Apr 3, 2024
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My Half Century With Islam: Its Loving Sufis, Four Secrets and the Monotheist Wars
by Doniphan Blair
On the road in Iran: (Lf-rt) Dave Winterburn, me (Doniphan Blair), Darko Radonovich (Yugoslavia) and Jimmy (Canada),1972, the only extant photo from my trip. photo: unknownPLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
NOW THAT WE’VE ENTERED ANOTHER
hell cycle in the Middle East, it is only fitting and proper I honor the brilliant and angelic Muslims and Arabs who helped me over the last half a century. Their personalities and culture touched me deeply, starting when I crossed into Asia at age 17; they inspired my art and spiritual development; and they contributed to my discovery—if you’ll permit me that boast—of four little known but rather large facts about the Middle East, which may allow me to return the favor.
To touch on my fourth finding first: About a century ago, a generation of visionary Muslim and Arab mystics and artists came to prominence in the United States and Europe as well as the Middle East. Although I was long familiar with the mystics, I only learned about the artists recently, when I stumbled on Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, tucked away on the upper floor of one of the school's new buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and saw a phenomenal show of 20th century fine art from the Middle East. That was on October 17th, 2023, ten days after the biggest-ever massacre of Israelis in the Arab-Jewish wars—which are also only a century old—as Columbia was being besieged by students protesting Israel and tacitly or overtly supporting Hamas, the radical Islamist organization which ruled Gaza and perpetrated the attack. Columbia’s then president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, was from Egypt and probably knew personally some of the 42 artists in the show, but she had a lot on her plate and didn’t publicize it much. Indeed, the show wasn't reviewed right away or that positively by New York's finicky art press, despite its obvious groundbreaking qualities, and few students attended. That was a pity, given their interest in the politics of the Middle East but ignorance of its artistic culture or progressive history—like when Arab feminists returned from the 1926 women's suffrage convention in Paris and burnt their veils at the Cairo train station—not to mention the odd coincidence of Columbia’s only gallery mounting such an important show at that time.
Covering from 1920 to 1970, the show featured fantastic content, like paintings of a women's “hammam” (steam bath), romantic encounters or Tropicalista visions, but also form, with styles ranging from realist and impressionist to abstract and avant-garde. So much so, an art critic and collector from the United Arab Emirates, Sooud Al Qassemi, called those artists “the most pivotal moment in the history of Arab art,” a point emphasized by the show’s name, which was what the artists themselves called their movement: Partisans of the Nude (see my article about them). Not only did the Partisans of the Nude like to paint images of people, which violates Sunni Muslim prohibitions against portraying humans, clothed or unclothed, they stood for truth and honesty, symbolized by the naked body, and against repressive religion and politics—proto-hippies, in other words. In fact, Art and Freedom, another group to which many of the Partisans also belonged, published “Long Live Degenerate Art”, in 1938, a manifesto which denounced censorship, nationalism and fascism, as well as the “Degenerate Art” show mounted by the Nazis a year earlier in Munich, Germany.
“Girl in a Fishnet” (1918) by Egyptian Amy Nimr, when she was 20. image: A Nimr.The Partisans of the Nude were mostly Arab men, including some of the top Middle Eastern painters of the day, but at least one was Jewish and a fifth were women. Exemplifying the latter was Amy Nimr (1898–1974), who attended art school in London but soon moved to Paris, got a one-woman show, and was hanging out with Henry Miller, the avant-garde, satirical and sex-positive American author (see my article about him), and his Jewish and Surrealist friends. That was not surprising given the innate surrealism of her work, such as “Girl in a Fishnet” (1918) of a woman hauled from the sea slathered in mussels, which she painted before Surrealism's first spark, Andre Breton's essay of June 1919, or the fishnet stockings craze of the 1930s. The daughter of a Lebanese publishing magnate, Nimr became Cairo’s premier cultural salonniere and continued to make interesting paintings, especially after her son was killed by a World War Two era landmine, until she was forced to flee Egypt, in 1952, by the nationalist revolution led by Abdel Nasser.
I have not been able to determine whether any of the Partisans of the Nude were involved with Sufism, which is Islam’s mystical, artistic, pacifist and non-sectarian order, but I assume some were. That's because Sufis had long dominated high culture across Islam and were prominent in Cairo until the 1970s, including teachers with western students, even as Sufism was being repressed or outlawed elsewhere in the Middle East. Moreover, Sufis had already taken the West by storm, beginning in 1908. That was when Hazrat Inayat Khan, a master sitar player and musicologist from India as well as a brilliant Sufi, performed a concert in San Francisco attended by a mystically-minded Jewish woman, Ada Martin. Directed by his “sheikh” (guru) to spread Sufism, if he encountered suitable students, Khan renamed her Rabi’ah, after Sufism’s first “saint of love,” and administered a crash course of teachings and blessings but no Islamic conversion. “His spiritual power was all summed up in the principle of love,” Martin wrote and, together, they founded the first Sufi group of the modern West, The Sufi Order.
The Wallach's Arab art retrospective, curated by the accomplished, young Columbia art professor Kirsten Scheid, who also teaches at Beirut’s American University, was the first of its kind in the United States and not just spectacular but illuminating. It raised my spirits from the orgy of violence and hate emerging from the Middle East but also across the West, in the large anti-Israel demonstrations in dozens of cities and campuses throughout Europe and Australia as well as America, including Columbia’s quad a dozen blocks away, where it immediately became a camp-in, and on my social media feed, sometimes from close friends. Antisemitism soon reached levels not seen since I started studying it in the 1980s, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, probably the worst Jew hatred since the 1940s. Conversely, the Partisans of the Nude artists radiated light. They proved that culture could be radically reimagined and renewed; and their work was a fortuitous gift in this fraught time to all of us but especially me during my dark night of the soul, the following few months, as I contemplated the possibility of another Holocaust. It also transported me back to my immersion in Islam 51 years earlier, which was peaceful, pleasurable and often enlightening. Strolling away from the Wallach Gallery, in fact, it dawned on me: During my journey to the East, perhaps I wasn’t a “white hippie drug addict destroying native space,” as a cultural Marxist might critique me today or a Central Asian satrap back then, but a fellow Partisan of the Nude or neo-Sufi searching for my peeps.
One of my drawings from my incarceration in Munich's Stadelheim Prison, before I knew much about India. illo: D. Blair 8/11/1972My Journey to the East
My journey to the East started slowly, with literary and cinematic references, but was brought to life by the world travelers I met, my first months on the road. Toronto Lee liked to reminisce about India's incredible food, over bowls of gruel, camping on a beach in British Columbia. Wolf told me about staying with a maharaja, while we played chess with homemade cardboard pieces on the yard of Munich’s Stadelheim Prison (he was in for distributing LSD, me for theft). After an elderly guard backhanded me in the face, and I spent a week listening to members of the Baader-Meinhof gang (AKA Red Army Faction) shout to each other down the air shafts, I wondered if the West wasn’t still somewhat Nazi, and I turned to face the East, as illustrated in my prison drawings.
My physical odyssey, however, began in Athens with the Turkish girl. We danced in a Plaka nightclub—she was on summer break from architecture school in Ankara—and retired to Annafiotika Way, an ancient alley directly under the Acropolis, where I was staying with Australia Paul, my road buddy since Yugoslavia. Although he later dissed the Turkish girl as ugly, I found her stunning, despite some acne, and smart, and our sex was slow and dreamy, which can be classified as mystical. My only conjugal connection during my Asia year, the Turkish girl came to symbolize the continent’s surprising openness and generosity but also hidden world of women, which I finally learned about twenty years later. In fact, matriarchy is my third “little known but rather large fact about the Middle East,” after the rise and fall of the Sufi Revolution.
A lush orientalism continued to embrace me as I stumbled off the small Greek ferry and around Izmir's large whorehouse district—its gaggles of women waving—and found a working-class restaurant where I first tasted Turkey’s delightful cuisine, still one of my faves. By the time I hit Istanbul, in mid-September 1972, I was speedballing newness and oldness, otherness and revelations about my innermost self or philosophy, like the night I toured the old city with a pack of dogs. They stayed behind when I entered a mosque, which are left open, and tried to fashion my own form of prayer.
John Milich (1944-2023), my great friend and teacher, around 2005, on vacation in Europe. photo: Iris SultanBy day, I ran around Istanbul’s museums, tea shops, hammams and hippie hotels, switching to The Utopia when I learned they had beds for a buck on the open roof. As I chose one and pushed my backpack beneath, I heard a “Hey” from across the roof, shouted by a skinny, bald, bearded and bespectacled guy, who was sitting on a bed, cross-legged. Ten years my senior, he had taken the “hippie trail” to India the year before and could provide practical tips and mystical bon mots in a mellifluous melange. Eventually a published political essayist, and professional astrologer and herbalist, as well as one of my mentors and a teacher to many, John Edmond Milich (1944-2023) converted to Islam on his deathbed. On the roof of The Utopia, I also met David Winterburn. Of more modest demeanor, if equally bearded and adventurous, David came to prefer Hinduism, lived overseas for over a decade, became a language expert, married an amazing African woman, and still goes to India.
A Turk in a trench coat and severe mustache turned out to be a nice guy, over beers in a cafe behind The Utopia, and to have hashish, the psychedelic green variety, yet another Turkish secret. When I shared it with the roof toppers, even Milich showed respect. A few days later, a short, bushy-bearded Cuban, who went by the name of Dolphin and was a member of Berkeley’s Hog Farm commune (famous for serving “breakfast in bed for 400,000” at Woodstock, three years earlier), appeared on the roof of The Utopia and announced, “I’m driving to Afghanistan in a bus called the Rainbow Express, 35 dollars a ticket.” I bought one.
We crossed the Bosporus into Asia on a large ferry, hit the bus’s cruising speed (50 mph) on the Ankara Plains, and saw double rainbows out the Bedford’s roof windows, on both the left and the right sides. That was prophetic, as you might imagine, for the 23 hippies barreling east on the Rainbow Express. Also prophetic was Milich, who found a book of poetry, rummaging in my pack, and started to shout sonorously, “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all wines flowed and all hearts opened. One evening I seated beauty on my knee, and I found her bitter, and I cursed her.”
