Intellectualism

 

 

INTELLECTUALISM 

 

Philosophically this means the claim that things can be known by the mere exercise of the rational mind.   The greatest of all modern philosophers Immanuel Kant (died 1804) demolished this claim in his masterpiece ‘The Critique of Pure reason’.  In the more popular and also current understanding, which is what we are going to consider presently, it means trusting the rational mind too much and looking down on mental phenomena like emotions as misleading nuisance. That is where the poison of intellectualism lies.  It forgets that man is always looking for happiness and that happiness is a state of mind, and not what seems to bring it about. It is an emotion of the most pleasant and sustainable kind only available to the innocent, truthful and dutiful.

 

In actual fact intellectualism is the joint off-spring of, on the one hand ‘rationalism’, the school which maintains that only rational, verbalisable thinking yields truths worth considering and acting on, and on the other hand ‘materialism’ which teaches that things are worth having when materially existent and available and all other values are items of pathetic self-deception.  Neither of these claims can stand up to critical scrutiny though as we will soon see. 

 

As well known, it is actions which benefit or damage people and their interests and a person just merely thinking and not acting at all can benefit or harm nobody except perhaps himself.  But as modern psychology shows, thinking is hardly a simple process.  Conscious rational thinking is only one part of it and not the most effective one in bringing about action.  Had it been so, nobody would drink, smoke or succumb to any indecent or criminal urges.  As a result of this fact, for example, doctors employed to fight the drinking habit may themselves drink while top police officers specialising in financial crime may themselves embezzle police funds. It was recently in the news that an ‘expert’ hired for detecting and catching paedophiles on behalf of the police was subsequently himself exposed a great offender.  Wrongs are often committed despite knowing full well that they are wrongs, but all the same we cannot stop ourselves.  Intellectual conviction alone cannot simply motivate.  

 

More interestingly, it almost does not matter whether we are religious or not in a simple sense.  Items keep being stolen from the mosques, very knowledgeable men of religion may be exposed as sexual pests and qadis may be caught taking bribes and judging unjustly as a result. All these people know what they need to know, can think rationally about their acts but for some reason go ahead and commit the errors they commit. From all above it should be clear that rational thinking in itself lacks the horsepower to convince the thinker himself to act as he thinks.  He often acts contrary to his reasoned out beliefs, because his emotions are compelling him!  Clearly emotions are not nuisance but essential factors in regulating us.

 

Why intellectualism and materialism often go hand in hand should be obvious.  It is because the material world is more explicit in perceptibility and simpler in structure than the spiritual world which is ‘in our hearts only’.  The material world is eminently suitable for rational analysis and exploitation and it takes only to establish the cause and effect mechanism in any material event to understand and then exploit it. As a result, people who cannot wait to enjoy worldly goods and exploit worldly opportunities find themselves quickly rewarded by a rational understanding of the material world. The Western technological advancement is a witness to that.  Once they taste the quickly delivered pleasant fruits of material advancement people feel no need to explore any other possible dimensions or levels to existence lest they miss some of the only too good looking worldly delicacies.  Going back to the subject of sex, intense and indiscriminate involvement in sexual acts makes love redundant. Chronic and intractable unhappiness, despite all the pleasures, is then unavoidable. A chronically unhappy person is a grave danger to both himself and others. There is a constant pressure build-up in him and he has to vent it of through any channels that is available; cursing, swearing, acts of unkindness and ultimately crime seem to afford relief and are therefore indulged routinely. If all fail to stop his sufferings, suicide may be contemplated and sometimes committed.

 

It is often when we do not have too much of “this world’s good things” or are frustrated in our material aims that we turn to alternatives, alternatives which can only be spiritual.  That is why religions always deplore and discourage too much material enjoyments and advise contentment with the reasonable minimum and modesty in all material things.  That is also why Allah limits most good believers’ means.  He says “Were Allah to enlarge the provision/rizq to His servants they would go overboard in the land but He (wisely and kindly) sends down in limited measure what He wants. That is because He is Aware (of their real needs) and Sees (all they do)” (Surah al Shura v. 27).  But that of course does not mean that He may not sometimes try us by enlarging our rizq and see what happens.  He Almighty says “We try you with good and evil for a test” (Surat al Anbiya v.35).  Shall we use the gifts to promote Allah’s Cause or to serve the Devil in more luxury?  The former happy conduct is only possible when our appetite for this world is well under control.  And that is the happy fruit of faith nurtured from at least as much emotion as from rational conviction.

 

 

THE FALLACIOUS REDUCTIONISM OF INTELLECTUALISM 

 

French rationalist philosopher Descartes, when pointed out the suffering caused to animals involved in physiological experiments defended the experiments done on monkeys as follows: “The violent reactions and loud voices the monkeys issue are as natural as the shrieking sounds made by doors with too rusty hinges. Both are mechanical phenomena which the scientist should ignore”. . When this present notorious ‘sexual liberation’ was being hatched one intellectual commented thus:  “Sex is nothing but the rubbing together of two anatomical tubes.  All the taboos attached to it are superstitions. People should be free to do with their bodies what they want”  When Stalin was asked what he thought about the mass deaths of starving Soviet citizens as a result of his reckless economic policies he coolly and ‘charmingly’ answered: “When a person dies it is a tragedy. When masses of people die it is only a statistic”.  When Hitler was massacring the Jews and the slavs he was saying “We are eliminating inferior races and promoting the survival of the fittest which is a service to mankind”. 

