Too Late For The Gods

We are too late for the gods
And too early for Being.
Being's poem, just begun, is man.

--Martin Heidegger

The Thoroughly Modern Dervish

To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts. We might even say that to be fully modern is to be anti-modern: from Marx's and Dostoevsky's time to our own, it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world's potentialities without loathing and fighting against some of its most palpable realities. No wonder then that, as the great modernist and anti-modernist Kierkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony.

--Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, pp. 13-14.

It is not the privilege of the Dervish to conduct her life as one would in the Middle Ages. Instead, she must rise to the Heideggerian challenge "to be conditioned by [the modern] world, and then [learn] to 'keep the fourfold in things' by building and nurturing things peculiarly suited to [her] fourfold" (Mark Wrathall, How To Read Heidegger, 117). How is this accomplished? First, by attending to one's own peculiar context, discovering its dynamic and ever-evolving "essence," and then discerning how best to dwell there. Wrathall remarks (quoting Heidegger):

"We dwell 'in saving the earth, in receiving the sky, in awaiting the divinities, in accompanying mortals'" (ibid., 113).

Are these but mysterious and high-sounding platitudes, impossible to fulfill? Or is there something to this Heideggerian gospel? Who can even essay an answer to such questions?

The thoroughly modern Dervish, I suppose...

The House, the Garden, and the Dervish Within

The house...

The garden...

and the Dervish within...

Dervish Authenticity

"Die before you die." --Prophet Muhammad

"The possibility of death...shows my world as the kind of place in which no way of being will be ultimately successful, no way of being will allow me to continue being who I am. This recognition, Heidegger believes, should shatter our reliance on cultural norms and practices, which purport to give us the right way to live. Coming to terms with death, then, allows us to take responsibility for ourselves...In anticipating death, I take responsibility for myself. I become authentic, my own person, meaning that I accept that my decisions are not required or essential, because there is no right way to be a human being. As a consequence of my anxiety in the face of death, I am set free to live my life as my own rather than doing things merely because others expect me to do them...Because it makes it possible to be authentic, Heidegger believes that death is not in and of itself to be resented and avoided. Indeed, far from interfering with life, anxiety in the face of death brings 'an unshakable joy' (Being and Time, p. 358). After all, the fact that our lives will end only gives that much more weight and significance to the particular choices that we make in life."

--Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger, 69-70.

Pir with patchwork cloak

Dervish Aesthetics

Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work [of art] is the instigation of the strife in which the unconcealment of beings as a whole, or truth, is won.

--Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art

Given such a definition, the question arises: to what does Dervish aesthetics not apply? The answer: Nothing.

The Dervish endeavors to be an artist of life: her masterpiece, the self.

Building Dwelling Thinking

Heidegger's hut:

Wittgenstein's house in Norway:

Montaigne's tower:

Interior of Women's Dervish Lodge, Kutahya, Turkey:

Mazeppist Dasein

To be perfectly candid, Mazeppism began in jest.

Part Irish:

Part Dervish:

Pantagruelist:

Philologist:

But, as the saying goes, if the peasant boots fit:

Wear 'em.

Dervish Denken

Martin Heidegger is the great master of astonishment, the man whose amazement before the blank fact that we are instead of not being, has put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious. His is the thought which makes even momentary condescension toward the fact of existence unforgivable. In the forest clearing to which his circular paths lead, though they do not reach it, Heidegger has postulated the unity of thought and of poetry, of thought, of poetry, and of that highest act of mortal pride and celebration which is to give thanks.

There are meaner metaphors to live by.

--George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (1989), 158.

Dervish Scripture

Dervish scripture favors epic as the epical itinerary traces the Dervish tariqa. The prototypical Dervish epic is Gilgamesh, with Enkidu performing the role of the liminal Dervish figure who lives close to the wild and serves as a reminder of the utter contingency of settled, "civilized" existence.

The Science of Dervish Geography

I to the hills lift up mine eyes/from whence shall come mine aid.
--Bay Psalm Book, 121.


The great precursor of Dervish geography was none other than the founding figure of civilizational studies, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406 CE). In a manner similar to (but with greater sophistication than) Ibn Khaldun, Dervish geography explores the subtle interrelationships that subsist between the earth's terrain and human ways of being-in-the-world.

Dervishes recognize these subtle interrelationships because they experience ("taste") them: believing themselves to be cutting a path (tariqa) through this world, they locate their position on this path by reference to various "stations" (maqaamat). In turn, they observe how the shaped qualities of space (both natural and humanly manipulated) appear to mimic (or even induce) the Dervishes's own "inner" or subjective experiences (ahwal) at each station.

Adepts of bewilderment (itself a station), Dervishes naturally gravitate towards wilderness spaces; the relative impoverishment of mountainous locales, for instance, appeal to them: they feel at home in hardscrabble environments.

A topographical map of the world (such as the one above) reveals how hospitable this planet is to supporting Dervish Lebensformen. Their relative marginalization in urban contexts corresponds to their relative absence from elite literary memory; the latter phenomenon creates a false impression of demographic under-representation or even absence. But the Dervish-type (think Max Weber) has long been (and continues to be) present through time and across human cultures. In North America, for instance, expect to find Dervishes in mountainous regions (here):

Or here:

And expect them to appear like this:

Rather than this:

The science of Dervish geography protects us from being misled by appearances.

Dervish Spirituality

The mute ecstasy of the everyday.

The Dervish Life

Sung to the tune of "The Christian Life" by the Louvin Brothers.

