Perspectives on Rumi and Sufism
Middle East Study Group
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
May 5, 2007
For many of us, Rumi’s poetry has provided an important passageway into Islamic culture. It is worth emphasizing that we have Coleman Barks to thank for that, regardless of any shortcomings in the scholarly accuracy of his translations. What matters, I believe, is the “voice” Barks has invented situate us in Rumi’s world. While it is not Rumi’s own music, it conveys the challenge of his message, and the vitality of his quick-shifting, often paradoxical poetic presence— by turns playful, yearning, baffled, angry, enraptured, troubled, meditative and didactic. Moreover, Barks’s translations usually succeed as poems, with a force and coherence that is lacking in more exact versions. Hence their phenomenal popularity, which has prompted critical resentment in some quarters. At present, looking back on Coleman Barks’s 20-plus years of Rumi translations and performances, it’s hard to imagine being without them. Rumi before Barks was only for the few, at least in this country. Admittedly, it is “our” Rumi that we are experiencing, however nicely the chasm of language and culture has been bridged, but that is an inescapable consequence of all cross-cultural interpretations. Moreover, Rumi’s richly nuanced poems are famously untranslatable. At best, they can be more or less effectively “represented,” through stylistic and lexical compromises that succeed in some respects while failing in others.
In post-9/11 America, where Islam has become the monolithic Other in a “clash of civilizations,” any engagements with Islamic culture that can stimulate deeper and broader understandings are valuable. Even the critical challenges to Barks’s Rumi translations have served as useful additions to its influence, alerting readers to important dimensions of Rumi’s work (and, indeed, of Islamic spirituality) that might not otherwise have been conveyed.
Differing Approaches to Sufism
It seems useful to distinguish between the different approaches to Sufism that we are likely to encounter, both in Western and Islamic contexts. Barks argues against the necessity of an Islamic reference frame, although he provides one in each of his introductions. He calls Sufism a “planetary” and “all-inclusive” way of the heart,” typifying a humanist-spiritual universalism that Aldous Huxley dubbed “the perennial philosophy” in the 1920s. Within this Western context, it is worth making a further distinction between psychological and spiritual tendencies. The psychological tradition treats Rumi as a model of personality transformation, and writers as diverse as Erich Fromm, James Hillman and the poet Robert Bly have approached him in this way. Someone loaned me a copy of Reza Aresteh’s Rumi, the Persian, the Mystic (1974), with Fromm’s preface. Aresteh (an Iranian psychologist) turns the stages of the Sufi mystic’s journey into the terms of psychoanalytic development. As he puts it, “the Sufi’s task is to break the idol of the phenomenal self, which is the mother idol.” This secular-psychological line of commentary lacks the overtly spiritual agenda of early twentieth century “perennialists” like Ananda Coomaraswamy, Martin Lings and Rene Guenon. Their legacy, which is entirely at home with traditional Sufi teachings, has been restated in contemporary terms by writers like Huston Smith and Jacob Needleman, both of whom draw from the spiritually eclectic Bay Area cultural context.
From an Islamic standpoint, Sufism is inseparable from the collective discipline of the Muslim tradition, and there are crucial historical and interpretive issues at stake here. To clarify them, our handout enables us to contrast the viewpoints of two well-known Islamic scholars—Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Fazlur Rahman. (It includes the following extracts: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam [2002], pp. 62-65; Fazlur Rahman, Islam [1968], pp. 186-191; and Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival [2006], pp. 60-61.)
Seyyed Hossein Nasr promotes a distinctively Shiite version of Islamic spirituality. He represents the Sufi mystical tradition on three scholarly fronts—as a historian of Sufism, as a philosophical interpreter of the esoteric traditions of Shiism, and as an authority on Ibn Arabi’s mystical philosophy. For many years he has argued that the batin (esoteric) tradition cultivated by both Shiite and Sunni mystics is at one with the spiritual root of all religions. Thus Nasr has allied himself with Huston Smith, the premier living historian of world religions, in promoting a theocentric traditionalism that rejects the materialism and skepticism of modernity. Nasr’s basic strategy is to treat universal spirituality as the inner dimension of all religious understandings, while encouraging each major religion to be faithful to its own “outer” tradition.