On the roof of the Utopia Hotel, with a view of the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, Istanbul. illo: D. BlairThat poem, “Season in Hell” (1873) by Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet some call “the teenager’s Christ,” acquired special meaning for me six months later, when I fell ill with hepatitis, and then dysentery and worms, and dropped fifty pounds and into a deep, months-long depression. It proved even more predictive thirty years later, when Milich became an avid conspiracy theorist (see my article about him).
Islam, however, was utterly unconspiratorial at that time. It was wide open and highly hospitable, in fact, from Morocco to Indonesia—almost everywhere except Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union’s Muslim states—as millions of Muslims enjoyed tourism’s easy money but also friendships and cultural exchange. Indeed, the tens of thousands of westerners, who crossed the Middle East and south-central Asia from the mid-1960s to the late-’70s, were almost always welcomed by locals, even in desert and mountain redoubts not visited since Marco Polo.
I learned that fact our first night out on the Rainbow Express when Dolphin drove off the road and into the woods and announced, “We’ll camp here for the night,” no facilities let alone permission. The Turkish police arrived within the hour, but all the chief wanted to do was sit by the fire, listen to me play guitar, and have one of his officers stuff cigarettes with hash—grinning broadly the entire time.
The very next night, however, we were pelted with tomatoes by the boys of Erzincan. Evidently, they spotted us entering the town’s historic hammam, peaked through its roof vents, and got excited by the sight of foreign partisans of the nude, doing the steam bath co-ed, plus there was a truck nearby with tomatoes. The only person hit hard was Barbara, the beauty among us (naturally), by a big, rotten tomato in her face, but we helped her back to the bus and scrambled aboard, even as the boys surrounded and started shaking it. After Dolphin drove us off, I went in front and played an E-blues boogie, which got the Rainbowers rocking and him banging the steering wheel and beeping the horn. Dolphin was oldest person on the bus, at 37, and I was the youngest.
Life onboard the Rainbow Express bus, including a visitor (in back, in a fez), western Afghanistan. illo: D. Blair Two hundred miles later, Iran’s curvy Arabic script and camels loping across the road broke my worldview, literally: a crack appeared and those images flooded in. Also breaking was the Rainbow Express, in a gorgeous gorge in the Alborz Mountains, a hundred miles north-east of Tehran, Iran. Our resident German hippie, also an acid dealer, gave me a few hits and the admonition not to dose the Yugoslavians, whom he considered too young and immature, even though they were a year older than me. Naturally, I immediately located Darko and Jelko, and the two-years-older David, and we dropped down by the river. Listening to its torrent and looking at the snowcapped peaks of Persia, I thought I could see Alamut Castle, on a saw-toothed ridge, the first mountain fortress of the Hashashin cult. I had heard about them recently from Mick Jagger’s character in “Performance” (1970), a film written and co-directed by the poet Donald Cammell, which explores the zero-sum challenge between vision, freedom and responsibility. (The actual Alamut was 75 miles west.)
Emerging in 1090 CE, the Hashashin were a small Persian sect of Ishmaelites, itself a subsect of Islam’s minority sect, the Shi’a, but they loomed large across Central Asia, as well as my imagination, due to their innovative use of hash, espionage and suicide strikes. Suicide is forbidden by Islam, but “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted” according to Hassan-i-Sabbah, the first sheikh of the Hashashin, a position eventually called “The Old Man of the Mountains.” That philosophy took Hinduism's one-sentence summary of reality, “Everything is 'maya’”, which is Sanskrit for illusion or mental construct and an early form of post-modernism, and perverted it into cynicism, fanaticism and nihilism. I-Sabbah's first tactical success was to sneak himself and some acolytes into Alamut, as servants and laborers, surround the satrap (which means regional governor) and reveal themselves, daggers drawn, although they did allow him to pack and leave and even provided an "exit castle" payment. The Hashashin's threat letter soon became a gold coin and a dagger, often placed on the target's bed, meaning "Take the bribe or die."
I-Sabbah didn’t take drugs himself and killed his own son for drink. He studied science and developed Alamut's library and lab, which he supposedly didn't leave for 20 years, into a renown Shi'a knowledge center which hosted scholars (notably the architect polymath al-Tusi). But his primary research was cults. Indeed, he perfected the use of large doses of hash, pretend paradises (gardens stocked with women, food and luxury goods), and radical readings of “The Quran” to brainwash and exploit followers, including having them leap to their death from the walls of Alamut to impress visitors. The Hashashin gave us the word “assassin,” in fact, which derives from their name (meaning hashish user), because they would stand still and pray after an attack, instead of fleeing, which shocked onlookers and expanded their notoriety from mere celebrity murderers. Their first high-level hit was Nizam al-Mulk, the talented, liberal “vizier” (administrator) of the nearby Seljuk Empire, whom i-Sabbah hated for some reason, on route to Baghdad in 1092 AD. The claim that those two, plus the poet Omar Khayyam, attended school together and swore an oath of mutual assistance, which al-Mulk abrogated, is undoubtedly apocryphal. It was one of the many Assassin tales which raced across Islam and around Europe, where they became a signifier for intense oriental devotion, as in this line from the 13th century French troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhand: “You have me more fully in your power than the Old Man his Assassins.”
The First Crusade of Christian Europe started six years after the Hashashin, perhaps not coincidentally, if stories about them so inflamed the western imagination. Since i-Sabbah had studied with the powerful Ishmaelites of Egypt and knew the region, he dispatched his lieutenants to defend Islam. They usurped castles in the mountains north of Jerusalem and used their own assassins or bribed “sleeper” agents to attack both local and invading Crusader leaders. In the 12th century, they killed the Count of Tripoli, Raymond II, and the King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat (France), and made multiple attempts on the great Muslim general Saladin, because he was Sunni and may have mistreated Shi’a, which obliged him to sleep in a raised, enclosed bed. Until the Mongols breached and destroyed Alamut, almost two centuries later, the Hashashin terrorized the Middle East and Persia using disinformation, rumormongering and roleplaying, much like today’s conspiracy theorists, and suicide strikes, grotesque violence and religious fantasy, much like today’s Islamo-fascists. (Their ceremonies eventually included Islamic Satanism.)
On my seven-month, 7,000-mile journey through Islam, however, I met no Islamo-fascists, assassins or even bandits, except for a Kabul cabbie who put a knife to my throat.
Images from my journey to the East dominated my art for decades. illo: D. Blair, 1979 After our delightful afternoon tripping in the Alborz Mountains, Darko, Jelko, David and I hitchhiked into the town of Amol, near the Caspian Sea, for a bite and some of the opium Iran was famous for, even under the repressive Shah Pahlavi. At the restaurant, we met a banker who ferreted out a connection, but opium doesn’t burn in cigarettes like hash, so we couldn’t get high. The next day, our banker friend and his two young daughters came out, in his chauffeured Mercedes, to the Rainbow Express, still next to a mountain road under repair by a family of Iranian mechanics, for an afternoon of intercultural dialogue.
By the time we got to the Afghan border, it was closed, but the guards let us sleep in a large, Persian carpet-covered room, a cozy, colorful bivouac before entering that ancient and wild land. Aside from its ubiquitous hash, which began a mile from the border with a guy waiving a slab from the side of the road, I was amazed by Afghanistan's mountains and deserts, which were dun-brown but dotted with green oases and villages of domed mud huts; the 1940s-era trucks covered with paintings of planes, trains and telephones (but no people); the flocks of females in bright blue, head-to-toe burkas, chirping in Farsi and swooping around like birds; and the black -turbaned and -bearded men, stoic but sometimes friendly. There was the owner of Your Apple Pie Bakery in Kandahar, who liked DJing tapes while chatting up Barbara; the Kabul hotel boys, who spun madly around the room while I rocked another blues at my 18th birthday party; the hotelier in Mazar-i-Sharif, who blasted Turkic tunes and provided tea, crackers and opium (which he showed me how to ingest: orally, starting with a tiny piece); and the “chai wallah” of Kunduz’s biggest tea house, who entertained me, Hans Van Loo and his buddy Wim (Dutch hippies with whom I’m still in touch) with evocative gestures and "number one" hash, five bucks a pound. The chai wallah was so welcoming, calm and expressive, I came to assume he was an acolyte of Afghanistan’s millennia-old and highly revered Sufism.
I still kick myself for not visiting the Buddhas of Bamiyan, ten stories tall and one of the seven wonders of the world, which survived 13 centuries of Islam and the weather of the Hindu Kush Mountains only to be shelled to smithereens by Islamo-fascists in 2001. But it was December, the mountains were freezing, and I was desperate for India.
My Dutch friends Hans Van Loo (rt) and Wim on Chapura Beach, Goa, 1972. illo: D. BlairDelhi’s rickshaws, restaurants and ear cleaners did not disappoint, nor did Bombay (now Mumbai), where we camped on the street next to the India Gate and partied for a week, or my full hippie immersion in Goa. For two months, I camped on Chapura Beach, hiked the beaches (as a partisan of the nude), swam with the dolphins (once), read Dostoyevsky's “Crime and Punishment” (1866), which touched me deeply, and ingested copious quantities of hash and LSD. Every sunset, I would make a chillum of my Number One Kunduz and shout the Hindu hashish prayers, “Alec bom” and “Bom Shankar,” which brought Hans and Wim from their nearby hut and, eventually, a crowd of “India freaks,” pilgrims to Goa from afar as Brazil, Japan and South Africa.
“Journey to the East” is a metaphor for self-examination, I knew from reading Herman Hesse’s 1932 book by that name, but some acquaintance with religion was useful, if not essential, I finally realized. Having had little ecumenical education during my secular humanist youth or years at an elite New York City high school, I cribbed from English Erica and the other Dutch Hans, who managed a multi-faith shrine in a tiny, thatched hut next door to my tent. There was also the English-speaking Indians, who seemed to enjoy a rollicking good religious discussion, and the “sadhus,” the wandering Hindu holy men and (very rarely) women. A sadhu named Boleram liked to sneak up behind me at night, when I was walking home along the beach, a little tipsy from the cafe, and scream. “To keep you in the present,” he said, smirking, when I ran into him in the hut of Craig Karp, a harmonica-playing Jewish kid from the New York suburbs, for whom Boleram cooked in exchange for room and board. (After Craig and I hitchhiked west together in 1974, I went to the San Francisco Art Institute for 16 years while he attended Portland State, got a degree in Arabic, joined the State Department, and became their man in northern Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet War, 1979-‘89.)
