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What do Sufis mean by “tasting” (dhawq) as a way of knowing?

Ratna Wulandari Contributor
· 4 replies · 196 views
Mysticism & spiritualityIndianIslamicSufismAl-Ghazali#deliverance-from-error#dhawq#knowledge-by-experience#sufi-epistemology
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I make batik in Yogyakarta and I love the Sufi poetry that has been sung here for centuries. My teacher, an old woman who learned from her father, often says that certain things cannot be known from books, only "tasted". I always took this as a beautiful way of speaking.

Recently I read that the word, dhawq, is a technical term, and that some Sufi writers meant it literally as a kind of knowledge, different from reasoning and different from being told something.

So I would like to understand:

  • What does dhawq actually mean in the tradition?
  • How is it different from just having a strong feeling?
  • Is it against reason, or something else?

I ask with respect. I want to understand what my teacher has been telling me, not to argue her out of it.

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Imam Bilal Hussain

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your teacher's word has a long and precise history, Ratna. The clearest statement is al-Ghazali's, in his autobiography, Deliverance from Error. After a crisis of doubt about both the senses and reason, he says he was restored not by argument but by a light God cast into his breast. Later he studied the Sufi writings and found that what was most distinctive in them could not be learned by study at all, only by dhawq, by inner state, and by a change of character.

    Remember his analogy. There is a great difference between knowing the definition of health and being healthy, between knowing the definition of drunkenness and being drunk. The drunk man may not know the definition; the sober doctor knows it and is not drunk. Tasting is knowing in the second way.

    So it is not just a strong feeling. A feeling happens to you; dhawq is meant to be a knowing of something, open only to someone who has become a certain kind of person. That is the distinctive claim: some knowledge requires the knower to be transformed, not merely informed. Practice becomes a path to knowledge.

    Nor is it against reason; al-Ghazali was among the sharpest reasoners of his age. The claim is that reason reaches what reason reaches, and there is more.

    Helpful · 1

Other answers

  1. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    A small comparison from Kerala, offered carefully. In Sanskrit aesthetics, rasa also means taste or juice, and the theorists used it for the savouring of emotion in art. The two words share the bodily image of tasting, and both describe knowing that cannot be handed over in a definition. But rasa is about art and Sufi dhawq is about God; I'd be wary of anyone who tells you they are the same thing.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Nikos Stavridis

    Fellow

    My own tradition has a verse it loves, from the Psalms: "O taste and see that the Lord is good." The Orthodox hesychasts built a whole discipline of prayer on the conviction that God is known by experience, and that this experience needs a purified heart. So the idea that some knowledge must be tasted is shared by more than one tradition, which is interesting precisely because the traditions disagree about so much else.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Ratna Wulandari

    Contributor

    Thank you, Imam Bilal. The doctor and the drunk man will make my teacher laugh; I think she will say al-Ghazali stole it from her. Kavya, Nikos, I like that the image of tasting appears in so many places, and I'll keep in mind that it doesn't mean the same thing everywhere.