In contrast, Fazlur Rahman promotes a Sunni historical interpretation of Sufism that challenges any Sufi deviations from traditional Muslim authority, for ethical as well as institutional reasons. In the handout extract from Islam (pp. 187-188), Rahman summarizes, then criticizes Rumi’s famous poem from the Mathnawi, “Moses and the Shepherd,” in which God admonishes Moses for trying to impose orthodox norms of devotion upon a naively pious shepherd. The poem’s key passage is the following: “Wert thou sent as a Prophet to unite, or wert thou sent to sever? I have bestowed on everyone a particular mode of worship. I have given everyone a particular form of expression… The idiom of Hindustan is excellent for Hindus, the idiom of Sind is excellent for the people of Sind.” Rahman quotes this appeal to spiritual relativism as an example of what he considers the dangerous “tendency toward compromise” within Sufism. Significantly, he views it as a typically Persian deviation from the uniform orthodoxy maintained by the Arab tradition.
Rahman’s subsequent historical commentary (p. 188) stresses the corruption and disunity caused by non-Arab Sufi traditions. “The strong tendency to compromise with local ideas and customs of the converts has divided Islam into a variety of religious and social cultures and militated against the forces of uniformity represented by the orthodox ulama. This uniformity remained while Islam remained true to the early spirit of the Arab stamp. Under the rising tide, from the 12th century onwards, of essentially non-Arab interpretations of Islam, the original stamp—of which the carriers were the ulama—became submerged if not entirely suppressed. The massive catalyst of these new interpretations was Sufism, which also reacted forcefully on the Arab lands.”
Some have questioned whether Rumi’s radical inclusivism has not been imposed on his texts by Westerners. But Hossein Nasr insists that Rumi, like all Sufis, regarded a radical openness to spiritual truth as the highest development of Islam. “Not only are there Sunnis as well as Shiites who are Sufis, but Shiism and Sufism also share together the original inner message of the Prophet and the power of spiritual and initiatic guidance… The esoteric dimension actually lies at the heart of religion and is the source of both its endurance and renewal… In Islam itself, Sufism has been over the centuries the hidden heart that has renewed the religion intellectually, spiritually, and ethically and has played the greatest role in its spread and in its relation with other religions” (Nasr, The Heart of Islam, p. 64).
What Nasr objects to in the American popularization of Rumi is the disappearance of Islamic identity into a generic spirituality. Barks has not been troubled by this, since he promotes Rumi’s message as truth for everyman, in the spirit of the perennial philosophy. In each of his publications, however, Barks introduces his Rumi translations with brief accounts of Rumi’s life and work, clarifying the Islamic context of his writings and teachings.
Rumi and Persian Sufism
In 1237 Rumi took over his father’s position as preacher (khatib), jurist and teacher in Konya (western Anatolia), which was then the capital of the Turkish Seljuk government of Rum (eastern “Rome”). For a century (roughly 1050 to 1150), the Seljuks had unified Islam by reviving Sunni civilization, but the empire’s gradual fragmentation into smaller rival states left it vulnerable to a devastating invasion by the Mongols of Genghis Khan (d. 1227) in the early 13th century. Rumi’s father, Baha al-Din, who was a religious scholar and mystic, left the Balkh area to escape the inevitable catastrophe. Sometime in the late 1220s, he was hired by Kay Qobad, the Rum Seljuk sultan, to join an urban elite spreading Turco-Persian Islamic culture within a region (Anatolia) largely populated with Christian Greeks and Armenians and unconverted Turks. Rumi always called himself a “Balkhi,” referring to an eastern Iranian and Central Asian culture area that had long been impacted by a diversity of religious influences, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Greek Neoplatonism.
