Bāyazīd Bisṭāmī

Abū Yazīd Ṭayfūr al-Bisṭāmī, known in Persian as Bāyazīd, lived in the town of Bisṭām in north-eastern Iran in the ninth century; the sources give his death as 874 or 848. He seems to have spent most of his life there, practising severe austerity, and left no writings. His teaching survives in sayings collected by his family and later authors.

He is remembered above all for his shaṭḥiyāt, ecstatic utterances in which the speaker seems to be God rather than the man: he is reported, for example, to have cried “Glory be to me!” in the place of the praise due to God. His followers understood these as the speech of one who had passed away from himself, through whom God spoke. An account of his ascent to God, modelled on the Prophet’s night journey, became a classic of Sufi literature.

Later Sufis treated him as the type of “intoxication”, in contrast to Junayd’s “sobriety”; Junayd himself commented on his sayings, finding them true but not yet the end of the path. Some modern scholars, notably R. C. Zaehner, argued for Indian influence on his thought, through a teacher called Abū ʿAlī al-Sindī; the claim remains disputed.