 

Atheists dismiss God saying “God is nothing but a projection of ignorant men’s own fears and hopes, who do not know how to deal with them rationally.    This “Nothing but” method of distorting realities by impoverishing them is called ‘Reductive Fallacy’ by some and works by ignoring all elements making up a reality except the one that is the easiest to notice or rather the thinker likes to see exclusively for ideological reasons.  Marx had also reduced the whole history to ‘class struggle’ and predicted our future as the dissolution of the state when the society would become a happy utopia populated by absolute equals. With this intellectual simpleton’s tool one can kill and eat his own child because “the child is nothing but a lump of nutritious matter”.  In fact in a recent mental scandal one man in Germany persuaded and ate another and the courts were hard-pressed to find a law to convict the self-styled cannibal!  With this intellectual simpleton’s tool Pol Pot killed twenty million Cambodians in cold blood to create his ideal society of happy and equal workers.  With this intellectual simpleton’s  tool the sexual revolutionaries abolished all taboos and removed all bars placed before the rubbing together of all anatomical tubes of the body! Do we see how happily simple is everything once we apply to it our intellectual simpleton’s tool?  Do we now understand why so happily cock-sure in theory and so dictatorial in practice are the intellectual simpletons, i.e., those suffering from severe intellectualism with its accompanying emotional and moral bankruptcy?

 

In brief my dear readers please understand then that although intellectualism in people may not always be this extreme it is never away from this kind of danger, namely, distorting realities too much, many of them of great importance to us, by unconsciously ignoring a thousand elements and aspects of it and  highlighting only one or two which are more obvious without necessarily being the most important. Often a too rational or intellectual man is only too good at deceiving himself and the other naives and when the bad consequences of his assumptions arrive, he is the last to admit guilt. He will accuse anything and anybody but himself.  Hitler died unrepentant, Stalin died unrepentant, Pol Pot died unrepentant, simply because they were intellectual sharp razors dealing with arbitrary thin slices of reality while also being spiritual blinds and dwarfs.  Hitler’s mad and stormy rhetoric, Stalin’s imperturbable cool and cunning and Pol Pot’s plainly extreme psychopathic mind were blind to all considerations but a few aspects, often only theoretical, which their defective minds could selectively register and consider.  They lived from narrow tunnels with a single entrance and single exit in which the travel could only be one-way. 

 

It is with this very same defective mental set-up and emotional starvation that dominantly intellectual people shifted our culture from the holistic traditional to the reductively fallacious modern.  Among so much wealth and opportunity modern societies suffer from maladies and plagues which they needed not to, had they known better about their souls.  Neither scientific and technological advancement, nor prosperity and cultural sophistication are evil in themselves; on the contrary, in wise hands they can be great saviours of mankind.  But intellectualism is a mental defect and often converts the potential blessings of scientific advancements into curses.  In order to make the best of everything we need far more wisdom than an intellectual attitude can contain.  That is next.

 

 

FAITH AND SUFISM 

 

Provided it is rooted in Reality in its widest sense faith is the single most useful mental tool to ensure our happy success in life.  I am saying ‘happy’ success because intellectualism also distorted the concept of success by making it too objective which means the subjective aspect of judging whether anything constitutes a success is largely ignored.  From oldest times all sages recognised that real success in life cannot be divorced from feeling deservedly happy with and about oneself.  Many people win in the lottery great sums and make great show of happiness but often it only proves the beginning of their misery for life.  Many winners waste their new-found wealth on outwardly fabulous goods and services trying desperately to appear happy but inside them is a nightmare-like incredulity and misery.  Greatly ambitious people spend their lives fighting for top prizes of  life as they see them, like great wealth or top political leadership only to find that once obtained these prizes need even more labour and worry to keep than earning them.  They may begin to fear even their own shadows and actually it is not rare for such unhappy fearers to see their worst fears being realised.  Enemies and rivals are everywhere. All great sages concluded that happiness is a state of mind more than anything else and as such has hardly any objective standard like a measure of wealth or a level of indulgence in physical pleasures like food and sex.  For happiness to go up unhappy emotions like fear, anxiety, regret or resentment must go down. 

 

Since it is impossible to control most of the events which can hurt us in this big and complex world our happiness, our peace of mind, need a fundamental emotion which can modify and control all other emotions we are heir to.  This has been conclusively identified as faith and need not be religious in a formal sense.  An ambitious politician or sportsman, if he is to succeed,  needs a faith to the effect that come hell or high water he is prepared to fight any obstacles on his way and exploit any opportunities coming his way and that ultimately he is both capable of winning and worthy of the prize he is seeking.  This emotion has not demonstrable objective basis but helps the ambitious man more than any objective assets he may have.  It provides him with a grand picture of his destiny, reveals to him the way forward at any stage he is in and sustains his determination and fundamental optimism however bad or desperate any state of affairs are at any given time.  From Marxist (atheistic) revolutionaries to mystic searchers and from money-worshipping entrepreneurs to religious pioneers faith in various forms always makes the centrepiece of their mental machinery like a locomotive forming the most essential part of a train.  This is indisputable.

 

But faith becomes its strongest and worthiest when it is rooted in the total reality and goodness of existence, i.e, both in objective and subjective reality.  Objective in the sense that there will be no fundamental contradiction between the promises of a faith and the laws of nature as seen from a broadest possible perspective.  Subjective in the sense that no demands of the faith offends any universally held moral convictions, nor are they too harsh on anybody but can be seen as just by all reasonable and decent people, especially when it is explained to them.   

 

We believe that the faith most fitting this bill is Islam.  Just to make a few comparison in major issues we may consider the following:  Islam is not racist like Judaism but universal.  It is not basically misogynist or anti-sexuality like Christianity nor does it compromise on the Unity of God.  It does not divide men into castes like Hinduism does, each dominating those lower down and treating the ‘lowest’ no better than animals; nor does it complicate salvation with interminable sufferings in interminable reincarnations.  Islam is eminently simple, realistic to a fault and moderate to the extreme.  All its harams/taboos are negotiable and not absolute:  One can formally (not from the heart) deny Islamic faith when in mortal danger from enemies who demand a denial or can eat any food Islam bans if under he is under duress.  Unlike a Jehovah’s witness a Muslim does not have to see his child die because as parent he regards blood transfusion to be unallowable.  In Islam celibacy is not a virtue but a defect and marriage is the virtue and the perfection. Riches are not evil provided legitimately earned and taxes on it are adequately paid.  Deliberate starvation, uncleanliness or social withdrawal for ‘spiritual’ reasons are not acceptable but moderate eating, highest possible hygiene and elegant grooming and social participation and responsibility are valued. 

