Why is Sufism accepted in the West more than the other branches of Islam?
Amori Patel ·
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Studying Levantine Arabic4y
Originally Answered: Why is Sufism accepted in the west more than the other branches of islam?
Perhaps because rabble rousing fundamentalists have done significant damage to Islam in recent years. They have flooded the West with their publications, and the results are clear for everyone to see on the late night news.
Sufism is accepted because it represents the kernel, the essence, while Islam continues to serve as the outer shell. The folks who are often seeking another spiritual path, generally go through a lot of paths, at times through various Eastern religions, before settling upon Tassawuf (Sufism).
The popular image of the ‘whirling dervish’ or the ‘qawalli’ musician, singing ‘Allah Huu’ in a state of spiritual ecstasy does a lot more for Sufism and proper Islam than the fundamentalist who wants to kill everyone who rubs him the wrong way.
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Dimitris Almyrantis ·
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Lover of stories the world has forgotten (2016-present)4y
Originally Answered: Why is Sufism accepted in the west more than the other branches of islam?
While I like Amori Patel’s answer - that the West likes Sufism more because its popular image reflects the spiritual meaning of the religion, and legalist Islam has been tarnished by the image of the quick-to-anger fanatic - I don’t think it tells half the story.
I think it focuses on the current political ruckus, in which Moslem communities in the West are encouraged to prove themselves as “good Moslems” and “non-violent”, and are minutely examined for traces of rebelliousness that might cast them into the “non-conforming.” But that’s no older than the Iraq war, truth be told, and will have faded by the time Islamic Terrorism is no longer the Big Thing.
But Sufism has been more popular in the West since the 19th century, and - speaking for Greece, which has had long contact with Ottoman Islam - this has held true since the middle ages. There’s much more to it than “peaceful mystics” vs. “violent fanatics”, in fact that dynamic often seems to be reversed.
The word “dervish” - how Sufis were chiefly known in the past - carries connotations of the fierce warrior as well as the otherworldly mystic. The “dervishes” were at the forefront of the Turkish armies, and the Janissaries - who were in the early centuries still semi-Christian converts - were their military arm. The immense fluted caps of the janissary murids stood for the sleeve of their saint, Bektash veli, and it was the Sufi lodges which were the center of Moslem convert communities in Europe.
More northerly visitors to Islamic lands found similar common points:
^ Above: Games of the Highland Brigade in Cairo 1883 - Below: The Pyrrhic dance by Jean-Léon Gérôme 1885 (dance of the Albanian highlanders - the best warriors of the Mehmet Ali dynasty of Egypt, brought over from the Balkans, whom he associates with King Pyrrhus of ancient Epirus).
Leaving Islam aside, consider the Scottish Highlanders - heirs to a warrior culture whom Britain had fought and defeated - inherited tremendous cultural prestige, to the point that modern Scottish culture is built around them (despite Scotland being mostly the 90% Lowlands). Is it at all surprising that, on recognising similar customs among the Albanians and the dervish vanguard of the old Ottoman army, that respect carried over?
Point is, it’s easy to look at what has historically been praised in the West about Sufism - the music, the dancing, the sexual liberality - and take it superficially, as in reflecting the customs of the modern West. But hundreds of years ago, when Europe and the Islamic world were far less distinct on these things, it was these same traits that won it respect.
By way of example, I remember one celebrated figure of the Greek revolt of 1821 which won her independence from the Ottomans, Karaiskakis. He had like many of the Christian rebels once served the Moslem ruler of Albania and Greece, Ali Pasha, and became notorious in later Greek tradition for his filthy mouth (e.g. referring to the advice of his dick when speaking to enemy emissaries). He is also known for his controversial relationship with a Turkish woman, who during the rebellion dressed like a man - adopting the masculine name Zafeiris - and served as his concubine and “most loyal man”.
There is a song about him (referring to his last words, while being impaled sideways on an iron spit - “should I come back, I’ll fuck them”):
“Listen, o nun’s son
I’m your friend Panuryia
your right-hand-man
and who knows you better
than his own mind
They say you’re playing
with hanims
with Turkish girls and nuns
and they shower you with curses
that say you are wandering
in the mahallas
and with dervishes dance
what should I tell them?
They say you treat with
the Ali Pashas, with them you joke
and I ask, what should I say?
“Tell them, friend Panurya
reh, I have violins in my dick
and it has also dumbecks
and I will ring them as I please
and make doorhandles shatter.
When I return, I will fuck them
but should I run late, give them this:
it’s my two balls […]
Hail, to whoever does not bend the knee
and does not make proskynesis*
Listen, what the karakolya** say about me,
that I should not fuck?
