Junayd of Baghdad

Sufi writing distinguishes two states and two temperaments. Sukr, intoxication, is the condition in which the mystic is overwhelmed, says things he cannot afterwards account for, and is not responsible in the ordinary sense. Sahw, sobriety, is the condition after the storm, in which the person has come back and can function. Junayd is the founder of the party that holds the second to be the higher.

His argument is structural rather than temperamental. Annihilation, fana, is real and necessary, but it is not the end of the road. What follows it is baqa, subsistence: the self is returned, remade, and set back down inside its ordinary obligations, so that the mystic prays, trades, judges and keeps the law like anyone else, with the difference now internal and invisible. A man permanently intoxicated has not completed the journey; he has stopped in the middle of it.

Underneath sits his doctrine of the covenant. Junayd reads the Quranic scene in which God addresses the not yet created descendants of Adam, asking whether he is not their Lord, as describing a state in which the soul existed in God before it existed in itself. The mystical path is therefore a return to a condition that is prior, not the acquisition of something new, and union is a recovery of what was always the case. That framing let him describe the highest states without ever asserting that a man becomes God, which is exactly the accusation the tradition needed to be able to answer.

A Sufi order authenticates itself by its silsila, the chain of transmission running back from the living master through his master and so on. An extraordinary proportion of those chains, across orders that agree on very little else, pass through Junayd. He is the point at which the tradition consolidated: the teacher whose formulations were careful enough to be quotable by people who needed to demonstrate that they were not saying anything actionable.

That caution was earned. He taught in Baghdad in the decades when the relation between Sufi practice and the jurists was being negotiated and had not yet been settled, and much of his surviving work is in letters, written in a compressed and deliberately difficult idiom, meant for people who already knew what he was talking about. He is said to have warned al-Hallaj, who had been in his circle, that his openness would end badly, and the tradition preserves an account in which Junayd was asked to sign the legal opinion against him and answered on the basis of the outward law rather than the inward state.

The long consequence is that Sufism had a respectable face available when it needed one. When al-Ghazali, two centuries later, argued that Sufi practice belonged inside mainstream Sunni religion rather than outside it, the material he was defending was largely of this school. Whether that respectability was a preservation or a domestication is a question the tradition itself has argued about ever since.