The Sufi Way Re-Search
Sufism is defined as a “science of pious self-examination and religious psychology, assisted by the studies of the Islamic scriptures with that particular end in view.”
Origins
The exact origins of Sufism haven’t been pin-pointed. Possible locations include Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, particularly near the border with northern Syria.
Describing the “Way”
Sufis don’t generally document one way of following the Sufi “way.” But they do have some general, albeit vague, practices.
Sufis generally live/d a life of asceticism. The name “Sufi” comes from the Arabic word for “wool” for the type of clothing they wore. They often begged for whatever they needed. “Some seem to have displayed a certain contempt for existing social institutions…asking themselves how far it was possible to go on living in such a society and working to uphold it.” 1
Music, Chanting, and Dance
Sufis used music, chanting, and dances as methods for subjugating the individuals ego. They chanted together, “the collective repetition of certain formulas,” but not necessarily from religious texts. Poetry or whatever else inspired them. They praised One God. And they listened to music, which they saw as an important aid in spiritual development.
The famous whirling Dervishes, a Sufi order founded by the poet Rumi, are one example.
Gnawa is another Sufi order, popular in Morocco, that uses music is to enable a trance state. For reasons that are unclear to me, women are particularly vulnerable to gnawa trance. Its actually considered a bit dangerous, gnawa circles, because people lose total control of themselves.
There is a good, scholarly PDF on Moroccan gnawa and dance trances, called “Moroccan Gnawa and Transglobal Trance:The Medium is the Music” for those interest in reading more.
In addition to music and dance, I think some Sufis favored some drugs too. And, although I didn’t see this part in the books, they certainly used mandalas, visual patterns and abstractions, to focus and meditate. I mean, just look at the Alhambra and traditions of Islamic design and ornament. The symbols and patterns are like a Catholic stations of the cross, signifing locations of the soul along the “way.”
Sufis consider themselves the peacemakers of Islam, sensing community with all religions that worship One God.
Sufism and Islamic Tradition
Some Muslims don’t consider Sufism Islamic. Sufism started in the Prophet Mohammed’s lifetime because some of his followers wanted a more direct relationship with God. Sufi’s use Islamic texts to support their primary goal to experience a personal relationship with God. Personal experience is key. This slight reversal of primacy is something that many Muslims find distasteful, believing the Koran should be followed first and maintain chief primacy in spiritual pursuit.
Some Sufism isn’t really Sufism at all. For example, the marabout tribes of North Africa might belong to a Sufi order or might not. Marabouts follow the cult of saints, believing the “dead man was a Friend of God.” 1 In Morocco, for example, there are usually local saints with their own shrines and following of pilgrims.
Arguably, Sufism pre-dates Islam and was embeded within the Islamic religion from the begining. While it is held together by the skin of Islamic law, it contains within it ideas from Zoroastrianism, Pythagoreans, Hermeticism, Kaballism, and Buddhism. From a certain perspective, the Islamic law aspect of Sufism is secondary, a political necessity to make the more primary mystical pursuit tangible within a broader socio-political framework, that provided by Islam.
Guide
A Sufi needs a guide on their mystical journey, which can come in form of Nature or, more commonly, a Sufi Master.
Sufis admire/d Lucifer for his refusal to bow before anyone but God.1 I’ve heard other Muslims repeat 0the tale, about how Lucifer was right to refuse to bow to Adam and Eve.
The core motivating force in Sufism is a direct relationship with God. This motivation is naturally opposed to any human controlling force or human submission to anyone but God.
But there is a risk in pursuing an inner journey without feedback or direction from a calming force. And many Sufi Masters have warned that not everyone is capable of a true mystical experience. Recognizing this risk, when Sufism began to take structure and gain prominence in around the 11th century, many orders insistent students fully submit to the guidance of a Sufi Master to protect them on their “way.”
The Seven Senses
- Touch
- Sight
- Hearing
- Taste
- Discernment
- Intellect
- Prophecy
Al-Ghazali, a prominent Sufi who was born in Persia in 1058, identified the seven senses above. He found them as part of a spiritual crisis. Finding his life too academic and worldly, he sold his possessions and started on the Sufi way. He started his inner process of self-examination by anchoring himself in his senses. His logic is interesting and if you want to know more about it, I suggest reading his essay Deliverance from Error 
In short, Al-Ghazali identifies seven senses. The first set being easy to come by: touch, sight, hearing, and taste. Then, around age seven comes a sense of discernment. And later, a person develops the sense of intellect. He claims there is another state of sensory perception, that of prophecy, a supra-intellect. A drop of which is revealed in the human power of dreaming. “God most high has favored His creatures by giving them something analogous to the special faculty of prophecy, namely dreams.” 2
As a note, seven is too divine. I’d be happier with the symmetry if there were eight senses. Perhaps dreaming should be listed as a sense all its own?
