i Western Sufism ii iii i Western Sufism From the Abbasids to the New Age Mark Sedgwick i 1 iv 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sedgwick, Mark J., author. Title: Western Sufism : from the Abbasids to the new age / Mark Sedgwick. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016008846 (print) | LCCN 2016011517 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199977642 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780199977659 (updf) | ISBN 9780199977666 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Mysticism—Islam—History. | Mysticism—History. | Sufism—History. | Sufism—Europe—History. | Sufism—North America—History. | Neoplatonism. Classification: LCC BP188.5 .S43 2017 (print) | LCC BP188.5 (ebook) | DDC 297.409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008846 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America v For Lina vi vii i Contents Introduction 1 Part I | Premodern Intercultural Transfers 1. Neoplatonism and Emanationism 15 Plotinus: The Key 17 Emanation Explained 19 Neoplatonism Spreads 24 2. Islamic Emanationism 30 Arab Neoplatonism 31 The First Sufis 36 Sufi Classics 40 3. Jewish and Christian Emanationism 50 Jewish Neoplatonism 50 Jewish Sufism 56 Latin Emanationism 58 Conclusion to Part I 66 Part II | Imagining Sufism, 1480– 1899 4. Dervishes 71 Angels and Deviants 72 The View from France 79 Sufism as Mystical Theology 82 viii viii i Contents 5. Deism and Pantheism 85 Theprisca theologia in the Renaissance 86 Universalism: Guillaume Postel and the Jesuits 89 Deism Demonstrated by Arab and Turk 93 Pantheism and Anti-Exotericism 97 6. Universalist Sufism 102 Sufism as Esoteric Pantheism 103 Perennialism and Universalism in India 106 TheDabistan and After 108 7. Dervishes Epicurean and Fanatical 113 Dervishes in Drama, Painting, and Verse 114 The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 121 Fighting Dervishes 125 Conclusion to Part II 130 Part III | The Establishment of Sufism in the West, 1910– 1933 8. Transcendentalism, Theosophy, and Sufism 135 Transcendentalism and the Missouri Platonists 137 The Theosophical Society and Carl- Henrik Bjerregaard 142 Ivan Aguéli, the Western Sufi 148 9. Toward the One: Inayat Khan and the Sufi Movement 156 Inayat Khan Visits America 157 The Sufi Message is Spread 162 The Continuation of the Sufi Movement 170 10. Tradition and Consciousness 172 René Guénon and the Traditionalists 173 George Gurdjieff and Consciousness 176 The Early Years of John G. Bennett 181 Conclusion to Part III 183 Part IV | The Development of Sufism in the New Age 11. Polarization 189 Toward Islam 190 Reorientation with Meher Baba 191 The Travels of John G. Bennett 194 The Maryamiyya and the Oglala Sioux 202 ix j ix Contents 12. Idries Shah and Sufi Psychology 208 Shah and the Gurdjieff Tradition 209 Shah’s Sufism 213 Followers and Opponents 217 13. Sufism Meets the New Age 222 Traditionalism and the New Age 223 The Sufi Movement Conserved 223 Sufi Sam in San Francisco 225 Vilayat and the Sufi Order International 231 Fazal and Mystical Warfare 233 14. Islamic Sufism 236 Ian Dallas and the Darqawiyya 237 Ibn Arabi and Beshara 240 The Murabitun and Sufi Jihad 243 John G. Bennett at Sherborne 246 Conclusion to Part IV 247 15. Conclusion 249 Notes 263 Selected Bibliography 319 Index 333 x xi Western Sufism xii 1 Introduction i Most American and European bookstores have a selection of books on Sufism. Sometimes these are in the religion section and sometimes in the spirituality section; they are usually separate from books on Islam, which are normally found in religion, not spirituality. This is in contrast to arrangements at Western universities, where Sufism is generally taught by someone in the Islamic Studies program— not, it might seem, very successfully, if bookstores and their customers remain convinced that Sufism is one thing and Islam is another. But the idea of Sufism and Islam as distinct and separate entities is also found in many of the books on sale, especially in books by such bestselling Sufi authors as Inayat Khan and Idries Shah. There is a gap, then, between what Sufism is according to Islamic Studies scholars, and the role that Sufism plays in the lives of contemporary Westerners. According to the lit- erature scholar Nancy Shields Hardin, writing on the work of Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize winner who often