Keywords: Piety, fear of God, godliness, abstinence, iman,hadith,Sufism, Quran,sura, heart, sirr, wara, khawf, muhasaba, spiritual stations, makamat, muttakiyan, fana, Kubrawi.
Abstract:Taqwais a verbal noun from taqa to fear [God], itself a secondary formation from form VIII of w-k-y, ittaqa to fear [God] (see on this phenomenon, Wright, Arabic Grammar, I, 禮 148 Rem.b). From this same secondary formation is derived the adjective taqi, pl. atqiya pious, God-fearing, in fact a synonym of the form VIII participle muttaqi. Depending on context, the denotations of the term in classical Islamic religious and mystical literature include godliness, devoutness, piety, God-fearing, pious abstinence and uprightness. As a social ideal,taqwaoriginally connoted dutifulness, faithful observance, a meaning which was discarded in most later Islamic ethical thought.
In the poetry of Labid (d. 40 AH/660 CE), for instance, the social connotation oftaqwaas moral behaviour or reverential dutifulness with respect to ones tribe or relatives appears to have fused with the Quranic religious ideal of fear of God, so that concepts for a respectful relationship between the members of a tribe and the reverential behaviour towards God seem even to be interchangeable and identical (M.M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam, Leiden 1972, 117), but this combination of social and spiritual meanings oftaqwais now obsolete.
Author
Dr. Leonard Lewisohn
A respectedauthor, translator and lecturer in the area of Islamic studies and a specialist in Persian language and Sufi literature, the late Dr Lewisohn (1953 – 2018) was a Research Associate at the London Middle East Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and Associate Member of the Centre for Iranian Studies also at SOAS. Dr Lewisohn’s works includeBeyond Faith and Fidelity: the Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud Shabistari(London, 1993), a critical edition ofDivan-i Muhammad Shirin