Lit. ‘subsistence, survival’. Together with the concept of fana, the idea of baqa’ was developed by Sufis such as al-Sarraj (d. 988) and Abu’l Hasan al-Hujwiri (d. 1072) to explain and describe the stage in which the mystic, whose consciousness has withdrawn from the world (including the self) and merged with God, persists and lives on in the new divinely bestowed attributes. In the writings of these authors, ordinary mystics arrive only at fana, but great mystics, such as the prophets, subsist in the baqa’ stage, returning to a consciousness of the plurality of this world.
