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Bi ismillahir rahmanir raheem
assalamu alaikum
I remember reading this a few years ago and thinking Masha allah.
Islamic Spirituality - The Forgotten Revolution
� Abdal-Hakim Murad
Numbers appearing in [] are references to footnotes.
THE POVERTY OF FANATICISM
'Blood is no argument', as Shakespeare observed. Sadly, Muslim
ranks are today swollen with those who disagree. The World Trade Centre,
yesterday's symbol of global finance, has today become a monument to
the failure of global Islam to control those who believe that the West
can be bullied into changing its wayward ways towards the East. There
is no real excuse to hand. It is simply not enough to clamour, as many
have done, about 'chickens coming home to roost', and to protest that
Washington's acquiescence in Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing is
the inevitable generator of such hate. It is of course true - as Shabbir
Akhtar has noted - that powerlessness can corrupt as insistently as
does power. But to comprehend is not to sanction or even to empathize.
To take innocent life to achieve a goal is the hallmark of the most
extreme secular utilitarian ethic, and stands at the opposite pole of
the absolute moral constraints required by religion.
There was a time, not long ago, when the 'ultras' were few, forming
only a tiny wart on the face of the worldwide attempt to revivify Islam.
Sadly, we can no longer enjoy the luxury of ignoring them. The extreme
has broadened, and the middle ground, giving way, is everywhere dislocated
and confused. And this enfeeblement of the middle ground, was what was
enjoined by the Prophetic example, is in turn accelerated by the opprobrium
which the extremists bring not simply upon themselves, but upon committed
Muslims everywhere. For here, as elsewhere, the preferences of the media
work firmly against us. David Koresh could broadcast his fringe Biblical
message from Ranch Apocalypse without the image of Christianity, or
even its Adventist wing, being in any way besmirched. But when a fringe
Islamic group bombs Swedish tourists in Cairo, the muck is instantly
spread over 'militant Muslims' everywhere.
If these things go on, the Islamic movement will cease to form an
authentic summons to cultural and spiritual renewal, and will exist
as little more than a splintered array of maniacal factions. The prospect
of such an appalling and humiliating end to the story of a religion
which once surpassed all others in its capacity for tolerating debate
and dissent is now a real possibility. The entire experience of Islamic
work over the past fifteen years has been one of increasing radicalization,
driven by the perceived failure of the traditional Islamic institutions
and the older Muslim movements to lead the Muslim peoples into the worthy
but so far chimerical promised land of the 'Islamic State.'
If this final catastrophe is to be averted, the mainstream will have
to regain the initiative. But for this to happen, it must begin by confessing
that the radical critique of moderation has its force. The Islamic movement
has so far been remarkably unsuccessful. We must ask ourselves how it
is that a man like Nasser, a butcher, a failed soldier and a cynical
demagogue, could have taken over a country as pivotal as Egypt, despite
the vacuity of his beliefs, while the Muslim Brotherhood, with its pullulating
millions of members, should have failed, and failed continuously, for
six decades. The radical accusation of a failure in methodology cannot
fail to strike home in such a context of dismal and prolonged inadequacy.
It is in this context - startlingly, perhaps, but inescapably - that
we must present our case for the revival of the spiritual life within
Islam. If it is ever to prosper, the 'Islamic revival' must be made
to see that it is in crisis, and that its mental resources are proving
insufficient to meet contemporary needs. The response to this must be
grounded in an act of collective muhasaba, of self-examination,
in terms that transcend the ideologised neo-Islam of the revivalists,
and return to a more classical and indigenously Muslim dialectic.
Symptomatic of the disease is the fact that among all the explanations
offered for the crisis of the Islamic movement, the only authentically
Muslim interpretation, namely, that God should not be lending it His
support, is conspicuously absent. It is true that we frequently hear
the Quranic verse which states that "God does not change the condition
of a people until they change the condition of their own selves."