Imagination
Sufis realized not everyone was capable of having a direct experience with God. Al-Ghazali said the full range of properties of prophetic revelation could only be understood through direct experience, which is impossible to accurately communicate. He describes the stages of the “way” to prophetic sensory development as starting with “revelations and visions [reaching] a higher state…which it is hard to describe in language; if a man attempts to express these, his words inevitably contain what is clearly erroneous.” His inability to articulate his experience explains why many Sufi students are sworn to secrecy about their experiences of mystical states and higher knowledge.
The Nimatullahi Sufi Order, which stems back to the beginning of Islam and considerst the Prophet the first Sufi master, warns of “Sufis Who are Disciples of their own Imaginations.” The Nimatullahi Order calls for complete and unconditional submission on the part of a Sufi student to a Sufi master as a means of avoiding the problem of imagination.
Al-Ghazali, from what I read, didn’t demand submission to a master over direct experience. He recognized not all individuals could achieve direct experience and wrote everyone should study the traits of true prophets and use intellect and discernment to determine the true from the false. He suggested people unable to obtain their own prophetic visions would benefit from time spent near a true mystic.
Even Carl Jung warned about the dangers of realizing the Self.
“The dark side of the Self is the most dangerous thing of all, precisely because the Self is the greatest power in the psyche. It can cause people to “spin” megalomanic or other delusory fantasies that catch them up and “possess” them. A person in this state thinks with mounting excitement that he has grasped and solved the great cosmic riddles; he therefore loses all touch with human reality. A reliable symptom of this condition is the loss of one’s sense of humor and human contacts.”
Carl Jung also believed in the human ability to prophecize and emphasized dream analysis as a means of fostering that skill, developing the higher Self.
“Without a human psyche to receive divine inspirations and utter them in words or shape them in art, no religious symbol has ever come into the reality of our human life.”
For Carl Jung’s advice on following the “way,” I suggest reading his book “Man and His Symbols
Love
As I wrote earlier, Sufis used music and poetry to induce a trance-like state that brought them closer to God. And Sufi poetry wasn’t necessarily religious. Sufism is called “the religion of Love” and the most famous Sufi poety, Rumi, makes it clear why. Just read some of his poetry if you haven’t already to get a sense of mysticism of the heart.
Sufism also influenced Western ideas of romantic love, finding counterparts in troubadours and their tales of chivalry and courtly love. The energy created by a love that was unobtainable, unattached to worldly possession, opened a gateway into understanding the greater Love, that is the Love for and of God.
In his book “Divine Madness,” John R. Haule explains that Sufi romantic love “is a powerful expression of the human spirit. It is an ennobling bond between two human souls who are separated by physical, moral, and social constraints-typically in opposition to the rules of matrimony and liberated from the procreative instinct. Its sublime goal is a mature and individuated love of God. Just as God is one, so are we one with God and with one another when we love.”
In the words of Rumi:
“Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong,
consuming herself, unabashed.
Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.
Having died of self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.
Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.”
A consuming experience of romantic love is the catalyst by which the sages reconnect with Divine desire opens the door to direct experience of Light, Oneness, the Universal Being.
A seeker went to ask a sage for guidance on the Sufi way.
The sage counseled,
“if you have never trodden the path of love, go away and fall in love;
then come back and see us.”
True love, not simple want, is the starting point of spiritual alchemy, (Arabic: al-kimi, meaning gold).
Light
“Come you lost atoms, to your Center draw
And be the Eternal mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wandered into Darkness wide
Return and back into your Sun subside.”-Farid al-Din ‘Attar, ‘Mantiq al-Tayr’ 5
For Sufis, each man has a “divine spark” and mystical endeavor is a “liberation of light and its return to its source.” 1. Sufis trace God as descending by various stages into inorganic matter and created a scale of spiritual pursuit tied to various levels of luminosity. “Ibn al-Arabi (1240) substituted for this monism of light a monism of being, in which all phenomena are nothing but manifestations of being, which is one with God. In both systems, mysticism occupies the ground between abstract knowledge and experiential perception of this ultimate unity in the original, primordial material, whether light or being.” 1
The energy of Love that is used to motivate a Sufi on their path is fuel for the perception of Light, the pure energy of God. “It is light which God most high casts into the heart.” This quote from Al-Ghazali is just one of the metaphors for light and prophetic experience. The world is full of them, “seeing the light.” And it is a metaphor which spans all religious pursuit. It is even embedded in Jungian psychology. For all these words and citations, it is a simple thing, really, knowing we have the ability to “see the light.”
- The World of Islam: Faith, People, Culture (The Great Civilizations)
. Edited by Bernard Lewis.
- Voices of Wisdom: A Multicultural Philosophy Reader
by Gary E. Kessler. - Man and His Symbols
by Carl Jung - Divine Madness: Archetypes of Romantic Love. Boston: Shambhala, 1990. By John Ryan Haule.
- Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest (Art and Imagination)
by Laleh Bakhtiar.
- Just an article” I found after I wrote this and want to read sometime.
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January 20th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
I knew seven was the wrong number. Eight’s the number of expansion. Al-Ghazali forgot smell.
July 31st, 2010 at 6:27 am
[...] to Sufis, a spiritual awakening begins with the extraordinary; a dream, an illness, a great love, or – if [...]