“Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies.”
With these words, William Dalrymple defended plans to build an Islamic cultural center near the site of the World Trade Center in New York. Writing in The New York Times and Interntional Herald Tribune this week, he points out that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the main figure behind the project – called the Cordoba Initiative – is one of America’s leading Sufi thinkers.
Since 9/11, and most recently during the debate over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” (it is two and a half city-blocks from Ground Zero and it’s not a mosque), there have been frequent calls to understand better the religious divisions and complexity within the Islamic world, and to stop identifying every adherent of the world’s second largest religion with a very small group of violent fundamentalists.
Unfortunately, just as often these distinctions are forgotten — especially when, as now in the US, emotive and non-rational impulses are at work.
And yet, by ignoring the nuances and differences between different Muslim groups, the self-appointed warriors against terrorism may be ignoring crucial allies.
“In the most radical parts of the Mulsim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do,” writes Dalrymple.
And so, as a small step in beginning to understand some of the differences between groups of Muslims within and between countries, Nicolaas Biegmann’s new book “Living Sufism: Sufi Rituals in the Middle East and the Balkans” is as good a place to start as any.
In his introduction, entitled “A Different Islam,” Biegmann, a scholar of Sufism and of Balkan history, sets up Sufis in opposition to Islamic fundamentalists in just the same way as Dalrymple.
“[A]mong Muslims there are two extremes. At one extreme we see the fundamentalist ‘Islamists’… They are exclusive, politicized, and vociferous. … At the other extreme we find the Sufis, the mystics in Islam, who are in love with God.”
Indeed, the very reasons which make Sufism an attractive counter-weight to Islamic fundamentalism also seem to make it unlikely that Sufis — despite their great numbers — will ever constitute a strong political or popular force. As Biegmann puts it, Sufis “remain largely in the background because of a lack of ambition to rule or proselytize, and mostly because they do not want to cause any trouble. No mess, no press.”
Drawing on a lifetime of experience living and studying in Egypt, Syria and the Balkans, the author — who is proficient in Arabic, Turkish, and Serbo-Croat — has produced an intimate portrait of the living practices of certain Sufi orders.
Biegmann provides some 140 photographs of Sufi rituals, accompanied by 50 or so pages of explanatory text. The book has been excellently published in a wide format by the American University in Cairo Press in order to give due space to the photographs.
In his first two chapters, Biegmann provides a serviceable primer on the origins, rituals, and organization of Sufis. He describes the zikr, or “remembrance,” the principal Sufi ritual, in which the 99 Names of God, and related declarations, such as “There is no god but God,” are repeated, sometimes to the accompaniment of music and rhythmic movement.
Biegmann outlines how Sufis are organized into orders (turuk, singular tarika), each of which has a spiritual ancestor, its founder saint, and within which there are autonomous groups led by a sheikh. There is great variety between the practices of the hundreds of different orders, and even within orders spread across the world.
“The zikr of the Rifa‘is [one of the larger Sufi orders] in Egypt is very dissimilar from that of their brethren in Macedonia and Kosovo,” notes the author.
A long interview with Sheikh Zahir, an Egyptian sheikh of the Rifa‘i order, is the centerpiece of two chapters devoted to Sufism in Egypt. The Sheikh describes in detail the experience of the zikr, the aim of which is to become detached from all worldly concerns and reach union with God. Despite the intensely personal nature of this experience, the Sheikh succeeds in conveying something of its quality.
“The heart is a live vessel,” Sheikh Zahir explains, “If a pot is only half full of honey and you touch it, you will touch glass. But if we fill it to the brim, will you then touch glass or honey? You will touch honey, because it is overflowing. When you touch someone who is engaged in the zikr, he will say, ‘Allah’.”
The chapters on Egypt are followed by some 40 photographs of followers of Sheikh Zahir practicing their rituals, principally the zikr. Many of these are very intimate, capturing as far as one can the movement and intensity of the process of “remembrance.” Only because of his close friendship with the Sheikh over a period of 20 years — Biegmann wrote “Egypt: Moulids, Saints, Sufis” in 1990 — was the author able to record such private moments in photographs.
“Living Sufism” continues with descriptions and photographs of Sufi practices in Bosnia-Herzogovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Syria. Although Biegmann by no means aims to provide an exhaustive overview of all Sufi orders across the world, his choice of two Middle Eastern countries along with some of the Balkan states gives the reader a good sense of the variety of Sufism.
Sheikh Hilal, for example, a leader of a group of Nakshbandi Sufis in Bosnia-Herzogovina, refuses to lead anything other than a seated zikr, in marked contrast to the standing zikr-s of Sheikh Zahir which involves rhythmic movement.
Biegmann’s book is an excellent place to start learning about Sufism. And even for those already acquainted with these mystics’ rituals, “Living Sufism” will provide new details and angles on this multifarious tradition.
It is, after all, imperative to begin to understand the tradition from which men like Feisal Abdul Rauf come, not to mention the dozens of Pakistani Sufis recently killed by the Taliban in Lahore, or the estimated 6 million adherents of Sufism in Egypt.
Nicolaas Biegmann, “Living Sufism: Sufi Rituals in the Middle East and the Balkans,” AUC Press, 2009, LE200 / $39.95
