Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Sufism in Senegal: a detailed book review

Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal

allAfrica.com

BOOK REVIEW
November 29, 2005
Posted to the web November 29, 2005

review by Msia Kibona Clark
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Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal

Written by Khadim Mbacke, edited by John Hunwick, and translated by Eric Ross


An examination of Islam in West Africa exposes one to a world in which Islam has fused with local culture to such an extent that it is often difficult to tell where one ends and where the other begins. This has been the distinctive characteristic of West African Islam. It is a world of Sufism, Islamic brotherhoods, and rich African culture that finds ample room for expression through the Islamic faith.

Khadim Mbacke's book, Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal, delves deep into the practice of Islam in one of West Africa's truly unique countries. Senegal is unique in that the Senegalese people are very modern & cosmopolitan, very proud & traditional, and very Muslim. This makes for a unique combination and has led to the success of Senegalese religious and social networks abroad. Mbacke captures an essential component of that Senegalese mystique in his history of Islam in the country.

Mbacke's introduction gives a historical overview of the arrival of Islam in Africa in the 7th Century AD. Though Mbacke concentrates on the arrival of Islam in North Africa and its spread to West Africa, not addressing the significance of the religion's entrance in East Africa, he also gives an alternate account of Islam's entrance into Africa. Most scholars describe Islam's entrance into Africa, and the subsequent conversion of Africans to the religion, as a wholly violent phenomenon. The popularity of the word "jihad" has caused its overuse. Scholars often paint the picture of marauding Arabs invading Africa and conquering kingdom after kingdom killing all who refuse to submit to the will of Allah. Mbacke offers an additional account, telling of refugees fleeing the persecution of Muslims that occurred in Mecca during the height of Prophet Muhammad's influence in the region. Mbacke says that these refugees fled to North Africa and were the earliest converts to the new religion.

As North African conversion was well under way, the religion spread southward and eventually led to mass conversions, beginning in the 11th Century. Unlike in East Africa, where the kingdoms were smaller, the enormous size of the kingdoms in West Africa meant when the chiefs converted to Islam it led to mass conversions of entire groups of people.

Mbacke says that Sufi brotherhoods first appeared in Africa in the 15th Century and fit in comfortabley with West African society. Sufi brotherhoods were, and are, seen as essential to maintaining a straight path of religious purity. They provided a support system for Muslims who could seek guidance and religious teaching. Mbacke gives us the two components of these brotherhoods: the shaykhs ("masters") and the murids ("disciples"). The relationship between a shaykh and his disciples is similar to that of the relationship between teacher and student. The shaykhs, however, play a much more extensive role in a disciple's life. Shaykhs advise murids on all matters, religious and personal, and have specific obligations to lead their murids in their religious and private lives. As for the murids, Mbacke discusses the responsibilities a murid has to his shaykh. This includes a code of conduct when in the presence of the shaykh and complete relinquishing of personal will to one's shaykh. What Mbacke does not say is that the reverence and respect Murids have for their shaykh has led critics to say it borders on worship. This criticism has especially been heard from the growing numbers of fundamentalist and more orthodox Muslims in West Africa.

Khadim Mbacke goes on to tell the history behind Senegal's four largest brotherhoods; the Qadiri, the Tijani, the Mouride, and the Layenne. The Qadiri were the first to establish themselves in Senegal, but their decline and internal divisions were soon overshadowed by the arrival of the Tijani. The Tijani date back to the 18th Century and emerged in Algeria and spread throughout Africa and the Middle East. Later, the European colonial conquest of Africa would also play a role in the evolution of Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal. As the French colonial government curtailed much of the Islamic activity that had previously been enjoyed, Muslims in Senegal reacted and there was a backlash to the restrictions of the colonial government. Mbacke says this led to a rejection of "all forms of collaboration with the colonizer". Spearheading this opposition to the French was Shaykh Ahmad Bamba, who would be the founder of the Mourides. Shaykh Ahmad Bamba presented a threat to the French regime, which exiled the leader in 1895 and again in 1903. By the time of Shaykh Ahmad Bamba's final return to Senegal in 1907 he had amassed an enormous following and would be the founder of Senegal's largest brotherhood. The fourth brotherhood that Mbacke discusses are the Layenne, who Mbacke says are concentrated on the Cap Vert peninsula.

Khadim Mbacke then discusses the relations within the brotherhoods, telling of their organizational structure, and the relations between brotherhoods, discussing the divisions that exists in Senegalese society based on ones membership in a particular brotherhood. Mbacke also tackles a controversial subject, the Islamic schools that the brotherhoods have set up. These schools have come under fire because of their unorthodox methods as well as because of their quality of education. According to Mbacke, these schools often suffer from a lack of resources and funding as well as a lack of recognition of their diplomas.

Mback also discusses the important role the brotherhoods have played in the economy via the agricultural sector and the financial duties between a shaykh and his murids. Mbacke further examines the importance of brotherhoods in the social and political spheres. Socially, Shaykhs have a great deal of influence on the lives of the murids. This includes solving disputes, arranging marriages, and handling relations between murids. Politically, the brotherhoods in Senegal have also proven themselves extremely influential. Under both the colonial administration as well as all three post-independence regimes, the Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal have put themselves in strategic positions with each regime. Mbacke gives a detailed look into the influence of the brotherhoods under the French and later under the governments of Leopold Senghor and Abdou Diouf, and what that influence has meant for politics in Senegal and well as for the role of Islamic brotherhoods in the country.

Khadim Mbacke concludes his book with a look at the future of Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal. Mbacke compares the original goals of the founders of these brotherhoods with the divisions that now exist between them. The author is a bit scathing in his criticism of the current status of the brotherhoods in Senegal, pointing to materialism and ignorance as ills that currently plague them all. He is critical of what he calls a state of "stagnation", saying, "their (the brotherhoods) initial force no longer propels them and they have become mired by the dead weight of ignorant masses". Mbacke seems to be calling for a reform of the Islamic brotherhoods, a "return to normative Islamic practice based in universally recognized principles".

Khadim Mbacke's book is one of the few detailed histories of the phenomenon of Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal. For any serious scholar of religion in West Africa, the book offers a great historical picture of the influence of Islam in one of West Africa's most dynamic countries. The book makes a great companion to the wealth of literature that deals with Senegalese traders in New York and other metropolitan cities. The fact that most of these traders are intricately connected trough these brotherhoods and have set up effective networks that link fellow members all over the world is an amazing phenomenon that scholars are only recently studying in any detail. Mbacke's book takes us to the source of that network and discusses the foundations that have created the network. Alternately, while very detailed and informative, Mbacke will certainly ruffle some feathers with his criticisms. The criticisms are timely, however, and should open the door for more debate among the Senegalese community, both in Senegal and abroad.

Msia Kibona Clark is a Sasakawa Fellow and PhD Candidate at Howard University's African Studies Department. Her dissertation topic examines the impact of African immigration to the U.S. on African and African American relationships. Msia is also the Ugandan Country Specialist for Amnesty International and the Book Review Editor for AllAfrica.com.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Sufism in Turkey - What Goes Around...

What goes round...

