Contemporary Sufism

Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture

Meena Sharify-Funk, William Rory Dickson, Merin Shobhana Xavier, William Dickson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134879991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is Sufism? Contemporary views vary tremendously, even among Sufis themselves. Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture brings to light the religious frameworks that shape the views of Sufism's friends, adversaries, admirers, and detractors and, in the process, helps readers better understand the diversity of contemporary Sufism, the pressures and cultural openings to which it responds, and the many divergent opinions about contemporary Sufism's relationship to Islam. The three main themes: piety, politics, and popular culture are explored in relation to the Islamic and Western contexts that shape them, as well as to the historical conditions that frame contemporary debates. This book is split into three parts:

• Sufism and anti-Sufism in contemporary contexts;

• Contemporary Sufism in the West: Poetic influences and popular manifestations;

• Gendering Sufism: Tradition and transformation.

This book will fascinate anyone interested in the challenges of contemporary Sufism as well as its relationship to Islam, gender, and the West. It offers an ideal starting point from which undergraduate and postgraduate students, teachers and lecturers can explore Sufism today.

1

CONTEXTUALIZING THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE ON CONTEMPORARY SUFISM IN THE WEST

In most major North American bookstores, physical or online, one can usually find several books on Islam, often alongside a somewhat larger number on “Eastern Religions.” In either case, there are normally a few books on Sufism. Sufism is situated either as an aspect of Islamic spirituality or as one of the many mystical traditions of the East, alongside Hindu Vedanta or Kundalini Yoga, and Zen or Tibetan Buddhist meditation-based paths. English-language books on Sufism in particular range from academic, historical overviews of Sufism, such as Carl W. Ernst’s Sufism,¹ to books written by Western Sufi teachers, including Hazrat Inayat Khan’s (d. 1927) The Heart of Sufism or Kabir Helminski’s The Knowing Heart.² Outside of religious categorizations altogether, there are usually various translations of the poetry of the famous Persian Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi, including Deepak Chopra’s The Love Poems of Rumi, Maryam Mafi’s Rumi’s Little Book of Life, and Coleman Barks’s The Essential Rumi.³ In particular, Barks’s artful and contemporary renditions of Rumi’s poetry have helped make it a bestseller in the West. Regardless of whether we consider books from academic, religious, or literary genres, a map of the contemporary literature on Sufism that is available in the West leads us back to an older tradition of Western interpretation (largely grounded in Orientalism) and the intersection of imperialism, romanticism, and perennialism that it represents.

Literature on Sufism has been available in the West at least since the 15th century. However, Sufism would not gain widespread public recognition in Europe and North America until the mid-20th century. It is only since the 1970s that scholars of Sufism began to contend with Sufism as a lived tradition, as opposed to a textual artifact or an ossified carryover of classical Islamic civilization. These later studies have tended to capture the localized manifestation of Sufism in regional contexts, such as Sufism in Pakistan, Egypt, the United Kingdom, or America. More recently, scholars have begun to chart the increasingly transnational and politicized nature of Sufism.⁴ Twenty-first-century studies of Sufism not only highlight local Sufi communities, movements, and brotherhoods (tariqas) but further explore how these movements form networks of affiliation across borders, nationalities, and cultures, transforming Sufi rituals, theologies, and philosophies in the process. To help contextualize this trajectory taken by the field of Sufism, this chapter provides an historical outline of European and North American encounters with Sufism, Sufi texts, and traditions.

This outline also further contextualizes our own work on contemporary Sufism by offering an overview of the development of Western understandings of Sufism in general and the field of contemporary Sufism in particular. Neither meant to be exhaustive nor a literature review, we consider the varied forms of knowledge produced on Sufism in the West (academic and popular works about Sufism, and works of Sufism by Western Sufi teachers) to paint a picture of how Sufism has been written about and constructed in the Western imagination. In doing so, we capture a diverse set of authors who together represent the range of approaches to, and genres of literature about, Sufism. These authors include not only academic scholars but also practitioners, poets, and Sufi teachers whose works have added to and shaped the idea of Sufism in the Western milieu, which has influenced the broader global perception and practice of Sufism. Our choice to include “non-academic” productions of knowledge in this overview of Western writings on Sufism is a deliberate one. A more expansive approach to a survey of this literature conveys to readers the different modes that have influenced the varying approaches to Sufism that are discussed in the subsequent chapters. Some threads of this narrative are picked up and elaborated upon in this book’s later chapters (particularly Chapters 4 and 5). We will see that a persistent aspect of Sufism’s appeal in the West results from its reframing as a universal, perennial tradition of transformative wisdom that transcends dogma and religion. Although conceptions of the universal and formless nature of wisdom have been important constitutive elements of Sufism throughout its history, these conceptions have traditionally been framed in Islamic ways, using the vocabulary of the Qur’an, Hadith, and the conceptual framework offered by the medieval Islamic intellectual traditions. In contrast, Western interpreters of Sufism have in many ways reframed its universalism in Western terms, largely situating it in terms of the spiritual perennialism and universalism that came to the fore during the Renaissance, and was later taken up by Romantic and Orientalist interpreters.

Orientalism and the study of Sufism

Sufism did not emerge as a broadly acknowledged category of religion in the West until the late 18th century, largely as a result of the access to Eastern or “Oriental” traditions that colonial rule afforded. Although now an anachronism, “the Orient” was a term that Europeans and North Americans used in previous centuries to evoke “the East”: the regions of the world we now refer to as North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.⁵ First used in France in the 1830s, the term Orientalism came to refer primarily to the academic discipline that crystalized in the 18th and 19th centuries and was concerned with the study of the languages, cultures, religions, and peoples of the Orient. Since Edward W. Said’s (d. 2003) watershed study Orientalism, the term is used now as a critical label for this academic discipline, and for the broader cultural phenomenon of European fascination with the Orient.⁶

Using Michel Foucault’s (d. 1984) work on the production of knowledge (and its inevitable relationship to power) Said suggested that Orientalism was not just an academic discipline or cultural imaginary but a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”⁷ Although Orientalism has roots in ancient Greco-Roman and medieval Christian engagements with the cultures of the Middle East, it emerged as a paramount element of the (primarily) British and French project of controlling the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. For Said, Orientalism was a network of notions about the Orient that formed a coherent “body of theory and practice” with considerable material support. This system of knowledge acted as a lens that refracted an accepted, homogenizing vision of the Orient at all levels of European society, a vision that justified and hence perpetuated Western dominance of the region.

Said’s Orientalism is a rich, subtle, and critical overview of European literature on the Orient: whether engaging the philological works of Sir William Jones (d. 1794), Napoleon’s (d. 1821) employment of Orientalist scholars to assist in his invasion of Egypt and make it more palatable to Egyptians, or depictions of the Orient in Gustave Flaubert’s (d. 1880) novels, Said draws out the ways in which Europeans constructed the Orient as a place to control, categorize, romanticize, or racialize. His work is particularly à propos when dealing with Orientalists like Ernest Renan (d. 1892), who married a sense of scientific mission in the study of the Orient with an incorrigible racism and anti-Semitism:

Read almost any page by Renan on Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or proto-Semitic and you read a fact of power, by which the Orientalist philologist’s authority summons out of the library at will examples of man’s speech, and ranges them there surrounded by a suave European prose that points out defects, virtues, barbarisms, and shortcomings in the language, the people, and the civilization.⁸

Said’s work has been recognized as one of the more significant and influential cultural studies of the 20th century, and his insights remain essential to making sense of contemporary Western understandings of the East and Islam. Said’s analysis brought to the fore ways in which Western discourses on the Orient functioned to justify and perpetuate Western superiority and dominance. He ingeniously foregrounded how scholarship on Islam has historically intersected with the needs of empire, and the ways in which this pattern can persist within contemporary discourses on Islam in the West, such as is found in his criticism of Bernard Lewis’s writings on Arabs.⁹ In the 1970s, Said observed that in the United States, “the Middle East experts who advise policy makers are imbued with Orientalism almost to a person.”¹⁰

