Sukr and Ṣaḥw

Sukr is intoxication and ṣaḥw is sobriety. Al-Hujwīrī treats the pair as the title of one of the great arguments in the tradition, between the followers of Bāyazīd (Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī) and the followers of Junayd. He defines the terms first:

You must know that “intoxication” and “rapture” are terms used by spiritualists to denote the rapture of love for God, while the term “sobriety” expresses the attainment of that which is desired.

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

The case for intoxication

Bāyazīd’s school, he says, “prefer intoxication to sobriety,” and their argument is clear. Sobriety “involves the fixity and equilibrium of human attributes, which are the greatest veil between God and Man,” while intoxication destroys them. They illustrate it with two scriptural verses. Of David it is said “David killed Goliath”; of the Prophet, “Thou didst not throw, when thou threwest, but God threw.” The first attributes the act to the man, the second to God, and al-Hujwīrī grants the point: “The attribution of a man’s act to God is better than the attribution of God’s act to a man, for in the latter case the man stands by himself, while in the former case he stands through God.”

The pair’s most famous exchange is a pair of letters. Yaḥyā b. Muʿādh asked what to say of someone who drinks a single drop of the ocean of love and becomes intoxicated. Bāyazīd answered with a question of his own:

“What do you say of one who, if all the oceans in the world were filled with the wine of love, would drink them all and still cry for more to slake his thirst?”

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

Al-Hujwīrī adds that people mistake who was speaking about what: “The man of sobriety is he who is unable to drink even one drop, and the man of intoxication is he who drinks all and still desires more.”

The case for sobriety

They are the followers of Abu ´l-Qásim al-Junayd b. Muḥammad, who in his time was called the Peacock of the Divines (Ṭá´ús al-`Ulamá). He is the chief of this sect and the Imám of their Imáms. His doctrine is based on sobriety

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

Junayd’s own objection to intoxication is preserved in an anecdote. When al-Ḥallāj came to him in a state of rapture and said that sobriety and intoxication are both attributes of man, and that man is veiled until his attributes are annihilated, Junayd answered:

“O son of Manṣúr,” said Junayd, “you are in error concerning sobriety and intoxication. The former denotes soundness of one’s spiritual state in relation to God, while the latter denotes excess of longing and extremity of love, and neither of them can be acquired by human effort.”

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

Where the two meet

Al-Hujwīrī refuses to rank them without conditions. There are, he says, two kinds of each. Intoxication can come from affection for the benefit received or from love of the Giver, and “he who regards the benefactor sees through Him and therefore does not see himself, so that, although he is intoxicated, his intoxication is sobriety.” Sobriety likewise can be heedlessness or love, and the first “is the greatest of veils, but the latter is the clearest of revelations.” In the end:

In short, where true mystics tread, sobriety and intoxication are the effect of difference (ikhtiláf), and when the Sultan of Truth displays his beauty, both sobriety and intoxication appear to be intruders (ṭufaylí), because the boundaries of both are joined, and the end of the one is the beginning of the other

— Kashf al-Maḥjūb, Chapter XIV

His warning is that false intoxication is a veil: “to fancy one’s self annihilated while the attributes really subsist.” For the true state of the lover, see Maḥabba; for what is annihilated and what stays, Fanā and Baqā; for the related involuntary states, Qabḍ and Basṭ and Wajd.