Quick Answer
A hundred pages that describe the inside of a human being as a series of chambers, and the practices of Islam as the keys to each. Attributed to the founder of the Qadiri order and probably composed by his school after him, the book reads every act of worship at four depths, from the law to the truth, and maps the heart from its outer breast to its innermost secret. It is compressed, unargued and meant for people already walking. For them it is a classic. For others it is a window on how a Sufi order pictured the soul.
Key Takeaways
- Four levels for every practice: law, path, knowledge, truth.
- The heart has chambers, and the secret is in the innermost one.
- The path is the soul's descent reversed.
- Attribution is traditional, and the text is later than the man.
- Bayrak's translation is by a practising shaykh, and it reads that way.
16 min read
What This Book Is
Sirr al-Asrar wa Mazhar al-Anwar, The Secret of Secrets and the Manifestation of Lights, is a short Arabic treatise transmitted within the Qadiri Sufi order under the name of its founder, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani.
It sets out, in twenty-four brief chapters, an account of the human being's origin, structure and return: the soul's descent from God through the worlds into the body, the layers of the heart it must pass back through, the four levels at which every religious practice can be performed, and the states, visions and knowledge that mark the way.
The English translation by Tosun Bayrak, published by the Islamic Texts Society in 1992 in its Golden Palm series, runs to around 120 pages with introduction and notes, and is the edition reviewed here.
It is a small book. It is not a simple one.
What the title means. The secret of secrets is the innermost point of the heart, the sirr, where the divine and the human touch. The manifestation of lights is what happens when the veils over that point are removed. The book is a description of the passage inward to that point and of what shines when it is reached, and everything in it is organised around that single movement.
Who Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani Was
Born in Gilan, in northern Persia, in 1077, Abd al-Qadir came to Baghdad as a young man to study Hanbali law, the strictest of the Sunni schools, and spent years in study and then in solitary wandering before emerging, around the age of fifty, as a preacher.
His sermons, delivered in a hall built for the purpose, drew audiences in the tens of thousands and converted, by tradition, Jews and Christians as well as lapsed Muslims. Collections of them survive, and they are sober, scriptural and severe. He was a jurist and a preacher first, a Sufi in the sense that he practised and taught the inner life, and never a writer of speculative mysticism.
He died in 1166. His sons and disciples organised his following into the Qadiri order, and within two centuries he had become the most widely venerated saint in Sunni Islam, the Ghawth al-Azam, the supreme helper, whose intercession is invoked from Morocco to Java.
The Question of Attribution
It must be faced, since it changes how the book is read.
The Sirr al-Asrar is attributed to Abd al-Qadir by the Qadiri tradition and printed under his name. Scholars have noted that its technical vocabulary, its scheme of worlds and its four-level reading of practice reflect developments in Sufi thought later than his lifetime, and that his authenticated works, the sermons and the Ghunya, a manual of law and devotion, are different in kind. The consensus is that the treatise was composed within his school, perhaps a century or two after him, and gathered his authority.
This does not diminish the book. Attribution to a founder is how Sufi orders have always transmitted their teaching, and the text is a genuine product of the Qadiri tradition, expressing what the order understood the master to have taught. Read it as the Qadiri map of the soul, drawn under the founder's name, and the question of the pen becomes secondary.
The Descent of the Soul
The opening chapters, and the cosmology the rest depends on.
The book begins with the human being's origin: a soul created in the world of the divine, sent down through the intermediate worlds into a body, and clothed at each stage with a further garment that veils its origin from itself. By the time it is born it has forgotten where it came from.
The account is Neoplatonic in structure, as most Sufi cosmology after the tenth century is, and it sets the terms of the path: the return is the descent reversed, the removal of the garments in the order they were put on, until the soul stands again in the presence it left.
The chapter is brief and assumes its readers will recognise the scheme. It is the place where a reader from another tradition sees how close the Sufi map runs to the Neoplatonic one and how differently the Sufis use it.
