Sufism

The Essentials

Mark J. Sedgwick

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781617972652
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

For more than a millennium, Sufism has been the core of the spiritual experience of countless Muslims. As the chief mystical tradition of Islam, it has helped to shape the history of Islamic societies.Although it is the Sufi face of Islam that has often appealed to Westerners, Sufis and Sufism remain mysterious to many in the West, and are still widely misunderstood. In this new, redesigned paperback edition of this bestselling book, a scholar with long experience of Sufism in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Europe succinctly presents the essentials of Sufism and shows how Sufis live and worship, and why.As well as what Sufism is and where it comes from, the book discusses Sufi orders not only in the Islamic world but also in the West. The political, social, and economic significance of Sufism is outlined, and the question of how and why Sufism has become one of the more controversial aspects of contemporary Islamic religious life is addressed.This book assumes no prior knowledge of the subject. It is a penetrating and concise introduction for everyone interested in Islam and Islamic societies.

1	What is Sufism and where does it come from?

---

The origins of Sufism

Nobody is entirely sure why Sufis are called Sufis. The etymology of the Arabic word sûfî is unclear. It may come from sûf, wool; there is a theory that a group of especially devoted followers of the Prophet Muhammad wore woollen cloaks, which were in those days cheaper and less comfortable than those in general use. Alternatively, the word may come from suffa, a raised platform or step, and refer to a group of particularly devoted Muslims who used to assemble on a platform outside the house of the Prophet. There are several other theories, none of them much more convincing than these two, and none of them particularly helpful, either. What all these explanations have in common, though, is a reference to special devotion and to the Prophet.

Many Sufis themselves, when asked to define a Sufi, will use a phrase such as “a traveler on the path back to his Maker”—defining Sufism in terms of its objective. Such definitions may be inspirational, but are not very useful to the historian or the sociologist. To confuse matters further, there are today Sufis who do not even describe themselves as Sufis—they may describe themselves merely as pious or as followers of Shaykh So-and-So.

Certain non-Sufi Muslims are quite clear about what a Sufi is: a Sufi is a Muslim who has departed or been led astray from the path of Islam and is following practices borrowed from other religions. Views such as these, and the difficulties they have caused for Sufis, are discussed in Chapter Five, but are mentioned here because they have also been held by Western scholars, some of whom see Sufism as syncretism, an amalgam of elements of different religions. There are certainly syncretistic elements in the beliefs and practice of some Sufis, especially uneducated ones from poor and isolated communities, but then the religion of the poor and uneducated always differs from that of the educated and religious professionals, not only in Islam. A scholar in Damascus who has spent his life studying the central texts of Islam under a series of other scholars knows very well what is in them and what is not; a peasant farmer’s beliefs and practices are derived less directly, and misunderstandings may more easily occur. In countries such as India, where Muslims live side-by-side with non-Muslims, the potential for transfer from one culture to another is high; similar transfer can also be observed in the other direction, for example, from Muslims to Arab Christians. Instances of syncretic transfer into the Sufism of the uneducated are to be expected, then, but it is easy (and wrong) to exaggerate the number of these instances of extraneous elements. Western scholar—administrators in Malaya, for example, observed in the nineteenth century that Sufis often visited graves and concluded that they had inserted Hindu grave-worship into Islam; in fact, Muslims of all varieties visit tombs in all parts of the Islamic world, including places such as Morocco, where Hinduism is not known.

All in all, that some elements of some Sufis’ Sufism come from outside Islam does not tell us much about the origins of Sufism. The view of Sufism as the product of syncretism does, however, throw some interesting light on Western scholarship: it is clear that this view originally derived partly from nineteenth-century racial theories. A once popular view saw the Aryan races as being gifted with imagination and creativity, and the Semitic races—principally the Jews and Arabs—as doomed to sterile legalism. For followers of this theory, Islam, like Judaism, was the legalistic product of the inferior Semitic mind; Sufism, more spiritual, could only have come from somewhere else—from the Aryan minds of the Persians, from outside Islam. The contrast between Sufism and Islam was taken so far that when a character in Kipling’s Kim is described as a Sufi, this is glossed as ‘a free-thinker,’ which, as we will see, is not at all an accurate description.

