Stations and states (al-maqamat wa'l-ahwal)

"Stations and states" (al-maqamat wa'l-ahwal) is a term of Sufism for the halting places of the heart's journey to God – repentance, patience, contentment, love and others – and for what comes upon the wayfarer in them. On the difference between them, Ibn al-Qayyim reports that the masters of the path disagree whether some halting places are stations or states; that for them the stations are acquired and the states are gifts; and that some say states are the fruits of stations and stations the fruits of deeds, so that whoever is better in deeds is higher in station, and whoever is higher in station is greater in state. ¹

Ibn Taymiyya opened al-Tuhfa al-'Iraqiyya by calling it words on "the works of the heart that are sometimes called the stations and the states" – love of God and His Messenger, reliance, sincerity, gratitude, patience, fear and hope – and held them obligatory on everyone under the command by agreement of the imams, with people standing in them as those who wrong themselves, those of the middle way and those who race ahead. ^{2 3} He answered those who made some stations, such as reliance, belong to the common people rather than the elite. ⁴

In Madarij al-Salikin Ibn al-Qayyim gives a chapter "on the halting places of 'You alone we worship', in which the heart moves station by station on its journey to God", and notes that people have said much about their description and number, some making them a thousand and some a hundred, each describing them according to his own journey. ¹ He then holds that their order does not mean the wayfarer completes a station and leaves it for the next, like the stages of a physical journey: wakefulness is with him in every station, and so are insight and patience; the order is that of something conditioned on its condition, which stays with it – as contentment depends on patience. ^{1 5}

He holds that the order every arranger of the stations proposes "is not free of arbitrariness and unsupported claim", since one who takes on the whole of Islam takes on its stations and states, and that the better way is that of the early masters, who spoke of each station – its reality, what brings it about, what spoils it – without restricting them to a number. ^{5 6} He then chooses to set out the stations of servanthood found in the Qur'an and Sunna in an order "not required but commendable", on the model of a physical journey, to make them easier to grasp. ⁶

The editor of part 1 of Madarij al-Salikin takes these passages as evidence of Ibn al-Qayyim's independence of method, and of his not having set out to write a commentary on al-Harawi's Manazil al-Sa'irin, since he says nowhere, in his introduction or elsewhere, that his book is one. ⁶

The definitions of stations and states in the Sufis' own books, such as al-Qushayri's Risala and al-Sarraj's al-Luma', and academic readings have not yet been added.