The Worlds
The intermediate levels, named and ordered.
The book distinguishes the world of the kingdom, the material world of the senses; the world of dominion, the angelic and imaginal; the world of power, the plane of the divine attributes; and the world of the divine essence itself. The soul passes down through them in its descent and up through them in its return, and each has its own kind of knowledge and its own kind of veil.
Readers of Corbin on the imaginal will recognise the middle worlds. The Sirr gives the scheme in its practical form, as stages a practitioner passes through, with the signs of each.
The Four Levels
The idea that organises the whole treatise and that it is most remembered for.
Every practice of Islam, the book says, can be performed at four depths. At the level of the law, sharia, it is an outward act done correctly. At the level of the path, tariqa, it is done with inward attention and intention. At the level of knowledge, marifa, it is done with awareness of what it means and of the presence it addresses. At the level of truth, haqiqa, it is no longer done by the person at all: the self has been effaced and the act is God's.
The scheme is then applied, chapter by chapter, to purification, prayer, alms, fasting, pilgrimage, and remembrance. Purification at the first level is washing; at the fourth it is the cleansing of the heart from everything other than God. Fasting at the first level is abstaining from food; at the fourth it is the abstention of the whole being from everything but the divine. Pilgrimage at the first level is going to Mecca; at the fourth it is the pilgrimage to the heart, where the true Kaaba is.
The four-level reading became standard across the Sufi orders and is one of the tradition's most useful tools. This book is one of its clearest statements.
The Chambers of the Heart
The anatomy the book is named for.
The heart, in the Sirr, is a series of concentric chambers. The breast, sadr, is the seat of Islam, of outward submission. The heart proper, qalb, is the seat of faith. The inner heart, fu'ad, is the seat of direct knowledge. The innermost core, lubb, is the seat of unity. And at the centre is the secret, sirr, where the divine light is manifested to the one who has passed through all the rest.
Each chamber has its own light, its own knowledge and its own veil, and the seeker's whole work is to move inward from chamber to chamber. The scheme draws on Quranic vocabulary, since each of these words appears in the Quran, and the book reads them as a map.
The anatomy is worth holding as an image even for readers who take none of the theology. Most accounts of the inner life treat the heart as a single organ that is either open or closed, pure or impure. The Sirr says it has rooms, that most people live in the outermost one their whole lives, that the door to the next is a specific practice done at a specific depth, and that the rooms get quieter and brighter as one goes in. Whether or not there are four, the picture of an interior with structure, and of practice as the way of moving through it, is one of the tradition's most durable gifts.
Kinds of Knowledge
A chapter that distinguishes what can be learned from what must be given.
The book separates the knowledge of the law, acquired by study; the knowledge of the path, acquired by practice under guidance; the knowledge of gnosis, given directly to the purified heart; and the knowledge of truth, which is the state of the one who has arrived rather than knowledge of anything. It insists that the outer knowledge is necessary and insufficient, that the scholar without practice is like a donkey carrying books, in the Quranic phrase, and that the inner knowledge cannot be transmitted by words.
This is the same distinction al-Ghazali makes between the definition of health and health itself, stated as a doctrine rather than a discovery.
The Practices Read Inward
The central chapters, and the most practical.
Taken together, the chapters on purification, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage form a manual of the inner life organised around the outer duties. Each begins with the law's requirement, then moves inward through the levels, and each is short. The chapter on prayer gives the prayer of the body, the prayer of the heart, the prayer of the spirit and the prayer of the secret, and describes what each feels like from inside.
The book's method is to keep the outward practice intact and reveal what is happening in it. It never suggests the outward can be dropped. It suggests that most people who perform it are performing only its surface, and that the surface was designed to open.
Remembrance
The practice the Qadiri order is known for, and the chapter most practitioners use.
Dhikr, remembrance, is the repetition of the name of God or of the formula of unity, aloud or silently, alone or in congregation. The book gives its stages: the remembrance of the tongue, then of the heart, then of the inner heart, then of the spirit, then of the secret, each subtler than the last, until the remembrance is no longer performed but is the state of the one who was performing it.
