Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/217

 where he died. Jalalu d-Din had been educated by his father, and after his death he sought further instruction at Aleppo and Damascus, where he came under the influence of Burhanu d-Din of Tirmidh, who had been one of his father's pupils, and continued his training in Sufi doctrines. After this teacher's death he came in touch with the eccentric but saintly Shams-i-Tabriz, a man of great spiritual power but illiterate, who left a great impress on his age by his tremendous spiritual enthusiasm and the strange crudity of his conduct and character. It was after the death of Shams-i-Tabriz that Jalalu d-Din commenced his great mystical poem, the Masnawi, a work which has attained an extraordinary eminence and reverence throughout the whole of Turkish Islam. As already mentioned, Jalalu d-Din founded an order of Darwishes known as the Mawlawi order, or "dancing darwishes," as they are called by Europeans.

The whole course of doctrinal Sufism begins with Dhu n-Nun and ends with Jalalu d-Din; later writers do little more than repeat their teaching in new literary form, and it will be sufficient to select a few typical examples. In the 8th cent. we have  ' Abdu r-Razzaq (d. 730), a pantheistic Sufi who wrote a commentary on and defended the teaching of Muhiyyu d-Din ibnu l-'Arabi. He advocated the doctrine of free will on the ground that the human soul is an emanation from God, and so shares the Divine character. This world, he holds, is the best possible world: differences in condition exist and justice