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What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East? by Doniphan Blair
ISLAM, WHILE MONOTHEIST, IS NOT MONOLITHIC.
Islam divides, sometimes severely, between majoritarian Sunnis (about 85% of Muslims) and minority Shi’a, or innumerable and very varying subsects. The Shi’a Druze, for example, live peacefully in Israel, while the Sunni Wahhabis reject Jews utterly as infidels. What’s missing from this equation—in the Middle East or discussions about Islam or current affairs, in general—is Sufism, one of the faith's most acclaimed denominations.
Not only did Sufis dominate much of Islam's high culture and mysticism, they appear to have saved the civilization on three occasions, largely by being one of the most tolerant, artistic and hard-working religious groups in history. Although Lapidus doesn't state that unequivocably in his respected “History of Islamic Societies” (1988), he allocates Sufis some seventy index entries to only half that for Sunni or Shi’a,
The Sufis are still here, fortunately. Numbers are low in the Middle East but they’re doing well from Morocco to Malaysia with notably prominent communities on the "Sufi Arch" between Turkey and India. The Naqshbandi, considered the “mother” sect, has some 40 million peace-professing adherents around Kazakhstan and Central Asia. There are dozens of smaller but still well-known Sufi groups: the musically-oriented Chistis of India, the Turkish Bektashi, notable for their humor and high regard for Jesus (not incompatible, apparently), and the Mevlevi, founded by sons of the 13 C. superstar poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.
Advocates of active meditation, the Mevlevi profess through dance (the Whirling Dervishes, still practicing in Rumi’s home town of Konya, Turkey, and elsewhere in the Middle East), poetry and the “Religion of Love,” for which Rumi is rightfully considered a saint.
“Love alone cuts arguments short, for it alone comes to the rescue,” Rumi tells us.
Sufism is also well known in the United States, so much so most Americans are unaware that most—though not all—Sufis are Muslim. Sufism arrived in 1908, early for America’s eastern religion explosion, when Hazrat Khan, an oud player and Chisti from India, was approached by a mystically-minded Jewish woman, Ada Martin, after his concert in San Francisco (not surprisingly).
"His spiritual power was all summed up in the principle of love," she later wrote. Instructed by his teacher to spread Sufism in the West if he encountered receptive souls, Kahn renamed her Rabi'ah, after the 9th C. Baghdadi Sufi saint and pioneer of the Religion of Love, and he administered a crash course in philosophy and blessing, with no Islamic conversion, notably. Rabi'ah Martin went on to head the Sufi Order, the first of many American Sufi fraternities, for thirty years.
With its mystical interests and religious freedoms, America provided a fertile ground for Sufism. Today there are dozens of groups, representing almost all the classical schools, and some new age ones, involving as many as 100,000 adherents. (Estimates vary and are limited by the absence of a central organization, according to Michael Newman, president of the International Association of Sufism, which is based in a Novato, California, industrial park.) Although just a fraction of America’s approximately six million Muslims, Sufis enjoy a prominent reputation due to their prodigious cultural work (of 271 New York Times mentions, from 1996 to 2004, some 80% concern poetry, music or dance).
Sufis remain central to America’s mystical renaissance. They sponsor and routinely fill classes and conferences; they sell enormous quantities of books—Rumi is one of America’s best selling poets; and they reside across America, individually or in groups. Dayemi Tariqat, a community in Carbondale, Illinois, has a couple hundred members and is administered by Sheikh Din Muhammad al-Dayemi, also of Jewish extraction—not a coincidence, considering the Sufi tradition of tolerance. As is often the case with American Sufi guides, Dayemi draws on Jewish, Christian and Hindu as well as Islamic thought.
Today and historically, not only are there Shi’a and Sunni Sufis (a notable achievement) but Hindu Sufis (Kashmir has both Muslim and Hindu Sufis AND male and female Sufi saints), Jewish Sufis (N.W. Egypt features the tomb of a venerated Jewish saint) and Christian Sufis.
St. Francis of Assissi and the first Freemasons may have been actual Sufis or influenced by them but better documented is Spain’s Golden Age, which had a large number of Sufis, including women teachers and the world renown philosopher al-Arabi (14th C.). Indeed, Spanish Sufism was instrumental in fostering in southern France of troubadour culture (from the Arabic root "TRB," meaning "lute player," according to poet Robert Graves). After the depredations of the Albigensian Crusade (13th C.), the troubadours fled across Europe, singing of love and god intoxication, themes which took root and eventually blossomed into the romantic revolutions of Shakespeare, Blake and The Beatles.