 

Islamic dogmas have nothing inherently impossible in them and metaphoric interpretation of its dogmas are positively encouraged so that no intellectual difficulties stare at the believer in the face if he finds a literal meaning of a dogma difficult to accept.  To this end Allah explains in Surat Ali Imran v.7 that other than ‘muhkamat’, i.e., the legalistic and material-oriented verses,  the verses in the Qur’an are ‘mutashabihat’, i.e., metaphorical whose ultimate meanings only Allah knows.  In Surat al Zumar v. 23 He Almighty says “Allah has sent down the best news in the form of a Book of metaphors”.  Now let not some readers think that by metaphorizing verses of dogma and spirituality they are being discredited or devalued.  On the very contrary they are being elevated heavenward and put beyond common mortal scrutiny and penetration.  Metaphors are unavoidable because the realities like resurrection, judgment, paradise and hell… are realities no human mind at its ordinary level in this world can bear to witness. 

 

They are all the more real, more terrible or blissful than any man can bear! This fact only adds to the glory and reality of Islamic faith.  The truth of such dogmas is in their tied and tested power in motivating us and pleasing our sense of justice and boosting our desire for guidance and grace.  It is like a baby’s enjoying its mother’s milk despite being totally unable to know where it is coming from or what it is made of.  In other words the Qur’anic dogmas do not address the intellectual deserts of the mind but water and fertilise its spiritual instincts with which man  is born.  In other words faith in the ‘ghaib’, i.e., the imperceptible and unverifiable realities beyond our common experiences is an utterly non-intellectualist demand on us and as such very powerful to motor us towards our spiritual destiny- the Company of Allah which Allah the Most Gracious introduces in Surat al Qamar v.55 “Indeed the pious are in Gardens and Rivers as occupants of seats of truthfulness in the Company of an Able King”.  These are such experiences and such realities that only in metaphorised form we can bear them without going insane! So understand this!

 

To pursue our aims of salvation we need such insights and more and these cannot come our way while we busy ourselves too much with this world’s filth which our improper desires in or about this world are.  We need to apply a lot of brakes to our crude and unexamined ego drives and desires, and demolish our acquired bad habits and calcified prejudices all of which create that impious and reckless personality sense we call our ‘I’, our ‘self’.  Had we been decent and realistic in our worldly aims we could see that much of what we are doing in this world are either silly enterprises or silly repetitions of the same mistakes.  We just waste time, energy and resources only to keep our mistakes repeating themselves.  It is like a carpenter turning around a piece of simple beam of timber fifty times to decide from where to measure and cut it.  He perhaps needs only two or three turns and perspectives to decide.  When one decides to worship Allah as Allah demands this incompetence and waste he suffers from in his worldly tasks begin to abate and he gradually becomes so exact and skilful and quick in his chores and eliminates so much mistakes and waste that what remains of time outside his religious devotions becomes more than enough for him to earn an honest and decent living and look after his family as well finding far more leisure. 

 

As this new man persists in his pursuit of more salvation from his old ego his relations with other persons, be they good or bad, believer or unbeliever, are equally transformed.  He finds that he can now far more easily persuade others to do more right things and less wrong things and especially to wrestle with less and embrace others more.  Far down the road what await him are even greater and greater understandings, more and more glorious and saving insights.  He discovers, for example that Allah’s angels begin to take especial notice of him and offer him increasing guidance, protection and help.  Read if you wish:
“Those who say ‘Our Lord is Allah’ and then walk straight- angels come down on them saying “Do not fear, do not grieve! We are your guardians in this world and the next in which yours are all what your hearts yearn after and all you call for…” (Surat Fussilat, vv 30-33)

 

All these achievements are the aim of true and real believers of greatest determination which specially favoured group Allah calls variously as ‘al Mu’minun’, ‘al Sabiqun’, ‘al Muqarrabun’, al Siddiqun,  ‘al Muhsinun’ and ‘Awliya Allah’, call them what you want.  Later in Islam some believers of this calibre and destiny called themselves Sufis and their path ‘Tasawwuf’ but do not be misled by this new name. What is meant is as above.  Although Sufism was also hijacked by many spiritual conmen the real form has always been around. True Sufi is the man who is always, even in his sleep mindful of and dutiful towards Allah and wary of and shunning his vain ego. That is why the Prophet sws said “My eyes may sleep but my heart is always awake”.  And he also said “I converted  my devil to Islam”
With all above in mind we say that real Sufism is real Islam and real Islam is real Sufism and it is only this single holy entity that enables us to see and think about everything from every possible angle and not only intellectually. With the holistic vision always at hand we can both judge justly and act wisely basically at all times. The salvation we seek is from our unexamined, uncultivated and alienated egos and from nothing else. And what a success is that salvation and what a glory it delivers here and now and there and thereafter.  Amen.

 

 

REALITY OF REAL SUFISM

 

Some praise and embrace, some condemn and reject.  That is how Sufism is taken.  Why?  Because there are both good and bad Sufis as well as good and bad observers of it.  Good people like and may join good Sufis.  If not naïve, they recognize bad Sufis and steer clear of them.  Bad people hate any kind of Sufism even when a sufi they come to know is like an angel in human form. That is because good Sufism asks for the sacrifice of the ego’s vain desires (false gods inhabiting his heart) on the altar of God.  How can an ego-worshipping person sacrifice his idols the ego pleasures?

