In this episode, I'm going to describe a tradition that most Americans have never
even heard of. This tradition involves the idea that the relationship between
God and his believers is defined by love - both because God loves his creation and
because the most effective way to approach God is by cultivating love. This
story begins in the city of Baghdad, which was created as the new capital of
the Abbasid Empire in the middle of the eighth century. A focus on loving God
arose simultaneously in several territories, but became particularly
prominent in this city. During the eighth and ninth centuries, Baghdad was one of
the most cosmopolitan and diverse cities in the world, and the multi-religious,
multi-ethnic population of the city was involved in vigorous debates that had
enormous ramifications for the development of European, Asian, and
African history. Some of these debates were political: Shi’i Muslims were arguing
that only direct male descendants of the prophet's daughter Fatima, and son-in-law,
'Ali, had the right to lead the Muslim community. They called these divinely
chosen leaders Imams, and various Imams actually lived in Baghdad with their Shi’i
supporters during this period. Many Muslim scholars argued that leadership
should not be based on succession but on righteousness and learning. Many of these
early scholars developed the classical disciplines of Qur'anic interpretation
and Islamic Law. Over the course of 300 years, these scholars agreed to tolerate
disagreements over legal interpretation in order to preserve a sense of
community. This focus on scholarship and community ultimately became known as
Sunnism. The rulers of the Empire called the caliphs gathered together
experts from places as distant as India and Spain. They called in Jewish,
Christian, Muslim, and Zoroastrian scholars, anyone who could read and write
in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Persian, or
Sanskrit and they tasked these international scholars with translating
the astrological, medicinal, and philosophic works of the ancient Greeks
into Arabic. The effect of these efforts was the creation of an Arabic-Islamic
tradition of Greek philosophy and theology, as well as the development of
new fields of study such as optics, algebra,
and astronomy. Eighth-century Baghdad was a place where Muslims, Jews, and
Zoroastrians debated the nature of God and prophecy; where Shi'is and proto-
Sunnis argued over leadership; where the first Muslim legal scholars interpreted
the Qur'an and the sayings of Muhammad; and where powerful rulers cultivated
discussions of Greek philosophy. And amid this intellectual fervor, a new movement
arose. Increasingly, people began to refer to a new group of Muslims that they
called "Sufis." The first members of this group seemed to have been ascetics -
people who sought to withdraw from the political, social, and even material
worlds by embracing fasting and poverty. As the movement grew, these individuals and
their students articulated a vision that rejected elite institutions of learning,
arguing that these were tainted by their association with political leaders.
Instead, they argued that God should be pursued through single-minded,
wholehearted devotion and love, and that believers who followed the path of love
could achieve direct, experiential knowledge of the divine. As this movement
grew in popularity and spread out from Baghdad to the whole of the Abbasid
Empire, specific individuals became renowned for their exceptional love and
devotion to God, and became known as "the friends of God." Many Muslims believed that
the intense and single-minded devotions of these individuals caused them to not
only love God but also to be loved by God in return, and they often believed
that God was more likely to respond to the prayers and requests of his friends,
his beloveds. Today there are shrines dedicated to the friends of God around
the world: in North and West Africa, Central and South Asia, China and
Indonesia. And just as Muslims around the world travel to Mecca each year for
the great pilgrimage - called the Hajj - so, too, do many Muslims undertake pilgrimages
to these smaller shrines to ask God's particular friends to intercede on their
behalf. And while the first Sufis rejected the legal and philosophical
circles maintained by the Abbasid caliphs, they did develop their own
teaching circles and networks that transmitted their ideas to each new
generation. As the movement expanded, these teaching
lineages grew in both membership and complexity. Some even organized into
full-fledged institutions with leadership structures
and rules for membership. As these teaching circles developed, members
became just as intellectually sophisticated, their ideas just as
elaborate and complex as the philosophers and theologians that their
predecessors had rejected. By the 12th century, people who called themselves
Sufis could be anything from illiterate itinerant ascetics to educated
philosophers and legal scholars. Because Sufi traditions of love lent themselves
particularly well to poetry, some of the most historically influential Sufis were
those who combined Sufi ideas with love poetry. In the 13th century, one Sufi
philosopher and poet named Ibn Arabi would describe the path to God in these terms:
Marvel, a garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form: a meadow for gazelles, a cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground, Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim, the tables of the Torah, the Scrolls of the Qur'an.
I profess the religion of love; Wherever its caravan turns along the way, that is the belief, the faith I keep.
The path of love described and developed by Sufis spread
across the world, but these figures and their ideas also attracted criticism.
Some Muslims objected to Sufi practices, particularly the traditions of visiting
the shrines of Gods friend's, and accused Sufis of idolatry - of worshipping these
humans in the place of God. These critics often stemmed from one particular legal
school that became the prevailing institution in Saudi Arabia. As a result,
although there are Sufis almost everywhere there are Muslims, there are
no openly practicing Sufis today in Saudi Arabia, and very few in the
neighboring Gulf States. Like Islam itself, Sufism has no one definition - it
is made up of the voices and experiences of people who call themselves Sufis. In
some places and regions, these lovers of God were pacifists, in others they were
dissidents, and in still others Sufi leaders argued that their proximity
to God gave them the right to rule. Sufi philosophy has been debated as
thoroughly as Islamic law; Sufi poetry has been read by medieval Christian
theologians and American hippies; and every year millions of Muslims travel to
visit Sufi shrines - and you probably hadn't even heard of Sufis before today.
Why not? What forces shape the information that you have access to? Why
do Americans have so many questions about Islamic law and so few about
Islamic philosophy? And what else haven't you heard of? What questions do you not
even know enough to ask?