[1. Al-Qur'an 13:11.] But never, it seems, is this principle
intelligently grasped. It is assumed that the sacred text is here doing
no more than to enjoin individual moral reform as a precondition for
collective societal success. Nothing could be more hazardous, however,
than to measure such moral reform against the yardstick of the fiqh
without giving concern to whether the virtues gained have been acquired
through conformity (a relatively simple task), or proceed spontaneously
from a genuine realignment of the soul. The verse is speaking of a spiritual
change, specifically, a transformation of the nafs of the believers
- not a moral one. And as the Blessed Prophet never tired of reminding
us, there is little value in outward conformity to the rules unless
this conformity is mirrored and engendered by an authentically righteous
disposition of the heart. 'No-one shall enter the Garden by his works,'
as he expressed it. Meanwhile, the profoundly judgemental and works
- oriented tenor of modern revivalist Islam (we must shun the problematic
buzz-word 'fundamentalism'), fixated on visible manifestations of morality,
has failed to address the underlying question of what revelation is
for. For it is theological nonsense to suggest that God's final concern
is with our ability to conform to a complex set of rules. His concern
is rather that we should be restored, through our labours and His grace,
to that state of purity and equilibrium with which we were born. The
rules are a vital means to that end, and are facilitated by it. But
they do not take its place.
To make this point, the Holy Quran deploys a striking metaphor. In
Sura Ibrahim, verses 24 to 26, we read:
Have you not seen how God coineth a likeness: a goodly word like
a goodly tree, the root whereof is set firm, its branch in the heaven?
It bringeth forth its fruit at every time, by the leave of its Lord.
Thus doth God coin likenesses for men, that perhaps they may reflect.
And the likeness of an evil word is that of an evil tree that hath
been torn up by the root from upon the earth, possessed of no stability.
According to the scholars of tafsir (exegesis),
the reference here is to the 'words' (kalima) of faith and unfaith.
The former is illustrated as a natural growth, whose florescence of
moral and intellectual achievement is nourished by firm roots, which
in turn denote the basis of faith: the quality of the proofs one has
received, and the certainty and sound awareness of God which alone signify
that one is firmly grounded in the reality of existence. The fruits
thus yielded - the palpable benefits of the religious life - are permanent
('at every time'), and are not man's own accomplishment, for they only
come 'by the leave of its Lord'. Thus is the sound life of faith. The
contrast is then drawn with the only alternative: kufr, which
is not grounded in reality but in illusion, and is hence 'possessed
of no stability'. id="notes">[2. For a further analysis of this
passage, see Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad,
http://66.34.131.5/ISLAM/BOOKS/quilliam.htm#KEY - Key to the
Garden ( http://66.34.131.5/ISLAM/BOOKS/quillint.htm - Quilliam
Press , London 1990 CE), 78-81.]
This passage, reminiscent of some of the binary categorisations of
human types presented early on in Surat al-Baqara, precisely
encapsulates the relationship between faith and works, the hierarchy
which exists between them, and the sustainable balance between nourishment
and fructition, between taking and giving, which true faith must maintain.
It is against this criterion that we must judge the quality of contemporary
'activist' styles of faith. Is the young 'ultra', with his intense rage
which can sometimes render him liable to nervous disorders, and his
fixation on a relatively narrow range of issues and concerns, really
firmly rooted, and fruitful, in the sense described by this Quranic
image?
Let me point to the answer with an example drawn from my own experience.
I used to know, quite well, a leader of the radical 'Islamic' group,
the Jama'at Islamiya, at the Egyptian university of Assiut. His
name was Hamdi. He grew a luxuriant beard, was constantly scrubbing
his teeth with his miswak, and spent his time preaching hatred of the
Coptic Christians, a number of whom were actually attacked and beaten
up as a result of his khutbas. He had hundreds of followers;
in fact, Assiut today remains a citadel of hardline, Wahhabi-style activism.
The moral of the story is that some five years after this acquaintance,
providence again brought me face to face with Shaikh Hamdi. This time,
chancing to see him on a Cairo street, I almost failed to recognise
him. The beard was gone. He was in trousers and a sweater. More astonishing
still was that he was walking with a young Western girl who turned out
to be an Australian, whom, as he sheepishly explained to me, he was
intending to marry. I talked to him, and it became clear that he was
no longer even a minimally observant Muslim, no longer prayed, and that
his ambition in life was to leave Egypt, live in Australia, and make
money. What was extraordinary was that his experiences in Islamic activism
had made no impression on him - he was once again the same distracted,
ordinary Egyptian youth he had been before his conversion to 'radical
Islam'.
This phenomenon, which we might label 'salafi burnout', is
a recognised feature of many modern Muslim cultures. An initial enthusiasm,
gained usually in one's early twenties, loses steam some seven to ten
years later. Prison and torture - the frequent lot of the Islamic radical
- may serve to prolong commitment, but ultimately, a majority of these
neo-Muslims relapse, seemingly no better or worse for their experience
in the cult-like universe of the salafi mindset.