Love is an intrinsically Islamic concept, in point of fact of either Islamic extremists or disparagers.
Muhammad was loving, tolerant and considerate, according to ample evidence, notably his relationship with his first wife, Khadijah, which was quite romantic.
Alas, Muhammad was a politician and military general beset by war as well as a religious leader struggling for reform and forced to defend his own revolution. While his Koran mentions "jihad" (struggle) and punitive prohibitions, it only does so on the rare occasion. It often recommends tolerance and forgiveness (“Requit evil with good, and he who is your enemy will become your dearest friend,” Sura 41:34), and describes god as loving, starting with its opening sentence (“In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful”). A robust monotheism, Islam is universalist, anti-tribal and pro-justice, ideas which empower romantic love.
For this reason, in teahouses and mosques across Islam, Sufis could defend their ethical inheritance from Muhammad with more logic than Sunni or Shi’a fundamentalists with their tortured ideological derivations or contrived genetic connections.
By the same token, Sufis were often persecuted. As Arab tribesmen and generals accrued empire, they became a powerful warrior clans and then classes, against whom pacifist romantics often lose, at least at first.
The first Sufis were evidently poor, mendicant and highly devoted. They could have been converts from earlier esoteric sects, students of Pharonic magic or ancient Gnosticism, fakirs who pierced their flesh or fasted every other day, ascetics who wore the rough "sufe" cloth (which may have given them their name). Or they could have been the poorer, more mystical Muslims, camped out on the veranda of Muhammad's house in Medina (eventually the Great Mosque), so-called "Dwellers of the Suffah" (which also might have inspired the name).
Although contemporary chroniclers noted their emergence, it took some three centuries for Sufi thinkers to adapt their ideas to central Muslim issues and for high Islamic civilization, due to having to surmount a few basic problems. The eastern mystic is traditionally on a quest to experience god directly, usually with the help of a teacher, a “sheikh” in Arabic or “pir” in Persian. This religious release and transcendence smacked of polytheism to fundamentalist Muslims, both in its union with god and its enshrinement of the teacher.
Moreover, Sufi devotion to “futuwah,” their codes of generosity, self-denial, brotherhood and right action, would occasionally generate both highly enlightened individuals and highly empowered followers, who naturally threaten clerical or military power. Mystical warriors figure in all three monotheisms, but the cohort is amplified in Islam by the exemplar of Muhammad as a mystic and general and his political theory of a unified mosque-state, which fostered Islam's long line of charismatic visionaries, reform movements and outright uprisings.
Mansur al-Hallaj (10th C.) was a devoted and disciplined Sufi but when he developed a reputation for miracle making and elevated claims, like “I am The Truth,” he irritated the ruling Abbasids, who were the architects of Islam’s first Golden Age (8-11th C.) The Abbasds had an empire to run and, if they couldn’t co-opt a movement, they repressed it. After tolerating al-Hallaj for a while, they arrested him, brought him to Baghdad, tried him for heresy and tortured him grotesquely. Forgiving his persecuters from the chopping block, al-Hallaj was martyred in full spiritual glory and came to be considered the founder of Sufism's “ecstatic” or “intoxicated” school.
Around the same time, however, a “sober” school was emerging. Even as they lamented the passing of early mystical titans, Sufis wanted to experience the divine in the flesh, rather than through ritual or texts. This drove them to study reality and develop active, participatory even public meditations, which made an important distinction from more ethereal Asian mystical practices. While the Intoxicated Sufis informed Rumi and other poets and artists, the Sobers were notably successful in integrating with Islamic civilized life. They did so by basing their teachings strictly on Shari’a law, by adopting social norms and by working publicly as artists, musicians or craftspeople.
“The perfect mystic is not an ecstatic devotee lost in the contemplation of the Oneness,” insisted Abu Sa’id, as early as the 8th C. “The true saint goes in and out amongst the people…and never forgets God for a single moment.”
"Sufis do not abandon this world, nor do they hold that human appetites must be done away with," concluded al-Ghazali, the 11 th C. titan of Islamic scholarship. "They only discipline those desires that are in discordance with the religious life and the dictates of sound reason." Meanwhile, Naqshband, the 14 th C. innovator who founded the largest Sufi sect, the Naqshbandi, summarized the teachings as, “Give your hands to work and your soul to God.”
