The khirqa — also called the muraqqaʿa, the patched frock — is the garment a shaikh confers on a murīd, his disciple. It is the most concrete thing in this vocabulary: an actual object, sewn from patches, that marks a person as belonging to the path.
Al-Hujwīrī gives it a chapter, opening with its warrant:
“Know that the wearing of a muraqqaʿa (patched frock) is the badge of aspirants to Ṣúfiism. The wearing of these garments is a Sunna (custom of the Prophet).”
He then does something characteristic: rather than list the sayings collected about the frock, he picks the reading he considers best and explains why he is not doing more. “Many allegories have been uttered concerning the muraqqaʿa… and the generality of aspirants to Ṣúfiism display much extravagance (ghuluww) in this matter. My aim, however, in the present work is not to relate sayings, but to elucidate the difficulties of Ṣúfiism.”
“The best allegory concerning the muraqqaʿa is this, that its collar (qabba) is patience, its two sleeves fear and hope, its two gussets (tiríz) contraction and dilation, its belt self-abnegation, its hem soundness in faith, its fringe sincerity.”
Then he raises the stakes with a second version: “Better still is the following: ‘Its collar is annihilation of intercourse (with men), its two sleeves are observance and continence, its two gussets are poverty and purity, its belt is persistence in contemplation, its hem is tranquillity in God's presence…’”
Both readings assume the wearer knows the vocabulary. The gussets are qabḍ and basṭ; the belt is the discipline of the nafs. The frock is a wearable summary of the system.
Al-Hujwīrī is unsentimental about the range of people who present themselves for the frock, and sorts them into four classes. The first is the one worth quoting, because it describes a motive rather than a merit:
“He whose purity, enlightenment, subtlety, even balance of temperament, and soundness of character give him insight into the hearts of the Ṣúfís, so that he perceives the nearness of their spiritual adepts to God… He joins himself to them in hope of attaining to the same degree.”
The remaining classes are less flattering, and the chapter's practical purpose is to let a shaikh tell them apart.
Suhrawardī, whose manual shaped how the orders actually operated, is unusually frank about the investiture's authority:
“A custom of the Sufis is the putting on of the khirka, which, at the beginning of their sway over the murids, the shaikhs have considered laudable; but regarding which they have received no order from the sunnat except the hadis of Umm-i-Khalid.”
This is the same honesty he shows about samāʿ, which he also calls an innovation. He does not defend these practices by inventing precedent for them; he defends them on the ground that they are not contrary to the sunna and that they work.
He also records the frock's role in the audition assembly, where a listener overcome by ecstasy casts it off: if no shaikh is present, “they give the khirka to the singer; because the exciter of wajd… is his song.” (Chapter V)
Suhrawardī's chapter on being a shaikh is largely about judgement — how much to ask, and when. On property: “If the murid desire at once to give up his property, the shaikh may accept; because, in return for it, he can give to the murid that state (for which he is fit) which is the cause of tranquillity of heart.” The transaction is explicit, and it is not a transfer of goods for nothing.
On the disciple's own choice: “According to the hadis the murid should choose fakr (poverty), which is the wealth of Sufism, and the condition of tarikat (the path to God) — although to him, poverty and riches are, as ʿUmar hath said, one.” (Chapter IV; see zuhd and tawakkul.)
The last clause undoes the first in the right way. Poverty is chosen, and to the one who has properly chosen it the distinction has stopped mattering.
The passages above are quoted from complete public-domain translations, all of which are free to read here in full.
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