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Many legends grew up around those few months during which the Shaikh visited Tunis, Tripoli and Istanbul. Consequently an article published in Revue Africaine two years after his death tells us: 'He spent ten years of his life in the East, travelling in Egypt, Syria, Persia and India. This remains the most mysterious and least known part of his life.' But although these ten years in the East were no more real than a dream, I think there can be little doubt that this dream corresponds to what the Shaikh would have chosen for himself if his destiny had allowed it. The urgency with which he sought to escape from his function shows at any rate that he would not have chosen to spend the rest of his life beneath the weight of the responsibility that was to be his, and one of his motives, possibly the chief, is no doubt to be understood in the light of what he says about the learning which he 'felt the need for'.
Berque writes: 'I knew Shaikh Bin-'Aliwah from 1921 until 1934. I saw him slowly grow old. His intellectual enquiringness seemed to become sharper each day, and to the very end he remained a lover of metaphysical investigation. There are few problems which he had not broached, scarcely any philosophies whose essence he had not extracted'.
From his writings, as also from the testimony of those who knew him, one has the impression of a vast and penetratingly active intelligence of which the higher or central part was utterly and eternally satisfied—he speaks of 'remaining inwardly forever steeped in drunkenness'—and of which the circumference, that is, the earthly or mental part, in so far as it had any respite from the demands made on him by his thousands of disciples, found ample sustenance in meditating on the Qoran and the Traditions and in exploring some of the Sufic treatises, in particular those of Ibn 'Arabi and Jili. Moreover he was a great lover of poetry, especially of the odes of 'Umar ibn al-Farid, long passages of which he seems to have known by heart. But although it does not appear directly in his writings, and although it is relatively most unimportant, it is evident from what Berque says of the Shaikh's thirst for information about other religions that at the extreme edge of this circumference there was a certain 'nostalgia' for something which he would never have found unless he could have come into some kind of contact with representatives of other religions who were on a spiritual level with himself, such as, for example, his slightly younger Hindu contemporary, Sri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai, whose teaching was essentially the same as his own. But he seems to have had no knowledge of Hinduism, and none of Taoism or Buddhism, nor had he any intellectual exchanges with the Qabbalists of Judaism, and as regards Christianity, with which he always maintained a certain contact, it is extremely doubtful whether he ever met any representative of it who was even remotely comparable to himself.
Here, however, he would in any case have needed an exception, for generally speaking Christianity scarcely admits of mutual understanding with other religions. Even the Christian mystic, though he may not reject other religions as false, is indifferent to them, legitimately so, for the method of 'the straight and narrow path' of love scarcely admits of looking either to the right or to the left.
But although all mystic paths are 'straight and narrow' in a certain sense, this description is not immediately apt as regards Islamic mysticism, for wheresoe'er ye turn, there is the Face of God. In Islam, as we have seen, it is the vista of knowledge which predominates over that of love, and the Sufi is essentially a Gnostic. Sufism is not so much a path hedged by temptations and distractions on both sides as a passage across a wilderness, each stone of which is liable to be transformed in an instant from barren poverty to Infinite Riches. In one of the Shaikh's poems, the Creator is represented as saying:
'The veil of creation I have made
As a screen for the Truth, and in creation there lie
Secrets which suddenly like springs gush forth'.
He also continually quotes the saying of the Prophet: 'Lord, increase me in marvelling at Thee.' The alchemy of Gnosis does not leave things at their face-value, but reduces them to nothingness or reveals them as aspects of the Face of God.
