Sufi Orders
THE CASE OF SUFI ORDERS
Sufi orders basically come in two categories- true and commercial. Sometimes though, there may be some cross-contamination when a particular sheikh is a hypocrite greedy for worldly benefits and perks. We will not be discussing the commercial fake.
Actually, the Sufi master primarily aims at an intensive conquest of amenable souls, so as to multiply the number of exceptionally good servants of Allah, relying on Allah as far as success is concerned, for only Allah can guide hearts in a true sense. The masters efforts may be crowned with extensive success later on, but that is not his deliberate aim as he knows full well that overextending himself may end up with having to deal with a lot of nutty or plain bad apples. Spreading one’s net out too wide may bring in more sea nasties in addition to good fish and the nasties can do anything, up to and including a takeover.
As far as us the humble if hopefully good-willed imitators are concerned, we better go for quality rather than numbers, that is to say the intensive. Our academy and institute is trying to implement this project. Hopefully more high quality Sufis shall cast more high quality spiritual pollen further out as to trigger a spring, blooming with spiritual development among people, without robbing or enslaving anybody and even without being known as the catalysts. To earn Allah’s Pleasure, one need not be famous although in suitable cases that may help more. That is up to Allah to decide and grant. More about this pollination metaphor later.
To begin with, our choice is going for the intensive cultivation of ourselves whereby each and every aspirant is mentored to attain all the holiness in him which is awaiting arousal and functioning. As we know, in each and every man is the spirit which Allah implanted in him from His Own; it is only a matter of right effort with right perseverance to reach and stir this holy spirit into action like a fertilized bird egg ticking into the embryo development mode when put in a warm enough environment. Of course not all eggs so put will deliver a healthy chick, and in fact some eggs will fail either because of genetic defects or imperfect hatching conditions as far as they are concerned. In other words, no prophet or Sufi master can help to save all of his charges despite the best will in the world. Read if you wish:
“You cannot (o Prophet) guide whom you love but Allah guides whom He will...” (28: 56).
We can only try and pray and in fact, we can never feel secure in ourselves let alone concerning others. After all the Lord Almighty said “None can feel safe from the conspiracy of Allah but the people who are bound to fail” (7: 99).
We therefore take refuge in Allah against being complacent. This reminds one the extraordinary boastings of some Sufis, after they are granted a few spiritual visions with which they are spoiled. We should beware that we remain sane and therefore safe at all times.
ALLEGED SPIRITUAL ORDERS NOTORIOUS FOR THEIR LITTLE AND SELECTIVE (PREFERABLY CELEBRITIES-ORIENTED) INTENSIVE EFFORT WHILE THEIR ENERGIES ARE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY DIRECTED TO EXTENSIVE EFFORT
Some allegedly spiritual orders in all religions blossom into worldwide movements with all the paraphernalia of worldly success, like wealth, fame and notoriety, participation in the high society and rubbing shoulders and exchanging deals with the high and the mighty including top politicians. Eventually, such orders may end up as members of the profane elites running particular countries and sometimes acting as international actors as well. This membership cannot fail to dip them into political and financial corruption, which is inseparable from all politics and big business- this is so, simply because in the sharing of profane benefits, laws of the jungle apply and not the laws of salvation. A saint cannot prosper in a brothel, after all, unless he also joins the fornication-based system.
Such orders do impose some intensive effort, but that is more akin to marketing brain-washings than to real ennobling effort. The recruit is not programmed towards developing a universal conscience, caring about all creation with justice and mercy; instead he is suitably brainwashed to be both a good customer of the orders offers and products and a good salesmen of the same. So, if the leader who often has implicit or explicit divine pretensions, has books published in his name the recruit is asked to sell as many of them as possible, whatever it takes to do so. In the case of free books and leaflets, pestilentially pushing them to people is another equally required task. The whole thing looks the same as pushing product advert cards to passers-by on crowded street pavements and is recruitment and sales promotion oriented. How similar are the attitudes and methods of the servants of the Satan whether marketing telephone cards or cults!
The more successful of such cults boast of a few top film or music stars who both serve as publicity idols and big donors- it has to be said that this is a very unlikely combination in mainstream commercial publicity whereby the celebrities used are the recipients of the fabulous sums of money, not the givers. Does not this show, albeit in a negative example, that the spiritual beats the material: if the product is material, the star charges fees for promoting it, while if it is spiritual he or she both pays and promotes! Incidentally, good enslavement, isn’t it?
THE WORTHY INTENSIVE EFFORT
Intensive effort on persons can be as wicked as brainwashing and as noble as bringing about sanctity in the person cultivated.