 

So we must know what is good Sufism.  But before that let’s see what bad Sufism is.

 

 

THE UNIVERSAL PHENOMENON OF SPIRITUAL CONMEN AND BAD ‘SUFISM’

 

You know what is a conman, don’t you?  It is a man who can talk and argue so well that he can ease you of your assets as smoothly as removing a hair from butter and make you feel grateful for the fact and hopeful of the rewards. None of which is found to be valid in the end. A recent film advert features three handsome persons, two men and one woman, and the caption is something like this : “They cheat, they betray, they steal- but they do it with style”.   So are all ‘confidence tricksters’ which term we shorten to ‘conman’ (when singular, conmen when plural)  or often ‘con’.

 

Conmen do not only operate in the field of finance or sales.  There is a special kind of conman who is expert in the spiritual field. He masterfully assumes airs of sanctity and religious erudition, and often also pretends miraculous powers as well as faking miracles. He may even claim to be a prophet or God!  He wears the right clothes and grooms the right way and wafts the right perfumes and casts the right gazes until his victim is spiritually aroused- like sexual arousal-  and becomes ready to be taken.  Then comes the subtle milking process which may exchange the whole material and spiritual assets of the victim with bundles of spiritual fraudulent promissory notes and investment certificates.  In America particularly, there are hundreds of deluded and/or fraudulent Christian and Hindu cults whose victims (for the word ‘victim’ fits them better than the word ‘disciple’ or ‘member’)… whose victims may lose everything they used to possess and enjoy, including their family ties, and all they get may be their total swindle or worse-  a participation in a mass-suicide ordered by the con, when he is also a madman.  Conmen exist among all faith communities and they give a bad name to both the faith and its esoteric manifestations. 

 

If some muslims are act as such cons then you may condemn them as much as you want. Among muslims the sign of a spiritual conman is often a religious/spiritual organisation which controls phenomenal assets and runs on dynastic lines. Members are secretive, arrogant, and exclusivist, in the sense that only their kind is entitled to lead or judge others and the rest of the muslims must be looked down and tolerated as deserving fools and failures. Among them there are some who falsely claim to be Sufis and preach and practice plain silly and sometimes also blasphemous or criminal things.  In Islamic history the Assassins were one such sect as was the Shaikh Badraddin’s communistic ‘sufi’ community  which in the 15th century had risen in rebellion against the Ottoman sultan and the rebellion was put down after great slaughter on both sides in Anatolian and Rumelia. What we are interested in is not such misleading and abusive spiritual pretensions and parasitical rich or anarchical rebellious organisations proffering them. We are interested in real Sufism.  So read and evaluate accordingly what comes next.

 

 

WHAT IS SUFISM

 

I am putting the answer with lightning speed:  Sufism is the recreation of the spirituality of the Messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sellem (sws), as far as possible, in your own heart.  In other words your heart is being filled with the Prophet’s ‘nur’ which is derived from Allah’s.  It is almost discarding yourself and fitting into the void so created the enlightened self of the Prophet (sws).  This is not so outlandish a project as it would seem at first sight:   All men’s souls come from Allah’s Spirit (Nafahtu feehi min roohi-  I blew in man of MY SPIRIT… Qur’an, 15: 29) and it happens that the Prophet sws has been the most fortunate and successful person ever to represent in his heart and soul the best image of Divine Spirit or the Holy Spirit as it is also called.  But let us make one thing sure: Spirit is not an entity let alone a substance as philosophers define it.  Spirit is a level of understanding  which recognises and responds to the organising and motivating meaning behind existence which understanding can only be attained  by beings having enough level of the spirit in themselves. For example, a dog is a very clever animal but its level of spirit is high enough to appreciate love but too low to need or develop religious faith let alone appreciate faith in its superiors the men.  But a gradation of spiritual levels or abilities exists also among men themselves:  Allah said “Hum darajatin ‘indallah, wallahu basirun bima ya’malun”, i.e., They (people) occupy ranks in their relations to Allah; Allah is the Seer of all they are doing” (3: 163).  In other words, depending on our level of understanding spiritual truths  we attain and occupy ranks in our relation to Allah and our ranks can rise depending on both our sincere efforts and Allah’s grace in response to them.  There is a deeper meaning to this Divine verse but we should not go into it yet.

 

With this potential open to mankind, a few spiritually sensitive and gifted muslims after the first first generation of muslims were out, seeing that Muslims were increasingly indulging their lusts and relaxing their relations with Allah decided to rediscover and live in themselves the spirituality of the Prophet’s sws dearest companions  . These few spiritually sensitive and very gifted muslims saw with great sadness that mere mouthing the Islamic creed (shahada) and physical (unfeeling) praying and fasting changed almost nothing so far as muslims’ characters and dealings with each other were concerned. Although a minority always thanked Allah by living up to their Islamic responsibilities, the majority, no matter how learned or otherwise, carried on displaying bad characters and committing abominations. As if Islam had never come and the idols and pagan ethos were still in place the community became more and more hedonistic and brutally infighting and overall ignored the laws of Islam. 

 

For example, later Umayyad rulers, against Islam’s very insistence and precedent,  did not encourage conversions to Islam among whom they conquered and if the latter converted nevertheless, then the Umayyad rulers did not exempt them from the poll tax as they had to. They unabashedly explained that receiving the tax was more profitable than gaining converts because the Umayyad treasury needed the money.  When Abdullah b. Zubair RA declared his caliphate and whole Arabia, Iraq and Egypt submitted to him all the revenue of the pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina went to him instead of the Umayyad caliphate and the then Umayyad caliph Abdul Malik, to woo back the revenue built up the magnificent Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem and declared it holier than Mecca and Medina and the new centre of pilgrimage for all Muslims. It did not work but look at the dash, daring and impiety!  Before him Yazid the accursed was famous for saying that he was looking to the day when he could drink wine on the roof of the Kaaba!  It was this low Muslims were going just a few generations after the Prophet sws!

