The Four Pillars of Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi's "Wabi Sabi"

Silence. Seclusion. Hunger. Vigilance.

The Religion of Peter Pan vs. the Prophetic Tradition

Our religious traditions tend to dignify the refusal to accept one's human, all-too-human limitations. Psychologists sometimes refer to this refusal as the "Peter Pan Syndrome." This would not necessarily be a bad thing, if the "refusal to accept one's human limitations" expressed itself as a relentless desire to explore what may be possible within those limits--and, having identified the possible, to attempt it. And religions have provided human beings with resources necessary to do just that.

Often it is the case, however, that religious traditions fail to encourage an exploration of human limitations and offer, instead, a condemnation of those limits: human beings are to be blamed for lacking divine perfection. And since the divine alone is perfect, it alone is capable. Consequently, human beings are encouraged to forgo the labor of thinking through the possible and to resort, instead, to wishful or magical thinking. If one just prays hard enough, or performs a particular ritual often enough, God will intervene (deus ex machina) and all will be well.

When promoted by culturally admired institutions, magical thinking grants the adherent of a religious tradition permission to rationalize the status quo as "God's will" or fate--it is for this reason that Marx famously referred to religion as the "opiate of the masses."

Our religious traditions also offer adherents relief from the adult responsibility to undertake the difficult task of individual identity construction. Why should anyone attempt this difficult task and risk finding one's self, at the end of much effort, with an ambiguous result when the religious institution or community is prepared to offer its adherents a ready-made identity--like a shirt straight off the rack?

An alternative to the religion of Peter Pan is the so-called "Prophetic Tradition."

Of course, "prophecy" is often popularly understood as a mode of magical thinking, but this is nothing more than Peter Pan hermeneutics. In Biblical religion, "the prophet is the mouthpiece of the will of God. He does not see or predict a future reality. In fact, the future concerns him only in so far as it cannot yet be grasped and beheld as reality, in so far as it is still latent in the will of God and also in the free relationship of man to this divine will, and hence is, in a certain way, dependent on the inner decision of man" [Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters, 32].

We must learn to recognize in such theologically-charged language a definition of "prophecy" as the discernment of human possibility and freedom exercised against genuine human limitations. "The will of God," according to this definition, is the limiting case; the human being remains the responsible actor.

The "Prophetic tradition" eschews magic and wishful thinking; it demands mature action in an imperfect world. It is, has always been, and will most likely always be the mode of Biblical religion with the fewest adherents: but those few afrad (an Arabic term meaning "singulars") have a special role to play in the history of human religiosity. For by their labors of discernment and their struggle to cope with the limitations of their species and the world, they undertake the Great Work of Amelioration: they are true "progressives" who, in solidarity with their fellow human beings, engage in the prophetic struggle against cruelty, ignorance, and all forms of social and political inertia that inure to the benefit of those deeply invested in the status quo. By their efforts, healing occurs in individual lives and Biblical religion itself--to the extent that this is possible--finds redemption in the historical record.

To say nothing of the eyes of God.

Sohbet According to Buber

But how was man, in particular the "simple man," with whom the hasidic movement is primarily concerned, to arrive at living his life in fervent joy? How, in the fires of temptation, was he to recast the Evil Urge into an urge for what is good?...How, in his meeting with creatures and things, grow aware of the divine sparks hidden within them? How, through holy kavvanah [intention] illumine everyday life? We do, indeed, know that all that is necessary is to have a soul united within itself and indivisibly directed to its divine goal. But how, in the chaos of life on our earth, are we to keep the holy goal in sight?...Man needs counsel and aid, he must be lifted and redeemed...A helper is needed, a helper for both body and soul, for both earthly and heavenly matters. This helper is called the zaddik [murshid, guide]...It is he who can teach you to conduct your affairs so that your soul remains free, and he can teach you to strengthen your soul, to keep you steadfast beneath the blows of destiny. And over and over he takes you by the hand and guides you until you are able to venture on alone. He does not relieve you of doing what you have grown strong enough to do for yourself. He does not lighten your soul of the struggle it must wage in order to accomplish its particular task in this world. And all this also holds for the communication of the soul with God. The zaddik must make communication with God easier for his hasidim, but he cannot take their place...The zaddik strengthens his hasid in the hours of doubting, but he does not infiltrate him with truth, he only helps him conquer and reconquer it for himself...again and again he emphasizes the limits of mediation. One man can take the place of another only as far as the threshold of the inner sanctum...Within these limits the zaddik has the greatest possible influence not only on the faith and mind of the hasid, but on his active everyday life, and even on his sleep, which he renders deep and pure...As a zaddik once said: "I learned Torah from all the limbs of my teacher." This was the zaddik's influence on his true disciples...[emphasis added].

As Buber was quick to point out, however, the influence between zaddik and hasid is mutual.

Here we come to the very foundation of hasidism, on which the life between those who quicken, and those who are quickened, is built up. The quintessence of this life is the relationship between the zaddik and his disciples, which unfolds the interaction between the quickener and the quickened in complete clarity. The teacher helps his disciples find themselves and in hours of desolation the disciples help their teacher find himself again. The teacher kindles the souls of his disciples and they surround him and light his life with the flame he has kindled. The disciple asks, and in his manner of asking unconsciously evokes a reply, which his teacher's spirit would not have produced without the stimulus of the question.

[Selected from Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Early Masters, pp. 4-8.

Bektashi Humanism

Before Feuerbach, There Was al-Shaykh al-Akbar (d. 1240 CE)

Since there are as many cups as drinkers at the Pool which will be found in the abode of the hereafter, and since the water in the cup takes the form of the cup in both shape and color, we know for certain that knowledge of God takes on the measure of your view, your preparedness, and what you are in yourself. No two people will ever come together in a single knowledge of God in all respects, since a single constitution is never found in two different people, nor can there be such a thing. When there are two, there must be that through which the distinction is made, since the entity of each is immutably established. Were this not so, they could not be two. Hence no one ever knows anything of the Real except his own self.

[Quoted in Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989), 342].

Prophetic Feuerbach

"If you wish for a being without any anthropomorphism, without any human additions, be they additions of the intellect, or the heart, or of imagination, then be courageous and consistent enough to give up God altogether, and to appeal only to pure, naked, godless nature as to the last basis of your existence. As long as you admit a difference, so long you incarnate in God your own difference, so long you incorporate your own essence and nature in the universal and primary being; for as you do not have nor know in distinction from human nature any other being than Nature, so, on the other hand, you neither have nor know any other being in distinction from Nature than the human one." --Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion, tr. Alexander Loos, pp. 48-49.

The Essence of Religion

'The essence of religion is the projection of human essence as other. The essence of theology is the "absolutization," the metaphysical hypostatization of this other, as real, or as the only essentially real Being. Imagination plays the role of providing the object of this hypostatization, or of this entification. But imagination, in Feuerbach's view, is not "imaginary." It is the real reflex of real existence--of that existence which constitutes the distinctly human. It is the expression of human needs, human desires, human feelings. What makes this distinctively human is that it is the consciousness of an object of feeling. But this "unhappy" consciousness is the veiled, unconscious or unknowing form of the consciousness of one's own feeling, that is, it is selbstfuhlende Gefuhl. To the extent that one is aware of one's own feelings, in the sense of having feeling itself as an object of feeling, one is a conscious being in the human sense, for this self-conscious feeling has as its object not merely this or that particular feeling, as a form of sensibility or irritability in the organic sense--an itch or a feeling of hunger, whose objects are in fact outward, physiologically particular objects. Rather, this self-conscious feeling has the nature of feeling itself as its object, that is, the species nature of feeling. Such a feeling is given only to human beings who are at the same time the subjects and the objects of the feeling. It is a feeling toward that which is human in another, and thus entails, unknowingly, the species concept of humanity itself. It is feeling toward another who is like oneself, and thus it transcends the particularity of mere sensibility; it has a universal as its object--that is, an essence' Marx W. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1977), 217-218.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.

