MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 11 of 100

Correct — option (4): mujahada, zikr and muraqaba. The question is answerable without remembering a list, provided you hold one distinction: Sufi vocabulary separates what the seeker does from what the seeker attains. The three named here are all things done. Mujahada is striving — the disciplined struggle against the nafs, the lower or appetitive self, through fasting, vigil, restraint and obedience to the shaikh; it is the effort that clears the ground. Zikr is remembrance — the repeated invocation of God, whether by the divine names or by set formulae, performed silently or aloud, alone or in the assembly, and it is the central and most characteristic act of Sufi devotion. Muraqaba is watchfulness — sustained inward attention, a meditation in which the disciple withdraws from the world's occupations and holds himself under the gaze of God. Together they cover the three registers of the path: bodily discipline, verbal devotion and inward contemplation, which is why they are grouped as the special practices and why the grouping is not arbitrary. Now apply the distinction to the other three choices, and each fails in a way that teaches something. Fana, the passing away or annihilation of the self, and wasl, union with the divine, are not practices at all — they are the conditions the practices are meant to lead to, the end of the road rather than the walking of it. Options (1) and (3) each smuggle in at least one of them, and option (1) smuggles in both, so both collapse on the same principle. Option (2) is subtler and better constructed: it keeps two genuine practices, zikr and muraqaba, and replaces mujahada with tawajjuh, the directed spiritual attention that a master turns upon a disciple. Tawajjuh is a real Sufi term, but it describes what the shaikh does for the seeker rather than one of the three disciplines the seeker performs, and that is the distinction on which the item finally turns.

• (1)Mujahada, Wasl, Fana — Two thirds of this list belongs to the wrong category. Wasl, union with the divine, and fana, the passing away of the individual self in God, are the goals of the Sufi path, the conditions a seeker hopes to reach; they are not exercises that anybody performs. Only mujahada, the struggle against the lower self, is a practice. A candidate who has learnt the Sufi vocabulary as one undifferentiated glossary will find all three words familiar and see nothing wrong, which is exactly the weakness the option is built on. Sorting the vocabulary once into disciplines, stations and states — into doing, becoming and attaining — makes this whole class of question straightforward.
• (2)Zikr, Murakabah, Tawajjuh — The strongest distractor by a distance, because it contains no category error at all — every term in it is something that happens on the Sufi path, and two of the three, zikr and muraqaba, are correct. The substitution is mujahada out, tawajjuh in. Tawajjuh is the concentrated spiritual attention that a shaikh directs towards a disciple, a transmission from master to seeker rather than a discipline the seeker undertakes for himself, and the conventional triad of special practices names the seeker's own three: striving, remembrance and watchful contemplation. This is the option that separates a candidate who has read about Sufi practice from one who has read a list of Sufi words.
• (3)Fana, Zikr, Mujahada — Closer than option (1), and wrong for the same reason. It correctly includes zikr and mujahada, and then puts fana in the place that belongs to muraqaba. Fana, the annihilation of the self, is the culminating state of the path — in some formulations followed by baqa, subsistence in God — and it cannot be listed among the practices without confusing the destination with the journey. The tell is that a list of practices should be able to describe what a disciple does on an ordinary day in a khanqah; remembrance and striving and meditation all pass that test, and the extinction of the self does not.

Sufism is the mystical dimension of Islam, and the syllabus examines it through a small, stable vocabulary that is worth sorting into layers. At the top are the stages of the path — shariat, the law; tariqat, the way; haqiqat, the truth; marifat, gnosis — through which a seeker is understood to progress. Below them lie the practices by which the progress is attempted: mujahada, the struggle against the lower self; zikr, the remembrance of God; muraqaba, meditative watchfulness; and, in many orders, sama, the listening to devotional music, which the Chishtis embraced and stricter orders rejected. Beyond the practices lie the states and stations — fana, the passing away of the self, and wasl, union — which are attained rather than performed. The social organisation is equally examinable: the silsila or spiritual lineage, the pir and murid relationship, the khanqah as the hospice where the order lived and fed the poor, and the dargah with its annual urs commemorating a saint's death. The four orders that matter most in India are the Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri and Naqshbandi.