The Abbasid dynasty which replaced the Umayyad changed some impious policies like charging the poll tax to new Muslims and instead encouraged conversions.  But they also imposed their own kind of impious policies. For example, Abbasid caliph Ma’mun persecuted imams who refused to subscribe to his pet thesis that the Qur’an was created and not the uncreated word of Allah, having been persuaded by his Mu’tazilide mentors that that was the case. Mutazilides were muslim philosophers modelling themselves on some too rationalistic Greek philosophers and for a century or so were the rage of the age.  So muslim persecuted muslim for mere and eventually meaningless word-plays.  Just as the old Turkish saying puts it “An idle priest will bury the living just to keep busy”. What the Mutazilides and caliphs supporting them were doing was a repetition of the doctrinal disputes and witch hunts the earlier Christians were the adepts  of and the virus for this disease had apparently penetrated Islam through the conversion of many Christians who then brought in their contaminated old spiritual baggage quite unconsciously.

 

In view of such distortion and degeneration in many muslims’ behaviour, towards the end of the second century of Islam a novel movement of Islamic spirituality began to emerge.  As already indicated, some exceptionally spiritual-oriented men began to be noticed, living lives of great piety and uttering words of great enlightenment and committing charitable acts of incredible kindness and generosity.  In fact reaction against the increasing worldliness of Muslims had began as early as Othman’s RA time and never ceased after thereafter. Eventually we had saints/awliya like Jalaluddin Rumi (13. C) whom now the whole world now admires so much. The worldliness among muslims was increasing thanks to the great and enriching conquests which was moving the frontiers of Islam to the Great Wall of China in the East to Spain in the West.  Fabulous cities sprang up everywhere, like the metropolises Baghdad and Cairo in the middle and Samarkand and Cordoba at the flanks.

 

Each boasted of huge populations, palaces, parks, universities, libraries, hospitals, shopping centers, factories… (as well as great worldly luxuries) and produced great scholars, scientists, inventors and artists (as well as hedonists) who paved the way for the modern civilization. At the same time brutality, corruption and treachery remained the bedrock of government and politics and the masses followed their leaders except a minority of spiritually-minded decent people. Sufis came from among this minority and spread their spirituality far outside their small numbers. Muslims have never been able to be fully spiritualised but Sufism did make a huge difference.  At times it tamed fierce sultans and stopped them from their otherwise unbridled abominations like wanton executions and other injustices and cruelties. Some sultans themselves became great Sufis (like Ibrahim b. Adham) while others became obedient disciples of great sheikhs and therefore stayed out of mischief.  Sufis provided us with the sublimest examples of spirituality as well as the best ever spiritual literature.  No other religion than Islam could produce holier saints or more eloquent and penetrating wisdoms than the Sufis did.  Having said this, we must also add that this new prestigious business could not fail to attract increasing numbers of parasites and conmen who wore the sufi garb to ply their abominable trades of profiteering.  Throughout their history all true Sufis complained about such fraudulent abusers of Sufism. Them we also are rejecting and ignoring in this essay.

 

 

WHY ISLAM PRODUCED THE HOLIEST SAINTS?

 

Spirituality is something which can be contracted from a living person endowed with it and not so much merely listening to or reading about him.  It is like producing yoghurt.  To convert milk into yoghurt you cannot read into it the recipe which says that to the milk must be added a spoonful or so of actual yoghurt.  You must buy a cup of live yoghurt and taking a spoonful from it add  it to your plain milk. Your milk must be lukewarm and must be kept lukewarm for a few hours before it sets and becomes the delicious yoghurt you want.
For a Jew the model of spirituality is Moses and for a Christian it is Jesus. Each Jewish or Christian aspirant must be ‘inoculated’ and fermented with the virus (spirit) of his respective role model. But the role models are mainly lost.  How can you make a perfect copy of a piece of ancient furniture if all you got to go by is a single rotten leg or panel or ornamental carving?  Even worse, some false parts may have been added to the genuine pieces making the whole quite different from the original. The images of all past masters like the above two have been thus heavily doctored until, in the case of Jesus, we find a god-man in true pagan tradition. It is like building an image of a long-extinct dinosaur whose only a tooth an a shin bone you found.  On these flimsy relics you must build all the skeleton, the muscle, the internal organs and the external limbs and organs as well as skin, hair or scale and colour of the extinct animal!  No doubt ten reconstruction palaeontologists will come up with ten different reconstructed models. A recent TV series animating dinosaurs was made under the guidance of top experts.  There we saw dinosaur-birds the size of ostriches jumping like sparrows!   How can such huge and clumsy animals jump so quickly and lightly like sparrows? 

 

So much for expert palaeontologists.  The same for our Christian Abrahamic cousins.  In each country we find another image of Jesus. A Negro in Ethiopian churches, a Nordic, long-haired blond in northern Europe and a dark Italian in Rome. As for the character of Jesus we only have an unreliable sketch, often featuring conflicting tendencies.  At one point he forgives everyone, at another he curses a fig tree which then dries up on the spot. We muslims of course absolve the holy Christ of such silly behaviour and much else foisted upon him by his Christian votaries.  We very much love and adore the real Jesus Christ we find in the Qur’an: A true and great prophet-messenger of Allah who could not be farther away than the pagan god he was later made into.  He was the Christ of Israel who was later adopted by the gentiles who gradually distorted him.  Still, he was so good that the Christians ended up with some spiritual profit.