Tell them how it goes, Theodore.
*proskynesis: the act of prostration, associated with submission to Turkish authority - in Greek culture, going back to the refusal of the Macedonian generals to make proskynesis to the deified, Persianized Alexander.
**Karakolya: Kara-Kol, “black hand”, in Greek meaning a policeman or gendarme — a (dialectical) indictment of the sort of ethnic nationalism, and anti-miscegenation rhetoric, embodied in the right-wing nationalism represented by the police.
Notice, the song is a defense of the Islamic cultural connections of a man whom ‘orthodox’ nationalism would seek to deny, but this is a kind of dervishes’ Islam distinguished not by its peacefulness, but by its ability to accommodate Balkan notions of the culture hero.
In old time his prowess, and probably his gallantry, was so great that the name of Zmay (“dragon”) is given by the Servians to the greatest of their heroes. A brave man is called yunak (the hero); if he is a superior hero, he is called Soko (the falcon), but if his heroism is something extraordinary, then he gets the name of Zmay (the dragon). (Servia and the Servians, Count Cedomilj Mijatovic)
Compare with the “Draculas” of Romania, or Husein the Zmaj od Bosne (“Dragon of Bosnia”), who led a rising of the ayyans - the Moslem warrior-nobility - against the sultanate in 1831. A common element of all these men - including Ali Pasha, who loomed no smaller in the Balkan imagination - was neither religion nor any modern notion of morality, but that they dared fight the all-pervasive, near-omnipotent empire for a personal, local cause the little guy could empathize with. They embodied the qualities the Balkan male wished he had on a larger-than-life scale.
The aforementioned Karaiskakis reputedly convinced Ali Pasha to take him into his service by the quip, “if you know me [by reputation] to be a master, make me a master; if you know of me as a slave, make me a slave.” When, in time, a firman for his old master’s execution came, Ali refused to be strangled as a good subject should, because “he would not die the death of a slave”, and took three warriors with him before getting his head cut off.
The dervishes won support in the Balkans much as how Christianity won support among the Germans by suddenly reinventing Christ as a sword-wielding warrior: by saying “alright, you can still drink, be the hero and woo the girl when you win.” The abolition of the janissaries and outlawing of the Bektashi Sufis in 1826, which passed down as the “Fortunate Incident” in royal Ottoman chronicles, went down as the “Unfortunate Incident” in the Balkan lands.
Which takes me back to why I specifically mentioned the meaning of karakol as an agent of the state. All this is tied to a deep distrust of the state institution, Ottoman or otherwise, and its potential lapse into tyranny: the best hero is that larger than life man who stands against the state, even if (or perhaps especially if) he dies a brave death doing so.
It should not be difficult to see why the kind of modern Islam that prides itself on its own rationalism fails to win sympathy, let alone converts:Strong association with the state — countries like Turkey (with its Imam Hatip curriculum), Morocco, Saudi or Iran rub salt in the wounds of people who define their cultural identity by opposition to dictatorship. The idea of a “strong leader” is actively promoted by many Moslems as, if not mandated by Islam, at least very advantageous to developing countries who want to have “their own Reza Shah/Kemal Ataturk/Saddam Husseyn”, and does not echo at all well in Europe.
Emasculation — a man who can’t drink, dance to upbeat tunes, and admire girls is seen as less than a man, doubly so if this was imposed by someone else. The stress laid by rationalist Islam on making laws, and its government by jurists - who would extend aforementioned “state” regulation into common life fails to ring bells outside specific cultures.
The kind of positive press Sufis enjoy is of a different sort. I remember a conversation (some years? past) in which a fellow Greek highly praised some Sufis in the subcontinent who had formed a ring around non-Moslem mourners after a terrorist attack, to show that they would let the attack take their own life first (I think something similar happened in Egypt).
