By Vanessa Gomez Brake, *Sufi Leader, Peacemaker Buried in Jerusalem* - Illume - USAThursday, June 17, 2010
Jews, Christians and Muslims prayed together as regional Sufi leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari was laid to rest in his home in Old City Jerusalem.
On June 1 he passed away at the age of 61, after a long struggle with heart disease. Rabbis, Muslim and Druze sheiks, Christian clerics and lay people of diverse faiths paid respects at the mourning tent, which received visitors for three days.
Sheikh Bukhari was the head of the mystical Naqshabandi Holy Land Sufi Order and Uzbek community. In his lifetime, he became deeply engaged in interfaith peace activities, including co-founding Jerusalem Peacemakers, and participating in the Interfaith Coordinating Council in Israel, Interfaith Encounter Association and the Sulha Peace Project.
Some have said Sheikh Bukhari’s heart disease was due to the stresses of peace work. His teachings and practices had put him in danger on several occasions.
The Sufi leader believed in interfaith unity and nonviolent approaches to resolving conflicts. When faced with the reality of violence in the Middle East, he found inspiration in Islamic law and tradition, as well as in the writings of Gandhi, King and Mandela.
When asked when his interfaith peace work began, he recalled a phone call he received in 1999 from the Vatican. A Cardinal requested his participation in the upcoming millennium celebration. The plan was for a Catholic Cardinal, Rabbi David Rosen and the Sufi leader to lead a peace prayer on the Mount of Olives. It was this occasion that had Sheikh Bukhari become more seriously involved in interfaith efforts in the Holy Land.
In his own words, “What sets these peace efforts apart from the rest of Israel’s peace camp is a focus on religion, rather than politics, as the basis for dialogue and negotiation. Mainstream activists are largely secular.”
He had a vision that religion would win the peace: “It’s not religions that want peace…The people who believe in God, the religious people, the people who really want to implement God’s word, they can make the peace, they can make the changes, because if a politician stands and speaks, many people listen to him, but how many people agree with him? Very little. But when the religious leader who stands and speaks, they listen to him and they agree with him. The religious leader has a stronger role than a politician.”
On this topic he told one reporter in 2008:
Religious leaders have to take a role to work with the community on the grassroots, to help the people to find that violence will not solve our problem. The only way we do it by acting as a family, remembering that God created us to live here in peace and harmony, not to kill each other.
And for the last 9 years now I’ve been doing that, and we formed an organization called Jerusalem Peacemaker. We make activities to bring peoples together to sit and find a common language that we all love the Holy Land we all love the spirit, so we have to do something about it.
I had the chance to meet Sheikh Bukhari in Melbourne this past December. Thousands of people had descended on the Australian city for the Parliament of World Religions. People of various faith traditions from across the globe attended to learn from one another.
At the Parliament, Bukhari was on a panel with others from the Middle East to discuss ‘Religion, Conflict and Peace Building: The Case of Israel-WestBank-Gaza.’ The panelist told stories of how peacemakers in the Holy Land were working together to bridge the gulf between peoples.
Besides attending the panel discussion, I encountered the Sheikh in the press room as he was interviewed by Rachel Kohn, Australia’s leading journalist on religion. The two had met previously in his Jerusalem home in 2008. In that discussion, he outlines the history of his home and his family’s burial process.
We have our own graveyard in the garden here. So we never leave home, so we’re born here and we die here, and we’re buried here. So we have in my garden a small cemetery, its only for the family members, so we all get a chance to be buried inside the house and that’s one of the privileges we have that nobody else does…
It is a big room, about 4 by 4 under the ground and we lay them next to each other and by the time for the one who’s dead, he becomes just bones, so we move the bones aside and we lay next to it…
Sheikh Bukhari was thus wrapped in a white shroud, and buried in same grave as that of his grandfather, great-grandfather and the line of family sheikhs dating back to the 17th century.
His family had first migrated from Bukhara to Jerusalem in 1616 to establish a center to teach Sufism. Their home was built on the Via Dolorosa, the road that Jesus walked from the place of Pontius Pilate’s sentencing to his crucifixion.
He was a direct descendent of the Sunni scholar Imam Muhammad Ismail al-Bukhari of Bukhara, the ninth-century author of the hadith al-bukhari a collecter oral tradition that contains guidance about Islamic tradition and religious law and practice.
Bukhari’s family played a role in the political history of Jerusalem during the Ottoman era, when they were charged with overseeing the Islamic holy places in the Holy Land, including in Lebanon.
In his interview with Rachel Kohn, he had spoken of the many holy places in Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount for Christians, and the Wailing Wall of the Jews. Such sites are sources of contention in Israel, however Bukhari once said:
The place is not relevant to the worshipping, because God says ‘I gave you the whole earth to worship me on it.’ So any place, if I pray here in my house or anybody prays anywhere else, if I go to the church or the synagogue and I pray there, God will not say ‘No, you step out, you don’t belong here.’
…The place, it’s not relevant to the worshipping. If we are really sincere about God our holy places are the same…So the holy places, belong to God, not to us. …..If the mosque was here or there, or the temple was here or there, this is our own issue, but God says anywhere you pray, I’ll accept it. I accept it, so let’s not pinpoint issues that make complications…
Sheikh Bukhari is survived by a wife and six children, whose families are scattered across Jerusalem, Gaza and the US.
