The Sufis whirl into the world of politics

By Yunus Momoniat - Mail & Guardian - Johannesburg, South Africa

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Renunciation of the worldly does not spirit the mystic out of the realm of human affairs, and the fate of the Sufi obeys this iron law of reality. Even Sufis are embedded in social, political and economic networks that sometimes nudge them into wordly interventions.

The origins of Sufism go back to Mohammed and Ali, his cousin, son-in-law and Islam’s first caliph. But it was in the ninth and 10th centuries that it matured, enjoying a golden age from the 11th to 13th centuries. Sufism prescribes a submission (the meaning of the word Islam) so total that followers withdrew into a severe asceticism, the way to an ecstacy in the presence of the Supreme Being. Indeed the highest state a Sufi can reach is fana, a total annihilation of the self, an ecstasy arrived at through meditation, trance, flagellation and the intoxication induced by rituals such as whirling.

Sufism produces an equanimity in the adherent, and an aversion to the dramas of differentiation and identity. Indeed, the tradition is replete with examples that contrast with the current image of Islam, and Sufi-dominated regions have a reputation for temperate relations among believers of different religions.

Held in awe by some Muslims because of the perception that they enjoy a more direct relation to the deity, and denounced as heretics by more orthodox believers, the Sufis are themselves differentiated by sectarian, geopolitical and cultural determinations. Sufism has been seen as the inspiration for geopolitical developments like the separation of Pakistan from India. Indeed, some have argued that the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam was influenced by Sufism, while the rule of the jurists (vilayet-i faqih) in Iran is another example of a politicised Sufism. According to Abdoolkarim Soroush, an Iranian philosopher, Sufism depends upon a strong current of authoritarianism, and many Muslim rulers of the past used Sufi traditions to bolster their rule. The fundamental structure of a Sufi order, in which the murid (follower) takes instruction from a sheikh (master), fits neatly into a basically tribal society, where loyalty is the glue that holds together the social structure.

Professor Abdulkarim Tayob of the University of Cape Town suggests that today’s Muslims’ increasing interest in Sufism is a sign of a turn away from the politicisation of Islam that emerged since the 1970s. But the Sufi’s subjective quest for communion with God often plays itself out in a contested sphere, where the Sufi can be perceived as partisan even if he or she only wants to leave the world as it is. Sufis practise a form of benevolence that can lend itself to a kind of accommodation with the powers that be, and in a post-9/11 world, Sufism has become the object of American political scientists keen to find a strain of Islam they might deploy in the West’s 21st-century crusade against the political Islam of the Islamists. But any deployment of Sufism in current global agendas would have to include in its calculations the heterogeneity of Sufi orders, allegiances and political identifications.

A brief survey of Sufi politics around the world reveals their imbrication in a series of conflict situations, both on the side of power and against it. During the 19th century the Sufi order was a significant force of resistance against foreign occupation in Sudan, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, but this was essentially a traditionalist stance against modernisation, which later nationalists opposed.

In Bangladesh, renowned for its Sufi-inspired traditions of tolerance, Islamists have emerged since the 1990s, challenging the state to apply Shariah law in place of the secular law that Sufism made possible. Kashmir, the only Indian state (a contested status) where Muslims predominate, and seen as the centre of Sufism in south Asia, has also become a terrain of intense conflict. In Indonesia, Sufism is credited with, until recently, having kept at bay more militant variants of Islam, but in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, a shift from Sufism to Wahabism -- the dominant form of political Islam -- is noted by Pakistani defence analyst Dr Ayesha Siddiqa.

Iraq seems to present all these trends in one rapidly disintegrating national space. Sufis have been both pro- and anti-Saddam. The former vice-president under Saddam, Ezzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was a sheik of two Sufi orders, designated the King of Clubs in the United States’s Most Wanted pack of cards, and suspected of leading the insurgents after Saddam’s death. To add to the complexity, a significant number of Kurds subscribe to various Sufi orders and Jala Talabani, the current president, is Kurdish.

Iraq’s Sufis have been the targets of both Sunni and Shiite militants, and many of their shrines have been attacked -- one in Balad, north of Baghdad, by a suicide bomber. For a while, Sufi groups were seen as collaborators with the American invasion, since they refused to resort to violence. But Sufis have also been the objects of American violations -- their imams have been detained and mosques bombed by US forces -- and reports suggest they have begun to join the insurgents to oust the Americans and oppose Shiite rule.

The fortunes of Sufism, then, are open to the vagaries of historical developments, and if the picture looks confused it is because no pattern is universally applicable to the various scenarios. Sufis are not a monolithic bloc, are riven by sectarianism and each sect acts in accordance with its own particular history and interests. Whether Sufis will fall into the camp of the Islamists or play into designs concocted by the West to ameliorate the force of political Islam will depend on their positioning, and their decisions are unlikely to obey the logic of the primary antagonists of current global conflicts.

[picture: Sufis celebrate Prophet Mohammed’s birthday outside the Tamim Ansar shrine in Afghanistan; photo by AP]