What are the Three Special Practices that are included in the practice of Sufism ?

Question

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (c) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2026 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer