Fanā is the passing away of the self. Baqā is what remains after it. The pair describes a single movement rather than two separate stages, and the classical writers are careful about a distinction that popular accounts usually lose: what passes away is not the person, but the attributes that veil God from them.
Al-Hujwīrī, writing in Persian around 1070, puts it with unusual precision. Discussing a definition he found obscure, he explains that the phrase
“is not ‘the not-being of the essence’, but ‘the not-being of that which contaminates the essence’; and all human attributes are a source of contamination: when that is removed, the result is annihilation of the attributes (faná-yi ṣifat).”
He returns to the point later, and the warning is sharper the second time. The terms ʿadam (not-being) and fanā, he says, “denote the disappearance of a blameworthy instrument (álat-i madhmúm) and disapproved attribute in the course of seeking a praiseworthy attribute; they do not signify the search for non-reality.” He had seen both errors in his own lifetime: philosophers who laughed at the doctrine as nonsense, and pretenders who repeated it without grasping it. “Both parties are in the wrong: one ignorantly denies the truth, and the other makes ignorance a state (of perfection).”
Fanā on its own would be merely a loss. What makes it meaningful in the Sufi sources is that something subsists. Ibn al-Fāriḍ, the Egyptian poet whose great ode Nicholson translated in full, asks for exactly this in the middle of the poem:
“I have come to hope that which others fear: succour therewith a dead man’s spirit that is prepared for (everlasting) life!”
— Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Tāʾiyya v. 116, in Studies in Islamic Mysticism
Nicholson glosses the passage in a single sentence: “By passing-away (faná) the mystic wins immortal life in God (baqá).”
Margaret Smith, writing on Rabiʿa and the women saints, quotes a description of the same completion: “Perishability (fanā ’) is ended and subsistence (baqā ’) is made perfect. Weariness and care cease, the elements perish and there remains what will not cease.” (Rabiʿa the Mystic, Chapter X)
This was not settled doctrine, and the sources preserve the argument. Al-Hujwīrī records an exchange in which a man from Nishapur used the formula “he becomes annihilated and then becomes subsistent,” and Khwāja Muẓaffar objected:
“How can subsistence (baqá) be predicated of annihilation (faná)? Annihilation means ‘not-being’, while subsistence refers to ‘being’: each term negates the other.”
Al-Hujwīrī himself had written a whole book on the pair as a young man, the Kitāb-i Fanā ū Baqā, and in the Kashf he disowns its confidence: he composed it, he says, “in the vanity and rashness of youth,” and will now “set forth the whole matter with caution.” (Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter V) That admission is worth more than most definitions.
There is also a famous rebuke on the point. Al-Ḥallāj asked Ibrāhīm what forty years of Sufism had given him. Ibrāhīm answered that he had made trust in God his own. Al-Ḥallāj replied: “You have wasted your life in cultivating your spiritual nature: what has become of annihilation in Unification (al-faná fi ´l-tawḥíd)?” (Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV)
Suhrawardī, in the thirteenth-century manual that became the standard handbook of the Sufi orders, ties fanā to the practice of dhikr. In the formula lā ilāha illā ʾllāh, he writes, the negation and the affirmation do two different kinds of work: the reciter “regardeth the existence of hadis wholly with the glance of fana; as to affirmation, the existence of kadim with the eye of baka.” (Awārif al-Maʿārif, Chapter V)
Elsewhere he gives it a plainer and more demanding sense: the highest renunciation comes about “by the fana (effacement) of his own desire in the will of God.” (Awārif al-Maʿārif, Chapter VIII)
Nicholson, describing Abū Saʿīd ibn Abi ʾl-Khayr, notes that the repetition of the divine name is “a method everywhere practised by Moslem mystics for bringing about faná, i.e. the passing-away from self.” (Studies in Islamic Mysticism, Chapter I)
Quotations keep each translator’s own transliteration, which is why the spelling varies between them: Nicholson prints faná, Wilberforce Clarke fana, Margaret Smith fanā’.
“Annihilation” is Nicholson's word, and it has stuck in English. It is a defensible rendering of a term that literally means perishing or ceasing, but it carries a violence the Arabic need not. Where al-Hujwīrī writes that the Sufi has “nothing in his possession nor is himself possessed by anything,” the sense is closer to dispossession than to destruction. (Chapter III) Readers who come to these texts through the English word alone often arrive expecting a doctrine of self-obliteration and find something more like the removal of a claim.
The passages above are quoted from complete public-domain translations, all of which are free to read here in full.
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