The Two-legged Tripod of Current Islamic Practice
Umar ibn al-Khattab reported: We were sitting with the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, one day, a man appeared with very white clothes and very black hair. There were no signs of travel on him and we did not recognize him. He sat in front of the Prophet, rested his knees by his knees, and placed his hands on his thighs. The man said, “O Muhammad, tell me about Islam.” The Prophet said, “Islam is to testify there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, to establish prayer, to give charity, to fast the month of Ramadan, and to perform pilgrimage to the House if a way is possible.” The man said, “You have spoken truthfully.” We were surprised that he asked him and said he was truthful. He said, “Tell me about faith.” The Prophet said, “Faith is to believe in Allah, His angels, His Books, His Messengers, the Last Day, and to believe in providence, its good and its harm.” The man said, “You have spoken truthfully. Tell me about excellence.” The Prophet said, “Excellence is to worship Allah as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He surely sees you.”
I feel like, without pretension inshallah, I have become the conscience of our religion?! At least to me and a few people near to me. That is NOT because of superior knowledge or piety. Many of my co-religionists have more of both of these! But rather because I am a convert and am able to see things from numerous perspectives. Having been through secular Judaism, left-wing politics and Marxism, Humanistic Psychology, Buddhism, New Age Sufism and finally traditional Islamic Sufism I have experienced the world from numerous perspectives. On the other hand, most Muslims have lived their entire lives in an ethnic echo-chamber. Even when they immigrate to a Western country they resist the local wisdoms in favour of their cultural platitudes! So I can see more than most!
Therefore, when I go to the Muslim venues including the holy sites of Mecca and Madina and the grand mosques of Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Turkey, as well as local mosques, I have noticed the following phenomena-relating back to the cited hadith
1-The Iman is good-almost everywhere in the Islamic world and even in the West! The mosques are full for jumaa prayer, overfilled for the Eid and well-attended at Tarawih during Ramadan. This tells me that the faith is there! By contrast, at the churches, including the one where we do our group dhikr(another issue to be explained further on) the pews are empty. Some of the Evangelical Churches may well be better attended but that remains the exception in the Christian world!
2- Islam, i.e the outward practices. Most of the Muslims I meet are trying to keep up the outer practices-doing the obligatory ones and avoiding the prohibited things. Most Muslims do not gamble, do not drink alcohol or eat pork. Most Muslims avoid fornication and adultery even though the modern world prevents them from having second wives and concubines- like in the days of the Prophets. Verdict: Islam, the behavioural component, is well -respected.
3-Ihsan?! I look around the mosques at jumaa prayer and rarely do I see people of light?! The same was shockingly true in Mecca when I did hajj many years ago. I kept walking around the Kabaa looking for people of light. The site was luminous but the people were not! Finally I ran into a group where it was manifest! They were a group of Bangladeshi Naqshbandi Sufis. I found a similar small group in Madina not far from the Prophet’s mosque! But overall the people were in a pitiful spiritual state. The maqamat (the holy sites) were luminous but the people were not!
Interestingly enough, John Bennett tells the same story about the great Indian saint Shivapuri Baba who visited Mecca in the 1890’s! He made the following statement which concurs with my own observations” The pilgrims at Mecca are inspired with true religious fervour (strong Iman) but I do not find myself attracted to Islam as it is today”. This was before the end of the Ottoman empire when the Wahhabbis had not yet done the damage that they eventually did to the spirituality of Islam. I guess he did not have the occasion to meet some real Sufis! I believe he would then have felt their camaraderie(like-mindedness) with his own aspirations!
The Causes: How did we get here?! This is, no doubt, a complex question! Our Prophet saws had warned that each generation after him would be worse than that before. Nevertheless, there have been great Sufis throughout the ages from Abu Bayazid Bistami to Abdul Qadr Jilani, Ibn Arabi and Jellalludin Rumi.and Abu Hassan Ash-Shadhili-all many generations after him saws..I think it is safe to say that they all had a high degree of Ihsan! So what happened?!
Did the corruption of the Ottoman empire have something to do with it? Or the wealth in the Muslim countries that our Prophet saws feared so much? All of that is possible.
1-But the one unavoidable factor is the rising up of Wahhabbism/Salafism that started in earnest after the defeat of the Ottomans in WW1.By 1925 they had taken over the holy sites and began imposing their dry, lifeless, despiritualized version of Islam throughout the Muslim world-via their petrodollars.
Nowadays, even when you go to far away outposts of Islam like Trinidad where I spent some time, you find people who know nothing about Sufism and retain a negative image of it! They have lost the essential tool for developing Ihsan! I consider Wahhabism as the extension of the Khawarij heresy into the modern world. It appears that the great scholar of Islam- Tahir al Qudri- agrees with me on that one.
2- The second obstacle, a descendant I believe of the Mutazili heresy are the movements like Ikhwan Muslimeen. Like the Mutazilis, even though they are not often recognized as such, they emphasize reason beyond anything else As Joshua Philipp, of Epoch Times, pointed out in his astute reporting on the Islamic Brotherhood, Sayeed Qutb studied social sciences in the U.S. and then brought Marxist thought into the Islamic paradigm. ( Quite an achievement of understanding for a non-Muslim!) From there, we start hearing more and more about political Islam -the very type of Islam so popular in the modern world that my sheikh-Sheikh Nazim denounced every time he met them!” You do not understand our religion” he would say! “People get the governments they deserve .You cannot impose Islamic governments from above”. What insight that man r.a. had!
3- A third source is the modern world-full of Materialism, Empiricism and Rationalism. The scientific paradigm, economic planning and all other types of over-planning and overthinking. When we consider this “toxic soup” of Wahhabism, Ikhwanism and Scientific Materialism , we should not be surprised that the Islamic world is in such a pitiful state spiritually!
The Consequences : I will make a bold statement here! I would state that almost all the problems in the contemporary Muslim world and yes that includes Palestine and Iran and Lebanon etc.,etc. come from this loss of Ihsan (P.S. I will be writing a future article on the Causal Nexus as most Muslims have bought into the logical version of causality rather than the moral one.) What we find is a lack of subtlety, a lack of refinement, a lack of empathy and a lack of the true sense of the sacred. It is like we have a body without blood and without breath. Emptiness and Deadness. Men addicted to porn sites. Hijabi women walking the streets of Western cities looking miserable and bitter. Parents who do not understand their children and marry their daughters to the first rich man they can find( Yes,it’s still happening!) Dissatisfaction everywhere!
The Solutions:
So what are the answers?
Bring back the Sufis! They contain the lifeblood of the religion. Bring back the group dhikr and the Samaa and the Hadrat. Bring back the private dhikr with the name of Allah. Push back on the critics of Sufism-whether they be Wahhabbis or Ikhwanis or Orientalists. What we see instead is the glorification of scholarship! Scholarship has its place, no doubt. But it is not the highest nor the deepest part of the religion. We can learn our Shariah from them , how to recite Quran with proper tajweed, how to do wudhu and ghusl. But mostly they are cerebral people with limited hal-for those who can perceive hal in their souls.
The real Sufis, however, are glowing and energetically powerful. The first one I met, in Jerusalem, put me into the hal of fana immediately and the second one had me in a state of ecstasy that made it difficult to find myself in the streets of Philadelphia-the city he was residing in at the time. These are the people of God! These are the carriers of the most intense forms of Ihsan. These are the people we need to align with. Not the people who have memorized the most Islamic ilm. These are the people who can revive the nation. The others are more like University professors and less like true awliya of Allah. May Allah fortify and invigorate our Ihsan.
Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim