Ansari -- THE SUFIS How did emerge in the early Islamic era? How did Sufism differ in the manner in which the individual approached ? Compare the growth of Sufism alongside the development of philosophy and the hadith? Analyse the responses to the growth of Sufism. To what extent was it tolerated or oppressed? Why? Sifi mystics and merchants have been credited with being the most successful exporters of Islam into Central Asia. What would account for the success of Sufi in contrast to orthodox Sunni or Shi’a?

Almost from the start, however, as the scholars were codifying the law, some Gradually a buzz got started about these eccentrics -- that some of them had people were asking, "Is this all the revelation comes to in the end -- a set of broken through the barriers of the material world to a direct experience of Allah. rules? Because I'm not feeling it. Is there nothing more to Islam?" Instructions from God on high were all very well, but some people longed to experience God In Basra, for example, lived the poet Rabia al-Basri, whose life is now laced with as a palpable living presence right now, right down here. What they wanted legend. Born in the last years of Umayyad rule, she was a young woman when from the revelations was transformation and transcendence. the Abbasids took over. As a little girl, she had been traveling somewhere with her family when bandits hit the caravan. They killed her parents and sold Rabia A few of these people began to experiment with spiritual exercises that went into slavery. That's how she ended up in Basra as a slave in some rich man's way beyond the requirements of duty. They read the Qur'an incessantly or household. Her master, the stories say, kept noticing a luminous spirituality spent hours reciting the names of Allah. In Baghdad, for example, there was a about her that made him wonder .... One night, when she was lost in prayer, he man named al-Junayd who habitually performed four hundred units of the observed a halo surrounding her body. It struck him suddenly that he had a Muslim prayer ritual after work every day. In reaction, perhaps, to the luxurious saint living in his house, and awe took hold of him. He set Rabia free and lifestyles of Muslim elite, some of these seekers embraced voluntary poverty, pledged to arrange a good marriage for her. He would get her connected to one living on bread and water, dispensing with furniture, and wearing simple of the best families in the city, he vowed. She had only to name the man she garments made of rough, uncarded wool, which is called suf in Arabic, for which wanted to marry, and he would open up negotiations at once. reason people began to call these people Sufis. But Rabia said she could not marry any man, for she was already in love. They professed no new creed, these Sufis. They were not out to launch another sect. Sure, they opposed worldly ambition and corruption and greed, "In love?" gasped her recent master. "With whom?" but so did every Muslim, in theory. The Sufis differed from the others only in "With Allah!" And she began to pour forth poetry of such rapturous passion that saying, "How do you purify your heart? Whatever the exactly correct gestures her former owner became her first and lifelong disciple. Rabia entered upon a and litanies may be, how do you actually get immersed in Allah to the exclusion life of ascetic contemplation, mystic musings that frequently erupted into a love of all else?" poetry so intensely emotional it sounded almost carnal, except that the "lover" They began to work out techniques for eliminating distractions and cravings not she addressed was Allah: just from prayer but from life. Some spoke of engaging in spiritual warfare O my own Lord, the stars glitter against their own meanest tendencies. Harking back to a hadith in which and the eyes of men are closed. Mohammed distinguished between a "greater" and a "lesser" jihad, they Kings have locked their doors. declared that the internal struggle to expunge the ego was the real jihad, the Lovers are alone with their beloved ones ... And here I am alone with You. greater jihad. (The lesser jihad they identified as the struggle against external enemies of the community.) How much poetry she poured forth, I don't know. The canon that survives is slight, but in her day, her fame was great: many journeyed to Basra just to see Rabia for themselves. Many came away convinced that she had found the key But the sober Sufis began to back away from him, because Hallaj was saying to union with Allah. To her, the key was not fear but love, utterly abandoned, things like, "My turban is wrapped around nothing but God." And again, "Inside reckless, and unlimited love. my clothes you'll find nothing but God." And finally, in case someone didn't get his point, "I am God." Well, actually, he said, "I am Truth," but "Truth" was Easy enough to say but how could one actually fall into such love? Hungry famously one of the ninety-nine names of God and given Hallaj's recent history, seekers hung around with the charismatic mystic herself, hoping to catch her no one could miss what he was getting at. passion like a fever. Some did catch it, they said, which of course brought more seekers to her gates. I don't call them students, because no books were This was too much. The orthodox scholars demanded action. The