The Ismaili-Sufi Sage of Pamir: Mubarak-i Wakhani and the Esoteri ...

Love (ishq) is the central theme of all his works, and the ultimate destiny of his spiritual quest; it is understood by Mubārak as being a divine power that brings the universe into existence, motivates the activity of every creature and wells up in the human heart to establish unity in the midst of multiplicity. This study is mainly based on three of his major books, namely Dīvān-i Kulliyāt, ālib al-Matlub, and ājāt va Munājāt, of which the latter is in prose form. It questions Mubārak’s notion of the meanings and functions of love, and its power and creativity in the light of Ismāīlī esotericism and Sufi mysticism. The divine love that he glorifies tends to be less suprasensory but more real than it is assumed to be in the general Sufi context. In other words, it is not simply a love for an extraordinary, non-human entity called ‘God’, but it is a cult of divine beauty expressed in the concrete form of a human being. Viewed from a slightly different sectarian angle, it is a love for God, whose physical attributes—manifested in a human body of the Imam of the Time (Imām-i Zamān)—are as important as his spiritual attributes. Combining Sufi ideas with the Ismāīlī esoteric (bāin) doctrine of God, he creates the object of this love in the persona of the Ismāīlī Imam. He employs the Sufi language of love to express his ideas about the nature of, as he calls it, the Truth (al-aqq) as the spiritual representation of the divine essence in the physical body of the Imam of the Time. He uses Sufi methods, both practical (detachment from the physical world’s passions; exercising dhikr, chilla-nishīnī, madô) and theoretical (the path of gnosis and love), to achieve his ultimate goal, that is, to be worthy of the Beloved. His mystical poetry, therefore, seeks to establish a state of equilibrium between Ismāīlī and Sufi philosophy expressed in the finest form of the mystical spirit. The ultimate goal of his spiritual path is to be adequate for the Beloved’s spiritual vision (dīdār). At the heart of Mubārak’s notion of dīdār, which is a significant element in Ismāīlī ritual practice that is meant to embrace the very moment of the Imam’s physical congregation with his devotees (murīdān), lies the Sufi idea of union with God or annihilation (fanā) in the divinity of the divine unique.¹³