Key Sufi Concepts (I)

THOSE ASTONISHING SUFIS
Adilbai Kharkovli (1980)

The great decade of interest and experiment,

featuring Eastern religions and strange practices, has come

and gone, leaving a curious detritus of beliefs, myths,

practices and disillusioned seekers-after-knowledge scattered

from California to Kathmandu. It has fulfilled two

obvious functions: things ranging from vegetarianism to

mystical chants, formerly the preserve of odd local cults

and weird societies of often less than balanced people,

have become known to a tremendous mass of people. The

new fads, like flying saucers, have been linked with the

old ones, like ancient Chinese fortune-telling books;

imitation Indians (both Hindu and Redskin) are still to

be found; books on magic and miracles sell by the hundred

thousand. And, as a perhaps beneficial spin-off, many

cults have been exposed for what they are - very often

groups which attract the unbalanced and unbalance those

prone to such directions.

Reading the literature and talking to a wide

variety of thinking people, one sees that a single facet

of this explosion of interest has been the most dramatic,

yet the most elusive. This is the revelation, to the people

of the East and the West, of the riches of investigation

and experience locked within the literature and practices

of a body of people who have been called, for the past

thousand and a half years, the Sufis.

Nobody knows when or where this movement

started. Its foremost theoreticians give such varying

answers to the question that there can now be little doubt

that they deliberately confuse any effort to trace their

knowledge further than they want it to go. We know the

names and much about the lives and doings

of an astonishing number and variety of their sages:

from Spain and Morocco to India, from what is now

the Soviet Union to the middle of Africa. But as soon

as you try to piece together exactly what they are doing and why - and how -

you come across unsuperable obstacles. Theirs undeniably

is a secret which is kept in the most effective of all

ways: by showing themselves and then proliferating their

materials to such an extent that the conventional thinker

or researcher will be unable to find characteristic traces

from which he can deduce a general theory.

There are many people who take this variety and

depth as the evidence of the authenticity of the endeavour.

Certain it is that there is no other community which

has been able to operate in this way - for all others have

been compelled by social and other pressures to ossify

their dogmas and to declare their principles, often in so

narrow a way as to proclaim their limitations to an almost

laughable extent.

But experience of true Sufi groups does reveal that

the things which other systems regard as primary, central,

are found among the Sufis as peripheral or transitory,

secondary. This idea, again, is so startling and indeed so

beguiling that some have found in it a proof of the legitimacy
of the Sufi approach. The Sufis themselves say that all true systems
started by the use, by a skilled individual, of rituals and methods
which were applied as required. Almost all of them, they continue,
degenerate into mimes. Among them are the majority of the spiritual
systems known at the present day, as well as traditional medicine,
ideologies and social institutions.

Concealment and elective operation, then, may be

taken as the hallmarks of the Sufi. What have they in common
which might help us to make a link? Well, if it is true that the Sufi
has a skill which has to be exercised in accordance with conditions
and the state of his pupil, it would seem likely that he would
'conceal' a great deal from that pupil's curiosity for information
about origins and so on. If, say, a surgeon were to operate upon
you, or a doctor prescribe a treatment, neither would encourage
your interfering with the process by constant enquiries about
the history of his skill.

That this is the probable basis of much of the Sufi

mystery seems probable when we look at what the Sufis themselves
say about it. "Sufism" they say, "is activity, not

theory".

This activity, they continue, can take almost any

form.

Sufi activity familiar to a vast and growing audience is found
in the form of tales told by Sufis.

They may appear didactic, cautionary or humorous, or downright
mysterious. A study of these tales and what Sufis themselves
say about them reveals, however, something which is seldom suspected.
People try to use them in customary ways - to penetrate their meaning
or to allow them to act on them, or to relate them to something
already known, and so on - but their use is otherwise. The tales
are there to prepare the mind for further understanding, not to give
any understanding which the pupil can perceive; and they are also
designed, especially in the mass, to baffle in part, so that the learner
will admit that he cannot understand, and will therefore apply to
the teacher for real teaching. They are, in this latter role, the goad
which takes the individual to the teacher.

Thus the Sufi story is designed to help overcome

unperceived assumptions. The assumption in most cases is

that the learner can learn unaided.

Similarly, Sufi assignments, whether they be manual

labour or working on exercises, contain the element

least suspected by the student: the one whereby he comes

to a realisation that perception comes beyond activity.

When Sufis report results of enterprises, spiritual exercises,

formulae or even doing gardening chores for their

master, it is to be noted that these developments do not

come during the activity, but invariably after it. This is

underlined by hints from Sufi sources that the ordinary 'self' as experienced by most people, stands in the way of self-realization.

Only a fatiguing of this secondary self makes

it possible for the subtler impulses to be perceived by

the primary self; and then only when this is done as a part

of a programme planned and carried out by a real teaching

master, not by imitation.

Sufi stories and Sufi activities, therefore,

both contain the effective function of blocking the working

of the would-be analytical mind and the grosser self, as

a preparation for higher insight.

These conceptions, the Sufis aver, lie at the

root of all genuine traditions; but, as in the case of the

deterioration into ritualism already noted, they have

become ossified by tradition in all other systems to mere

repetition, disguised entertainment and emotionality.