So attractive was the Sufi interpretation of Islam that, even as authorities persecuted them at home, wandering Sufis, wielding the word not the sword, conquered almost as much territory as all Islamic armies combined. For this reason, there are so many strong Sufi lineages today along the edges of the Muslim, 57-nation landmass, from West Africa and Morocco to Bangladesh and Indonesia. The Sufis also persevered and prospered for a period in the Arab heartland, using creative theology, liaisons with other sects, community organizing, artistry and hard work.
Sufis came to dominate Middle Eastern Islam intellectually and spiritually around the 1100s.
As it happened, Islamic scholars divided themselves into four distinct schools and even announced, "The closing of the Gates of Ijtihad," the end of religious investigation, in the 10th C. When al-Ghazali proved Sufism was the “mystical heart of Sunnism,” first in his extensive writings and lectures and then by example, retiring from high office in Baghdad for ten years study and practice in Damascus, it revived enthusiasm for and devotion to Islam.
Around this time, the Qadiri, the first still-extant Sufi brotherhood, was founded in Baghdad, in keeping with the teachings of Qadir. Sufi centers were soon established in Granada, Marrakesh, Fez, Tunis, Cairo, Jerusalem and Mecca; within a century or two in Timbuktu, Samarkand, Herat and Balkh; and eventually in Delhi, the Balkans, West Africa and Bangladesh.
Another secret to Sufi success was their parsing of consciousness: how the mind works through metaphors, how metaphors are grouped in symbol systems, and how these mental language systems can be overlayed, in increasing levels of complexity, to produce human consciousness and culture, from names and numbers to math and poetry or magic spells and theology. The word “wine,” for example, is four characters symbolizing sounds, an English indicator for inebriating beverage and a traditional metaphor for romantic or spiritual rapture.
Once this operating system was identified, Sufism could support not only all religions but Muslim primitivists, who worshipped saints’ relics and fate, average folks, who could advance effectively through personal relationships with teachers, a complex hierarchy of masters and saints, and scientists and artists, who operated in the abstract via free will. Sufis were quite modern, especially when compared with contemporary medieval Christians or fundamentalist Muslims, literalists who denied advanced metaphorical systems even though the Koran itself notes, “God speaks in parables to mankind,” Sura 24:37.
Sufis tolerated differences, especially amongst themselves. Some remained fakirs or sworn-to-poverty mendicants while others enjoyed wine, romantic poetry and passion, accepted women as disciples, teachers and lovers (some were also gay), experimented with hypnosis and drugs, and invented or refined styles of music, dance, literature, architecture and assorted crafts—so much so it seems that most of Islam's greatest artists were Sufis. The artisans and masons who constructed Jerusalem’s gorgeous, gold-domed al-Aqsa Mosque (684 AD) were supposedly Sufi.
Re alcohol: Muhammad did not always condemn it, as in “There is great harm in both [drinking and gambling], although they have some benefit for men,” Sura 2:21 (my parentheticals and italics). Of course, when Koranic verses conflict, as they occasionally do, fundamentalists ignore the moderate citing and liberals, the reverse.
Drinking was widespread in early Islam, so much so Sufis both used “wine” and “tavern” as code words for secret teachings and master’s house, as well as downshifted metaphorical gears to rhapsodize extensively about actual drinking, as in Omar Khayyam’s famous definition of happiness: “A book, a bottle of wine and thou.” Though some are loathe to admit, alcohol remains privately popular among many Muslims today.
The Sufis’ most important achievement was their liberal balance between private and public. Although they enjoyed romance, hidden practices and esoteric teachings, they got into public art, activism and civic duty, like being comedic performers or building workshops, schools, communities, guilds and, ultimately, nations. After the Mongolian holocaust of the 13th C., which depopulated Baghdad and Persia, eliminating fine pottery for a century, it was largely activist Sufis who resurrected the region and its high culture. This can be considered their second save of Islamic Civilization.
The notorious Mongols were viciously anti-Muslim, until, that is, a remarkable pacifist turnaround. The chance conversion of Genghis’s grandson Baraka (of Golden Horde fame) by devout merchants (often Sufis) was followed by most of his cousins, again probably Sufi-assisted (since they were the experts on crosscultural outreach). A Mongolian renaissance soon followed. Better documented was Afghan Sufis and the conqueror Tamerlain (14th C.): they advised him, made his son’s courts cultural centers and eventually installed one of their own as khan.
