In An Antique Land I

"Perhaps the most elusive aspect of medieval slavery is its role as spiritual metaphor, as an instrument of the religious imagination. In south India, among the pietist and fiercely egalitarian Vachanakara saint-poets of Bomma's own lifetime, for example, slavery was often used as an image to represent the devotee's quest for God: through the transforming power of metaphor the poets became their Lord's servants and lovers, androgynous in their longing; slaves, searching for their master with a passion that dissolved selfhood, wealth, caste and gender, indeed, difference itself. In their poetry it was slavery that was the paradoxical embodiment of perfect freedom; the image that represented the very notion of relationship, of human bonds, as well the possibility of their transcendence.

This imagery would not have been unfamiliar to Ben Yiju. He and his friends were all orthodox, observant Jews, strongly aware of their distinctive religious identity. But they were also part of the Arabic-speaking world, and the everyday language of their religious life was one they shared with the Muslims of that region: when they invoked the name of God in their writings it was usually as Allah, and more often than not their invocations were in Arabic forms, such as insha'Allah and al-hamdulillah. Distinct though their faith was, it was still a part of the religious world of the Middle East - and that world was being turned upside down by the Sufis, the mystics of Islam.

Judaism too soon felt the impact of Sufism. Shortly before Ben Yiju's lifetime the Jewish mystic Bahya Ibn Paquda composed The Duties of the Heart, a treatise culled largely from Sufi sources (...) Abraham Maimonides (1186-1237), a son of the great Talmudist Moses Maimonides, even composed a Sufi text of his own, and he is know to have remarked once that the Sufis were 'worthier disciples of the Prophets of Israel than were the Jews of his time'."

Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land