Another Islam

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Second-biggest and fastest-growing of world religions, Islam in the post-Sept. 11 world attracts more attention than ever. Its external observers tend to be either lumpers or splitters. Many lumpers regard the Muslim experience monolithically – often in negative, talk-radio style as the single-minded source of virulent terrorism. This column is not in praise of lumpers.

Most splitters differentiate along two axes. A first distinction deals with the place of Islam in human affairs. On one extreme is Islamism (such as practiced by the Afghan Taliban and their Wahhabi and Deobandi mentors) which makes Islam the obligatory basis of all activity and recognizes no separation between mosque and state – indeed, condemns as sacrilegious the Western concept of nation-state. At the other pole is Muslim secularism which relegates Islam to private belief and, as in modern Turkey, guards against any expansion of religious role. Along the spectrum lie infinite gradations, such as the “traditional” Islam of pre-Taliban and pre-communist Afghanistan: present but not determinate in politics, culturally pervasive but in a manner more pious than zealous.

A second split derives from vicious politics of succession more than 1,400 years ago. The issues: Who should lead Islam worldwide and how should he be selected? Sunnis (85 percent of Muslims) believe that leadership depends on consensus. Shi’as (15 percent, concentrated in Iran with pockets elsewhere including central Afghanistan) say that ultimate authority must always be vested in descendants of the Prophet Mohammed. The fact that no such central control has truly existed for centuries does little to reconcile these two camps which, frequently, have hurled curses and armies at each other.

Ominously, however, the current Islamist movement has moved toward transcending this ancient Sunni-Shi’a split. Contemporary Islamist theoreticians point to the Khomeni’s Iranian Revolution (Shi’a) and Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet Holy War (mostly Sunni) as their two greatest accomplishments – and as proof that common purpose can run deeper than doctrinal schism. While (Sunni) Osama bin Laden lived in Sudan, for instance, he and his Islamist hosts in Khartoum were advised and supplied by (Shi’a) Iran. Lesson for those who lament the world’s sectarian strife: Ecumenical getting together is not always for the good.

But take heart. There is yet another Islam that turns on another axis. Sufism – a.k.a. Islamic mysticism – thrives among both Sunnis and Shi’as. And its central concern is not war but love.

Networks of Muslim mysticism stretch from Mauritania to Bangladesh. Sometimes these groups are politically active and – as in the current kidnapping of American reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi – not always for the good. Far more often they concentrate on what sufis call the “real work” of internal, spiritual development. This effort recalls what Mohammed himself said about the two dimensions of Holy War (jihad): 1) an external jihad against the forces of ungodliness outside one’s self (for 1980s Afghans, the atheist USSR; for 1990s Islamists based in Afghanistan, the materialist USA); and 2) a more difficult internal struggle – the “greater jihad” – against forces of evil within one’s own being.

Sufis claim that the Prophet (like other Islam-revered prophets such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus) was himself a sufi whose years of spiritual practice – plus the imponderable of God’s grace – prepared and purified his heart to receive the Holy Qoran. The initial revelation came, without warning, in 610 CE. Despite his years of solitary prayer in a mountain cave, Mohammed was amazed and terrified. We catch that suddenness in the sufi poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, born in or near Afghanistan in 1207:

God’s love moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,

From cell to cell.

Like rainwater falling into the ground,

Like groundwater up into flowers.

Now it looks like a bowl of rice and fish,

And now like a horse being

saddled,

And now like that vine trailing along the wall.

God’s love lives in all of these until

One day

It breaks them open.

Note that things are broken open by love and from the inside. Such emphasis on interior dynamics is condemned by most current Islamism which, as with the Taliban, insists on the external letter of the Sharia (Muslim Law). Sufis also observe the Law, but in less strident tones and as more a means than an end. Its deeper purpose: to serve as a “lamp” on each sect’s mystical tariqa or Path of Love. Law is necessary, but Love is Truth. Rumi again:

Out beyond all ideas of wrong doing and right doing

Is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the Soul lies down in that field, the world

Becomes too big to talk about.

Ponder that one: a Soul field “beyond … wrong doing and right doing.” No wonder the Taliban, who based power on fearfully legalistic enforcement of ultra-puritanical ethics, denounced and proscribed sufism in Afghanistan.

Next on the Taliban “To Destroy” list – after the Bamiyan Buddhas – were colorful, venerable sufi shrines dedicated to the memory of spiritual masters. Such pirs or saints preach that God’s Love is greater even than His Law and remind would-be mujahedin (holy warriors) that the last jihad enemy is within one’s self. Such determined non-projection is wonderfully subversive of aggressive impulses, whether in Mullah Omar’s Kandahar or closer to home. (Allow me a cryptic, pop-psych aside. American poet and sufi admirer Robert Bly proposes this projection-avoidance device: Next time you feel a visceral dislike for someone newly met, look immediately to the shadow cast by your own right leg.)

There are various sufi brotherhoods (likewise called tariqas), each of which dates back to a founding master. These can be mobilized politically, and some Muslim monarchies (16th to 18th century Safavid Iran; 20th century Sanussi Libya, overthrown by Qaddafi in 1969) have had a sufi base. French scholar Olivier Roy argues that much early anti-Soviet resistance in northern Afghanistan was based on sufi associations.

Two of the seven “official” Afghan Resistance party leaders – created by Pakistan’s ISI, celebrated by America’s CIA, and dubbed “the seven dwarfs” by some independent observers – had sufi pedigrees. One of these is descended from the 11th century Baghdad founder of Qadiriyya sufism. This inherited sanctity did not preclude his managing the pre-war Peugeot dealership in Kabul. Now he seems more at home in London and Saville Row suits. An elaborate Western wardrobe, ultimately made

possible by the generosity of impoverished followers, has led to his nickname “Gucci Pir.”

Sufism deserves better. Islam deserves better. Afghanistan deserves better. Even the memory of Jalaludin Rumi, now very much the New Age rage, deserves a more dignified treatment than it’s getting in America. Read “Rumi Madness” (Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2001) by my former student and close Afghan friend Masood Farivar. We learn, with no great cultural satisfaction, that “Rumi Tarot Cards” are now available for purchase. And that someone named Donna Karan “launched her spring [fashion] line a few years ago to the sound of Rumi’s poetry being read by Madonna and Goldie Hawn.”

In Afghanistan, Rumi’s memory is less marketable but also – like much of life – less trivial. Afghans routinely know his poetry … just as we ourselves absorb advertising jingles. And, after years of Taliban suppression, sufis are freely practicing once again. They meet in small gatherings, often on Thursday evenings, for sessions of zikr whereby God is “remembered” in rhythmic chants synched to breath and movement. Practice without expectation, it’s said, and perhaps your self will dissolve into God’s Universal Self. Then, it’s said, you’re free … like the brand of sufis called malangs who wander the byways of Afghanistan without plans or provisions, letting God call the shots.

Even malangs, however, have one fixed date: Now Roz or New Year’s Day on March 21 when Muslim mystics of every stripe congregate in the northern shrine city of Mazar-e-Sharif. With the Taliban gone, this sacred fair (and secular buzkashi tournament) will now take place for the first time in six years. There’s nothing to match it in all of Central Asia. I haven’t been since 1977. Following a quarter century of chaos and suffering, the 2002 version of Now Roz should be spectacular. Stay tuned in the Bangor Daily News.

Meanwhile Jalaludin Rumi has this advice for us all, novice journalists included: “Work like

a small creek.”

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.