The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (2360 page)

tim al-A
amm (who left behind the four principles of S
f
life, to remember that no one eats your daily bread for you, that no one performs your acts except yourself, that as death is hurrying toward you so address your life now to meet it, and that every moment of your life is under the eye and judgement of God), and Ibr
h
m ibn Adham. The latter was a prince who experienced a dramatic conversion when out hunting.
Or again Kashmiri Sufism, from the 14th cent. onward, drew on Hindu asceticism, even producing an order, the Rishis, whose name was derived from the word
i
(understood as ‘a singer of sacred songs’).
Since Sufism was a commitment to God in absolute trust and obedience, it (unsurprisingly) gave rise to intense experience of that relationship. Techniques were developed (e.g.
dhikr
, sama‘) which were capable of producing trance states of ecstasy. The realized condition of union with God produced such a sense of the absolute truth of God, and of the bliss of union with him, that poetry and teaching began to emerge in which the distinction between God and the self seemed to be blurred—or even obliterated: the disturbance this caused for those sensitive to the absolute transcendence of God can be seen in the fate of al-
all
j, although far more threatening in effect was the mystically monistic system of
ibn al-‘Arab
. Any potential conflict between the ‘ulam
and the Sufis was largely overcome by the work of al-Ghaz(z)
l