 

For muslims Allah preserved all the memory of Muhammad sws, their model, in full.  We have libraryfuls of many volumes on the biography, character, sayings and doings of Muhammad sws from many angles and in great detail as no other man ever inspired his followers to establish, compile and transmit. Both his physique and character, his sayings and doings are with us- fresh as if they were yesterday, full and convincing. True a lot of dubious reports did filter down to us but it has not been too difficult to weed them out. What is more our Sufis credibly traced their spiritual lineage to the Prophet sws.  For example most tariqats (sufi orders) trace their lineage to our master Ali RA who was a first cousin and also the son-in-law of the Prophet.  His offspring, all magnificent spirits, initially flourished in Iraq and Medina and taught and served as models for their disciples.  So we find our great imam Abu Hanifa a pupil in spirituality of Jafar al Sadiq AS, a grandson of the Prophet sws.  The famous sufi Hasan al Basri was another disciple of the blessed line of the Prophet sws.  Naqshibandi Sufis trace their inheritance of the Prophet’s sws lights through his first and greatest disciple Abu Bakr RA.

 

Of course it is another matter how much each later sufi disciple is getting the benefit but that the spirituality, the spiritual prophetic yoghurt ferment is still as available and effective as at any time before is a fact.  Abu Bakr RA had become the healthy delicious ‘yoghurt’ like the Prophet sws and all companions of Abu Bakr RA who had the aptitude then became yoghurts fermented from his. As you may know, a cup of yoghurt can be used to start a fermentation chain whereby new yoghurts can be made generation after generation until the Day of Judgment.  A candle may light another and that lights still another… to infinity without the ability diminishing. The same with the Prophet’s sws light. His spiritual inheritors the true sheikhs can produce new sheikhs to infinity. Which means Sufism is a sure way of creating and recreating the blessings of the Messenger of Allah sws over generations without diminishing.  Subhan Allahi ‘uluwwan kabira!. So, if the sheikh thinks we are the right quality and right temperature milk he can spoon out a spoonful from his yoghurt and inoculate our milk to make us yoghurts as well.  The right milk is our sincerity and the right temperature is our hard work, our commitment.  The sheikh will not waste ferment fermenting   corrupted and cold milk.  Cold or corrupted milk can only produce too watery or corrupted yoghurt.  Or we may put it like this: His yoghurt is available to all for self-inoculation but only people with the right milk can benefit.

 

What you get from Sufism in a successful case of fermentation is another good servant of Allah whose image and conduct reflects that of the Messenger of Allah sws-  a chaste and honest man, a sincere and totally benevolent soul, a mild and generous temperament, a compassionate and loyal friend, a wise counsellor, a humble yet blessedly saving companion effusing serendipity… in fact all that you can expect from a flesh and blood but otherwise truly and fully God-oriented man.  This man is never envious or jealous but always appreciative and well-wishing.  This man is the supreme product of Islam because he is an as perfect copy as possible of the Messenger of Allah given the fact that he is not him but another person. Nobody can be as glorious as the Prophet sws but any reasonably good copy is the most glorious man of his time. You cannot ask something better than that.

 

 

THE QUR’ANIC AND NATURAL BASIS OF SUFISM

 

Some unperceptive brothers and sisters wonder how on earth we have tariqats and their sheikhs and their methods while during the Prophet’s times these were not around and such terms were unknown. They therefore conclude that Sufism and its elements are all bid’ats (unjustified innovations).  The first thing these brothers and sisters should kindly consider is this: For something to really exist and be effective it does not have to be noticed and known. For example oxygen always existed and sustained life. But only recently its existence and effectiveness were discovered and explained. To apply this metaphor to Islam there is no doubt that in the person of our master Muhammad sws his companions found a spiritual mentor as much by example as by word.  He sws attracted and influenced them for at least four reasons, namely, his wonderful if at times shocking message, his excellent, endearing, ingratiating character, his cognitive miracles and his physical miracles.  Let us see what each is.

 

To a nation untutored as well us uninterested in revealed monotheistic religion he presented their first ever contact with the True Divine.  He offered them a simple but most magnificent theology, a catalogue of startling and compelling incentives and threats and a law so just and moral that anybody with common and fair sense could not imagine better alternatives to.  All were dressed in a literary garb and with a literary quality the world had never seen before and has never seen since.  The Qur’an is unique in its literary merits and outclasses all literary works to date be it those of greatest writers or most talented mystics. 
Secondly, Muhammad sws was such an honest, charitable, pleasant yet dignified man that not to love and admire him was impossible. He had not a single bad habit or character defect that could repel you. He was ever ready to help, ever ready to please and accommodate. Yet he was neither naïve nor a walkover. 

 

Nobody could cheat or outwit him nor did he hesitate for a moment to call wrong “wrong” and fight like a lion to put it right.  For all that, Allah said about him in sura al Qalam “Thou indeed art on a mighty and magnificent character” (68:4).  In another sura, Ali Imran He Almighty says “With the compassion of Allah You have been tender to them. Had you been rude and stone-hearted they would disperse from around you”(3:159).  So, he both attracted good men and kept them.  Lastly, nobody could accuse him of pride; through and through he effused humility at its most heart-warming and endearing, being eminently accessible and criticisable at all times although his companions were normally too impressed with his goodness to criticise him.  His enemies and doubters sometimes did but quickly found themselves corrected by his wise responses.  A Jew who began accusing him of delaying a repayment ended up embracing Islam when the Prophet sws confirmed his right to say what he did and paid him the amount demanded.  For his person he never took offence or revenge! Incredible good!

