Annihilation (fana') in Sufi usage

"Annihilation" (fana') is a term of Sufism for the servant's absence from all but God: in his will, in his witnessing, or – in the claim of some – in existence itself. Ibn Taymiyya took it as an example of the ambiguous expressions in the shaykhs' words that are seized on by those who make creator and creature equal, and divided it into three kinds: one belonging to the perfect among the prophets and friends of God, one to the friends of God and righteous people who are on the way, and one to the people of heresy. ¹ The division appears in his treatise al-'Ubudiyya, and he returns to it in a separate section on "the annihilation found in the words of the Sufis". ²

For Ibn Taymiyya this is that the servant loves none but God, worships none but Him, relies on none but Him and seeks nothing else. He reads in this sense the saying of Abu Yazid, "I want not to want anything but what He wants" – that is, what God loves and is pleased with, by His religious will – and explains by it the saying that the "sound heart" is the one sound from all but God. Whether it is called annihilation or not, he holds that this meaning is the beginning and end of Islam and the inner and outer side of religion. ^{1 3} He calls it "the praiseworthy annihilation" on which the followers of the prophets stand. ⁴

This, he says, happens to many wayfarers: their hearts are drawn so strongly to the remembrance, worship and love of God, and are too weak to witness anything other than what they worship, that nothing but God crosses them. He compares it to what befalls someone overcome by love, fear or hope, whose heart turns away from everything else. When it grows strong, its possessor is absent through what he finds from his own finding, through what he witnesses from his witnessing, through the One he remembers from his remembering, until "what never was passes away and what has always been remains" – meaning that things pass away in the servant's witnessing, not in their existence. ³ He relates that the lover's discernment may be so shaken that he thinks he is his beloved, and tells the story of a man who threw himself into the sea after the one he loved. ³

He says that some slipped at this point and took it for union between lover and beloved, which he holds to be an error, since nothing unites with the Creator; what becomes one is what is willed and loved, so that lover and beloved agree in the kind of what they will and dislike. He holds this whole kind of annihilation to be deficient. ⁵

Companions, Followers and shaykhs

Ibn Taymiyya states that the greatest friends of God, such as Abu Bakr, Umar and the first forerunners, did not fall into this annihilation; that the Companions were too firm in the states of faith for their minds to vanish or for them to faint, swoon or become intoxicated; and that the beginnings of this appeared among the Followers, in the worshippers of Basra, some of whom fainted on hearing the Qur'an and some of whom died, such as Abu Juhayr the blind and Zurara ibn Awfa, judge of Basra. ⁵ Later, among the Sufi shaykhs, there were those whom annihilation and intoxication so overcame that their discernment weakened and they said things they knew on sobering to be mistaken, as is reported of the likes of Abu Yazid, Abu al-Husayn al-Nuri and Abu Bakr al-Shibli; unlike Abu Sulayman al-Darani, Ma'ruf al-Karkhi, al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad and al-Junayd, whose minds and discernment stayed with them in their states. ⁶ He adds that when the Prophet ﷺ was taken up in the Ascension he was among his people next morning with his state unchanged, unlike the fainting that came over Moses. ⁶

This he calls "annihilation in what exists", counts as the doctrine of the people of union and links with the Qaramita. He says that what the shaykhs and righteous people meant by their talk of annihilation is not that the creatures one sees are the Lord of the heavens and the earth, and that all the shaykhs who are followed in religion agree with the early generations that the Creator is distinct from creatures: nothing of His essence is in His creatures and nothing of His creatures is in His essence. ⁴

Elsewhere he notes that some shaykhs made annihilation in witnessing the unity of lordship – witnessing that God is the creator of everything – the final goal, calling it gathering, annihilation, effacement and erasure; he holds that many of them slipped here, and that al-Junayd pointed his companions to a "second separation" beyond it. See gathering and separation. ^{7 8}

This page presents annihilation through Ibn Taymiyya's division. The Sufis' own definitions of annihilation and subsistence from their books (such as al-Qushayri's Risala) and academic readings of the term have not yet been added.