Texts of Islam

Oriental Mysticism: Part I: Chapter I. Of the Traveller, the Goal, the Stages, and the Road

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is a 19th-century scholarly exposition of Islamic mystical philosophy (Sufism), drawn from Palmer's 1867 work introducing Western readers to the Sufi tradition. The text presents the soul's journey toward God as a path of mystical perception rather than rational intellect, arguing that "Divine Light" — not ordinary intelligence — is the sole means of attaining knowledge of God, which is itself the purpose of human existence. The work distinguishes between two schools of thought: the Sufis, who hold that no road to God exists because God is omnipresent and infinite, making the very concept of a journey paradoxical; and the Unitarians (Ahl i Wahdat), who assert a more radical monism — that all existence is God's existence, and the illusion of a separate self is both the fundamental error and, paradoxically, the only path toward Him. Both positions are grounded in Quranic citations and classical Islamic philosophical poetry, giving the exposition an authoritative, textual character. The distinctive claim is this double paradox: the road to God is simultaneously nonexistent (because God is already everywhere) and real (because the error of believing oneself separate from God must itself be traversed).

Oriental Mysticism: Part I: Chapter I. Of the Traveller, the Goal, the Stages, and the Road

Related pages View as graph →