Abstract:
This paper aims to present Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as a Western example that reconfirms the necessity for man’s inner development up to the stage of the Completest Self (nafs-i safiyya). With the advent of Christianity and the resultant triumph of its “morality of slave” (1886, sec. 260), the “death of God” (1882) becomes the “fundamental event of Western history” and its “intrinsic law” so far (Heidegger 1977, 67). The central question is how the West shall return the lost God, and so answer adequately to the drive of the eternal return? Nietzsche’s answer is expressed within the concepts of the “death before death,” the “man of Greek tragedy,” the “nomad” (“traveler”), and the “overman,” while this paper identifies their essence in the teachings of Sufism. The “death before death” declared by Prophet Muhammad (s), the Sufi exercise Stop, the background of Sufi teaching, and the seven stages of nafs, including the Completest Self, are juxtaposed to the concepts of the German philosopher. It results that according to Nietzsche, what the West should bring from the state of absence to the state of presence is the summarizing truth of Sufism.
Machine summary:
It is precisely the issue of the Old/New Testament which replaced the life-affirming virtues with the annihilating compensatory forms— including the pathos of distance, the ideology of suffering, the inward turn of self-mastery, the principle of ressentiment, and so forth—thus transforming Christianity into "the greatest misfortune of humanity" so far (Nietzsche 1895, sec.
The man of the ancient Greek theater points up the difference between the ceasing of an individual's life, on the one hand, and the eternal return, on the other hand, while Christianity turned "the death bed into a bed of agony" (Nietzsche 2003, sec.
I argue that Nietzsche's life-affirming pain, extracted from the ancient Greek theater, can be identified in the Sufi exercise(s) Stop, Pause of Time, Freezing of Movement, and Pause of Time and Pause of Space that the dervish must carry on in order to attain higher states of his being.
—Persian proverb In The Wanderer (1880), Nietzsche tells about the new meaning of life of a man who becomes a "nomad" (the term itself used in sec.
As the dervish who, in his struggle to become Sufi, learns the principles of truth from the deep knowledge of Sufism, the post-Christian "nomad," in his struggle to become "overman," learns Nietzsche's truth that is comprised in Einstein's relativity theory,1 which was discussed almost one thousand years before Einstein in Hujiwiri's technical literature (Kashf al-mahjub) about the identity of time and space in applied Sufi experience (as cited in Shah 1979, 38).