Much beyond the mere concern for non-believers this evinces, the admiration for the sheikh who goes against earthly violence strikes a chord with us. I remember a story my interlocutor then certainly did not know, how a Sufi in 19th c. Greece, on hearing his patron had been murdered, went and openly criticized the authority of the local petty king - the same Ali Pasha I mentioned before - but the respect he held was so great that he was suffered to leave alive. You can skip the extract, which I still think is interesting enough to put here:
There was then residing at Yannena a dervish, named Yusuf, who was an object of universal admiration for his many virtues and austerity of life. Ibrahim [Pasha] had been his intimate friend. As soon as he heard the rumour of the Pasha's death, Yusuf hurried to the palace of the presumed murderer. Ali, who had a singular respect for the dervises, rose from his divan, advanced to meet Yusuf, and sought to place him by his side. But his venerable visitor indignantly rejected the offer, and addressed him in a strain of vehement reproach. Every crime of his now trembling auditor was dwelt upon, and their atrocity painted in the darkest colours. The dervish concluded with the following emphatic words:
"I cannot tread on a carpet here, I cannot look on anything, which is not wet with the tears of the wretched. The very sofa on which thou wishest me to sit is steeped in blood; it reeks with that of thy own brothers, whom thy mother put to death in their childhood. Those ataghans [long knives], which hang on thy walls, have been blunted on the skulls of the Suliots and Kimariots, whose errors our religion teaches us to deplore, as long as they submit to our authority. From this window I behold the tomb of Emina, that virtuous wife of whom thou wert the murderer. Beyond, I see the lake into which thou didst cast seventeen innocent matrons, and which daily, like the hell that waits to swallow thee, devours the victims of thy insatiable fury.
…Wretch ! for once thou shalt hear the truth! In and out of the city, and in the midst of the mountains, every thing proclaims thy crimes; not a step canst thou stir without treading on the grave of some being, created in God’s image, who accuses thee to Heaven of having shortened his days. Thou livest surrounded by pomp, and luxury, and flattering panders; and time, that marks every child of Adam with the ineffaceable seal of old age, has not yet taught thee that thou art mortal […]”
…after shaking the dust from off his feet against the palace walls, [Yusuf] returned to bis home. (The life of Ali Pasha, RA Davenport, 1878)
Just imagine the effect people like this had on the perceptions of the contemporary populace. It was things like these that won Sufis respect among Christians, and not only (notice the warlord he was criticizing was, in fact, respectful). Not merely “piety”, but a mixture of earthliness and otherworldly bravery that accommodated what people thought was fitting and natural.
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Talib Bah ·
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Sufi | Islamic Mysticism4y
Originally Answered: Why is Sufism accepted in the west more than the other branches of islam?
This is a very large question but it can be summarized as:
The Sufi teaches love. This appeals to the hearts of people in the west.
Historically, the Sufis, by virtue of being mystics and travelers, were the ones spreading Islam to the east, around the Middle East as well as to Africa. It is not attractive to every soul to learn spirituality only from the perspective of Shariat, i.e., external rules of right and wrong. Seekers are looking for a deep, inner reunion with the divine. Known today as enlightenment. The Sufi has the inner teaching of Islam. This teaching makes the din of Islam come alive and makes it beautiful. For example, many muslims pray five times a day because they have to - because of fear. The Sufi prays because he wants to, because he loves Allah and he wants to please the one he loves, Allah. This is appealing to people, because people want to do spiritual practices out of love, not out of fear. Now there’s a fear of Allah (known as Khauf) but that’s a different topic, and it grows once ones spiritual station grows.
Also, many Sufis, particularly in the West, are very merciful when teaching spirituality and they teach it in steps, not expecting the seeker who joined Islam yesterday to conduct five daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, doing extra Duaa’, following Shariat all at once. It comes in steps. Sufis are tolerant to this. Some Sufi orders in the west are even tolerant of different religious traditions. This makes it easier for seekers in the west to join the path.
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But Sufism has been more popular in the West since the 19th century, and - speaking for Greece, which has had long contact with Ottoman Islam - this has held true since the middle ages. There’s much more to it than “peaceful mystics” vs. “violent fanatics”, in fact that dynamic often seems to be reversed.
The word “dervish” - how Sufis were chiefly known in the past - carries connotations of the fierce warrior as well as the otherworldly mystic. The “dervishes” were at the forefront of the Turkish armies, and the Janissaries - who were in the early centuries still semi-Christian converts - were their military arm. The immense fluted caps of the janissary murids stood for the sleeve of their saint, Bektash veli, and it was the Sufi lodges which were the center of Moslem convert communities in Europe.
More northerly visitors to Islamic lands found similar common points:
^ Above: Games of the Highland Brigade in Cairo 1883 - Below: The Pyrrhic dance by Jean-Léon Gérôme 1885 (dance of the Albanian highlanders - the best warriors of the Mehmet Ali dynasty of Egypt, brought over from the Balkans, whom he associates with King Pyrrhus of ancient Epirus).
Leaving Islam aside, consider the Scottish Highlanders - heirs to a warrior culture whom Britain had fought and defeated - inherited tremendous cultural prestige, to the point that modern Scottish culture is built around them (despite Scotland being mostly the 90% Lowlands). Is it at all surprising that, on recognising similar customs among the Albanians and the dervish vanguard of the old Ottoman army, that respect carried over?
