The Way of the Follower: True Respect
As I enter a new phase of my life, post-retirement, I have taken on the task of promoting Sufism as my principal mission. However, I have found the resistance and objections to this way and in fact to any serious spiritual way that is not a la mode like Mindfulness and Yoga to be particularly challenging. Incidentally each of those practices have been coopted into the Modern way of life- Mindfulness to be more efficient at work and Yoga as a means of attaining physical fitness. So they have both lost their spiritual teeth so to speak. That is the precipitating factor for this article in which I am trying to understand where all this resistance is coming from and what we can do about it.
I will begin this text with two iconic stories in the history of Sufism- the stories of Jellalluddin Rumi and that of Abu-Hassan ash-Shadhuli and their initiations..
Let’s start with Abu-Hassan as-Shadhili, founder of one of the greatest tariqats of Sufism- the Shadhili tariqat also known, at times, as the Shadhili-Darqawi tariqat (after another great Sufi -Mulay ad-Darqawi)or more recently as the Shadhili-Darqawi-Alawi tariqat in honour of the great Algerian saint of the 20th century Ahmad al Alawi of Mostaghanem. He, Abu Hassan had travelled the entire Muslim world of the time looking for the Qutb(the spiritual pole of the time).When he finally got to Iraq, he was told that the Qutb of the moment was in his home country Morocco. Boy, is this way ever ironic and paradoxical! Do we often have to do somersaults, cartwheels and about-faces on this path.! I may be involved in some of those gymnastics myself at this time but that’s another matter.
When he, Abu Hassan, got to Jebel Alam , the home of his new teacher, Abdul-Salam Ibn Mashish and climbed the hill to see him, he was told to go back down the hill and do the major ablution(ghusl as it’s called). He did as he was instructed( the seekers were obedient in those days) but was told it wasn’t enough. He was sent back down again three more times until Ibn Mashish finally accepted him as student. It was later explained to him that this was necessary to rid him of the knowledge he already obtained. You see Abu-Hassan was already an erudite scholar of Islamic sciences but in order to get the real knowledge(‘marifat’) he had to cleanse himself of the intellectual baggage he was carrying. Very interesting.
The Jellaluddin Rumi story is very similar. He was what Sheikh Nazim used to call a ’king-sized alim’, a teacher of outer Islamic knowledge with thousands of students. When he met his teacher, Shems Tabriz, he was travelling with loads of books strapped to his horses. Shems grabbed all the books and threw them into a well saying: ”I can bring them all up dry if you wish, but if you want the real knowledge, leave them and follow me” which he did. His love for his teacher was intense but his own students were very upset that he had left them for the inner way. Legend has it that his own students assassinated Shems because of their jealousy but as far as I understand there is no proof of that in the historical record. What there is proof of is that Jellalluddin became a great mystic and poet. His works including the Three Volume Matthnawi are read all over the world and studied by many as a formula for mystical realization. He is one of the best-selling poets even in the Western non-Muslim world. And his practice of active meditation(as in the whirling dervishes) is shown around the world although no-one is able any longer to use it as a mystical method because the lineage has been cut.
So what do we understand from these stories? That one of the most efficient means of enlightenment, if not THE most efficient, is following an enlightened one –without protestation and without resistance. The Hindus call this Guru Yoga or Bhakti Yoga. In Sufism we call it ’itiba’-following. It is often accompanied by ’bayat’-taking the hand of the Sheikh in obedience.
My own path has involved a series of such ‘followings’-sometimes simply of a truth that was thrown in my face by a person channeling Divine Wisdom (like one of my early girlfriends who changed my life by calling me a ‘positivist’ lol-it was no compliment in her books)but more often of a person that I could not fail to acknowledge as superior to me in knowledge and in state. There was Pir Vilayat Khan of the Universalist Sufi Order of the West,, then Muhammad Jumal of Jerusalem who introduced me to Islam, Bawa Muhayyiddeeen, who was living proof that other worlds existed beyond our knowledge, Sheikh Nazim al Qubrusi, the one I spent the most time with, Sheikh Nuh of Jordan who taught me ‘istiqama’(uprightness) and lastly Sheikh Abu_Qassim of Erdeyf, Tunisia whose ‘hal’ was impressive and overwhelming at times. Without these people, I would be a narrow-minded, spiritually ignorant doctor like most of my colleagues from medical school. With them, my understanding has deepened and clarified to the point where I actually think I know “what’s it all about” That might sound arrogant but it’s really not my doing or something I can take personal credit for .It’s the doing of Allah. All I had to do was submit to what was unfolding before me. But ‘submit’ is exactly what modern people have the most trouble with. That’s why I’m writing about “Following” here.