Meanwhile in Persia, a lineage of Sunni Sufis became involved with the khans and allied with local Shi’a to form the Safavid dynasty, the foundation of modern Iran. Although their shift to politics and soldiering diminished their ethical ascendency, they exchanged for broad beneficial influence, as Lapidus details (p. 214):
“After the twelfth century, Sufism played a particularly important role in tribal unification. Rural populations throughout North Africa came to be organized in Sufi-led communities. In Morocco, the Sa’dian and the ‘Alawi dynasties were based on Sufi-led coalitions of pastoral and mountain people. The Safavids united individuals, clienteles, and clans to conquer and govern Iran. The conquerors of Anatolia and the Balkans, while under overall dynastic direction, were at the local level led by Sufis. In Inner Asia, the khwajas created coalitions of pastoral people. The tribes that occupied Somalia were united by allegiance to Sufis.”
And on and on: Sufis were second only in north India to the Moghul Sultans, active in Malaysia and Indonesia, prominent in West and East Africa, and influential in all those locations in healing, education and business as well as mysticism and art.
But after 500 years, worldviews atrophy. The Sufi focus on mystical growth and master-student relationships and Islam’s prophecy-based law and absence of political science did not produce mechanisms for evolving civic society and what love and tolerance need to function: rule of law and representative government.
Although the Sufi Era (12-15th C.), typified by al-Ghazali, Rumi and the Mongolian conversions, continued in many places, from advanced Ottoman cities to Moghul India and elsewhere, spiritual life was ground down by xenophobic tribalism, stagnant bureaucracies and punishing feudalism.
Advanced Sufis emigrated or went underground. Others became introverted, focused on fakir tricks or otherwise decadent. Others altered their behavior until it was indistinguishable from their neighbors’, although some secret teachings and talented adepts did persist. Indeed, the elevated Sufis kept coming: in the 19th C., the ascetic Algerian, al-Qadir, fought and negotiated with the French, the Indonesian brotherhoods organized against Dutch colonizers and the Sufi-like Baha’is, advocating universal religion and female emancipation, emerged in Iran.
Generally speaking, however, they were part of antique Islam, which was losing ground to assimilationists, on one hand, and radical “reformers,” on the other. Many orders faded away and, in the 20th C., Ataturk legislated Turkey’s ancient Sufi guilds out of existence. The more visionary among them saw modernism coming and shifted their skills to secular and commercial transactions, while a handful took their teachings directly to the West.
Today Sufis are rebounding and as diverse as ever, from fully modern and artistic to traditional and primitive, from Shi’a and Sunni to Christian and Jew, from Middle Eastern to Middle American. Estimated at about 3% of Muslims worldwide, by Cairo-based scholars, they are active in America, Europe and Australia, where there may be a couple hundred thousand, and then Malaysia, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, West Africa and elsewhere, with a total population of about 50 million.
Which begs the questions: What happened to the Sufis of the Middle East?
In Baghdad, a Sufi mosque is open and operating after twenty years persecution under the Baathist regime. A friend of this author, who lived and studied in the Middle East, reports Sufi circles in Damascus and Cairo, with students numbering from a few to a few hundred. Filmmaker Mohamed Diab, also of Ciaro, told me that, “Among my friends, one of every five is an atheist and two are Sufis.” Newman, of the International Association, noted meeting Middle Eastern Sufis frequently from Syria at conferences. But the numbers are minuscule compared to days of yore, especially in the Gulf states, and Mecca, the spiritual center of Islam, which has no known Sufis (there may be clandestine groups).
In addition, post-September 11, 2001, why so little said of Sufism or by leading Sufis (although many condemned it privately)? Doesn’t Sufism refute accusations that Islam is inherently violent? Doesn’t its Religion of Love, cultural mixing and creativity offer critical solutions to Islam as well as the West? Doesn’t it provide a historical precedent on which to erect an updated Sunnism?
One explanation is: Sufis have come full circle, returning to the quietism of their founders, the mystics’ de facto separation of church and state, spirit and body. Hundreds of years ago, in fact, the word “sufi” began to disappear in the Middle East, as practitioners called themselves “friends,” “travellers on the path” or “followers of the Tradition" (suggesting to some the word was an Occidental bowdlerization).