This ephemerality of extremist activism should be as suspicious as
its content. Authentic Muslim faith is simply not supposed to be this
fragile; as the Qur'an says, its root is meant to be 'set firm'. One
has to conclude that of the two trees depicted in the Quranic image,
salafi extremism resembles the second rather than the first. After all,
the Sahaba were not known for a transient commitment: their devotion
and piety remained incomparably pure until they died.
What attracts young Muslims to this type of ephemeral but ferocious
activism? One does not have to subscribe to determinist social theories
to realise the importance of the almost universal condition of insecurity
which Muslim societies are now experiencing. The Islamic world is passing
through a most devastating period of transition. A history of economic
and scientific change which in Europe took five hundred years, is, in
the Muslim world, being squeezed into a couple of generations. For instance,
only thirty-five years ago the capital of Saudi Arabia was a cluster
of mud huts, as it had been for thousands of years. Today's Riyadh is
a hi-tech megacity of glass towers, Coke machines, and gliding Cadillacs.
This is an extreme case, but to some extent the dislocations of modernity
are common to every Muslim society, excepting, perhaps, a handful of
the most remote tribal peoples.
Such a transition period, with its centrifugal forces which allow
nothing to remain constant, makes human beings very insecure. They look
around for something to hold onto, that will give them an identity.
In our case, that something is usually Islam. And because they are being
propelled into it by this psychic sense of insecurity, rather than by
the more normal processes of conversion and faith, they lack some of
the natural religious virtues, which are acquired by contact with a
continuous tradition, and can never be learnt from a book.
One easily visualises how this works. A young Arab, part of an oversized
family, competing for scarce jobs, unable to marry because he is poor,
perhaps a migrant to a rapidly expanding city, feels like a man lost
in a desert without signposts. One morning he picks up a copy of Sayyid
Qutb from a newsstand, and is 'born-again' on the spot. This is what
he needed: instant certainty, a framework in which to interpret the
landscape before him, to resolve the problems and tensions of his life,
and, even more deliciously, a way of feeling superior and in control.
He joins a group, and, anxious to retain his newfound certainty, accepts
the usual proposition that all the other groups are mistaken.
This, of course, is not how Muslim religious conversion is supposed
to work. It is meant to be a process of intellectual maturation, triggered
by the presence of a very holy person or place. Tawba, in its traditional
form, yields an outlook of joy, contentment, and a deep affection for
others. The modern type of tawba, however, born of insecurity,
often makes Muslims narrow, intolerant, and exclusivist. Even more noticeably,
it produces people whose faith is, despite its apparent intensity, liable
to vanish as suddenly as it came. Deprived of real nourishment, the
activist's soul can only grow hungry and emaciated, until at last it
dies.
THE ACTIVISM WITHIN
How should we respond to this disorder? We must begin by remembering
what Islam is for. As we noted earlier, our din is not, ultimately,
a manual of rules which, when meticulously followed, becomes a passport
to paradise. Instead, it is a package of social, intellectual and spiritual
technology whose purpose is to cleanse the human heart. In the Qur'an,
the Lord says that on the Day of Judgement, nothing will be of any use
to us, except a sound heart (qalbun salim). [3. Sura 26:89.
The archetype is Abrahamic: see Sura 37:84.] And in a famous hadith,
the Prophet, upon whom be blessings and peace, says that
"Verily in the body there is a piece of flesh. If it is sound,
the body is all sound. If it is corrupt, the body is all corrupt.
Verily, it is the heart.
Mindful of this commandment, under which all the other commandments
of Islam are subsumed, and which alone gives them meaning, the Islamic
scholars have worked out a science, an ilm (science), of analysing
the 'states' of the heart, and the methods of bringing it into this
condition of soundness. In the fullness of time, this science acquired
the name tasawwuf, in English 'Sufism' - a traditional label
for what we might nowadays more intelligibly call 'Islamic psychology.'
At this point, many hackles are raised and well-rehearsed objections
voiced. It is vital to understand that mainstream Sufism is not, and
never has been, a doctrinal system, or a school of thought - a madhhab.
