ABSTRACT
The wheel now appears to have turned full circle. Sufism has run its course; and in the progress of human thought it is illusory to imagine that there can ever be a return to the point of departure. A new journey lies ahead for humanity to travel. Some men at all events will be seeking to walk along that road in the company of God. Some Muslims will desire to recapture in their own hearts the ecstatic joy experienced by those Sufis of old, to comfort and confirm them: Within an age become exceeding strange, Cruel, and terrible, wherein we need Most urgently a statement of our faith And intellectual arguments thereto. If the “intellectual arguments” must of necessity be of a different order from those which satisfied al-Junaid, al-Ghazālī, Ibn ‘Arabī, Jalā1 al-Dīn Rūmī, it by no means follows that the discipline of body and spirit invented by the Sufi masters will prove inadequate to meet the requirements of the modern and future man.