The mentor (called sheikh or murshid in Sufism) must be really good and genuine for the best results, while it is known from experience, that sometimes a not so morally good but clever and knowledgeable pretender may help an exceptionally sincere and hard-working disciple to attain spiritual ranks of which the pretender himself is not aware of and cannot attain. Obviously the True Guide is Allah, and Allah’s employing an imperfect sheikh in the production of a seriously advanced good Sufi is another proof of Allah’s strange ways. What happens in such cases looks like as follows: the exceptionally talented sincere murid is in fact learning from the secrets already in him as deposited in the spirit Allah blew into him upfront and the imperfect sheikh pours into him enough useful knowledge to trigger and catalyse a reaction of self-revelation to occur in the murid. In fact there is a special class of talented people termed ‘Uwaisi” who are directly guided by Allah without a sheikh being around. This term derives from the name of Uwais al Qarani who had fallen in love with and believed the Messenger of Allah (S) but could not travel to visit him because his mother was very ill and she had nobody other than her good son Uwais to care for her. As a result, Rasulullah (S) advised his companions to treat Uwais as a dear brother, if and when he would come to Medina. We may also see a few prophets as ‘uwaisis’ in the sense that such prophets had no inkling of either Allah’s Unity or His Law or both, unlike some other prophets who knew these matters before they were called to their mission. Prophets like Joseph (S) however knew all about Allah and His Law because they were the sons of prophets, in the case of Joseph it was his father Jacob (S).
The worthy intensive effort is that work on the part of a sheikh, spent on mentoring a talented and pure-hearted murid. Here talent does not mean academic talent, although that helps enormously, but it means a great aptitude for spiritual understanding and appreciation which enables the murid to help his sheikh to help him far more than the sheikh could otherwise help. In fact exceptionally talented murids may at times help back the sheikh, normally without the murid realising, but definitely the sheikh is aware, with or without an acknowledgement as such.
A good sheikh’s preference, is to help as many talented murids he can find, helping them in the form applying to them intensive spiritual training. The place of honour in this task is the sheikh’s constant emphasis on noblest morality and most graceful manners, the result of attainment of which will be that the murid shall attain the most perfect possible (for a non-prophet) emulation of Rasullulah (S), which after all is the ultimate product of all true Sufism.
The numbers the good sheikh can raise this way is of secondary importance. A good khalifa (both as an appointed assistant sheikh and a worthy successor) will insha Allah do his part in the manufacturing of more true saints and he for his part may be blessed with all the murids the world can contain. All the reward this more successful successor accumulates is credited in full to his more lonely sheikh. We can see this in the profits accruing to the Messenger of Allah (S): All the rewards accruing to each and every believer from his time to the Day of Judgment will accrue to Rasulullah (S) as well and in full because in a hadith we find this “Whoever opens a channel to a good shall be rewarded with all the rewards accruing to all those who utilized that channel to do their own good works”. Conversely “Whoever opens a channel to an evil practice shall be punished with an amount of punishment equal to all punishment accruing to all those who do utilize that channel to do their evils”. We take refuge in Allah from that.
THE LESSON AND THE PART FOR THE MURID TO PLAY
It should be obvious by now that a worthy murid should put attainment of highest morality and most graceful manners as his life’s dearest and highest aim and serve his sheikh and his brethren in faith and all humanity and eventually all creation through such attainments. A murid with true promise has no time for things which may distance him from this supremely noble aim. Mind you, not a single innocent or legal biological indulgence like good enough eating, sheltering, married life and earning an honest living etc., is sinful but on the contrary part of the murid’s obligations to himself and to the society. Even some reasonable play, sport, social pleasantries including humour and jokes and artistic activity are welcome, since most of these were among the Prophet’s behaviours. In fact these defrost and detoxify the soul and confer on it new energy and more spiritual awareness and alertness. In other words a Sufi guide needs to live all the legitimate or innocent experiences he can get of ordinary people’s lives in order that he can advise and guide them from first-hand experience. The more he knows about life the more competently he can work intensely on others who come to him for help or meet him during a crisis. In fact for thoroughness’ sake the Greatest of Guides Allah the Most High allows the Satan to mislead each and every one of His servants from time to time in a thousand different ways, and that is intended, unbeknown to the Satan, to refine and build up His servants more. That is why repentance is the most precious of acts and a most effective learning experience.
So o Sufi, do not avoid or escape life and the society of men lest you miss very many priceless chances to learn about the Lord, for the Lord is in His servants in ways you cannot imagine. Read if you wish “Whichever direction you turn to right there is the Face of Allah” (2: 115). Amen.
