SUFIS AS MYTHIC BEARERS OF ESOTERIC TRADITION

Mark Sedgwick

By the 1930s, there were several notable new religious movements in Europe that claimed Sufism as the origin, or as one of the major ori- gins, of their teachings and practice. Gurdjieff in Paris is perhaps the most famous, identifying the Sarmoung order in Central Asia as the source of many of his teachings and spiritual exercises. There was also Inayat Khan’s Sufi Order, based in London and Geneva, with follow- ers in France and the United States. Then there was Frithjof Schuon, shaykh of the Swiss-based Alawiyya, following a variation on the Tra- ditionalism developed by René Guénon. There were also the followers of Meher Baba, mostly in India, but also in Britain and America. One final group that had at one point also claimed a Sufi origin, but by the end of the 1930s had taken a very different form, was the followers of Rudolf von Sebottendorff in Munich, to whom we will briefly return. Despite the claim of a common origin in Sufism, the teachings and practices of these movements differed dramatically from each other. They also differed, sometimes significantly and sometimes dramati- cally, from Sufi teachings and practices as found in the Muslim world. Schuon’s Alawiyya tried hardest to follow Islamic norms, and Inayat Khan was in certain respects close to Islamic Sufism, but Gurdjieff was in many ways no closer to Islamic Sufism than to anything else. Meher Baba’s and Sebottendorff ’s movements really had almost nothing to do with anything an inhabitant of the Muslim world would recognize as Sufism.1 Most importantly, for Muslims in the Muslim world, Sufism is clearly a path within Islam. The only Western movement mentioned so far that agreed with this was Schuon’s, and even that had in some ways changed its mind by the end of the twentieth century. This 1930s variety in Western understanding of Sufism, and of the tradition that Sufism carried, was not new. In the Western imagina- tion, Sufism had been a mythic bearer of esoteric tradition since the late seventeenth century, if “esoteric” is defined in its widest possible

1 Sebottendorff is discussed below. For Meher Baba, see Sedgwick, ‘European Neo- Sufi Movements’. 414 mark sedgwick sense as indicating aspects of religion that are hidden from the gen- eral public.2 As this article will show, early twentieth-century Western understandings of Sufism built on and derived from earlier under- standings that saw Sufism as a form of Deism, as an incarnation of romantic concepts of individual religiosity, and as a form of Freema- sonry. This has much to do with Western intellectual history, and little to do with Sufism itself. Sufism is indeed a bearer of esotericism. The distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric that is made in European languages is also made in languages such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and is perhaps made somewhat more precisely. The esoteric is thebatin , and the exo- teric is the zahir. A verse of the Quran, for example, has an exoteric, zahiri meaning that is either obvious or arrived at using tools such as linguistic and contextual analysis, and an esoteric, batini meaning that can be arrived at using tools such as direct divine inspiration or numerology. In Islam, the custodians of the batin are indeed the Sufis. Knowledge of the batin is found elsewhere as well, and some Sufis are relatively uninterested in the batin, but even so most teaching and practice concerning the batin is to be found among Sufis.3 The earliest understandings of Sufism found in European languages, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, did not, however, empha- size esotericism, and correctly so. Four different varieties of Western writer on Sufism can be identi- fied. First come early modern scholars, who generally worked from texts without the benefit of direct personal experience of the Muslim world. This was partly because they were following the model of schol- arship in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, fields in which direct personal experience was obviously impossible, and partly because travel from Europe to the Muslim world was still extremely difficult. Second come Europeans who did travel to the Muslim world, initially few in num- ber and generally on diplomatic missions. Such travelers, however, generally had at best a poor knowledge of the languages concerned, and so worked from observation without the benefit of texts—the reverse of the scholars’ method. Third, and most importantly, come

2 Narrower and more precise definitions would produce a somewhat different pic- ture, especially in the earlier period, depending somewhat of one’s view of the esoteric influence on Deism. 3 References to Islamic norms are not footnoted in this article. For further details, see any standard work, such as Ernst, Sufism.