Kashf and Ḥijāb

A ḥijāb is a veil: whatever stands between a person and God. Kashf is its lifting, the unveiling. The pair is built into the name of the oldest book on this site, the Kashf al-Maḥjūb, “the unveiling of the veiled,” which its author renders more freely:

I have entitled it “The Revelation of The Mystery”.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Author’s Introduction

The later chapters of the book (XV to XXV) are arranged as a sequence of eleven, each headed “The Uncovering of the … Veil,” from the first to the eleventh. That structure is al-Hujwīrī’s answer to a question the whole tradition asks: what stands between a person and God, and how is it removed?

A universe of veils

His introduction states the doctrine with unusual plainness:

Know that I have found this universe an abode of Divine mysteries, which are deposited in created things. Substances accidents, elements, bodies, forms, and properties—all these are veils of Divine mysteries.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Author’s Introduction

Everything is a veil, then, in the sense that everything stands in the place where God might have been seen. The consequence is that the mind cannot easily escape them:

Hence the intellect can hardly comprehend those Divine mysteries, and the spirit can but dimly perceive the marvels of nearness to God. Man, enamoured of his gross environment, remains sunk in ignorance and apathy, making no attempt to cast off the veil that has fallen upon him.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Author’s Introduction

The greatest veil

Of all the veils, one is worst, and it is not outside the person:

the animal soul, which the Koran (xii, 53) describes as “commanding to evil” (ammáratun bi ´l-sú´), is the greatest of all veils between God and Man.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Author’s Introduction

This is the nafs of the next entry in the glossary (Nafs and Rūḥ), and it explains why so much of the path is a discipline of the self. A saying he quotes later makes the same point about people: “thy preoccupation with men is the greatest veil between thee and God.” (Chapter XIV)

Veils that can be thick or thin

The chapter of technical terms in the Kashf has a short definition of the veil on the heart, called ghayn:

Ghayn. A veil on the heart which is removed by asking pardon of God. It may be either thin or dense. The latter is for those who forget (God) and commit great sins; the former is for all, not excepting saint or prophet.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XXIV

The cure differs by thickness: “For removing the dense veil a proper repentance is necessary, and for removing the thin veil a sincere return to God.” Even the Prophet, al-Hujwīrī notes, is recorded as asking pardon of God a hundred times a day for a veil on his heart. See Tawba for the three kinds of repentance and the distinction between repenting and returning.

Even love can be a veil

The doctrine cuts deeper than a list of obstacles. The same sources say that the best things on the path can also become veils if the seeker rests in them. Al-Hujwīrī records Abū Yazīd’s remark that “lovers are veiled (from God) by their love,” because love needs a lover and a beloved (see Maḥabba). On intoxication, he says that to fancy oneself annihilated while the attributes remain is “a veil,” whereas sobriety that sees the attributes annihilated “is actual revelation” (see Sukr and Ṣaḥw).

Nicholson’s chapter on divine love makes the same extension to piety itself. He lists what the Sufis reject as insufficient: “the barren dialectic of the theologian; the canting righteousness of the Pharisee rooted in forms and ceremonies; the less crude but equally undisinterested worship of which the motive is desire to gain everlasting happiness in the life hereafter; the relatively pure devotion of the mystic who, although he loves God, yet thinks of himself as loving, and whose heart is not wholly emptied of ‘otherness’--all these are ‘veils’ to be removed.” (Chapter IV) The unveiling is therefore not one event but a long process of seeing that each thing which looked like the goal was in the way. Its end is described under Fanā and Baqā.