Qur’anic Roots and Ethical Foundations of Suluk in Islamic Pedagogical Methodology

NOTES FROM THE IIIT CONFERENCE ON APPROACHING THE QUR’AN AND SUNNAH #7

[This is the seventh in a series of my notes on the International Institute of Islamic Thought conference on approaching the Qur’an and Sunnah held in Herndon, VA. These notes are raw material for an edited report I will write on the conference later and represent my perception of the discussion. The proceedings will be published by IIIT at a later time. The Minaret of Freedom Institute thanks IIIT for the grant that makes the publication of these notes possible. Responsibility for any errors in the notes is mine alone.]

7th Session, Moderator: Khaled Troudi

Paper presentation by Kenneth Honercamp

“The Qur’anic Roots and Ethical Foundations of Suluk in Islamic Pedagogical Methodology and its Relevance Today”

To answer the question “How did early Islamic society integrate the essential ideals, values and sensibilities of the Qur’an and sunnah into its individual and social behavior” by looking at Sufic master-disciple relations in Nishapur. Abu Husayn al-Nuri said Sufism is ethical conduct (akhlâq). Al-Junayd called Sufism a process of purification, departure from base character to arrival at noble character. Hamdun al-Qassar defines Sufism as “correct comportment.” Such citations dispel the motion that Sufism is pre-occupied with metaphysics, philosophical ontology, and mystical experience. Adab and akhlâq are at the core. The ethical-mystical orientation distinguishes Sufism from other paths.

For Ibn Ajîba, “The rûh as long as it is engrossed in ignorance (ghafla) is named the ego-self (nafs) and will never access the divine presence.” The teachers of the formative period of Sufism equated the degree of progress to the degree of commitment to the process. The master-disciple relationship provided the teachers with the normative model by which they could restore their disciples and the community to rectitude after they had lost touch with the Qur’an and sunnah. Their very presence in the community was a source of hope. They are models for their own communities as the Prophet was for the first Muslim community. Upholding reverence of the awliyâ is an active principle of the transformative process and a reflection of the reverence owed to the Prophet of God. For Sulami the concept of hurma is based on an ontological vision of a multi-faceted hierarchy of divine presences including reverence of all God’s creation. Sulami says, “He who has not founded his aspirant’s journey upon the Qur’an and the Sunnah will attain nothing of knowledge of God.” Service is an essential element as are avoiding worldly goods and compassion for all creation.

Ethics has been the central thread of scholarly Islamic discourse for centuries. Today the only ethical options offered are secular humanism or pragmatic survivalism.  I believe making the formative and classical Sufi texts available to a broader public could have a positive effect on the present discourse.

Discussant 1: Mahmoud Ayoub

Unlike Christian thought, Islam has no ethical theory; ethics is the sphere of action rather than the sphere of theory. Thus when Muslims wrote of ethical theory they were guided by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. When someone entered the house of Abu Said with his left foot instead of his right, Abu Said would not speak to him anymore. The Sufi’s journey is from the material world to God. If begins with self-discipline and ends with the relation in God. To use the full service of his master the disciple must be in the hands of the master as a corpse is in the hands of the corpse-washer. The problem is when one wants to impose this on others. One of the earliest Sufis insisted that whenever a Sufi lives with another, no matter whom, he must serve him. Mustafa Kamal Shaybi tells the story of a murîd who was quite affluent and to go on a trading trip entrusted his concubine (jâriyyah) to his closest friend, who fell in love with her. He wrote to his shaikh for advice, who recommended he visit a mu`amiliyyat (sp?) shaikh, but his townsmen discouraged him. He wrote back to his shaikh who said I already told you. He arrived at the house to find the shaikh had a young boy on his lap and a wine bottle in his hand. He asked, “How can you do such a thing?” The response was that the boy was his son and the bottle contained water. I call myself a Sufi, but I have yet to find a shaikh.

Discussant 2: Ahmad Kazemi Mousavi

Mousavi: Sufis are considered to be more tolerant. In the formative period adab was essential. We have a stronger sense of brotherhood among Sufis, which is socially important.

Response by Kenneth Honercamp

In Tabaqât Sufiyya, Sulami says there are as many definitions of Sufism as there are Sufis because they see it according to their own state. Maybe we can distill some principles from all these different definitions. Takhalli may mean to empty yourself of bad character traits and tahally means to fill yourself with good traits. Some feel that we should start with tahally in order to attract people. There were no orders in the formative period and people were not called sheikhs, but sahaba.

Louay Safi: I agree that in our current society, Muslims, especially, are spiritually impoverished. I am uncomfortable with certain adab adopted by Sufism that I think have a negative impact on society. My problem is with hurma given to the shaikh that nurtures a hierarchical impact on society that encourages a master-slave relationship. I can accept respect, but respect has to be mutual. I understand why the Sufis use the concept of fakar, beacuse our egos do distract us from spirituality, but I have a problem with the dichotomy that pride is negative while humility is positive. We need to encourage people to acquire wealth without letting the wealth take over their heart.

Ayoub: Whatever the Sufis do is rooted in the Qur’an. Allah says I have raised some above others. We are equal before God in our human worth, not in our talents. We are all fukurâ in Allah. To learn the spirit of Sufism read Abu Talib al-Makki’s Qut al-qulub fi mu’amalat al-mahbub wa wasf tariq al-murid ila maqam al-tawhid (The nourishment of hearts in dealing with the Beloved and the description of the seeker’s way to the station of declaring oneness), which influenced even al-Ghazali.  A shaikh once ordered a novice to clean the latrines and his wealthy mother sent some servants to do it for him. The shaikh asked the mother: If a physician prescribed medicine to cure your son of illness, would you give it his servants?

Honercamp: By pride I mean takabbur, which no one considers good. The concept of killing or smashing the nafs is [a kind of exaggeration]; we mean transformation of the nafs. One sage said if you try to mold charcoal it will crumble, but if you put it next to hot charcoal it will glow.

Hisham Al-Talib: Is Sufism more prominent among Sunnis or Shia?

Ayoub: The majority of Sufis are Sunnis. When Irfan became Shia there was much distrust of the Sufis. Now they want to embrace their entire heritage. Sufism is not a madhhab, but a mashrab

Yusuf: 33:35 declares spiritual equality, so why do we go against it?

Honercamp: If your son says, “Baba, have a problem,” would you tell him to go look at the Qur’an and sunnah?

Yusuf: Why not?

Safi: Can the murîd question the shaikh?

Catvovic: Yes, I have often seen it.

Abu Baker Al-Shingieti: In the Qur’an hurma is used in different ways. The popular imagination of Muslims has taken it further. For example in places where “woman” is called hurma. In the case of Hurmut al mashayukh, in Sudan it can be used as a form of respect but it also can be a form of immunity like a percentage of your earning that must go to the shaikh.

Ahmed Rafiq: Indonesian Tariqa are almost all among the Sunni. Shia dhikr is through Jafar as-Sadiq. People in my village all follow some tariqa without realizing that they are doing so.

Honercamp: Nishapur saw itself in opposition to Baghdad. After the Hallaj incident many Sufis fled to Nishapur.  ? brought the two traditions together.

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad: The real issue is not questioning, but the modality of mentorship. Pedogogy is the subject of this paper. At the risk of being criticized for bringing in a non-Muslim example, I always appreciated the answer Karl Hess’s mother gave to him when he, as a small boy, asked her what was her maiden name. She said “Look it up,” and he had to go to the count courthouse to find out.

Honercamp: I’m thinking of mentor as exemplar.  Our problem is we don’t have people that others look up to. We quantify knowledge, but we don’t qualify it. We never looked at our teacher unless he spoke to us. We want to be like our teacher, not take his knowledge. We don’t have this in the West.

Ahmad: If you want to be like your shaikh, you should want to have his knowledge. I was impressed by your shaikh when his response to your comments of how much you learned from him was “It is the other way around.” This is mutual respect that Dr. Louay speaks about.

Al-Shingieti: When I was six or seven years old, my father was a shaikh. “Look it up” is more than a matter of going to court records or the Internet, it is to look into the soul of your community.

Catovic: We grow up in a society with an egalitarian lack of hierarchy and there is a frustration of working in a culture of shut up and listen. I wonder about the Sufi development in the United States. Have they modified the more stringent rules of interaction rather than reversing expectations?