Abbasid involved, no scholarship, no study. Rabia of Basra did not teach. She simply khalifa wanted to appease the scholars so they would get off his back about the radiated, and people in her vicinity changed. This became the pattern in philosophers. He therefore had Hallaj clapped in prison for eleven years, but Sufism: direct transmission of techniques leading to enlightenment from master Hallaj was so lost to the world by this time, he didn't care. Even in his cell he to mureed, as would-be Sufis were called. Until this time, most Muslim mystics kept spouting his God-intoxicated utterances, sometimes associating himself were "sober" Sufis, rigorously devoted to rituals and recitation. Their devotions with Jesus Christ, and often mentioning martyrdom. One thing was for sure: he focused on fear (of God). Rabia Basri put love at the center and helped spawn recanted nothing. Finally, the orthodox establishment decided they had run out a long tradition of "God-intoxicated Sufis." Let's be clear, though: all of these of options. They would have to pressure the state to apply the time-tested, people were first and Sufis next. I state this caveat simply because never-fail method of discrediting a message: kill the messenger. today lots of people call themselves Sufis when they're really just singing and The authorities did not just execute Hallaj. They hung him, cut off his limbs, dancing themselves into a state of euphoria. The Sufis were not after a mere decapitated him, and finally burned his corpse. Oddly enough, it didn't work. emotion. They weren't trying to get high. Their spiritual practices began with Hallaj was gone, but Sufism continued to proliferate. Charismatic individuals the known devotions of Islam and then added more on top. kept emerging, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all across the civilized People flocked to Sufis with a definite goal in mind. They hoped to "get world. Some were "sober" Sufis like Junayd and some were the God- somewhere." Working with a Sufi master smacked of learning a methodology. intoxicated variety, like Rabia Basri and Hallaj. Indeed, what Sufis did came to be labeled the , the "method." Those who In sum, by the mid-eleventh century, Muslims were hard at work on three great entered upon the method expected to move through distinct stages to cultural projects, pursued respectively by scholar-theologians, philosopher- annihilation of their egos and immersion in God. scientists, and Sufi mystics: to elaborate Islamic doctrine and law in full; to The jurists and the orthodox scholars did not look kindly on the Sufis, especially unravel the patterns and principles of the natural world; and to develop a the God-intoxicated variety. The language employed by these saints began to technique for achieving personal union with God. Yes, the three groups sound a bit heretical. Their claims grew ever more extravagant. Common folks overlapped somewhat, but overall they pulled in competing directions, and their began to ascribe magical powers to the most famous Sufis. The hostilities intellectual disagreements had high and sometimes bloody political and financial came to a head in the late tenth century CE with a Persian Sufi named al-Hallaj. stakes. At this juncture, one of the intellectual giants of world history was born of Persian-speaking parents in the province of Khorasan. His name was Abu Hallaj means "cotton carder." This was his father's profession, and he too Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali. started out in the family trade; but the longing for union with God sank talons into his heart, and he abandoned his home to search for a master who would By his early twenties, Ghazali had already earned acclaim as one of the initiate him into Sufi secrets. At one point, he spent an entire year standing foremost of his age. No matter how many hadith you knew, he knew motionless in front of the Ka'ba, never uttering a sound. One year! Imagine the more. In his day, some ulama had elaborated a to compete with that of attention this might have drawn to him. Later, he went traveling to India and to the Mu'tazilites. The Asharite school, as it was called, insisted that faith could Central Asia, and everywhere he went he spouted poetry and gave strange never be based on reason, only on revelation. Reason's function was only to speeches, and he attracted countless followers. support revelation. Asharite theologians were constantly squaring off against prominent Mu'tazilites in public debates, but the Mu'tazilites knew fancy Greek West, by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume; and in the tricks for winning arguments, such as logic and rhetoric, so they were constantly 1970s, I read essentially the same argument made again by the American Zen making the Asharites look confused. Buddhist Alan Watts, who likened cause and effect to a cat walking back and forth past a narrow slit in a fence. If we're looking through the slit from the other Ghazali came to their rescue. The way to beat the philosophers, he decided, side, Watts said, we keep seeing first the head of the cat and then the tail, was to join them enough to use their tricks against them. He plunged into a which doesn't mean the head causes the tail. (Actuallly; I think it does, in a study of the ancients, mastered logic, and