The popularity in the US of Rumi, a 13th-century Turkish poet, is a tragic irony, as the order of Sufi dervishes he founded is banned at home, writes William Dalrymple

Saturday November 5, 2005
The Guardian

It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11, Bin Laden and the Clash of Civilisations, but the bestselling poet in the US in the 1990s was not any of the giants of American letters - Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens or Sylvia Plath; nor was it Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or any European poet. Instead, remarkably, it was a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught sharia law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey.

Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi lived in Central Anatolia in the early 13th century, and he died around the time of Dante's eighth birthday. How Rumi came to outsell any other poet in America in the late 1990s, at least according to the LA Times, is an unlikely story - but not quite as unlikely as the way Rumi has been mysteriously morphed from a medieval scholar of Islamic law, or fiqh, into an American New Age guru.

A selection from the "arousing" Rumi translations by the poet Coleman Barks has been set to music with his verses mouthed by such spiritual luminaries as Madonna, Goldie Hawn and Demi Moore (the cover blurb of this CD describes it as all about "Passion. Music. Romance. Transcending the boundaries of ecstasy it creates a musical tribute to the Act of Love.") Sarah Jessica Parker is reported to do her aerobics to rock'n'roll settings of Rumi, and he is also available in a self-help audiobook version aimed at stressed New York commuters. Rumi has even been hailed as one of the torchbearers (according to one book on the subject) "of homoeroticism and spirituality".

Very little of this, of course, seems to have much connection to the original, historical Rumi, or the voluminous pages of profoundly mystical Persian religious verse he wrote. According to his most authoritative modern biographer, the Persian scholar Franklin D Lewis, "while Rumi seems slightly out of place in the company of Ginsberg, and seriously misunderstood as a poet of sexual love, it simply defies credulity to find Rumi in the realm of haute couture. But models draped in Donna Karan's new black, charcoal and platinum fall fashions actually flounced down the runway to health guru Deepak Chopra's recent musical versions of Rumi."

There is an additional layer of paradox and absurdity here: although Rumi lived and wrote in central Turkey, he is almost unread in his homeland and there is no accessible modern edition of his work in contemporary Turkish. According to Talat Halman, the leading Turkish Rumi scholar, whom I went to see in Istanbul, "Rumi is certainly not the bestselling poet in Turkey - far from it. For one thing, his poems have not been translated as extensively as they should have been, and the translations that exist are not poetic enough. People here simply don't have the patience to read a huge book like [Rumi's masterpiece] The Masnavi."

But it is not just that Rumi's poetry is unread. The order of Sufi dervishes that Rumi was father to, the Mevlevis, have been officially banned since the time of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and their beautiful lodges or tekkes lie locked and left to decay or seized by the state, in order - a tragic irony - to westernise Turkey, and bring it closer to Europe and the US. Although discreet expressions of Sufism are now openly tolerated, and pictures of Whirling Dervishes are prominently used in Turkish government tourist brochures, the open practice of the Sufi mysticism that Rumi represented can still technically result in a seven-month prison sentence. While in Turkey making a Channel 4 documentary on Sufi music this summer we found it almost impossible to get any genuine Turkish Sufi group to allow us to film them, so nervous were they of the reaction of the authorities.

It all adds up to an archetypal - if unusually poignant - case of east-west misunderstanding: a west earnestly looking eastwards for an ancient spiritual wisdom, which it receives through the filter of sexed-up translations that most Persian scholars regard as seriously flawed, and which recreate a Rumi wholly divorced from his Islamic context; while in the east, a Republican Turkish government anxious to integrate Turkey with Europe bans Rumi's Sufi brotherhood as part of its attempt to embrace a west it perceives as rational, industrial, intolerant of superstition and somehow post-mystical.

In the middle of this confusion of civilisations, Sufism or Islamic mysticism, the most accessible, tolerant and pluralistic incarnation of Islam, and a uniquely valuable bridge between east and west at this moment of crisis, finds itself suppressed by the Islamic world's two most pro-western governments: the fundamentalist Saudi Wahhabis, who see it as a heretical threat to their own harsh, literal and intolerant interpretation of the Qur'an; and secular Turkey, which regards it as a token of their embarrassing, corrupt and superstitious Ottoman past.

It is, as Halman says, a major missed opportunity. He believes that Rumi's brand of Sufism represents "the free spirit of Islam ... the liberal spirit that I think needs to be recognised at a time when Islam has come to be considered almost synonymous with terrorism. The Sufi spirit softens the message of the Qur'an by emphasising the sense of love, and the passionate relationship between the believer and the beloved, God of course being the ultimate beloved. So in the eyes of Rumi and the Sufis, God becomes not the angry god of punishment, nor the god of revenge, but the god of love."

At this moment, more than ever, that message desperately needs to be heard.

Like most medieval saints in both the east and west, the life of the historical Rumi lies clouded in a fog of later hagiography. Some facts do however stand out. He was born in Balkh, capital of Khorasan, in what is now Afghanistan, on September 30 1207, and migrated with his family to Anatolia shortly before his home city was destroyed by the Mongols in 1221. After training as a Muslim preacher and jurist, he taught sharia law, of the Hanafi school, in a madrasa in Konya where he died on December 17 1273, and where his shrine, the Yesil Turbe, or Green Tomb, still stands.

At 37, Rumi's life was transformed when he met an enigmatic wandering dervish called Shams Tabrizi, who brought about a major spiritual epiphany in the respectable and bookish jurist. The two quickly became inseparable (though judging by Rumi's writings, it is most unlikely there was any sexual relationship as some have claimed). When Tabrizi mysteriously disappeared, Rumi's grief was expressed in one of the greatest outpourings of longing and separation ever produced in any language: a great waterfall of Persian verse - some 3,500 odes, 2,000 quatrains, and a massive mystical epic, The Masnavi, 26,000 couplets long, a rambling collection of tales, teaching stories and spiritual anecdotes built around the theme of "the Nightingale who was separated from the Rose". It is, in the eyes of many, the deepest, most complex and most mellifluous collection of mystical poetry ever written in any language, and from any religious tradition. It certainly stands as the supreme expression of mystical Islam.

Rumi advocated an individual and interior spirituality, and it is the love, rather than the fear, of God that lies at the heart of his message. He attempts to merge the spirit of the human with the ideal of a god of love, whom Rumi locates within the human heart. Rumi's first biographer, Aflaki, tells of a man who came to Rumi asking how he could reach the other world, as only there would he be at peace. "What do you know about where He is?" asked Rumi. "Everything in this or that world is within you."

Because God can best be reached through the gateway of the heart, Rumi believed you did not necessarily need ritual to get to him, and that the Divine is as accessible to Christians and Jews as to Muslims: "Love's creed is separate from all religions," he wrote. "The creed and denomination of lovers is God." All traditions are tolerated, because in the opinion of Rumi anyone is capable of expressing their love for God, and that transcends both religious associations and your place in the social order: "My religion," he wrote, "is to live through love."

Yet for all this, Rumi himself always remained an orthodox and practising Sunni Muslim. As Lewis rightly notes, "Rumi did not come to his theology of tolerance and inclusive spirituality by turning away from traditional Islam, but through immersion in it." He was not a "guru calmly dispensing words of wisdom capable of resolving, panacea-like, all our ontological ailments", as he is presented in the translations of Coleman Barks, so much as "a poet of overpowering longing, trying to grope through his shattering sense of loss". Likewise the poet and fellow of All Souls Andrew Harvey, who has produced some fine recreations of Rumi's verse, emphasises Rumi's "rigorous, even ferocious austerity". It is a far cry, he believes, from the New Age construct, "Rosebud Rumi, a Californian hippy-like figure of vague ecstatic sweetness and diffused warm-hearted brotherhood, a kind of medieval Jerry Garcia of the Sacred Heart".

One way Rumi did, however, most certainly diverge from some of the more austere ulema of his time was in that he believed passionately in the use of music, poetry and dancing as a path for reaching God, as a way of, as he put it, opening the gates of paradise. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine, and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. It was from these ideas that the whirling of Rumi's Mevlevi Sufi brotherhood - known in the west as the Whirling Dervishes - developed into a ritual form. The intention was to help devotees focus on the God within: as one Mevlevi Whirler we interviewed put it, there is a "palpable stillness you discover at the centre of the whirling ... everyone disappears and you feel as if you're in the eye of a hurricane".

Beautiful as it is, this use of poetry and music in ritual is one of the many aspects of Sufi practice that has attracted the wrath of modern Islamists. For although there is nothing in the Qur'an that specifically bans music, Islamic tradition has always associated music with courts, dancing girls and immorality, and there is a long tradition of clerical opposition to music. Today, Islamic puritans, like those of 17th-century England, firmly regard all music as unacceptable, and work to ban it wherever they come to power.

While filming in Pakistan we interviewed Maulana Mohammad Abdul Malik, a senior cleric with the Islamist political party, Jamaat-i-Islami, which has just banned the public playing of music within the Frontier province. For him the matter was quite simple. "Music is against Islam," he said. "These musical instruments - the tabla, sarangi, dhol - lead men astray and are sinful. They are forbidden, and these musicians are wrongdoers." This attitude is on the ascendant across the Islamic world and the pacifist Sufis have frequently faced violence from their Islamist opponents: several Sufi shrines and brotherhoods, for example, have recently been bombed in Iraq.

In Turkey, however, the Sufis have suffered far more from the secular Republicans than from the country's relatively quiescent Islamists. Before the first world war there were almost 100,000 disciples of the Mevlevi order throughout the Ottoman empire. But in 1925, as part of his desire to create a modern, western-orientated, secular state, Atatürk banned all the different Sufi orders and closed their tekkes. Pious foundations were suspended and their endowments expropriated; Sufi hospices were closed and their contents seized; all religious titles were abolished and dervish clothes outlawed. Turkish intellectuals were encouraged to study the western classics, while Rumi's writings, along with those of all his Sufi peers, were treated as an intellectual irrelevance. In 1937, Atatürk went even further, prohibiting by law any form of traditional music, especially the playing of the ney, the Sufis' reed flute.

While filming in Istanbul, we visited one beautiful old Ottoman tekke, by the Mevlana gate of the old walls: since 1925 it had been used as an orphanage and warehouse, before its priceless library was finally destroyed in a fire in the 1980s. It has now fallen into ruins and lies locked and abandoned. All one can do is peer through the barbed wire at the domes and semi-domes and the overgrown panels of Ottoman calligraphy half covered with vines and creepers. Other Mevlevi centres, like the magnificent Galata tekke in the centre of Istanbul, have become museums.

As far as the Turkish state is con-cerned, the Mevlevis are little more than a museum culture to be exploited as a tourist attraction. This process began in the mid-60s when the wife of a senior US army officer came to Konya and asked her government escorts about the dervishes. The officials were thrown into a panic. The local mayor eventually found an old dervish and forced him to teach the local basketball team how to turn; soon a "folkloric" festival began to be mounted in the Konya sports hall every year to attract foreign tourists. For a while there was even a brief attempt made to replace the Sufi musicians who accompanied the dancers with the town's brass band, which was judged to be more modern and republican.

One man whose life has been shaped by this official Turkish hostility to Sufism is the great Turkish ney player, Kudsi Erguner. Erguner, who has for years lived in Paris working with Peter Brook, Didier Lockwood and Peter Gabriel, was born into a family of hereditary ney players of the Istanbul Mevlevi brotherhood. His recent autobiography, Journeys of a Sufi Musician, gives a wonderful picture of the trials of being a Sufi devotee in the early years of the Turkish Republic after the Sufi orders were banned. He describes the strict secrecy in which his father and the other Mevlevis were forced to organise their spiritual life: "Though I must have been hardly five years old, I remember those old men with luminous faces whose eyes always appeared moist as if they had just wiped away a tear at the sound of the ney, or the recitation of a Rumi poem."

Every time the brotherhood had a musical gathering (sama), members of the brotherhood would be posted at each end of the street as lookouts to give warnings of a police raid. It was not dissimilar to the US during Prohibition - except that in the case of the Sufis, bottles of raki were kept in a fridge as a cover: "This alcohol was practically considered a symbol of the republic, so it was unthinkable for the authorities to believe that it could be drunk by 'religious fanatics'. If the police came in, the sheikh could always bring out the bottle and say they were only having a little party among friends."

All his professional life, Erguner found both his music and its Sufi inspiration blocked by Turkish officialdom, so that even his sell-out tours in Paris and London were disapproved of by the respective Turkish embassies, which accused him of "projecting a retrogressive image of Turkey abroad". More shocking still is the description Erguner gives of the government's refusal to conserve Turkey's Sufi heritage. On one occasion he found a priceless stash of Ottoman Sufi music and instruments in the cellar of the Istanbul mosque of Yeni Cami, where they had been dumped in the 1920s after being confiscated from various tekkes. Despite all his efforts, Erguner could not get permission to conserve any of the material: "In this damp underground vault these venerable relics, including flags, books, clothes and musical instruments were left to rot. My begging was of no avail, and none of it could be saved."

We filmed Erguner playing his ney after hours in one of Sinan's great mosques in Istanbul. It is one of the most elegiac sounds in all world music, and for Rumi the supreme symbol for man's separation from God. As the opening lines of The Masnavi puts it: "Listen to the song of the ney, how it laments its separation from the reed bed." Afterwards I accompanied Erguner to the south-east of the country to visit the marshy reed beds where he, and his father before him, have always found the reeds which they turn into neys. As we walked through the reeds, looking down at the Mediterranean sparkling far below us, he talked sadly of all that had been lost.

"In Turkish culture," he said, "Sufism has always provided the religious justification for the fine arts. It is like the sea and a boat: one cannot exist without the other. All our fine arts found themselves in Sufism. In Istanbul alone there were 700 tekkes. This is where the arts of poetry, music and calligraphy were all developed and passed down."

Erguner selected a fine reed of the right length and width and got out his knife: "When you look at the history of classical music in the Ottoman empire," he said, "there is not a single composer who was not a follower of Rumi. That is why in Turkey you cannot distinguish classical music from religious music. So what happened [under Atatürk] in the 1920s was like a cultural revolution: it turned everything upside down."

We walked on through the reeds, Erguner expertly fingering them in search of the perfect ney: "The buildings and the foundations disappeared," he said, "and the poets and musicians found themselves out on the streets. Successive generations of children were taught to look west, were told that civilisation lay elsewhere. So the deep continuity, the exchange between human beings, the continuity of teaching, all that was utterly lost."

He shook his head: "Once such a tradition is broken," he said, "it can never really be recovered. Today people in Turkey are beginning to understand that western civilisation is not the only answer, that our own civilisation had great worth. But in so many ways it is too late now: too much has already been lost, and can never be recovered."

· William Dalrymple's film Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 11.30pm tomorrow. There will be a special screening at the Barbican earlier in the day at 4.15pm, followed by a Q&A with Dalrymple and the director Simon Broughton. This will coincide with a Barbican festival of Sufi music featuring many of the musicians in the film. www.barbican.org.uk/contemporary and www.williamdalrymple.com

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Sufis allege forced conversion in Muslim town [Old News]

Sufis allege forced conversion in Muslim town [Old News]

[TamilNet, November 03, 2004 14:08 GMT]
Clerics of a Sufi sect of Islam in Kattankudy, a large Muslim town near Batticaloa riven by religious clashes which started four days ago, said Wednesday that more than six hundred of their followers were forcibly converted to orthodoxy under threat of violence and death. Sri Lanka army troops were also deployed in the troubled town along with special riot Police to prevent further violence.

Irumbu- a Police patrol with loud hailers at the orthodox Irumbu Thaikka Mosque Wednesday

Sufi mosque that was demolished by armed orthodox Islamic groups on Sunday
More than two hundred Muslim families that belong to the Sufi sect led by the cleric Abdur Rauf Mowlavi sought refuge in Araiyampathy, a Tamil village next to Kattankudy Tuesday night, fearing violent attacks by armed orthodox Islamic groups.

Some adherents of the Sufi sect alleged that a Muslim politician who was close ally of President Kumaratunga had instigated armed extremists against them.

"Our people were made to give up their faith at gun point", a spokesman for the Sufis said.

An orthodox cleric denied the charge. He said that the followers of Rauf Mowlavi voluntarily came over to accept orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, government officials and Police convened two separate peace meetings between the Sufis and the orthodox Ulama board members.

"They have agreed to a truce tentatively. It is difficult to dispel fear and suspicion overnight", a Police officer said.

A large number of families that follow the teachings of the pantheistic Sufi sect led by Abdur Rauf Mowlavi are on protest fast in their main mosque premises. Sri Lanka army troops and special motorbike commandos provided security to the Sufi mosque compound Wednesday.

On Sunday armed orthodox Islamic groups also attacked another Sufi sect in Kattankudy led by the charismatic cleric called Payilvaan.

Famous Dargahs of India: Interview with Mumtaz Currim

Famous Dargahs of India -- Deccan Herald, October 30, 2005

Mumtaz Currim, research scholar and art historian in Islamic Studies, talks to Vimla Patil about the influence of Sufism on Indian culture and world-famous dargahs in India.

The confluence of Sufism and Hindu Bhakti cults, which has enriched Indian culture over the centuries, is indeed fascinating. Sufis came to India mainly during the 12th and 13th centuries, bringing with them their philosophy of love and devotion to the divine. Their belief decreed that the almighty was the ‘beloved’ and the devotee sought a loving glimpse of his presence. They believed that the devotee had only to ‘raise the veil which separated the individual soul from the universal soul’ so as to bring about the union of the human and the divine. This philosophy and perception of the divine appealed greatly to millions of HIndus who followed the Bhakti cult. This philosophy influenced many Bhakti-cult saint/poets of medieval India. An excellent example is the poetry of Meerabai, who used Sufi imagery in her song “Ghungat ke pata khol, tohe piya milenge.” Essentially simple and uncomplicated, both the Sufi and Bhakti cults attracted millions because the foundation of both was love and compassion. Both these cults created a huge treasure of dance, music, paintings and literature.

Mumtaz Currim, a scholar and researcher of Sufi history and chronicler of Sufi Digraphs in India, has a great deal to reveal about this fusion of religious thought which lives on in Indian culture to this day. She says, “I found my vocation when I obtained my master’s degree in Islamic Cultures and Societies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since 1999, I have been a visiting lecturer in the post-graduate course on the History of Indian Aesthetics conducted annually by the University of Mumbai. Earlier, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophies of the East and West from the Mumbai University and worked with Madame Sophia Wadia at the Indian PEN society with luminaries like Nissim Ezekiel. I have written not only several cook books, but also extensive travel features for Voyage magazine and worked as the copy editor of the famous art magazine Marg, founded by Mulk Raj Anand.

“Sometime during my career, I became interested in Sufism and its wonderful history— especially since its advent in India during the 12th and 13th centuries,” Mumtaz continues, “Sufis arrived in India from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to settle in Sindh, Multan, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan, Bihar, Karnataka and Bengal. By the 16th century, leading orders such as the Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri, Firdausi, Qubrawi, Shattari and Naqshbandi spread their influence across the subcontinent and attracted millions from other faiths to this cult. Sufi Shaykhs and the hierarchy of their followers devoted themselves to learning, vigilant prayers and psychological and mystical practices and humanitarian work. Many great Sufi saints lived and practiced their path to divinity in India. Their dargahs are famous places of pilgrimages not only for Muslims, but also for people of other religions who have faith in the power of the saints to be the intercessors between man and god. Such dargahs became important religious centers in Iran, Morocco, Central Asia and India. Nine dargahs in India are famous throughout the world— among them are the Ajmer Dargah of Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti, the dargah of Shaykh Salim Chishti in Fatehpur Sikri near Agra and the dargah of Shaykh Nizamuddin Awliya in Delhi. The Sarkhej Durgah near Ahmedabad also attracts millions. So does the Khwaja Syed Kohommed Gesu Durgah in Karnataka. Festivals called Urs are held at such dargahs every year and millions visit these sacred places in search of peace and divine blessings through the intercession of the great mystics.”


Currim’s is co-editor with George Michell of a Marg volume called Dargahs— Abodes of the Saints, a profusely illustrated coffee table book that has rich photographic content from Karoki Lewis. The book is an authoritative tome on Sufism and the famous dargahs of India. “A Sufi is one who seeks communion with the final reality,” says Mumtaz, “His path involves a rigorous way of life and an inward journey in close proximity with a spiritual master. Sufism is a mystical tradition in Islam, which introduces a strongly personal element into religious discipline to pave the way for a deeper spiritual life. Peter Awn, in Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Religions says, ‘Sufism evokes complex layers of meanings of a spiritual attainment that raises one to a rank of unique intimacy with God. Once the journey to God is over, the infinite journey in God begins.’ Sufism acknowledges three planes— material, psychic and spiritual. These are important stations, which the neophyte passes through with the help of the master. Sufism says that love is not to be learnt from man. It is a gift of God and comes from his grace.”

Mumtaz has given innumerable presentations on Islam and its worldview, Sufism, the aesthetics of Islamic art and architecture, miniature paintings, calligraphy and fine arts with a special emphasis on India. At present, she is researching for a book on Indian and Pakistani Mughal-style art for India Book House.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Sufism in Senegal: a detailed book review
No comments:
Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal

allAfrica.com

BOOK REVIEW
November 29, 2005
Posted to the web November 29, 2005

review by Msia Kibona Clark
----

Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal

Written by Khadim Mbacke, edited by John Hunwick, and translated by Eric Ross


An examination of Islam in West Africa exposes one to a world in which Islam has fused with local culture to such an extent that it is often difficult to tell where one ends and where the other begins. This has been the distinctive characteristic of West African Islam. It is a world of Sufism, Islamic brotherhoods, and rich African culture that finds ample room for expression through the Islamic faith.

Khadim Mbacke's book, Sufism and Religious Brotherhoods in Senegal, delves deep into the practice of Islam in one of West Africa's truly unique countries. Senegal is unique in that the Senegalese people are very modern & cosmopolitan, very proud & traditional, and very Muslim. This makes for a unique combination and has led to the success of Senegalese religious and social networks abroad. Mbacke captures an essential component of that Senegalese mystique in his history of Islam in the country.

Mbacke's introduction gives a historical overview of the arrival of Islam in Africa in the 7th Century AD. Though Mbacke concentrates on the arrival of Islam in North Africa and its spread to West Africa, not addressing the significance of the religion's entrance in East Africa, he also gives an alternate account of Islam's entrance into Africa. Most scholars describe Islam's entrance into Africa, and the subsequent conversion of Africans to the religion, as a wholly violent phenomenon. The popularity of the word "jihad" has caused its overuse. Scholars often paint the picture of marauding Arabs invading Africa and conquering kingdom after kingdom killing all who refuse to submit to the will of Allah. Mbacke offers an additional account, telling of refugees fleeing the persecution of Muslims that occurred in Mecca during the height of Prophet Muhammad's influence in the region. Mbacke says that these refugees fled to North Africa and were the earliest converts to the new religion.

As North African conversion was well under way, the religion spread southward and eventually led to mass conversions, beginning in the 11th Century. Unlike in East Africa, where the kingdoms were smaller, the enormous size of the kingdoms in West Africa meant when the chiefs converted to Islam it led to mass conversions of entire groups of people.

Mbacke says that Sufi brotherhoods first appeared in Africa in the 15th Century and fit in comfortabley with West African society. Sufi brotherhoods were, and are, seen as essential to maintaining a straight path of religious purity. They provided a support system for Muslims who could seek guidance and religious teaching. Mbacke gives us the two components of these brotherhoods: the shaykhs ("masters") and the murids ("disciples"). The relationship between a shaykh and his disciples is similar to that of the relationship between teacher and student. The shaykhs, however, play a much more extensive role in a disciple's life. Shaykhs advise murids on all matters, religious and personal, and have specific obligations to lead their murids in their religious and private lives. As for the murids, Mbacke discusses the responsibilities a murid has to his shaykh. This includes a code of conduct when in the presence of the shaykh and complete relinquishing of personal will to one's shaykh. What Mbacke does not say is that the reverence and respect Murids have for their shaykh has led critics to say it borders on worship. This criticism has especially been heard from the growing numbers of fundamentalist and more orthodox Muslims in West Africa.

Khadim Mbacke goes on to tell the history behind Senegal's four largest brotherhoods; the Qadiri, the Tijani, the Mouride, and the Layenne. The Qadiri were the first to establish themselves in Senegal, but their decline and internal divisions were soon overshadowed by the arrival of the Tijani. The Tijani date back to the 18th Century and emerged in Algeria and spread throughout Africa and the Middle East. Later, the European colonial conquest of Africa would also play a role in the evolution of Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal. As the French colonial government curtailed much of the Islamic activity that had previously been enjoyed, Muslims in Senegal reacted and there was a backlash to the restrictions of the colonial government. Mbacke says this led to a rejection of "all forms of collaboration with the colonizer". Spearheading this opposition to the French was Shaykh Ahmad Bamba, who would be the founder of the Mourides. Shaykh Ahmad Bamba presented a threat to the French regime, which exiled the leader in 1895 and again in 1903. By the time of Shaykh Ahmad Bamba's final return to Senegal in 1907 he had amassed an enormous following and would be the founder of Senegal's largest brotherhood. The fourth brotherhood that Mbacke discusses are the Layenne, who Mbacke says are concentrated on the Cap Vert peninsula.

Khadim Mbacke then discusses the relations within the brotherhoods, telling of their organizational structure, and the relations between brotherhoods, discussing the divisions that exists in Senegalese society based on ones membership in a particular brotherhood. Mbacke also tackles a controversial subject, the Islamic schools that the brotherhoods have set up. These schools have come under fire because of their unorthodox methods as well as because of their quality of education. According to Mbacke, these schools often suffer from a lack of resources and funding as well as a lack of recognition of their diplomas.

Mback also discusses the important role the brotherhoods have played in the economy via the agricultural sector and the financial duties between a shaykh and his murids. Mbacke further examines the importance of brotherhoods in the social and political spheres. Socially, Shaykhs have a great deal of influence on the lives of the murids. This includes solving disputes, arranging marriages, and handling relations between murids. Politically, the brotherhoods in Senegal have also proven themselves extremely influential. Under both the colonial administration as well as all three post-independence regimes, the Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal have put themselves in strategic positions with each regime. Mbacke gives a detailed look into the influence of the brotherhoods under the French and later under the governments of Leopold Senghor and Abdou Diouf, and what that influence has meant for politics in Senegal and well as for the role of Islamic brotherhoods in the country.

Khadim Mbacke concludes his book with a look at the future of Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal. Mbacke compares the original goals of the founders of these brotherhoods with the divisions that now exist between them. The author is a bit scathing in his criticism of the current status of the brotherhoods in Senegal, pointing to materialism and ignorance as ills that currently plague them all. He is critical of what he calls a state of "stagnation", saying, "their (the brotherhoods) initial force no longer propels them and they have become mired by the dead weight of ignorant masses". Mbacke seems to be calling for a reform of the Islamic brotherhoods, a "return to normative Islamic practice based in universally recognized principles".

Khadim Mbacke's book is one of the few detailed histories of the phenomenon of Islamic brotherhoods in Senegal. For any serious scholar of religion in West Africa, the book offers a great historical picture of the influence of Islam in one of West Africa's most dynamic countries. The book makes a great companion to the wealth of literature that deals with Senegalese traders in New York and other metropolitan cities. The fact that most of these traders are intricately connected trough these brotherhoods and have set up effective networks that link fellow members all over the world is an amazing phenomenon that scholars are only recently studying in any detail. Mbacke's book takes us to the source of that network and discusses the foundations that have created the network. Alternately, while very detailed and informative, Mbacke will certainly ruffle some feathers with his criticisms. The criticisms are timely, however, and should open the door for more debate among the Senegalese community, both in Senegal and abroad.

Msia Kibona Clark is a Sasakawa Fellow and PhD Candidate at Howard University's African Studies Department. Her dissertation topic examines the impact of African immigration to the U.S. on African and African American relationships. Msia is also the Ugandan Country Specialist for Amnesty International and the Book Review Editor for AllAfrica.com.
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Sunday, November 27, 2005

Sufism in Turkey - What Goes Around...
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What goes round...

