As militant Islam does its best to discredit the religion, it is important to remember that there are other voices within the faith. One such is the Sufis, a branch of Islamic mystics with roots in many religious traditions. The lessons of Sufism are often communicated through humorous stories and mystical or romantic poetry. As a part of Joe's Good News Saturdays, we spend some time each week with the Sufis and their "wisdom of idiots."
Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami (known popularly as Omar Khayyam) was a Sufi scholar who lived in the late Eleventh and early Twelfth Centuries in Khorasan, Persia. While today he is more famous as a poet, he was a man of many talents, having also been a mathematician who made significant contributions to the field of algebra and an astronomer who assisted in devising the highly-accurate Persian calendar.
XLIII. You know, my Friends, with what a brave CarouseThis excerpt, like that of Hafiz featured in last week's Sufi Wisdom, contains several examples of standard Sufic imagery, most significantly the theme of intoxication. Is Khayyam speaking here of a Bacchanalian lifestyle, as the first quatrain might imply, or...something else?
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.XLIV.
XLV.
And lately, by the Tavern Door agape,
Came stealing through the Dusk an Angel Shape
Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and
He bid me taste of it; and 'twas -- the Grape!
The Grape that can with Logic absolute
The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:
The subtle Alchemest that in a Trice
Life's leaden Metal into Gold transmute.
. . .The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it. . . ."
The most often quoted passage from the "Rubiyat" (from the linked Fitzgerald translation) is easily
"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"
which has a storied and popular meaning. It's found a happy home as the words of a lover, an invitation to engage in sexual pleasure (after a meal and a few drinks of course). "Paradise" is thereby achieved. There's no mention of the dull and tedious requirements of a life as suggested by Milton, Dante, some cautious Jewish scholar, etc. etc.
(But our translator was after all of the Romantic period in English Literature. So what exactly was his interest and were the "romantics" only interested in "romance?")
Modern psychology and popular religious belief does not permit poetry to readily contain metaphor, lest it take on the trappings of philosophy, an alien and definitely unscientific beast. (Psychology after all is taught as a social "science.") And the Bible, another example, has after all, clear and understandable words of wisdom all should follow. (And if we have difficulty understanding those words there invariably is a scholar available to enlighten us lest we attempt the task ourselves.)
What religion would have us drinking wine on the river banks and making love instead of the more traditional means of achieving Paradise through tithing, abstinence and prayer? Hmm..there seems to be drift towards a choice of one or the other. This of course would be denied by most modern theologians. "It's OK to have sex" (but only with certain conditions). Alcoholic drink is forbidden (but any conflict can be avoided by avertiing one's eyes). Et cetera.
So was this learned mathematician suggesting we spend our lives in drunken revelry (the quoted passages in the article) and having sex like a college undergraduate on spring break, (an almost idyllic setting for pursuit of two of the means to "Paradise")?
Or were such practices a part of a lifestyle that was neither puritan nor hedonist but something else?
(Note that I am limited by present terms such as "puritan" in a traditional world that seems polarized on most matters. "Something else" must invariably wind up being "in between" in this instance and I'm not certain that's it at all either.)
After all the linked biographer reminds us: ""Khayyam's fame as a poet has caused some to forget his scientific achievements which were much more substantial."
(Somehow I can't see my Calculas professor dispensing condoms and bottles of Vodka to students at the end of the last class before Spring break.)
It may be there's more than meets the eye to this Sufi poet.
"(Somehow I can't see my Calculas professor dispensing condoms and bottles of Vodka to students at the end of the last class before Spring break.)"
Oddly, I can see my (first) calc prof doing this...
Intoxication, as a Sufi theme, refers (if I understand it correctly) to the ecstasy of the mystical union with the divine. It is repeatedly stated that reason alone is not enough, indeed can be a hindrance on the path, and that understanding requires moving beyond the evidence of the physical senses and the structures of logic devised to make sense of it.
This is illustrated in the first quatrain quoted here. The poet claims to have divorced Reason to marry Wine (the "Daughter of the Grape") -- which is of course the instrument of intoxication. He has, in other words, given up his commitment to the material world in favor of the spiritual quest.