Richard Frye, in his Golden Age of Persia (pp. 158-9), provides useful details about the influence of these pre-Islamic spiritual traditions on the “God-intoxicated” mystical tendencies of Persian Sufism. “The east [of Iran] seems to have been the birthplace of a special kind of Sufism, exemplified by Bayazid of Bistam (d. 875). He was not the first of the Iranian Sufis, however… The life story of Ibrahim b. Adham of Balkh (d. 777) is so much like that of Buddha that one wonders whether the biography of Ibrahim was fitted into the pattern of Buddha. Indeed all that we know of Ibrahim and his disciple Shaqiq (d. 810), also of Balkh, indicates a strong Buddhist rather than Zoroastrian background to the asceticism preached and practiced by these two… Although our sources are scanty, we may suggest that Sufism in Iran received an initial impulse from Buddhist monks, perhaps from the famous Naubahar monastery or vihara in Balkh…We know that Buddhists existed in Khurasan at the time of the Arab conquests, but whether one should go as far as Horten in postulating many particular Indian influences on Sufism I am unable to say… However, Bayazid learned about the doctrine of the annhilation of the self in God (fana) from a mystic of Sind called Abu Ali, while Attar in his “Memoirs of the Saints” says that Bayazid became acquainted with the Indian practice of holding one’s breath, which became a religious exercise on the path to God. Bayazid was the first Muslim Sufi to expound the doctrine of the annhilation of the self in God, and his description of the path he followed provided a model for later Sufis. Historically we propose that Bayazid was a creative representative of an eastern school of Sufism, which owed much to the east Iranian milieu in which it arose. Whether all or most of the impulses for the development of this school came from India is difficult to determine, but the influences certainly existed.”
In The Sufi Orders of Islam (1971), J. Spencer Trimingham’s classic study of Sufism through the history of its individual orders, Rumi’s Persian mystical tradition is called “Khurasanian,” in contrast with the more restrained “Baghdadian” tradition of Arab Sufism (60). This returns us to Fazlur Rahman’s dichotomy between Arab orthodoxy and Persian heterodoxy. Mahmoud Ayoub, in his recent Islam: Faith and History (2004), observes that Sufism first emerged in Basra and Kufa as an ascetic movement, because “Iraq had long been home to eastern Christian asceticism” (140). Analogously, Ayoud observes, Egyptian Sufism was an outgrowth of the ascetic-gnostic traditions of Christian monasticism. Balkh, however, had been an ancient center of Buddhist piety (141). In general, historians of Sufism tend to explain the differences between Arab and Persian Sufi traditions in terms of the pre-Islamic religious influences within contrasting regional culture areas.
Dervish Lodges in 13th Century Anatolia
With reference to the social and political context of Rumi’s Sufi world in Anatolia, I’ve included a handout selection from an important recent text: Ethel Sara Wolper’s Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Space in Medieval Anatolia (2003). Wolper argues that the Mongol invasions drove leading intellectuals and charismatic religious leaders out of Iran and Central Asia into Anatolia, where they became cultural and religious supporters of the Seljuk government. The Seljuks of Rum wisely made a deal with the Mongols after Seljuk forces were defeated in 1243, paying tribute in exchange for a semi-autonomy that enabled their Islamicizing culture to continue. However, Seljuk Anatolia rapidly fragmented into a fabric of smaller states (beyliks) run by local military amirs and landowning clients of the Mongols. Wolper shows how these local rulers developed a populist base by building Sufi dervish lodges. Often several rival lodges appeared in a single city. The effect was to displace the centrally situated Seljuk madrasas with more inclusive, spiritually heterogeneous religious institutions that decentralized the city while increasing the local ruler’s base of support.
Wolper argues that the Seljuk system of social control had depended on the dominance of court and madrasa, which tended to exclude the local Greek and Armenian Christian populations as well as non-Muslim Turkmen. But following the break-up of the Rum Seljuk state, local dervish lodges assumed an unprecedented political role. Their charismatic religious leaders and eclectic, local-oriented teachings challenged the authority of the orthodox madrasa-trained bureaucratic and religious elite. In the process of interacting with the local population, dervish lodges created opportunities for Muslim-Christian cooperation, liberalizing attitudes toward non-Muslims. In the 14th century, rival Sufi organizations in each city began to produce hagiographic texts to fortify their special claims by idealizing their charismatic founders. Wolper’s research thus provides the historical background for Franklin Lewis’s pathbreaking achievement in revising (and demystifying) Rumi’s biography, much of which had been based on hagiographic narratives written a century after his death.
