In the name of God, The Most Gracious, Most Merciful
Say: I seek refuge with the Lord of the Dawn,
From the mischief of the created things,
From the mischief of darkness, as it overspreads,
From the mischief of those who practice secret arts,
And from the mischief of the envious one as he practices envy.
Sans ville, sans maison, sans patrie,
Gueux, vagabond, vivant au jour le jour.
J’aime bien Diogène le cynique. Rien ne l’impressionne, pas même le conquérant de l’univers (connu) car il est homme, tout comme lui. Mieux peut-être que lui car il est chercheur de vérité et n’est pas avide de gloire et de reconnaissance. C’est une véritable exigence.
Sur l’agora, donc devant tout le monde, à midi où le soleil est au zénith du jour, Diogène se promène avec une lanterne allumée comme s’il n’y voyait rien. « Que fais-tu donc ? » lui demandent les habitants, familiers de ses excentricités libertaires. « – Je cherche un homme », répond le philosophe. Un homme, un vrai, adulte, lucide et responsable. Pas un esclave de ses passions et de ses préjugés, pas un ratiocineur fier de son outil et qui ne voit pas plus loin que le bout de son nez, pas un automate ni un mouton courant où va la foule, bien au chaud, laine contre laine. Augustin Pajou, au Louvre, l’a moulé en 1781.
Jacques Lacarrière résume Diogène à « quatre et saints principes :
1 . Savoir s’adapter aux circonstances au lieu de vouloir les changer ;
2 . Faire appel le plus souvent possible à soi-même au lieu de recourir toujours aux autres pour résoudre ses propres problèmes ;
3 . Etre capable de penser et d’agir, s’il le faut, à contre-courant ;
4 . Savoir que cette vie n’a d’autre but ni d’autre raison d’être que d’exercer le mieux possible le métier d’homme.
« Dictionnaire amoureux de la Grèce », Plon 2001, p.224
Il jugeait les hommes faibles, versatiles et moutonniers. Il se voulait « cynique » – chien – parce qu’il aimait mordre ses semblables et intervenir dans leur sérieux comme un chien dans un jeu de quilles. Il renversait les grands mots creux, les idées toutes faites, les habitudes moutonnières. Pour lui, on ne naît pas homme, on le devient.
The science of unknowing that is at the core of malamiyyah spirituality, can be defined as a way to place each reality on its own level. Thus, spiritual health consists in preventing confusion of the various levels. Such a confusion would be deadly since it would amount to a ‘deification’ of the human individual as such, or of one of his deeper layers of being. Now, this type of confusion is intrinsically connected, according to Sulami, to the very notion of inner ‘consideration’ or ‘vision’ of oneself (nazar).For the soul to ’see’ is, in a certain sense, to ‘appropriate’ and therefore to ‘bring down’. Spiritual progress presupposes a measure of ‘unknowing’, and any attempt at monitoring this progress amounts to individualizing what pertains, by definition, to the universal. Malamati identify this individualized appropriation to the Koranic “dispersed dust” Habd’an manthuran (XXV, 23)
To ‘blame’, whether it be inner or outer, is the superior way to make such a perfidious identification difficult, if not impossible.This is attained by breaking in upon and discontinuing the complacent ‘gaze’ upon one’s self, keeping in mind that the malamati’s work is focused on the lower realms of the soul and does not impinge upon the Intellect. Their attitude is also coupled to a vigilant distrust towards any kind of self-satisfaction or pleasure that would arise from acts of devotion or virtuous behavior.
In his Usul al- Maldmatiyydt wa-gbiltat al-sufiyah, Sulami emphasizes this ascetic principle of malamiyyah spirituality in a most radical manner:They [(the malami)] believe that their submission is not in their hands but belongs to destiny, and that they have no choice in performing their actions.
They went so far as to say that they were forbidden to find any sweetness in worship and submission because when a man likes something and finds pleasure in it while looking at it with satisfaction this is the sign that he is not in a lofty position. One of them said: “Far from you the pleasure of submission, for it is indeed a deadly poison.”
The Arabic word malāma means “to blame”. The element of ’scandal’ or ‘embarrassment’ associated with blame serves only to conceal or make much more difficult the genuine discernment (or ‘firasa’ in Arabic) between false Malamatis and true ones; for the genuine Malamati’s scandal is eminently involuntary, impersonal and altogether superficial whereas the scandal of a false Malamati is deliberate, personal and wholly destructive in substance.
The Malamati is one for whom the doctrine of “spiritual states” is fraught with subtle deceptions of the most despicable kind; he despises personal piety, not because he is focused on the perceptions or reactions of people, but because as a consistent involuntary witness of his own “pious hypocrisy”, God in turn wishes to keep him preserved and sheltered in divine occultation. The Malamati “sins” on the outward shell of his being whereas the “pious” but ignorant man sins in the kernel of his.
In their actions, the malamati bore much resemblance to the Greek Cynics, such as Diogenes of Sinope and Dionysius the Areopagite, as well as to certain of the Eastern Syriac Christians, such as Isaac the Syrian. Within the Islamic tradition, some of the tales concerning Nasreddin bear some similarity to the practices of the Malāmatiyya, insofar as Nasreddin’s wisdom is rather well hidden behind a foolish façade. Dionysius the Areopagite was the judge of the Areopagus who, as related in Acts, xvii, 34, was converted to Christianity by the preaching of Saint Paul. … Nasreddin (also commonly spelled Nasrudin, Nasredin, Nasruddin, Nasr Eddin, Nastradhin, Nasreddine, Nastratin, Nusrettin) was a lower Muslim cleric who lived among the Middle-eastern people in the Middle Ages. …
