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The Body in Remembrance: Dhikr in Moroccan Sufism

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The Body in Remembrance: Dhikr in Moroccan Sufism THE BODY IN REMEMBRANCE DHIKR IN MOROCCAN SUFISM Lindsay Rosenfeld A Senior Honors Thesis University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Submitted in partial fulfillment for Honors in Global Studies April 2013 Approved by: ___________________________ Dr. Della Pollock (Advisor) ____________________________ Dr. William Lachicotte (Reader) Acknowledgements, 3 A Note on Translation, 5 CONTENTS Preface, 6 INTRODUCTION: Struggling with Amina, 7 CHAPTER ONE: Body Beginnings, 18 1. Methodology, 23 CHAPTER TWO: Setting the Stage – What is Dhikr?, 27 CHAPTER THREE: Ascetic Body in Practice, 36 2. Struggling with the Body, 44 3. Moving through Dhikr: From Struggling with to Being in the Body, 52 CHAPTER FOUR: Embodied History and Culture, 59 4. Remembrance Extended, 59 5. Rachida: The Child of the Zāwiya, 61 6. Seen Unseen: Looking Good, Looking Right, 72 CONCLUSION: Moving with Dhikr, 83 References, 92 Appendix A: Glossary, 98 Appendix B: Transcripts, 102 7. Dr. Saqi, 103 8. Mustapha, 119 9. Farah, 126 10. Mohamed, 132 11. Rachida, 136 12. Youssef, 144 Appendix C: Institutional Review Board Documents, 149 13. Consent Forms, 150 14. Interview Sample Questions, 153 2 acknowledgements In “Interbeing,” Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper.” In much the same way, this work could not exist without the ideas and encouragement of many others: my friends in the field, advisers and readers, interpreters, fellow thesis writers and classmates, professors, family, friends, and teachers of new and old who have opened the paths before us. And many whose names remain unknown: the Boutchichiyya brothers and sisters, librarians, taxi drivers, medina dwellers, gas pumpers and paper printers, helpful strangers, and oh-so many more. Their words and their bodies move through each line of this work, dancing across the blurry boundaries between one work’s end and another’s beginning. I am perhaps most indebted to Ghassan, my Moroccan interpreter and dear friend, for his unwavering willingness to fumble through the many unknowns of this research by my side. This work would not have been possible without his involvement: as interlocutor, interpreter, critic, historian, chauffeur, and partner-in-crime. Thank you, Ghassan, for your commitment and curiosity. There are no words to fully express what this thesis owes to Della Pollock. For your endless support and encouragement, unwavering patience, and warm critiques; for your handle-less mugs; for your guidance and your friendship; and for graciously imagining this work with me: thank you! I would gladly begin again if it meant trudging through the thickness of these questions with you, coffee in hand and laughter close. To all of those who gave time and patience to the interviews on which this thesis is based: the beauty of your stories and your bodies continue to leave me in awe. My deepest hope is that this work is a testimony to your kindness and passion, and to my gratitude. At inception, there was Khalid Saqi, who first introduced me to the vastness of Sufism, filled me with much more than prayer and tea, and welcomed me to ask and think with him. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: many thanks to my professor 3 and reader, William Lachicotte, for giving me embodiment and for offering endless patience and care; Michal Osterweil, for her constant push for fullness, openness, and complexity; Kelsey Jost-Creegan, for the burdens of “thesis buddy,” for Foster’s, for friendship; my fellow Global Studies thesis writers, for your curiosity and diligent editing; and to the Morehead-Cain Foundation Discovery Fund and the Dunlevie Honors Undergraduate Research Fund, my in-country research would not have been possible without your generous financial support. And to the countless others who have contributed to this work in ways I could never properly name, thank you! Thank you for your time, your words, stories, bodies, movements, hopes, thoughts, and smiles. at last, you will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) Margaret Atwood 4 a note on translation The Arabic names and terms that appear in this thesis have been translated and transliterated in accordance with John Renard’s work in The A to Z of Sufism. While names of cities appear in the Latinized spelling (e.g., “Tétouan” for Ṭitwān), Arabic words are accentuated in italics throughout, defined in-text, and assembled in Appendix A: Glossary. Exceptions include “Qur’an” and the names of institutions, individuals, and Sufi orders, such as Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania Institute, Amina, and the