الذوق الصوفي عند الجنيد البغدادي (The Concept of Taste (ḏawq) According to the Sūfī Mystic al-Ǧunayd)

Al-Ǧunayd’s Ṣūfī philosophy is based on the Quranic verse 7:172. Through his con­templation of this verse, al-Ǧunayd formed his view on the concept of taste (ḏawq), which is based on the relation between ‘passing-away’, ‘God’s oneness’, and ‘covenant’. It is noteworthy that al-Ǧunayd divided the stages of passing-away into four levels: the passing-away of human language while retaining speech; the passing-away of form; the passing-away of the senses; and ultimately the passing-away of the self. Al-Ǧunayd did not follow the Islamic philosophers who attempted to prove the principle of God’s oneness rationally, as is evidenced by his saying: “When the minds of the rational individuals reach God’s oneness, they reach bewilderment.” Instead of rationality, he regarded the idea of ‘taste’ relevant concerning God’s one­ness. He formulated his own concept of ḏawq dividing it into four levels, with the highest level being described in symbolic language as “a specter standing before him, not a third between them […] and the knowledge in this is that the end of the servant returns to his beginning, to be as he was before he was […] now he is as he was before he was, and this is the ultimate reality of the tawḥīd of the person who declares God’s oneness, through the disappearance of his distinction between ‘Him’ and ‘Me’. It is noteworthy that according to al-Ǧunayd, God’s oneness equals pass­ing-away, since the personality of him who reaches union is annihilated in God’s oneness, in which the distinction between self and other disappears, and God be­comes as He was in eternity. Finally, the term ‘covenant’ represents the bridge link­ing the concepts of ‘passing-away’ and ‘God’s oneness’, which are in fact synonyms. ‘Covenant’ represents the return of the soul to the source of the human condition, as it was in the ‘world of eternity’, before it existed in the ‘world of time’, and thus the end of the servant returns to his beginning, to be as he was before he was.