Sufism as a Liberalizing Tendency
In recent meetings, we have been reading and discussing Rumi poems in an Islamic context. By comparing a number of contemporary translations of “The Reed Flute Song,” which opens Rumi’s Mathnawi, we’ve gotten some sense of the translation issues. Hopefully, while engaging with Rumi’s poetic achievement, we’ve also been learning something about the radical openness Sufi traditions have encouraged. Once again, Rumi’s spiritual inclusivism appears to have been entirely at ease with his Quranic, Prophet-centered loyalties. My sense of this is that it reconnects us with Abdullahi An-Naim’s contemporary project of liberalizing Sharia interpretation world-wide, and of fostering productive interactions between secular and religious perspectives. Graham Packer’s September 2006 New Yorker article on An-Naim’s career stresses his starting point as a participant in Mahmoud Taha’s Republican Brotherhood in the Sudan, where “an egalitarian brand of Sufism was the dominant form of Islam, before the Islamic fundamentalists took over.” Our handout from Taha’s Second Message of Islam (translated by An-Naim) shows his commitment to an evolutionary understanding of the spiritual elitism that has always been associated with Sufism. Humanity, Taha argues, is now finally capable of responding to the egalitarianism and universality of the Meccan revelations, which belonged to the first period of Muhammad’s mystical experiences, before his assumption of specific political and military responsibilities in Medina. In 1983, Taha was executed in the Sudan, by a regime that had become increasingly Islamist and repressive. Vali Nasr makes an important point about Sufism’s role within today’s intensely politicized religious debates (see our handout from pp. 60-61 of his Shia Revival): “In many parts of the Muslim world today, the battle between Sufism on the one hand and Wahhabi or Salafist Puritanism on the other vastly overshadows any struggle between Islamic traditionalism and Modernism.”
Grand Lake Neighborhood Center
May 5, 2007
For many of us, Rumi’s poetry has provided an important passageway into Islamic culture. It is worth emphasizing that we have Coleman Barks to thank for that, regardless of any shortcomings in the scholarly accuracy of his translations. What matters, I believe, is the “voice” Barks has invented situate us in Rumi’s world. While it is not Rumi’s own music, it conveys the challenge of his message, and the vitality of his quick-shifting, often paradoxical poetic presence— by turns playful, yearning, baffled, angry, enraptured, troubled, meditative and didactic. Moreover, Barks’s translations usually succeed as poems, with a force and coherence that is lacking in more exact versions. Hence their phenomenal popularity, which has prompted critical resentment in some quarters. At present, looking back on Coleman Barks’s 20-plus years of Rumi translations and performances, it’s hard to imagine being without them. Rumi before Barks was only for the few, at least in this country. Admittedly, it is “our” Rumi that we are experiencing, however nicely the chasm of language and culture has been bridged, but that is an inescapable consequence of all cross-cultural interpretations. Moreover, Rumi’s richly nuanced poems are famously untranslatable. At best, they can be more or less effectively “represented,” through stylistic and lexical compromises that succeed in some respects while failing in others.
In post-9/11 America, where Islam has become the monolithic Other in a “clash of civilizations,” any engagements with Islamic culture that can stimulate deeper and broader understandings are valuable. Even the critical challenges to Barks’s Rumi translations have served as useful additions to its influence, alerting readers to important dimensions of Rumi’s work (and, indeed, of Islamic spirituality) that might not otherwise have been conveyed.