It is, instead, a set of insights and practices which operate within
the various Islamic madhhabs; in other words, it is not a
madhhab, it is an ilm. And like most of the other Islamic ulum,
it was not known by name, or in its later developed form, in the age
of the Prophet (upon him be blessings and peace) or his Companions.
This does not make it less legitimate. There are many Islamic sciences
which only took shape many years after the Prophetic age: usul al-fiqh,
for instance, or the innumerable technical disciplines of hadith.
Now this, of course, leads us into the often misunderstood area of
sunna and bid'a, two notions which are wielded as blunt instruments
by many contemporary activists, but which are often grossly misunderstood.
The classic Orientalist thesis is of course that Islam, as an 'arid
Semitic religion', failed to incorporate mechanisms for its own development,
and that it petrified upon the death of its founder. This, however,
is a nonsense rooted in the ethnic determinism of the nineteenth century
historians who had shaped the views of the early Orientalist synthesizers
(Muir, Le Bon, Renan, Caetani). Islam, as the religion designed for
the end of time, has in fact proved itself eminently adaptable to the
rapidly changing conditions which characterise this final and most 'entropic'
stage of history.
What is a bid'a, according to the classical definitions of
Islamic law? We all know the famous hadith:
Beware of matters newly begun, for every matter newly begun is
innovation, every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance
is in Hell. [4. This hadith is in fact an instance of takhsis
al-amm: a frequent procedure of usul al-fiqh by which
an apparently unqualified statement is qualified to avoid the contradiction
of another necessary principle. See Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri,
Reliance of the Traveller, tr. Nuh Ha Mim Keller (Abu Dhabi,
1991 CE), 907-8 for some further examples.]
Does this mean that everything introduced into Islam that was not
known to the first generation of Muslims is to be rejected? The classical
ulema do not accept such a literalistic interpretation.
Let us take a definition from Imam al-Shafi'i, an authority universally
accepted in Sunni Islam. Imam al-Shafi'i writes:
There are two kinds of introduced matters (muhdathat).
One is that which contradicts a text of the Qur'an, or the Sunna,
or a report from the early Muslims (athar), or the
consensus (ijma') of the Muslims: this is an 'innovation
of misguidance' (bid'at dalala). The second kind is
that which is in itself good and entails no contradiction of any
of these authorities: this is a 'non-reprehensible innovation' (bid'a
ghayr madhmuma). [5. Ibn Asakir, Tabyin Kadhib al-Muftari
(Damascus, 1347), 97.]
This basic distinction between acceptable and unacceptable forms
of bid'a is recognised by the overwhelming majority of classical
ulema. Among some, for instance al-Izz ibn Abd al-Salam (one of the
half-dozen or so great mujtahids of Islamic history), innovations fall
under the five axiological headings of the Shari'a: the obligatory (wajib),
the recommended (mandub), the permissible (mubah), the
offensive (makruh), and the forbidden (haram).[6.
Cited in Muhammad al-Jurdani, al-Jawahir al-lu'lu'iyya fi sharh al-Arba'in
al-Nawawiya (Damascus, 1328), 220-1.]
Under the category of 'obligatory innovation', Ibn Abd al-Salam gives
the following examples: recording the Qur'an and the laws of Islam in
writing at a time when it was feared that they would be lost, studying
Arabic grammar in order to resolve controversies over the Qur'an, and
developing philosophical theology (kalam) to refute the claims
of the Mu'tazilites.
Category two is 'recommended innovation'. Under this heading the
ulema list such activities as building madrasas, writing books on beneficial
Islamic subjects, and in-depth studies of Arabic linguistics.
Category three is 'permissible', or 'neutral innovation', including
worldly activities such as sifting flour, and constructing houses in
various styles not known in Medina.
Category four is the 'reprehensible innovation'. This includes such
misdemeanours as overdecorating mosques or the Qur'an.
Category five is the 'forbidden innovation'. This includes unlawful
taxes, giving judgeships to those unqualified to hold them, and sectarian
beliefs and practices that explicitly contravene the known principles
of the Qur'an and the Sunna.
The above classification of bid'a types is normal in classical
Shari'a literature, being accepted by the four schools of orthodox
fiqh. There have been only two significant exceptions to this
understanding in the history of Islamic thought: the Zahiri school as
articulated by Ibn Hazm, and one wing of the Hanbali madhhab, represented
by Ibn Taymiya, who goes against the classical ijma' on this
issue, and claims that all forms of innovation, good or bad, are un-Islamic.
