The Last Words of the Dying Sheikh

They gather around the bed.

The students have been gathering for days. Word moves through a Sufi community when the master is dying: the circle tightens, the daily business of the khanqah is suspended, people sleep on the floor rather than return to their homes. They want to be there for the last teaching. The last teaching is the one that costs the most.

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Junayd al-Baghdadi dies in 910, reciting the Quran.

He has been ill for days. His students ask if they can bring him food, medicine, whatever is available. He refuses. He is asked: master, do you need anything from us? He says: I need from you what you cannot give me, and what can be given to me you are not able to give. He means: I need the divine mercy at the threshold of death, which only God can provide, and you cannot provide it. But I also receive something from you — the love, the presence — which is genuinely given in your being here.

He continues to recite. When he finishes the recitation, he is gone.

The students record the moment not because of its drama — there is very little drama — but because of its precision. The man who spent his life teaching sobriety and the disciplined management of mystical states dies exactly in the manner of his teaching: quietly, within the forms of Islamic practice, reciting what he had memorized as a child, maintaining his connection to the tradition that had formed him until the connection extended into whatever comes next.

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Bayāzīd Bastāmī’s reported death is different.

He dies in his seventies, having been the most dramatic of the early masters during his life — the man who cried Glory be to me in the middle of meditation. At the end, his students ask him: master, what is your age? He says: I am four years old. They are confused. He explains: For seventy years I was veiled from God by my ego. For four years I have seen clearly. I count from the beginning of the seeing.

This is the Sufi theology of time delivered as a deathbed statement: the years before the awakening do not count as life in the deepest sense. The true age of the person is the age of their clarity. Bayāzīd, at seventy-something years old, is four years old in the time that matters.

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Ibrahim ibn Adham, dying in Syria on a military expedition, asks for his bow. He is at sea, one account says. He asks to shoot an arrow before he dies. The arrow goes into the water. He says: I have never done anything with ease but this. And dies.

The interpretation the tradition gives: the arrow is his life — his prayers, his practice, his teaching — released without the weight of ego. The ease with which the arrow flies is the ease of an action taken from the place of complete absence-of-self. Seventy years of practice to reach the point where a single arrow can be shot with perfect freedom. The ease is the achievement.

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Rumi asks for music the night he dies.

When I die, do not weep. Weep on the day of my birth, which was the beginning of my separation. Tonight is the night of union. He has said this before. He says it again at the end. The ney sounds in the room. The students do not know whether he is awake or already gone. He is not making a distinction between the two states.

The last words attributed to him vary in the sources. One common form: Hurry. It is almost dawn. He means: the wedding has gone on through the night, and now it is nearly sunrise. The time between night and dawn — the hour when mystics have always prayed, the hour closest to the divine — is ending.

He goes in the direction the reed flute was always playing.

Not away. Toward.