Already quite early in the history of Islamic mysticism it was realised that piety could easily become a great danger to spiritual life. The mental process which led to this insight could, for example, be the sudden awareness of an advanced mystic that his position as the leader and the revered model of a host of admiring followers is really a pitfall, because it tempts him to become convinced by his own holiness. The story of Shaykh San’ān, as it is told by Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār in the Conference of the Birds (Manṭiq al-ṭayr), is the classical illustration of this precarious situation. In a dream this great mystic is instructed to abandon his glorious role as a teacher of 400 adepts near the Kaʿba and to travel to the Byzantine lands where he falls in love with a Christian girl of superior beauty. The girl treats him very badly: she forces him to perform the most abject acts imaginable to the pious Ṣūfī: to drink wine, to burn the Koran as well as his own Ṣūfī cloak, to put on the Christian cincture (zunnār) and, in the end, even to become a swineherd. The descent of the Shaykh into utter humiliation is, however, a stage in the pursuit of his spiritual aims which cannot be avoided. It is a process of purification: there is no other way for him to overcome the formidable obstacle of his riyā – the “self conceit” of the pious man.

At the background of this parable stands the concept of malāma, “blame.” From the late third/ninth century onwards the attitude, designated in Ṣūfī textbooks as malāmatiyya, is known to have been current, especially in Khurasan where its first proponent would have been Ḥamdūn al-Qaṣṣār (died 271/884). This tendency has found its reflection in several works on the theory of mysticism written in the subsequent centuries. The way out of the impasse into which piety almost inevitably leads is sought in the purifying force of criticism on the mystic's soul. Blame has, as Hujwīrī has put it, “a great effect in making love sincere.” The essence of the doctrine on blame is that the mystic should strive to become totally indifferent to the judgement of his behaviour by other people, either in a negative or in a positive sense.