inhaled the treatises of the Greek. sense, but I won't get into that here.) Then he wrote a book about Greek philosophy called The Aims of the Philosophers. It was chiefly about Aristotle. In the preface, he said the Greeks Take it however you will, the argument against causality undermines the whole were wrong and he would prove it, but first -- in this book -- he would explain scientific enterprise. If nothing actually causes anything else, why bother to what Greek philosophy was all about so that readers would know what he was observe the natural world in search of meaningful patterns? If God is the only refuting when they read his next book. cause, the only way to make sense of the world is to know God's will, which means that the only thing worth studying is the revelation, which means that the One has to admire Ghazali's fair-mindedness. He didn't set up a straw man for only people worth listening to are the ulama. Ghazali allowed that mathematics, himself to knock down. His account of Aristotle was so lucid, so erudite, that logic, and even the natural sciences could lead to true conclusions, but even hard-core Aristotelians read the book and said, ''Aha! Now at last I wherever they conflicted with the revelations, they were wrong. But if science is understand Aristotle!" right only when it reaches the same conclusions as revelation, we don't need Ghazali's book made its way to Andalusia and from there into Christian Europe, science. All the truth we need we can get from the revelations. where it dazzled those few who could read. Western Europeans had pretty Some of the philosophers struck back. Ibn Rushd (known to Europeans as much forgotten classical Greek thought since the fall of e Rome. For most, this Averroes) wrote a riposte to Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, was their first exposure to Aristotle. Somewhere along the way, however, but it did little good: when the smoke cleared, Ghazali had won the day. From Ghazali's preface had dropped out, so Europeans n didn't know Ghazali was ;, his time forward, Greek-based Muslim philosophy lost steam and Muslim against Aristotle. Some, indeed, thought he was Aristotle, writing under a pen interest in natural science foundered. Ghazali won tremendous accolades for name. In any case, The Aims ofthe Philosod phers so impressed Europeans his work. He was appointed head of the prestigious Nizamiya University in that Aristotle acquired for them an aura of d imposing authority, and later Baghdad, the Yale of the medieval Islamic world. The orthodox establishment Christian philosophers devoted much energy to reconciling church doctrines acknowledged him as the leading religious authority of the age. Ghazali had a with Aristotelian thought. Meanwhile, back in Persia, Ghazali had written his problem, however: he was an authentically religious man, and somehow, amid follow-up to The :s Aims of the Philosophers, a second seminal volume called all the status and applause, he knew he didn't have the real treasure. He The Incoherence of .-the Philosophers. Here, Ghazali identified twenty believed in the revelations, he revered the Prophet and the Book, he was premises on which Greek and Greco- depended, then used devoted to the shari'a, but he wasn't feeling the palpable presence of God-the syllogistic logic to dismantle each one. His most consequential argument, to my very same dissatisfaction that had given rise to Sufism. Ghazali had a sudden mind, was his le attack on the notion of cause-and-effect relationships among spiritual crisis, resigned all his posts, gave away all his possessions, abandoned material phenomena. No such connections exist, according to Ghazali: we think all his friends, and went into seclusion. When he came out of it many months fire h causes cotton to burn, because fire is always there when cotton burns. We later, he declared that the scholars had it right, but the Sufis had it righter: The mistake contiguity for causality. Actually, says Ghazali, it's God who causes Law was the Law and you had to follow it, but you couldn't reach Allah through cotton to burn, since He is the first and only cause of all things. The fire just book learning and good behavior alone. You needed to open your heart, and happens to be there. If I'm making Ghazali sound ridiculous here, it's only only the Sufis p knew how to get the heart opened up. because I'm not as fair-minded as he was with Aristotle. I disagree with him. Not everyone does. Ghazali's case against causality was resurrected in the Ghazali now wrote two more seminal books, The Alchemy of Happiness and Yarmuk, the chronicles tell of the widow Umm Hakim fighting Byzantine soldiers The Revival of the Religious Sciences. In these, he forged a synthesis between with a tent pole for a sword. Also, details about some of the battles come from orthodox theology and Sufism by explaining how the shari' a fit in with the tariqa, women bards, who observed the fighting and composed poems about it, the Sufi method for becoming one with God. He created a place for mysticism essentially acting as war correspondents. within the framework of orthodox Islam and thus made Sufism respectable. Women must also have been present at crucial community meetings in those Before Ghazali came along, three intellectual movements were competing for early