Concerning the Dervishes and Sufis: This is my perspective on a matter that is highly nuanced. Understanding often requires our questioning certain assumptions and pushing certain comfort zones of what we think to be, or would like to be, true.
I welcome those interested to read further, and those who aren't interested quite simply aren't.
This can't be easily articulated. Sufism is a path requiring GREAT courage and great self questioning, painful at times. The Sufi begins by extensively questioning the conditioned aspects of the self, those conditioned by psychic wounds and damaging experiences, and in particular those conditioned by our dominant cultures. The point isn't questioning for questionings sake, but to get to the root of what's essential in the Self.
- Why do you and I believe what we believe?
- How do you and I know what we know to be true?
- How do we know who and what we are?
- How do you know what you know? Why do you know what you know?
- Our cultural, religious, spiritual, political, and social views - how did we develop them?
The Sufis seeks through rigorous self-examination experiential knowledge of this and more. The great Sufi, al-Ghazzali writes his account of his "conversion" to Sufism through a rigorous Kant-like systematic questioning of every form of epistemology he was aware of in his book "Munqidh Min al-Dalal" (available in English as "The Confessions of Ghazzali") I recommend this book, as does Idries Shah.
This is a bit of what I understand based on what little I have learned - My father himself was initiated into a Sufi Tariqa (path or brotherhoods) in India, and I was formally introduced to practice of two Sufi Tariqas as an adult - the Naqshbandi and the Shattari - and have befriended a great number of members of the Darqawi / Shadhli Tariqa over the years. In all I have spent the last 16 years studying the matter from the exterior as well as the interior.
I have my biases, I am a western, black, Muslim raised with an intellectual and practical appreciation of Sufism (or Tasawwuf properly speaking) as well as formal exoteric Islam. My biases color what i write, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to not sift the convenient from this, but to sift the truly useful and use it as an occasion to acquire a wider knowledge of the world and of a school of thought that has produced some of the most profound art, poetry, architecture, and thought the world has known.
The issues are nuanced, not given to simplifications. Anyone reading the source books Shah himself refers to would quickly see that his view was a simplification, and indeed a useful one. Think of an "Invisible College" bearing teachings that directly confront the mental conditioning of the audience that would best profit from their understanding, what is needed is a semantic slipping under cognitive filters not with a purpose to deceive but to get the self to be able to honestly weight a matter on its own merits, stripped of filters set in place to limit one's perception of reality.
Perenialist philosophers, like Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, Frithjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Huston Smith, etc., have similar more explicitly stated positions. I've heard from Nasr's own mouth his grave misgivings of Shah, though he also expressed a real respect for Shah.
Many Sufi teachers do regard Shah's writings with suspicion. I grew up on his writings literally since the age of 10, and I understand the suspicion of non-Western Sufi teachers towards shah.
I myself disagree with him on some points but overall his project was to present a specific set of potentially highly empowering teachings to a specific audience with specific cultural conditioning in a specific time frame.
His writing career had a specific direction, his earliest writings followed the writings of his Father, Sidar Ikbal Shah, and were educational works on Islam for British readers.
- Next his writings focused on Magic and non-Islamic esoteric streams.
- Next he wrote extensively on Sufism first as surveys of the field, and then increasingly using traditional Afghan Sufi teaching stories ending with his popular mullah Nasrudin tales...
- Next he wrote a bunch of Childern's books and finally a novel about the Afghani / soviet jihad (Kara Kush) - check it out, its a great read.. really.
There is a thread that winds through his writings, from his travel account of his "Hajj" to Mecca and his travels in Saudi Arabia, to his accounts of the "Hadiths (teachings) of Muhammad, to his books on Western and Eastern ceremonial Magic, to Sufism, to Kid's stories and novels. The reader's challenge is to discover it. It can not be pointed out. it must be discovered.