Differing Approaches to Sufism
It seems useful to distinguish between the different approaches to Sufism that we are likely to encounter, both in Western and Islamic contexts. Barks argues against the necessity of an Islamic reference frame, although he provides one in each of his introductions. He calls Sufism a “planetary” and “all-inclusive” way of the heart,” typifying a humanist-spiritual universalism that Aldous Huxley dubbed “the perennial philosophy” in the 1920s. Within this Western context, it is worth making a further distinction between psychological and spiritual tendencies. The psychological tradition treats Rumi as a model of personality transformation, and writers as diverse as Erich Fromm, James Hillman and the poet Robert Bly have approached him in this way. Someone loaned me a copy of Reza Aresteh’s Rumi, the Persian, the Mystic (1974), with Fromm’s preface. Aresteh (an Iranian psychologist) turns the stages of the Sufi mystic’s journey into the terms of psychoanalytic development. As he puts it, “the Sufi’s task is to break the idol of the phenomenal self, which is the mother idol.” This secular-psychological line of commentary lacks the overtly spiritual agenda of early twentieth century “perennialists” like Ananda Coomaraswamy, Martin Lings and Rene Guenon. Their legacy, which is entirely at home with traditional Sufi teachings, has been restated in contemporary terms by writers like Huston Smith and Jacob Needleman, both of whom draw from the spiritually eclectic Bay Area cultural context.
From an Islamic standpoint, Sufism is inseparable from the collective discipline of the Muslim tradition, and there are crucial historical and interpretive issues at stake here. To clarify them, our handout enables us to contrast the viewpoints of two well-known Islamic scholars—Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Fazlur Rahman. (It includes the following extracts: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam [2002], pp. 62-65; Fazlur Rahman, Islam [1968], pp. 186-191; and Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival [2006], pp. 60-61.)
Seyyed Hossein Nasr promotes a distinctively Shiite version of Islamic spirituality. He represents the Sufi mystical tradition on three scholarly fronts—as a historian of Sufism, as a philosophical interpreter of the esoteric traditions of Shiism, and as an authority on Ibn Arabi’s mystical philosophy. For many years he has argued that the batin (esoteric) tradition cultivated by both Shiite and Sunni mystics is at one with the spiritual root of all religions. Thus Nasr has allied himself with Huston Smith, the premier living historian of world religions, in promoting a theocentric traditionalism that rejects the materialism and skepticism of modernity. Nasr’s basic strategy is to treat universal spirituality as the inner dimension of all religious understandings, while encouraging each major religion to be faithful to its own “outer” tradition.
In contrast, Fazlur Rahman promotes a Sunni historical interpretation of Sufism that challenges any Sufi deviations from traditional Muslim authority, for ethical as well as institutional reasons. In the handout extract from Islam (pp. 187-188), Rahman summarizes, then criticizes Rumi’s famous poem from the Mathnawi, “Moses and the Shepherd,” in which God admonishes Moses for trying to impose orthodox norms of devotion upon a naively pious shepherd. The poem’s key passage is the following: “Wert thou sent as a Prophet to unite, or wert thou sent to sever? I have bestowed on everyone a particular mode of worship. I have given everyone a particular form of expression… The idiom of Hindustan is excellent for Hindus, the idiom of Sind is excellent for the people of Sind.” Rahman quotes this appeal to spiritual relativism as an example of what he considers the dangerous “tendency toward compromise” within Sufism. Significantly, he views it as a typically Persian deviation from the uniform orthodoxy maintained by the Arab tradition.
Rahman’s subsequent historical commentary (p. 188) stresses the corruption and disunity caused by non-Arab Sufi traditions. “The strong tendency to compromise with local ideas and customs of the converts has divided Islam into a variety of religious and social cultures and militated against the forces of uniformity represented by the orthodox ulama. This uniformity remained while Islam remained true to the early spirit of the Arab stamp. Under the rising tide, from the 12th century onwards, of essentially non-Arab interpretations of Islam, the original stamp—of which the carriers were the ulama—became submerged if not entirely suppressed. The massive catalyst of these new interpretations was Sufism, which also reacted forcefully on the Arab lands.”
Some have questioned whether Rumi’s radical inclusivism has not been imposed on his texts by Westerners. But Hossein Nasr insists that Rumi, like all Sufis, regarded a radical openness to spiritual truth as the highest development of Islam. “Not only are there Sunnis as well as Shiites who are Sufis, but Shiism and Sufism also share together the original inner message of the Prophet and the power of spiritual and initiatic guidance… The esoteric dimension actually lies at the heart of religion and is the source of both its endurance and renewal… In Islam itself, Sufism has been over the centuries the hidden heart that has renewed the religion intellectually, spiritually, and ethically and has played the greatest role in its spread and in its relation with other religions” (Nasr, The Heart of Islam, p. 64).
What Nasr objects to in the American popularization of Rumi is the disappearance of Islamic identity into a generic spirituality. Barks has not been troubled by this, since he promotes Rumi’s message as truth for everyman, in the spirit of the perennial philosophy. In each of his publications, however, Barks introduces his Rumi translations with brief accounts of Rumi’s life and work, clarifying the Islamic context of his writings and teachings.
Rumi and Persian Sufism
In 1237 Rumi took over his father’s position as preacher (khatib), jurist and teacher in Konya (western Anatolia), which was then the capital of the Turkish Seljuk government of Rum (eastern “Rome”). For a century (roughly 1050 to 1150), the Seljuks had unified Islam by reviving Sunni civilization, but the empire’s gradual fragmentation into smaller rival states left it vulnerable to a devastating invasion by the Mongols of Genghis Khan (d. 1227) in the early 13th century. Rumi’s father, Baha al-Din, who was a religious scholar and mystic, left the Balkh area to escape the inevitable catastrophe. Sometime in the late 1220s, he was hired by Kay Qobad, the Rum Seljuk sultan, to join an urban elite spreading Turco-Persian Islamic culture within a region (Anatolia) largely populated with Christian Greeks and Armenians and unconverted Turks. Rumi always called himself a “Balkhi,” referring to an eastern Iranian and Central Asian culture area that had long been impacted by a diversity of religious influences, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Greek Neoplatonism.
Richard Frye, in his Golden Age of Persia (pp. 158-9), provides useful details about the influence of these pre-Islamic spiritual traditions on the “God-intoxicated” mystical tendencies of Persian Sufism. “The east [of Iran] seems to have been the birthplace of a special kind of Sufism, exemplified by Bayazid of Bistam (d. 875). He was not the first of the Iranian Sufis, however… The life story of Ibrahim b. Adham of Balkh (d. 777) is so much like that of Buddha that one wonders whether the biography of Ibrahim was fitted into the pattern of Buddha. Indeed all that we know of Ibrahim and his disciple Shaqiq (d. 810), also of Balkh, indicates a strong Buddhist rather than Zoroastrian background to the asceticism preached and practiced by these two… Although our sources are scanty, we may suggest that Sufism in Iran received an initial impulse from Buddhist monks, perhaps from the famous Naubahar monastery or vihara in Balkh…We know that Buddhists existed in Khurasan at the time of the Arab conquests, but whether one should go as far as Horten in postulating many particular Indian influences on Sufism I am unable to say… However, Bayazid learned about the doctrine of the annhilation of the self in God (fana) from a mystic of Sind called Abu Ali, while Attar in his “Memoirs of the Saints” says that Bayazid became acquainted with the Indian practice of holding one’s breath, which became a religious exercise on the path to God. Bayazid was the first Muslim Sufi to expound the doctrine of the annhilation of the self in God, and his description of the path he followed provided a model for later Sufis. Historically we propose that Bayazid was a creative representative of an eastern school of Sufism, which owed much to the east Iranian milieu in which it arose. Whether all or most of the impulses for the development of this school came from India is difficult to determine, but the influences certainly existed.”
In The Sufi Orders of Islam (1971), J. Spencer Trimingham’s classic study of Sufism through the history of its individual orders, Rumi’s Persian mystical tradition is called “Khurasanian,” in contrast with the more restrained “Baghdadian” tradition of Arab Sufism (60). This returns us to Fazlur Rahman’s dichotomy between Arab orthodoxy and Persian heterodoxy. Mahmoud Ayoub, in his recent Islam: Faith and History (2004), observes that Sufism first emerged in Basra and Kufa as an ascetic movement, because “Iraq had long been home to eastern Christian asceticism” (140). Analogously, Ayoud observes, Egyptian Sufism was an outgrowth of the ascetic-gnostic traditions of Christian monasticism. Balkh, however, had been an ancient center of Buddhist piety (141). In general, historians of Sufism tend to explain the differences between Arab and Persian Sufi traditions in terms of the pre-Islamic religious influences within contrasting regional culture areas.