Why is it, then, that so many Muslims now believe that innovation
in any form is unacceptable in Islam? One factor has already been touched
on: the mental complexes thrown up by insecurity, which incline people
to find comfort in absolutist and literalist interpretations. Another
lies in the influence of the well-financed neo-Hanbali madhhab called
Wahhabism, whose leaders are famous for their rejection of all possibility
of development.
In any case, armed with this more sophisticated and classical awareness
of Islam's ability to acknowledge and assimilate novelty, we can understand
how Muslim civilisation was able so quickly to produce novel academic
disciplines to deal with new problems as these arose.
Islamic psychology is characteristic of the new ulum which,
although present in latent and implicit form in the Quran, were first
systematized in Islamic culture during the early Abbasid period. Given
the importance that the Quran attaches to obtaining a 'sound heart',
we are not surprised to find that the influence of Islamic psychology
has been massive and all-pervasive. In the formative first four centuries
of Islam, the time when the great works of tafsir, hadith, grammar,
and so forth were laid down, the ulema also applied their minds to this
problem of al-qalb al-salim. This was first visible when, following
the example of the Tabi'in, many of the early ascetics, such as Sufyan
ibn Uyayna, Sufyan al-Thawri, and Abdallah ibn al-Mubarak, had focussed
their concerns explicitly on the art of purifying the heart. The methods
they recommended were frequent fasting and night prayer, periodic retreats,
and a preoccupation with murabata: service as volunteer fighters
in the border castles of Asia Minor.
This type of pietist orientation was not in the least systematic
during this period. It was a loose category embracing all Muslims who
sought salvation through the Prophetic virtues of renunciation, sincerity,
and deep devotion to the revelation. These men and women were variously
referred to as al-bakka'un: 'the weepers', because of their fear
of the Day of Judgement, or as zuhhad, ascetics, or ubbad,
'unceasing worshippers'.
By the third century, however, we start to find writings which can
be understood as belonging to a distinct devotional school. The increasing
luxury and materialism of Abbasid urban society spurred many Muslims
to campaign for a restoration of the simplicity of the Prophetic age.
Purity of heart, compassion for others, and a constant recollection
of God were the defining features of this trend. We find references
to the method of muhasaba: self-examination to detect impurities
of intention. Also stressed was riyada: self-discipline.
By this time, too, the main outlines of Quranic psychology had been
worked out. The human creature, it was realised, was made up of four
constituent parts: the body (jism), the mind (aql), the
spirit (ruh), and the self (nafs). The first two need
little comment. Less familiar (at least to people of a modern education)
are the third and fourth categories.
The spirit is the ruh, that underlying essence of the human
individual which survives death. It is hard to comprehend rationally,
being in part of Divine inspiration, as the Quran says:
"And they ask you about the spirit; say, the spirit is of the
command of my Lord. And you have been given of knowledge only a
little." [7. Al-Qur'an 17:85.
According to the early Islamic psychologists, the ruh is a non-material
reality which pervades the entire human body, but is centred on the
heart, the qalb. It represents that part of man which is not
of this world, and which connects him with his Creator, and which, if
he is fortunate, enables him to see God in the next world. When we are
born, this ruh is intact and pure. As we are initiated into the
distractions of the world, however, it is covered over with the 'rust'
(ran) of which the Quran speaks. This rust is made up of two
things: sin and distraction. When, through the process of self-discipline,
these are banished, so that the worshipper is preserved from sin and
is focussing entirely on the immediate presence and reality of God,
the rust is dissolved, and the ruh once again is free. The heart
is sound; and salvation, and closeness to God, are achieved.
This sounds simple enough. However, the early Muslims taught that
such precious things come only at an appropriate price. Cleaning up
the Augean stables of the heart is a most excruciating challenge. Outward
conformity to the rules of religion is simple enough; but it is only
the first step. Much more demanding is the policy known as mujahada:
the daily combat against the lower self, the nafs. As the Quran
says:
'As for him that fears the standing before his Lord, and forbids
his nafs its desires, for him, Heaven shall be his place
of resort.'[8. Al-Qur'an 79:40.]
Hence the Sufi commandment:
'Slaughter your ego with the knives of mujahada.'
[9. al-Qushayri, al-Risala (Cairo, n.d.), I, 393.]
Once the nafs is controlled, then the heart is clear, and
the virtues proceed from it easily and naturally.