The popularity in the US of Rumi, a 13th-century Turkish poet, is a tragic irony, as the order of Sufi dervishes he founded is banned at home, writes William Dalrymple

Saturday November 5, 2005
The Guardian

It seems almost unbelievable in the world of 9/11, Bin Laden and the Clash of Civilisations, but the bestselling poet in the US in the 1990s was not any of the giants of American letters - Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens or Sylvia Plath; nor was it Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or any European poet. Instead, remarkably, it was a classically trained Muslim cleric who taught sharia law in a madrasa in what is now Turkey.

Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi lived in Central Anatolia in the early 13th century, and he died around the time of Dante's eighth birthday. How Rumi came to outsell any other poet in America in the late 1990s, at least according to the LA Times, is an unlikely story - but not quite as unlikely as the way Rumi has been mysteriously morphed from a medieval scholar of Islamic law, or fiqh, into an American New Age guru.

A selection from the "arousing" Rumi translations by the poet Coleman Barks has been set to music with his verses mouthed by such spiritual luminaries as Madonna, Goldie Hawn and Demi Moore (the cover blurb of this CD describes it as all about "Passion. Music. Romance. Transcending the boundaries of ecstasy it creates a musical tribute to the Act of Love.") Sarah Jessica Parker is reported to do her aerobics to rock'n'roll settings of Rumi, and he is also available in a self-help audiobook version aimed at stressed New York commuters. Rumi has even been hailed as one of the torchbearers (according to one book on the subject) "of homoeroticism and spirituality".

Very little of this, of course, seems to have much connection to the original, historical Rumi, or the voluminous pages of profoundly mystical Persian religious verse he wrote. According to his most authoritative modern biographer, the Persian scholar Franklin D Lewis, "while Rumi seems slightly out of place in the company of Ginsberg, and seriously misunderstood as a poet of sexual love, it simply defies credulity to find Rumi in the realm of haute couture. But models draped in Donna Karan's new black, charcoal and platinum fall fashions actually flounced down the runway to health guru Deepak Chopra's recent musical versions of Rumi."

There is an additional layer of paradox and absurdity here: although Rumi lived and wrote in central Turkey, he is almost unread in his homeland and there is no accessible modern edition of his work in contemporary Turkish. According to Talat Halman, the leading Turkish Rumi scholar, whom I went to see in Istanbul, "Rumi is certainly not the bestselling poet in Turkey - far from it. For one thing, his poems have not been translated as extensively as they should have been, and the translations that exist are not poetic enough. People here simply don't have the patience to read a huge book like [Rumi's masterpiece] The Masnavi."

But it is not just that Rumi's poetry is unread. The order of Sufi dervishes that Rumi was father to, the Mevlevis, have been officially banned since the time of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and their beautiful lodges or tekkes lie locked and left to decay or seized by the state, in order - a tragic irony - to westernise Turkey, and bring it closer to Europe and the US. Although discreet expressions of Sufism are now openly tolerated, and pictures of Whirling Dervishes are prominently used in Turkish government tourist brochures, the open practice of the Sufi mysticism that Rumi represented can still technically result in a seven-month prison sentence. While in Turkey making a Channel 4 documentary on Sufi music this summer we found it almost impossible to get any genuine Turkish Sufi group to allow us to film them, so nervous were they of the reaction of the authorities.

It all adds up to an archetypal - if unusually poignant - case of east-west misunderstanding: a west earnestly looking eastwards for an ancient spiritual wisdom, which it receives through the filter of sexed-up translations that most Persian scholars regard as seriously flawed, and which recreate a Rumi wholly divorced from his Islamic context; while in the east, a Republican Turkish government anxious to integrate Turkey with Europe bans Rumi's Sufi brotherhood as part of its attempt to embrace a west it perceives as rational, industrial, intolerant of superstition and somehow post-mystical.

In the middle of this confusion of civilisations, Sufism or Islamic mysticism, the most accessible, tolerant and pluralistic incarnation of Islam, and a uniquely valuable bridge between east and west at this moment of crisis, finds itself suppressed by the Islamic world's two most pro-western governments: the fundamentalist Saudi Wahhabis, who see it as a heretical threat to their own harsh, literal and intolerant interpretation of the Qur'an; and secular Turkey, which regards it as a token of their embarrassing, corrupt and superstitious Ottoman past.

It is, as Halman says, a major missed opportunity. He believes that Rumi's brand of Sufism represents "the free spirit of Islam ... the liberal spirit that I think needs to be recognised at a time when Islam has come to be considered almost synonymous with terrorism. The Sufi spirit softens the message of the Qur'an by emphasising the sense of love, and the passionate relationship between the believer and the beloved, God of course being the ultimate beloved. So in the eyes of Rumi and the Sufis, God becomes not the angry god of punishment, nor the god of revenge, but the god of love."

At this moment, more than ever, that message desperately needs to be heard.

Like most medieval saints in both the east and west, the life of the historical Rumi lies clouded in a fog of later hagiography. Some facts do however stand out. He was born in Balkh, capital of Khorasan, in what is now Afghanistan, on September 30 1207, and migrated with his family to Anatolia shortly before his home city was destroyed by the Mongols in 1221. After training as a Muslim preacher and jurist, he taught sharia law, of the Hanafi school, in a madrasa in Konya where he died on December 17 1273, and where his shrine, the Yesil Turbe, or Green Tomb, still stands.

At 37, Rumi's life was transformed when he met an enigmatic wandering dervish called Shams Tabrizi, who brought about a major spiritual epiphany in the respectable and bookish jurist. The two quickly became inseparable (though judging by Rumi's writings, it is most unlikely there was any sexual relationship as some have claimed). When Tabrizi mysteriously disappeared, Rumi's grief was expressed in one of the greatest outpourings of longing and separation ever produced in any language: a great waterfall of Persian verse - some 3,500 odes, 2,000 quatrains, and a massive mystical epic, The Masnavi, 26,000 couplets long, a rambling collection of tales, teaching stories and spiritual anecdotes built around the theme of "the Nightingale who was separated from the Rose". It is, in the eyes of many, the deepest, most complex and most mellifluous collection of mystical poetry ever written in any language, and from any religious tradition. It certainly stands as the supreme expression of mystical Islam.

Rumi advocated an individual and interior spirituality, and it is the love, rather than the fear, of God that lies at the heart of his message. He attempts to merge the spirit of the human with the ideal of a god of love, whom Rumi locates within the human heart. Rumi's first biographer, Aflaki, tells of a man who came to Rumi asking how he could reach the other world, as only there would he be at peace. "What do you know about where He is?" asked Rumi. "Everything in this or that world is within you."

Because God can best be reached through the gateway of the heart, Rumi believed you did not necessarily need ritual to get to him, and that the Divine is as accessible to Christians and Jews as to Muslims: "Love's creed is separate from all religions," he wrote. "The creed and denomination of lovers is God." All traditions are tolerated, because in the opinion of Rumi anyone is capable of expressing their love for God, and that transcends both religious associations and your place in the social order: "My religion," he wrote, "is to live through love."

