Chapters (11)
The word sufi comes from suf (wool). It refers to the coarse garments worn by early Muslims as protest against the silks and satins of the sultans and caliphs. The dissidents’ complaint was that Muslims were becoming too worldly and less spiritual. “Love the pitcher less and the water more,” they said. Develop your inner core to “experience God.”6
Going beyond the rituals of religion, these mystics try to achieve God consciousness through dhikr (remembrance) of God. They repeat some of Allah’s ninety-nine names or sing poetry to music or dance themselves into a trance, turning right to left or going around in circles, as do the famous Sufis known as the Whirling Dervishes.
Early Sufis clustered around masters and formed circles that developed into Sufi orders.
Muslims are of two minds about Sufis. That’s because some Sufis take liberties with, or profess no allegiance to, the basics of the faith. Others create a cult of sainthood, leading to a veneration of, and pilgrimages to, mausoleums of the saints. Yet others believe in magic and superstition. Such aberrations raise eyebrows.
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