The Highest Spiritual Degree

Peace, one and all…

Narrated Abu al-Darda’: “Those who are given the highest spiritual degree are those who practice the invocation of God.”
(Quoted by al-Bayhaqi. Validated hadith.)

The term dhikr, which we have translated as “invocation,” can also be translated as “remembrance,” “reminder,” or “mention.” In order to respect this polysemy, the following phrase can be used as a definition: [Dhikr is the] remembrance of God through the repetition of a sacred formula. After reading this hadlth, one may ask: “How does invocation confer the highest degree of spirituality?” This question can also be formulated in the following way: “Why does the repetition of the Divine Name or the Shahada—and not another rite—confer the highest degree of spirituality?” This hadlth in itself clarifies the meanings of the Qur’anic verse affirming the primacy of the invocation:

‘Surely prayer keeps away from indecency and evil, and certainly the remembrance of God is the greatest’ (Quran 29:45)

Nevertheless, in order to reply to the twofold question, one has to look into the nature and the role of invocation in the spiritual path. For this, it is necessary to clarify the role of invocation in surpassing the limits of the mind, a process through which access to the heart becomes possible.

All doctrine is related to the mind; but mystical doctrine, which corresponds to the Lore of Certainty, is a summons to the mind to transcend itself. The Divine Name Allah is the synthesis of all truth and therefore the root of all doctrine, and as such it offers certainty to the Heart and to those elements of the soul which are nearest to the Heart. But being a synthesis, it cannot in itself meet the needs of the mind; and so, in order that the whole intelligence including the mind may participate in the spiritual path, the Name as it were holds out a hand to the mental faculties, an extension of itself which offers them lore as well as certainty and which, in addition to being a synthesis, has an analytical aspect on which it can work. The extension of the Name is the divinely revealed testification (shahada) that there is no god but God (La ilaha illa Allah). No god but God: for the mind it is a formulation of truth; for the will it is an injunction with regard to truth; but for the Heart and its intuitive prolongations of certainty it is a single synthesis, a Name of Truth, belonging as such to the highest category of Divine Names. This synthetic aspect makes itself felt even when the Shahada is taken in its analytical sense, for the synthesis is always there in the background, ever ready as it were to reabsorb the formulation back into itself. Thus while necessarily inviting analysis, as it must, the Shahada seems in a sense to defy analysis. It is both open and closed, obvious and enigmatic; and even in its obviousness it is something of a stranger to the mind which it dazzles with its exceeding simplicity and clarity, just as it also dazzles because it reverberates with hidden implications.
(What is Sufism?, pp. 63-64)

Taken from Tayyib Chourif, Spiritual Teachings of the Prophet