Yet for all this, Rumi himself always remained an orthodox and practising Sunni Muslim. As Lewis rightly notes, "Rumi did not come to his theology of tolerance and inclusive spirituality by turning away from traditional Islam, but through immersion in it." He was not a "guru calmly dispensing words of wisdom capable of resolving, panacea-like, all our ontological ailments", as he is presented in the translations of Coleman Barks, so much as "a poet of overpowering longing, trying to grope through his shattering sense of loss". Likewise the poet and fellow of All Souls Andrew Harvey, who has produced some fine recreations of Rumi's verse, emphasises Rumi's "rigorous, even ferocious austerity". It is a far cry, he believes, from the New Age construct, "Rosebud Rumi, a Californian hippy-like figure of vague ecstatic sweetness and diffused warm-hearted brotherhood, a kind of medieval Jerry Garcia of the Sacred Heart".

One way Rumi did, however, most certainly diverge from some of the more austere ulema of his time was in that he believed passionately in the use of music, poetry and dancing as a path for reaching God, as a way of, as he put it, opening the gates of paradise. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine, and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. It was from these ideas that the whirling of Rumi's Mevlevi Sufi brotherhood - known in the west as the Whirling Dervishes - developed into a ritual form. The intention was to help devotees focus on the God within: as one Mevlevi Whirler we interviewed put it, there is a "palpable stillness you discover at the centre of the whirling ... everyone disappears and you feel as if you're in the eye of a hurricane".

Beautiful as it is, this use of poetry and music in ritual is one of the many aspects of Sufi practice that has attracted the wrath of modern Islamists. For although there is nothing in the Qur'an that specifically bans music, Islamic tradition has always associated music with courts, dancing girls and immorality, and there is a long tradition of clerical opposition to music. Today, Islamic puritans, like those of 17th-century England, firmly regard all music as unacceptable, and work to ban it wherever they come to power.

While filming in Pakistan we interviewed Maulana Mohammad Abdul Malik, a senior cleric with the Islamist political party, Jamaat-i-Islami, which has just banned the public playing of music within the Frontier province. For him the matter was quite simple. "Music is against Islam," he said. "These musical instruments - the tabla, sarangi, dhol - lead men astray and are sinful. They are forbidden, and these musicians are wrongdoers." This attitude is on the ascendant across the Islamic world and the pacifist Sufis have frequently faced violence from their Islamist opponents: several Sufi shrines and brotherhoods, for example, have recently been bombed in Iraq.

In Turkey, however, the Sufis have suffered far more from the secular Republicans than from the country's relatively quiescent Islamists. Before the first world war there were almost 100,000 disciples of the Mevlevi order throughout the Ottoman empire. But in 1925, as part of his desire to create a modern, western-orientated, secular state, Atatürk banned all the different Sufi orders and closed their tekkes. Pious foundations were suspended and their endowments expropriated; Sufi hospices were closed and their contents seized; all religious titles were abolished and dervish clothes outlawed. Turkish intellectuals were encouraged to study the western classics, while Rumi's writings, along with those of all his Sufi peers, were treated as an intellectual irrelevance. In 1937, Atatürk went even further, prohibiting by law any form of traditional music, especially the playing of the ney, the Sufis' reed flute.

While filming in Istanbul, we visited one beautiful old Ottoman tekke, by the Mevlana gate of the old walls: since 1925 it had been used as an orphanage and warehouse, before its priceless library was finally destroyed in a fire in the 1980s. It has now fallen into ruins and lies locked and abandoned. All one can do is peer through the barbed wire at the domes and semi-domes and the overgrown panels of Ottoman calligraphy half covered with vines and creepers. Other Mevlevi centres, like the magnificent Galata tekke in the centre of Istanbul, have become museums.

As far as the Turkish state is con-cerned, the Mevlevis are little more than a museum culture to be exploited as a tourist attraction. This process began in the mid-60s when the wife of a senior US army officer came to Konya and asked her government escorts about the dervishes. The officials were thrown into a panic. The local mayor eventually found an old dervish and forced him to teach the local basketball team how to turn; soon a "folkloric" festival began to be mounted in the Konya sports hall every year to attract foreign tourists. For a while there was even a brief attempt made to replace the Sufi musicians who accompanied the dancers with the town's brass band, which was judged to be more modern and republican.

One man whose life has been shaped by this official Turkish hostility to Sufism is the great Turkish ney player, Kudsi Erguner. Erguner, who has for years lived in Paris working with Peter Brook, Didier Lockwood and Peter Gabriel, was born into a family of hereditary ney players of the Istanbul Mevlevi brotherhood. His recent autobiography, Journeys of a Sufi Musician, gives a wonderful picture of the trials of being a Sufi devotee in the early years of the Turkish Republic after the Sufi orders were banned. He describes the strict secrecy in which his father and the other Mevlevis were forced to organise their spiritual life: "Though I must have been hardly five years old, I remember those old men with luminous faces whose eyes always appeared moist as if they had just wiped away a tear at the sound of the ney, or the recitation of a Rumi poem."

Every time the brotherhood had a musical gathering (sama), members of the brotherhood would be posted at each end of the street as lookouts to give warnings of a police raid. It was not dissimilar to the US during Prohibition - except that in the case of the Sufis, bottles of raki were kept in a fridge as a cover: "This alcohol was practically considered a symbol of the republic, so it was unthinkable for the authorities to believe that it could be drunk by 'religious fanatics'. If the police came in, the sheikh could always bring out the bottle and say they were only having a little party among friends."

All his professional life, Erguner found both his music and its Sufi inspiration blocked by Turkish officialdom, so that even his sell-out tours in Paris and London were disapproved of by the respective Turkish embassies, which accused him of "projecting a retrogressive image of Turkey abroad". More shocking still is the description Erguner gives of the government's refusal to conserve Turkey's Sufi heritage. On one occasion he found a priceless stash of Ottoman Sufi music and instruments in the cellar of the Istanbul mosque of Yeni Cami, where they had been dumped in the 1920s after being confiscated from various tekkes. Despite all his efforts, Erguner could not get permission to conserve any of the material: "In this damp underground vault these venerable relics, including flags, books, clothes and musical instruments were left to rot. My begging was of no avail, and none of it could be saved."

We filmed Erguner playing his ney after hours in one of Sinan's great mosques in Istanbul. It is one of the most elegiac sounds in all world music, and for Rumi the supreme symbol for man's separation from God. As the opening lines of The Masnavi puts it: "Listen to the song of the ney, how it laments its separation from the reed bed." Afterwards I accompanied Erguner to the south-east of the country to visit the marshy reed beds where he, and his father before him, have always found the reeds which they turn into neys. As we walked through the reeds, looking down at the Mediterranean sparkling far below us, he talked sadly of all that had been lost.

"In Turkish culture," he said, "Sufism has always provided the religious justification for the fine arts. It is like the sea and a boat: one cannot exist without the other. All our fine arts found themselves in Sufism. In Istanbul alone there were 700 tekkes. This is where the arts of poetry, music and calligraphy were all developed and passed down."

Erguner selected a fine reed of the right length and width and got out his knife: "When you look at the history of classical music in the Ottoman empire," he said, "there is not a single composer who was not a follower of Rumi. That is why in Turkey you cannot distinguish classical music from religious music. So what happened [under Atatürk] in the 1920s was like a cultural revolution: it turned everything upside down."

