To Sufi or Not to Be

A devotee dancing at Mela Chiraghan to celebrate the Sufi poet, Shah Hussain

I started writing articles here as an excuse to capture some of my elusive yet recurring thoughts. It’s not a perfect process. Introspecting your deepest intuitions is quite like peering into the silhouettes of a crystal ball; trying to put into words the little you can recognize amongst a cacophony of shadows. So I treat all my articles as living documents; continuously editing and evolving them as I gain more clarity. This is my first attempt at sharing what I have been building up to so far.

Previously, I have addressed how we develop symbolic abstractions to express mental models of the world around us. We use them to weave narratives that we can then hold to be true. And from that perspective, a 6th grade Math class, a copy of the New York Times and the Sunday church service are all pursuing an identical purpose; convincing you that their way of making sense of the world is accurate. As useful as they might be in certain ways, they still remain quite fickle.

It’s because the very act of creating a symbol imbues it with limitations by attaching a “meaning” to it. Firstly, the symbol can not “mean” anything more than the constrains of our sensory, cognitive and linguistic capacity. So the narratives we construct as a tapestry of symbols, inherit all their fundamental limitations. For example, you can’t paint a bird’s tweeting onto canvas no matter how good you are at painting because paint can not capture sound. But a talented artist could paint sceneries that invoke a somewhat similar mental state within you. That is about as clever as we can get with our symbols.

But now we have a problem. We can recognize that the way we experience reality is grounded in symbols and narratives which are simply constructs of useful convenience. So what do we hold sacred? Is there anything we can believe in that is beyond question?

Let’s give it a try with “I think therefore I am”. Seems harmless enough yet it subsumes and conceals several assumptions:

• Introduces an ego-centric “I”. What is “I”? Am I really the “I”? What if other beings are also versions of me? What are the boundaries of this “I”? Is it my body that keeps changing? Or an abstract mind or soul?
• Introduces the process of “thinking”. Does the “I” have control over the thoughts or is it simply experiencing them? Why does being associated with this process gives “I” the right to claim existence?
• Introduces the idea of “am” or existence. What does it mean to exist? Are there things that don’t exist? Even if you imagine a purple elephant in your head, it exists there. What meaningful difference is there between that and a “real” one?

But this tells us something interesting about this “ultimate” truth we are looking for. It’s truthfulness can not depend on something that is not equally as “ultimate” otherwise it becomes questionable and hence not worthy of the title. And if it does depend on another “ultimate” truth, then it makes that other truth even more “ultimate” and hence denies its own “ultimate”-ness. So all said and done, we are looking for a statement that stands in and of itself.

So it would be something of the form “A square is anything that has 4 sides”, where the statement defines the concept it introduces. But unfortunately we can’t depend on the idea of “sides”. So what we really arrive at is “A square is a square.”

It sounds very stupid and disappointing but the ultimate truth of things is that they are what they are. And any attempt to describe them in terms of other things is a useful but inevitably flawed endeavor. There is an element of surrender in recognizing that. Acknowledging that your mind is simply not capable of constructing a narrative that is perfectly truthful is a liberating move. You can finally let go of the hubris that made you think otherwise. You can let go of the nagging feeling of imperfection in how you see the world and yourself. You can just be what you are. But there is more. You can let go of this very idea of a “you”; a symbolic tool created to make sense of the world. Dissolve into the rest of the universe and bear witness to the simple fact that it is.

