Dervish Praxis

A. "By knowing self, the servant comes to know God inasmuch as He has disclosed Himself to the soul. He knows God in His similarity, but can never know Him in His incomparability. It follows that by worshiping God, the servant is worshiping himself. He worships God as He discloses Himself to the soul, and that is determined and defined by the soul itself. It also follows that one cannot worship anything other than God, since whatever one worships is God's self-disclosure to the soul."

From William Chittick's commentary on Ibn 'Arabi's The Meccan Openings and other writings (Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 342).

B. The Dervish enters every act of worship--indeed, every act of her existence--with an awe-full awareness that whatever-is is a process of self-disclosure; and that every process of self-disclosure is, likewise, an act of self-invention: for whatever-is is in perpetual motion. Stasis is the property of whatever-is-not.

C. The bottom line is that there is no bottom line. There is no bottom at all. All that is solid melts into air. Therefore, modernity is the Dervish's proper milieu. The collapse of the medieval world-view amounted to the surrender of a utopian nostalgia for a time before time, a time that never was. That nostalgia offered assurances of solid ground that the advent of modernity revealed as illusory. The Dervish is, therefore, profoundly disillusioned: a disillusioned "saint".

D. Those who struggle to recreate the lost medieval dream in the modern world have failed to recognize that the era in which they live, i.e., the present, is propitious. But, then, life in the present is always propitious--even as it recedes into the past for a creature (i.e., Dasein) whose temporal orientation is always toward the future. And that is Dervish praxis, the Dervish's "greater jihad": the struggle to step outside of her temporal (future-oriented) trajectory through acts of ek-stasis. For the present is not part of time: it is eternity.

E. In effect, the Dervish must attempt to grasp a handful of water and then, bewildered, learn to laugh, heartily, at the absurdity of it all.

F. Another type of modern throws himself into parodies of the past: he "needs history because it is the storage closet where all the costumes are kept. He notices that none really fits him"--not primitive, not classical, not medieval, not Oriental--"so he keeps trying on more and more," unable to accept the fact that a modern man "can never really look well-dressed," because no social role in modern times can ever be a perfect fit. Nietzsche's own stance towards the perils of modernity is to embrace them all with joy: "We moderns, we half-barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger. The only stimulus that tickles us is the infinite, the immeasurable."

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1988), 22-23.

G. Chinese proverb: A small saint runs up to the mountains, but a great saint lives in the city.