The Wahhabi who Loved Beauty - Kerim Fenari
Kyrie Eleison
- Kerim Fenari
___________________________________________________________
Spending three years in the desert heat of Saudi Arabia was for me a
time of Ultimate Enlightenment, which raised the veil from the
Umma's most enigmatic and closely-guarded secret. Access to the
Ka`ba is relatively straightforward when compared to the challenge
of grasping this secret, namely, the hidden, Manichean division in
today's Muslim world, which is not between secularisation and Islam -
a relatively straightforward tension - but between normative Islam
and the heresy which is its latter-day simulacrum. As I came to
realise, understanding this schism is the key to grasping everything
that is wrong with the Muslim nation today.
Saudi Arabia has undoubted virtues. Its crude but generally
effective erasure of vice from public spaces is praiseworthy and
deserves our respect. Once, returning to London, I took my small
child into the Fleet Street church of St Dunstan's, to escape from
the February rain. Inside, however, we were confronted with an
exhibition of giant terracotta bas-reliefs depicting the Disciples
of Christ, all nude and grimacing, their grotesquely deformed
pudenda projecting into the nave. We hurriedly exited into the rain;
and I silently prayed for a long life for King Fahd, who, despite
all that may be said, is not ashamed before the world to suppress
the perversions of the age, and to drive them deep underground where
they belong.
The King deserves our prayers, too, for his patronage of several
mosque projects: not the extensions to the Great Sanctuaries of
Makka and Madina, which were accomplished by teams of mediocrities;
but the smaller mosques of Quba and Qiblatayn in Madina, and the
astonishingly beautiful Miqat of Dhu'l-Hulayfa, the oasis-like
structure just south of the Holy Prophet's city where pilgrims from
the north bathe, pray, and don their Ihram; a truly noble setting
for the primordially beautiful and dignified rites of our religion.
Yet it cannot be said that the modern Saudi soul is attuned to
beauty. Buildings surviving from before the 20th century are
uniformly impressive; more recent structures are exhibitions of the
worst of Third World kitsch. And people's homes are lurid and
garishly decorated with shocking pink carpets and fluffed-up
Ziegfeld Follies furniture, all illuminated by fluorescent tubes or
mock-Bourbon chandeliers.
To those who have come to Islam, as I did, out of a love for Islamic
art and the art of Islamic living, this collapse of the age-old
Muslim aesthetic is puzzling. The usual explanation is the obvious
supply-side account, which describes how the invasion of Muslim suqs
in the 19th century by cheap European manufactured goods destroyed
the crafts and the artisanal classes which for centuries had
cultivated beauty. The Islamic guilds which presided over the
production of artefacts which are absent from modern Muslim homes
but which are the prized possessions of Western museums had been
training grounds not only for technique, but for spiritual
excellence, taking as their motto the hadith: `Allah is beautiful,
and He loves beauty'. The ihsan here advocated is an intuitive gift.
Guild masters would train their apprentices for seven years in
religious practices as well as in the mechanics of crafting carpets,
lamps or ceramics. Every guild was either part of a Sufi tariqa, or
functioned as a tariqa in its own right. Manual work was hence
turned into a method of dhikr; every instant at the potter's wheel,
or the rugmaker's frame, would be occupied with the mention of God
and His Prophet. The production of beauty was seen as evidence of
the craftsman's inner repose and detachment; faults were the
consequence of faults in the soul.
The Industrial Revolution swept most of this away; and ironically
the Muslim crafts now survive largely thanks to the Western demand.
Nowadays, `ethnic' artifacts, from costly Afghan rugs down to humble
brass candlesticks sold at Oxfam, are mainly attractive to people
who do not share the worldview which made their beauty possible.
Saudi Arabia, because it has the money to demolish and rebuild and
import, has been ravaged more deeply than most Muslim countries in
this regard. Most Moroccans are too poor to pull down their stone
houses and replace them with cement imitations of Western models;
but the Saudis have been unrestrained. Almost all of Makka and
Madina, and a good part of Jeddah, has been uncomprehendingly
bulldozed and replaced with concrete carbuncles, faced in ghastly
variegated marble.
