Sulamī’s oeuvre. While he often elsewhere approaches questions of religious growth through the categories of proper customs (ādāb), virtues or character traits (akhlāq), and the spiritual states (aḥwāl), ʿUyūb al-Nafs generally lacks these characteristic elements. The treatise relies on imagery of healing and therapy rather than travel or discipline, collecting isolated practical strategies to address specific defects in a believer’s religio-moral life. This analysis of ʿUyūb al-Nafs in the context of al-Sulamī’s larger ethical project will thus concentrate less on what the good life looks like than on how one moves toward it—how healing and progress occur in the life of the believer. The strong influence of the path of blame on al-Sulamī has long been recognised, and the remedies al-Sulamī prescribes for these sixty-nine maladies of the nafs contribute to our understanding of the fusion of the malāmatiyya and other spiritual currents during the formative period of Sufism. Setting al-Sulamī’s work in dialogue with ethical theories inherited from the Greek philosophical tradition—a tradition that appears to have left no visible trace on his writings—also enables one to identify al-Sulamī’s distinctive contribution with greater precision.

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Published in: Key Classical Works on Islamic Ethics
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
See chapter on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004459472_007