This Om Prakash Sharma masterpiece had its American debut in his 1986, one-man show at Ancient Currents, a gallery in San Francisco, I ran with my brother, Nicholas Blair. image: OP Sharma, 1965I learned about Indian art from Om Prakash Sharma, one of India’s first and finest abstract painters (Indian critics dubbed his style “neo-Tantra”), and a great sitarist, who attended Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship and met my father somehow (we lived three blocks from campus). For three weeks, Om hosted and ferried me around Old Delhi, visiting herbal doctors, mango stands and artist buddies, while his wife Savitri fattened me up from hepatitis on her fabulous yogurts and curries. I was awed by—indeed, I still strive to abide—Om’s preternatural balance of East and West aesthetics, capitalist and communist concepts, and mysticism and rationalism, as well as maintaining a rebel artist and middleclass householder lifestyle simultaneously. Om lived in four modest rooms with Savitri, three kids and his girlfriend, Kathleen, an American studying Bharatnatyam, south Indian dance. It could have been considered a polygamous Muslim marriage, borrowed from Delhi's eight centuries of romantic, openminded Sufis, but Om was Hindu, and Old Delhi was still fairly traditional at that time (see my article about him).
I found Hinduism’s florid myths and guruology equal parts grotesque and fascinating, and inhaled them from the India freaks. A long-blond-haired surfer type from California, whom I met on top of a truck in Gujarat State, told me an epic tale of gods and goddesses, after which he added, “But India itself is the guru.” A skinny French girl in a dirty sari (probably an ex-junkie) taught me the Hindu prayers at the ashram of Swami Muktananda, which I stumbled on hitchhiking around the fluorescent green countryside east of Mumbai. An upper caster who renounced those privileges to become a wandering, sworn-to-poverty sadhu, Muktananda had Boleram’s angular energy and withering gaze, which he would turn on me from his pillowed repose, on the dais of his marbled hall, echoing with the chants of dozens of devotees (mostly gringo), whenever I walked in.
Considered a “sadguru,” a combination of sadhu and guru which means perfectly realized being, Muktananda enthralled, educated and enlightened many people, first as a sadhu, then at his ashram, finally around the world, which he began touring in 1970. He would give talks and blessings and set up satellite ashrams, including the Siddha Yoga Foundation, a large facility two miles from my live-work studio in Oakland, California, which is still going strong today. Unfortunately, Muktananda could be abusive: spiritually of liberal humanism, physically of men, and sexually of women, even girls, according to eyewitness reports and journalists, like William Rodarmor (see CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983).
David Winterburn and I occasionally play a game we call “Find the Guru Who Has Transcended Sex,” where one team proposes a clean candidate and the other gets to dig up dirt, which is hard for the first team to win since spiritual awakening is adjacent to romanticism and, thereby, connected to sexual love. The last time we played, David said, “The temptation of the flesh seems to symbolize the difficulty of the journey.” Sufism, on the other hand, embraced female-male relations, romance and sex, which was probably why I was so smitten by it.
From my 'Fall of Love' seriograph series, trying to summarized my five years of world travel. photo: N. Blair, Mexico 1975, illo: D. Blair 2017My Sufism
My Sufism started slowly, also with world traveler mentions, but increased as I hitchhiked across India's Rajasthan State and saw its mosques, maharaja castles and Persian miniature paintings, and exploded when I returned to the States and finally cracked a book. Brilliant almost from page one, Sufism marries mysticism, poetry, music, dance, tolerance and romantic love with secular activities, like work, family life and even soldiering. Most importantly, it has some of the simplest but most sophisticated metaphysics in the history of religion.
On the road in Islam, I also learned to paint, including images of people. Arabic-like brush strokes appeared in my India sketches, expanded during my South America years, and matured into canvasses of monochrome figures, shaped like Arabic letters, or colorful nudes formed from Arabic-like puzzle pieces (see below), which could be considered my contribution to the Partisans of the Nude art movement.
For thirty years, I dipped and sometimes dove into Muslim, Arab, Turkish, Persian, Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Egyptian and Palestinian culture but especially Sufism, which often expressed the others' best. A decade before I began studying Judaism and my mother’s Holocaust experience, I adopted various aspects of Islamic ideas, dress and music. My father was a fan of Egypt’s ethereal grand diva, Umm Kulthum, whom he heard there as a soldier during World War Two, and I played related riffs on guitar. My Asian interests, which also included Japan, China and Tibet, harmonized easily with my liberal upbringing and the multiculturalism of Manhattan and California, where I settled, although the reading and deciphering did take years.
From my series of nudes using Arabic-like brushstrokes, which can be considered part of the Partisans of the Nude movement. illo: 'Ryoko in Repose', D. Blair, 2012 Everything changed after 9/11, a suicide strike in the Hashashin tradition, even though the hijackers were Sunni not Shi’a. When no one wrote editorials or toured talk shows to explain how the Sufis exemplified President George W. Bush's claim that, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam… Islam is peace” (9/17/2001)—except for Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Egyptian-American writer, Sufi and founder of Cordoba House (disparaged as “Ground Zero Mosque”), a lovely proposed mosque and cultural center cancelled for being two blocks from the Twin Towers—I felt obliged to speak up. Within two months, I wrote and performed my “Art Fatwa” (see below), a manifesto celebrating Islamic creativity and condemning Muslims or Westerners who defame Muhammad’s dedication to peace and love. A few months later, I produced “East Actually Does Meet West”, a poster with that headline over a photo of a Muslim and an American musician meeting backstage at a performance (also below). And I began buying every Sufi book I could find in New York, Berkeley or Fremont, California, which has a large Afghan community and many ethnic grocery stores, some of which stock books.
After a six-month read and three-week typing frenzy, I finished “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?”, a 6,000-word article based on the best evidence I had unearthed and the tragic realization that Sufi sheiks were laying low for fear of assassins. I gleaned a lot from “A History of Islamic Societies” (1988) by Ira Lapidus, a respected professor of Islam at the University of California, Berkeley, which has 26 index entrees each for “Sunni” or “Shi’a” but double that (53) for “Sufi.” Although I was just an amateur researcher, who had only visited Islam for seven months in the ‘70s (plus the West Bank for a week during the first Palestinian "intifada," or uprising, in 1988), and was not a Sufi, nor devotee of any religion, I felt duty bound to build on what Lapidus and other scholars had referred to or revealed, if only in a single sentence, to rise to the challenge not only of the much ballyhooed “clash of civilizations” but Sufi creativity and what I myself had witnessed.
My 'Art Fatwa', which includes the lines: 'Islamic artists to rise up. For one thousand years, your mystical brothers have been slaughtering you. There is no war with the West, the crisis is between moderate and radical Islam.' illo: D. Blair, 2001 Kabul was quite the Shangri-la in the early ‘70s. There was Afghan pop music blasting everywhere; bazars bursting with color, sides of beef black with flies, and bearded men who liked to haggle but would often give you a little extra (the so-called “baksheesh,” meaning friendly gift, in their case, but also corrupt bribe); hippie cafes covered with magical, mirror-speckled cloth (sewn by Kuchi tribal women); and a downtown with uncovered Afghan women, often beautiful, a few in miniskirts, some studying medicine. (After the first women graduated from Afghanistan's only medical school in 1957, about half of the country's doctors were soon female, until the Taliban's first takeover in 1996). The hippie invasion unnerved Muslim conservatives, I could imagine, even though I myself didn't experience any opprobrium, especially since Afghanistan was still semi-feudal and extremely impoverished, as I noticed touring its rural regions (a year after the devastating drought of 1971, which caused a famine). But their fears seemed far outweighed by the feelings of other Afghans, who were enjoying the tourist revenue, cultural exchange and friendships, including romantic.
Regardless, the country was antique and world-class corrupt. On July 17, 1973, King Zahir Shah, a liberal who instituted some reforms, was overthrown and exiled by his cousin and competitor, Daoud Khan, a military man friendly with the Soviets who claimed he could accelerate progress. I didn’t hear about the coup, when I passed through Kabul a few days later on my way west, but I followed developments in the American press and through David, who returned to Kabul to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer. He was evacuated in March 1978, two months after the Islamist revolution in neighboring Iran and two months before Afghan socialists, led by the Marxist Khalq party, killed Khan and 2000 of his supporters, and shifted the government toward socialism and a brutal police state. (The day after David and I arrived in Herat, Afghanistan, in 1972, there was a large demonstration in front of our hotel involving members of Khalq and Parcham, a moderate socialist party which, unlike Khalq, accepted Islam. It concluded with knife killings, which David witnessed and I saw the blood from.) Within a year and a half of the so-called Saur Revolution, the American ambassador was kidnapped and killed, the Soviet Union had invaded (to stop the capitalist counterrevolution), and that noble, dun-brown land, dotted with green oases, had entered a hell cycle of invasions (the Soviets killed about one million, the Americans up to 200,000), civil wars and authoritarian governments, ongoing today.
My poster “East Actually Does Meet West” (Max Michel, left, Nicholas Soter). illo: D. Blair, 2002 When “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” was not accepted for publication, I self-published a 20-page chapbook (see its cover below) and mailed it to a few friends and scholars, including Lapidus. When neither he nor anyone else acclaimed my findings, I feared I was suffering from a bad case of Dunning-Kruger delusions, but I calmed those concerns—if you agree with my positive self-diagnosis—with 20 more years of reading and news following. My discoveries are even more critical today, it would seem, in light of the lack of awareness of Sufi history and achievement, even among liberal or educated Muslims, and the popularity of radical Islamism, among conservative or young Muslims but also Western academics, young people and leftists.
So, what did I glean from Lapidus, the other scholars and my Arab and Muslim friends, not to mention the Sufi greats? And is it relevant to the modern Middle East? You be the judge, of course, but it’s inevitably controversial, especially as the region’s radicals push it toward broader war. One thing for sure, with the situation so ancient, intractable and dangerous, we are well advised to explore any promising perspective, which my four main findings appear to provide, take for example:
The cover of my book “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” illo: D. Blair, 2004 Sufis Saved Islam Four Times
The Sufis were a significant spiritual force in Islam starting a generation after Muhammad. Often itinerant mystics, quietist contemplatives or local teachers, they emphasized esoteric knowledge, vision-inducing rituals and “futuwah,” their codes of self-denial, generosity and right action. Although the Persian poet Mansur al-Hallaj (858-922 CE), sometimes called the “Sufi Christ,” was martyred in Baghdad for defying the caliph of the Sunni Abbasids, Islam's second empire, which stretched from North Africa to Afghanistan, the Abbasids were fairly liberal. They supported the sciences and arts, including outspoken poets, some of whom were openly queer, alcoholic or both (notably the genius Abu Nuwas, boon friend of the 8th century Sultan Harun al-Rashid).
Gradually growing in stature, the Sufis attained leadership status around 1100 CE after a titan of Islamic scholarship, al-Ghazali, proved that “Sufism was the mystical heart of Sunnism.” Al-Ghazali’s theological leap revived both Sunnism, Islam’s majority sect (about 85% of Muslims), which had grown moribund over the half millennium since Muhammad, and the Abbasids themselves, who had long exhausted their golden age. A century earlier, their clerics "Closed the Gates of Ijtihad," meaning ended scriptural interpretation, never a good sign. Indeed, the new Sunni Sufism served as a rebuttal not only of the decadent Abbasids and their authoritarian caliphs but the nihilist Hashashin, who emerged at the same time and ran with the same mystical-wanderer crowd (Vizier al-Mulk's assassin infiltrated his travel party roleplaying a Sufi). Many Sufi greats started as Shi’a, Islam’s small, scholarly, hierarchical and artistic sect—Shi’a didn't prohibit human figuration and often adorned their mosques with massive portraits—but they switched to Sunnism for its egalitarianism, six times more Muslims and al-Ghazali’s shattering insight.
A few decades after al-Ghazali, also in Baghdad (the world’s largest city from 800 to 1258 CE with up to a million citizens), al-Qadiri solved another riddle of Islam: How does one unify religion and politics? He must have achieved this balance, I believe, because his disciples, the Qadiriyya, established the first stable Sufi “tariqa,” which translates as “path” but means “religious order” (since Sufis opposed sects and sectarianism). The Qadiriyya are still with us, in fact, as are many of the subsequent tariqas which integrated freedom, vision and responsibility. “Give your hands to work and your soul to God” was the one-sentence summary of Naqshband, a 14th century Persian sheikh, whose conservative tariqa, the Naqshbandi, continues to minister to about four-fifths of contemporary Sufis, mostly residents of central Asia.
Calling each other “friends,” the Sufis left their caves and meditation spots, took up professions and spouses, and formed tariqas and other fraternities, some of which provided community services, like hostels for travelers. This followed the lived example of Muhammad, who grew from camel train leader and family man to prophet and general, although most Sufis interpreted his mosque-state to mean ethical deeds enacted by individuals or grassroot organizations, and his conquests as spiritual endeavors. Sufis eschewed worldly affairs not because they considered it evil or themselves holier than thou, but because it distracted from their enjoyment of God, which they amplified to include nature, romance and art. In this manner, al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE), al-Qadiri (1077–1166), Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) and the myriad more Sufi greats—like ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), the prolific philosopher, poet and romantic, who hiked and sailed to the Middle East from Spain (where he studied with two Sufi master women)—inspired a spiritual and cultural shift which saved Islam. The Sufi Revolution was instrumental in rebuilding Islam from the Mongol Apocalypse, the invasions of the 13th and 14th century by Genghis Kahn and his minions, which probably killed over 20 million people in Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, traumatized millions more, and ended high culture for generations in some regions.
The Mongols were largely areligious, but a few of Genghis’s grandsons met traveling Sufi merchants and converted to Islam, which popularized the faith. Many Mongol chieftains came to enjoy Muslim civilization, especially its Sufism, including Tamerlane, another mass murdering conqueror, who invited the renown Persian Sufi poet Hafez (1325-‘90) to sit at his court. Alas, when Tamerlane took offense at an edgy metaphor, the poet prudently snuck out of the palace and fled. As it happened, Hafez exalted romantic mysticism (and vice-versa, mystical romanticism), claiming that “Wine-drunk, love-drunk, we inherit paradise,” and he utterly reviled fanaticism. “Lay not reproach at the drunkard’s door, Oh fanatic, thou that art pure of soul; not thine on the page of life to enroll the faults of others” (translated by Gertrude Bell, an English woman explorer, anthropologist and colonial administrator, in “The Hafez Poems of Gertrude Bell”, 1897).
The great scholar, mystic and poet Rumi. illo: unknown, 17th century, Turkey The Sufi-led recovery from the Mongol Apocalypse was so spectacular, in fact, it begat the Sufi Renaissance personified by Rumi (1207-’73), who was from Balkh, Afghanistan, a cultured crossroads city (turned spooky hamlet surrounded by dripping mud ruins, by the time I got there, in 1972). The precocious young Rumi reveled in the cosmopolitan Balkh until his father, Bahuaddin, packed up the family and fled, just ahead of the Mongols. After hiking 2,500 miles to Mecca and doing their Hajj pilgrimage, they settled in Turkey. Rumi became an Islamic judge and community leader but also prolific writer, adventurous mystic and one of the bestselling poets of all time—across both Islam and the West—as well as a dedicated romantic. Rumi's one-sentence revelations include “Love alone cuts arguments short, for it alone comes to the rescue,” and “To the ones who really see—the ‘chosen lovers’—love is a shattering, eternal light.”
That brings Sufi saves to four: al-Ghazali, al-Qadiri, the post-Mongol resurrection and their golden age. Moreover, not only were there Sunni and Shi’a Sufis, which helped pacify the severe sectarian civil war plaguing Islam since the death of Muhammad, there were Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Taoist, Confucian and even Jewish Sufis.
Mediaeval Judaism’s greatest philosopher, Maimonides (1138-1204 CE), known for his masterpiece “Guide for the Perplexed”, was a rational deist who fled intolerant Spain for the Holy Land and became court doctor for Saladin (1137-1193), one of Egypt's most revered sultans as well as generals. His sons, however, became Sufis, again with no Islamic conversion. Enamored of the mysticism of their ancient prophets, they rebelled against Maimonidian logic, joined the burgeoning Sufi movement, and reinterpreted “The Bible” as a mystical treatise. Indeed, they helped pioneer the Jewish mystical reawakening exemplified by “The Kabbalah”, a purportedly ancient Hebrew text, which was actually being written contemporaneously in Spain and only arrived in Jerusalem a century or two later. Their interest in mystical monotheism explains the plethora of Jewish Sufis today.
Sufi poets and philosophers proceeded to entertain and enlighten entire towns, regions, even empires, even those ruled by tyrants persecuting them, using the trick of couching avant-garde ideas in devout Islam. They were inspired, assisted and periodically replaced by one of the many wandering Sufi sadhus, who were not unlike the activists and hippies of the 1960s. Poetry was their rock and roll, in terms of popularity and promoting change, but Sufis also excelled at music, dance and other arts, religion and mystical theory and practice, like chanting, “moving meditation” (circular walking or spin dancing) and other techniques for inducing visions or rapture. Last but not least was their special sauce: romance, humor (some became court jesters), ironic insinuation and moral suasion, if not so much the legal variant, although many Sufis were Islamic scholars and judges.
Muslim scientists hard at work, circa ninth century, Baghdad. photo: courtesy Tazkiyah Science became central to Islam, due to monotheism’s establishment of an ordered universe, the Prophet Muhammad, who recommended Muslims “Seek knowledge even to China,” and rationalist sects, like the Sunni Mu’taziles, of ninth century Baghdad, or the Shi'a intellectuals 300 miles south, in Basra. Science was integral to Islam's first golden age, from 775 to 945 CE among the Abbasids, and Islamic science became central to Western Civilization, after the Christians repressed and occasionally killed scientists and destroyed libraries, during the eight, long centuries of the Dark Ages. In addition to incorporating the knowledge of classical Greece, India and China, Muslim scholars developed much of their own, from algebra and algorithms to alchemy (transforming physical substances mystically), which are all Arabic words (“al” means “the” in Arabic), as well as astronomy and medicine. After returning to science and classical civilization in the 13th century, Christians relied on Muslim scholars like Ibn Sina, the 11th century Uzbek known as “the father of medicine” (a prodigious traveler and experimenter, he discovered germ theory and wrote the Middle Ages' main medical text), and the 12th century Spanish polymath, Ibn Rushd (called Avicenna and Averroes, respectively, by Europeans).
Alas, science provided little mass benefit until the Industrial Revolution, and most Sufis followed al-Ghazali's preference for revelation over rationalism, although there were a few scientific Sufis, notably members of the Muʿtazile school or Omar Khayyam. A Persian mathematician and astronomer as well as poet, philosopher and possible friend of i-Sabbah (they were born two years but 500 miles apart), Khayyam investigated all sorts of things, including Sufism itself and its view of reality, as a series of overlaying symbol hierarchies, using a descriptive code based on alcohol (tavern as the teacher's house, wine as teachings, etc). Such iconography worked well in Islam where drinking was common, despite scriptural prohibition, Sufism was sometimes forbidden, and the two shared altered states of consciousness (as Hafez liked to emphasize). In addition to imbibing real or metaphorical spirits, Sufis used divination (through dreams or other means), supernatural healing and other esoteric practices, like smoking hash, Tantric sex, “malamati” (“taming the ego by blaming oneself”), or the fakirs' “torture meditation” like self-flagellation.
Long before al-Ghazali, Sufism was respected from Afghanistan to Spain, where troubadours exported it to Christian Europe and helped incite a romantic revolution among the Albigensians of southern France (also called Cathars). Devoted to their beloveds and arts as well as sheikhs and saints, Sufis fashioned a functional and pragmatic way to live a sacred and romantic life, which modeled and inspired right action, creativity and love. In fact, Sufis are said to have conquered more territory with the word than all of Islam's armies with the sword. After leading the recovery from the Mongols, the Sufi Renaissance flourished from Senegal and Timbuktu in West Africa to Balkh and Delhi in Central Asia, with outlying regions continuing to join the movement for centuries. Indeed, it served as the basis of Islam's second wave of golden ages, arguably greater than the 10th century Abbasids or Spanish Umayyads, especially in the Turkey-based Ottoman Empire, from 1299 to 1922, and India's Mughal Empire, founded in 1526 by a descendent of Tamerlane and lasting until 1858.
“In the 1600s a Sufi teacher from the west of the Pamirs [Tajikistan] crossed into southern Xinjiang and Gansu [western China], where he preached with great success,” notes Valerie Hansen in her fascinating “Silk Road” (2012). “In the 1700s his successors travelled to Yemen, where they studied with Naqshbandi [Sufi] teachers. On their return, they were unusually influential… In time, the descendants of these Sufis became the Khoja rulers of Khotan and Yarkand [in western Xinjiang]… Under their influence, Xinjiang became fully Islamicized.” Unfortunately, their descendants, the Uyghurs, have been harshly repressed by Chinese authorities, including having their culture decimated and almost two million people incarcerated in “re-education” camps since 2015.
An Indian sadhu on bed of nails, Benares, India, circa 1907. photo: unknown The Sufi Downturn
The Sufis were so innovative as well as functional and religious, they were often ushered into the inner sanctums of Islam’s ruling elites as poets, advisors or outright sovereigns, as in Xinjiang. Over the centuries, however, cultures lose their edge, especially when leadership is passed to the first born instead of the most talented, or the system is corrupted by religious charlatans or Machiavellian politicians. Moreover, some Sufis indulged in odd superstitions, excessive rituals or strange practices, including the fakirs' self-abuse (such as the cliche of sitting on a bed of nails, which was one practice), while others regressed to conservative Sunnism or acquiesced to tyranny. Most historians of Islam mention or acclaim the Sufi Renaissance, which flourished from about the 13th to the 17th century, and longer in lots of regions. The last Mughal emperor, Shah Zafar II, who ruled from 1837 to 1858, was originally a wandering Sufi poet, which helped him and his people find peace amid Britain's conquest and colonization. Alas, neither historians nor the Sufis themselves said much, or anything at all, about Sufism’s decline, decadence or contribution to the fundamentalist counterrevolution. This is due to embarrassment as well as respect, but also because there were still many brilliant Sufis hard at work, and they eventually wowed the West.
Translations of Rumi, Hafez and Khayyam began arriving in Europe at the end of 18th century, with talented teachers and artists, like Inayat Khan, coming a century or so later, although many didn't identify as Sufis, because persecution was already elevated in some regions. The Lebanese-American wunderkind Kahil Gibran wrote and illustrated “The Prophet” (1923), which doesn’t mention “Sufi” but obviously draws on its themes. “The Prophet” was very popular during the Eastern mysticism fad of the “Roaring '20s”, and remains a bestseller today, especially among born-again hippies (the Wallach's Partisan Show had two lovely Gibran drawings). Meher Baba, a Zoroastrian from Mumbai, studied with a female Sufi master from Afghanistan (who ran away to India on her wedding day), became known as a nonsectarian positivist for his mantra, “Don’t worry, be happy” (chalked on a board, because he took a vow of silence), and was chosen by Rabi’ah Martin to take over her and Khan's Sufi Order (which still has a spectacular, art-filled temple in Orinda, California). The Russian-born George Gurdjieff hiked much of central Asia in his youth, had many “Meetings with Remarkable Men” (as the title of his book, finally published in English in 1963, puts it), settled in Paris (where he weathered the Nazis), and taught Sufi practices without naming them. Known as a fabulist and trickster as well as disciplined mystic, insightful lay psychiatrist and repository of ancient wisdom, Gurdjieff still has many disciples and a few organizations worldwide.
Alas, this Sufi success, too, concealed a problem: the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism. As Sufis came to the West, enjoyed its religious freedoms, cultural and financial opportunities, and the esteem of its intellectuals and some celebrities (notably American actor Edward G. Robinson and English author Doris Lessing), they didn’t complain, let alone write exposes, about Sufism being under attack by Muslim “reformers,” first the religious then the political. Ancestral lands should be a place of knowledge and spirituality not tyranny and sectarian conflict, at least symbolically, they believed. The Ottomans had the most Sufi orders of any society, from Rumi’s Whirling Dervishes to the Janissaries, a widely respected, if sometimes brutal, military battalion, but Turkey’s founding father, Ataturk, outlawed them all in 1925. Sufis controlled the guilds and opposed Ataturk's innovative project to secularize society, abolish Ottoman identity hierarchies, and switch Turkish from writing in Arabic to Roman script.
Members of a Wahhabi militia, the Ikhwan, raiding Transjordan, the old name for Jordan, 1923. photo: unknownAs it happened, the Ottomans had just spent the previous century fighting the Sufis’ worst nightmare, the army of Sunni radicals which galloped out of the Arabian desert in the late-1700s. Called the Wahhabis, they were led by two Muhammads, the indefatigable preacher Wahhab and his wily warrior buddy, bin Saud. After the first Muhammad's conquests as a prophet, any Arabian warlord worth his salt needed a fiery preacher. Determined to destroy what they deemed un-Islamic, the Wahhab-Saud “jihad”—which means striving or struggle as well as war against unbelievers—was an understandable reaction to Ottoman corruption and archaic Sufism. It was also similar to other austere movements that emerged from the desert and the back-to-basics theology and aggressive proselytizing of the Protestants, which had started two centuries earlier in Germany. After overturning Catholic corruption and hierarchies and translating “The Bible” into local languages, the seemingly progressive Protestant Reformation unleashed a storm of sectarian wars and deranged witch hunts, lasting 150 years, and a fanatical evangelism, still with us today.
Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 12:21 PM
by Doniphan Blair
On the road in Iran: (Lf-rt) Dave Winterburn, me (Doniphan Blair), Darko Radonovich (Yugoslavia) and Jimmy (Canada),1972, the only extant photo from my trip. photo: unknownGo to My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
Go to My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
NOW THAT WE’VE ENTERED ANOTHER
hell cycle in the Middle East, it is only fitting and proper I honor the brilliant and angelic Muslims and Arabs who helped me over the last half a century. Their personalities and culture touched me deeply, starting when I crossed into Asia at age 17; they inspired my art and spiritual development; and they contributed to my discovery—if you’ll permit me that boast—of four little known but rather large facts about the Middle East, which may allow me to return the favor.
To touch on my fourth finding first: About a century ago, a generation of visionary Muslim and Arab mystics and artists came to prominence in the United States and Europe as well as the Middle East. Although I was long familiar with the mystics, I only learned about the artists recently, when I stumbled on Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, tucked away on the upper floor of one of the school's new buildings on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and saw a phenomenal show of 20th century fine art from the Middle East. That was on October 17th, 2023, ten days after the biggest-ever massacre of Israelis in the Arab-Jewish wars—which are also only a century old—as Columbia was being besieged by students protesting Israel and tacitly or overtly supporting Hamas, the radical Islamist organization which ruled Gaza and perpetrated the attack. Columbia’s then president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, was from Egypt and probably knew personally some of the 42 artists in the show, but she had a lot on her plate and didn’t publicize it much. Indeed, the show wasn't reviewed right away or that positively by New York's finicky art press, despite its obvious groundbreaking qualities, and few students attended. That was a pity, given their interest in the politics of the Middle East but ignorance of its artistic culture or progressive history—like when Arab feminists returned from the 1926 women's suffrage convention in Paris and burnt their veils at the Cairo train station—not to mention the odd coincidence of Columbia’s only gallery mounting such an important show at that time.
Covering from 1920 to 1970, the show featured fantastic content, like paintings of a women's “hammam” (steam bath), romantic encounters or Tropicalista visions, but also form, with styles ranging from realist and impressionist to abstract and avant-garde. So much so, an art critic and collector from the United Arab Emirates, Sooud Al Qassemi, called those artists “the most pivotal moment in the history of Arab art,” a point emphasized by the show’s name, which was what the artists themselves called their movement: Partisans of the Nude (see my article about them). Not only did the Partisans of the Nude like to paint images of people, which violates Sunni Muslim prohibitions against portraying humans, clothed or unclothed, they stood for truth and honesty, symbolized by the naked body, and against repressive religion and politics—proto-hippies, in other words. In fact, Art and Freedom, another group to which many of the Partisans also belonged, published “Long Live Degenerate Art”, in 1938, a manifesto which denounced censorship, nationalism and fascism, as well as the “Degenerate Art” show mounted by the Nazis a year earlier in Munich, Germany.
“Girl in a Fishnet” (1918) by Egyptian Amy Nimr, when she was 20. image: A Nimr.I have not been able to determine whether any of the Partisans of the Nude were involved with Sufism, which is Islam’s mystical, artistic, pacifist and non-sectarian order, but I assume some were. That's because Sufis had long dominated high culture across Islam and were prominent in Cairo until the 1970s, including teachers with western students, even as Sufism was being repressed or outlawed elsewhere in the Middle East. Moreover, Sufis had already taken the West by storm, beginning in 1908. That was when Hazrat Inayat Khan, a master sitar player and musicologist from India as well as a brilliant Sufi, performed a concert in San Francisco attended by a mystically-minded Jewish woman, Ada Martin. Directed by his “sheikh” (guru) to spread Sufism, if he encountered suitable students, Khan renamed her Rabi’ah, after Sufism’s first “saint of love,” and administered a crash course of teachings and blessings but no Islamic conversion. “His spiritual power was all summed up in the principle of love,” Martin wrote and, together, they founded the first Sufi group of the modern West, The Sufi Order.
The Wallach's Arab art retrospective, curated by the accomplished, young Columbia art professor Kirsten Scheid, who also teaches at Beirut’s American University, was the first of its kind in the United States and not just spectacular but illuminating. It raised my spirits from the orgy of violence and hate emerging from the Middle East but also across the West, in the large anti-Israel demonstrations in dozens of cities and campuses throughout Europe and Australia as well as America, including Columbia’s quad a dozen blocks away, where it immediately became a camp-in, and on my social media feed, sometimes from close friends. Antisemitism soon reached levels not seen since I started studying it in the 1980s, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, probably the worst Jew hatred since the 1940s. Conversely, the Partisans of the Nude artists radiated light. They proved that culture could be radically reimagined and renewed; and their work was a fortuitous gift in this fraught time to all of us but especially me during my dark night of the soul, the following few months, as I contemplated the possibility of another Holocaust. It also transported me back to my immersion in Islam 51 years earlier, which was peaceful, pleasurable and often enlightening. Strolling away from the Wallach Gallery, in fact, it dawned on me: During my journey to the East, perhaps I wasn’t a “white hippie drug addict destroying native space,” as a cultural Marxist might critique me today or a Central Asian satrap back then, but a fellow Partisan of the Nude or neo-Sufi searching for my peeps.
