Abstract
The famous and highly influential Andalusian mystic, Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 638/1240) provides insight into the nature and significance of the Sufi robe (khirqa) in his magisterial work, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya:
One of my teachers, ’Alī ibn ’Abd Allāh ibn Jāmiʼ, who was a companion of ’Alī al-Mutawakkil and Qaḍīb al-Bāet Khaḍir; he used to live in his garden outside Mosul. Khaḍir had invested him with the khirqa in the presence of Qaḍīb al-Bān. He in turn transmitted it to me, on the very same spot in his garden where he had received it from Khaḍir and in the same way that it had been performed in his case. … From this time onwards I maintained [the validity and effectiveness of] investiture with the khirqa and I invested people with it because I understood that Khaḍir ascribed importance to it. Up until then I was no supporter of investiture with the khirqa when understood in this sense: as far as I was concerned it was simply an expression of companionship. … So it is that when the masters of spiritual states perceive some imperfection in one of their companions and wish to perfect that person’s state, they resort to the custom of meeting with the person alone. The master then takes the piece of clothing he is wearing in the spiritual state he is in at that particular moment, removes it and puts it on the man whom he wishes to guide to perfection. He then holds the man closely to him—and the master’s state spreads to his disciple, who thereby attains to the desired perfection. This is the “clothing” as I understand it and as it has been transmitted by our masters.2
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Notes
Muhī al-Dīn Ibn ’Arabī, Al-futūḥāt al-makkiyya (Cairo: Maktabat al-thiqāfa al-dīniyya, n.d.), I:187. The significance of the khirqa is alluded to again in Kitāb al-nasab, MS. Esad Efendi, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Istanbul, folios 90a–b. Translation from Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ’Arabī, trans. by Peter Kingsley (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993), 145–46. This incident occurred in 601/1204 in the Iraqi city of Mosul, two years after Ibn ’arabī received the first “eastern” khirqa, that of ’Abd al-Qadir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1165) which Ibn ’Arabī got at Mecca.
For more information on the khirqa of Khadir, see Louis Massignon, Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1922), 111–12.
Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, Siyar a’lām al-nubalā’ 35 vol. (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-risāla, 1985), vols. 22 and 23. For a discussion of the Hamuwayi family, see Jamal J. Elias, “Sufi Lords of Bahrabad” in Iranian Studies 27:1–4 (1994), 53–75; Sa’īd Nafīsī, “Khāndān-i Sa’d al-Dīn-i Ḥamawī” in Kunjkāwīhā-yi ’ilmī wa adabī, Intishārāt-i dānishgāh-i Tihrān 83 (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1950); and Fritz Meier, Abū Sa’īd-i Abū l-ḫayr, Acta Iranica 3rd Series, no. 11 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1976), 322–23, note. 22.
For information on the Uwaysis, see (among others) J. Baldick, Imaginary Muslims: The Uwaysi Sufis of Central Asia (London: I. B. Taurus, 1993); and Ahmet Yašar Ocak, Veysel Karanî ve ÜveysÜlik (Istanbul: Dergah Yaymlari, 1982).
For information on the early development of the khirqa, see Eric Geoffroy, “L’apparition des voies: les khirqa primitives (Xlle siècle-début XIIIe siècle),” in Les voies d’Allah: Les ordres mystiques dans l’islam des origines à aujourd’hui, edited by Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 44–54; and J.-L. Michon. “Khirḳa,” Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 5. T7b–18a.
This list appears in an unpublished treatise entitled Al-Qawā’id al-wafiyya fi aṣl ḥukm al-khirqat al-ṣūfiyya (Louis Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallāji, trans. by Herbert Mason, Bollingen Series, no. 98 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 2:107–108.
’Alī ibn ’Uthmān al-Jullābī al-Hujwīrī, The Kashf al-mahjub:The Oldest Treatise on Sufiism, trans. by R. A. Nicholson, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, vol. 17 (London: Luzac and Co., 1911; rpt. 1976), 45.
Shihāb al-Dīn ’Umar al-Suhrawardī, Kitāb ’awārif al-ma’ārif (Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-’arabī, 1983), 95–102.
For a detailed study of Suhrawardī and his ’Awārif al-ma’ārif, see Richard Gramlich, Die Gaben der Erkenntnisse des ’Umar as-Suhrawardī, Freiburger Islamstudien, no. 6 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1978).
Jamal J. Elias, The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ’Alāʼ ad-dawla as-Simnānī (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 39–41.
Nūr al-Dīn ’Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al ’uns, edited by Mahdi Tawhidipur (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-i Sa’dī, 1958), 437.
Fritz Meier, “Ein Knigge für Sufi’s,” in Scritti in onore di Giuseppe Furlani, pt. 1, Revista degli studi orientali 32 (1957), 485–524.
Mas’ūd Qasimī, ed., Ādāb al-ṣūfiyya (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-yi Zawwār, 1984).
Gerhard Böwering, “The Adab Literature of Classical Sufism: Anṣārī’s Code of Conduct,” in Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 69–70.
Abu al-MafākhirYaḥyā Bākharzī, Awrād al-aḥbāb wa fuṣūṣ al-ādāb, vol. 2, ed. Iraj Afshar (Tehran: Instishārāt-i dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1966), 23ff. A summary of the contents of this work is available in Muhammad Isa Waley, “A Kubrawi Manual of Sufism: the Fuṣūṣ al-ādāb of Yahya Bakharzi,” in The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 1992), 289–310.
An important example of correspondence between masters and their students in the Kubrawi school is that exchanged by Isfarā’inī and Simnānī; see Hermann Landolt, ed., Correspondence spirituelle échangée entre Nuroddin Esfarayeni et son disciple ’Alaoddawleh Semnani, Le departement d’iranologie de l’institut franco-iranien de recherche, no. 21 (Tehran: L’institut francoiranien de recherche, 1972).
Abū Naṣr al-Sarrāj, Kitāb al-luma’fi al-taṣawwuf, ed. ’Abd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (Cairo: Dār al-kutub al-ḥadītha, 1960), 249.
Elias, Throne Carrier, 41. For the khirqa-yi hazār mīkhī see also M. T. Danishpazhuh, “Khirqa-yi hazār mīkhī,” Collected Papers on Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism, ed. H. Landolt and M. Mohaghegh (Tehran: La branche de Téhéran de l’institut des études islamiques de l’Université McGill, 1971), 147–178.
Böwering, 74–75. Several of these are the names of stages along the Sufi path as it is described by writers such as Abū Bakr al-Kalābādhī in his Kitāb al-ta’arruf li madhhab ahl al-taṣawwuf (Cairo: Maktabat Khānjī, 1933); trans. A.J. Arberry as The Doctrine of the Ṣūfis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935; rpt. 1979).
’Abd al-Ḥqq Muḥaddith Dihlawī, Akhār al-akhār, Urdu trans. Iqbal al-Din Ahmad (Karachi: Dār al-ishā’at, 1963), 487.
Abū al-Najīb al-Suhrawardī, Ādāb al-murī ādī n, ed. Najīb Māyil-i Hirawī, with Persian trans, by ‘Umar ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad Shirkan (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Mawlā, 1984), 281.
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Elias, J.J. (2001). The Sufi Robe (Khirqa) as a Vehicle of Spiritual Authority. In: Gordon, S. (eds) Robes and Honor. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61845-3_12
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