A Sense of Justice

"...During the time that I was at the IMF I had many interviews and often there was this surprise that an active civil servant could at the same time be a mystic. I found the combination very inspiring and beneficial. That is why I have written my two books..."

Dr. H. J. Witteveen to Sufi News, November 2010

By Staff Reporter, *Business: An Austere Mystic* - Time - New York, NY, USA / Monday, August 15, 1977

Hendrikus Johannes Witteveen, 56, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, is the most enigmatic international civil servant since the days of Dag Hammarskjeid, the mystic who died in a plane crash while serving as Secretary-General of the United Nations.

An economist by training, Witteveen always carries a pocket calculator, which he whips into action during esoteric discussions of international finance.

A strict adherent of the obscure Sufi religious cult, Witteveen, despite the intense pressures of his job, finds time to meditate every morning and evening. He sees no conflict between the practice of the dismal science and the mysticism of the Sufi. Says he: "The Sufi movement is above all differences of nationality and race."

On the eve of the emergency meeting of 14 nations convened in Paris last week by the IMF, Witteveen, a thin, elegant figure who lives in Washington with his wife, spoke serenely to TIME about his economic philosophy and his religious convictions. Although he calls himself a liberal (he is a member of Holland's People's Party for Freedom and Democracy), and acknowledges an intellectual debt to Keynes, he nonetheless is a believer in the "market mechanism and the price mechanism."

At the same time, Witteveen is anything but a passive administrator. He wants the IMF to provide more assistance and on tougher terms to economically troubled countries. He believes that fund members will approve some new articles that will enable him to police currency exchange rates. Even more ambitiously, he would like to see the IMF in role of a world central bank.

"With such great responsibilities one could easily become very tense," says Witteveen, whose eclectic reading list covers the Bible, the Koran and the Inspector Maigret whodunit novels.

But most of all he finds inner peace in meditation, "turning away from all that happened during the day."

Witteveen's parents were both members of the Sufi movement. "I grew up with it. I began to study, and was very much touched and convinced. This is a deep and wide philosophy of life. An important part of it is mysticism."

Appropriately among the ten articles of faith professed by a Sufi is the law of reciprocity: "To fulfill by unselfishness and a sense of justice for mankind." The austere Dutchman launches his austerity programs with this profound sense of duty.

[Editor's note: Dr. H. J. Witteveen, or Murshid Karimbakhsh, which is how he is usually known among the Sufis, is a murshid (guide) in the International Sufi Movement. We are republishing this 33 years old article about him because -as Ibn 'Arabi has said- "it has a lot of light in it". Throughout his life Dr. Witteveen has been and presently is an excellent example of the Sufi principle of conjoining activity in the world together with spirituality.

Sufism in Action (2003) and Universal Sufism (2002/1997) are available in English, in Dutch and -the latter- also in Italian.]