As the view of Sufism as coming from outside Islam because Arabs could not possibly have invented it faded, the different preoccupations of a different century replaced it with another view. In the twentieth century a view of Sufism as the Islam of the people arose, of Sufism as vital and emotional and generally fun, as opposed to the dry Islam of the educated elites. Again, syncretism—but this time not from racially desirable Aryans, but rather from politically desirable oppressed classes. In fact, Sufis can come from any class, as is discussed in Chapter Two.

Sufism is sometimes wrongly seen as something akin to a philosophy and as rejecting the strict rules of Islam. Sufis are sometimes thought to be especially addicted to two forbidden fruits, wine and young boys—a view resulting largely from taking literally the images used in certain Sufi poetry, where intoxication and (male) lovers are often referred to. In these poems, intoxication in fact refers not to alcohol but to God, and the beloved represents the divine—the use of the male gender to refer to presumably female lovers is a long-established, if somewhat strange, tradition of Arabic poetry. If such misreading were not possible, the metaphors of the poetry in question would lose much of their force. There have been Sufi orders such as the Malamatiya, whose name derives from the Arabic word for ‘blame,’ whose followers deliberately broke Islamic law in order to attract blame and thus avoid the risk and difficulties of public adulation of their piety and sanctity. Such orders are, however, very unusual. The vast majority of Sufis follow the Shari‘a (the rules of Islam) scrupulously, perhaps more scrupulously than most non-Sufis.

The case for syncretism or philosophy as the origins of Sufism, then, is far from proven. The difficulty with establishing alternative origins is that there is no mention of Sufism in the earliest historical records of Islam. To some, the significance of this is clear: Sufism must be a later invention. Sufis themselves disagree. In a well-known phrase, many Sufis will tell you that at the beginning Sufism was a practice or reality without a name, and that now it is a name without a reality. The ‘now’ can be today or centuries ago. Muslims, like many others, see history as a decline from a golden age—the golden age being in this case not Greece or Rome, but the time of the Prophet. There are various recorded sayings of the Prophet (hadith) which endorse such a view, speaking of the inevitable decline of faith and standards over the centuries which were to come after him. The companions of the Prophet, according to some, were in fact all Sufis, and as a result there was no need for any special label to describe them. It was only as time passed and the Muslims fell away from their original perfection that the group of those who remained immersed in the depth and breadth of primeval Islam needed a label—Sufis—to distinguish them from the rest, who increasingly followed a more superficial religious practice. This is a standard Sufi explanation of the origins of Sufism, and while it is impossible to prove scientifically, neither can it be disproved.

Sufism as a practical program

A more fruitful approach than attempting to understand Sufism in terms of its origins is to examine its objectives. In the last resort, these do not differ significantly from the objectives of Islam as a whole; what is distinctively Sufi is different emphases and special techniques. Chief among the objectives of Islam are submission to the will of God and to God’s instructions, and preparation for the Final Day. This is a view with which no Muslim, Sufi or not, would disagree.

Submission is much stressed in Islam: indeed, the word islâm literally means ‘submission,’ and a muslim is one who has submitted. But while the emphasis in some religions is more on explanation than action—for instance, Protestant Christians tend to extract guidelines from general principles and apply them, as they wish, to their own actions—Islam generally emphasizes action far more than explanation. Rather than deriving action from principle, Muslims often deduce principles from instructions for action. In theory at least, a Muslim does something or refrains from doing it not because that seems sensible or right, but because that is what God has instructed. Although one may speculate about the hikma—the reason or wisdom behind an instruction—it is the instruction that counts, not the hikma. This does not mean that Islam looks only at actions, however. It is often said that we will be judged by our intentions—an interesting variation on the Christian proverb that the road to hell is paved with good intentions—and intentions are generally stressed throughout Islam: many ritual acts, for example, have no meaning or effect if performed without the requisite intention.

Sufism, then, aims at the submission of the Sufi to the will of God and at preparation for the expected meeting with Him, as does Islam as a whole. An essential element in this preparation is the control of the nafs or lower self. All Muslims agree on the need to subdue the nafs, but the emphasis given to the struggle with the nafs is distinctively Sufi. A hadith much beloved of Sufis talks of two types of struggle (jihad): the lesser jihad, against the enemies of Islam on the battlefield, and the greater jihad, against the nafs. This order is particularly significant when one remembers that the circumstances of the birth of Islam were such that the Prophet and his companions spent much time on the battlefield. This hadith is less frequently referred to in fundamentalist or political activist circles.