Standing in the ruins of a formerly exquisite Saudi city, one
realises that the `decline of the guilds' explanation does not go
far enough. Offered the choice between beautiful and ugly Western
imports, the Saudis seem invariably to choose what is ugly. They
reject their own music, but do not listen to Mozart instead, but to
Michael Jackson and other exhalations of the damned degeneracy of
America. They throw out traditional Arab or Ottoman furniture, and
replace it with mock "Louis Farouk" vulgarity so extreme that it is
produced in Europe largely for export. One can imagine the truckers
and removal men in Italy or Spain averting their eyes from their
awful loads, thankfully putting them on ships bound only for distant
Arabian ports.
While living in Saudi Arabia, I had an acquaintance who was troubled
by all of this. He was an American convert from a middle-class
background who had a scholarship to study at the `Umm al-Qura
Islamic University' in Makka. Although he is today the least likely
of men to read Q-News http://www.aapi.co.uk/qnews, I will preserve
his anonymity by calling him Jalal.
Jalal loved Islamic art, and the great lyrical productions of Sufi
poetry. He had come to the religion not through reading Mawdudi, or
Muhammad Qutb - for their complex-ridden resentfulness would have
repelled a person of his culture and sensitivity - but through
travelling in tribal Muslim areas, where he breathed that precious
and liberating air which one can only describe as the Islamic
spirit. Not the boy-scout bonhomerie of the liberal Ikhwan, or the
nervous guilt of the Tabligh, but authentic, unpolluted Islam, as
shaped and lived for countless generations by joyfully untroubled
lovers of Allah.
Jalal's fate, however, was to don a gas-mask supplied by the Wahhabi
sect, which cut him off from the liberating oxygen of normative
Islam and slowly asphyxiated him with fumes of human making. At the
university, his open-mindedness made him heedless of our counsels
about choosing company that would open his heart to the love of his
Lord, rather than close it in recriminations and self-exaltation.
And this was his undoing.
I never learned the name of the man who converted him to Wahhabism.
But one can deduce his character, and the expression on his face,
and his body-language, without difficulty. As months passed, and
Jalal the Arabic student fell under the spell of the shouting
sermoniser he insisted on hearing, a shadow crept over his features.
Formerly a frequent visitor to Madina, he went less often, troubled
by Wahhabi polemic against paying too much attention to God's
messengers. His confidence that the sacred could be discerned in
nature, in saints and in beauty began to waver, a process that
clearly agonised him. At times, when we spoke, he would return for a
while to his old self, and talk enthusiastically about architecture,
of textiles, of the sacred geography of Muslim cities. But then a
cloud would come over his face, and he would almost shudder, as his
programming once again took him over, and he parroted the shallow
slogans of Wahhabism. I thought, once, of the film Invasion of the
Body Snatchers. Jalal was being possessed.
Prior to my years in Saudi Arabia, I had been puzzled by the
vehemence of the traditional ulema's hostility to Wahhabism.
Wahhabism, I felt sure, was no more than an overheated Hanbalism,
with a naive Bedouin literalism in speaking of a delineated and
anthropomorphic God.
Watching the shadows gather around Jalal, however, convinced me that
something more ominous, even infernal, was at work. Wahhabism seemed
to be not simply or even primarily a package of ideas; it was an
existential condition. It breathed an intensity, a dark
radioactivity which could, on prolonged exposure, make me physically
weak, or sick. After one intense session with a Wahhabi, whose
blindness had veiled from him my own orientation, I had to detoxify
myself by taking a long walk, breathing deeply, and repeating
thousands of prayers upon the Holy Prophet.
I once met a Ugandan who lamented the decline of Islam in his
country, and laid the blame very bitterly at the Wahhabis' door.