Omar Ali-Shah (? it's been 20+ years) has a book which cites several errors in translation made in the Edward Fitzgerald translation. I would recommend reading his book if truly interested in the Rubiyat.
The various sources are pretty well in agreement that Fitzgerald's translation was "creative". Only a small portion of his translation (120 of around 600 of the Fitzgerald quatrains) can be traced back to Persian originals.
I would have skipped the Fitzgerald translation altogether, aside from a footnote, had I been able to locate a more accurate translation online and had the excerpt I used not contained clearly Sufic themes.
Which raises an interesting issue: Shah wrote quite a bit about the importance of tailoring the form of the Sufi message and the excercises to be performed by seekers to the times and to the environment (cultural, social, linguistic, etc.) at hand -- note his frequent voicing of concern over the use of "whirling" and the like long past their shelf life, maintained more as a tradition as such than as a spiritual exercise. If Fitzgerald's "transmogrification" of Khayyam's Rubaiyat into English maintained the Sufic content and made this content more accessible to Westerners than a strictly accurate translation might have, perhaps it is the better version in terms of the original purpose of the poetry (versus the original's aesthetics or its status as a historical artifact worthy of preservation).
For Sufis, poetry isn't the sort of game it is in the post-modern West, whereby would-be sophisticates express their cleverness in indecipherable word salads which their wannabe-peers pretend to understand -- all as an end in itself. It's a tool, a means for conveying information and aiding the seeker's progress along the path...and the value of any tool is evaluated by how well it performs its intended function.
You know what I don't get? I don't get it when people split a thing like a religion in two lumping all the bad stuff into the "non" side of the religion and then over-idealizing what is left. This kind of over-idealizing the postive aspects of a religion seems intrinsic to this kind of thinking and it basically amounts to a willful blindness about reality.
That is what seems to happen a lot in the case of Islam and especially the Sufis. Well intentioned and tolerant people can be found bending over backwards to separate the good from the bad as in your treatment here of the Sufis as if they could be separated from the same source that gives rise to the Islamic crazies. But they are derived from the same source. They are not separate. One is the light end of the scale, the other the dark end. The same ideas that at the dark end of the scale produce fanaticism and the light end produce far less detructive yet related results.
And so my contention about the Sufis that they aren't all that particularly amazing or original or wise any more than the Islamic fanatics are. This should be clear to anyone who hasn't pre-committed themselves to cleanly separating and idelizing the Sufis in some vain attempt to salvage Islam the religion via the product of a culture which is not wholly Islamic and which has many ancient sources.
Has anyone here read the Song of Solomon? The Book of Psalms? There is more than enough evidence in just these two books that the so-called characteristics of Sufi poetry existed in the Middle East long before the advent of Islam.
Although, I do admire the individual Sufi poets for their facility with words and their imagery and I can admire the individual acheivements of many other Sufis, I can't find a thing about the Sufis as a group that can't be found in ample qauntities in older more original traditions.
To say otherwise and pretend that the Sufis are the real Islam while the fanatics aren't real Muslims only enables a vast majority of moderate Muslims who also split Islam in to real/positive and non/negative halves. This means most of the Islamic moderates remain paralyzed and unwilling to accept the idea that Islam is in need of a fundamental reformation and that the very religious ideas that produce what seems to be positives are the very same ideas that produce the stagnation and backwardness that now cripple the Islamic world. Frankly, it is counter-productive to continue to enable this practice. They must come to recognize that the source for both positive and negative is the same.
Christians have already faced this long ago when we had to admit that we had done wrong in the name of our religion because of aspects of our religion. We had to admit that our religion couldn't be exonerated through some real/false split and that we had to be wary from then on of its weaknesses. We should not be doing anything which encourages Muslims to do any less if we want to ever be able to live peacefully with them as equals.
As if you need me to annoy you further, I have some more thoughts about the Sufis.