Point is, it’s easy to look at what has historically been praised in the West about Sufism - the music, the dancing, the sexual liberality - and take it superficially, as in reflecting the customs of the modern West. But hundreds of years ago, when Europe and the Islamic world were far less distinct on these things, it was these same traits that won it respect.
By way of example, I remember one celebrated figure of the Greek revolt of 1821 which won her independence from the Ottomans, Karaiskakis. He had like many of the Christian rebels once served the Moslem ruler of Albania and Greece, Ali Pasha, and became notorious in later Greek tradition for his filthy mouth (e.g. referring to the advice of his dick when speaking to enemy emissaries). He is also known for his controversial relationship with a Turkish woman, who during the rebellion dressed like a man - adopting the masculine name Zafeiris - and served as his concubine and “most loyal man”.
There is a song about him (referring to his last words, while being impaled sideways on an iron spit - “should I come back, I’ll fuck them”):
“Listen, o nun’s son
I’m your friend Panuryia
your right-hand-man
and who knows you better
than his own mind
They say you’re playing
with hanims
with Turkish girls and nuns
and they shower you with curses
that say you are wandering
in the mahallas
and with dervishes dance
what should I tell them?
They say you treat with
the Ali Pashas, with them you joke
and I ask, what should I say?
“Tell them, friend Panurya
reh, I have violins in my dick
and it has also dumbecks
and I will ring them as I please
and make doorhandles shatter.
When I return, I will fuck them
but should I run late, give them this:
it’s my two balls […]
Hail, to whoever does not bend the knee
and does not make proskynesis*
Listen, what the karakolya** say about me,
that I should not fuck?
Tell them how it goes, Theodore.
*proskynesis: the act of prostration, associated with submission to Turkish authority - in Greek culture, going back to the refusal of the Macedonian generals to make proskynesis to the deified, Persianized Alexander.
**Karakolya: Kara-Kol, “black hand”, in Greek meaning a policeman or gendarme — a (dialectical) indictment of the sort of ethnic nationalism, and anti-miscegenation rhetoric, embodied in the right-wing nationalism represented by the police.
Notice, the song is a defense of the Islamic cultural connections of a man whom ‘orthodox’ nationalism would seek to deny, but this is a kind of dervishes’ Islam distinguished not by its peacefulness, but by its ability to accommodate Balkan notions of the culture hero.
In old time his prowess, and probably his gallantry, was so great that the name of Zmay (“dragon”) is given by the Servians to the greatest of their heroes. A brave man is called yunak (the hero); if he is a superior hero, he is called Soko (the falcon), but if his heroism is something extraordinary, then he gets the name of Zmay (the dragon). (Servia and the Servians, Count Cedomilj Mijatovic)
Compare with the “Draculas” of Romania, or Husein the Zmaj od Bosne (“Dragon of Bosnia”), who led a rising of the ayyans - the Moslem warrior-nobility - against the sultanate in 1831. A common element of all these men - including Ali Pasha, who loomed no smaller in the Balkan imagination - was neither religion nor any modern notion of morality, but that they dared fight the all-pervasive, near-omnipotent empire for a personal, local cause the little guy could empathize with. They embodied the qualities the Balkan male wished he had on a larger-than-life scale.
The aforementioned Karaiskakis reputedly convinced Ali Pasha to take him into his service by the quip, “if you know me [by reputation] to be a master, make me a master; if you know of me as a slave, make me a slave.” When, in time, a firman for his old master’s execution came, Ali refused to be strangled as a good subject should, because “he would not die the death of a slave”, and took three warriors with him before getting his head cut off.
The dervishes won support in the Balkans much as how Christianity won support among the Germans by suddenly reinventing Christ as a sword-wielding warrior: by saying “alright, you can still drink, be the hero and woo the girl when you win.” The abolition of the janissaries and outlawing of the Bektashi Sufis in 1826, which passed down as the “Fortunate Incident” in royal Ottoman chronicles, went down as the “Unfortunate Incident” in the Balkan lands.
Which takes me back to why I specifically mentioned the meaning of karakol as an agent of the state. All this is tied to a deep distrust of the state institution, Ottoman or otherwise, and its potential lapse into tyranny: the best hero is that larger than life man who stands against the state, even if (or perhaps especially if) he dies a brave death doing so.
It should not be difficult to see why the kind of modern Islam that prides itself on its own rationalism fails to win sympathy, let alone converts:Strong association with the state — countries like Turkey (with its Imam Hatip curriculum), Morocco, Saudi or Iran rub salt in the wounds of people who define their cultural identity by opposition to dictatorship. The idea of a “strong leader” is actively promoted by many Moslems as, if not mandated by Islam, at least very advantageous to developing countries who want to have “their own Reza Shah/Kemal Ataturk/Saddam Husseyn”, and does not echo at all well in Europe.
