Sufi Surfing
SCHWARTZ, STEPHEN
Sufi Surfing Pico Iyer and the Californization of mystical Islam. BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Pico Iyer, who mainly works as a writer for Time, comes to the topic of Sufism after a series of books that...
...He meets with professors, attends seminars, and encounters a troubled woman, Camilla—a name Latin in origin, but a homonym of the Arabic name Kamila meaning "perfect" which is not mentioned in the narrative...
...Gotovac placed Rumi, along with such other Sufis as Suhrawardi and Hallaj, on an equal level with St...
...what they threaten, in fact, is Saudi Arabia...
...His Sufism is a marketable mysticism, reduced to small bites of tranquility and enlightenment...
...The novel's protagonist, John Macmillan, is an English graduate student of unreported age and appearance...
...Interspersed with these episodes, and the enervated consequences that flow from them, are trips to places like Damascus, Seville, and the cities of Iran, that should be, but somehow are not, vivid—in order to meet individuals who should be, but somehow are not, insightful...
...Bektashi Sufis were the chaplains for the Ottoman fighting force known as the Janissaries (recruited as children from Christian families...
...Iyer suggests the subversive elements in Sufism may threaten the present government in Iran...
...The elderly and distinguished leader of the community, Sheikh Myhedin Shehu, was killed, and up to a hundred and fifty more Albanians died...
...Although most advocate for peace, they do not preach surrender to aggression...
...One would like to explain this away as a deep Sufi parable, but, a travel writer, Iyer's approach to Sufism remains that of a tourist among tourists...
...The greatest Arab jihad fighter of his time, he wrote that Sufis found participation in jihad the most difficult duty they incurred as Muslims...
...In fact, leaving "California Sufism" is the first thing a genuine student should do...
...On July 19, 1998, for instance, the first pitched battle between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army took place in the town of Rahovec...
...One would never imagine, reading this story, that real Sufis are surprisingly easy to find in the United States...
...Through scenes like this, one realizes that not all Sufis, regardless of their reputation as adherents of a peaceful Islam, can be expected to be New Age huggy bears...
...My own real engagement with Sufism came at age forty-four, when I came across a volume by Baba Rexheb Beqiri, who established an Albanian Sufi presence in Michigan, entitled The Mysticism of Islam and Bektashism...
...Finally, he obtains a manuscript of verse that, somewhat inexplicably, excites him...
...Aside from Macmillan's dully enigmatic and petulant mentor, Sefhadi, the book's experts talk about research without describing it, express an over-dramatized amour propre, and lecture in New Age generalities...
...Spiritual odysseys do, in fact, beckon us today...
...Macmillan's affair with Camilla is formalized and barely complicated, described with an oddly inept vocabulary about sex ("when he met her there, she let out a great cry, and then began sobbing...
...Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi, leader of the Algerian Muslim struggle against the French a hundred and fifty years ago, was a Sufi who made protection of Christians and Jews his outstanding mission in times of war...
...brutal Communist dictatorship— unsullied by commercialization, uniformity, and standardization...
...All this makes a difference—and makes worrisome Iyer's sort of California tourist Sufism lite—for the Sufis are anything but marginal in the present combat for the soul of Islam...
...Here at home, no Islamic leader has been more outspoken, in demanding loyalty on the part of American Muslims to the United States and its democratic polity, than Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani of the Naqshbandi Sufis...
...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Pico Iyer, who mainly works as a writer for Time, comes to the topic of Sufism after a series of books that seem unlikely preparation...
...Open fighting in the streets culminated in a Serb assault on the Helveti-Karabashi Sufi shrine in the town, in which hundreds of terrified residents had gathered...
...Iyer's protagonist, John Macmillan, goes to California to study Sufism...
...There are pious and sober Sufis, and rebellious, ecstatic Sufis...
...Among America's strongest allies in Iraq are Kurdish and Arab Sufi sheikhs, who are immensely fearful since Saudi-funded Wahhabis have flooded their territory in the aftermath of war, using relief operations as a pretext for religious colonialism...
...Macmillan also drives around California in a kind of Raymond Chandler reverie, but without gangsters, detectives, or blood...
...He is shown obscure manuscripts (of which we learn nothing) by some Los Angeles Iranians and a Muslim in India...
...For instance, dhikr (the central Sufi ritual of remembrance of God) is absent, as are the names of the dervish orders...
...Rather, they restore stolen manuscripts to their rightful owners and rebuild vandalized libraries, as in Iraq and Kosovo...
...Nor would one learn, from this book, that the Sufi classics crackle with energy and verve...
...He produced a novel, Cuba and the Night, which showed a desperate need to find a place—even if it happened to be a A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Stephen Schwartz is author of The Two Faces of Islam...
...Now, in his latest novel, Abandon, he has turned inward, ostensibly to an exploration of the Islamic mystical tradition called Sufism in search of an alternative to a globalized world...
...The Dervish-dana incident figures in the indictment of Milosevic at the Hague...
...Much has been said in praise of the Sufi poet Rumi, but I know nothing more eloquent in celebration of Islamic spiritual traditions than the recollection of the Croatian poet Vlado Gotovac, a dissident who was tortured and threatened with death in Yugoslav Communist prisons...
...and there is no self-awareness that would lift such unappetizing porridge to the level one might expect from a novel touching, even marginally, on the chaos and controversy with which, for instance, contemporary Iran is associated...
...Serb paramilitaries also committed a horrifying massacre in the home and shrine of another Kosovo Sufi, Sheikh Dervishdana...
...Until the recent campaign by Saudi agents of the extremist Wahhabi sect to subvert their struggle, the Chechens who fought against Russian imperialism were overwhelmingly members of two famous and combative Sufi orders, the Naqshbandis and Qadiris...
...Then, in Kosovo, I met genuine Sufis, committed to a life and death struggle for the survival of their communities in the face of Serbian aggression...
...Bloodlessness is, indeed, the operating description of Iyer's Abandon: an empty landscape of happenings where nothing happens...
...Yet war is not the only means by which activist Sufism contributes to struggles for freedom...
...Augustine, Holderlin, Melville, Apollinaire, Man-delstam, and others as the master writers of civilization...
...In the pages of Abandon, there are no real Sufis, only academic experts or weekend Sufis...
...Strangely, the location for his inward search is California, the capital of ultimate banality...
...Everything in the novel seems exhausted...
...But to embark upon them requires something more than lackluster campus colloquia about Rumi...
...Unlike the Sufis in Iyer's Abandon, real dervishes today do not troll exotic locations for rare manuscripts to "liberate...
...His Video Night in Kath-mandu, Falling Off the Map, and The Global Soul glittered with the bright lights and Time-reporter sorts of insights about a homogenized, post-postmodern, globalized world...
Vol. 9 • September 2003 • No. 2
