Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/196

 enthusiasts for tradition, but eschewed bodily indulgence as an entanglement of the flesh which hindered the progress of the spirit, so that they were in no sense the successors of the "Companions," but were influenced by new ideas unknown to early Islam. Yet superficially the results were very much alike, and this caused the two to be connected, and helped the later custom of connecting the early puritans with the ascetics of a subsequent age. In its earliest form, also, Islam made a strong appeal to the motive of fear, an appeal not based on divine severity so much as on divine justice and on man's consciousness of his own sinfulness and unworthiness, and on the fleeting passage of the life lived in this present world. There was an intense concentration on the Day of Judgment and on the perils of the sinner, a teaching which is perceived in the Qur'an even by the most casual reader: but all this was not altogether congenial to the Arab, although he in poetry certainly inclined towards a tone of sadness. The inevitable result of this teaching was asceticism in the puritanical sense, or, perhaps we should say, a tone of severity in religion.

Jami, one of the greatest Persian authorities on Sufism, tells us that the name "Sufi" was first applied to Abu Hashim (d. 162), an Arab of Kufa who spent the greater part of his life in Syria, and is typical of the early Islamic devotee who followed the simplicity of the Prophet's life and was deeply influenced by the Qur'anic teaching about sin,