Alongside recognizing these insights, Said’s thesis has since been criticized for, in a sense, doing to Orientalism the very thing that he suggests Orientalist discourse did to the Orient: offering a homogenizing and reductive vision of the phenomenon. In making his case for Orientalism as a Western tradition that caricatures the Orient while highlighting Western rightness and superiority, Said tends to overlook some of the sympathetic, positive Western scholarly engagements with the Orient. Where he does address such positive Western interventions, Said can at times reduce them to relations of power, or situate them as mere products of the Orientalist interpretive framework, as one might suggest he does to a degree in his otherwise rich, sympathetic analysis of the French scholar of Islam and Sufism, Louis Massignon (d. 1962).¹¹ As a result, a somewhat homogenized and monolithic picture of European Orientalism emerges, one that fails to fully account for the more varied, dialogical encounters between Westerners and Easterners that make up the totality of the historical picture (though it should be said these are not entirely neglected by Said).¹² Although the modern period began as one characterized by Western dominance, influence was not a one-way street, and just as the West would transform the lifeways of the East, so too would the East transform the culture of the West, despite an uneven playing field.

Precolonial European encounters with Sufism

First, it is useful to recall those European experiences of Sufism and the Orient that took place outside the context of European dominance, especially as these experiences would shape the contours of later Orientalism. In Chapter 4, for example, we consider the life and work of Ramon Llull (d. 1315), a Spanish Christian philosopher and mystic. Born in Mallorca just years after its return to Christian hands following three centuries of Muslim rule, Llull’s environment remained shaped by Muslim culture and thought. A devout Christian committed to proselytizing Muslims, Llull studied Arabic and read Muslim religious and philosophical texts. He even wrote works in Arabic, some of which show clear signs of Sufi influences. The extent of this influence is such that Ernst refers to Llull’s understanding as a “Christian Sufism.”¹³ Integrating Christian theology with Neoplatonism and Sufism, Llull’s thought would prove instrumental in the esoteric revival during the Renaissance in 15th-century Florence.

While subtle Sufi influences were at play in Florence, an anonymous Latin work entitled Treatise on the Customs, Conditions, and Wickedness of the Turks (1480) played a major role in informing European perceptions of the Orient in general and of Sufism in particular, even earning Martin Luther’s praise.¹⁴ As we will see in Chapter 4, the work was actually written by George of Hungary, a Dominican who was captured by the Ottomans during their conquest of Transylvania. He was subsequently sold into slavery in Turkey, where he would become a Sufi practitioner for over a decade before returning to Europe and repenting of his Islamic practice. Mark Sedgwick suggests that George is “the first Western Sufi who is known by name,” and that his Treatise on the Turks contains “the earliest known discussion in a Western printed work of Sufis and dervishes,” in addition to the first translations of Sufi poetry into a Western language.¹⁵ In contrast with later European encounters with Sufism that take place within a context of Western dominance, George experienced Sufism during the ascendency of the Ottoman Empire, at a time of Islamic expansion into Europe. As a European observer, George was profoundly impressed by Ottoman society, and wrote not from a position of contempt but rather of admiration for what seemed to him to be quite a natural Ottoman superiority (though one that could only be explained as diabolical in origin, from his late medieval Christian perspective).

George attempted to explain the frequent Christian conversions to Islam in the Ottoman Empire, describing worldly reasons such as admiration for Ottoman military and political achievements, and attraction to the sophisticat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Contextualizing the production of knowledge on contemporary Sufism in the West
• Part I: Sufism and anti-Sufism in contemporary contexts
• Part II: Contemporary Sufism in the West: Poetic influences and popular manifestations
• Part III: Gendering Sufism: Tradition and transformation
• Index