In the modern world there are few people sensitive to this need-to follow. They often believe that they are acting independently but in fact they, too, are following but they don‘t know it and they don’t know who it is they are following. There is almost always some hidden force behind their thinking-a liberal philosopher, a marketer, a politician trying to convince them that democracy and “due process of the law” is actually working or that modern medicine is on the verge of solving all our health problems- like it was supposed to do with the genome project. For those of us who have travelled extensively and come back home , it becomes very clear that our people( Canadians and Quebecois in my case) are just as conditioned and brain-washed as any others on the planet. This includes the Arabs and Turks who I have spent a considerable time with. They all have their reflex reactions, one as predictable as the other.
There are, at the same time, secular people like David Brooks, well-known editor at the New York Times, who have come to the same conclusions. Look at these quotes from a fairly recent NYTimes copy.
David Brooks: Somewhere along the way our society lost the art of following
“Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. It’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are superior to ourselves”.
“The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves.”
Aha! Someone else is getting it. This fundamentalist egalitarianism and its accompanying doubt and cynicism are obscuring our thinking processers and leading us to acute confusional states(not to be confused with delirium lol).
Now, one of the first objections that will come up about my thesis here is around the tragic consequences of ‘following’. Following Shems Tabriz and Ibn Mashish is one thing but what about those who followed Charlie Manson and Jim Jones? The journalists much prefer those latter stories to the much more numerous stories of people learning wisdom and developing their spirituality around legitimate teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh and and Sheikh Nazim and guru Ram Das to name a few. The catastrophic stories, of course, are much more newsworthy.
Indeed one of the principal issues about ‘following’, if not the most important one, is developing discernment. That’s why when people ask me where to go for spiritual instruction, I tell them to research it carefully. And listen to rumours as well! I have yet to run into one that wasn’t true! There are many unethical gurus out there-ones that abuse their students and their children sexually(Sai Baba and Swami Muktanada to name two of them who were very popular),one’s that siphon off their students money and one’s that play power games like Andrew Cohen. I once went to visit Chogyam Trungpa, the famous Tibetan teacher of “crazy wisdom”( I would prefer to call it ‘corrupt cleverness’) at his center “The Tail of the Tiger” only to have my relatively naïve Quebecois girlfriend be hit on by one male after another and be totally freaked out. We had to leave early because of how upset she was. I later learnt that the teacher himself was doing the same thing with his female students plus abusing alcohol. ”Crazy Wisdom” my eye!
But in fact there are many more honest, ethical teachers out there who do respect their own value systems, so identifying gurudom and spiritual teachers in general with corrupt cult practices is a very unfair generalization. In my own path, I would say that there were 9 honest brokers for every scoundrel. Then again, I was careful with my choices and generally took notice of the rumour mill to my advantage.
So how did we get to this state where people believe so strongly in autonomy and independence and are so fearful of following. After all, for at least 3000 years mankind has functioned with theological concepts such as the Will of God, trust in God and trusting in the religious structures around them. Well, in the last three hundred years there were two watershed events and one philosophical shift. The philosophical shift was called The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment. It shifted peoples’ beliefs away from the Ecclesiastical authorities and trust in God to trust in Science, Liberal philosophy and man’s capacity to reason and analyze. The actual events were The French and American Revolutions- occurring during approximately the same time period.