The reason may be simpler: survival. Sufis have long had run-ins with conservative sultans and mullahs but a war of annihilation began around 1750, with the arrival of the extremist Wahhabis. With their Saudi oil wealth one side and shock troops like al-Qaeda on the other, Wahhabism has come to dominate the discourse of 21rst C. Islam.
Islam always had an austere side—indeed, many Sufis were ascetics—but a more aggressive abstemiousness arrived with the 7th C. Kharijites, who wanted to make jihad Islam’s “Sixth Pillar” (after profession of faith, making the hajj, etc.) and use it against “deviant” Muslims as well as infidels (they failed and were hung by their own petard). Five centuries later, during the Mongolian holocaust, totalitarian tendencies peaked in the scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, from Southern Turkey, as he deconstructed and found fault in each enlightened Islamic school. Of course, an overwrought simplicity is quite common in Christianity, with its celibate priesthood and Puritans, but it is prone to exaggeration in Islam, due to a combination of Muhammad’s modesty, the extremes of the desert and Islam’s advanced monotheism.
Another factor, often overlooked in comparative religion surveys, was the trauma inflicted by Islam’s rapid revolution. Arabia was in need reform and Muhammad was as true reformer, one who could invent, synthesize and sensitively translate new ideas to his neighbors, but his success could not help but injure the romantic, sensual and somewhat matriarchal Arab worldview. Men mostly ruled the Arab tribes, except in Yemen, by the 7th C., but polytheism is inherently female. Mecca’s Ka’aba Temple had priestesses practicing sacred sex up to the arrival of Muhammad, very late for the Middle East. Coming long after literacy (hence fully documented), this religious activity left vestigial practices, colorful memories and male shame well into the Islamic Era.
To be sure, matriarchal promiscuity must end simply for patriarchy to function—for men to love and invest in their children, they must know who they are—but Islam attempted an enlightened balance and began surprisingly female friendly. Muhammad had three loves, prayer, perfume and women, according to hadith but born out by history.
First off, Muhammad married a matriarch, his much beloved, older and wealthy first wife, Khadija (also his boss); she counseled him to accept his first visions and she became the first Muslim; his immediate family, with whom he often consulted, were all female (he was an orphan with no surviving sons); he attempted to emancipate impoverished and enslaved women to full Muslim status (albeit legally calibrated as a half-male) until backsliding to retain the men needed to defend his nascent state; many of his first followers and later adherents, like the Sufis, were feminists (for their day); and, there was a number of powerful women, from generals and scholars, like Muhammad’s wife Aisha and daughter Fatima, to mystics and queens, like Rabi’a of Baghdad (9th C.) and Queen Arwa of Yemen (11th C.).
But as patriarchal monotheism gathered steam, frustrated adherents, particularly men, began seeing everything, especially their defeats, in its totalizing terms. “Violence against women was common during economic crisis,” according to a modern titan of Islamic scholarship, Fatema Mernissi (1940 -2015, Moroccan), “Al-Hakim (11th C.) forced women to veil and forbade mixing when irregularities in the Nile flow brought about inflation and social unrest.”
The Koran mandates women to cover their breasts, a logical non-abusive policy for patriarchs trying to reform matriarchies, but not a word about face veiling, which was contrived centuries later from a hadith about Muhammad curtaining off his wife’s quarters from guests overstaying their visit. But face covering was already a tradition among some elites and obligatory working class protection against the desert environment. It became general urban fashion in the Middle East around the 10th and 11th C., but only reached rural women and distant lands as late as the 19th or 20th C., as the fading of Islam and humiliation of colonization inflicted a sense of loss, leadership failure and need to blame.
Addressing these feelings head-on was Muhammad Wahhab, a poor 18th C. cleric and student of Ibn Taymiyyah who emerged from the Arabian desert to become a great “reformer,” as Muslims sometimes call those seeking to “purify” the faith. Likening himself to Muhammad, who cleansed the Ka’aba of idols (and Martin Luther, who simplified and translated the Catholic liturgy), he sought to defend Islam from “shirk,” the “worship of that which is not god.” To this end, he recommended austerity, jihad and literalism (although how he interpreted the Sura 24:37, “God speaks in parables,” is not known). Wahhab came to oppose all but the most well-established hadiths about Muhammad (as noted in his modest writings), all sanctification outside the mosque, Sufi practice (like worshipping at tombs), Shi’ism in its entirety, all entertainment (literally, from gambling, drinking and smoking to painting, dance and music, except liturgical) and, last but not least, all public female culture.