Emasculation — a man who can’t drink, dance to upbeat tunes, and admire girls is seen as less than a man, doubly so if this was imposed by someone else. The stress laid by rationalist Islam on making laws, and its government by jurists - who would extend aforementioned “state” regulation into common life fails to ring bells outside specific cultures.
The kind of positive press Sufis enjoy is of a different sort. I remember a conversation (some years? past) in which a fellow Greek highly praised some Sufis in the subcontinent who had formed a ring around non-Moslem mourners after a terrorist attack, to show that they would let the attack take their own life first (I think something similar happened in Egypt).
Much beyond the mere concern for non-believers this evinces, the admiration for the sheikh who goes against earthly violence strikes a chord with us. I remember a story my interlocutor then certainly did not know, how a Sufi in 19th c. Greece, on hearing his patron had been murdered, went and openly criticized the authority of the local petty king - the same Ali Pasha I mentioned before - but the respect he held was so great that he was suffered to leave alive. You can skip the extract, which I still think is interesting enough to put here:
There was then residing at Yannena a dervish, named Yusuf, who was an object of universal admiration for his many virtues and austerity of life. Ibrahim [Pasha] had been his intimate friend. As soon as he heard the rumour of the Pasha's death, Yusuf hurried to the palace of the presumed murderer. Ali, who had a singular respect for the dervises, rose from his divan, advanced to meet Yusuf, and sought to place him by his side. But his venerable visitor indignantly rejected the offer, and addressed him in a strain of vehement reproach. Every crime of his now trembling auditor was dwelt upon, and their atrocity painted in the darkest colours. The dervish concluded with the following emphatic words:
"I cannot tread on a carpet here, I cannot look on anything, which is not wet with the tears of the wretched. The very sofa on which thou wishest me to sit is steeped in blood; it reeks with that of thy own brothers, whom thy mother put to death in their childhood. Those ataghans [long knives], which hang on thy walls, have been blunted on the skulls of the Suliots and Kimariots, whose errors our religion teaches us to deplore, as long as they submit to our authority. From this window I behold the tomb of Emina, that virtuous wife of whom thou wert the murderer. Beyond, I see the lake into which thou didst cast seventeen innocent matrons, and which daily, like the hell that waits to swallow thee, devours the victims of thy insatiable fury.
…Wretch ! for once thou shalt hear the truth! In and out of the city, and in the midst of the mountains, every thing proclaims thy crimes; not a step canst thou stir without treading on the grave of some being, created in God’s image, who accuses thee to Heaven of having shortened his days. Thou livest surrounded by pomp, and luxury, and flattering panders; and time, that marks every child of Adam with the ineffaceable seal of old age, has not yet taught thee that thou art mortal […]”
…after shaking the dust from off his feet against the palace walls, [Yusuf] returned to bis home. (The life of Ali Pasha, RA Davenport, 1878)
Just imagine the effect people like this had on the perceptions of the contemporary populace. It was things like these that won Sufis respect among Christians, and not only (notice the warlord he was criticizing was, in fact, respectful). Not merely “piety”, but a mixture of earthliness and otherworldly bravery that accommodated what people thought was fitting and natural.
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Talib Bah ·
Follow
Sufi | Islamic Mysticism4y
Originally Answered: Why is Sufism accepted in the west more than the other branches of islam?
This is a very large question but it can be summarized as:
The Sufi teaches love. This appeals to the hearts of people in the west.
Historically, the Sufis, by virtue of being mystics and travelers, were the ones spreading Islam to the east, around the Middle East as well as to Africa. It is not attractive to every soul to learn spirituality only from the perspective of Shariat, i.e., external rules of right and wrong. Seekers are looking for a deep, inner reunion with the divine. Known today as enlightenment. The Sufi has the inner teaching of Islam. This teaching makes the din of Islam come alive and makes it beautiful. For example, many muslims pray five times a day because they have to - because of fear. The Sufi prays because he wants to, because he loves Allah and he wants to please the one he loves, Allah. This is appealing to people, because people want to do spiritual practices out of love, not out of fear. Now there’s a fear of Allah (known as Khauf) but that’s a different topic, and it grows once ones spiritual station grows.
Also, many Sufis, particularly in the West, are very merciful when teaching spirituality and they teach it in steps, not expecting the seeker who joined Islam yesterday to conduct five daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, doing extra Duaa’, following Shariat all at once. It comes in steps. Sufis are tolerant to this. Some Sufi orders in the west are even tolerant of different religious traditions. This makes it easier for seekers in the west to join the path.
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