Sufi wake-up calls

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Famously spiritual, Hindu India also has a long history of Muslim mystics. Most came originally from Central Asia, many from Afghanistan. Here in Delhi their tombs now hide among slums and skyscrapers, but their tradition of Sufism (see “Another Islam,” BDN, Feb. 6, 2002) lives on. Its basic message: Wake up.

Sufis maintain that most humans are “asleep” in what amounts to collective delusion. We’re “forgotten” why we’re here on earth and Who sent us. Worse, we’ve stopped trying to remember. Common perceptions become habitual, then taken for absolute truth.

The wake up process makes use of sohbat or spiritual conversation. Get two Muslims together, especially two Persian-speakers, and some degree of sohbat is almost inevitable, like talk of sex or sports or shopping in the West. This soul chat is full of maxims, poems, and stories. Old narratives are told back and forth. Old truths are shared. But once this base is established, the energy changes from confirmation to mild challenge. A kind of spiritual shock therapy begins. It’s wake up time.

Before going further, these questions: Has 9-11 really served as “a wake-up call for America”? Or has manipulation of 9-11 – by the president and his politically fundamentalist appointees – driven us into a dark corner of our national dreamscape?

Back to Sufism and its non-fundamentalist dictums. One of these is that the human mind has a stake in maintaining its own delusions. It doesn’t want to wake up. Shake it too hard, confront it too abruptly, and it hunkers down even further. (Some readers may have found themselves hunkering down in the last paragraph.) So Sufis work in the gentler forms of parable or aphorism. Enter the Persian sage/buffoon named Mullah Nasruddin.

Mullahs are ambiguous figures in Central Asia. Most villages have one of these religious specialists – to lead prayers, write charms, and perhaps teach a semblance of Qur’anic literacy – but their characters vary. Some mullahs are wise, learned, and deeply pious men. Others prey on villager superstitions. Still others, like Taliban leader Mullah Omar, are charismatic, hard-core fanatics around whom militant movements evolve.

The vast corpus of Mullah Nasruddin stories – certainly hundreds, probably thousands of them – reflect this ambiguity. They’re meant to be “funny” in two ways: amusing and unnerving. Farce is mixed with mind games. Sometimes Mullah’s the clever joker, sometimes the joke’s on him. Often he seems to play it both ways, and we’re not quite sure what’s what. Expectations are reversed in truly wacky ways.

Listeners have a choice. They can guffaw and go on. Or they can pause and let the narrative sink in. It’s then that symbolism comes into play. Some story items – like a lost key (see below) – are simultaneously themselves and much more than themselves. Simple folktales expand figuratively into metaphysical puzzles. Whole structures of reality are thrown up for grabs. Sufis believe that the resulting confusion is good for spiritual development, that it works on an unconscious level to open our souls. And, thanks to humor, the conscious mind – so defensively set in its ways – barely notices these playful wake-up calls.

Let’s try one.

One mid-day Mullah Nasruddin was on hands and knees in his garden. It was high noon and the sun burned hot overhead. Mullah was sweating. His clothes were getting dirty. A neighbor looked over the compound wall and said, “Mullah Sahib, what are you doing there in the heat and the dirt?”

Mullah said, “I’m looking for my key.”

The neighbor said, “Think a moment. Where and when did you last have it?”

“Oh,” Mullah said, “That’s easy. I last had it inside the house yesterday evening. I lost it there.”

The neighbor was familiar with such nonsense. It was nothing new from Mullah Nasruddin. But neighbors must maintain good relations, so he phrased his question politely: “Oh, Mullah Sahib,” he said, “If you lost your key inside last night, why look for it out here in the bright sun?”

“Because,” Mullah replied, “the light’s so much better outside.”

Any effect? Any sense of being unnerved as well as amused? Any momentary shake-up, barely perceptible, in your existential structure – as Sufis would say, “in your chest”? If not, don’t worry. (Sufis, despite clicking what we call “worry beads,” consider anxiety a form of unhelpful egotism.) Just take it as a joke.

But what if there is a sudden hitch in your mental machinery, a faint jab to the jaw of routine comprehension? Then, Sufis say, the story wants you to learn it by heart. Learn it so you can tell it aloud, of course with your own intonations. Don’t concern yourself with what it means. Just learn it by heart. Then let it sit there. Any effect?

Here’s another:

Mullah Nasruddin became an international businessman. Every day he’d load panniers of flour on a donkey and take it for sale to a market across the border one mile away. He’d sell the flour, buy the same amount with his proceeds, and then take it back home to sell at the same price.

People scratched their heads. Even by Mullah’s zany standards, this commerce seemed bizarre. But then gradually people noticed that Mullah was getting rich. He endowed a mosque, planted an orchard, and built a new house for himself.

Bewilderment turned to envy in Mullah’s village. The customs officials were notified. They began stopping his daily donkey and checking its baggage for contraband. They took the saddlebags apart and looked under the saddle. All they ever found was flour.

Years later Mullah was asked about this enterprise. By that time he’d lost interest in profit and loss. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I remember now. Back then I made good money smuggling donkeys.”

These mild wake-up calls touch mind and, ultimately, soul. They make us question our mental marching orders, throw us constructively off-stride, ask us to reconsider where we’re going.

At the moment, for instance, we’re being marched toward an unnecessary war with disguised goals, severe human casualties, and no credible plan for the aftermath. Most of us, polls report, are willing to be marched. 9-11, which could have been a wake-up call, has in fact turned us into sleep-walkers. Maybe our national soul could use some Mullah Nasruddin.

Consider current news: Stock markets fall. Civil liberties founder. Afghanistan, our proud post-9-11 boast, is much less stable than a year ago … and getting worse. Our hypocrisy regarding U.N. Security Council resolutions – rabid pursuit of attack on Iraq, supportive indifference towards Israeli violations – is ever more apparent. Never has the United States been so feared and hated around the world. Never have anti-American terrorists had such an easy task of recruitment. And still many of us share the collective delusion that all root causes lie somewhere else, that our own policies are in no way to blame.

Want to wake up? Go back to the first story, the one in which Mullah Nasruddin is cast as a fool. What could be meant, figuratively, by “key”? Where does the fool try to find it? Where was the key really lost?

In what dark recess of our national psyche could the key really be found? What kind of bravery – real patriotism – would that search require?

Another time we’ll get to smuggling donkeys.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.