Such was “reform” in late medieval Islam.
Wahhab had it hard, at first. Many Bedouin men (and some women) evidently prefererd song, smoke (tobacco or hashish imported from Afghanistan) or a glass of date wine to fire and brimstone after a long day. His own father and brother, also clerics, denounced him. When he attempted to make the hajj, with a small band, the Meccans challenged him to a theological debate and “the qadi of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on hadith, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, from his “Wahhabism”). A century later, a general dislike of Wahhabis was noted by explorer/translator Richard Burton during his hajj (with both his Sufi and English identity under wraps).
But Wahhab stuck by his simple theme, winning a few adherents. After landing a parish in his native province, he proceeded to eliminate its tombs, including one belonging a Companion of the Prophet. He didn’t become famous for “the enjoining of virtue and the prohibition of vice,” however, until a woman came to him to confess to adultery and he killed her on the spot. This brought him to the attention of Abdullah bin Saud, Saudi Arabia’s founding father (literally, he supposedly sired some 100 children and it is the only nation named for family not a tribe). Like politicians worldwide until today, bin Saud needed a religious angle. The two became allies in 1746 and the clan/sect declared jihad against all comers, all infidel and Muslim “unbelievers.”
Desert dwellers are often experts raiders and fighters but they flocked to Wahhabis’ call not so much for its extreme austerity, which Saud himself was known to ignore (calling for song when there were no clerics about), but its promise of fantastic wealth, property and women, which god had now sanctified them to seize. By the end of the 18th C, this prophetic/”profitic” enterprise had taken most of the peninsula and parts of Iraq, where they killed thousands of Shi’a and desecrated the shrine of Husayn, a grandson of Muhammed, and the Shi’a’s holiest of holies. Finally occupying Mecca, 1803-13, they instituted their “signature activity of dome demolition” (Algar’s phrase) destroying the historic cemetery, Muhammad’s birthplace and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, although the latter survived.
They also expelled and murdered Mecca’s long established Sufi population.
Coincidentally, the chore of ousting the Wahhabis fell to Muhammad Ali, the progressive Egyptian Pasha, who rebuilt Alexandria, opened Egypt to Europe and condemned obscurantist Islam.
But a century later, the Wahhabis were back, helmed by Saud’s great-grandson, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Saud, a military, political and theological genius. Using traditional tribal intrigue to defeat the Ottomans, he allied with the French, then the British, who discovered his petroleum bonanza, and finally the United States (who ignored his slaving, misogyny and theology during a vicious world war and the esperate race for oil), catapulting his clan into the world’s wealthiest family and corporation in a mere 20 years.
By extrapolating from related issues in the Koran, Saud convinced his clerics to accept not just bicycles but oil drilling equipment and entire cities of infidels (whom he preferred to non-Wahhab Muslims). Indeed, his faith’s strong monotheism provided a superstition-free worldview from which one could leap to rationalism—if one ignored Wahhabism’s medieval dimension—hence, the rapid modernization of the Saudi elite, now replete with Oxford PhDs, Russian prostitutes, Johnny Walker and every conceivable appliance.
But the clerics had long studied their parishioners tendency to depravity, hence for each step towards the West and wealth, they contrived a countervailing restriction, striving to recreate a fantasy Islam. Called Salafism and modeled on life at the time of Muhammad, it was, in fact, infinitely more austere. Men were precluded from ever setting eyes on unrelated women (a practice previously allowed at weddings), women were prohibited all public activity (including display of face and voice or public appearance without a chaperone), public secular culture was outlawed and all non-Wahhabi religion forbidden, meaning the few remaining Shi’a were barely tolerated and the Sufis did not exist.
Except for the Meccan killings in 1803, neither Sufi nor secular historians appear to document pogroms of Sufis in the Middle East. Sufis were accustomed to clandestine operation within Sunnism and the Shi’a, who practice their distinctly different rituals publically and bore the brunt of Wahhabi brutality. It is estimated Shi’a were slaughtered by the hundred thousands during the Saud/Wahhabis 20th C. campaign. To be sure, they responded in kind, from the Shi’a-Sufi dervish who snuck into the Wahhab camp and assassinated his son in 1813 to the 1978 seizure of the Ka’aba and taking of hostages in Mecca, terminated only by the Saudi importation of French paratroopers.
