Shabistari's Garden of Mystery

Detach thyself, be hanifi
And from all faiths' fetters free;
So come, like the monk, step up
into religion's abbey.

tr. Leonard Lewisohn, Beyond Faith and Infidelity, 90.

Wm. Blake

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow
chinks of his cavern.

Robert Bly Poetry Reading

Hermann Hesse

When I was in high school, friends told me repeatedly that, if ever there was a book that I should read, it was Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi). I would love it, I was told.

Always a bit skeptical of such endorsements, I waited until my sophomore year in college to read Hesse--but not TGBG. Instead, I read Narcissus and Goldmund. The latter book became such a favorite of mine that I did not read any more Hesse for fear of being disappointed (I will admit: a lousy reason to avoid an author).

Close to four decades later, I have picked up TGBG and, once again, find myself under the master's spell.

Slowly, slowly we muddle our way through this valley of shadows, with eyes fixed to the ground while the sun shines above us and bluebirds tweet and skitter all around...

Debussy: Arabesque I (1888)

The Code of the Dervish

One of the rules of spiritual poverty observed by the faqir is to refrain from blame or criticism of those who are enmeshed in worldly ambition. Instead, the faqir is merciful and charitably disposed towards them and prays for them until they are relieved of the burden of this affliction.

--Javad Nurbakhsh (from Sulami's Tabaqat).

The True Dervish

When Abu Bakr al-Masri was asked to identify the true faqir he replied: "He is the one who neither exercises power nor acquires wealth."

--al-Qushayri's Risalah, p. 278.

Dervish Disaffiliation

Abu 'Ali Daqqaq was asked if the Dervish receives any sort of compensation for his sacrifices in life. He replied: "What people wear, the dervish wears, and he eats what they eat; but in his deepest consciousness (sirr), he is not one of them."

[Javad Nurbakhsh locates this in Qushayri's Risala].

Happy Are You Poor...

"The faqir is one who has no need of God."

--Muzaffer Kermanshahi

Mentioned in Qushayri's Risalah (according to Javad Nurbakhsh).

The dervish renounces this world and the next for truth's sake.

O God grant me the riches of poverty,
For in such largesse lies my power and glory.

--Hafez (attributed)

Affiliation vs. Affinity

As Merriam-Webster reminds us, to affiliate with someone or something typically involves a subordinate relation of "membership."

It also involves a concern with "origins."

An affinity, on the other hand, involves sympathy marked by a community of interest.

In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, we are under continual social pressure to affiliate, i.e., to submerge our individual identities in the larger identity of a group or organization.

In a sane society, we would be encouraged to cultivate sympathies in which mutual interests create community: the voluntary association of the like-minded. Instead, "authentic" identity is acquired by affiliation.

Our affiliations are frequently accidents of history and birth; by contrast, affinities result from conscious decisions made in pursuit of one's passions.

Which of these two presents a more "authentic" identity?

Sufis affiliate; the dervish demonstrates an affinity. "Affinity, not affiliation" would also serve well as an Anarchist motto or slogan.

To choose affinity over affiliation is a form of askesis; askesis is the mark of the dervish and, for the dervish, means to sacrifice as much as possible the inherited benefits of in-group identity (white privilege, for example).

In the Persian of Sa'adi, the dervish is an azad: a free individual. In Ibn Bajjah's Arabic, the dervish is al-mutawahhid or an isolato. In either case, the fine tethers of community are achieved not by coercion but rather by consensual communion.

Identity, then, is nothing less than a gift of the Holy Ghost.

Dervishes and Sufis Distinguished

"...not all dervishes are Sufis. Moreover, the term 'dervish' indicates more the dimension of practice, while 'Sufi' designates more that of theory: the dervish is a Sufi in action, and the Sufi is a dervish in the abstract."

--Julian Baldick, Mystical Islam, NYU Press (1989, 2012), 19.

The "D" Stood for "Dervish"

God and the Holy Ghost

There is no sinning against God, what does God care about sin!
But there is sinning against the Holy Ghost, since the Holy
Ghost is with us
in the flesh, is part of our consciousness.

The Holy Ghost is the deepest part of our own consciousness
wherein we know ourself for what we are
and know our dependence on the creative beyond.

So if we go counter to our own deepest consciousness
naturally we destroy the most essential self in us,
and once done, there is no remedy, no salvation for this,
nonentity is our portion.

Belief

Forever nameless
Forever unknown
Forever unconceived
Forever unrepresented
yet forever felt in the soul.

Absolute Reverence

I feel absolute reverence to nobody and to nothing human,
neither to persons nor things nor ideas, ideals nor religions nor
institutions,
to these things I feel only respect, and a tinge of reverence
when I see the fluttering of pure life in them.

But to something unseen, unknown, creative
from which I feel I am a derivative
I feel absolute reverence. Say no more!

