Bayāzīd Bastāmī: Nothing Left But God

He says: I sloughed off my self as a snake sloughs its skin, and then I looked, and I was He.

This is the moment. Bayāzīd Bastāmī, the ninth-century mystic of Bastam in northeastern Persia, has been working toward this for decades. He has a teacher — a man of Sindhi origin named Sadiq, who taught him the practice of attention and the possibility of the self’s dissolution. He has been practicing through years of fasting, vigil, and what he calls the abandonment of the self’s desires.

And then: the snake sheds its skin. The self falls off. What remains is not nothing. What remains is God, looking out through Bayāzīd’s eyes.

He says: Subhani — Glory be to me.

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The utterance is outrageous by any orthodox measure. Subhan Allah — Glory be to God — is a standard phrase of Islamic prayer. Subhani — Glory be to me — is the same phrase with the divine pronoun replaced by the first person. Bayāzīd has given God’s glory to himself.

The students who are present are horrified. They record it and later report it to scholars who debate it.

What Bayāzīd says afterward — in the accounts preserved in Attar’s hagiography — is the key. He says: if you hear me say Subhani, repeat back to me God is greater, to bring me back from the state. He recognizes that the utterance is not an ordinary statement. It is a report from inside a state in which the distinction between I and God has dissolved. The person who is in that state cannot distinguish their speaking from God’s speaking, their existence from God’s existence, because in that state the distinction is not operative.

The instruction to be brought back — God is greater than what you are saying — is the Sufi practice of returning from ecstasy to sobriety. Bayāzīd can be brought back. He is not permanently in fana. But when he is in fana, the Subhani is inevitable.

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His utterances accumulate.

I am the wine drinker, the wine, and the cupbearer. In one phrase: the devotee (wine drinker), the divine (wine), and the mediating reality (cupbearer) are all the same thing. This is not theological argument. It is the description of a state in which the subject-object structure of ordinary experience has dissolved.

I went from God to God until they cried from me: ‘O thou I!’ The movement from the created I to the divine I, and then the arrival at the place where the distinction between the two is gone: from me (still the individual speaking) O thou I (the divine addressing what it recognizes as itself in the human speaker).

The hagiographers collect these utterances and call them shathiyyat — ecstatic expressions, literally utterances that have overflowed their container. The tradition takes them as evidence of genuine fana rather than blasphemy, though it acknowledges that the line is thin and can only be drawn by those who understand fana from inside.

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Bayāzīd’s counterstatement is equally famous and equally important.

I have not known You as You deserve to be known. Spoken in a different moment, after the state has passed, by the same Bayāzīd who claimed glory for himself. The oscillation is the teaching: in fana, I am God. In sobriety, I have not even begun to approach knowing God. Both are true. The sobriety statement does not cancel the fana statement; the fana statement does not excuse the sobriety of knowing how far one has not come.

This double movement — the extravagant claim of union and the modest acknowledgment of distance — is Bayāzīd’s peculiar genius. He does not choose. He holds both, because both are honest at their respective moments.

The snake sheds its skin. The snake grows a new skin. The skin is shed again.

Nothing left but God. Then: I have not known You as You deserve to be known.

These are not contradictions. They are the same truth seen from inside the fire and from outside it.