The Malāmatiyya (ملاميه) or Malamatis are a Sufi (Muslim mystic) group that was active in 8th-century Samanid Iran. Believing in the value of self-blame, that piety should be a private matter, and that being held in good esteem would lead to worldly attachment, they concealed their knowledge and made sure their faults would be known, reminding them of their imperfection.
The Arabic word malāma (ملامه) means "to blame". According to Annemarie Schimmel, "the Malāmatīs deliberately tried to draw the contempt of the world upon themselves by committing unseemly, even unlawful, actions, but they preserved perfect purity of thought and loved God without second thought" (Schimmel 86). Schimmel goes on to relate a story illustrative of such actions: "One of them was hailed by a large crowd when he entered a town; they tried to accompany the great saint; but on the road he publicly started urinating in an unlawful way so that all of them left him and no longer believed in his high spiritual rank" (quoted in Schimmel 86).
In fact, the Malāmatīs are considered, by one of the better known Sufi Masters, Ibn al-'Arabi, as the ultimate Sufis, people whose deep inward piety is concealed not only from the eyes of men but ultimately from themselves, the attachment to the perception of one's own piety constituting a formidable barrier to genuine self-realisation. The Malamati is one for whom the doctrine of "spiritual states" is fraught with subtle deceptions of the most despicable kind; he despises personal piety, not because he is focused on the perceptions or reactions of people, but as a consistent involuntary witness of his own "pious hypocrisy". God in turn wishes to keep him preserved and sheltered in divine occultation. The nature of this sheltering may be occasioned by a "public fall from grace" or a scandal that involves public opprobrium. Farid, in one of his Odes quoted by R.A. Nicholson in his Studies in Islamic Mysticism, describes the Malamatiyya thus: "My fellows in the religion of love are those who love; and they have approved my ignominy and thought well of my disgrace". Ibn al-'Arabi, by contrast, calls the Malamatiyya "the most perfect of the gnostics", those who "know and are not known". The Malamati's "sins" are considered to be on the outward shell of his being whereas the "pious" but ignorant man sins in the kernel of his.
The figure of Uways Qarani is most representative in this respect. Farid al-Din 'Attar tells us about him: "during his life in this world, he (Uways) was hiding from all in order to devote himself to acts of worship and obedience" ('Attar 1976, p. 2). 'Attar also relates that the Prophet had declared at the time of his death that his robe should be given to Uways, a man he had never met in this life. When 'Umar looked for Uways during his stay in Kufa, he asked a native of Qarn (the home town of Uways) and was answered "there was one such man, but he was a madman, a senseless person who because of his madness does not live among his fellow countrymen (...) He does not mingle with anybody and does not eat nor drink anything that others drink and eat. He does not know sadness nor joy; when others laugh, he weeps, and when they weep, he laughs" (ibid., p. 29). We can already perceive here, in the case of an early mystic like Uways, the dual, and seemingly contradictory, spiritual vocation of 'obscurity' and 'eccentricity.' The unassuming figure of Uways is, at the same time, blatantly discordant in the social context. This discordant status that is often referred to as 'madness' is the mark of the irruption of a transcendent, vertical perspective within the world of terrestrial horizontality. It is akin to a negation of the negation: the Spirit 'negates' the distorted notions of the soul, the biases and comforts. When Uways finally meets with 'Umar, he tells him that it would be better for him that "nobody (but God) would know him and had knowledge of who he was." To remain incognito can be considered as the leaven of malamiyyah spirituality. However, malamiyyah will tend to apply this principle in a way that amounts to opting for the spiritual 'desert of solitude' among men rather than choosing a flight toward the physical 'desert' of nature.
