Al-Junayd al-Baghdadi

About this book

In the Baghdad of the slave wars and the murdered caliphs, where a careless word about God could send a man to the executioner's mat, one teacher learned to carry the most dangerous truth of his age without being destroyed by it.Al-Junayd al-Baghdadi began as a glassmaker's nephew and a dealer in fine cloth, trained in the law and formed in the circle of his uncle Sari al-Saqati. He became the master to whom nearly every later Sufi order would trace its descent: the man who took the perilous, formless devotion of the early mystics and made it disciplined, lawful, and safe to pass from one soul to the next.This is the story of his choice. Against the ecstatics who cried their visions in the open and paid for them with their lives, Junayd taught sobriety, the return from annihilation to the clear and lawful life, the deepest things kept behind a closed door and veiled in letters built to be unreadable by hostile eyes. It is the story of the trial that nearly ended the Sufis of Baghdad, of his guarded teaching circle, and of al-Hallaj, the disciple who would not be silenced and went to the scaffold for it.Narrative history drawn from the classical sources and modern scholarship, The Sober Master of Baghdad recovers the life of the man who gave Islamic mysticism its mainstream, and shows why his quiet victory outlasted every louder one.The second volume in The Early Muslim Saints.