Before they came, he said, Islam had been spreading fast, largely
through the public and joyful celebrations of Mawlid. Singing with
passion and rhythm is the key to the African soul, he told me; and
yet the Wahhabis, well-funded and with deadly zeal in their eyes,
slowly turned off the taps to the Mawlid, until the entire community
became disconsolate, forced awkwardly into a dry type of religion
that failed to speak to their condition. With the Muslims browbeaten
by an organised anti-tariqa and anti-Mawlid sect, the Christian
missionaries, with their Africanised hymns, suddenly found the going
much easier.
Back in Makka, Jalal's condition was getting worse. He began to
stand very close in front of me, fingering my lapels as he spoke. In
this I recognised a symptom of a very advanced case of Wahhabism.
When I spoke to him of beauty, or art, or literature, or holiness,
his face now blazed with an amused and self-righteous contempt. All
that was bid`a. A mosque could be made of concrete, carpeted with
lime-green rugs, and illuminated with multicoloured fluorescent
strips, and it was just as good a space for prayer as a medieval
structure erected by great craftsmen. Jalal's room at the
university, which he shared with three others, was slowly stripped
of anything "ethnically" Muslim - small rugs from Kashmir, rosewater
sprinklers, and, of course, his ebony prayer beads. His life was
stripped down, sterilised, irradiated with ultraviolet light from
the harshest end of the religious spectrum. His reading habits
withered, as he realised that the great sacred poets of Islam: Rumi,
Sana'i, Shabistari and the rest, were all Sufis, and that the soil
of Wahhabism had been as sterile for literature as it had been for
all the other arts of Islam.
I watched this transformation with pain. I had hoped, as had others,
that he would someday combine his cultural sensitivities with his
Islamic knowledge to become a major Muslim leader back in America,
speaking two languages with fluency. His destiny, however, lay
through the Wahhabi desert. And in the end, he died of thirst.
He suffered a kind of spiritual heart-attack. His attempt to change
his spiritual makeup finally collapsed, as I should have
anticipated. A crisis which must have tortured him almost beyond
endurance brought about his sudden departure from the university,
and from the country. He renounced Islam, and encountered and
married a Chinese girl. He now practices a form of Nishiren Buddhism
which no doubt helps to satisfy, as Wahhabism never could, his
craving for contemplation and beauty.
Jalal's case was extreme, but I fear it is not unique. The spread of
Wahhabism, fostered by the general disequilibrium of the age, is
rapid, and is contaminating many thousands of souls that might
otherwise, with proper exposure to traditional ulama and an
attachment to a spiritual director, have found the tranquillity and
serenity of authentic Islam. While I know that everything is by
Allah's decree, I blame myself for Jalal's apostasy. I should have
taken him to visit the saints, and the true gatherings of divine
love that discreetly flourish in Saudi Arabia, which could have
inoculated him against the virus which led to his death. But he
represents, in extreme form, the whole story of the Umma's
contemporary crisis. Our lack of recognition of, of insistence upon,
beauty, as the traditional accompaniment to the Muslim life,
indicates the absence of beauty in our souls, and the distance from
our Maker that ensues from the decline of tradition and from the
diabolically-contrived spread of heresy and disharmony.
Thankfully, the Umma is still filled with saints, Sufis, and great
craftsmen. Economic backwardness has in this respect been a great
preservative. Having travelled the world, I know that amid no other
community may one find such glories of spirituality and human
excellence. All the more reason to defend tradition against this new
plague, which denatures and impoverishes Islam precisely at the
moment in history when the West, shattered by the decline of its own
religion, could begin to see it as an appealing and desperately-
needed alternative.
George
Interesting article, I however think this kind of b.s. has sort of grabbed
ahold of Islam as a whole not just wahabbism as people like to believe or
point fingers. So called 'sufi's' can also be unbearably obnoxious and
dogmatic as well, among some there is righteous indignation at questiong the
Qur'an or useing critical thinking or free thought. It all has to be
accepted as a tidy package or you can "f off" or worse you risking God's
wrath. I think people choose this path to wake up not to be deluded on a
different level and become mentally ill in a different way.
