Bayazid Bastami

Life & Legacy

Bāyazīd Basṭāmī, (d. 875), commonly known as the Sultān-ul-Ārifīn (King of Those Who Know) was a Persian Sufi who became famous for his bold articulation of fanāʾ–the Sufi notion of self-annhilation.
Abu Ali al-Sindhi, a Hindu convert from Sindh, was one of the tutors of Bayazid al-Basṭāmī, and he taught him the concept of fanaa.
Many "ecstatic utterances" (شطحات shatˤħāt) have been attributed to Basṭāmī, which lead to him being known as the "drunken" or "ecstatic" (Arabic: سُكْر, sukr) school of Islamic mysticism. Such utterance may be argued as Basṭāmī dying with mystical union and the deity speaking through his tongue. Bisṭāmī also claimed to have ascended through the seven heavens in his dream. His journey, known as the Mi'raj of Basṭāmī, is clearly patterned on the Mi'raj of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Basṭāmī is characterized in three different ways: a free thinking radical, a pious Sufi who is deeply concerned with following the shari'a and engaging in "devotions beyond the obligatory," and a pious individual who is presented as having a dream similar to the Mi'raj of Muhammad. The Mi'raj of Bisṭāmī seems as if Bisṭāmī is going through a self journey; as he ascends through each heaven, Basṭāmī is gaining knowledge in how he communicates with the angels (e.g. languages and gestures) and the number of angels he encounters increases.
His grandfather, Surūshān, was born a Zoroastrian, an indication that Basṭāmī had Persian heritage, despite the fact that his transmitted sayings are in Arabic. Very little is known about the life of Basṭāmī, whose importance lies in his biographical tradition, since he left no written works. The early biographical reports portray him as a wanderer but also as the leader of teaching circles. The early biographers describe him as a mystic who dismissed excessive asceticism; but who was also scrupulous about ritual purity, to the point of washing his tongue before chanting God's names. He also appreciated the work of the great jurists. A measure that shows how influential his image remains in posterity is the fact that he is named in the lineage (silsila) of one of the largest Sufi brotherhoods today, the Naqshbandi order.