En Masse

Today, society has sanctified
the sin against the Holy Ghost,
and all are encouraged into the sin
so that all may be lost together, en masse, the great word of our
civilization.

Bells

The Mohammedans say that the sound of bells,
especially big ones, is obscene.

That hard clapper striking in a hard mouth
and resounding after with a long hiss of insistence is obscene.

Yet bells call the Christians to God,
especially clapper bells, hard tongues wagging in hard mouths,
metal hitting on metal, to enforce our attention,
and bring us to God.

The soft thudding of drums,
of finger or fist or soft-skinned sticks upon the stretched
membrane of sound,
sends summons in the old hollows of the sun.

And the accumulated splashing of a gong,
where tissue plunges into bronze with wide wild circles of sound
and leaves off,
belongs to the bamboo thicket, and the drake in the air flying past.

And the sound of a blast through the sea-curved core of a shell
when a black priest blows on a conch,
and the dawn cry from a minaret, God is great,
and the calling of an old red Indian high on the pueblo roof
whose voice flies on, calling like a swan
singing between the sun and the marsh,
on and on, like a dark-faced bird singing alone,
singing to the men below, the fellow tribesmen
who go by without pausing, soft-foot, without listening, yet
they hear:
there are other ways of summons, crying: Listen! Listen!
Come near!

--From The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence
Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994,
513-516.

The Dervish Diaries

A Dervish is a man or woman who, in the words of D. H. Lawrence, has "come through." What does this mean? It means to accept, with Lawrence, that "a man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification." Dervishes don't passively inherit their religion, but actively appropriate it from a wide variety of sources and make it conform to the demands of their individual genius.

Moreover, "to come through" means to remain on the margins of established religiosity and yet never cease from knocking on the establishment's bolted door: for the term "dervish/darvish" means, quite literally, one who hangs about the doorways, who knocks, who importunes...

The goal of such impertinence is not to gain admittance to the "in" crowd: for the dervish, perpetual outsider that she is, is always already where she belongs. Her goal is to persuade those who lock themselves inside to open up; to allow their eyes to adjust to daylight; perchance to step outside themselves (lit., to become ecstatic).

To be a dervish is to be willing to play a perpetual waiting game and pay that game's going price--no matter how dear.

O pillars of flame by night, O my young men
spinning and dancing like flamey fire-spouts in the dark
ahead of the multitude!
O ruddy god in our veins, O fiery god in our genitals!
O rippling hard fire of courage, O fusing of hot trust
when the fire reaches us, O my young men!

And the same flame that fills us with life, it will dance and
burn the house down,
all the fittings and elaborate furnishings
and all the people that go with the fittings and the
furnishings,
the upholstered dead that sit in deep arm-chairs.

[from Lawrence's poem, "Spiral Flame"].

The Tangled Webs of Anti-Semitism, Christian Theology, and Islamophobia

The tangled webs of Christian theology and anti-Semitism are considered here.

Left out of consideration in this article is the fact that the same theological anxieties responsible for Christian hatred of Jews may be harnessed to redirect Christian hatred towards Muslims--a re-direction often encouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by Zionist Jews.

"If There Weren't So Many Lies In The World..."

Coming down from the ridge, Lawrence pondered his future. Though his publishers were eager for him to write another novel, he said, he felt he did not want to; he would not do it. "If there weren't so many lies in the world," he said, looking at me earnestly, "I would not write at all."

--Brewster Ghiselin's recollection of a conversation he had with D. H. Lawrence in Bandol, France, 1929.

D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, edited by Edward Nehls, vol. III, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press (1959), 293.

Lawrentian Religion

In a letter dated 3rd December 1907 (when he was but 22 years of age), D. H. Lawrence revealed some of his religious precocity to the Rev. Robert Reid, a local Congregationalist minister and friend of Lawrence's mother:

"Now I do not believe in conversion [as found in Christian teachings] ... I believe that a man is converted when he first hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self. I believe that a man is born first unto himself--for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitude of brothers. Then, it appears to me, a man gradually formulates his religion, be it what it may. A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification. So I contend that true Socialism is religion; that honest, fervent politics are religion; that whatever a man will labour for earnestly and in some measure unselfishly is religion."

"I have now only to state my position with regard to Christianity. At the present moment I do not, cannot believe in the divinity of Jesus. There are only the old doubts in the way, the old questions. I went through the lowest parts of Sneinton to Emily's to dinner when she lived in Nottingham--it had a profound influence on me. 'It cannot be'-- I said to myself 'that a pitiful, omnipotent Christ died nineteen hundred years ago to save these people from this and yet they are here.' Women, with child--so many are in that condition in the slums--bruised, drunk, with breasts half bare. It is not compatible with the idea of an Omnipotent, pitying Divine. And how, too, shall I reconcile it to a belief in a personal God. I cannot be a materialist--but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery--such suffering, such dreadful suffering--and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all? I do not want them to be punished after death--what good then, when it is all irremediably done?...I do not wage any war against Christianity--I do not hate it--but these questions will not be answered, and for the present my religion is the lessening, in some pitiful moiety, the great human discrepancies."