We walked on through the reeds, Erguner expertly fingering them in search of the perfect ney: "The buildings and the foundations disappeared," he said, "and the poets and musicians found themselves out on the streets. Successive generations of children were taught to look west, were told that civilisation lay elsewhere. So the deep continuity, the exchange between human beings, the continuity of teaching, all that was utterly lost."

He shook his head: "Once such a tradition is broken," he said, "it can never really be recovered. Today people in Turkey are beginning to understand that western civilisation is not the only answer, that our own civilisation had great worth. But in so many ways it is too late now: too much has already been lost, and can never be recovered."

· William Dalrymple's film Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 11.30pm tomorrow. There will be a special screening at the Barbican earlier in the day at 4.15pm, followed by a Q&A with Dalrymple and the director Simon Broughton. This will coincide with a Barbican festival of Sufi music featuring many of the musicians in the film. www.barbican.org.uk/contemporary and www.williamdalrymple.com
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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Sufis allege forced conversion in Muslim town [Old News]
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Sufis allege forced conversion in Muslim town [Old News]

[TamilNet, November 03, 2004 14:08 GMT]
Clerics of a Sufi sect of Islam in Kattankudy, a large Muslim town near Batticaloa riven by religious clashes which started four days ago, said Wednesday that more than six hundred of their followers were forcibly converted to orthodoxy under threat of violence and death. Sri Lanka army troops were also deployed in the troubled town along with special riot Police to prevent further violence.

Irumbu- a Police patrol with loud hailers at the orthodox Irumbu Thaikka Mosque Wednesday

Sufi mosque that was demolished by armed orthodox Islamic groups on Sunday
More than two hundred Muslim families that belong to the Sufi sect led by the cleric Abdur Rauf Mowlavi sought refuge in Araiyampathy, a Tamil village next to Kattankudy Tuesday night, fearing violent attacks by armed orthodox Islamic groups.

Some adherents of the Sufi sect alleged that a Muslim politician who was close ally of President Kumaratunga had instigated armed extremists against them.

"Our people were made to give up their faith at gun point", a spokesman for the Sufis said.

An orthodox cleric denied the charge. He said that the followers of Rauf Mowlavi voluntarily came over to accept orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, government officials and Police convened two separate peace meetings between the Sufis and the orthodox Ulama board members.

"They have agreed to a truce tentatively. It is difficult to dispel fear and suspicion overnight", a Police officer said.

A large number of families that follow the teachings of the pantheistic Sufi sect led by Abdur Rauf Mowlavi are on protest fast in their main mosque premises. Sri Lanka army troops and special motorbike commandos provided security to the Sufi mosque compound Wednesday.

On Sunday armed orthodox Islamic groups also attacked another Sufi sect in Kattankudy led by the charismatic cleric called Payilvaan.
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Famous Dargahs of India: Interview with Mumtaz Currim
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Famous Dargahs of India -- Deccan Herald, October 30, 2005

Mumtaz Currim, research scholar and art historian in Islamic Studies, talks to Vimla Patil about the influence of Sufism on Indian culture and world-famous dargahs in India.

The confluence of Sufism and Hindu Bhakti cults, which has enriched Indian culture over the centuries, is indeed fascinating. Sufis came to India mainly during the 12th and 13th centuries, bringing with them their philosophy of love and devotion to the divine. Their belief decreed that the almighty was the ‘beloved’ and the devotee sought a loving glimpse of his presence. They believed that the devotee had only to ‘raise the veil which separated the individual soul from the universal soul’ so as to bring about the union of the human and the divine. This philosophy and perception of the divine appealed greatly to millions of HIndus who followed the Bhakti cult. This philosophy influenced many Bhakti-cult saint/poets of medieval India. An excellent example is the poetry of Meerabai, who used Sufi imagery in her song “Ghungat ke pata khol, tohe piya milenge.” Essentially simple and uncomplicated, both the Sufi and Bhakti cults attracted millions because the foundation of both was love and compassion. Both these cults created a huge treasure of dance, music, paintings and literature.

Mumtaz Currim, a scholar and researcher of Sufi history and chronicler of Sufi Digraphs in India, has a great deal to reveal about this fusion of religious thought which lives on in Indian culture to this day. She says, “I found my vocation when I obtained my master’s degree in Islamic Cultures and Societies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since 1999, I have been a visiting lecturer in the post-graduate course on the History of Indian Aesthetics conducted annually by the University of Mumbai. Earlier, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophies of the East and West from the Mumbai University and worked with Madame Sophia Wadia at the Indian PEN society with luminaries like Nissim Ezekiel. I have written not only several cook books, but also extensive travel features for Voyage magazine and worked as the copy editor of the famous art magazine Marg, founded by Mulk Raj Anand.

“Sometime during my career, I became interested in Sufism and its wonderful history— especially since its advent in India during the 12th and 13th centuries,” Mumtaz continues, “Sufis arrived in India from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to settle in Sindh, Multan, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan, Bihar, Karnataka and Bengal. By the 16th century, leading orders such as the Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri, Firdausi, Qubrawi, Shattari and Naqshbandi spread their influence across the subcontinent and attracted millions from other faiths to this cult. Sufi Shaykhs and the hierarchy of their followers devoted themselves to learning, vigilant prayers and psychological and mystical practices and humanitarian work. Many great Sufi saints lived and practiced their path to divinity in India. Their dargahs are famous places of pilgrimages not only for Muslims, but also for people of other religions who have faith in the power of the saints to be the intercessors between man and god. Such dargahs became important religious centers in Iran, Morocco, Central Asia and India. Nine dargahs in India are famous throughout the world— among them are the Ajmer Dargah of Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti, the dargah of Shaykh Salim Chishti in Fatehpur Sikri near Agra and the dargah of Shaykh Nizamuddin Awliya in Delhi. The Sarkhej Durgah near Ahmedabad also attracts millions. So does the Khwaja Syed Kohommed Gesu Durgah in Karnataka. Festivals called Urs are held at such dargahs every year and millions visit these sacred places in search of peace and divine blessings through the intercession of the great mystics.”


Currim’s is co-editor with George Michell of a Marg volume called Dargahs— Abodes of the Saints, a profusely illustrated coffee table book that has rich photographic content from Karoki Lewis. The book is an authoritative tome on Sufism and the famous dargahs of India. “A Sufi is one who seeks communion with the final reality,” says Mumtaz, “His path involves a rigorous way of life and an inward journey in close proximity with a spiritual master. Sufism is a mystical tradition in Islam, which introduces a strongly personal element into religious discipline to pave the way for a deeper spiritual life. Peter Awn, in Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Religions says, ‘Sufism evokes complex layers of meanings of a spiritual attainment that raises one to a rank of unique intimacy with God. Once the journey to God is over, the infinite journey in God begins.’ Sufism acknowledges three planes— material, psychic and spiritual. These are important stations, which the neophyte passes through with the help of the master. Sufism says that love is not to be learnt from man. It is a gift of God and comes from his grace.”

Mumtaz has given innumerable presentations on Islam and its worldview, Sufism, the aesthetics of Islamic art and architecture, miniature paintings, calligraphy and fine arts with a special emphasis on India. At present, she is researching for a book on Indian and Pakistani Mughal-style art for India Book House.
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