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Third-Wave Sufism in America and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship

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Third-Wave Sufism in America and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship 4 Third-wave Sufism in America and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship Gisela Webb Sufism, or tasawwuf, is the ‘mystical dimension of Islam’.1 The term refers to a variety of modes of spirituality that developed in the Islamic world, including ascetic- socio-critical movements, esoteric and poetic interpretations of the Qur’an, and spiritual confraternities. The goal of Sufism has consistently been deepened devotion, spiritual transformation and ultimately the interiorization of the basic tenet of Islamic belief ‘that there is no God but the God’, or in the classic Sufi interpretation, ‘Only you, O God, are the Real (al-Haqq)’. Sufis have historically been major transmitters of Islam to regions far beyond the religion’s ‘Middle’ Eastern origin – Central Asia, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Malay-Indonesian world – and Sufis have continued that tradition in North America. However, until the 1990s there was little scholarly attention given to Sufism in America. There are a number of reasons contributing to this situation. First, there was a tendency among Orientalist academics, anti-cult groups and traditional Muslims alike to lump the American-bred Sufi groups into categories such as ‘cults’, ‘new age’, popular religion, ‘sects’, or ‘unorthodox’, thereby dismissing Sufism as a serious topic in the study of religion.2 Second, the historical situation (including the historiography) of Sufism itself, both inside and outside the Islamic world, has complicated the issue of understanding the relationship of present- day Sufi movements to traditional Islamic practice. That is, Sufism has always been an alternative discourse in the Islamic world, existing side by side, at times in tension, with more ‘conserving’ and legalistic elements in the tradition, and there continue to be voices in Islam that would deny the legitimacy and pervasiveness of Sufism in Islamic cultures. Add to this the criticism by some modernist and fundamentalist/ultra-conservative elements in the Muslim revivalist discourse who see Sufism as tied to pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial situations of backwardness, pacifism and societal decay. Add to this the lack of attention given in contemporary Islamic Studies to the relationship of classical traditions in Islamic mystical literature (oral and written) to their actual use in the lives of ordinary and learned Muslim indi- viduals. Related to this is the lack of attention given to the role of the ‘holy person- age’, the wali Allah (the ‘friend of God’), which was historically the central focus of popular religious and devotional life in virtually every region of the Islamic world.3 A final complication is that there are indeed many Americans involved in Sufi move- ments who emphasize historical Sufism’s language and goal of ‘the transcendent unity of God beyond all distinctions’ (including religious differences) in a way that Third-wave Sufism in America and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship 87 denies any ‘essential’ connection of Sufism with the religion of Islam.4 Despite this constellation of issues affecting the discourse on Sufism, there is enough evidence to suggest that contemporary Sufi orders have been continuing their historical role as major sources of transmission of Islamic cultural and religious beliefs, values and practices to North America. I would further argue that Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and the ‘Fellowship’ he founded have continued this transmission while addressing and indeed affecting, the dis- course on the relationship between ‘Islam’ and ‘Sufism’ in the current ‘globalized’ societal order. First-wave Sufism One can identify three major phases of Sufi activity in America. They roughly corre- spond to three distinct periods of interaction between Euro-American and Asian worlds in the twentieth century. The first period, beginning in the early 1900s, is characterized by the interest of Americans and Europeans in ‘Oriental wisdom’, which grew out of contact that Europeans had with Asians (in the broadest sense) during the colonial period. Along with the negative aspect of ‘Orient as other’ that characterized the period, the interaction of cultures did produce a number of teach- ers trained in both traditional learning and European institutions, who saw a spiri- tual lack and longing in the West and who felt compelled to bring their teachings to the West. Of course there were those who were less than authentic masters; in any case, this wave of teachers from ‘the East’ had a receptive audience in the United States. Hazrat Inayat Khan, who in 1910 founded the Sufi Order in the West, is the most well-known representative of this period. He was trained in both classical Indian and Western music, and was initiated into the Chishtiyya order by Khawaja Abu Hashim Madani. His teachings embody elements characteristic of Chishtiyya Sufism, in particular, the melding of Indian Advaita Vedanta and Islamic wahdat al-wujud (‘unity of