--from The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I: September 1901-May 1913, edited by James T. Boulton, Cambridge University Press (1979), 39-41.

Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

--D. H. Lawrence

On Pilgrimage

My first pilgrimage took place in second or third grade, when I convinced my parents to take me to Gettysburg:

Other civil war battlefields and monuments would follow:

As I grew into adulthood and my tastes became more literary in nature, my choice of pilgrimage sites did likewise.


Edgar Allen Poe house (Philadelphia):

Hartford Accident & Indemnity Company (Wallace Stevens):

Hemingway's Finca (Key West):

The Thomas Wolfe house in Asheville:

Jack London's grave:

Robinson Jeffers's Tor House:

Montaigne's statue (across the street from the Sorbonne):

But these are all ziyarat when compared to the Great Pilgrimage known as hajj:

The Andalusian Moment

An imaginative journey...

Ghazalian Piety

As related by Ibn Tufayl:

If my words have done no more than to shake you in the faith of your fathers, that would have been reason enough to write them. For he who does not doubt does not look; and he who does not look will not see, but must remain in blindness and confusion.

--From Lenn E. Goodman's translation of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, 101.

A Tragic Hero's Prayer

Great God, you have given me strength and intelligence and skill, so that before me demons, lions and elephants, waterless deserts and great rivers like the Nile, are as nothing in my eyes. But enemies are many and the years are few.

--a prayer of Rostam following his third trial in the Shahnameh, tr. Dick Davis.

The Quarrel With Christianity: An Easter Meditation

I developed my basic critique of Christianity by the time I was 20 years old. I have found no compelling reason to abandon or even modify that critique in the three and a half decades that have since elapsed.

The critique is primarily moral and only secondarily historical.

The moral critique is this: a god worthy of my worship ought to be my moral superior. The Christian god--at least as he appears in his Pauline guise--does not appear to me to be my moral superior. Hence, he is not worthy of my worship.

The god who emerges from Paul's letters as preserved in the New Testament is a god who becomes angry at his creation (humanity) for exercising its god-given free will (or, ethically more problematic, for acting out its divinely pre-determined destiny) in ways that offend him. Rather than attempt to rectify the situation, Paul's god simply retaliates by demanding that he be appeased by blood sacrifice--human blood sacrifice.

Now, Paul was trained as a Pharisee and, as his writings amply attest, he was a creative interpreter of his scriptural inheritance. Nevertheless, the lesson that he might have drawn from the story of Abraham on Mt. Moriah--that god does not really desire human sacrifice--was not one that the Apostle to the Gentiles appears to have entertained. On the contrary, in order to make sense of the death of the man he had become convinced was the Jewish Messiah, Jesus the Nazarene, Paul avidly embraced the notion that would later become known in Christian theology as the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.

That doctrine makes explicit another ethically problematic assumption that is implicit in Paul's embrace of the divine demand for human sacrifice: the assumption that god will allow the innocent to be punished for the sins of the guilty. Wouldn't a "just" god demand that the guilty be punished for their own misdeeds and the innocent be rewarded (or at least permitted to go unpunished) for their righteousness?

The ethical problem here is best illustrated by an analogy. Let us say that a murder is committed, a suspect is arrested, evidence is gathered, a trial held and, as a consequence, the suspect is convicted and sentenced to death. Subsequent to the convict's execution, new evidence comes to light that completely exonerates him or her and points the finger of blame towards another individual. In our own (admittedly fallible human) system of justice, we would have the new suspect arrested and tried on the newly acquired evidence. But according to the (supposedly infallible divine) system of the Pauline god's justice, the execution of the innocent convict atones for the actions of the guilty individual and there the matter ends.

Well, not quite. Paul is adamant about the resurrection of Christ and, I suspect, his insistence upon the historicity of this "event" is due, in part, to his unacknowledged recognition of the moral quandary involved. For it seems that, in Paul's mind, Christ's resurrection somehow rectifies his god's willingness to allow the guilty to go unpunished so long as there is an innocent victim that may be punished in their place.

I fail to see the moral logic. How does a "happy ending" for the innocent victim erase the injustice of that innocent victim's previous suffering? If atonement is the point of this system of justice, who will atone for that? Perhaps it will be argued that god atones for this injustice through his own "suffering." This argument creates far more problems than it solves. For example, how does god suffer? And who, we have to wonder, saddled this (allegedly) omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly just and merciful deity with such a convoluted (not to mention bizarre) system of justice? When working out a scheme of atonement, this is what he came up with? There is plenty of job security in these questions for professional theodicians, but little comfort for those who are honestly vexed by the ethical issues they raise.