The original inclination to hide their states (talbis al-hal) may be converted, by the same token, into an open manifestation of states. The 'folly' of the malamiyyah is not to be understood as a calculated method since it professes an element of inspiration, 'disposition' or 'state' (hal). The mystic is led to behave in a manner that may make no sense to him or to others, as if to portray the unintelligible kernel of relativity alive in the world. As a consequence, Ibn 'Ajiba defines the malamati as one who "hides his taste of sanctity and displays states that make people flee his company" (Sulami 1985, p. 263). This type of display will tend to situate the mystic in an apparently offensive position toward the shari'a, and in a disruptive situation vis-a-vis traditional societal practices (adab).
Forms, whether psychological, moral or social, are viewed as inadequate vis-a-vis spiritual realities. The world of forms, even though conventional, is a 'scandal" that must be scandalized in order to suggest 'real' normality. Malamati ordinariness can actually result in a bad reputation. According to Muhammad Parsa, a Naqshbandi figure from the 9-10th century, the fact that the Prophet was called a liar, a madman and a poet was a kind of veil with which God hid him from the eyes of the world. Along the same lines, the malamati bases his perspective on the idea that sanctity can only be 'abnormal' and 'shocking' in a world that is defined by the law of spiritual gravity. In other words, in a sick world, health can only appear in the guise of illness. Moreover, on a microcosmic level the Spirit appears in all its 'poverty' and 'sickness' from the haughty perspective of the soul. Titus Burckhardt illustrates this in terms of the recurring mythological theme of the "royal hero who comes back to his kingdom under the guise of a poor stranger, or even of a mountebank or a mendicant" (Burckhardt 1980, p. 39). In a similar vein, Sulami quotes Abu-l-Hasan al Husri's comment that "if it were possible that there be a prophet (after Muhammad) in our days, he would be one of them (the malamatiyyah)" (Deladrière n.d. p. 13). A prophet could only be hidden or scandalous in a time when the world has become a spiritual wasteland. He would be totally inconspicuous or else so 'different' and 'marginal' that he would disconcert and unsettle even those - particularly those - who claim to be religious.
The malamati does not escape the world but works within it as a hidden warrior in the 'greater jihad.' He may have an inclination to solitude and retreat, but his destiny consists in being a spiritual presence in the world. Actually, by contrast with the usual Sufi practices, the malamiyyah way tends to de-emphasize the role of communal structures, organizations and collective practices, including majalis and sama' in spiritual life. It could even be said that malamiyyah spirituality is akin to the Sufism 'without a name' present in the early days of Islam, before Sufism became 'recognizable' as a set of institutions and specific collective practices. The Naqshbandi and Shadhili orders are the most representative examples of this orientation in the world of Sufism, since they tend to place the emphasis on inner dhikr and social 'inconspicuousness'. In this sense, the malamiyyah embodies one of the most fundamental tenets of Islamic spirituality, a spirituality that radiates through an ordinary presence in the world. The splendor of the malamiyyah is purely inward and does not reveal itself outwardly in a spectacular fashion. The mystic is like the Prophet who "talks to people and goes to the markets." This way of being goes along with a staunch distrust of the most representative methodical supports of Sufism: spiritual retreat (khalwa) and spiritual concert (sama'). These practices are held in suspicion by most malami. It is important to understand, in this respect, that malamiyyah objections to khalwa and sama' have nothing to do with the intrinsic value and goals of these methodical elements. They are merely directed at the dangers and abuses of these practices, but the very fact that the malami would focus on these dangers and abuses is indicative of their pessimistic approach to the human soul. In his Usul, Sulami criticizes the Sufi disciples "who made the error of living in isolation":
They delude themselves in thinking that isolation and living in caves, mountains and deserts would secure them from the evil of their nafs and that this retreat could allow them to reach the degree of sanctity, because they do not know that the reason for Masters' retreat and isolation was their knowledge and the strength of their states. It is the divine attraction that attached them to Him and made them rich and independent from all that is not Him, so he who cannot be compared to them in terms of inner strength and depth of worship can only simulate isolation, thereby being unfair to himself and harming himself. (Sulami 1985, p. 182)