The writer also mentions mawlid, that is somthing that has never appealed to
me, I hope i'm not a bad person.
Salaam
Martin Edwards
>Yet it cannot be said that the modern Saudi soul is attuned to
>beauty. Buildings surviving from before the 20th century are
>uniformly impressive; more recent structures are exhibitions of the
>worst of Third World kitsch. And people's homes are lurid and
>garishly decorated with shocking pink carpets and fluffed-up
>Ziegfeld Follies furniture, all illuminated by fluorescent tubes or
>mock-Bourbon chandeliers.
>
******Martin Edwards.******
Come on! Nobody's gonna drive that lousy freeway
when you can take the Red Car for a nickel.
-Eddy Valiant
Kyrie Eleison
wrote:
Salaam to you George, or is it Mark?
Here's what I have learned perturbs most Sufis (this is heresay on m
part btw):
The wanton application of (from one perspective, just as equally)
invalid 'free thought' and line of questioning -- promulgated mostly
by the commanding self, which attempts to avert any type of diagnosis
and detection.
This does not impugne the possibility that there are smart, seekers
after Truth who "shake" pretender sufis into uncontainable ire.
Therefore, these so-called Sufis that you are referring to aren't
really sufis at all. Are you expressing that the Wahabbis are faced
with similar dispositions?
In essence, what would you identify to the be the root problem?
George
I wouldn't say whether one is actually a sufi or not becuase it is such a
subjective thing. I have considered that it is my own nafs or commanding
self that is blocking my receptivity to these kinds of people and the
statements they make. I would say the cause is, but I may be wrong, is lack
of exposure to the best of other traditions, a world view that won't let
people relax too much, its just human nature very common in other areas too
like world politics.
have a nice day
francesca_trb
wrote:
>Hi Kirie,
>
>I wouldn't say whether one is actually a sufi or not becuase it is such a
>subjective thing. I have considered that it is my own nafs or commanding
>self that is blocking my receptivity to these kinds of people and the
>statements they make. I would say the cause is, but I may be wrong, is lack
>of exposure to the best of other traditions, a world view that won't let
>people relax too much, its just human nature very common in other areas too
>like world politics.
>
>have a nice day
>
>
>Hi,
>Sorry to ruffle anyone's feathers but I just picked up 'Sufi Thought and
>Action' supposedly complied by Idries Shah but published in 1990, there is a
>extraordinarily ludicrous chapter called 'Avoiding Imitator's' by a certain
>Gashim Mirzoeff (?) He goes on to pick out and describe every kind of sufi
>group (and I mean every) existing and calls them either deluded or CULT,
>CULT, CULTISH without having the actual balls to name names.
Exposure to the best of other traditions...Now how might that be
achieved?
Who to trust, who to believe? I agree, it is so complicated.
"But there is another layer of supposedly 'sufi' activity which has
invaded the West, and which is clearly based either on the excitatory
(primitive and shamanistic) cults of the Middle East, or else upon
the adventures of certain spurious or self-deceived 'teachers' who
have regularly invaded the West since Victorian times." - Avoiding
Imitators, 'Gashim Mirzoeff', Sufi Thought and Action
>The grand
>finally is to say "the only" way for the 'unshallow' seekers to find actual
>sufi teaching material is to contact octagon directly and I guess be put on
>their mailing list.
Or pop down to your local library where you will find numerous Octagon
books (which should be more that adequate) which have been generously
donated by 'The Sufi Trust'. But no one is pointing a gun at your
head.
>He also says that no actual sufi teacher is SENT to a
>people except with a perfect grasp of the (english) language, gee wow Idries
>Shah again!
"Real Sufi 'missionaries' always speak the language of the country in
which they are working perfectly." - Ibid
>And again sent by WHOM and for what grandieose purpose?! Is this
>just a bunch of dudes trying to keep their publishing company going or what?