Boutchichiyya Order respectively. Ghassan, a Moroccan student from Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, collaborated with me during my three-week research period in May of 2012 as an interpreter. Not only did he help in the logistical planning and actualization of this research, but he also created a truly remarkable interview space – one in which the participant could speak in his/her language of comfort (English, Arabic, and/or French). He frequently asked follow-up questions of his own, reading the words and bodies of our friends from the field in ways that were beyond my ability to do so. Ghassan was present during all of the interviews conducted in Arabic and/or French and, thus, only attended the interviews with men, most of whom spoke in Arabic/French. All of the women expressed their ability and desire to speak in English. For interviews in Arabic/French, Ghassan created transcriptions in English for each. Transcripts are assembled in Appendix B: Transcripts. 5 preface The body in dhikr moves beyond the borders and boundaries of consciousness, of language, of dualistic thinking, of convention, twisting and turning, expressing, moving, telling, thinking, becoming, performing, and remembering – the body remembers itself to itself and its place in divinity and history. The bodies of this work are alive with agency, refusing silence and stillness. I have been blessed to learn from them and in learning, write and remember with them. This thesis is about the Ritual of Remembrance, or dhikr. It is about a small collection of Moroccans for whom Remembrance is life, for whom the body remembers, for whom the body is a critical site of spiritual life. Thus, the body in dhikr has to be about mysticism and asceticism, history and culture. And the ethnographic process has led me to realize that it is about so much more than all of this. I have had the pleasure of learning from Morocco and her people on two occasions – first as a student abroad in the Fall of 2011 and then again for a few short weeks in May of 2012, during which time I focused on the great many questions of the body in dhikr. I have since returned more times than I could possibly remember – walking through the medina’s streets in slumber, rocking with the performers of dhikr in writing, feeling the same frustrated excitement of my interviews dance across my skin in transcription. To write about the body, much less the body in Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, is, for me, about shifting registers, about opening to a great many possibilities. In writing, I am attempting to embody what Lena Hammergren calls “kinesthetic discourse,” which privileges the body as subject and author (54). I am trying to reach into memory in writing, and remember my own body and the bodies of my friends in the “field.” In remembering and in writing, I am clinging to the hope that the words and bodies of this piece, the embodied narrators, can and do flow freely within and beyond these margins. I fear, as Marta E. Savigliano, “bodies colonized by words, especially when conjured, dancing, from the past – since they cannot move/talk back” (199). Just so, this thesis “looms open” (Foster, xiii), reveling in beautiful uncertainty, in incompleteness. 6 introduction STRUGGLING WITH AMINA You can say that the body compels us. Postmodern performance of bodies; cross-discipline fascination with the body as discourse; theoretical de-stabilizations of the grounds and identities in which bodies have moved. Long absent from analysis, the body looms open – open to theorizing, historicizing, interpretation. Susan Leigh Foster in Corporealities, xiii We were sitting in the back corner of the office, knees touching and backs bent to fit into the small space. It was after three on Tuesday and as Amina was topping off our glasses with tea I remember watching as the day’s fatigue crawled across her body. It seemed to begin in her right hand, her knuckles white in a tight grip around the silver handle. I imagined its spins and twirls as it moved through the tunnel of her sleeve and up her forearm, around the bend in her elbow, shooting beyond her shoulder only to be dispersed throughout her chest and into her toes. The music of liquid dropping into glass was only background noise to this dance. Her motions of lifting and pouring, lifting and pouring stretched slowly through time, drawn out by the awkwardness of a first meeting. I shifted in my seat, thinking that her voice sounded older on the phone. Based on the description given to me by Rachid, one of her male counterparts at the Boutchichiyya Order, I had assumed that her wisdom was a reflection of her years. And yet the face across from me could not have been carrying more than four decades.
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