Islamic pluralism: Literalistic Wahhabistic Sufism

The dogma ate my homework

Editor’s note: If read in its entirety, it should be clear from the article that the author loves and honors Islam, Sufism, tradition and Islamic law. In this article, she has critiqued an approach toward Islam, Sufism, tradition and Islamic law, one that has gained increasing popularity in the US and British diaspora.

I love my brothers and sisters. But I’m fearful of notions of tradition that imply a carbon-copy imitation of patterns of the past. Where the style of dress is almost as important as the specifics of the zakat calculations. Where the historicity of gender patterns is fossilized by reference to tradition. Where every single act must be legitimated and checked off in reference to an ancient tome written before the invention of ultrasound machines, trains and telephones. Where any divergence from 12th century practices is seen as invalid and illegitimate.

This upsets me because to me, it feels like a hijacking of the spirit of Sufism. Fake pirs and drug-addicts and “goofy Sufis” at mazars are not the soul of Sufism. “Hama oost” (All is He) rhetoric that implies a lack of ritual, and an absence of ethical practice are not part of the soul of Sufism. Dogmatism and slavish legalism that do not accommodate the principles of the religion are not part of the soul of Sufism either.

This is a trend that is catching on in the North American and British diaspora. This frightens me.

The delegitimation, or even criminalization of anything that is not verifiable from centuries-old sources will have an impact on people’s lives. It makes them ridiculous, irrelevant, painful, and hard.

Here, sometimes, forms of Sufism become just as dogmatic and literalistic about a romanticized and utopian notion of “tradition” as the Wahhabis have been. Compassion cannot be taken for granted just because the practitioners are Sufi. Even tolerance and inclusiveness cannot be assumed on the part of many Sufis. Sectarianism has found a home in such forms of Sufism.

I’m a Sufi, and this makes me nervous.

Call these ideas progressive, reformist, modernist – label them whatever you wish. It’s here and now that we have to seek the Beloved. We can’t throw the specificity of today to the winds. We can’t abandon thought and reflection. Our saints would not wish that. In the Prophetic tradition of compassion, they called for ease in religion, not difficulty. And ease relies on the organic, dynamic relatedness of all parts of life to each other. Time and space, though relative, must be accepted in this dimension; and the demands of a particular time and a particular space (cultural and geographic context) must be respected.

This article is not some kind of “Revenge of the Flakes.” Nor is it a call for a return to goofiness in Sufism. Nor is it an “attack” on tradition. In fact I challenge those who interpret it as an attack on tradition to refrain from short-changing Islamic tradition. We underestimate Islamic and Sufi traditions when we regard them as dead and lacking in the capacity to grow into the present. It is this very hijacking of tradition that I resist. Tradition does not have to be narrow-minded, intolerant, sectarian, and irrelevant to the present.

We have Sufi-oriented and other religious leaders today that hesitate to state publicly their seemingly “non-traditional” (from a stereotypical view of tradition) views. These views are related to a range of issues – apostasy, gender, sectarianism. Public legitimacy is at stake. Is their gradualism working? This doesn’t appear to be the case.

In the meantime, the masses are drawn, as flies to honey, to a romanticized notion of legitimate “tradition” – tradition that is divorced from the specificity of reality, from compassion, from inclusiveness.

They think: the more dogmatic, the better. They believe: The less “Western” the better; the less local the better. The less real, the better. The older, the better. The more removed from modernity, the better. But real lives are local, modern, real, often Western, complicated, muddled.

Inevitably, in the diaspora, struggling to represent and defend and construct a viable identity, Muslims are more vulnerable to a solid, uniform, certain, black-and-white body of “tradition” about which there is no complexity and no grey areas. Wahhabi theology formed the basis of a great deal of “North American Islam” for the past few decades. Wahhabistic thought formed the foundations of much 쭡instream Muslimulture, practice, and norms. The tide is turning. There’s hope, we thought. But the danger is now that Sufism will be mobilized for the purpose of literalism, dogmatism, romanticized and utopian religion. Some groups are using Sufism just as the Wahhabis and the Islamists used Wahhabi and Islamist thought: for an absence of attention to historicity in religion.

I remember Hazrat Wahid Baksh (my shaykh, an elderly Chishti-Sabri shaykh from Rahim Yar Khan) once expressed concern about a popular encyclopedic text on Islamic spirituality coming out of North America. He even wrote to the shaykh/scholar here who produced it. My shaykh, an 80+ year-old relatively traditional Chishti in Pakistan, was troubled by an American Muslim shaikh’s thoughts. Hazrat Wahid Baksh’s theology was never fossilized, always dynamic, never inhuman and abstract, always specific and concrete.

I remember a group of Malaysian mureeds flew into Lahore. One of them was a woman, and I asked her who had accompanied her on her journey. My friends, she said. Her male mureed friends? My legalistic brain sprang to judge, and I asked my shaykh about it. He said, the purpose of the law is the key, and the purpose of the mahram companion is the woman’s safety; in this day and age, when travelling from airport to airport with a group of trustworthy companions, there was no danger of foul play.

As Imam Hamza Yusuf hints more than subtly:

“The laws are there to serve human beings; we are not there to serve the law. We are there to serve Allah, and that is why whenever the law does not serve you, you are permitted to abandon it, and that is actually following the law. That is where the confusion lies because people do not realize that. The law is for our benefit, not for our harm. Therefore, if the law harms us, we no longer have to abide by it. … If you are worshipping the law, then you cannot understand that. You cannot worship the sacred law because the law is there to serve you; it is for your maslaha, your benefit, and that is our fiqh.”

Some are fearful that differentiating between harmful and beneficial law will lead people astray. They are especially fearful of “allowing” the masses to differentiate thus. News flash: the masses are living life and already making decisions and distinctions. It does no one any service to pretend that public religion is homogeneous, solid, uniform, and predictably ancient, while private religion remains messy and grey. This is another feature of the new Sufi groups ᠡ elitism that propagates a strict orthodoxy in legal matters to the masses; an elitism that keeps secret the flexibility in legal matters, because otherwise the masses will become ά̥ss pious.r they might make mistakes.

Accept that the world is an arena of error and learning. If we did not err, Allah would create another creature that erred, sinned, repented and asked forgiveness. The humility and “soz” (pain) of error is higher than infallibility. Perfection per se is not a goal. God is the goal.

Greys are frightening. Blacks and whites are reassuring, but they are artificial. Seeking certainty through reflection, hard thinking, seeking Allah’s guidance, and tearful prayer in the middle of the night is still the only way to go. We can’t skip those steps, tracing out the certainty of a different time, different people, different circumstances.

39:46 Say: “O Allah. Creator of the heavens and the earth! Knower of all that is hidden and open! it is You that will judge between Your servants in those matters about which they have differed.”

We do not follow those who force harm on people by insisting on the letter of the law without its spirit. We struggle to find the right balance, but we do not stop trying to reach it. We do not take refuge from our fears in false certainty, utopianism and romanticized notions of tradition.

Shabana Mir is a regular commentator on issues in the Muslim community.  She resides in Washington, DC with her husband Svend White and newborn daughter. You can read more of her thoughts at her weblog, Koonj.