Because its objective is nothing less than salvation, this vital
Islamic science has been consistently expounded by the great scholars
of classical Islam. While today there are many Muslims, influenced by
either Wahhabi or Orientalist agendas, who believe that Sufism has always
led a somewhat marginal existence in Islam, the reality is that the
overwhelming majority of the classical scholars were actively involved
in Sufism.
The early Shafi'i scholars of Khurasan: al-Hakim al-Nisaburi, Ibn
Furak, al-Qushayri and al-Bayhaqi, were all Sufis who formed links in
the richest academic tradition of Abbasid Islam, which culminated in
the achievement of Imam Hujjat al-Islam al-Ghazali. Ghazali himself,
author of some three hundred books, including the definitive rebuttals
of Arab philosophy and the Ismailis, three large textbooks of Shafi'i
fiqh, the best-known tract of usul al-fiqh, two works
on logic, and several theological treatises, also left us with the classic
statement of orthodox Sufism: the Ihya Ulum al-Din, a book of
which Imam Nawawi remarked:
"Were the books of Islam all to be lost, excepting only the
Ihya', it would suffice to replace them all." [10. al-Zabidi,
Ithaf al-sada al-muttaqin (Cairo, 1311), I, 27.
Imam Nawawi himself wrote two books which record his debt to Sufism,
one called the Bustan al-Arifin ('Garden of the Gnostics', and
another called the al-Maqasid (recently published in English
translation, Sunna Books, Evanston Il. trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller).
Among the Malikis, too, Sufism was popular. Al-Sawi, al-Dardir, al-Laqqani
and Abd al-Wahhab al-Baghdadi were all exponents of Sufism. The Maliki
jurist of Cairo, Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha'rani defines Sufism as follows:
'The path of the Sufis is built on the Quran and the Sunna, and
is based on living according to the morals of the prophets and the
purified ones. It may not be blamed, unless it violates an explicit
statement from the Quran, sunna, or ijma. If it does not
contravene any of these sources, then no pretext remains for condemning
it, except one's own low opinion of others, or interpreting what
they do as ostentation, which is unlawful. No-one denies the states
of the Sufis except someone ignorant of the way they are.'[11.
Sha'rani, al-Tabaqat al-Kubra (Cairo, 1374), I, 4.]
For Hanbali Sufism one has to look no further than the revered figures
of Abdallah Ansari, Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Ibn al-Jawzi, and Ibn Rajab.
In fact, virtually all the great luminaries of medieval Islam: al-Suyuti,
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, al-Ayni, Ibn Khaldun, al-Subki, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami;
tafsir writers like Baydawi, al-Sawi, Abu'l-Su'ud, al-Baghawi, and Ibn
Kathir [12. It is true that Ibn Kathir in his Bidaya is
critical of some later Sufis. Nonetheless, in his Mawlid, which
he asked his pupils to recite on the occasion of the Blessed Prophet's
birthday each year, he makes his personal debt to a conservative and
sober Sufism quite clear.] ; aqida writers such as Taftazani,
al-Nasafi, al-Razi: all wrote in support of Sufism. Many, indeed, composed
independent works of Sufi inspiration. The ulema of the great dynasties
of Islamic history, including the Ottomans and the Moghuls, were deeply
infused with the Sufi outlook, regarding it as one of the most central
and indispensable of Islamic sciences.
Further confirmation of the Islamic legitimacy of Sufism is supplied
by the enthusiasm of its exponents for carrying Islam beyond the boundaries
of the Islamic world. The Islamization process in India, Black Africa,
and South-East Asia was carried out largely at the hands of wandering
Sufi teachers. Likewise, the Islamic obligation of jihad has been borne
with especial zeal by the Sufi orders. All the great nineteenth century
jihadists: Uthman dan Fodio (Hausaland), al-Sanousi (Libya), Abd al-Qadir
al-Jaza'iri (Algeria), Imam Shamil (Daghestan) and the leaders of the
Padre Rebellion (Sumatra) were active practitioners of Sufism, writing
extensively on it while on their campaigns. Nothing is further from
reality, in fact, than the claim that Sufism represents a quietist and
non-militant form of Islam.
With all this, we confront a paradox. Why is it, if Sufism has been
so respected a part of Muslim intellectual and political life throughout
our history, that there are, nowadays, angry voices raised against it?
There are two fundamental reasons here.
