Baqāʾ

Baqāʾ, “subsistence” or “remaining”, is the Sufi term for the state that follows the passing away of the self (fanāʾ). Having passed away from themselves, the seeker remains, or subsists, through God: they return to their own qualities and to the world, but now transformed, acting by God’s will rather than their own.

The pairing of fanāʾ and baqāʾ, developed by al-Junayd and the Baghdad school in the ninth and tenth centuries, became one of the defining marks of “sober” Sufism. Against the ecstatic sayings of those who remained in the intoxication of passing away, the sober Sufis held that the highest state is a return to clarity, ordinary life and the keeping of the law, in which the saint is outwardly like other people but inwardly with God.

In the school of Ibn ʿArabī, baqāʾ is associated with the perfect human being, who sees God in all things and all things in God, and holds together the oneness of reality and the distinctions of the world.