days, since the fact of their public arguments with Khalifa Omar are adherents in the Islamic world. After Ghazali, two of those currents had come to recorded -- and yet Omar appointed a woman to administer the market in an accommodation and the third had been eliminated. Medina. Besides all this, women figure prominently among the scholars of early Islam. In the first century after the Hijra, women such as Hafsa, Umm al-Darda, I don't say the philosophers acknowledged that Ghazali had proved them wrong Amra bin Abdul Rahman, and others rose to eminence as authorities on hadith. and as a result shriveled up and died. Nor do I even say that public opinion Some were famous calligraphers. They and others taught classes, took in turned against the philosophers because Ghazali had proved them wrong. students of both sexes, and gave public lectures. Public opinion rarely believes or disbelieves anything based on proof. Besides, hardly anything in philosophy is ever definitively proven right or wrong. Clearly, these women were not shut out of public life, public recognition, and public consequence. The practice of relegating women to an unseen private I say, rather, that some people wanted to turn away from philosophy and natural realm derived, it seems, from Byzantine and Sassanid practices. Among the science in this era. Some already regarded reason as dangerous trickery upper classes of those societies, women were sequestered as a mark of high leading only to chaos, and Ghazali gave such people the ammunition they status. Aristocratic Arab families adopted the same customs as a way of needed to look respectable, and even smart while they were denouncing appropriating their predecessors' status. The average Muslim woman probably philosophy and reason. saw her access to public life markedly reduced in the fourth century AH (that is, In the years that followed, more and more people turned in this direction. The after about 1000 CE) or at least that's what the tone of scholars' remarks on assumption that many shades of gray exist in ethical and moral matters allows gender roles imply. The radical separation of gender roles into non-overlapping people to adopt thousands of idiosyncratic positions, no two people having spheres accompanied by the sequestration of women probably froze into place exactly the same set of beliefs, but in times of turmoil, people lose their taste for during the era of social breakdown that marked the latter days of the Abbasid subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity. Doctrines that assert unambiguous khalifate. The same forces that squeezed proto-science out of Islamic rules promote social solidarity because they enable people to cohere around intellectual life, the same forces that devalued reason as an instrument of shared beliefs, and when no one knows what tomorrow may bring, people ethical and social inquiry, acted to constrict the position of women. prefer to clump together. Ghazali devotes one-fourth of his oeuvre, The Revival of the Religious Sometime during this period, the status of women in Islamic society seems to Sciences, to a discourse on marriage, family life, and the proper etiquette for the have changed as well. Various clues suggest to me that in the early· days of sexes. Here, he says that a woman "should remain in the inner sanctum of her Islam, women had more independence and a greater role in public affairs than house and tend to her spinning; she should not enter and exit excessively; she they had later on, or than many have in the Islamic world today. The Prophet's should speak infrequently with her neighbors and visit them only when the first wife Khadija, for example, was a powerful and successful businesswoman situation requires it; she should safeguard her husband in his absence and in who started out as Mohammed's employer. The Prophet's youngest wife his presence; she should seek his pleasure in all affairs.... She should not leave Ayesha led one major party during the schism that followed Othman's death. his home without his permission: if she goes out with his permission, she should She even commanded armies in the field, and no one seemed surprised that a conceal herself in worn-out clothes ... being careful that no stranger hear her woman would take on this role. Women were present at the iconic early battles voice or recognize her personally.... She should ... be ready at all times for (her as nurses and support staff and even sometimes as fighters. In the battle of husband) to enjoy her whenever he wishes." Ghazali also discusses men's obligations to their wives, but add up all his remarks and you can see that he's envisioning a social world divided strictly into public and private realms, with women restricted to the private one and the public realm reserved exclusively for men. Anxiety about change and a longing for stability tend to deepen traditional and familiar patterns of society. In the Muslim world, these included patriarchal patterns inherent not just in Arabic tribal life but also in pre-Islamic Byzantine and Sassanid societies. Ghazali's ideas proved persuasive in his time and in the centuries following his death because this was a period of rising disorder, a time of anxiety that cast a pall over civilized life, a time of instability that came finally to a horrifying crescendo.