Wajd is ecstasy: the “finding” or “feeling” in which the seeker’s own self drops away. Nicholson’s chapter on illumination and ecstasy opens with a claim about how much weight the word carries:
The whole of Sūfism rests on the belief that when the individual self is lost, the Universal Self is found, or, in religious language, that ecstasy affords the only means by which the soul can directly communicate and become united with God. Asceticism, purification, love, gnosis, saintship--all the leading ideas of Sūfism--are developed from this cardinal principle.
There is no single technical term. Nicholson lists a cluster, “more or less, equivalent to ‘ecstasy’”: fanā (passing-away), wajd (feeling), samāʿ (hearing), dhawq (taste), shirb (drinking), ghaybat (absence from self), jadhbat (attraction), sukr (intoxication) and ḥāl (emotion). He admits that definitions do not bring us much nearer to the experience: it is described, for example, as “a divine mystery which God communicates to true believers who behold Him with the eye of certainty.” The glossary treats several of these separately (Fanā and Baqā, Samāʿ, Sukr and Ṣaḥw, Ḥāl).
In the classical account it is involuntary. Nicholson says that, “in theory, the ecstatic trance is involuntary, although certain conditions are recognised as being specially favourable to its occurrence,” and quotes the traditional account: “It comes to a man through vision of the majesty of God and through revelation of the divine omnipotence to his heart.” He gives the example of Abū Ḥamza, who was “walking in the streets of Baghdād and meditating on the nearness of God,” fell into ecstasy, and went on his way “neither seeing nor hearing, until he recovered his senses and found himself in the desert.”
But the Sufis, he adds, “soon discovered that ecstasy might be induced artificially, not only by concentration of thought, recollection (dhikr), and other innocent methods of autohypnosis, but also by music, singing, and dancing.” That is the subject of the long dispute over audition (Samāʿ). Al-Hujwīrī’s middle view, as Nicholson reports it, quotes Dhu ’l-Nūn:
“When the heart throbs and rapture grows intense, and the agitation of ecstasy is manifested and conventional forms are gone, this is not dancing nor bodily indulgence, but a dissolution of the soul.”
The Awārif al-Maʿārif is the strictest source here on conduct at an assembly. It tells the participant to sit “with respect and gravity,” to restrain the body “from excess of motion, especially in the presence of shaikhs,” not to “become agitated with a little of the splendours of wajd,” and not to “affect intoxication with a little taste of the pure wine (of love for God).” (Chapter V) About the feigned version he is unsparing:
If — let us flee to God for protection, — without the descending of wajd and of hal, he manifesteth wajd and layeth claim to hal, — it is verily the essence of hypocrisy and of sin, the foulest blameable act, and the most disgraceful of states.
A gathering where someone falsely displays ecstasy and “maketh time perturbed with false tawajud,” he says, is one that “it is necessary for true seekers to shun.” The word tawājud names the effort to induce or display the state, and Suhrawardī’s position is nuanced: a sincere attempt, he allows, may be “possibly a portion of wajd,” so that its blessing yields a portion of good, but a display that has not been given is condemned.
Suhrawardī adds a point about stages. In his discussion of audition, he says that while wajd is “the perfection of the hal of ‘the first ones,’” it is the defect of “the last ones,” because for them it is the sign of resuming the state of witnessing after a slight loss of it. The advanced traveller, on this account, does not need what the beginner is given. The same tension between rapture and steadiness runs through al-Hujwīrī’s discussion in Sukr and Ṣaḥw, and the sources’ common warning against claiming states is the subject of Malāma.
The passages above are quoted from complete public-domain translations, all of which are free to read here in full.
Read The Mystics of IslamRead the Awārif al-Maʿārif