The reasoning this item rewards is categorisation, not recall, and it is the same reasoning that answers most questions about religious and philosophical vocabulary. Given a list of technical terms, sort them by what kind of thing they are before asking whether they are on any particular list. Here the sort is between the doing and the attaining, and it kills two of the four choices immediately, because fana and wasl are the end of the road and cannot appear among the means of travelling it. That leaves a two-way decision between two lists of genuine practices, which is where the actual knowledge is needed: the conventional triad is the seeker's own — striving, remembrance, contemplation — while tawajjuh belongs to the master's side of the relationship. For a Maharashtra candidate the topic is not remote. Sufi orders were established across the Deccan from the fourteenth century onward under the Bahmani and later the Deccan sultanates, and their shrines remain among the most visited in the region, so the vocabulary appears in state-level papers with some regularity.

• The three practices grouped as the special disciplines of the Sufi path are mujahada, the struggle against the nafs or lower self; zikr, the remembrance of God through repeated invocation of the divine names; and muraqaba, meditative watchfulness in which the seeker holds himself under the divine gaze.
• Fana, the passing away of the individual self in God, and wasl, union with the divine, belong to a different category — they are the states the path aims at rather than practices undertaken on it, and in many formulations fana is followed by baqa, subsistence in God.
• Tawajjuh is the concentrated spiritual attention directed by a shaikh towards a disciple; it is a genuine Sufi term but belongs to the master's side of the pir-murid relationship rather than to the seeker's own disciplines.
• The Sufi path is conventionally described in four stages — shariat, the law; tariqat, the way; haqiqat, the truth; and marifat, gnosis — and its institutions are the silsila or spiritual lineage, the khanqah or hospice, and the dargah with its annual urs.
• The four principal Sufi orders in India are the Chishti, associated with Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer and Nizamuddin Auliya at Delhi and known for embracing sama, devotional music; the Suhrawardi; the Qadiri; and the Naqshbandi, associated with Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and the doctrine of wahdat-ul-shuhud set against Ibn Arabi's wahdat-ul-wujud.

• Treating Sufi technical terms as one undifferentiated glossary; sorting them into stages, practices and states settles most questions in this area before any list has to be recalled
• Mistaking fana and wasl for practices — they are the goals of the path, the conditions attained, not the exercises performed on the way to them
• Rejecting tawajjuh as a made-up word: it is a genuine Sufi term for the master's directed attention, which is precisely why the option containing it is the hardest to eliminate
• Assuming that a list containing two correct items must be the answer; in a three-item list the single substitution is where the whole question lives

MPSC asks Sufism and Bhakti largely through vocabulary and through saint-and-place or saint-and-order pairs, in a bare recall format with four short lists to choose between — no statements, no combinations. The defence against that format is categorisation rather than memorisation, because a sorted vocabulary answers many different lists from one piece of understanding. UPSC works the same material through doctrine and social history: what distinguished one order's attitude to the state or to music from another's, which saint belonged to which silsila, how Sufi and Bhakti currents interacted in a particular region. The overlap is the vocabulary and the orders; the difference is that MPSC will ask you to recognise a term and UPSC to use it. Preparing a single sheet that sorts the terms by category and lists the four orders with one distinguishing feature each covers both examiners economically.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Sufi terminology, the term fana is best described as which one of the following stages or conditions of the mystical path ?

  • (a)The disciplined struggle against the lower self
  • (b)The passing away or annihilation of the individual self in God
  • (c)The repeated invocation of the divine names
  • (d)The spiritual attention directed by a master towards a disciple

  Answer(b) The passing away or annihilation of the individual self in God — fana is a state attained at the culmination of the path, in many formulations followed by baqa, subsistence in God. The struggle against the lower self is mujahada, the invocation of the divine names is zikr, and the master's directed attention is tawajjuh, so the other three describe practices rather than states.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following Sufi orders is particularly associated with the practice of sama, the use of devotional music as an aid to spiritual experience ?

  • (a)Naqshbandi
  • (b)Suhrawardi
  • (c)Chishti
  • (d)Qadiri

  Answer(c) Chishti — the order of Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer and Nizamuddin Auliya at Delhi, which embraced sama as a means of devotion and whose assemblies of devotional song are the ancestor of the qawwali tradition. Stricter orders, the Naqshbandi in particular, were hostile to the practice, and the disagreement over sama is one of the standard ways of distinguishing the silsilas from one another.