Sufis played an important role in spreading Islam, especially in Russia, the Indian Subcontinent and the Far East.

Rumi, the Sufi Poet

Rumi is the best-selling poet in the US. A mystic, Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) was born in Balkh, Afghanistan, then part of Persia, but his family moved to Turkey during the Mongol invasion. He grew up to be a Sufi mawlana (teacher), but fell under the spell of another, Shams al-Din, and became his student. After Shams died, or was murdered, Rumi became desolate and took to writing poetry.

His enormous output includes Mathnawi (Epic), containing six books of 25,000 rhyming couplets, as well as 2,500 mystical odes and at least 1,600 quatrains. Rumi would recite the verses whenever or wherever they occurred to him — “dancing, in the bath, standing, sitting, walking, by day or by night.”7 Today he is considered the greatest mystic poet of Persia and possibly in all of Islam.

Offshoots of Islam

Alevis: 6 million to 20 million, mostly in Turkey and in Germany. De-emphasize the daily prayer, fasting and the pilgrimage of Haj.

Bahais: 7 million. Syed Mirza Ali, a nineteenth-century Iranian, claimed to be a new manifestation of God and took on the title of “the Bab” (the Gate). Members of the Bahai faith are followers of Baha’Ullah, a disciple of the Bab. The Bahai headquarters are in Haifa, Israel, near the spot where Baha’Ullah died.

Nusayris/Alawites: 1 million, mostly in Syria. Also called Alawites (not to be confused with the Alevis).

Druze: 750,000 to 1 million, mostly in Lebanon, Syria and Israel. They are an offshoot of Shi’ites.

Ahmadis: 10 million. Named after Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (18351908), who claimed to be the Islamic Mahdi, the Messiah and the last avatar of the Hindu God Vishnu. Ahmadis are also known as the Ahmaddiya or as Qadiyanis, after the town of Qadiyan in Punjab.

Chapter 4

Women

IMAGE AND REALITY

The West has a fixed image of the Muslim woman. She is a second-class citizen.

She is forced to wear a veil — or worse, a head-to-toe tent-like cloak — when going out, if she is allowed to go out at all. She may be subjected to genital mutilation. If she has premarital sex or an affair during marriage, she may be publicly stoned to death or murdered in “honor killings.” She may not marry a non-Muslim — an edict that does not apply to men, who can wed Christians and Jews and take four wives. She may not have an abortion. She will inherit less property than a man. Her testimony is worth only half that of a man.

Western stereotypes of Islam have been around for centuries. “The treatment of women provided Europeans with an excuse to declare the inferiority of Muslims and their religion, and also justification for Europe’s imperialist and colonialist policies and practices,” writes Guity Nashat, professor of history at the University of Illinois.1 A telling example was that of Lord Cromer, British consul in Egypt toward the end of the nineteenth century, who said the “degradation of Muslim women” proved the “backwardness of Islam,” even while he was a founding member of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England.2