Disclaimer: From the Weekly Standard. But it's not a political piece.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/199lssqw.asp?pg=1Getting to Know the SufisThere is a tolerant, pluralist tradition in Islam. We can't afford to ignore it.
by Stephen Schwartz
02/07/2005, Volume 010, Issue 20
JUST FOUR MONTHS AGO, thousands of mourners thronged the Grand Mosque in Mecca for the funeral of a famous Sufi teacher. This was an extraordinary event, given the discrimination against all non-Wahhabi Muslims that is the state policy of Saudi Arabia. The dead man, 58-year-old Seyed Mohammad Alawi Al-Maliki, had been blacklisted from employment in religious education, banned from preaching in the Grand Mosque (a privilege once enjoyed by his father and grandfather), and even imprisoned by the Saudi regime and deprived of his passport. That so many Saudi subjects were willing to gather openly to mourn him--indeed, that his family succeeded in excluding Wahhabi clerics from the mosque during the memorial--says something important, not just about the state of dissent inside the Saudi kingdom, but also about pluralism in Islam.
It's hard to know which facet of Al-Maliki's identity his mourners were turning out to honor--if indeed these can be separated. He was, first, a Hejazi, a native of the western Arabian region that was an independent kingdom before the Saudi-Wahhabi conquest in the 1920s. Home to Mecca, Medina, and the commercial port of Jeddah, the Hejaz hosts an urban, cosmopolitan culture very different from that of the desert nomads. Al-Maliki's funeral was the first for a prominent Hejazi to be held in the Grand Mosque in decades.
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ISLAMIC PLURALISM is not a new idea dreamed up in the West and offered as a helpful cure for Muslim rage. It is a longstanding reality. The Muslim world comprises a spectrum of religious interpretations. If, at one end of the continuum, we find the fanatical creed of Wahhabism, cruel and arbitrary, more an Arab-supremacist state ideology than a religious sect, at the other end we find the enlightened traditions of Sufism. These stress not only intra-Islamic dialogue, separation of spiritual from clerical authority, and teaching in the vernacular, but also respect for all believers, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or other. Sufis emphasize, above all, their commitment to mutual civility, interaction, and cooperation among believers, regardless of sect.
Indeed, the further the distance from Wahhabism, the greater the element of pluralism present in Islam. Where the Wahhabis insist that there is only one, monolithic, authentic Islam (theirs), the Sufis express their faith through hundreds of different orders and communities around the globe, none pretending to an exclusive hold on truth. Sufis may be either Sunni or Shia; some would claim to have transcended the difference. Throughout its 1,200-year history, Sufism has rested on a spiritual foundation of love for the creator and creation, which implies the cultivation of mercy and compassion toward all human beings. These principles are expressed in esoteric teachings imparted through formal instruction.
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Among Western experts at the State Department and in academic Middle East Studies programs, Sufism is often dismissed as "folk Islam," echoing the denigration voiced by the Islamic clerical establishment. This is paradoxical, for although there are regions where Sufism is the prevalent form of Islam and its influence is seen in a lack of strict observance, Sufis are more often than not sophisticated in their breadth of reading and worldview. In some countries, such as Egypt, Sufis are sometimes derided as credulous bumpkins, but in others, like India, they tend to be viewed as an elite.
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