>This really reminds me of scientolgy. Or was it Mr. Shah taking on a bunch
>of pseudonyms or his students to keep the publicity machine rolling?
It occurs to me that within its context the article serves a very
valid and much needed function.
I would suggest that those who do not have this book endevour to
locate the extract, if necessary I will type it out, purley for
educational purposes if any copyright fanatics are lingering ;-)
Peace,
"No Sufi activity of which I am aware aims at conviction. Sufism
provides information and methods, not controversy and debate. Sufism
is studied my means of itself." - Authenticity, KHTK, -Idries Shah
Indications Of An Authentic Sufi School:
viii) It will neither claim to have a mission to teach everyone, nor
will it enrol everyone. It will first make sure that the interested
person has enough information and experience to come to a decision
about the Sufis and Sufism in an appropriate manner. - KHTK.
'Sufism is studied by means of itself.' Some people answer, 'But why
should I study it in order to find out if it is any use to me?' The
answer to this of, course, is, simply, 'There is no reason why you
should do so unless you want to, this desire being based on what you
read and hear about.' - Neglected Aspects Of Sufi Study,
Idries Shah. (I assume he was referring to his own publications here.)
Steve
"francesca_trb" <france...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3e24f885...@news.freeserve.com...
>>
> It occurs to me that within its context the article serves
a very
> valid and much needed function.
Care to elaborate?
>
> I would suggest that those who do not have this book
endevour to
> locate the extract, if necessary I will type it out,
purley for
> educational purposes if any copyright fanatics are
lingering ;-)
Mine is on loan to a friend. Refresh my memory, enhance my
education.
Peace,
francesca_trb
wrote:
>Care to elaborate?
Not at the moment.
>Mine is on loan to a friend. Refresh my memory, enhance my
>education.
>
Anything for a friend:
Avoiding Imitators.
During the Middle Ages the writings of such Sufi greats as Al Ghazzali
and Ibn al Arabi profoundly influenced the religious and scientific
thought of the West. It is not too far to go to say that Western
philosophical and religious thinking, as well as much of European
literature, would certainly not be what it is, in content or quality,
without Sufi influence, which has been documented by an increasing
number and variety of workers in the West itself.
There seems little doubt that there has been a continuing interchange
between Sufis and the West; certainly, much recent research indicates
this. This intercommunication, however, appears to have become
'neutralized' very early on: the strange men in odd headgear who chant
and gyrate, mentioned with approval by Ramon Lull seven centuries ago,
are more likely today to be men and women who are as at home in the
West as the East. They are likely to be people who have adapted the
traditional, culture linked ideas and practices of the East to the
milieu of the West, which today, of course, includes Americas and
places far afield as Australia and South Africa.
But there is another layer of supposedly 'sufi' activity which has
invaded the West, and which is clearly based either on the excitatory
(primitive and shamanistic) cults of the Middle East, or else upon the
adventures of certain spurious or self-deceived 'teachers' who have
regularly invaded the West since Victorian times. Let us now look at
some of them.
The most numerous emanate from the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent. Few
are well educated, though many have what seem to be impressive degrees
from local universities. They tend to favour outlandish garb, beards
and even turbans. They make trips across the world, contacting as far
as possible both local Indians and Pakistanis and also certain Western
people who have heard about Sufism, trying to present themselves as
legitimate teachers. They tend to be ignorant and they usually try to
get local people to from study groups and to raise money. Although
they tell tales about their origins and their important spiritual
teachers and ancestors, they are ignorant of the wider materials about
the Sufis, and can always be detected if they are questioned from the
basis of the classical Sufi books, of which they generally have only
the slightest acquaintance. Real Sufi 'missionaries' always speak the
language of the country in which they are working perfectly. The
accented tones of the adventurers generally give them away.
