Seeker After Truth

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May 01

What is Sufism?

with Neil Douglas-Klotz

ACCORDING TO A NUMBER of news sources, the bestselling poet in the English language today is Jelaluddin Rumi, a thirteenth-century Persian Sufi. Is this good news for Sufism, or bad news for the state of English poetry?

Both Rumi and Hafiz (who lived a generation later) have entranced readers because they emphasize passionate love. We are all looking for love, and while we may not know what the word means, we know love when we feel it. Sufi poetry speaks eloquently and passionately about the Beloved, and about intoxication, longing, lust, misunderstanding, and mistaken identity (of both lover and beloved). That is, all the stuff of life and soap opera. What makes Sufi poetry and story different from soap opera, however, is that they take place in a kind of magical universe of long ago and far away, a universe in which some greater, benign Reality encloses everything.

Most contemporary English poets would reject the whole context of Sufi poetry as romantic and idealistic. What matters today is today’s world, one in which we construct our own meaning. We can’t be anywhere but here, slogging along in the bleak reality of postmodern life.

Try telling that to the millions of people who are reading Sufi poetry. Their response is the good news for Sufism.

The bad news is that most people reading Rumi and Hafiz would like to bridge the gap between reading about divine love and actually experiencing it, but don’t know how. They have been led to believe (often by some academic or scholarly source) that Sufis only lived long ago and far away, where they wore robes and turbans and spoke with foreign accents. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Sufism is a living twenty-first-century tradition, with many different approaches and practices. Authentic Sufis speak in all languages, and may wear completely ordinary clothing. The word dervish means one who sits in the doorway, or on the threshold of something, ready to move on and transform him- or herself. This book is for modern dervishes, people who want to start living the Sufi poetry of love. It is based on this writer’s experience following the Sufi path for the past thirty years and applying it to everyday life.
If Sufism is a living spiritual path today, why isn’t it better known?

The twelfth-century Sufi Saadi once said, “You can get ten dervishes under a blanket, but you can’t get two kings to share the same continent.” However, in the modern era it has seemed more like wherever you have two Sufis together, you have three opinions. Since the Indian Sufi Inayat Khan brought a form of Sufism to the West in 1910, many different groups and teachers have arrived.

Most Sufi books have presented academic, historical, or philosophical information on the tradition, designed to appeal to the intellect. Some contemporary teachers have presented their own work and approaches, which often seem contradictory to the work of others. This has actually been a blessing, since unlike some other traditions, Sufism has not been organized to the extent that its wild character has been tamed.

Historically, diversity has been Sufism’s strength. It is ultimately a nomadic tradition, one that has constantly deconstructed and transplanted itself rather than settle and build gigantic shrines, institutions, monolithic rituals, or organizations. There is no Sufi Vatican or Potala. Rumi, for instance, was well positioned to take over his father’s business, being the main Sufi preacher of Konya, but along came his spiritual soulmate Shams-i-Tabriz. Rumi gave up his ordered way of life, spent all his time with Shams, and ultimately became a brokenhearted dervish who created the greatest oriental poetry in history. Ibn Arabi could have remained in Spain and built up a large following, but instead he chose to spend most of his life moving from place to place. On the other hand, when the Sufis have been co-opted by the establishment (as in the late Ottoman Empire), they have usually experienced serious problems. We Sufis are itinerant and like our freedom, which is probably also why we usually agree to disagree.

Who or What is a Sufi?
Sufism is, first of all, a series of “not’s”—not a religion, not a philosophy, not even a mysticism, as that word is usually conceived. It’s best to call Sufism a way of experiencing reality as love itself. The modern Sufi writer Massud Farzan said it well and succinctly:

Sufism is a unique phenomenology of Reality. The psychology of Sufism is Sufism itself; the art and science of Sufism is the very practice of Sufism.

Given such a slippery definition, is it possible to talk about any kind of “pure Sufism” today? A person with common sense would say no, but this has not stopped scholars and Sufis themselves from attempting to answer this question. Even the relationship of Sufism to Islam is fraught and may be another reason why Sufism as a path is not more popular today in the West. Is Sufism, as the more simplistic dictionary definitions maintain, the “mystical side of Islam”? Does Sufism (or its philosophy or practices) predate Islam? Is Sufism “the real Islam” ( just as some people would maintain that such Christian mystics as Meister Eckhart or St. Francis of Assisi represent the real teachings of Jesus, more than any form of the institu¬tional church)? Here is a typically Sufi answer, again given by Massud Farzan:

Does Sufism, derived from Koran and Mohammedan tradition, go against the sayings of the Book and the Prophet? The answer is yes and no. Insofar as Sufism strips the dogma from the religion and goes to its heart, insofar as it insists on the reality beyond the ritual, the thing behind the symbol, Sufism is at once Islam par excellence and distinctly apart from it.

Inayat Khan had this to say:
According to the sacred history which the Sufis have inherited from one another, it is clear that Sufism has never been owned by any race or religion, for differences and distinctions are the very delusions from which Sufis purify themselves. It might appear that Sufism must have been formed of the different elements of various religions which are prominent today, but it is not so, for Sufism itself is the essence of all the religions as well as the spirit of Islam.

There is no doubt that Sufism and Islam have an intimate relationship. What people disagree about is how one defines the words sufism and islam. Literally, the word islam means “surrender” to the one Ground of Reality, not to some thought-form or dogma. The word sufism derives from a word that simply means “wisdom,” and the Qur’an itself advocates “seeking wisdom, even as far as China.” Historically, Sufis have not adhered to any one school of Quranic interpretation or jurisprudence, and this has made the fundamen¬talists of all ages very nervous, even up to the present day, when some Islamic countries outlaw the practice of Sufism.

Whether this is reassuring or disturbing will depend upon your point of view. Does the history matter? To some it will, and to some it will not. It depends upon, in the words of the modern American Sufi Samuel Lewis, whether you want to allow your concepts to get in the way of the solution to your problems. And the main “problem” for most of us is the purpose of life itself.