I submit, with humility, that there is misunderstanding of what Shah wrote. His argument wasn't that Sufism was some sort of pre-Islamic philosophy that grafted itself onto Islam - a popular misunderstanding and some of Shah's later writings support this ambiguity on purpose, mainly as a draw to Western readers who seem to have some real antipathy towards anything associated with Islam.
I submit that what he actually argued, correctly, is that Sufism, and the Sufis, predated the establishment of present day Islam as a formal religion. There is a vast difference between these two notions.
The essence of what people call Sufism is the essence of every esoterism, many Sufis believe, and part of an unbroken chain of teaching through the ages, at times.
The Sufi teacher and Islamic prophet, Khidr, is the symbolic representative of this - a universal wandering teacher initiating individuals through the ages into specific esoteric teachings. There are stories of Khidr in Shah's writings, and a cryptic painting resembling the Tarot trump "The Hermit" on the cover of his book "Caravan of Dreams"
If you can find that book, contemplate the painting, then read the book back and forth, then read the story in the Arabian nights (Burton's translation) of Maruf the Cobbler. There is a key in this.
- Exoteric Islam itself is typified by the Sharia. Esoteric Islam is typified by the "Tariqa" though there are non Sufi expressions of Esotericism in Islam (particularly in the Iranian world).
This is similar to the split between Taoism and Confucianism in the Chinese world. Both were absolutely necessary and both formed a dynamic tension throughout the history of the Chinese tradition. The I-Ching is the root from which both Taoism and Confucianism stream.
Islam is similar and itself has the notion that it is simply the latest expression of a continual chain of exoteric religious traditions. Sufism states the same thing, that esotericism predates present day Islam but Sufism is a uniquely Islamic expression of a timeless and universal truth, just as exoteric Islam is a unique expression of other related timeless and universal truths.
The Sufi teacher sees in himself a task of awakening people in specific times and places to the fullness of their human potentiality through the understanding certain esoteric principles, and through the practice of specific exercises, which may vary due to cultural conditioning of the people being taught, to dissolve the subject/object split and cause a realization of the essential oneness of the cosmos, and disciplining and then dissolving the conditioned aspects of the Ego.
People often have manufacture red ideas regurgitating views and notions handed to them by their culture and unable to directly perceive reality – the dominant culture's basic assumptions are unquestioned. The practices of Sufism
Some practices are often similar to those of Zen Buddhism, whilst others are similar to other esoteric streams. The notion in some Western Ceremonial Magicians of "knowing thy Holy Guardian Angel" is similar to what I write below.
The Sufi's seek an end state that isn't a blissed out state of nirvana, which is a stage of the Sufi path called Fana - or extinction. The Sufi seeks to move beyond this.
In Fana the ego is de-conditioned to the point that the individuality of the subject appears to dissolve and the subject feels himself in a state of union with the cosmos itself.. or he experiences utter extinction, utter emptiness of all phenomena and of the self itself and experiences the sensation of being drowned in an ocean of being.
The final stage is called "Baqa" and it is the conditional return of the human individuality and the return to consciousness with a new understanding of, and identity with, what we believe to be the real self of the individual, which we believe has an essential identity to the Self itself (the Atman - see Ananda Coomerswamy's essay on Transmigration on this point).
The Self being an aspect of the divine reality hence the Sufi saying "He who knows himself knows his Lord".
The Sufi no longer perceives the "Oneness of Being" she once again perceives duality but perceives the emptiness of duality and the underlying unity of all things is an experiential matter that is "tasted" (or dhawq).
THIS IS GNOSIS at its final point, "dhawqi knowledge" experiential knowledge of the reality of the phenomena, seeing all phenomena as the movement of divine energies and "acts"
"Allah is reality" the Sufi says, al-Haq. On the cover of some of Shah's books is the Arabic calligraphy of the word Haq, on others is the word "Huwa" or "Hoo" which means "He" here being a reference to God.