 

Thirdly his cognitive miracles are certainly topped by the Qur’an whose knowledge came to him direct from Allah.  Then comes his uncanny gnosis born with him. In today’s terms he was the supreme psychic who saw into both past, present and future situations in matters worth knowing, his dreams were prophetic and he could confidently act on his gnosis.  This kind of knowledge, when in a Godly man, is called ‘ilm al ladun’ which derives from a reference to it in the sura al Kahf in the course of the story of Moses and Khidr (ala nabiyyina wa alaihima’ssalam).  The summary is very important for the case of Sufism. It is as follows.

 

 

STORY OF MOSES AND KHIDR (Peace be on both)

 

According to tradition, Moses AS asks Allah to let him know if there is a servant who knows what he Moses does not so that he Moses can acquire that kind of knowledge as well and can serve Allah more as a result.  Allah tells he and his attendant to take to a certain road and walk until they find a place where two seas meet and when a miraculous sign is given.  The other servant of Allah with the  knowledge Moses did not have should be there.  After an arduous walk they reach beach along with the road continues.  Some time later Moses feels he is tired enough to take a break and asks his servant for the salted fish they were taken along for their meal.  His servant replies that a while ago the fish had come alive and jumped into the sea and swam away.  “Only the Devil made me forget to remind you” apologises the servant. “That must be it” Moses says and the two retrace their steps to the place where the miracle had happened and in fact two seas were meeting.

 

As Allah promised, there they find a man about whom Allah says “Whom We have given a blessing and taught a knowledge from Our Side”.  Moses asks this man “Shall I subject myself to you so that you teach me what you have been taught about attaining perfection (or maturity)”.  Khidr (for that is said to be his name in the traditions about him) answers “Indeed you cannot keep patience with me. How can you bear with (the perplexing trials of) a knowledge in which you have no experience or expertise?”.  Moses says “Insha Allah you will find me patient and not rebelling you in any matter”.  Khidr replies “Then, when you follow me do not question anything I shall be doing but wait until I myself explain it to you”.  

 

Then the MASTER and the PUPIL begin a journey during which Khidr commits three acts which, on the face of it, are all AGAINST THE  SHARIAH.  In one he damages a ship they were boarding along with many other passengers, and makes it un-seaworthy. All have to abandon the ship which had to wait repairs.  Moses vehemently protests IN THE NAME OF THE SHARIAH. In the second he kills a young boy out of the blue. Moses even more indignantly protests IN THE NAME OF THE SHARIAH, pointing out that the master killed an innocent soul.   In each case Khidr responds saying “Did I not tell you that you cannot bear my company?”.  In the last instance Khidr repairs a derelict wall just outside a town whose people were rudely inhospitable. The two were very hungry and the last thing Moses could do as a very hungry and tired man was to work for hours to repair a wall whose apparent owners could only be the miserly townsfolk. “At least you could charge them some wages” he bewails in protest. “Aha” says Khidr “Didn’t I tell you that you could not bear my company? This is our parting then.  Yet let me explain to you what happened.  I damaged the ship because a king was in ambush in the high seas to capture all unwary ships.  To spare the two young sailor brothers such a loss, I damaged their ship so that they cannot sail until the king moves away.  I killed the boy because his parents were good believers and WE FEARED THAT he would torment them with his aggression and blasphemy later in life and WE WILLED that your Lord gives them someone better then him in purity and closer to them in compassion.  As for the wall, it belonged to two orphans and under it was buried a treasure for them and their father was a good man and Your Lord willed that the two grow up and unearth the treasure as a mercy from their Lord (were the wall allowed to crumble entirely the treasure could be exposed and stolen by others).  I did not do all these of my own accord (but with Allah’s inspiration and permission). That is the explanation of things you could not bear”. 

 

Now these totally Divine, genuine verses of the Book of Allah, slightly expanded by way of commentary, somehow totally escape those who protest against Sufism. Please read them carefully over and over again.  In them we see a great prophet-messenger from Allah, namely Moses, given a Book and a Shariah.  No contemporary should be superior to him in any respect if we are to believe our partially-sighted brothers and sisters.  YET, there is another person who may or may not be a prophet (for our Prophet sws says in a hadith that he doesn’t know whether Khidr, Dhul Qarnain and Luqman were prophets or not)  yet he is given a kind of knowledge from Allah’s Sublime Presence which not only the full prophet-messenger Moses AS is not given but even worse he is incapable of understanding!   Isn’t that unambiguously explicit from the very words of Allah azza wa jalla?  What is even more relevant to the condition of Sufis’ opponents is that the person who only knows about the Shariah and not given ‘ilm al ladun’/ a knowledge from Allah’s Side, may be  so shocked, so unable to fit anywhere the actions of someone with the ilm al ladun that he will shout out with horror and indignation “THAT IS AGAINST THE SHARIAH, how dare you”! 

 

Just like the great true prophet Moses did.  But is Allah also protesting against Khidr?  No, He Almighty is fully behind His servant Khidr and sends Moses away empty-handed but a wiser man. Now look at this. Khidr says “WE FEARED THAT he (the boy) would torment them  with his aggression and blasphemy and WE WILLED THAT your Lord give them someone better…”.   If we are to think like the opponents of Sufis and did not know that the above story we were reading was from the Book of Allah we could conclude that the acts and words words of Khidr indeed amounted to sheer SHIRK, pure blasphemy. How come a human being whatever his standing with Allah could kill a young boy because he FEARED (just feared) that he would become a bad man and then go on and say that “WE WILLED that your Lord give them someone better…”?  Is he ordering Allah around to clean up the mess and give another and better son to the boy’s parents? Since nobody can order Allah azza wa jalla around what remains to understand is that Allah has special servants who are normally unknown to us but can be found at special places characterized by ‘the meeting of two seas where miracles like dead fish coming alive can occur.  Theirs is a too special science direct from Allah’s Presence and unavailable to some prophets.  Don’t we get the impression that our Prophet’s sws leaving the question open of the likes of Khidr being  prophets or not is implying that to be given  ilm al ladun one need not be a prophet?  Had this not been the case the Messenger of Allah would explain that “Khidr had to be a prophet because he is saying that he had not done what he had done of his own accord but with Allah’s command.  Which brings us to another plague of a misunderstanding among muslims, both ulama and commoner. It is that ‘wahy’ comes only to prophets.  Before we correct this misconception let’s ask ourselves: “Who knows better Arabic, we or Allah?”

