On Danny DeVito and Avner Eisenberg

I just deleted this entry and am resubmitting it in the hope that the RSS feed will recognize it this time. ------ It didn't.  It's been a day and a half since I submitted by request, and so far all I have is an e-mail that my case has been assigned to someone.  Based on previous experience, tomorrow morning I'll probably get an e-mail asking all sorts of irrelevant questions, and they probably will not get to fixing it until early next week.  

Tonight we switch back to our other series, the various subgroups of Islam, and we have finally arrived at the point that has everyone intrigued: Sufism.  This curiosity must be due to the "New Age" conversion of this highly rigorous and demanding form of Islam to the ecstasy of a cheap pantheism.  There are many parallels between Sufism in Islam and Kaballah in Judaism, not necessarily in their details of beliefs and techniques, but because both of them supplied a facet of personal piety to what might otherwise just have been a dry, legalistic religion. Both Sufism and Kaballah made themselves be felt on the level of the common believer, but both of them really apply most strictly to the initiated.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word "Sufi"? Perhaps it's Danny DeVito in Jewel of the Nile (1985) walking over the hot coals in order to become one of "us," where "us" is supposed to be a Sufi brotherhood, led by the "Jewel" (Avner Eisenberg), whose main spiritual practice appears to be some fairly nifty juggling. Maybe it's the whirling dervishes who have made a public display of their piety and aspirations for a long time. Or perhaps you immediately think of some of the poetry that was written a thousand years ago by folks who were known as Sufis.

The hitch is that in some way all of the above (though not specifically Danny DeVito to the best of my knowledge) could very well be associated with Sufism. It has followed Islam wherever Islam has crossed national and cultural boundaries and has taken on particular the cultural attributes endemic to its new host culture. However, its beginnings were neither glamorous nor entertaining.

A religion with a strong moral code is bound to produce a certain amount of casuistry, and, if left unchecked, the casuistry can very easily wind up draining the spiritual blood out of the religion, so that no one has any particular spiritual joy any longer, but everyone is concerned with doing the right things in the right way lest they accrue ever-increasing amounts of punishment. People want and need an outlet for their spiritual capacity, whether the object with which they fill it is real or unreal. Things get even worse if the common people are slaving away at a legalistic religion while they see their supposed leaders are taking it extremely lightly and are ignoring the very same moral code. As a result groups will form who will attempt to supply what is lacking spiritually in the otherwise purely ethical form of the religion. So, the Sufis came about as a reaction against both the aridity of legalistic Islam and the excesses of the caliphate. The word "Sufi" is supposed to be derived from the word for wool because apparently these early Sufis wore plain woolen clothes, an indication of the simplicity of the life they had adopted. They practiced all of the normal demands of Islam rigorously and in addition placed strong ascetic requirements upon themselves. Their lives were very similar to those of monks in Christendom during the same time, except they had one other variable to deal with, namely the threat of persecution by mainstream Muslims.

In order to fully understand the jeopardy involved, one must realize that Islam goes to great lengths to stress the transcendence of Allah. Obviously he has some imminence, or he could not work in the world at all, but the further one separates God from the world both in quantity and quality, where God has everything and the world is purely dependent on him, the nearer one gets to the common, Ash'arite, picture of God in Islam. In contrast, the Sufis' goal was to obtain union with God. This was an audacious goal for this Sufi and potentially blasphemous one in the ears of non-Sufi Muslims, a breach that led to some bloodshed.

Not that the Sufis made it any easier on themselves because they often expressed the concepts of unification with God or being in the direct presence of God with language that essentially meant being identical with God -- a huge distinction, though for many people an unnecessarily subtle one. Interestingly, this is the same problem that Meister Eckhart ran into in the 14th century. After all, person A can be united with person B without A becoming the identical person as B. But if A says that he has become B, even though he may only mean that he has become united with B, he has to take some of the blame for how people are going to react to what he is saying. Or, to put it yet another way, if you believe in theism and not pantheism, then you're best off not teaching pantheism because people may not be able to read your thoughts behind your words.

Well, enough of the advice column part of this exposition, let me summarize the basic facts about Sufism.

1. Sufism crosses the boundary between Sunna and Shia. On the whole it drew more from the Shi'ites than from Sunnis, but both doctrinally and devotionally it transcended this division.

2. At least in its original form Sufism was a very rigorous ascetic collection of pious followers of Allah's commandments.

3. In distinction to other Muslim groups, the Sufis believed that it is already possible in this life to be in the presence of God, a state of bliss that is usually in most Muslims minds, reserved for heaven.

4. In order to attain this bliss one must become absolutely pure.

5. Purity is attained through total obedience to God, to one's spiritual master, and to one's order.

For about two centuries Sufism and mainstream Islam (both Shi'ite and Sunni) were not at peace with each other. Early persecution and execution of Sufis had given way to an uneasy tolerance. The gap was finally bridged by a person who is beyond doubt one of the great thinkers of Islam, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111).  Coming originally from an Ash'arite background, he felt stifled and explored various other options, including Sufism. In fact, al-Ghazali never met a philosophy from which he did not glean something, and he added new thoughts without necessarily discarding old ones. So, his embracing of Sufism did not imply a repudiation of his earlier conservative Islam. All of this sounds as though al-Ghazali was creating an eclectic muddle, but what actually emerged was a fine-tuned synthesis in which the orthodoxy of mainstream Islam was preserved and Sufism provided the spiritual fire that people needed so as not to be simply stuck in the rut of legalism. It would be going too far out on a limb to say that al-Ghazali thereby saved Islam (because it did not show any signs of collapsing), but he definitely contributed to the soul of the religion precisely by finding its soul and nurturing it.

As we said above, Sufism wound up taking on many different expressions, depending on the particular order and the specific geographical locations of the various orders. One of the best known orders are the Whirling Dervishes, who are at home in Turkey, and who believe that their personal rotations spinning on their own physical axis contributes to their attaining closeness to Allah. As the pictures taken by my friend Faye C. demonstrate, they are clearly combining personal devotions with free enterprise and tourism.