It gives some instruction on method, on posture, on the direction of attention, and on the signs of each stage, and warns against remembrance done for effect. The chapter is short and is the seed of a large later literature.
Retreat and Its Conditions
A chapter on khalwa, the solitary retreat, which the Qadiri and many other orders practise.
The book sets out the conditions: permission of a shaykh, a fixed period, seclusion, ablution, fasting, silence, constant remembrance, and the intention to seek God alone. It describes the temptations of retreat, the visions that arise, the danger of taking them as attainment, and the need to report everything to the guide.
This is one of the earlier written accounts of the practice in the Sufi literature, and its insistence on the shaykh's supervision reflects the orders' understanding that retreat without guidance is dangerous.
Dreams and Visions
A short chapter that classifies what the seeker will see.
The book distinguishes dreams that come from the lower self and mean nothing, dreams that come from the imagination and reflect the day, and true dreams that come from the spirit and carry knowledge. It gives signs for telling them apart, and it treats the visions of retreat and of advanced remembrance as belonging to the third kind, while warning that even true visions are stages and not the goal.
The chapter is a reminder that classical Sufism took dreams seriously as a source of guidance, and that the orders developed a practical hermeneutic of them long before modern psychology.
The Two Deaths
A theme that runs through the book and gives it its urgency.
The Sirr distinguishes the natural death that ends the body from the voluntary death that ends the self, and holds that the second must precede the first for the soul to return where it came from. Die before you die, in the saying attributed to the Prophet that the book quotes. The practices are the means of the voluntary death; the levels are its stages; and the secret at the heart's centre is what remains when the self has died.
It is a severe teaching and the book states it without softening. The whole treatise is, from one angle, a manual for dying while alive.
The Qadiri Order
The tradition the book belongs to, briefly.
The Qadiriyya is among the oldest Sufi orders and the most widely spread, with branches across North and West Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia. It is known for sobriety, for strict adherence to the law, for vocal congregational remembrance, and for the veneration of its founder as the supreme saint.
The Sirr al-Asrar is the order's core doctrinal text, read in its lodges as the founder's own teaching. A reader who wants to know what a Qadiri practitioner has been taught about the soul will find it here.
Bayrak's Translation
Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi, 1926 to 2018, was a Turkish-born artist and professor who became a shaykh of the Halveti-Jerrahi order and led its American branch for decades. He translated a number of Sufi classics, Jilani's among them, from the perspective of a practitioner.
The translation reads as a shaykh's rendering: clear, warm, occasionally interpretive, and attentive to what a reader on the path needs rather than to philological precision. His introduction gives the life of Abd al-Qadir as the tradition tells it and does not dwell on the attribution question. Readers who want the scholarly apparatus will not find it; readers who want the text as the order reads it will.
Beside Ghazali and Hujwiri
Where the book sits among the classics.
Ghazali explains the inner life to a reader who has not begun it, at length and with argument. Hujwiri surveys the path's doctrines, schools and practices for a reader who wants to understand them. The Sirr assumes a reader already on the path and gives the map of its interior, in outline, without argument.
It is the most compressed of the three and the least explanatory. A reader who comes to it first will find it opaque; one who comes to it after the others will find that it says in a paragraph what they said in a chapter, and will understand why the orders kept it.
The Difficulties
Three.
Attribution. The book is not by the man whose name it carries, in all likelihood, and the edition does not say so.
Compression. Chapters of two or three pages carry doctrines that later writers spent volumes on, and the reader must supply the connections.
No argument. Everything is asserted. A reader who wants to know why the heart has four chambers rather than three, or why the worlds are ordered as they are, is not told.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you practise within a Sufi order and want the classical Qadiri account of the inner life in its own words.
Read it if you are interested in the four-level reading of religious practice, which this book states as clearly as any.