described herself as a Sufi, “for a non- Sufi to understand what it means to be a Sufi is perhaps impossible,” as Sufism “is a composite of anomalies.”1 The Oxford English Dictionary, however, does attempt to define Sufism, and states that it is “a sect of Muslim ascetic mystics.”2 This is close to how Sufism is generally understood in university departments of Islamic Studies. It is not how it is understood by many best- selling Western Sufis or their readers, however. The first Sufis whom I myself met, shortly after I moved to Cairo in the 1980s,mid- were definitely Muslim, and did not seem especially anomalous. Neither did they seem especially ascetic, or even especially mystical (though I was not then very sure what it was to be mystical, or how to recognize a mystic if I met one). As I got to know more Sufis and began to work on my PhD thesis, which dealt with the history of one particular group of Sufi orders, ortariqas ,3 in the Arab world and in Southeast Asia, it began to seem rela- tively easy to say what it means to be a Sufi. Being a Sufi seemed to be about belonging 1 2 2 i Introduction to a tariqa and following a spiritual guide or shaykh, and involved developing Islamic practice from an obligation into an art. Some Sufis did follow some ascetic practices, and there was some talk of mystical states. So it seemed the Oxford English Dictionary had got it more or less right, and Hardin had got it wrong, as had Idries Shah, Doris Lessing, the managers of many Western bookstores, and their customers. After I finished my PhD, I became more curious about Western understandings of Sufism. One branch of one tariqa I had been studying for my PhD was located in Milan, and the Italian shaykh of that branch introduced me to the work of an early twentieth- century French Sufi, René Guénon. That introduction led to many other discoveries, and finally to a book I wrote on the Traditionalist movement that derived from Guénon’s work, Against the Modern World.4 My work on the Traditionalist movement led to an invitation to write an entry on “Neo- Sufism” for aDictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, and to give a confer- ence paper on “European Neo- Sufi Movements in the Interwar Period.”5 Guénon and the Traditionalist Sufis, it seemed, were examples of something called “Neo- Sufism,” and people were interested in the other Neo- Sufis as well. This led me to look into Inayat Khan, one of the bestselling Western writers on Sufism whom I, like my academic col- leagues, had until then ignored. It also led me to look into George Gurdjieff, an even more widely read writer whom some, apparently unaccountably, took for a Sufi. Inayat Khan and Gurdjieff were contemporaries of Guénon, and in the mid- 1920s all three men lived in Paris, though it seems none of them ever met. If they had, they would certainly have disagreed with each other. And yet, somehow, different though they were, their writings did all seem to have something in common. What was being called Neo- Sufism— and what in this book I prefer to call “Western Sufism”— was evidently a significant phenomenon. As well as people buying books by Inayat Khan, Guénon, and Gurdjieff, there were also people participating in groups inspired by them. I already knew how influential Guénonian Traditionalism was. Gurdjieff seemed important, too, with a network of Gurdjieff groups covering the US and many other countries, and with the nine- pointed Enneagram’s system of personality analysis becoming ever more popular. While I was working on Inayat Khan and Gurdjieff, I was teaching history at the American University in Cairo. A new department chair asked us to think of new courses that might attract more students, and I proposed courses on the two topics that our students were discussing more than any other during the early 2000s: terrorism and Zionism. To my slight surprise, neither proposal was deemed too sensitive, and both courses were accepted. My Zionism course started, as most such courses do, with the history of the Jews in Europe, with oppression, emancipation, and Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment). Emancipation and Haskala led me to Moses Mendelssohn and his German friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose play Nathan the Wise, performed in 1783, is often taken to represent the change in European attitudes to Jews that led to emancipation.