t h e p u r i t y o f v i s i o n
a n d i t s c o r u p t i o n
m a r g i n
w a l k e r
"...Islam burst forth in the form of an epic: now, a heroic history is written with the sword, and in a religious context the sword assumes a sacred function; combat becomes an ordeal. The genesis of a religion amounts to the creation of a relatively new moral and spiritual type; in Islam, this type consists in the equilibrium — paradoxical from the Christian point of view — between
contemplativeness and combativeness, and then between holy poverty and hallowed sexuality.
The Arab — and the man Arabized by Islam — has, so to speak, four poles, namely the desert, the sword, woman and religion. For the contemplative, the four poles become inward: the desert, the sword and woman become so many states or functions of the soul.
On the most general and, a priori, outward level, the sword represents death, the death one deals and the death one risks; its perfume is always present. Woman represents an analogous reciprocity; she is the love one receives and the love one gives, and thus she incarnates all the generous virtues; she compensates for the perfume of death with that of life. The deepest meaning of the sword is that there is no nobility without a renunciation of life, and this is why the initiatory vow of the Sufis — insofar as it relates historically to the "Pact of the Divine Acceptance" (Bay`at ar-Ridwan) — includes the promise to fight to the point of death, bodily in the case of the
warrior-martyrs (shahada shuhada') and spiritual in the case of the dervishes, the "poor" (faqir).
The symbiosis of love and death within the framework of poverty and in the face of the Absolute,
constitutes all that is essential in Arab nobility, so much so that we do not hesitate to say that here
lies the very substance of the Moslem soul of the heroic epoch, a substance that Sufism tends to
perpetuate by sublimizing it..." Frithjof Schuon, "Images of Islam"