Nafs literally means ‘self and can also be translated as ‘ego’—in the sense of ‘egotistical,’ not in the Freudian sense. It is the animal nature in man, that which drives us to eat, reproduce, lose our tempers, and fight. The objective is to control it more than to eliminate it altogether. In the image of one Sufi shaykh, the nafs is a like a powerful horse: if you can control the horse you can go many places, but if the horse is in control, you can achieve little. Sufis regard the nafs as a cunning but simple enemy, ever in waiting and easily influenced by Satan, but it is also an enemy which may sometimes be deceived without too much difficulty. The interior dialogue we all know as a struggle with temptation is seen by Sufis as a dialogue with the nafs, sometimes portrayed as a dialogue with Satan himself. All the arguments one might think of to justify eating forbidden fruit are the arguments of the nafs and should be ignored.

Sufism is best understood as a practical program for learning to control the nafs. Once the nafs has been subdued and a space made for God in the heart, God may be expected to fill that place with Himself, and ultimately the Sufi may come to know God while still on earth. This is described as ‘irfan, which may be translated as knowledge or gnosis. The path to ‘irfan is a long one, of course, and most Sufis never reach its end. Any progress along that path, however, is worthwhile, and the ultimate goal may usefully inspire even those who will never actually reach it. The techniques used by Sufis to move along that path and to subdue the nafs are considered in Chapter Two.

Orthodoxy, exotericism, and esotericism

Sufis distinguish for many purposes between the external and the interior, the exoteric and the esoteric. A verse of the Quran, for example, may have an esoteric or symbolic significance in addition to its plain meaning, its exoteric significance. This distinction is also applied to the fiqh, which is the exoteric rule of Islam. Esoteric and exoteric must be in balance: the right ideas are irrelevant if not concretized in action, and actions on their own serve little purpose. There is thus a greater tendency among Sufis to take a somewhat pragmatic view of the Law (the fiqh), to take into account the implications of an action in the struggle against the nafs—to avoid making a false idol out of the Law, remembering what it is for. This tendency is, importantly, to be found mostly among the shaykhs who lead Sufis, rather than in the Sufis who follow shaykhs; given the known cunning of the nafs, it would be a most dangerous proceeding for an individual to decide on his own to take a relaxed view of a certain injunction or prohibition. If one’s shaykh tells one that in the modern globalized world economy there is little to be gained by worrying overmuch about paying interest on a house loan, that is another matter. From this greater-than-usual emphasis on the esoteric derives much of what is distinctive about the Sufi interpretation of Islam.

The existence of such an interpretation of Islam might imply the existence of an opposed non-Sufi or even ‘orthodox’ interpretation. In fact, however, the Sufi interpretation of Islam is one view among many, along with modernist, liberal, and fundamentalist views, to name but a few. None of these are more or less authoritative than any others, partly because in Sunni Islam there is no single source of authoritative interpretation.

Most Muslims are Sunni Muslims, and it is with them that this book is primarily concerned. The largest non-Sunni minority within Islam, the Shia (nowadays most frequently found in Iran and Iraq) have a somewhat more authoritarian structure than most others, and offshoots of Shia Islam, such as the Druze or the Ismailis, do indeed have sources of infallible interpretation. Sunni Muslims, however, at the very most consider certain people better qualified than others to interpret Islam, whether because of greater learning, sanctity, or whatever. No one, however, is so well qualified that their interpretation is binding.

This situation might be expected to result in anarchy, but has not. This is because there is general agreement on the legitimate sources of Islam: the word of God recorded in the Quran and the hadith, the divinely-inspired instructions and comments of His Prophet, recorded in voluminous collections and studied by scholars and the pious ever since. There is also a general respect for the past consensus of the community of Muslims, in practice usually the consensus of the scholars among it. The Quran, for example, forbids the drinking of wine. The consensus of the community has been that whisky is much the same thing as wine; no one, therefore, can honestly maintain that the drinking of whisky is permitted. There has, however, been disagreement about coffee, tobacco, and hashish. The final consensus was that coffee was allowed. There has be...