being’) philosophical perspectives, as well as the use of sacred music, to elevate and attune the soul to the unitive structures of reality at the micro- and macrocosmic levels. He believed he had been given the mission of spreading the ‘Universal Message of the time’, a teaching that could unite East and West and lead to universal brotherhood, love and peace. However, he taught that this ‘Sufi’ message was not essentially tied to historical Islam, that the universal truth of Sufism lay at the core of all religions, and moreover, that he was called to develop new forms of ‘universal worship’ for his followers (which came to involve music as well as dis- courses).5 His autobiographical writings provide glimpses of the attitudes and social structures underlying the early twentieth century American spiritual ‘searching’. For example, he describes how in the West, ‘there are no disciples, only teachers’; how prejudice and scorn pervaded attitudes toward Islam, people of colour and people from ‘the East’, how his audiences were of the artistic and wealthy elites.6 After ini- tiating a number of murids (disciples) in the United States, Hazrat Khan returned to India, then returned to the USA in 1923 and 1925, establishing the first Sufi Order khangah (lodge) in Fairfax, California: the ‘Kaaba Allah’. Hazrat died in 1927, leav- ing small groups of murids to continue propagating the ‘Message’, but disagreement 88 Third-wave Sufism in America and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship among the murids regarding leadership, property and philosophies resulted in decline of the Order. The late Meher Baba attained some of the Sufi Order properties, adapted many of the Order’s teachings, and created ‘Sufism Reoriented’.7 Most of the ‘Sufi’, or Sufi-oriented, groups of the early twentieth century maintained this universalistic, theosophist orientation. Second-wave Sufism The second wave of Sufi activity in the United States coincided with the 1960s and 70s counter-cultural movement in which large numbers of (mostly) young middle- class (mostly, but not only) white Americans identified the cause of racism, the Vietnam War, and the evil of technocracy in a spiritual sickness that establishment religions in America had not only failed to solve, but had fostered. It was an era of seeking teachers of traditional wisdom from the ‘East’ – usually ‘Hindu’ – with little knowledge or concern as to the historical foundations of practices such as Zen, Yoga, or Sufism. It was a time of growth in comparative religious studies departments in the United States, interest in religious mysticism (fostered by the works of Mircea Eliade, William James, Thomas Merton, Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Zalman Schachter and Richard Demartino [student of D. T. Suzuki]), and cross- pollination of cultures and religions. Jewish and Christian Americans studied wisdom traditions of the East and sometimes revivified the mystical traditions of their own traditions (albeit in new adaptations).8 Certainly experimentation with drugs in the name of consciousness-raising was part of the landscape. It was the era of seeing the roots of Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement not only in the Bible, but in Gandhi, and Black Jewish and Black Muslim movements sought to revive elements of a lost legacy in the ‘Asiatic’ world. (e.g. ‘Moorish Science’). The ‘East’ seemed to offer therapeutic approaches to individual and – perhaps as a by – product – global transformation. Several Sufi groups flowered in this era. Some used ‘Sufism’ to designate a univer- sal teaching that transcended, and need not be tied to, institutional Islamic religious doctrine and practice. These universalistic, or ‘perennial’-oriented groups adopted some elements of traditional Sufi practice, but avoided overt affiliation with Islam. The most well-known example of this model was The Sufi Order of America, which was rejuvenated under the leadership of Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, son of Hazrat Inayat Khan and his American-born wife Ora Begum. After the death of his father and upon returning to America after his European education, Pir Vilayat adjusted to his hippie audience, and continued his father’s teachings while diversifying the organization and its teaching modes. Through him and other persons associated with the order, notably Shahabuddin Less and Sam Lewis, the West Coast sufi/zen/yoga/hassidic master of the late 1960s, thousands of people were introduced to ‘the Message’, and the Sufi Order of America became associated in popular American culture with ‘Sufi Dancing’ (later ‘Dances of Universal Peace’). Membership increased as the order began to co-sponsor (along with other universalist groups, such as the Temple of Understanding) events such as the ‘Cosmic Masses’ at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, organized in 1975, as part of the Spiritual Summit marking the thirtieth Third-wave Sufism in America and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship 89 anniversary of the United Nations. Also in the 1970s, the Sufi Order of the West had purchased land that had been part of a Shaker village in the Berkshire hills of upstate New York, naming it ‘the Abode of the Message’.
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