The second group generally emanates from North Africa, notably from
Algeria and sometimes from Egypt. They are clearly to be recognized as
sectarians as they stick to a limited number of excitatory techniques
and rely heavily on the supposed sanctity of their 'saints', about
whom they talk a great deal. Originally having made considerable
inroads into certain French intellectual circles, they have now spread
to several other countries. As with other secondary cults, they have
succeeded in inducing some orientalists to regard them as genuine
expression of Sufism; but this reflects such scholars' poor knowledge
of the phenomenon.
The third body of alleged Sufis are those who have come to be
fascinated by so-called 'dancing' Dervishes of Turkey. Some of them
emanate from Turkey itself, but these are in general in any case
followers of a mere cult, though claiming spiritual descent from the
illustrious Jalauddin Rumi., Teacher of Konya. In fact, as is fairly
well-known, Rumi himself banned 'dancing' except for certain specific
cases. Furthermore, in all Sufi circles, 'dancing' and all such
movements, are restricted to employees, since the effect of the
movement and the music is not on the participants, but upon the
observers. That is why even the Mevlevi musical halls are
technically termed Sama-Khana (Hall of Listening), and not 'Hall of
Music' (participation) or 'Hall of (Taking part in) Dancing'. Sufis
are notoriously careful in their use of words, and this point is well
attested through reference to the classical masters. What has
perpetuated the thirst for participation in music and dance is nothing
less than the aspiration which is specifically interdicted by the real
Sufis: the desire for emotional stimulation.
The 'dancers' cover a great range; from self-deluded followers and
self-imagined descendants of Rumi's Way to self-appointed teachers who
have merely attended the deteriorated ceremonials of the cult.
They delight, too, in dressing up in tall hats and flowing robes.
Iran, in recent years, has given rise to a number of equally spurious
sects all using the name of Sufi. None of these is regarded as
legitimate by the real Sufis of the East, though their numbers are
increasing so rapidly, with followers in the West as well, that they
may before long become accepted by Western people as genuine.
There are also several stray Arabs who may or may not be sincere, who
are carrying on supposedly Sufic activities in the West and the East.
They brandish what seem to be impressive credentials and yet most of
them are extremely ignorant about the real bases and procedures of the
Sufis. They will tend to amalgamate bits and pieces of Sufic activity
from any source, especially from books.
Authentic Sufi groups go top great lengths to avoid actually meeting
such people, partly to prevent them pretending that they have their
blessing.
The works and writings of Idries Shah in recent years have served to
highlight many of the spurious practitioners; since Shah's published
materials provide a basis from which to assess at least some of the
adventurers. Shah and others, too, have provided, within the Society
for Sufi Studies, an umbrella organization which provides all the
information and instruction necessary, so that only those who crave
the spurious or the absurd need patronise the mountebanks. The others
can obtain legitimate contact from the Society, whose books and
monographs are published by The Octagon Press of London. Another legal
and authentic Sufi body working in the East and West is, of course,
The Sufi Trust, which makes available the materials and contacts which
are sought, increasingly, by sincere inquirers.
This latter activity should go a long way towards clearing up the
confusion which allowed almost free rein to the adventurers and
deluded cultists.
Gashim Mirzoeff, Avoiding Imitators, Sufi Thought and Action.
Copyright © 1990 The Octagon Press
Published with the aid of a subvention from The Sufi Trust.
Steve
> On Tue, 14 Jan 2003 23:53:58 -0000, "Steve"
<kok...@wotmania.com>
> wrote:
>
> >Care to elaborate?
>
> Not at the moment.
OK, thought you might say that :-).
>
>
> >Mine is on loan to a friend. Refresh my memory, enhance
my
> >education.
> >
>
> Anything for a friend:
Thank you. Having now reexamined the article, I must say it
seems fairly straightforward and not "extremely ludicrous".
It presents the standard warnings concerning excitatory
practices, historical remnant groups and poorly-trained or
outright deceptive teachers. There are warnings of this sort
in all traditional Sufi material as well. This is just a
modern rephrasing IMO.
Nor, overall, is it particularly slippery or snakey. It is
however very, very polite. One might consider this an
appropriate demonstration of Adab.