Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/195

 worldly followers of the Umayyads, and similar instances appear amongst the devout Muslims of the present day. Such were not Sufis, but they may be regarded as the precursors of the Sufis. The historian al-Fakhri, describing the abstemious life of the first Khalifs, says that they endeavoured by this self-restraint to wean themselves from the lusts of the flesh. This is reading a later idea into a much earlier practice, which was originally designed simply as a more accurate following of the Prophet, who was unable to enjoy any luxury or splendour; but it shows that later generations were inclined to ascribe a more definitely ascetic motive to the affectedly simple life of the earlier Muslims, and no doubt that early puritanism, misunderstood by later ages, contributed to spread asceticism.

Al-Qushayri (cited Browne: Lit. Hist. of Persia, i. pp. 297–8), after referring to the "Companions" and "Followers" of the first age of Islam, then mentions the "ascetes" or "devotees" as the elect of a later age, those who were most deeply concerned with matters of religion, and finally the Sufis as those elect of still later times, "whose souls were set on God, and who guarded their hearts from the disasters of heedlessness." Historically this is an error, for the saints of early Islam were inspired by a spirit of strict adherence to the traditional life of their desert ancestors and rejected luxury as an "innovation," very much the same spirit as that observed in the ancient Hebrew prophets; whilst the Sufis were no