The Sufis are the poster children for those with the real Islam vs false Islam mindset. These are the guys that are held up as proof that "real" Islam really does really exist and that Islam has nothing to do with whatever crimes Muslims do in the name of religion. I guess that is why it drives me a bit nuts when well-intentioned Westerners do much the same thing. The Sufis are the chief means by which Muslims, western converts and sympathizers alike get to pretend that Islam is blameless for its troubles.
I have no problem appreciating the Sufis on purely aesthetic and artistic grounds, but when the religious aspect of their work is idealized as a means to get Islam off the hook for the many things for which it is rightly criticized, then I have a problem with that.
They way people fawn over the Sufis enables Muslims to continue to believe that Sufi thought is original to Islam when it clearly isn't. Then westerners like you all here come along and encourage Muslims to think that the Sufis have amazing wisdom to teach the world which is an indirect argument for the originality of Islam. But this paints an entirely false picture of the the world and its wisdom. All of the older religions prior to Islam reached the same conclusions and wrote the same kind of sacred poems long before them.
Why this is a problem for Islam is because it is the only major religion which still can't admit how very derivative it is. All religions are derivative to some extent and the later they arrived in history the less original they can really be. If Islam is at all original it is in its systemization of every aspect of life not for its insights into spirituality. But as long as Muslims are convinced that Islam is a huge original advance in every possible category, they will continue to look to Islam as the sum of all wisdom and be blind to all else that the world has to offer. How can anyone reform a society or a religion with such a skewed perpective? Answer: it won't happen. They will continue to stagnate.
I think we should include in any study of the Sufis the study of the fatal flaws in their thought and how the some of differences in Islamic way of thinking and being has led directly to its current problems. We can then honestly analyze what they are saying to us instead of piously pretending that the Sufis are nothing but a positive for Islam. Once we do this, then we could talk all day long about what great poets and scholars and human beings some Sufis have been.
Now I am truly done. Thanks for putting up with me. I won't post anymore for a while to make up for all this. Thats a promise :)
Salam, I'm looking for writers as I'm doing an Islamic sufi magazine name "The Path". I find some interesting articles here so i hope either i could use it or perhaps there are writers in this blog would love to write for the magazine.
Peggy,
A thoughtful post. One wishes that more Muslims WOULD idealize the Sufis, instead of seeing them as kooks and/or heretics. If they did, they would be forced to grapple with the Sufi teachings concerning both the truth of other religions and the untruth of all religions. To say that this would be a bit of a mind flip for many Muslims is a vast understatement.
Were the Sufis' thoughts original? Based on your formulation, we're really in a debate re: are ANY thoughts are really original, given that others have usually said something like it before. Ethical monotheism as a doctrine originates in Judaism, many aspects of the experiential approach can be found in other Eastern religions (and may predate even them), storytelling as a way of teaching is as old as man.
But the fusion and realization of a combination of UNoriginal ideas can become very original. I would argue that the Sufis' formulation and packaging of some of these ideas IS original, and in some cases a significant advance. The ongoing popularity of Sufi stories and poems among populations ignorant of or even hostile to their doctrines is a pretty good argument for that, I think.
As for "letting Islam off the hook," a quick perusal of the Winds of Change.NET category archives (see esp. "CIVIS: HATRED RISING") ought to dispel that notion post-haste.
We have never hesitated to point out the serious problems in the Muslim Ummah here at Winds of Change.NET. The Sufis ARE Muslims, however, and that too is worth pointing out.
Like the Jewish Kaballah scholars (to whom their thinking appears to have contributed), the Sufis have had influence on their religion out of proportion to their numbers. That influence is currently badly on the wane thanks to Wahhabi money and the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire. Still, we can hope for some restoration of it as one step along the path to the reformation of Islam into a religion that can live peacefully in the modern world.
The Sufis are the poster children for those with the real Islam vs false Islam mindset. These are the guys that are held up as proof that "real" Islam really does really exist and that Islam has nothing to do with whatever crimes Muslims do in the name of religion. I guess that is why it drives me a bit nuts when well-intentioned Westerners do much the same thing. The Sufis are the chief means by which Muslims, western converts and sympathizers alike get to pretend that Islam is blameless for its troubles.