Read it after an introduction and after Ghazali, when its compression will read as density rather than obscurity.
Read it slowly, a chapter at a time, and return. It was written to be lived with.
The book's most useful idea is the four levels, and it does not need the tradition to apply. Any practice you already do can be done at the depth of the rule, the depth of attention, the depth of understanding what it is for, and a depth at which you are no longer the one doing it. Most practice stays at the first level and wonders why it does not work. The Sirr says the practice was never the problem: the same act, done further in, is a different act. That is a claim you can test on anything you do daily, and the test does not take long.
The Qadiri map of the soul: four levels, the chambers of the heart, and the secret at the centre.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the attribution and the compression of the text are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Secret of Secrets about?
Sirr al-Asrar, a short Sufi treatise on the soul's descent into the body, the layers of the human heart, and the inner meaning of the outward practices of Islam: purification, prayer, fasting, alms, pilgrimage, remembrance and the rest, each read at four levels.
Who was Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani?
A Hanbali preacher and Sufi of Baghdad, 1077 to 1166, whose sermons drew enormous crowds and whose followers founded the Qadiri order, one of the oldest and most widespread Sufi brotherhoods. He is venerated across the Islamic world as the Ghawth, the supreme helper.
Did he write it?
Probably not in its present form. The text is attributed to him by the Qadiri tradition, but scholars note that its vocabulary and doctrines reflect a later period, and it is best read as a work of his school transmitted under his name.
What are the four levels?
The book reads each practice at four depths: the law, sharia; the path, tariqa; knowledge, marifa; and truth, haqiqa. Prayer, for instance, is bodily worship at the first level and the annihilation of the self in the divine presence at the fourth.
What does it say about the heart?
That the heart has layers, from the breast where Islam dwells through the heart proper, the inner heart and the innermost core, and that the seeker's work is to pass inward through them to the secret at the centre, which is the book's title.
What is the descent of the soul?
The opening chapters describe the soul's origin in the divine, its passage through the worlds of spirit, power and dominion into the body, and the veils it acquires on the way. The path is the reversal of that descent.
Is it a practice manual?
More than most Sufi classics. It gives instruction on remembrance, on the conditions for retreat, on the stages of dreams and visions, and on what to expect at each level, though always in compressed form.
Who translated it?
Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi, a Turkish-American Sufi master of the Halveti-Jerrahi order, for the Islamic Texts Society in 1992. His is the standard English version and the one reviewed here.
How long is it?
Around 120 pages including introduction and notes. The treatise itself is short, dense, and meant to be read slowly and returned to.
What is the Qadiri order?
The Sufi brotherhood that grew from Jilani's circle in Baghdad, now found from West Africa to Indonesia. It is known for sober practice, respect for the law, and the vocal remembrance of God in congregation.
How does it compare to Ghazali?
Ghazali argues and explains; this book states and points. It assumes the reader is already on the path and wants the map of its interior, and it gives that map in a few pages where Ghazali would take a volume.
Who should read it?
Sufi practitioners who want a classical account of the heart's layers, readers of comparative mysticism interested in the four-level reading of practice, and anyone who wants a short, dense text to live with rather than a long one to finish.
Go one room in
Take a practice you already keep and do it once at the second level instead of the first: the same act, with the whole of your attention on what it is for rather than on getting it done. The book claims that this is a different act, that the outer one was a door and you have been standing in the doorway. You will know within a week whether the claim is true for you. If it is, there are two more rooms, and the book describes them.
Sources & References
- Al-Jilani, Abd al-Qadir (attrib.). The Secret of Secrets, trans. Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi, Islamic Texts Society, 1992.
- Al-Jilani, Abd al-Qadir. Al-Ghunya li-Talibi Tariq al-Haqq and the collected sermons, for the authenticated works.
- Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam, on the Qadiriyya.
- Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders in Islam.
- Knysh, Alexander. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, on Jilani and the attribution of the Sirr.
- Bayrak, Tosun. The Name and the Named, for the translator's own teaching.