One of my drawings from my incarceration in Munich's Stadelheim Prison, before I knew much about India. illo: D. Blair 8/11/1972My journey to the East started slowly, with literary and cinematic references, but was brought to life by the world travelers I met, my first months on the road. Toronto Lee liked to reminisce about India's incredible food, over bowls of gruel, camping on a beach in British Columbia. Wolf told me about staying with a maharaja, while we played chess with homemade cardboard pieces on the yard of Munich’s Stadelheim Prison (he was in for distributing LSD, me for theft). After an elderly guard backhanded me in the face, and I spent a week listening to members of the Baader-Meinhof gang (AKA Red Army Faction) shout to each other down the air shafts, I wondered if the West wasn’t still somewhat Nazi, and I turned to face the East, as illustrated in my prison drawings.
My physical odyssey, however, began in Athens with the Turkish girl. We danced in a Plaka nightclub—she was on summer break from architecture school in Ankara—and retired to Annafiotika Way, an ancient alley directly under the Acropolis, where I was staying with Australia Paul, my road buddy since Yugoslavia. Although he later dissed the Turkish girl as ugly, I found her stunning, despite some acne, and smart, and our sex was slow and dreamy, which can be classified as mystical. My only conjugal connection during my Asia year, the Turkish girl came to symbolize the continent’s surprising openness and generosity but also hidden world of women, which I finally learned about twenty years later. In fact, matriarchy is my third “little known but rather large fact about the Middle East,” after the rise and fall of the Sufi Revolution.
A lush orientalism continued to embrace me as I stumbled off the small Greek ferry and around Izmir's large whorehouse district—its gaggles of women waving—and found a working-class restaurant where I first tasted Turkey’s delightful cuisine, still one of my faves. By the time I hit Istanbul, in mid-September 1972, I was speedballing newness and oldness, otherness and revelations about my innermost self or philosophy, like the night I toured the old city with a pack of dogs. They stayed behind when I entered a mosque, which are left open, and tried to fashion my own form of prayer.
John Milich (1944-2023), my great friend and teacher, around 2005, on vacation in Europe. photo: Iris SultanA Turk in a trench coat and severe mustache turned out to be a nice guy, over beers in a cafe behind The Utopia, and to have hashish, the psychedelic green variety, yet another Turkish secret. When I shared it with the roof toppers, even Milich showed respect. A few days later, a short, bushy-bearded Cuban, who went by the name of Dolphin and was a member of Berkeley’s Hog Farm commune (famous for serving “breakfast in bed for 400,000” at Woodstock, three years earlier), appeared on the roof of The Utopia and announced, “I’m driving to Afghanistan in a bus called the Rainbow Express, 35 dollars a ticket.” I bought one.
We crossed the Bosporus into Asia on a large ferry, hit the bus’s cruising speed (50 mph) on the Ankara Plains, and saw double rainbows out the Bedford’s roof windows, on both the left and the right sides. That was prophetic, as you might imagine, for the 23 hippies barreling east on the Rainbow Express. Also prophetic was Milich, who found a book of poetry, rummaging in my pack, and started to shout sonorously, “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all wines flowed and all hearts opened. One evening I seated beauty on my knee, and I found her bitter, and I cursed her.”
On the roof of the Utopia Hotel, with a view of the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, Istanbul. illo: D. BlairIslam, however, was utterly unconspiratorial at that time. It was wide open and highly hospitable, in fact, from Morocco to Indonesia—almost everywhere except Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union’s Muslim states—as millions of Muslims enjoyed tourism’s easy money but also friendships and cultural exchange. Indeed, the tens of thousands of westerners, who crossed the Middle East and south-central Asia from the mid-1960s to the late-’70s, were almost always welcomed by locals, even in desert and mountain redoubts not visited since Marco Polo.
I learned that fact our first night out on the Rainbow Express when Dolphin drove off the road and into the woods and announced, “We’ll camp here for the night,” no facilities let alone permission. The Turkish police arrived within the hour, but all the chief wanted to do was sit by the fire, listen to me play guitar, and have one of his officers stuff cigarettes with hash—grinning broadly the entire time.
The very next night, however, we were pelted with tomatoes by the boys of Erzincan. Evidently, they spotted us entering the town’s historic hammam, peaked through its roof vents, and got excited by the sight of foreign partisans of the nude, doing the steam bath co-ed, plus there was a truck nearby with tomatoes. The only person hit hard was Barbara, the beauty among us (naturally), by a big, rotten tomato in her face, but we helped her back to the bus and scrambled aboard, even as the boys surrounded and started shaking it. After Dolphin drove us off, I went in front and played an E-blues boogie, which got the Rainbowers rocking and him banging the steering wheel and beeping the horn. Dolphin was oldest person on the bus, at 37, and I was the youngest.
Life onboard the Rainbow Express bus, including a visitor (in back, in a fez), western Afghanistan. illo: D. Blair Emerging in 1090 CE, the Hashashin were a small Persian sect of Ishmaelites, itself a subsect of Islam’s minority sect, the Shi’a, but they loomed large across Central Asia, as well as my imagination, due to their innovative use of hash, espionage and suicide strikes. Suicide is forbidden by Islam, but “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted” according to Hassan-i-Sabbah, the first sheikh of the Hashashin, a position eventually called “The Old Man of the Mountains.” That philosophy took Hinduism's one-sentence summary of reality, “Everything is 'maya’”, which is Sanskrit for illusion or mental construct and an early form of post-modernism, and perverted it into cynicism, fanaticism and nihilism. I-Sabbah's first tactical success was to sneak himself and some acolytes into Alamut, as servants and laborers, surround the satrap (which means regional governor) and reveal themselves, daggers drawn, although they did allow him to pack and leave and even provided an "exit castle" payment. The Hashashin's threat letter soon became a gold coin and a dagger, often placed on the target's bed, meaning "Take the bribe or die."
I-Sabbah didn’t take drugs himself and killed his own son for drink. He studied science and developed Alamut's library and lab, which he supposedly didn't leave for 20 years, into a renown Shi'a knowledge center which hosted scholars (notably the architect polymath al-Tusi). But his primary research was cults. Indeed, he perfected the use of large doses of hash, pretend paradises (gardens stocked with women, food and luxury goods), and radical readings of “The Quran” to brainwash and exploit followers, including having them leap to their death from the walls of Alamut to impress visitors. The Hashashin gave us the word “assassin,” in fact, which derives from their name (meaning hashish user), because they would stand still and pray after an attack, instead of fleeing, which shocked onlookers and expanded their notoriety from mere celebrity murderers. Their first high-level hit was Nizam al-Mulk, the talented, liberal “vizier” (administrator) of the nearby Seljuk Empire, whom i-Sabbah hated for some reason, on route to Baghdad in 1092 AD. The claim that those two, plus the poet Omar Khayyam, attended school together and swore an oath of mutual assistance, which al-Mulk abrogated, is undoubtedly apocryphal. It was one of the many Assassin tales which raced across Islam and around Europe, where they became a signifier for intense oriental devotion, as in this line from the 13th century French troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhand: “You have me more fully in your power than the Old Man his Assassins.”
The First Crusade of Christian Europe started six years after the Hashashin, perhaps not coincidentally, if stories about them so inflamed the western imagination. Since i-Sabbah had studied with the powerful Ishmaelites of Egypt and knew the region, he dispatched his lieutenants to defend Islam. They usurped castles in the mountains north of Jerusalem and used their own assassins or bribed “sleeper” agents to attack both local and invading Crusader leaders. In the 12th century, they killed the Count of Tripoli, Raymond II, and the King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat (France), and made multiple attempts on the great Muslim general Saladin, because he was Sunni and may have mistreated Shi’a, which obliged him to sleep in a raised, enclosed bed. Until the Mongols breached and destroyed Alamut, almost two centuries later, the Hashashin terrorized the Middle East and Persia using disinformation, rumormongering and roleplaying, much like today’s conspiracy theorists, and suicide strikes, grotesque violence and religious fantasy, much like today’s Islamo-fascists. (Their ceremonies eventually included Islamic Satanism.)
On my seven-month, 7,000-mile journey through Islam, however, I met no Islamo-fascists, assassins or even bandits, except for a Kabul cabbie who put a knife to my throat.
Images from my journey to the East dominated my art for decades. illo: D. Blair, 1979 By the time we got to the Afghan border, it was closed, but the guards let us sleep in a large, Persian carpet-covered room, a cozy, colorful bivouac before entering that ancient and wild land. Aside from its ubiquitous hash, which began a mile from the border with a guy waiving a slab from the side of the road, I was amazed by Afghanistan's mountains and deserts, which were dun-brown but dotted with green oases and villages of domed mud huts; the 1940s-era trucks covered with paintings of planes, trains and telephones (but no people); the flocks of females in bright blue, head-to-toe burkas, chirping in Farsi and swooping around like birds; and the black -turbaned and -bearded men, stoic but sometimes friendly. There was the owner of Your Apple Pie Bakery in Kandahar, who liked DJing tapes while chatting up Barbara; the Kabul hotel boys, who spun madly around the room while I rocked another blues at my 18th birthday party; the hotelier in Mazar-i-Sharif, who blasted Turkic tunes and provided tea, crackers and opium (which he showed me how to ingest: orally, starting with a tiny piece); and the “chai wallah” of Kunduz’s biggest tea house, who entertained me, Hans Van Loo and his buddy Wim (Dutch hippies with whom I’m still in touch) with evocative gestures and "number one" hash, five bucks a pound. The chai wallah was so welcoming, calm and expressive, I came to assume he was an acolyte of Afghanistan’s millennia-old and highly revered Sufism.
I still kick myself for not visiting the Buddhas of Bamiyan, ten stories tall and one of the seven wonders of the world, which survived 13 centuries of Islam and the weather of the Hindu Kush Mountains only to be shelled to smithereens by Islamo-fascists in 2001. But it was December, the mountains were freezing, and I was desperate for India.
