Wakt and Nafas: The Sufi Use of Time

Scatteredness is the ordinary disease of the age: a heart strung between a regretted past and an anxious future, present in neither. The glossary of Hazrat Shaikh ‘Umar Suhrawardi’s Awarif-ul-Maarif, in the Palmer/Clarke English translation, answers with a short teaching on wakt — period, or time — and its sister term nafas, the moment, the breath. The three meanings it sets out run from the state that overpowers the servant to the present moment the master of time refuses to lose. The remedy is spiritual, not medical: presence of heart, kept by recitation.

What Wakt and Nafas Mean in Sufism

The glossary assigns wakt three meanings, and the art of the Sufi’s use of time lies in telling them apart. First, a prevailing state of the heart — contraction or expansion, sorrow or joy — that overpowers the servant while it lasts. Second, an assault from the hidden, ghaibat, that seizes the wayfarer without his will. Third, the plain present time between past and future — and here the phrase “master of wakt” is minted. Nafas, the breath or moment, completes the picture with the glossary’s own epigram: for the beginner, wakt; for the finisher, nafas. Beginners think in periods — weeks, retreats, seasons of the heart. Masters live moment to moment, with God.

Readers of this series will recognise the family of terms: the states that overrun the servant in the first meaning are the very kabz and bast — contraction and expansion — that the next post in the series treats, and the daily wird that the complete daily wird as a Sufi remedy system prescribes is a school for keeping time. The glossary’s diagnosis is the point: the servant who cannot name his wakt cannot master it.

The First Wakt: The State That Overpowers the Servant

The first wakt is a prevailing state — kabz, bast, sorrow, joy — that descends and overpowers the servant while it lasts. The glossary’s observation is clinical: while the state prevails, the servant cannot perceive any other state, and he judges everyone else’s state by his own. This, says the text, is the source of error among the people of the path — the companion in contraction reads the joy of others as vanity, the one swollen with expansion reads the stillness of others as absence. Both are weather, not sight.

It is to this meaning that the well-known maxim the glossary explains attaches: son of his time is the Sufi. The glossary places it here — beside the states that hold a man for a season. The Sufi is “of his time” in recognising the season Allah has placed him in, working within it rather than pretending it away, and refusing to export his state as a verdict on everyone else. The compliment is also a warning: whoever is only of his season mistakes the weather for the sky.

The Decree of Wakt: The Sword from the Hidden

The second wakt assaults from the hidden, seizing the wayfarer out of his own will — framed by the glossary as by the decree of wakt. Here stands the tradition’s sharper saying: wakt is the slaying sword. The book records that it has gentleness and wrathfulness; concordance with the decree — aligning with the season one is given — brings grace, and opposition to it brings violence. The wayfarer does not choose this wakt; he is overtaken, without his will.

The counsel inside this meaning is submission rather than strategy. A door closes, a plan dissolves, a season of dryness arrives uninvited — and the servant’s first work is not to rage against the decree but to read it: what worship is possible in this hour, what obedience remains open, what gratitude still fits. Opposition to the season, the glossary warns, is how a hard hour becomes a hard life; concordance is how grace enters through a door the servant did not open. The sword belongs to Allah, and the servant’s business is the edge he holds — his tongue, his limbs, his recitation in the present hour. The spiritual framing of that anxiety is carried by the Sufi practice for overcoming anxiety and fear.

The Master of Wakt: Living Between Past and Future

The third wakt is the present time between past and future — and on it the glossary builds its definition of mastery. The master of wakt is one so engaged in the recitations of the present time that solicitude for what is important at that moment keeps him from mention of the past and thought of the future; thus, in the text’s own phrase, his time he loses not. Mastery of time, the definition implies, is not productivity but presence: the recitation one is given, the duty one is in, done as the moment’s right work.

The glossary then distinguishes the owners of this third wakt from the travellers. For those joined to God and the companions of tamkin — divine enabling — this presence is constant. The wayfarers lose it and regain it; the tradition calls this changeability talwin of hal, the shifting of states. Presence of the moment thus functions, spiritually, as a remedy for scatteredness, regret and future-tense anxiety — always as worship framed, never as a health claim. Losing it is the wayfarer’s condition, not defeat: the art is in the regaining, the return to this moment’s recitation, the way one returns to wird after distraction. Grief, too, is met in this present tense — the Sufi healing of grief works one prayer at a time, not in arguments with the past.

Nafas: The Time of the Finisher

Nafas — the breath, the moment — is the glossary’s compressed summary of the whole teaching: wakt for the beginner, for the finisher, nafas. The beginner plans in periods: this month I will keep such a practice; this year I will reach such a state. The finisher lives on the breath: this recitation, this duty, this instant of remembrance — and the sum of such instants is a life. The shift from periods to breaths is the shift from managing time to being kept by the One who created it.

One may practise the beginning of this shift without pretending to the end. The glossary’s instruments are already in the servant’s hands: recitation — the wird, the divine names, the dhikr that occupies the heart — makes the present moment habitable. Without occupation, the idle heart reopens the workshop of past memories and future hopes that the teaching on the negation of thoughts describes. A heart reciting is a heart present; a heart present is, for those minutes, a master of its wakt. The finisher’s nafas is then not a technique to be acquired but a station to be given — the gift of a life spent returning, breath by breath, to the One who breathes.

Sources and Further Reading

• Awarif-ul-Maarif, by Shaikh ‘Umar Suhrawardi (d. 632 AH / 1234 CE, Baghdad) — the practice-glossary entry on wakt and its three meanings, in the Palmer/Clarke English translation (1891 era).
• The companion glossary entries on nafas, tamkin, and the changeability of states, in the same translation.
• The Spiritual Remedies series on alhashmi.org, posts 101–122, for the companion teachings on anxiety, grief, and the daily wird cited above.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does wakt mean in Sufism?

Wakt has three meanings in the glossary of Awarif-ul-Maarif: a prevailing state of the heart that overpowers the servant while it lasts; a state that assaults from the hidden and seizes the wayfarer without his will, by the decree of wakt; and the present time between past and future, mastery of which defines the master of time.

What does “son of his time is the Sufi” mean?

The glossary attaches this maxim to its first meaning of wakt: the prevailing state. The Sufi is of his time in recognising the season Allah has placed him in, working within it, and refusing to export his state as a verdict on others. Judging everyone else’s state by one’s own, the text warns, is the source of error among the people of the path.

What is nafas?

Nafas means the breath or the moment. The glossary’s epigram is that wakt belongs to the beginner and nafas to the finisher: beginners plan in periods, while the perfected live reciting, present, moment by moment — mastery of the present time, compressed into a single word.

How does one practise presence of the moment?

By occupation of the heart in recitation — the daily wird, the divine names, dhikr — and by returning, without self-attack, whenever the heart slips into past or future. Losing presence is the wayfarer’s condition, the changeability of states; the practice is the regaining. This is spiritual worship, complementing lawful effort and, where relevant, professional care — never replacing them.

Disclaimer: the spiritual practices described here complement lawful effort, sound counsel and medical care; they never replace them, and nothing in this post is a guaranteed cure or result. Presence of heart, wird and dhikr are acts of worship practised within the Shariah’s limits and under the guidance of a knowledgeable teacher; anxiety, grief and matters of health also belong with qualified professional care. Questions about the Trust’s programmes are welcome on +91 97317 17703 or at info@alhashmi.org.