Dervish Existentialism

"Existentialism" is an interesting label: few to whom it is applied are willing to accept its mantle.

And for good reason: the popularization of the term in the United States and Europe in the post-World War II era saw it twisted into a version of nihilistic "despairism."

As a corrective, we should define Existentialism responsibly: as a way of thinking about and acting in the world in which "existence precedes essence."

What does this phrase mean? Most directly, it is an assertion of human freedom, responsibility, and creativity. One enters the world (enters human existence) endowed with both the freedom and the responsibility to create a life worth living (i.e., one's essence).

Someone (a philosopher, perhaps) might counter that such an assertion identifies the essence of the human being as free, responsible, and creative; the proponents of the phrase would argue that such terms are empty until enacted existentially, i.e., in the world, in the course of one's life. Existentialism is about action, agency, and embodiment (another way of saying freedom, responsibility, and creativity). Freedom, responsibility, and creativity may be "essential" conditions for existential enactment, but what the Existentialist considers to be of the "essence" is the end product of a life-long process: an autobiograph, the self-composed life.

Philosophers since Plato have been hung up on the idea of "essence"; they wish to privilege an "essential" world of perfection beyond the lived world of imperfect existence. Existentialism denies the truth-value of the Plato to Kant canon of Western metaphysics. It turns Western philosophy on its head, so to speak.

The Dervish travels the road to Falsafa--not Western philosophy. She acknowledges her debts to Hellenism (as do all Faylasufs) which she creatively appropriates for her own purposes. Those purposes are "Existentialist," for they are concerned with self-composition in line with what the Qur'an refers to, enigmatically, as her fitra or "nature." And what is her nature? To be free, responsible, and creative. To invent herself.

Her Deity is a process of continual self-invention (which is to say that her Deity is a living God). Dervish Existentialism is Imitatio Dei as modeled in the Prophetic tradition that she has inherited from Biblical religion with its three central Testaments (Tanakh, Gospel, Qur'an) and ancillary literatures. Dervish Existentialism is the claim of a birthright: to have been born in the divine "image" and, therefore, to be called to a life of divine imagination.

Signposts along the way are, as mentioned, Prophetic example and the so-called ninety-nine most beautiful names of God (which she regularly invokes and upon which she meditates).

Such is the way of the Dervish: Existentialism avant la lettre.