My Dutch friends Hans Van Loo (rt) and Wim on Chapura Beach, Goa, 1972. illo: D. Blair“Journey to the East” is a metaphor for self-examination, I knew from reading Herman Hesse’s 1932 book by that name, but some acquaintance with religion was useful, if not essential, I finally realized. Having had little ecumenical education during my secular humanist youth or years at an elite New York City high school, I cribbed from English Erica and the other Dutch Hans, who managed a multi-faith shrine in a tiny, thatched hut next door to my tent. There was also the English-speaking Indians, who seemed to enjoy a rollicking good religious discussion, and the “sadhus,” the wandering Hindu holy men and (very rarely) women. A sadhu named Boleram liked to sneak up behind me at night, when I was walking home along the beach, a little tipsy from the cafe, and scream. “To keep you in the present,” he said, smirking, when I ran into him in the hut of Craig Karp, a harmonica-playing Jewish kid from the New York suburbs, for whom Boleram cooked in exchange for room and board. (After Craig and I hitchhiked west together in 1974, I went to the San Francisco Art Institute for 16 years while he attended Portland State, got a degree in Arabic, joined the State Department, and became their man in northern Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet War, 1979-‘89.)
This Om Prakash Sharma masterpiece had its American debut in his 1986, one-man show at Ancient Currents, a gallery in San Francisco, I ran with my brother, Nicholas Blair. image: OP Sharma, 1965I found Hinduism’s florid myths and guruology equal parts grotesque and fascinating, and inhaled them from the India freaks. A long-blond-haired surfer type from California, whom I met on top of a truck in Gujarat State, told me an epic tale of gods and goddesses, after which he added, “But India itself is the guru.” A skinny French girl in a dirty sari (probably an ex-junkie) taught me the Hindu prayers at the ashram of Swami Muktananda, which I stumbled on hitchhiking around the fluorescent green countryside east of Mumbai. An upper caster who renounced those privileges to become a wandering, sworn-to-poverty sadhu, Muktananda had Boleram’s angular energy and withering gaze, which he would turn on me from his pillowed repose, on the dais of his marbled hall, echoing with the chants of dozens of devotees (mostly gringo), whenever I walked in.
Considered a “sadguru,” a combination of sadhu and guru which means perfectly realized being, Muktananda enthralled, educated and enlightened many people, first as a sadhu, then at his ashram, finally around the world, which he began touring in 1970. He would give talks and blessings and set up satellite ashrams, including the Siddha Yoga Foundation, a large facility two miles from my live-work studio in Oakland, California, which is still going strong today. Unfortunately, Muktananda could be abusive: spiritually of liberal humanism, physically of men, and sexually of women, even girls, according to eyewitness reports and journalists, like William Rodarmor (see CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983).
David Winterburn and I occasionally play a game we call “Find the Guru Who Has Transcended Sex,” where one team proposes a clean candidate and the other gets to dig up dirt, which is hard for the first team to win since spiritual awakening is adjacent to romanticism and, thereby, connected to sexual love. The last time we played, David said, “The temptation of the flesh seems to symbolize the difficulty of the journey.” Sufism, on the other hand, embraced female-male relations, romance and sex, which was probably why I was so smitten by it.
From my 'Fall of Love' seriograph series, trying to summarized my five years of world travel. photo: N. Blair, Mexico 1975, illo: D. Blair 2017My Sufism started slowly, also with world traveler mentions, but increased as I hitchhiked across India's Rajasthan State and saw its mosques, maharaja castles and Persian miniature paintings, and exploded when I returned to the States and finally cracked a book. Brilliant almost from page one, Sufism marries mysticism, poetry, music, dance, tolerance and romantic love with secular activities, like work, family life and even soldiering. Most importantly, it has some of the simplest but most sophisticated metaphysics in the history of religion.
On the road in Islam, I also learned to paint, including images of people. Arabic-like brush strokes appeared in my India sketches, expanded during my South America years, and matured into canvasses of monochrome figures, shaped like Arabic letters, or colorful nudes formed from Arabic-like puzzle pieces (see below), which could be considered my contribution to the Partisans of the Nude art movement.
For thirty years, I dipped and sometimes dove into Muslim, Arab, Turkish, Persian, Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Egyptian and Palestinian culture but especially Sufism, which often expressed the others' best. A decade before I began studying Judaism and my mother’s Holocaust experience, I adopted various aspects of Islamic ideas, dress and music. My father was a fan of Egypt’s ethereal grand diva, Umm Kulthum, whom he heard there as a soldier during World War Two, and I played related riffs on guitar. My Asian interests, which also included Japan, China and Tibet, harmonized easily with my liberal upbringing and the multiculturalism of Manhattan and California, where I settled, although the reading and deciphering did take years.
From my series of nudes using Arabic-like brushstrokes, which can be considered part of the Partisans of the Nude movement. illo: 'Ryoko in Repose', D. Blair, 2012 After a six-month read and three-week typing frenzy, I finished “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?”, a 6,000-word article based on the best evidence I had unearthed and the tragic realization that Sufi sheiks were laying low for fear of assassins. I gleaned a lot from “A History of Islamic Societies” (1988) by Ira Lapidus, a respected professor of Islam at the University of California, Berkeley, which has 26 index entrees each for “Sunni” or “Shi’a” but double that (53) for “Sufi.” Although I was just an amateur researcher, who had only visited Islam for seven months in the ‘70s (plus the West Bank for a week during the first Palestinian "intifada," or uprising, in 1988), and was not a Sufi, nor devotee of any religion, I felt duty bound to build on what Lapidus and other scholars had referred to or revealed, if only in a single sentence, to rise to the challenge not only of the much ballyhooed “clash of civilizations” but Sufi creativity and what I myself had witnessed.
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My 'Art Fatwa', which includes the lines: 'Islamic artists to rise up. For one thousand years, your mystical brothers have been slaughtering you. There is no war with the West, the crisis is between moderate and radical Islam.' illo: D. Blair, 2001 Regardless, the country was antique and world-class corrupt. On July 17, 1973, King Zahir Shah, a liberal who instituted some reforms, was overthrown and exiled by his cousin and competitor, Daoud Khan, a military man friendly with the Soviets who claimed he could accelerate progress. I didn’t hear about the coup, when I passed through Kabul a few days later on my way west, but I followed developments in the American press and through David, who returned to Kabul to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer. He was evacuated in March 1978, two months after the Islamist revolution in neighboring Iran and two months before Afghan socialists, led by the Marxist Khalq party, killed Khan and 2000 of his supporters, and shifted the government toward socialism and a brutal police state. (The day after David and I arrived in Herat, Afghanistan, in 1972, there was a large demonstration in front of our hotel involving members of Khalq and Parcham, a moderate socialist party which, unlike Khalq, accepted Islam. It concluded with knife killings, which David witnessed and I saw the blood from.) Within a year and a half of the so-called Saur Revolution, the American ambassador was kidnapped and killed, the Soviet Union had invaded (to stop the capitalist counterrevolution), and that noble, dun-brown land, dotted with green oases, had entered a hell cycle of invasions (the Soviets killed about one million, the Americans up to 200,000), civil wars and authoritarian governments, ongoing today.
My poster “East Actually Does Meet West” (Max Michel, left, Nicholas Soter). illo: D. Blair, 2002 So, what did I glean from Lapidus, the other scholars and my Arab and Muslim friends, not to mention the Sufi greats? And is it relevant to the modern Middle East? You be the judge, of course, but it’s inevitably controversial, especially as the region’s radicals push it toward broader war. One thing for sure, with the situation so ancient, intractable and dangerous, we are well advised to explore any promising perspective, which my four main findings appear to provide, take for example:
The cover of my book “What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?” illo: D. Blair, 2004 The Sufis were a significant spiritual force in Islam starting a generation after Muhammad. Often itinerant mystics, quietist contemplatives or local teachers, they emphasized esoteric knowledge, vision-inducing rituals and “futuwah,” their codes of self-denial, generosity and right action. Although the Persian poet Mansur al-Hallaj (858-922 CE), sometimes called the “Sufi Christ,” was martyred in Baghdad for defying the caliph of the Sunni Abbasids, Islam's second empire, which stretched from North Africa to Afghanistan, the Abbasids were fairly liberal. They supported the sciences and arts, including outspoken poets, some of whom were openly queer, alcoholic or both (notably the genius Abu Nuwas, boon friend of the 8th century Sultan Harun al-Rashid).
Gradually growing in stature, the Sufis attained leadership status around 1100 CE after a titan of Islamic scholarship, al-Ghazali, proved that “Sufism was the mystical heart of Sunnism.” Al-Ghazali’s theological leap revived both Sunnism, Islam’s majority sect (about 85% of Muslims), which had grown moribund over the half millennium since Muhammad, and the Abbasids themselves, who had long exhausted their golden age. A century earlier, their clerics "Closed the Gates of Ijtihad," meaning ended scriptural interpretation, never a good sign. Indeed, the new Sunni Sufism served as a rebuttal not only of the decadent Abbasids and their authoritarian caliphs but the nihilist Hashashin, who emerged at the same time and ran with the same mystical-wanderer crowd (Vizier al-Mulk's assassin infiltrated his travel party roleplaying a Sufi). Many Sufi greats started as Shi’a, Islam’s small, scholarly, hierarchical and artistic sect—Shi’a didn't prohibit human figuration and often adorned their mosques with massive portraits—but they switched to Sunnism for its egalitarianism, six times more Muslims and al-Ghazali’s shattering insight.
A few decades after al-Ghazali, also in Baghdad (the world’s largest city from 800 to 1258 CE with up to a million citizens), al-Qadiri solved another riddle of Islam: How does one unify religion and politics? He must have achieved this balance, I believe, because his disciples, the Qadiriyya, established the first stable Sufi “tariqa,” which translates as “path” but means “religious order” (since Sufis opposed sects and sectarianism). The Qadiriyya are still with us, in fact, as are many of the subsequent tariqas which integrated freedom, vision and responsibility. “Give your hands to work and your soul to God” was the one-sentence summary of Naqshband, a 14th century Persian sheikh, whose conservative tariqa, the Naqshbandi, continues to minister to about four-fifths of contemporary Sufis, mostly residents of central Asia.
