The Quranic Story of Khidr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries pdf

The Quranic Story of Khidr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries as a Model for Spiritual Guidance

The Quranic Story of Khidr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries

“Where Two Seas Meet”: The Quranic Story of Khidr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries 

As a Model for Spiritual Guidance by Hugh Talat Halman

The story of Moses’ journey with Khidr (Qur’an 18.60-82) is often assumed to be a 

model for the master-disciple relationship in Sufism. 

How have Sufi thinkers applied this story to illuminating the relationship between spiritual guide (murshid) and disciple (murid)?

 To investigate this question, we have presented original translations and intertextual analyses of the work of three prominent Sufi exegetes: 

Abu ‘1-Qasim al-Qushayri (d. 1072), Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1309), and ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Qashani (d. 1329). 

After tracing the treatment of the Quranic story in the hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim, the classical tafsir of al-Tabari, this work examines the three Sufi tafsirs. 

The themes in these tafsirs are related to the distinction between the instructing 

master (shaykh al-ta‘lim) and mentor (shaykh al-suhbci). 

The commentator’s approaches to master-disciple relationships are related but varied. 

Al-Qushayri and Ruzbihan both emphasize right conduct (adab), moral training (ta ’dib), and mentoring companionship (suhba). 

Patience and obedience are necessary to fulfill this mentoring relationship and resolve the “paradox of mediation:” 

Moses asked to be taught what had not been originally transmitted from a human teacher. 

Unlike instruction (ta ‘lim), this process of mentoring companionship (suhba /ta ’dib) goes beyond discursive knowledge and involves both action (tasarruf) and silence.

Moses’ mistake is to have imposed stipulations of conventional knowledge on Khidr’s inspired knowledge. Ruzbihan follows this approach but accents as attributes of