Firstly, there is again the pervasive influence of Orientalist scholarship,
which, at least before 1922 when Massignon wrote his Essai sur les
origines de la lexique technique, was of the opinion that something
so fertile and profound as Sufism could never have grown from the essentially
'barren and legalistic' soil of Islam. Orientalist works translated
into Muslim languages were influential upon key Muslim modernists -
such as Muhammad Abduh in his later writings - who began to question
the centrality, or even the legitimacy, of Sufi discourse in Islam.
Secondly, there is the emergence of the Wahhabi da'wa. When
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, some two hundred years ago, teamed up with
the Saudi tribe and attacked the neighbouring clans, he was doing so
under the sign of an essentially neo-Kharijite version of Islam. Although
he invoked Ibn Taymiya, he had reservations even about him. For Ibn
Taymiya himself, although critical of the excesses of certain Sufi groups,
had been committed to a branch of mainstream Sufism. This is clear,
for instance, in Ibn Taymiya's work Sharh Futuh al-Ghayb, a commentary
on some technical points in the
http://www.ummah.org.uk/al-baz/ghaib.htm - Revelations
of the Unseen , a key work by the sixth-century saint of Baghdad,
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. Throughout the work Ibn Taymiya shows himself
to be a loyal disciple of al-Jilani, whom he always refers to as
shaykhuna ('our teacher'). This Qadiri affiliation is confirmed
in the later literature of the Qadiri tariqa, which records Ibn Taymiya
as a key link in the silsila, the chain of transmission of Qadiri
teachings.[13. See G. Makdisi's article 'Ibn Taymiyya: A Sufi
of the Qadiriya Order' in the American Journal of Arabic Studies,
1973.]
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, however, went far beyond this. Raised in the wastelands
of Najd in Central Arabia, he had little access to mainstream Muslim
scholarship. In fact, when his da'wa appeared and became notorious,
the scholars and muftis of the day applied to it the famous Hadith of
Najd:
Ibn Umar reported the Prophet (upon whom be blessings and peace)
as saying: "Oh God, bless us in our Syria; O God, bless us in our
Yemen." Those present said: "And in our Najd, O Messenger of God!"
but he said, "O God, bless us in our Syria; O God, bless us in our
Yemen." Those present said, "And in our Najd, O Messenger of God!".
Ibn Umar said that he thought that he said on the third occasion:
"Earthquakes and dissensions (fitna) are there, and there
shall arise the horn of the devil." [14. Narrated by Bukhari.
The translation is from J. Robson, Mishkat al-Masabih (Lahore,
1970), II, 1380.
And it is significant that almost uniquely among the lands of Islam,
Najd has never produced scholars of any repute.
The Najd-based da'wa of the Wahhabis, however, began to be
heard more loudly following the explosion of Saudi oil wealth. Many,
even most, Islamic publishing houses in Cairo and Beirut are now subsidised
by Wahhabi organisations, which prevent them from publishing traditional
works on Sufism, and remove passages in other works considered unacceptable
to Wahhabist doctrine.
The neo-Kharijite nature of Wahhabism makes it intolerant of all
other forms of Islamic expression. However, because it has no coherent
fiqh of its own - it rejects the orthodox madhhabs - and has
only the most basic and primitively anthropomorphic aqida, it
has a fluid, amoebalike tendency to produce divisions and subdivisions
among those who profess it. No longer are the Islamic groups essentially
united by a consistent madhhab and the Ash'ari [or Maturidi]
aqida. Instead, they are all trying to derive the shari'a
and the aqida from the Quran and the Sunna by themselves. The
result is the appalling state of division and conflict which disfigures
the modern salafi condition.
At this critical moment in our history, the umma has only one realistic
hope for survival, and that is to restore the 'middle way', defined
by that sophisticated classical consensus which was worked out over
painful centuries of debate and scholarship. That consensus alone has
the demonstrable ability to provide a basis for unity. But it can only
be retrieved when we improve the state of our hearts, and fill them
with the Islamic virtues of affection, respect, tolerance and reconciliation.
This inner reform, which is the traditional competence of Sufism, is
a precondition for the restoration of unity in the Islamic movement.
The alternative is likely to be continued, and agonising, failure.
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Rasul Allah (sallah llahu alaihi wa sallam) said: "Whoever knows himself, knows his Lord" and whoever knows his Lord has been given His gnosis and nearness.
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