In the chapter on the tearing of the frock (bab al-khirq) in Hujwiri's Kashf al-Mahjub, the author treats the Sufi custom of rending a garment (khirqa kardan), a practice observed especially in the great assemblies where eminent shaykhs were present. He records the objection of a group of jurists who held that deliberately tearing a sound garment is not permissible and amounts to corruption (fasad). Hujwiri rejects this view: a corruption undertaken for the sake of a greater good (salah) is a trivial matter, and there is no real difference between cutting a cloth into a hundred pieces and sewing them back together and cutting it into five, since in each patch of the frock lies the comfort of a believer's heart and the meeting of a need. At the same time he concedes candidly that rending the frock has no fundamental root (asl) in the mystical path itself, framing it as an established custom rather than a doctrinal obligation. The concept thus distills the excerpt's defense of a com...