It is not a coincidence that the above sounds a bit familiar. Many diverse religious traditions have found their own way into this idea:

• Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism: “moksha (liberation) is attained through recognizing this illusoriness of the phenomenal world and disidentification from the body-mind complex and the notion of ‘doership’ (self-agency), and acquiring vidyā (knowledge) of one’s true identity as Atman-Brahman (the single transcendental existence)”
• Meister Eckhart in Christianity: “All creatures are pure nothingness. I do not say they are small or petty: they are pure nothingness.” “The being (of things) is God.” “thou must be in Him and for Him, and not in thee and for thee.” “the core of the soul and the core of God are one.” “Man must live without why. He must seek nothing, not even God.”
• Ibn Arabi in Islam: “There is no existence save His existence.” “Nothing but the Reality is; there is no separate being, no arriving and no being far away.” “Thus, instead of [your own] essence, there is the essence of God and in place of [your own] attributes, there are the attributes of God. He who knows himself sees his whole existence to be the Divine existence, but does not experience that any change has taken place in his own nature or qualities. For when you know yourself, your sense of a limited identity vanishes, and you know that you and God are one and the same.”

I was introduced to this idea by the soulful works of Punjabi Sufi poets so I call this idea “Sufism” and those identifying with it “Sufi”. But as the Wikipedia page would have you know there is a lot of structure, connotations and definitions associated with “Sufism”. I don’t really care for any of them. It would be antithetical to build upon a foundational premise regarding the arbitrariness of our humanly narratives only to impose a specific set of narratives back again. To me, Meister Eckhart was a Sufi. Buddha was a Sufi. At the same time, you are free to call Ibn Arabi a Buddhist. Or maybe they are all “mystics”. The labels don’t matter. The practices don’t matter. Only this idea that they are all unified under. To quote Rumi, “There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth.” And in one way or another, we are all pursuing our path.

In my opinion, Sufism is and has always been the heart of Islam, the driver of the 8th-13th century “Muslim Renaissance” and historically the key appeal for new converts. It effuses the timeless values of universal equality, open-mindedness, tolerance and love for all. All of that is in a stark contrast to the regressively rigid, fundamentalist thinking of modern-day Wahabi and Salafi schools of thought.

Punjabi Sufis exemplify this contrast. Bulleh Shah was a heavy critic of the fundamentalist Sunni clergy to the point they declared him a non-Muslim, exiled him from his home city of Kasur and banned his funeral. He was a fierce advocate against caste-discrimination and an ardent supporter of the Sikh struggle against the oppression by the Muslim Mughal emperors. Baba Farid is simultaneously revered as the first major figure in Punjabi literature, founder of the Chishti order in Islam and a Bhagat in Sikh faith. Shah Hussain was so in love with a Hindu man that he named himself Madhoo after him (of course getting called infidel in the process) and got buried next to his beloved in my home city of Lahore.

Even though they lived in abject poverty and faced harsh resistance, their moral compass has stood the test of time. And they remain deeply loved today. Their tombs are visited every day by thousands of devotees with huge yearly festivals to celebrate their lives. While fundamentalists have been unable to counter their popularity, they have unfortunately succeeded in repressing and “reinterpreting” details of their lives. I grew up hearing about “Syed” Bulleh Shah when Bulleh explicitly stated his hate of being called “Syed” as a symbol of superior family lineage. I never learned anything about the deep relationship between Punjabi Sufis and Sikh philosophy. Shah Hussain’s relationship with Madhoo too was swept under the rug simply as a fondness for a disciple. Their prosecution by the clergy of their time was also conveniently omitted.

It is also surreal to discover that Ranjit Singh (a Sikh ruler) actually started the Mela Chiraghan in Lahore to celebrate the love of a Hindu (Madhoo) and a Muslim (Shah Hussain) man. Yet only about a century of British colonial rule later, this same region became the epicenter of one of the bloodiest inter-religious massacres in world history when Punjab got sliced in half as part of the India/Pakistan partition. The deep scars of the tragedy remain far from healed today. (There is actually a very interesting relationship between western imperialism, decline of Sufism and rise of Wahabism/Salafism that I hope to explore at some other point).

As I sit here contemplating their lives, I am grateful to have found within my cultural legacy these poets, lovers and rebels to look up to. And I aspire to hold up their mission of unity, oneness and love for all. In return of the love they have poured through their lives and works, I owe them a debt to restore the love that once existed among their people. And I shall strive to repay that debt.