Tawba is repentance, and in the classical sources it is the first station of the path. Al-Hujwīrī puts it at the head of his list and insists on the order: “the first ‘station’ is repentance (tawbat), then comes conversion (inábat), then renunciation (zuhd), then trust in God (tawakkul), and so on.” (Chapter XIV) Nothing later in the path is available to someone who has skipped it. The ḥāl and maqām pair explains why: repentance is a station, something stood in and held (Ḥāl and Maqām).
Al-Hujwīrī treats repentance in his chapter on purification, as the inner counterpart of washing:
“He who would serve God must purify himself outwardly with water, and he who would come nigh unto God must purify himself inwardly with repentance.”
He then makes the point that gives the subject its strangeness. Repentance is not a decision a person is strong enough to make:
“In short, repentance is a Divine strengthening and sin is a corporeal act: when contrition (nadámat) enters the heart the body has no means of expelling it; and as in the beginning no human act can expel repentance, so in the end no human act can maintain it.”
Rābiʿa says the same thing in a sentence. Someone asked her whether God would turn towards a sinner who turns towards Him, and she answered, as Nicholson tells it, that the order is the other way round:
“I have committed many sins; if I turn in penitence towards God, will He turn in mercy towards me?” “Nay,” she replied, “but if He shall turn towards thee, thou wilt turn towards Him.”
“Repentance is of three kinds: (1) from what is wrong to what is right, (2) from what is right to what is more right, (3) from selfhood to God. The first kind is the repentance of ordinary men; the second kind is the repentance of the elect; and the third kind of repentance belongs to the degree of Divine love (maḥabbat).”
The third kind is the one that changes what the word means. Al-Hujwīrī’s example is Moses, who asked to see God and then repented of the asking, “because he asked for it with his own volition (ikhtiyár), for in love personal volition is a taint.” Of the lovers he says:
“As regards those who love God, they repent not only of the imperfection of a station below the station to which they have attained, but also of being conscious of any ‘station’ or ‘state’ whatsoever.”
In his later list of technical terms he gives the plainest definitions: “Repentance (tawbat) is a turning back from disobedience to obedience, and return (rujú`) is a turning back from self to God.” For the lovers, he adds, sin is not disobedience but “consciousness of their own existence.” (Chapter XXIV)
Nicholson notes that the Sufi answer depends on who is asking. A director would tell a novice to remember his sins with remorse, as a cure for pride. But for the adept, he says, repentance is more complete than that, and he quotes al-Hujwīrī:
“The penitent,” says Hujwīrī, “is a lover of God, and the lover of God is in contemplation of God: in contemplation it is wrong to remember sin, for recollection of sin is a veil between God and the contemplative.”
Nicholson’s gloss: “Sin appertains to self-existence, which itself is the greatest of all sins. To forget sin is to forget self.” The same chapter records that “a certain well-known Sūfī repented seventy times and fell back into sin seventy times before he made a lasting repentance,” which is the consolation the tradition offers to anyone who has failed to keep the first resolve. Over the gate of repentance, he writes, stands the line “All self abandon ye who enter here!”
Repentance leads on to renunciation and trust in God, and its last form, the turning from self, is the entrance to passing away.
The passages above are quoted from complete public-domain translations, all of which are free to read here in full.
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