Calling each other “friends,” the Sufis left their caves and meditation spots, took up professions and spouses, and formed tariqas and other fraternities, some of which provided community services, like hostels for travelers. This followed the lived example of Muhammad, who grew from camel train leader and family man to prophet and general, although most Sufis interpreted his mosque-state to mean ethical deeds enacted by individuals or grassroot organizations, and his conquests as spiritual endeavors. Sufis eschewed worldly affairs not because they considered it evil or themselves holier than thou, but because it distracted from their enjoyment of God, which they amplified to include nature, romance and art. In this manner, al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE), al-Qadiri (1077–1166), Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) and the myriad more Sufi greats—like ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), the prolific philosopher, poet and romantic, who hiked and sailed to the Middle East from Spain (where he studied with two Sufi master women)—inspired a spiritual and cultural shift which saved Islam. The Sufi Revolution was instrumental in rebuilding Islam from the Mongol Apocalypse, the invasions of the 13th and 14th century by Genghis Kahn and his minions, which probably killed over 20 million people in Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, traumatized millions more, and ended high culture for generations in some regions.
The Mongols were largely areligious, but a few of Genghis’s grandsons met traveling Sufi merchants and converted to Islam, which popularized the faith. Many Mongol chieftains came to enjoy Muslim civilization, especially its Sufism, including Tamerlane, another mass murdering conqueror, who invited the renown Persian Sufi poet Hafez (1325-‘90) to sit at his court. Alas, when Tamerlane took offense at an edgy metaphor, the poet prudently snuck out of the palace and fled. As it happened, Hafez exalted romantic mysticism (and vice-versa, mystical romanticism), claiming that “Wine-drunk, love-drunk, we inherit paradise,” and he utterly reviled fanaticism. “Lay not reproach at the drunkard’s door, Oh fanatic, thou that art pure of soul; not thine on the page of life to enroll the faults of others” (translated by Gertrude Bell, an English woman explorer, anthropologist and colonial administrator, in “The Hafez Poems of Gertrude Bell”, 1897).
The great scholar, mystic and poet Rumi. illo: unknown, 17th century, Turkey That brings Sufi saves to four: al-Ghazali, al-Qadiri, the post-Mongol resurrection and their golden age. Moreover, not only were there Sunni and Shi’a Sufis, which helped pacify the severe sectarian civil war plaguing Islam since the death of Muhammad, there were Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Taoist, Confucian and even Jewish Sufis.
Mediaeval Judaism’s greatest philosopher, Maimonides (1138-1204 CE), known for his masterpiece “Guide for the Perplexed”, was a rational deist who fled intolerant Spain for the Holy Land and became court doctor for Saladin (1137-1193), one of Egypt's most revered sultans as well as generals. His sons, however, became Sufis, again with no Islamic conversion. Enamored of the mysticism of their ancient prophets, they rebelled against Maimonidian logic, joined the burgeoning Sufi movement, and reinterpreted “The Bible” as a mystical treatise. Indeed, they helped pioneer the Jewish mystical reawakening exemplified by “The Kabbalah”, a purportedly ancient Hebrew text, which was actually being written contemporaneously in Spain and only arrived in Jerusalem a century or two later. Their interest in mystical monotheism explains the plethora of Jewish Sufis today.
Sufi poets and philosophers proceeded to entertain and enlighten entire towns, regions, even empires, even those ruled by tyrants persecuting them, using the trick of couching avant-garde ideas in devout Islam. They were inspired, assisted and periodically replaced by one of the many wandering Sufi sadhus, who were not unlike the activists and hippies of the 1960s. Poetry was their rock and roll, in terms of popularity and promoting change, but Sufis also excelled at music, dance and other arts, religion and mystical theory and practice, like chanting, “moving meditation” (circular walking or spin dancing) and other techniques for inducing visions or rapture. Last but not least was their special sauce: romance, humor (some became court jesters), ironic insinuation and moral suasion, if not so much the legal variant, although many Sufis were Islamic scholars and judges.
Muslim scientists hard at work, circa ninth century, Baghdad. photo: courtesy Tazkiyah Alas, science provided little mass benefit until the Industrial Revolution, and most Sufis followed al-Ghazali's preference for revelation over rationalism, although there were a few scientific Sufis, notably members of the Muʿtazile school or Omar Khayyam. A Persian mathematician and astronomer as well as poet, philosopher and possible friend of i-Sabbah (they were born two years but 500 miles apart), Khayyam investigated all sorts of things, including Sufism itself and its view of reality, as a series of overlaying symbol hierarchies, using a descriptive code based on alcohol (tavern as the teacher's house, wine as teachings, etc). Such iconography worked well in Islam where drinking was common, despite scriptural prohibition, Sufism was sometimes forbidden, and the two shared altered states of consciousness (as Hafez liked to emphasize). In addition to imbibing real or metaphorical spirits, Sufis used divination (through dreams or other means), supernatural healing and other esoteric practices, like smoking hash, Tantric sex, “malamati” (“taming the ego by blaming oneself”), or the fakirs' “torture meditation” like self-flagellation.
Long before al-Ghazali, Sufism was respected from Afghanistan to Spain, where troubadours exported it to Christian Europe and helped incite a romantic revolution among the Albigensians of southern France (also called Cathars). Devoted to their beloveds and arts as well as sheikhs and saints, Sufis fashioned a functional and pragmatic way to live a sacred and romantic life, which modeled and inspired right action, creativity and love. In fact, Sufis are said to have conquered more territory with the word than all of Islam's armies with the sword. After leading the recovery from the Mongols, the Sufi Renaissance flourished from Senegal and Timbuktu in West Africa to Balkh and Delhi in Central Asia, with outlying regions continuing to join the movement for centuries. Indeed, it served as the basis of Islam's second wave of golden ages, arguably greater than the 10th century Abbasids or Spanish Umayyads, especially in the Turkey-based Ottoman Empire, from 1299 to 1922, and India's Mughal Empire, founded in 1526 by a descendent of Tamerlane and lasting until 1858.
“In the 1600s a Sufi teacher from the west of the Pamirs [Tajikistan] crossed into southern Xinjiang and Gansu [western China], where he preached with great success,” notes Valerie Hansen in her fascinating “Silk Road” (2012). “In the 1700s his successors travelled to Yemen, where they studied with Naqshbandi [Sufi] teachers. On their return, they were unusually influential… In time, the descendants of these Sufis became the Khoja rulers of Khotan and Yarkand [in western Xinjiang]… Under their influence, Xinjiang became fully Islamicized.” Unfortunately, their descendants, the Uyghurs, have been harshly repressed by Chinese authorities, including having their culture decimated and almost two million people incarcerated in “re-education” camps since 2015.
An Indian sadhu on bed of nails, Benares, India, circa 1907. photo: unknown The Sufis were so innovative as well as functional and religious, they were often ushered into the inner sanctums of Islam’s ruling elites as poets, advisors or outright sovereigns, as in Xinjiang. Over the centuries, however, cultures lose their edge, especially when leadership is passed to the first born instead of the most talented, or the system is corrupted by religious charlatans or Machiavellian politicians. Moreover, some Sufis indulged in odd superstitions, excessive rituals or strange practices, including the fakirs' self-abuse (such as the cliche of sitting on a bed of nails, which was one practice), while others regressed to conservative Sunnism or acquiesced to tyranny. Most historians of Islam mention or acclaim the Sufi Renaissance, which flourished from about the 13th to the 17th century, and longer in lots of regions. The last Mughal emperor, Shah Zafar II, who ruled from 1837 to 1858, was originally a wandering Sufi poet, which helped him and his people find peace amid Britain's conquest and colonization. Alas, neither historians nor the Sufis themselves said much, or anything at all, about Sufism’s decline, decadence or contribution to the fundamentalist counterrevolution. This is due to embarrassment as well as respect, but also because there were still many brilliant Sufis hard at work, and they eventually wowed the West.
Translations of Rumi, Hafez and Khayyam began arriving in Europe at the end of 18th century, with talented teachers and artists, like Inayat Khan, coming a century or so later, although many didn't identify as Sufis, because persecution was already elevated in some regions. The Lebanese-American wunderkind Kahil Gibran wrote and illustrated “The Prophet” (1923), which doesn’t mention “Sufi” but obviously draws on its themes. “The Prophet” was very popular during the Eastern mysticism fad of the “Roaring '20s”, and remains a bestseller today, especially among born-again hippies (the Wallach's Partisan Show had two lovely Gibran drawings). Meher Baba, a Zoroastrian from Mumbai, studied with a female Sufi master from Afghanistan (who ran away to India on her wedding day), became known as a nonsectarian positivist for his mantra, “Don’t worry, be happy” (chalked on a board, because he took a vow of silence), and was chosen by Rabi’ah Martin to take over her and Khan's Sufi Order (which still has a spectacular, art-filled temple in Orinda, California). The Russian-born George Gurdjieff hiked much of central Asia in his youth, had many “Meetings with Remarkable Men” (as the title of his book, finally published in English in 1963, puts it), settled in Paris (where he weathered the Nazis), and taught Sufi practices without naming them. Known as a fabulist and trickster as well as disciplined mystic, insightful lay psychiatrist and repository of ancient wisdom, Gurdjieff still has many disciples and a few organizations worldwide.
Alas, this Sufi success, too, concealed a problem: the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism. As Sufis came to the West, enjoyed its religious freedoms, cultural and financial opportunities, and the esteem of its intellectuals and some celebrities (notably American actor Edward G. Robinson and English author Doris Lessing), they didn’t complain, let alone write exposes, about Sufism being under attack by Muslim “reformers,” first the religious then the political. Ancestral lands should be a place of knowledge and spirituality not tyranny and sectarian conflict, at least symbolically, they believed. The Ottomans had the most Sufi orders of any society, from Rumi’s Whirling Dervishes to the Janissaries, a widely respected, if sometimes brutal, military battalion, but Turkey’s founding father, Ataturk, outlawed them all in 1925. Sufis controlled the guilds and opposed Ataturk's innovative project to secularize society, abolish Ottoman identity hierarchies, and switch Turkish from writing in Arabic to Roman script.
Members of a Wahhabi militia, the Ikhwan, raiding Transjordan, the old name for Jordan, 1923. photo: unknownArticle continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 12:21 PM
