Neither were the old teachers to be found who could guide...

Neither were the old teachers to be found who could guide the young seekers of the true path, nor were the young stalwarts to be seen anywhere whose life one could take as a model. Piety left us bag and baggage. Greed and avarice became the rule of the day. And all hearts lost genuine respect for the Shari'ah. “[^5] Later on, the author of Kashf al-Mahjub , 'Ali Hujwiri (d. c.

456/1063), came out even in stronger terms against what was prevalent in his days : “God has created us among men who give the name of Shari ` ah to all that their base selves crave for, and who give the name of honour and science to all those tricks with which they seek worldly power and glory, and who call double-dealing the fear of God, and who label the art of concealing hatred of men in their hearts the virtue of tolerance.”[^6] `Attar, who came much later, is perhaps, just because of that, more explicit than his predecessors: “Ours is the period in which this mode of talking (the truth) has taken on the veil of complete concealment.

It has become fashionable with the charlatans to parade as the wise and the virtuous, and the genuine men of love and insight have become rare like any­thing. We are living in such times that the evil-doers have pushed the good and the virtuous into complete oblivion.”[^7] The great concern for truth that all those writers felt comes out indirectly also in the special mode of recording and reporting statements from great Sufis which all of them generally (and al-Qushairi especially) adopt.

Practically every point that al-Qushairi makes, regarding every feature, major or minor, of Sufi way of life, is supported by him with three types of evidence. (1) Some statement from the Qur'an, better than which there is no basis for any prin­ciple governing the life of the faithful. (2) Some hadith or some incident in the life of the Holy Prophet. (3) Some comment or some incident in the life of a great Sufi. So far as the first of these is concerned, we know, the matter is very simple.

Nobody can afford to misquote the Qur'an, for the danger of discovery is always there. As to the second and third types of evidence, the risks of mis­quoting are always there. It was to avoid these risks that scholars of Hadith had devised the special techniques which came later on to be known as tech­niques of isnad (the method of basing traditions on the authority of narrators), and Asma' al-Rijal (the chain of narrators supporting a tradition).