Jews, Christians and Muslims prayed together as regional Sufi leader, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari was laid to rest in his home in Old City Jerusalem.
On June 1 he passed away at the age of 61, after a long struggle with heart disease. Rabbis, Muslim and Druze sheiks, Christian clerics and lay people of diverse faiths paid respects at the mourning tent, which received visitors for three days.
Sheikh Bukhari was the head of the mystical Naqshabandi Holy Land Sufi Order and Uzbek community. In his lifetime, he became deeply engaged in interfaith peace activities, including co-founding Jerusalem Peacemakers, and participating in the Interfaith Coordinating Council in Israel, Interfaith Encounter Association and the Sulha Peace Project.
Some have said Sheikh Bukhari’s heart disease was due to the stresses of peace work. His teachings and practices had put him in danger on several occasions.
The Sufi leader believed in interfaith unity and nonviolent approaches to resolving conflicts. When faced with the reality of violence in the Middle East, he found inspiration in Islamic law and tradition, as well as in the writings of Gandhi, King and Mandela.
When asked when his interfaith peace work began, he recalled a phone call he received in 1999 from the Vatican. A Cardinal requested his participation in the upcoming millennium celebration. The plan was for a Catholic Cardinal, Rabbi David Rosen and the Sufi leader to lead a peace prayer on the Mount of Olives. It was this occasion that had Sheikh Bukhari become more seriously involved in interfaith efforts in the Holy Land.
In his own words, “What sets these peace efforts apart from the rest of Israel’s peace camp is a focus on religion, rather than politics, as the basis for dialogue and negotiation. Mainstream activists are largely secular.”
He had a vision that religion would win the peace: “It’s not religions that want peace…The people who believe in God, the religious people, the people who really want to implement God’s word, they can make the peace, they can make the changes, because if a politician stands and speaks, many people listen to him, but how many people agree with him? Very little. But when the religious leader who stands and speaks, they listen to him and they agree with him. The religious leader has a stronger role than a politician.”
On this topic he told one reporter in 2008:
Religious leaders have to take a role to work with the community on the grassroots, to help the people to find that violence will not solve our problem. The only way we do it by acting as a family, remembering that God created us to live here in peace and harmony, not to kill each other.
And for the last 9 years now I’ve been doing that, and we formed an organization called Jerusalem Peacemaker. We make activities to bring peoples together to sit and find a common language that we all love the Holy Land we all love the spirit, so we have to do something about it.
I had the chance to meet Sheikh Bukhari in Melbourne this past December. Thousands of people had descended on the Australian city for the Parliament of World Religions. People of various faith traditions from across the globe attended to learn from one another.
At the Parliament, Bukhari was on a panel with others from the Middle East to discuss ‘Religion, Conflict and Peace Building: The Case of Israel-WestBank-Gaza.’ The panelist told stories of how peacemakers in the Holy Land were working together to bridge the gulf between peoples.
Besides attending the panel discussion, I encountered the Sheikh in the press room as he was interviewed by Rachel Kohn, Australia’s leading journalist on religion. The two had met previously in his Jerusalem home in 2008. In that discussion, he outlines the history of his home and his family’s burial process.
We have our own graveyard in the garden here. So we never leave home, so we’re born here and we die here, and we’re buried here. So we have in my garden a small cemetery, its only for the family members, so we all get a chance to be buried inside the house and that’s one of the privileges we have that nobody else does…
It is a big room, about 4 by 4 under the ground and we lay them next to each other and by the time for the one who’s dead, he becomes just bones, so we move the bones aside and we lay next to it…
Sheikh Bukhari was thus wrapped in a white shroud, and buried in same grave as that of his grandfather, great-grandfather and the line of family sheikhs dating back to the 17th century.
His family had first migrated from Bukhara to Jerusalem in 1616 to establish a center to teach Sufism. Their home was built on the Via Dolorosa, the road that Jesus walked from the place of Pontius Pilate’s sentencing to his crucifixion.
He was a direct descendent of the Sunni scholar Imam Muhammad Ismail al-Bukhari of Bukhara, the ninth-century author of the hadith al-bukhari a collecter oral tradition that contains guidance about Islamic tradition and religious law and practice.
Bukhari’s family played a role in the political history of Jerusalem during the Ottoman era, when they were charged with overseeing the Islamic holy places in the Holy Land, including in Lebanon.
In his interview with Rachel Kohn, he had spoken of the many holy places in Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount for Christians, and the Wailing Wall of the Jews. Such sites are sources of contention in Israel, however Bukhari once said:
The place is not relevant to the worshipping, because God says ‘I gave you the whole earth to worship me on it.’ So any place, if I pray here in my house or anybody prays anywhere else, if I go to the church or the synagogue and I pray there, God will not say ‘No, you step out, you don’t belong here.’
…The place, it’s not relevant to the worshipping. If we are really sincere about God our holy places are the same…So the holy places, belong to God, not to us. …..If the mosque was here or there, or the temple was here or there, this is our own issue, but God says anywhere you pray, I’ll accept it. I accept it, so let’s not pinpoint issues that make complications…
Sheikh Bukhari is survived by a wife and six children, whose families are scattered across Jerusalem, Gaza and the US.
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