In the American Declaration of Independence, it describes man as being created equal and and speaks of the fundamental rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. The French Revolutionaries used the slogan of ”Liberté, Égalite and Fraternité. So there is considerable overlap between the two. But what is the reality of these slogans and their effects 230 years down the line. ”Life” is still as tenuous and fragile as ever and full of pain. Sheikh Nazim gave the formula as 40 units of pain to one unit of pleasure. For each great scientific discovery like penicillin and insulin a new disease has arisen or an old disease like cancer has increased to epidemic proportions. And diabetes is more common than ever!
I recently saw a documentary with a very old Quebecois doctor who has been around for a long time. He said that from his observations, people are suffering more than ever as they die. Modern medicine often has the side-effect of prolonging the suffering and, with all the interventions and procedures involved, even increasing it.
Liberty, present as a value in both systems, has become hedonism , self-indulgence and even perversity. Many people find their well-being only in addictions to drugs and alcohol-a problem that has increased rather than lessened. And fraternité has actually diminished as families have been broken apart by modern capitalism, people moving away from their birthplaces for work and families being unwilling or unable to care for their young children and elderly relatives due to all of their own responsibilities and obligations. And equality?! There is more inequality than ever as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer(a statistical fact that even the most conservative economists have come to admit).
.The autonomy also becomes isolation and loneliness, the independence leads to an excess of burdens and a lack of social support and the liberty becomes getting drunk or stoned on the weekend to forget about one’s hellish experience at work.
So instead of Liberté , Égalite and Fraternité we now have enslavement to unpleasant workplaces( as the Marxists predicted),increasing inequality, individualism to the extreme and alienation all around us. The experiment, now 230 years old , has failed abysmally! But no-one will admit it, Certainly not the politicians. They keep talking about”democratic values”, ”due process of the Law” and economic opportunity. Who are they kidding?! I remember seeing Tony Blair on the television expressing his perplexity as to why the Iraqi people were not embracing our wonderful democratic principles. Really?! I think he actually believed it.
So when I watch people around me navigating their lives, when I see them rushing from one place to another, from daycare to stressful, airless workplaces to the grocery store and back home exhausted crashed out on the couch in front of their television or computer until they fall asleep and start the cycle again the next day, I have to ask the question Eldridge Cleaver first posed: “Are the beliefs that underpin these behaviours( that they need to earn so much to afford their lifestyle, that their children need to go to the best private schools and participate in all the extracurricular activities, that university education is the key to success and happiness amongst others) part of the problem or part of the solution? ”. Have people been hoodwinked into a philosophy that doesn’t really work and creates more pain than pleasure? By now, I am sure you know what I believe.
“Is there an alternative?” you may legitimately ask. ”Yes, there is”. I have spent time with people that are not stressed out, that are not rushed all the time, that seem happy a good percentage of the day. They are not modernists and they are not compulsive achievers. They are traditional people, people of faith, people of strong spiritual values. And I am trying to follow them and lead other people to follow them as well. I have not been entirely successful, no doubt. But I think if you met people who knew me in my youth they could tell you how different I am, how much more focused and more relaxed and less ambitious. So I have succeeded, at least to some extent. And I intend to spread that success to others. Could you be one of them? Because I care about you, the reader, it would certainly bring me great joy. But you would have to learn to follow! Because you will not be able to figure this out on your own just as I wasn’t. Their are two many traps and allures and false beliefs in your way.
Let us return briefly to the title of the article and ask “Why is The Way of Following the true respect?” Because it respects the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors – before the “Enlightenment”, which could more accurately be renamed “The Endarkenment!” Because it respects our differences-men and women, teachers and students, parents and children, old and young.. Because it respects the will of God and the way He has set up the world-in hierarchies , in ranks, we are taught in Islam –not in homogeneous conglomerates. It is not the way we think it should be, but the way it is. And ultimately because it is the only way we will arrive at peace if ever that is possible on this planet. In order for that to occur we need to respect our nature and the natural hierarchies that emerge from it. If someone knows more and better than us it is our duty to follow him or her-not to protest and object reflexly as we are taught in school as a matter of intellectual principle. Otherwise we are condemned to chaos, which is exactly what we see all around us!
Salaams, Ibrahim