Honercamp: Once when Ibn Arabi came to a group in awe of him, he put up his foot and asked someone to massage it.

Ahmad: I don’t see this as a relaxation of formality but as an example of hierarchy. To relax formality he would have rubbed his own foot.

Aisha Musa: Or rubbed their feet.

Ahmad: As Jesus (as) is reported to have washed the feet of his disciples.

Musa: “Look it up” is being a good example.

Honercamp: That is the Western view.

Safi: This question of pedagogy is very important. Role models is not a uniquely Islamic concept, Westerners value role models as well. What I would like to see is Sufis develop an open code of ethics on the mentor-disciple relations that we can look at it that of the shaikh and murîd can know and at least avoid abuses.

Ayoub: I see a tension between American individualism and the communal modes of Asian societies. I am concerned about the view that Islamic pedagogy does not encourage you to think for yourself and that Sufis relate knowledge not to communicate things bit to experience. Sufis have been very verbose. They wrote many books. If it were true that Islamic education in Muslim countries discouraged thought we wouldn’t have had the thinkers[iaa1] we now have. Westerners study Arabic for four years and can barely read, but in Libya students with shorter training can translate habit with no errors. In the West they have preceptors or confessors and in India the guru.

Mousavi: Sufism is not confined to master-disciple relations and many have been against it. Muwardi did, but Rumi didn’t.  Sufism belongs to the faculty of arts. All Sufi writing is beautiful. Attar, Hafiz. It produces beauty and a strong Muslim brotherhood. Sufis have a tolerance we see in no faqih.

Safi: We are talking on different levels. I defended Ibn Arabi from Salafi attacks. We are not here to take partisan positions on Sufism, but to a talk about the development of the personality of the people. I am not even against irfân, the biggest mystery in our life is Allah and we cannot talk about Allah without experiencing His presence. But I am against the hierarchy that prevents going beyond a controlling element. I have seen people who even with a slight influence of Sufism don’t like to be questioned. I think it is part of the reason we have authoritarian societies.

Honercamp: Sherman Jackson has spoken about this too, but there is no doubt that when Islam comes into a country it empowers the population. The master-disciple relationship is one of empowerment.

Ayoub: Sufism began as a one on one relationship, but as it became popular we have the Sufi madrassas coming in. A relationship is then between shaikh and a group.  A Turkish shaikh knowing he as at death invited his disciples to appoint a khalifah. All came with flowers for his shaikh except for one who brought a single wilted flower. Asked about his seeming lack of reverence, he said the other flowers were in the processes of praising God, but this one seemed to have finished, so he brought it.

Hisham: Are there atheist Sufis?

Honercamp: See Gershem Sholam on Trends in Mysticism. Accepting non-Muslims into the process can bring them to the path of becoming a Muslim, but the orthodox position is that Sufis are Muslims but non-Muslims are free to follow the path.

Ayoub: More historically, from the 17^th century on when Sufism became known in the West many asked the question as to whether Sufism is Islamic or the ”Iranian genius” introduced it to Islam. It took Arberry and others to refute this. Idriss Shah and others thought that if they introduce Sufism independent of Islam it would lead them to Islam. But I and others have argued that Sufism is Islam. I’ve met women rabbis who say “I’m a trained Sufi” and I say “you can’t be trained to be a Sufi, you have to live it by praying five times a day, etc. true Sufism cannot develop outside the Sharia.

[I had a comment that I did not have the opportunity to make in session so I shall insert there: Learning Arabic is not like learning those things for which originality is required such as pure science, art and love. Empowerment comes from the destruction of the old. Examples are the way the Nation of Islam prepared the way for orthodox Islam among Afro-Americans by turning Christian mythology upside down, and how al-Ghazali refuted the monistic rationalism in The Incoherence of the Philosophers.]

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[iaa1]Ahmad: [not delivered] Learning Arabic is not like learning things requiring originality, which is needed is science, in art and in love. Empowerment comes from the destruction of the old. Examples are the Nation of Islam and al-Ghazali’s Tahafut.

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute
www.minaret.org