When our aspirational thoughts return to us with a certain alienated majesty, we celebrate God's arrival. When we empathize with other human beings, we encounter "humanity" as a shared possession. We entitle the former experience "religious," the latter "religious ethics."

Pied Beauty

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

Van Morrison - Beautiful Vision - live 1984

Salt of the Earth

Ottoman era beggar.

Bosnian people.

More Organic Intellectuals

Bektashi dervish.

Anatolian peasant.

Bektashi Devotional Songs

Bektashiyya

A Brief Bektashi Catechism

Eid al-Adha

New Delhi, 2010.

Gülbābā

According to the entry on Gül-bābā in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, First Edition, Gül-bābā was the proper name of "a Bektās̲h̲ī dervish, a native of Marzifūn (Marsiwān in Asia Minor in the wilāyet of Sīwās) [who] took part in several wars waged by the Turks in the reigns of Sulṭāns Meḥemmed II, Bāyazīd II, Selīm I and Sulaimān II and fell during the siege of Buda (Ofen) in a skirmish below the walls of the city on the 29th Rabīʿ II 948 = 21st August 1541 (Pečewī, i. 227). After he had been buried on the spot where he had fallen, Sulaimān II declared him the patron saint of the city."

In the Second Edition of that prestigious publication, Gülbābā has become, instead of an historical individual, "... a Turkish title. It is only on the evidence of Ewliyā Čelebi that Gülbaba would seem to be a personal name, referring to a historical personage. Ewliyā Čelebi remarks (vi, 225) that Gülbaba died at the Ottoman conquest of Buda and that Sultan Süleymān had his corpse laid to rest and commended the fortress of Buda to his protection. Of such an important event no trace is to be found in other sources. It is mentioned neither by Pećewī (the reference to Pećewī given by CI. Huart in EI 1, s.v. Gül-Bābā, is the result of an error), nor by Ḏj̲alāl-zāde, the official historian of the campaign. We have therefore to accept that there was never a person with the name Gülbaba in the time of the Turks, and in particular no historical personage of this name, but that on the other hand there existed at all times one or more Gülbaba in charge of a tekke."

I find this latter explanation more satisfying, even if it means that the moving painting by Eisenhut (1886, above) of the death of Gül-bābā is now the illustration of a mythic tale rather than a depiction of an historical fact.

It also means that this fine statue outside of Gülbābā's turbe in Budapest:

is also a fiction. Such trifles ought not to disturb our sleep anymore than the question, "Who is buried in Gülbābā's tomb?"

What matters is that Gülbābā is the fragrance of the rose when it opens to the sun.

Secondhand Lions - Uncle Hub's speech

Dodecagon

Twelve gates to the city, hallelujah.

Thinking Dervish

We should not be ashamed of recognizing truth and assimilating it from whatever source it may reach us, even though it might come from earlier generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks truth there is nothing of more value than truth itself. It never cheapens or abases him who searches for it, but ennobles and honors him.

--Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (d. 873, CE), On First Philosophy.

Reading Dervish

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

"Ash-Wednesday," from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T S Eliot, © T S Eliot 1963, Faber & Faber Limited.

Sohbet As "Soul Friendship"

Based on a hierarchical relationship (that of Master and disciple), sohbet is a practice of muridiyya that needs to be reconsidered.

The Prophet Muhammad himself had companions--not disciples--but Sufi shaykhs and shaykhahs have chosen late ancient Christian practices for their model. This is an error that has led, over the centuries, to the slow enervation of tasawwuf.

An egalitarian relation of Buberian "I-You," of mirroring friends, of comrades in solidarity, of conversation partners committed to candor and deep discussion long into the night...That should be the model to emulate.

"He liked men near him with a large sense of life..." Not servants or sycophants. Pietists can be their own worst enemies.