18. ALWAYS A GOOD OPINION OF ALLAH
FROM ADOLESCENCE TO ADULTHOOD
If everything goes well, childhood is paradise. Of course everything never goes well at all times and even the best loved children had, their bad and unhappy days. To begin with, sickness is never away from the new-born and until about the age of seven at least a few bad stomach related illnesses a year are inevitable not to mention those usual childhood infections. The reason is not so much good health and ill health but it is the fact that young persons are fast developing organisms trying to rapidly adapt to a life outside the womb where all was real paradise barring genetic defects or accidents. All major biological adaptation processes are risky and also painful, and are at their densest below the age of seven or so.
Nevertheless, when a reasonably fortunate adult and even adolescent looks back at his childhood, it is a rather romantic and nostalgic experience. The same applies to an elderly person who looks back to his youth- for him they are ‘the good old days’.
Yet such nostalgias can rarely stand-up to a close and realistic enough inspection. Let us take my own childhood and youth. I was a child was a child in the 1940s and a rather fortunate one at that. Until I was ten we were a reasonably comfortable and humbly prosperous family simply because dad and mum were very talented people. Dad ran two shops, one pastry until about 10 in the morning when throngs of people on their way to their work would pass by his shop on the main thoroughfare of the town to their early morning jobs and liked picking up hot piping pastries he was turning out at breakneck speed (and I was helping in small things on school holidays and eating a nice and unusual breakfast as well and for free), and the other a carpentry and furniture making shop where, with his old Greek assistant, namely Menelaus, they would manufacture various bits of furniture especially for the prospective newlyweds. I have every reason to believe that I was the favourite child of my family both in respect to my parents and grandparents on the one hand and with respect to uncles and aunts and even more surprisingly to my siblings on the other. I was the most well-behaved and cheerful of my siblings and have no single memory of anybody being cross with me let alone hurt me except my only elder brother who had to have his hits and tumbles with me, I being at the receiving end as the younger one.
Had it not been for him I would have grown up too soft and unfit for future challenges. I am thanking him. Otherwise I was surrounded with absolute love from all sides, all of which could not spoil me in the least. Yet when I look deeper I do not fail to find some inevitable unhappiness not only I but nobody else could escape. To begin with, we as children had alot of outdoor activities in the course of which falls, knocks and hurts occurred. We bled at the knees which then became protracted scabs, we had chronic purulent eye infections all because even towns were rural in the sense that they were dotted by small farms and grazing grounds where man and animal and their debris mixed, which the hot summer sun and humid winters processed into highly infectious filth. Accordingly three siblings of mine nearly died of typhoid and a girl schoolmate actually died of it, giving me my first terror of death. Her funeral was the first great traumatic experience of my life.
Then came the fear of evil people. My father told us boys that paedophiles were everywhere looking for unwary boys and that we should run away from too complimenting strangers offering us sweets and the like- all of this despite the fact that mosques were everywhere resounding with azans and thronging with congregations. Apparently there was a lot of formal piety while, judging from the frequent fights and arguments and occasional violence among the adults, a lot of meanness going around as well. These and other ills, like always wearing scabs and at least fearing terrible infections (I for once had my eyes protected by a fine gauze cloth for a year with a weekly painful visit to the government ophthalmologist). In short life was far less comfortable and safe than it is now and the case must be that we tend to glamorise our early life more than it deserves. Instead I believe, we should thank for our present comforts, security and prosperity a bit more. Compared to those ‘good old days’ we are living like small kings. We should thank God.
What I am driving at is this: if we are wise which is to say mature, we should appreciate the goodness of God to us at all times and thank Him from the bottom of our heart for it. What is more, God’s favours to His believers can only increase over time and therefore we should see our present condition not worse but better than before. Read if you wish “If you give thanks I will definitely give more” (14: 7). Allah only speaks truth.
I am therefore saying that complaining of our fate despite all the good things in our life is an adolescent attitude and not an adult one. As you must know, adolescence is arguably the most critical and hurtful of times of our lives as we live then torn up between the loss of our childhood securities and certainties on the one hand and the incalculable challenges of an uncertain future as compounded by the fast and dizzying and drastic biological and psychological transformations surging in us on the other. So it is inevitable that, parallel to this torn-upness we go through another: We both desire and fear our upcoming adulthood. If the desire is more than the fear we can cope and end up as happily self-supporting adults with no nostalgia for a lost childhood. If not, we drag our feet and perhaps unconsciously seek to maintain our dependence on others, if not our parents then the state, and then drift towards God knows where. Then a guilty something gnaws at our heart: we are both an unhappy child and an inadequate adult and torn between two unhappinesses we do not feel like being thankful to Allah. However, it is not Allah Who is at fault but ourselves. Not thanking Allah is not being happy as well as not appreciating but rather resenting Allah.