Understood most charitably, Christian soteriology represents a lapse in moral judgment--analogous to the one exhibited by those who convince themselves that god's 11th hour substitution of the ram on Mt. Moriah somehow clears the deity (and/or Abraham) of the attempted murder of Abraham's son. The Qur'an, by the way, modifies the tale as it appears in Genesis: Abraham (Ibrahim) fully discloses to his son his plan to offer him as a sacrifice and his son, in turn, fully consents to the plan. This may represent an ethical improvement over the Biblical version, but the question of the god's desire for a human sacrifice remains unresolved.

When Kierkegaard struggled with this problem in the 19th century, he found that the only way to adequately address the moral issue was to theorize what he called the "teleological suspension of the ethical." This phrase, however, is simply a dodge: S.K. recognized that there was no way out of the moral problem that the story presents so he argued that there was a "higher" objective to consider. While we may be willing to accept the possibility of a "higher" objective, it strikes me as singularly dishonest (or impatient or lazy) to suggest that we are somehow entitled to ignore the moral issue since we have failed to resolve it. That is no way to "address" the issue; rather it is a way to avoid addressing it.

At age 20 I concluded that the genuine moral value of this tale (like the moral value of the story of Christ's crucifixion) is that it activates and intensifies our sense of justice (our conscience, if you will) and calls upon us, first, to candidly acknowledge the ethical problems involved and, second, to recognize that Paul's god must answer for them. It was then that I moved beyond Christianity into the vortex of adulthood and the way of the pilgrim and the stranger...

As for Paul himself, he remains, for me, a fascinating figure in his own right. Those who are interested in exploring him further should read Alan Segal's Paul The Convert.

Segal's 1992 book offers a compelling historical reading of Paul as a Pharisee who spent much of his formative years in the Jesus movement among Gentiles and, as a consequence, became convinced that the Christ event ushered in a new "antinomian" dispensation as the end of the world approached. On the surface, there does not appear to be anything new here. However, the book is filled with a wealth of information about the Jewishness of Jesus and his inner circle (including family members) and the contrast with Paul's alternative "Gentile dispensation" is made to stand out in bold relief. Segal tries to explain the Pauline difference by reference to recent theories of religious conversion. Paul was a Pharisee who was "converted" to a Gentile lifestyle (radical in itself) in an effort to create a new kind of community in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile. He latches on to something that was, at best, an exception in the teachings of Jesus (who "was sent for the lost sheep of Israel") and struggled to make it the center of the movement. The book is not just about Paul but about the beginnings of the Jesus movement in its late antique context--i.e., an intramural argument among Second Temple Jewish sectarians that turned into a world religion at the expense of its Jewishness. It is a tour de force.

Jesus and his brother James:

A Postscript to the Enlightenment

In his 1973 book on non-party Communist sympathizers (The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment), David Caute wrote:

"...we can understand fellow-travelling only in terms of a disillusionment. The societies which nailed 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' to their mastheads failed to live up to these ideals: the once-progressive doctrine of laissez-faire and enlightened self-interest resulted in poverty, unemployment and inexcusable inequalities of wealth and opportunity. Freedom came to mean exploitation, treating the worker as a wealth-producing object. Nations which valued liberty at home trampled colonial peoples underfoot. Capitalists and the politicians who served their interests did not scruple to embark on vast, decimating wars. Education, knowledge and culture remained minority privileges while art, appalled by its environment, turned its back on life. In short, the great promises of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were not realized. By the time the swastika rose over Germany, the theory of progress-by-evolution was already in ruins." (5-6).

This begs the question, of course, of why fellow-traveling at all? Why not wholehearted Communist party membership and revolutionary zeal?

There are a variety of answers to this question, although the one that appeals most to the Mazeppist is Nietzsche's observation from Human, All Too Human: "He who thinks much is not suited to be a party member: too soon, he thinks himself through and beyond the party."

Fellow-traveling is, in a sense, the thinking person's "consolation prize." More positively put, however, it is his lot as an integral human being, i.e., one who understands, with Kierkegaard, that "many fools do not make a wise man, and the crowd is doubtful recommendation for a cause" (Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing).

Fellow-traveling in politics and in religion is an Enlightenment postscript in more ways than Caute imagined.

Tchaikovsky : Violin Concerto in D major op.35

The marvelous violinist playing Tchaikovsky is Japanese.

Only a generation or two ago, the U.S. military stepped up its production of the A-Bomb in order to demonstrate our power to the world: and we nuked Japan before it could negotiate a surrender.

A generation before that, Japan was at war with Tchaikovsky's Russia.

The good, true, and beautiful rise up and push back, whenever and wherever they can.