Dervish Lodges in 13th Century Anatolia
With reference to the social and political context of Rumi’s Sufi world in Anatolia, I’ve included a handout selection from an important recent text: Ethel Sara Wolper’s Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Space in Medieval Anatolia (2003). Wolper argues that the Mongol invasions drove leading intellectuals and charismatic religious leaders out of Iran and Central Asia into Anatolia, where they became cultural and religious supporters of the Seljuk government. The Seljuks of Rum wisely made a deal with the Mongols after Seljuk forces were defeated in 1243, paying tribute in exchange for a semi-autonomy that enabled their Islamicizing culture to continue. However, Seljuk Anatolia rapidly fragmented into a fabric of smaller states (beyliks) run by local military amirs and landowning clients of the Mongols. Wolper shows how these local rulers developed a populist base by building Sufi dervish lodges. Often several rival lodges appeared in a single city. The effect was to displace the centrally situated Seljuk madrasas with more inclusive, spiritually heterogeneous religious institutions that decentralized the city while increasing the local ruler’s base of support.
Wolper argues that the Seljuk system of social control had depended on the dominance of court and madrasa, which tended to exclude the local Greek and Armenian Christian populations as well as non-Muslim Turkmen. But following the break-up of the Rum Seljuk state, local dervish lodges assumed an unprecedented political role. Their charismatic religious leaders and eclectic, local-oriented teachings challenged the authority of the orthodox madrasa-trained bureaucratic and religious elite. In the process of interacting with the local population, dervish lodges created opportunities for Muslim-Christian cooperation, liberalizing attitudes toward non-Muslims. In the 14th century, rival Sufi organizations in each city began to produce hagiographic texts to fortify their special claims by idealizing their charismatic founders. Wolper’s research thus provides the historical background for Franklin Lewis’s pathbreaking achievement in revising (and demystifying) Rumi’s biography, much of which had been based on hagiographic narratives written a century after his death.
Sufism as a Liberalizing Tendency
In recent meetings, we have been reading and discussing Rumi poems in an Islamic context. By comparing a number of contemporary translations of “The Reed Flute Song,” which opens Rumi’s Mathnawi, we’ve gotten some sense of the translation issues. Hopefully, while engaging with Rumi’s poetic achievement, we’ve also been learning something about the radical openness Sufi traditions have encouraged. Once again, Rumi’s spiritual inclusivism appears to have been entirely at ease with his Quranic, Prophet-centered loyalties. My sense of this is that it reconnects us with Abdullahi An-Naim’s contemporary project of liberalizing Sharia interpretation world-wide, and of fostering productive interactions between secular and religious perspectives. Graham Packer’s September 2006 New Yorker article on An-Naim’s career stresses his starting point as a participant in Mahmoud Taha’s Republican Brotherhood in the Sudan, where “an egalitarian brand of Sufism was the dominant form of Islam, before the Islamic fundamentalists took over.” Our handout from Taha’s Second Message of Islam (translated by An-Naim) shows his commitment to an evolutionary understanding of the spiritual elitism that has always been associated with Sufism. Humanity, Taha argues, is now finally capable of responding to the egalitarianism and universality of the Meccan revelations, which belonged to the first period of Muhammad’s mystical experiences, before his assumption of specific political and military responsibilities in Medina. In 1983, Taha was executed in the Sudan, by a regime that had become increasingly Islamist and repressive. Vali Nasr makes an important point about Sufism’s role within today’s intensely politicized religious debates (see our handout from pp. 60-61 of his Shia Revival): “In many parts of the Muslim world today, the battle between Sufism on the one hand and Wahhabi or Salafist Puritanism on the other vastly overshadows any struggle between Islamic traditionalism and Modernism.”