My buddies tell me that I should've waited
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun
But I still love them and I sing with pride
I like the Dervish life

I won't lose a friend by heeding God's call
For what is a friend who'd want you to fall

Others find pleasure in things I despise
I like the Dervish life

My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun
I live without them and walk in the light
I like the Dervish life

I won't lose a friend by heeding God's call
For what is a friend who'd want you to fall
Others find pleasure in things I despise

I like the Dervish life
I like the Dervish life

"In A World of Universal Poverty..."

Everything other than God is an image, so nothing whatsoever can be known in and of itself. The selfness of each thing is precisely the fact that it is an image of something else. Moreover, God cannot be known in himself, because none knows God but God, and no image of God can ever coincide with God in every respect. This means that, in the last analysis, nothing can truly be known. Only the image can be known--not in itself, but as image, as in-between, as a sign in the soul pointing to the divine names. Ibn 'Arabi makes the point in an often-quoted verse:

I have not perceived the reality of anything--
How can I perceive a thing in which You are? (D. 96)

Ibn 'Arabi's approach ends up in an admission of utter ignorance in face of the Real. This is why he often tells us that the ultimate, final knowledge is the knowledge of unknowingness, or what he likes to call hayra, "bewilderment" or "perplexity."

--William C. Chittick, Ibn 'Arabi: Heir to the Prophets, 110.

Welcome home, ibnu'l-barzakh!

Liminal Personae

Dervish Falsafa

Dervish falsafa is primarily ethical and concerns itself with how one ought to understand the human condition and relate to it. It is, therefore, a humanistic philosophy that is heir to the Hellenistic wisdom traditions which took root in the Eastern Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and throughout the Persianate cultural sphere in Late Antiquity. Its own roots, however, go further back in time to the early speculations on the nature of human life that found poetic expression in the Gilgamesh epic, Biblical literature, and the songs of Zarathustra (to name but a few examples). By the year one thousand of the Common Era, Dervish falsafa was widespread throughout Islamicate societies; it even penetrated elite circles (surreptitiously) and provided the critical "undersong" to Ferdowsi's epic Book of Kings.

Technically speaking, Dervish falsafa is a mode of philology--that is, it attempts to articulate logos in its many manifestations. Two main categories of Dervish "logology" are the Heraklitean and Ayoubian.

Heraklitus of Ephesus (Asia Minor, ca. 500 BCE) theorized what today we might term a "zero-sum" regulatory principle for the universe (a "law of nature") that he named logos. Analogous to Sir Isaac Newton's third law of motion (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) or Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of "compensation," Heraklitus posited a universe kept in balance by "a harmony of opposed tensions as in the bow and the lyre" (DK22B51). From the Heraklitean macrocosmic perspective, the universe is fundamentally "just" in the sense that, in the final analysis, the effect of the logos is a kind of cancelling out of all events. In another fragment he averred, "The way up and the way down are the same." As Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested, conclusions of this sort yield an ethical indifference (as we find, for example, in Krishna's advice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita). Emerson, schooled as he was in Biblical traditions, could not abide such a conclusion, and neither can the Dervish faylasufs. So, while they accept the Heraklitean macrocosmos, they turn to another tradition to supply the microcosmic dimension of lived experience: the Ayoubian (Jobian).

The anonymous author (or, more properly, playwright) of the Book of Job created a character (regarded in the Islamic tradition as a prophetic figure) who represents the proper comportment of the Dervish in the face of the tragic circumstances that often attend life on earth. Under such conditions, the Dervish emerges as one who bridles at the injustice on the microcosmic level of the "justice" meted out by the logos principle on the macrocosmic level. Job's assertion of the righteousness of his ways in the face of suffering and of his calling on God to account for that suffering provides Dervish falsafa with the mythological touchstone characteristic of what Hellmut Ritter named the "Muslim mystics' strife with God." The assertion of individual integrity and dignity in Dervish discourse and practice distinguishes it from its counterpart in traditional Muslim ethics: a resigned acceptance to one's fate. Of course, in the end, Dervishes, too, must acquiesce to the brute facts of mortal existence--and every Dervish understands and accepts these facts. But by refusing to "go quietly," they strike a blow--however Quixotic it may appear from a macrocosmic perspective--for anarchistic individuality and the sacrality of every living soul.

Dervish Piety

The religious history of Islam knows...special cases, in which...quarreling with God is not altogether prohibited, but permitted to a certain degree. It is permitted to the friends of God, who are on especially intimate terms with Him. Their intimacy with God is so well-founded and secure that it cannot be disturbed by occasional audacities, such as reproaches and lovers' disputes, which sometimes occur between lovers but do not disturb their friendly relations. Besides this class of God's friends, there is, however, another category of people who benefit by a special privilege when speaking to God more audaciously than other people. These are the sainted or religious fools, diwanegan, for whom Attar seems to have a peculiar predilection.

--Helmutt Ritter, "Muslim Mystics Strife With God."

Dervish Theodicy

In a mathnawi of Farid-ud-Din Attar, someone asks a "diwane" (a fool for God) what God is really up to. The fool responds: "Have you seen the slate of the schoolboys? Like these boys, God now writes something new on the slate, then wipes out what He has written. With this and nothing else He is busy all the time. He has no other occupation than producing and annihilating." Another fool, asked the same question, gave a similar answer: "God is a potter, who first makes fine pottery with great skill in order to smash the pots to pieces afterwards."

[Adapted from Hellmut Ritter, "Muslim Mystics Strife With God"].