And that is Hell in the making.
We need to grow up, grow out of a troubled and resentful adolescence of mind into that of a fully functioning adult free from piteous complaints and instead busy with adult activities, victories and thanks.
ABOUT COMPLAINTS
Complaints are of two types- on the one hand, constructive and responsible complaints and on the other subversive and irresponsible complaints. The first I call adult, the second I prefer to call immature or hysterical rather than adolescent for reasons which will be clear in a moment.
Adult or constructive and responsible complaints are those which aim to help both the complainer and the complained against. Take this example: you order a take away sandwich from a kiosk where they are made freshly on order telling the maker that you intend to consume it an hour or two later. You read your paper while waiting for your sandwich and eventually you are given it. You check it and find that fresh salad has been put together with hot meat or cheese. You know that this is not a healthy arrangement for a sandwich intended to be eaten an hour or two later because bacteria may grow in the mixture quickly. You very politely as well as kindly explain this to the maker, perhaps also reminding him that you had said you were going to consume it much later and that in such cases packing the cooked and uncooked items separately was the safer way. Because you are so relaxed and look so harmless and well-meaning that the sandwich man is unable to resent your complaint but profusely apologising with equal kindness and politeness replaces the sandwich without any fuss. In this example you helped both yourself and the man and also all future take-away customers who will not be harmed by any wrongly packed sandwiches. A Sufis or mature person’s complaints are always of this kind. In case the mistaken party responds immaturely the mature person just walks away and may in fact apologise to defuse a dangerous situation if for nothing else. An immature or “adolescent” personality may be very hot tempered and aggressive and may hit out without warning. You see, complaining is a dangerous business if you are not careful.
Before I forget I comment: Even Allah Who is always just and in the right will not resent a polite and respectful complaint. We have a few prayers on the part of prophets reported either in the Qur’an or the Hadith. To begin with the Qur’an we find Moses complaining constructively and respectfully. This happened when Moses, on the instructions of the Lord chose seventy of his people for a session of service to Him on the Mount Sinai. Because a few of these asked irreverent questions Allah hit out with lightning whereupon Moses raised his hands and voice in plaintive supplication- “Our Lord” he said “Had Thou willed Thou couldst destroy them and me before. Wilt Thou then destroy us for what a few trouble-makers from among us did?” (7: 155)
Another and better example is Rasulullah’s prayer he made on his way back from his abortive mission to Taif where he was almost killed in the hands of his unwelcoming hosts. Bleeding with injuries and exhausted from fatigue he cried out to Heaven “O Allah to Thee I complain about the weakness of my power and smallness of my means and my lowly status among people- to whom art Thou abandoning me? To an enemy glowering over me or a relation in whose hand Thou placed my affairs. Still if Thou at not angry with me I do not mind all this except that Thy sparing me shall be more comfortable for me...” Allah kindly and happily accepted His servant’s complaint and granted his request. He sent him to Medina to a king’s welcome and a bright future.
As for the subversive and irresponsible complaints we have again one from the Qur’an. Moses is leading his people to the Promised Land after presiding over their delivery from Egypt. In the terrible wilderness in between where nothing is growing they are being fed from heaven in the form of manna (a natural carbohydrate formed in the upper part of the desert atmosphere in the bellies of some insects feeding on tamarisk plant) and salwa (the delicious bird quail) which often fall from the sky ready roasted in the excessive daytime heat. Feeding on these two items day after day and forgetting their pains back in Egypt too soon they begin to pester Moses with their interminable complaints saying “Moses, we cannot make do with a single diet therefore pray to ‘your Lord’ (not theirs?) to issue to us from what the earth grows (and not what the heaven sends) like its vegetables, its cucumbers, its garlic, its lentils, its onions”. He said ‘are you replacing what is better with what is inferior? Then go back to Egypt where all you want are” (2: 61).
Allah continues in the same verse “After this the mark of lowliness and misery was placed on them and they met Allah’s wrath...”
You see whatever good Allah did for them they were not satisfied and instead of counting their blessings they complained and complained and complained- in brief they did not entertain too high an opinion about Allah. That is our subject, I mean our opinon about Allah (zannuna billah). We must outgrow our psychologically troubled adolescence and become psychological adults on top of anatomical. We must put our step on the Right Path and learn to increasingly enjoy a very high opinion about Allah. Then as we keep this very high opinion of Allah we may rest assured that Allah will do everything to even more enhance that opinion. This is key to heaven even while on this earth as we will shortly see insha Allah.
WATCHING YOUR WORLD WITH ABSORBED INTEREST- INTEREST IN ITS MIRACLES AND THEIR MIRACLEWORKER ALLAH
Let many philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists and a good many good-for-nothing amateurs claim that there is no God the Sufi knows that God is and he can therefore enjoy God’s workings as displayed in both the sensible world and the world felt inside by the Sufi and in fact by everybody else. What the godless people don’t understand is that not only their own consciousness is something scientifically un-provable but also that it is this very un-provable thing which creates and contains everything else these people ever come to know and analyse and supposedly understand. All our perceptions are nothing more than an involuntary synthesis of the impressions of our perceptive abilities like vision and touch and the stimuli from an apparently outside world which looks almost totally independent from us. What is more, we never let this mental construct alone but project into it thousands of our hopes, fears and fancies, as much as our superstitions and un-provable beliefs. Then all these go to form our ideas about what is and what is not and what is true and what is not and what is right and what is not, often with the result that we often disagree on many points including the so-called scientific and less often also fight and less often also kill!
We Sufis do not bother whether the taste of ice-cream is real or a mirage or for that matter whether God exists as much as matter seems to exist but we busy ourselves enjoying both the ice-cream and God. If God is a theory then it is the most useful theory ever founded, provided it is created in the image of what is the very best and noblest in man and not less and never the worst. So if the God image of a Medieval inquisitor or a modern religious terrorist is bad it is because these two people are bad and not that God cannot be perceived and benefited from better. We believe that God created man in reality in such a way that, among all creatures known to us, man, through the prophets among them, can create back God in his imagination and emotions. This must be a perfect formula because it worked and can continue to work at least in the majority of people including their best.
Against the wrong God of the terrorist and the inquisitor we have the infinitely Good if at times tactically terrible-looking God of the three great monotheistic religions, and especially that of Islam could not be improved upon. Make God too soft and too good and He does not work and make Him too harsh and He can only scare away and again not work. Human psychology works by the law of carrot-and-stick and without this dual motivator in fact nothing moral can work.
Now the believer, absolutely and happily convinced of the existence of God as both the Power and Intelligence behind all perceptible existence and any beyond, can settle and enjoy an unending exploration of God’s character and dealings, like the wisdom behind creation and death, pain and pleasure, justice and injustice and see, at least according to himself, the appropriateness of each manifestation. Only too prepared to approve and follow the lead of God he plods on despite all his worries and second thoughts and lo and behold as he persists in his faithful contemplations and obedience things in his life and experience begin to improve beyond recognition. Not only his angers and resentments and desire to hit out etc., begin to melt away and instead positively becomes more tolerant, understanding, generous etc. all of which begin to be reciprocated by his life. Not only his popularity improves but so does even his fortune. It looks as if all the world and all people in his life look with more favour on him and even enjoy pleasing and accommodating him. Even total strangers begin to like him instantly and race to help him. And that is in fact how he regards and treats others. Even stranger things begin to crop up: even inanimate things like the weather and shopping bargains and other coincidences of life take a turn for the better. It seems it is not only people responding instinctively positively towards the God’s friend but all other beings and factors. These combined things pleasurably persuades the man of God that an Intelligence and Power underlying all these personal intelligences and tangible impersonal powers are under the Command and Coordination of a Supra Ultimate Intelligence and Power which becomes too obvious in Its manifestations and too persuasive in Its fundamental benevolence. And that may not be all. A day may come when the friend of God feels grand strange powers are awakening in him which he can put to use at will. He begins to find information flowing into him as if from nowhere, information like the whereabouts, hows and whys of things and persons and also powers being available to him that he never suspected to exist before. Once there, he can just look back and laugh at the deniers and also excuse them unless they turn nasty.
All these and more are among the genuine fruits of faith in True God and as far as the good believer is concerned, they are available in abundance. The good believer then becomes an able commentator on the goings on around him whether human or natural affairs and fundamentally either justly happy with or justly unhappy with them. He has attained that science called ‘ilmun ladunni’, i.e. that science mentioned in the Qur’an in surat al Kahf v. 65ff. Equipped with it he can read the events and persons correctly and deal with matters arising, ably and justly. He becomes a member of Allah’s privy council so-to-speak where he partakes of certain inspirations as Allah sees fit for him to receive and execute and what is even more beautiful, he will never be proud about but dutifully thankful for it. Amen.