Strip away the chatter of the mind, strip away all conditioned habits and silence the thoughts for a moment and SOMETHING still watches, observes, and experiences. By de-conditioning the external individual, our grazing habits, our idiosyncrasies, we come to realize what and who we truly are.
"Dunya" is the illusory nature of the world, Dunya is mistranslated as "the world" - it is a specific misconception of the World and is an illusory element of the world that takes us away from the realization of the infinitude of the cosmos..
To reach out for grapes one can never grasp.. it always evades you, the money, the power, the sexual choice, the positions and fame: As Muhammad the Prophet stated: "If the son of Adam had a mountain of gold he will always want a second one.. his mouth will never be filled, except with the dust of his own grave.." this is the illusory nature of "Dunya", the Sufi seeks to "die" to it, hence the Sufi saying "Die before you die"
This is all gross simplification, Ibn Arabi and Rumi have similar teachings on this point, the divine reality, absolute and infinite at once (these two aspects, infinitude and absoluteness, are principial poles of manifestation, the absolute manifests in the world and nature in what the Sufis call "Jalal" or severity, the Infinite manifests in the world in what we call "Jamal" Jalaliyyat, and Jamaliyyat are two principles forming a dialectic and polarity.
The Chinese notions of Yin, and Yang, and the Tao best mirrors this outside of Islam. Masculinity and femininity are limited manifestations of these two principles in the animal world. Each principle in turn contains other principles which are, in a sense, archetypes, the human self manifests from specific archetypes, specific "names of Allah"..
The process of Sufism is to take us past the conditioned social aspects of our selves, our conditioned likes, dislikes, habits, customs, and persona - "the face", to "Our Lord" - our essential self.
Often in society we take the shells of other people, role models, and make ourselves like them. We experience wounds and slights and are taught specific social roles which are not bad in and of themselves, but they are highly relative.
When I was a punk I dressed like a punk, when I was a skater I dressed like a skater, when I was into Hip Hop I dressed the part. There is a specific type of materialism of specific ages and cultures. Our age has specific types that a Sufi like Shah wanted to deal with.
Shah's writings are tailored for readers with specific mindsets and mentalities - Western Anglo-phones who were culturally pre-disposed to be Islamophobic. He alludes to this sometimes explicitly and sometimes in a veiled way throughout his writings.
In every age in Sufism there is a Contextuality of messages, the messages of scholars of some ages were explicitly at times, and implicitly at other times, restricted to the mindsets of the people of the time. Their words would be meaningless to audiences of another time. The earliest Sufis were absolute ascetics, wore only coarse wool cloaks and were often celibates and vegetarian,
Sufis in another age were noted for their sensual enjoyment (Imam Junaid's famous statement about needing sex daily like he needs food, and Ibn Arabi's statements on sacred sexuality for example) and a stereotype of Sufis in many eastern culture revolves around their immense enjoyment of sweetmeats and candy ( I recall a Bangladeshi Naqshbandi Sufi who used to walk around my University campus randomly passing out candy every Friday )
Shah attempted, with some success, to present a limited conception of Sufism to specific groups of Westerners in accordance with their mindsets. Rene Guenon did the same in his way, both men tried to make specific subsets of the Sufi's teachings relevant to the immense problems of this age, this people.
On a "sexist" bias possibly found in some teachings or paths, it is useful to realize that we really aren't dealing with much different from that found in most traditional eastern practices, whether you are dealing with Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic. Traditional and post-traditional Eastern societies, their gender roles, and social roles, are very different from our Western ones, and it may be useful to restrain our judgement and observe with an open mind to notice the nuances. I'm not saying that one way is better than the other, but empathy and an openness to observing the Other is necessary to understand certain things.
Whatever one's objections are to non-Western gender roles and teachings, it is a useful exercise to consider things from other standpoints and ask how and why do we know a specific way is true?
If you have any questions about the Sufis or Sufism feel free to message me. |