 

So how can we dismiss Allah’s words in the following verse “We have REVEALED (awhayna) to the mother of Moses ‘suckle him and if you fear for his safety then release him into the water.  Do not fear because We shall give him back to you and make him one of the messengers” (28:7).  Similarly Allah sends angels to Mary and gives her the good news of the miraculous virgin birth of a son to be named Christ Jesus son of Mary”.  That all believers, one way or another, are  also entitled to wahy is explicit from what the Prophet sws told us.: “Lucid holy dreams (ruya salih) are one forty sixth of prophethood.  After me they are the inheritance of prophethood surviving among my followers”.  

 

Additionally, Mary also saw our master Gabriel AS who spoke to her from Allah before he blew into her of Allah’s Spirit. Was she a prophet?. If you ask people who think that Gabriel only visits and informs prophets they would deny that any muslim could see and be talked to by Gabriel.  Yet on the authority of Allah we know that Gabriel may also come to non-prophets, including women. So we must stop building imaginary pigeon-holes in the form of half-baked and ill-considered concepts and too abstract and conceptual and too analytical thinking some of our classical ulama contracted from the Greek philosophers like contracting measles from other babies. Among such misguided pontifications has been that Allah is too great and serious to be a subject of our love; that a believer can only fear and respect Him. Yet, in His Qur’an Allah is not mincing His words and says “HE loves them (believers) and they love Him” (5: 54) and “Those who believe are most intense in their love for Allah (2: 165).  The fact is that before we give ourselves to philosophising and pontificating about what Islam is and allows, every verse and word of the Qur’an should be adequately weighed and included into the formation of our ideas about religious truths. To demonstrate how blind imitation and hasty consensus may fly in the face of the Qur’an we can cite another example of handy definitions handed down the centuries to us without anybody checking with ALLAH!!!  

 

Now we are routinely told that prophets are two kinds.  Those who are given a new shariah are called messengers (rusul) and those who aren’t are called only prophets (anbiya).  Again, who knows better Arabic, we or Allah?  Yet according to most ulama Abraham is a messenger while his son Ishmael a prophet subject to Abraham’s shariah. But Allah calls Ishmael both a messenger and prophet when He Almighty says “ Mention in the Book also Ishmael. He was true to his promise and a messenger and prophet (rasulan nabiyya)” (19:54) which is exactly how He Almighty talk about Moses “Mention in the Book Moses. He was a sincere servant and was a messenger and prophet” (19:51).  So all those clear cut, tidy and complacent definitions of religious terms like ‘prophet, messenger, wahy…”  are not sacrosanct in the sense that they are not adequately based on the Qur’an. 

 

They are only approximate and Qur’an’s own unambiguous statements should take precedence over them which are after all uninspired human thoughts and not Divine Revelation. It is that same laxity with definitions and concepts which lies behind the objections to Sufism and all the concepts in it like tariqat, sheikh, murid and karamat.  Literal Greek-minded scholastic people conceive concepts, prescribe definitions and institute ways of deduction which are partially at odds with Allah’s explicit statements before which all talk should cease. Then on the basis of these imperfect, man-made concepts, definitions and deductions equally imperfect scholars should stop ignoring the brilliant and momentous implications of Divine stories like that of Moses and Khidr and explaining them away in flimsy and cowardly ways so as to deny some brighter muslims attaining blessings from Allah they the mere scholars failed to attain. Why they deny Allah’s  friends, deny the special knowledge they may be given and the karamat that  may issue from them by Allah’s power and permission. Why?  I shall tell you why with Allah’s help and permission. Because those unaware of higher insights and understandings given to the better servants of the Lord and who deny the existence or possibility of such superior knowledge and miraculous powers are suffering from pride and conceit.  How can they otherwise limit Allah’s generosity to the level of only what they the mere scholars are given?  Allah is saying above that he gave to one servant of His a knowledge which left a prophet like Moses AS aghast and protesting.  Are these people higher than our master Moses AS so that nobody may be given something they do not know or cannot do?

 

The Prophet sws had all the cognitive miraculous powers- by Allah’s mercy and permission-  more than Khidr and all prophets and saints put together.  For he was created, chosen and sent as the last and final prophetic messenger of Allah and he is our only exemplar in every human perfection from Khidr-like special high gnosis to most magnificent pious character.  He was also given many physical-looking miracles like the splitting of the moon, the Ascension to Heavens (mi’raj) and angels coming to help his armies. I am saying ‘physical looking, because his miracles only looked like physical but in actual fact were beyond physics and much else.   And what is more and as Sufis rightly claim one does not to be a prophet to be given miracles.  We find in the Qur’an the instant teleportation of the throne of Bilqis the queen of Sheba effected instantly by an attendant of Solomon AS, which attendant Allah describes as “One with whom was a science from the Book” (27:40).

 

If Solomon’s non-prophet companions could have such miracle-workers among them why not sayyidina Muhammad Rasullulah sws?  Yet he sws never boasted of any but admitted them as from Allah and not himself, which is true. Nobody really has anything and all belong and due to Allah.  There is no blasphemy as long as the apparent producer of the miracle humbly confesses that it was Allah’s work entirely and not his own.  Yet is equally our duty to acknowledge the good fortune of a brother or sister in the matter and thank Allah for helping and blessing so much a fellow believer. In that case our turn may also come.  

 

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