Alas, Sufis are poets, musicians and mystics not historians and lawyers, and they are more interested in beauty and enlightenment then old wounds and revenge. Still, their slaughter and expulsion from the heart of Islam, after an era of abuses, must have symbolized rather obviously that their epoch was over and they left the Middle East, although some continued, clandestinely or in more hospitable cities like Cairo and Damascus.
By the 19th C., innovative reform was being led by modernizing Shi’a, like Al-Afghani, and Sunni, like Abduh in Egypt, or secularists, like Ataturk in Turkey, the Baathists and Nasser. Egypt, the Middle East’s most populated and cultural nation, famous for bellydancing, novelists and film, attempted to modernize through socialism, reviving the ancient caliphate super-state through pan-Arabism, and opposing the new colonizers in their midst. But these policies bankrupted Egypt, culturally as well as financially and militarily, convincing Sadat to make peace with Israel. Ironically, however, after Sadat’s 1973 Yom Kippur war to regain Egyptian honor from the ignominious defeat of the Six Day War (1967), it was the Saudis who profited astronomically from the oil crisis they enacted in solidarity and usurped Islam, while the fundamentalists murdered him in 1980, shortly after he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
But Saudi Arabia was a bizarre oligarchic and feudal religious capitalist state and with the Shi’a revolution in Iran, Baathist pressure from Iraq, capped by the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and fundamentalists under attack by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they felt compelled to aggressively defend their ground in the only manner they knew: reform, i.e. extreme conservatism. They amplified their American liaisons by bringing an entire army to defend against Saddam Hussein and began investing in extremism, from massive Wahhib public works—schools, mosques and charities across Islam and the West—and sending cash and jihadis to defend Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda formed. Wahhabi ascendance has had a chilling effect across Islam.
''The Saudis have used the prestige attendant on the fact that they are the guardians of the two holy centers, Mecca and Medina, and their enormous wealth, to propagate their own interpretation of the Koran,'' said Karim Raslan, a Malaysian lawyer and writer. ''An underlying tenet of the Wahhabi approach is this pan-Islamic sense that demands that converted people should be leached of their culture.'' In Pakistan, where even hamlets boast new Saudi-built mosques, the once multicultural society has returned to medieval war with Shi’ites, defacing of Sufi shrines and murder of Sufis, the sexual abuse and slaughter of women and the outlawing of traditional dance.
As the post-September 11th events unfolded there came to be more mention of Sufis. On July 2, 2003, an Iraqi mayor, who was also a Sunni Sufi, was arrested for embezzling and on Oct. 24 a post-Taliban gathering of 700 tribal elders, scholars and politicians hosted by Pir Syed Ahmad Gailani, 67, head of a Sufi religious sect and resurrected political movement as well as friend of Mohammad Zahir Shah, the former king of Afghanistan, a resident of Rome, whose family was known to be Sufi or Sufi-sympathetic. But there is no advertising of these facts since A) good works are even better when done anonymously B) and the above mentioned tradition of laying low. There is no doubt Sufis oppose war in general and colonial invasion in particular. In Afghanistan the question is which invasion: by austere Wahhabi clerics and guerillas or by the Americans. Considering the martial strategy of using one enemy to defeat another, the desperate Sufi need for liberal civic society to function, and the virtually insane Wahhabi shock troops—from the most culturally and gender repressive society yet documented on the face of the planet, it easy to see where Sufi sympathies might lay.
The undernourished Arab and Middle Asian culture is in desperate need of movies, poems, books to address the transition they are enduring, and radical countrymen can never provide the future where artists, authors and Sufis might fully speak their mind, engage society and make well warranted leaps of invention.
It is pretty much obvious to everyone from Shi’a to Sufi, equal righters and artists, musicians and lovers, all except the fanatics themselves, of course, that the Wahhab system can not stand, will not lead Islam into the future, is a dead end. The time has come for Sufis to step out. They saved Islam three times—with al-Ghazali in the 12th C., rebuilding from the Mongolian holocaust in the 13th C., and the Second Islamic Golden Age of Rumi and Hafez et.al. in the 14th—and can do it a fourth. It may, however, take centuries.Posted on Nov 10, 2017 - 12:57 AM