At last! What I wanted to say to the Muslim community is
published on The Straits Times. 
Although I am not a Muslim, I did read some of the Sufi
teachings and appreciated them.
PAGE 18 | THE STRAITS TIMES, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 2006
Sufi antidote to religious
terrorism
I ALMOST fell off my seat in the cavernous NTUC auditorium on
Marina Bay last week. Reason? I was listening to an American
academic, Professor Abd al-Haqq Alan Godlas, saying in all
professorial earnestness that the root cause problems confronting
humanity was egotism. This is what you get when you get a Sufi to
talk about worldly affairs, I muttered under my breath.
The way I understood it then, Sufism was a form of Islamic
mysticism and spirituality, with Sufis often associated with
reclusiveness and withdrawal from social and political activities.
So it was a bit rich for them to think that they could fix the
world's problems simply by exhorting ppeople to overcome their
egotism, I thought to myself.
But at the end of a week of lectures, I realised that Prof Godlas,
who teaches Islamic studies at the University of Georgia in the US
and is well-known for his Islamic studies and Sufism website, was
dead serous. So were the other half a dozen Sufi scholars from the
US, Britain, Malaysia and Singapore who had gathered here to show
how effective the Way of the Sufi could be in creating a peaceful,
integrated and harmonious global society.
Among them was a Briton of Pakistani descent, Aftab Malik,
currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Ethnicity and Culture
at the University of Birmingham. He noted: "Zealotry and hate are
specific traits identified as detrimental to the soul and Islam's
spiritual tradition has always played a vital role in purging these
diseases from the heart." In short, Sufism is another name for
Islam's spiritual tradition, no less.
And from Ustaz Mohamed Alid, a Singaporean Muslim leader: "There is
an urgent need today to revieve the discipline of tasawwuf (Sufism) and its system of
tariqah (Sufi Orders).
Social ills are rooted in the diseases of the heart. It is
incumbent on every Muslim to be a Sufi."
The young Ustaz Mohamed Ali is the son of Ustaz Ali Mohamed,
chairman of the Khadijah Mosque and also leader of the local
chapter of a tariqah group.
The series of public talks culminated in a two-day conference
organised by the Aleem Siddique Mosque, which is named after a
great Sufi scholar, Maulana Shah Muhammad Abdul Aleem Siddique, who
played a pivotal role in the setting up of the Inter Religious
Organisation (IRO) in Singapore in 1949.
The conference provided the Sufis with an opportunity to debunk
various "myths" surrounding Sufism. For instance:
>> It is not true that Sufism is not an integral part of the
syariah (Islamic jurisprudence), as detractors claim.
As the 8th-century Islamic scholar Imam Malik said: "He who learns
syariah and neglects tasawwuf becomes a reprobate; he who
learn tasawwuf and
neglects syariah becomes an aspotate. But he who combines both will
reach the Truth."
>> It is not true either that Sufism was derived from Greek
and Buddhist sources. Nor is it some kind of "Islamic mysticism" as
some Western writers want you to believe.
Rather, Sufism is the spiritual dimension of Islam which has been
abandoned during the past 200 years when more attention was given
to the syariah.
>> Muslims who believe that Sufism is an innovation
(bid'ah) - something which
was not practised during the first three generation of Muslims -
also have it wrong, the scholars argue.
Black box
THE underlying current in their messages, I detected, was that
Sufism offered a natural antithesis in the fight against a virulent
strain of Islam, which some analysts have now described as radical
Wahhabism, which had its beginnings in 18th-century Saudi
Arabia.
Renowned Middle Eastern expert Bernard Lewis agrees. Sufism is
"remarkable" and "offers something better than tolerance", he told
a conference organised by the Nixon Center, an American
think-thank, in 2003 to introduce Sufism to US policy-makers.
The underlying current in their messages...was that
Sufism offered a natural antithesis in the fight against a virulent
strain of Islam, which some analysts have now described as radical
Wahhabism, which had its beginnings in 18th-Century Saudi
Arabia.
As he noted, the attitude to people of other religions exhibited
in Sufi writings is without parallel. Indeed it is not just
tolerance, it is acceptance. Poems by Sufi writers extol the same
message: All religions have the same purpose, the same message, the
same communication, and they worship the same God.
They may do so in different ways, but God is equally there in
church, in mosque and in synagogue, he said.
The same message was heard by participants at the week-long
programme in Singapore. It came from the irrepressible and
controversial Shyakh Hisham Kabbani, the deputy leader of
Napshbandi haqqani Sufi Order, which has over two million adherents
around the world. He leads the Islamic Supreme Council of America
in the US.
In an interview with the Middle Easter Quarterly in 2000, he put it
rather beautifully: "We all aspire to the same goal: to worship God
in a way that satisfies us and that pleases the Lord. Looking at it
in this way provides a basis for all people of faith to find a
common cause and find a way to achieve harmony and to work. It is
like we are all together inside a big black box with many pinholes
along the exterior. We look out and see pinpoints of light shining
in. each person picks one source of light and says "that is the one
I follow". But outside the box, there is only one sun
shining."
There is yet another reaons why the Sufis could perhaps play a
bigger role in countering terrorism: Theri system of tariqah requires that Islamic
knowledge would have to be learned from acknowledged teachers. That
would help curtail the influence of non-mainstream teachings on the
Internet on young Muslims, particularly in minority Muslim
societies in the West.
Nothing reflects better the seriousness of these Sufis in wanting
to assert what they consider their natural role in guiding the
ummah than the setting up of the Sufi Muslim Council in July in
Britain - "a non-profit, non-governmental religious organisation
dedicated to working for the cause of Islam".
The council represents "a silent majority frustrated with slow
progress since the London bombings of July last year", it said. The
launch, significantly, was held at the House of Commons, with
several leaders of Britain's main political parties
attending.
Not that the establishment of the council has been problem-free.
Some British Muslims see it as an attempt to usurp the role
currently played by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), set up in
1997 to represent more than 250 Muslim organisations around the
country. A recent survey showed that eight of 10 polled thought
that the MCB had not done nearly enough to combat anti-Western
extremism. The SMC's spiritual leader, Shaykh Kabbani, believes
that the time has come for governments to empower Sufis like him in
the war on terror.