The Sufi Book of Life Page 2

  Does Sufism, derived from Koran and Mohammedan tradition, go against the sayings of the Book and the Prophet? The answer is yes and no. Insofar as Sufism strips the dogma from the religion and goes to its heart, insofar as it insists on the reality beyond the ritual, the thing behind the symbol, Sufism is at once Islam par excellence and distinctly apart from it.2

  Inayat Khan had this to say:

  [A]ccording to the sacred history which the Sufis have inherited from one another, it is clear that Sufism has never been owned by any race or religion, for differences and distinctions are the very delusions from which Sufis purify themselves. It might appear that Sufism must have been formed of the different elements of various religions which are prominent today, but it is not so, for Sufism itself is the essence of all the religions as well as the spirit of Islam.3

  There is no doubt that Sufism and Islam have an intimate relationship. What people disagree about is how one defines the words sufism and islam. Literally, the word islam means “surrender” to the one Ground of Reality, not to some thought-form or dogma. The word sufism derives from a word that simply means “wisdom,” and the Qur’an itself advocates “seeking wisdom, even as far as China.” Historically, Sufis have not adhered to any one school of Quranic interpretation or jurisprudence, and this has made the fundamentalists of all ages very nervous, even up to the present day, when some Islamic countries outlaw the practice of Sufism.

  Whether this is reassuring or disturbing will depend upon your point of view. Does the history matter? To some it will, and to some it will not. It depends upon, in the words of the modern American Sufi Samuel Lewis, whether you want to allow your concepts to get in the way of the solution to your problems. And the main “problem” for most of us is the purpose of life itself.

  Purpose and Organization of This Book

  This book proposes to take the reader into the living experience of Sufism. It follows a genre that is hundreds of years old, called a “dervish handbook,” a companion to life’s experience. In one sense, this book presents a series of short essays or contemplations, illustrated by Sufi stories and poetry. Each chapter includes meditations and suggestions for further pathways to explore. In a deeper sense, it illustrates a way of approaching life in order to discover fully who we are, as completely human beings.

  As you might guess, the Sufi training is not like going through classes in a school. Although some classical Sufis proposed that seekers progress through certain stages, made up of expanded states of awareness (ahwal), which then settle into the more stable ways of living everyday life (maqamat), life doesn’t organize itself in a linear way. So, all attempts to organize Sufi teachings in this way are inherently artificial, or at least up for revision every generation.

  This book conveys the most essential practice shared by Sufis of all historical streams—the meditation on the heart qualities of the sacred (called al Asma ul Husna, or “the most beautiful names”). In this book, I am translating the same word (asma) as “pathways” in addition to “qualities” or “names” in order to emphasize the dynamic experience of the practice. I have not yet encountered a Sufi tradition, group, or order that does not use these practices. Any of these pathways of the heart can lead you to experience life with deeper feeling and more insight if you approach the practice at the right time. You need only one pathway, if you relentlessly follow it to its source.

  In the Sufi tradition, as we move toward becoming fully human, we revive an inner ecology and diversity of spirit. We feel and understand more in life because we can recognize it as a part of our own soul. Both freedom and joy come with being at home in the heart, a heart that we gradually discover to be much wider than we thought. The various pathways may seem to contradict each other (just like life). They are not neatly organized and proportional (just like life). They do work, at least in my experience.

  One of the first renditions of these practices in English was Edwin Arnold’s Pearls of the Faith, published in 1882. Arnold’s book took the form of a small volume of Victorian poetry, a format that cultivated English-speaking people of his time could assimilate. We now live in a much different era, one of the Internet and mass media, and a Sufi must be adaptable, if nothing else. On its surface, this book appears to fit into the “how-to,” self-improvement genre, a format that mirrors Western culture’s desire to receive things quickly and easily. We might bemoan this tendency as counterproductive to a spiritual life: What is easy is not necessarily better, and responding quickly often does not leave much time for reflection or feeling. Most self-help books want only to reconfirm what we already know. They aim for an “uh-huh,” not an “aha!” I would call this self-hypnosis rather than self-help.

  This book attempts to subvert the simplistic side of the self-help genre by building in various Sufi features, including randomness, paradox, and spiritual practice. As noted in the Quick-Start Guide, one can use this book as an oracle or search within it to find appropriate wisdom for the moment. What the reader finds under these circumstances may be surprising or even disturbing. Hopefully, it will be illuminating.

  Viewed through the lens of Sufism, the self-help genre may be perfectly appropriate. For most of its history, Sufism has operated as a kind of do-it-yourself tradition. We have no overall leader, potentate, or pope (which is not to say that some people haven’t tried to establish themselves, or someone else, as one). The Sufi guide is more a cross between a companion, therapist, and trickster than an almighty guru, and Rumi once said that ultimately the real pir (senior spiritual director) is Love itself.

  Updated for the twenty-first century, the pathways of the heart function very much like a search engine to the Internet of life, with our heart acting as the browser through which we view the world, inside and out.

  Some Words About the Words

  In order to cultivate the proper reverence for the divine, most previous books and lists have translated the Arabic names or qualities in the pathways using only the language of transcendence. These translations can encourage us to see the qualities of the One as always outside of us, which suggests that we need to ingest them, like vitamins. Devotion is an important fuel for the path, but mandatory reverence is not. We have a very different relationship to “religion” today than did our ancestors, who mostly lived in societies where behavior was dictated from above. When we use only the language of transcendence, we receive the impression that these practices are magic formulas by which we can compel the divine to fulfill our wishes. Such language, whatever its intent, encourages us to see prayer and spiritual practice as a type of bargaining. The modern Sufi M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen comments on this tendency:

  For what purpose are we supposed to recite these names? For what purpose do they tell us to shout in the supermarket? It is to buy the market produce that we desire in our minds. . .

  You may recite His names 1000 times for this, 7000 times for that, and 8000 times for the other, but even if you recite it 50,000 times you will not receive anything. Why? Because God has already given everything to you. You have only to open that treasury within your qalbs (hearts) and take out what has already been given.4

  The classical Sufi tradition contains a very strong emphasis on the divine unity of all life (called tawhid). In this view, shared by Rumi, Ibn Arabi, and many others (and justified by a reading of the Qur’an itself), the whole creation came into existence to express the unlimited, sacred qualities through all beings. In particular, God created the human being as a mirror capable of holding and expressing the totality of the divine reflection, including the whole consciousness of nature and the universe. This is what, in the Sufi view, being fully human means. In this sense, as Bawa Muhaiyaddeen notes, we already have all the pathways of the heart within us.

  Despite the emphasis on the unity of being, devotional practice, phrased in an I-Thou manner, is essential on the Sufi path. It teaches us to let go of our own limiting concepts and helps us open our hearts to a wider dimension of feeling. Similarly, modern
12-step programs propose that we do not really feel the impetus to change until life becomes unmanageable, and we decide to let go and try another way.

  This development of devotion in what the Sufis call the path of effacement ( fana) presents, however, only one side of the story. We also find a parallel development in the evolution of the self, or nafs. The latter word is often mistranslated in versions of Sufi poetry as the “animal self.” We can best see the nafs (a term consistent with the old Hebrew nephesh and Jesus’ Aramaic naphsha) as a fluid soul-self. This includes what modern psychology calls the “subconscious.” Really, the nafs is more a way of looking at the whole self from a subconscious viewpoint rather than as a separate self inside a self (like Russian matrushka dolls). From this view, we have within us an inner community of evolving voices, some of which contradict each other. Similarly, some modern psychologies work with a male and female inner self, or an inner judge or child. Sufi psychology expands this inner community to include a whole ecosystem, including non-human voices such as plants and animals. These “basic selves” are here to be transformed, to realize their unity of “one to the One.”

  In my experience, the practices of the pathways of the heart, when approached with devotion, can radically transform one’s subconscious reality. This new translation therefore approaches these pathways as though they are all already within us, waiting to be recognized and reunited in the circle of the heart’s unity with the divine Beloved.

  Personal Background

  I grew up in a multicultural American family, hearing German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and English. Perhaps this made it easier for me to work with foreign languages later. In addition, even though my brothers and I were raised outwardly as protestant Christians, my parents were both interested in spirituality, ecology, and holistic healing. When I went on my own spiritual search in my twenties, I felt I needed to find something that would include everything I had already experienced and allow me to continue to explore the depth of my being. Because Sufism honored all the prophets and messengers who had preceded Muhammad, I found that I could include my deep love for Jesus in my own developing spiritual practice.

  I have had the benefit of studying or receiving teaching from a number of Sufis, East and West, over the past thirty years, including Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, Pir Hidayat Inayat Khan, Pir Shabda Kahn, Murshida Fatima Lassar, Murshid Wali Ali Meyer, Murshida Vera Corda, the Rev. Frida Waterhouse, the Rev. Joe and Guin Miller, Irina Tweedie, Sheikh Suleiman Dede of Konya, Sheikh Muzaffer Ashki al-Jerrahi, Pir Sufi Barkat Ali, Shah Nazar Seyed Ali Kianfar, Nahid Angha, and others.

  My primary teacher was Hazrat Pir Moineddin Jablonski, the spiritual successor of Hazrat Murshid Sufi Ahmed Murad Chishti (Samuel L. Lewis, d. 1971), who was himself a student of Hazrat Inayat Khan (d. 1927). My teacher exemplified a complete approach to spiritual practice in his work with students. He realized that an unbalanced emphasis on transcendence in spiritual practice delays spiritual growth. He built upon the work of another of his teachers, Frida Waterhouse, and developed what he called “Soulwork,” a new way to do psychospiritual counseling based on the ancient path of Sufism.

  Although I have written a number of other books on Middle Eastern spirituality and an Aramaic approach to the words of Jesus over the past fifteen years, I didn’t feel that it was appropriate to write a book on Sufism while my own teacher was still around in the body. When Moineddin left his body behind in 2001, my inner life shifted. He had encouraged me in all my translation work, and when he left it seemed time to reap the harvest of the work I had done on the pathways of the heart since 1976. Through his friendship, counseling, and wisdom, Moineddin showed me a way to live an ordinary human life, unaffected by the world of “hype” that today surrounds even spirituality and spiritual teachers. In many ways, he saved my life, and I have dedicated this book to him.

  The translation work in this book is also inspired by Hazrat Haji Shemsuddin Ahmed, my Pakistani Qur’an teacher, who passed away about twenty years ago. A friend of Samuel Lewis’s, Shemsuddin taught traditional methods of interpreting and translating the Qur’an on various levels of meaning. Because Semitic languages such as Arabic use a root-and-pattern system, one can literally—that is, by the letters—translate various words in a number of different ways. In addition, through these roots, sacred words like those in the pathways of the heart show their affinity to each other through families of meaning.

  So this type of translation is not simply a matter of looking a word up in a dictionary. It is both sacred science and art. The translations here result from three decades of practice, and more than fifteen years of conscious work, in which the author has experienced all the pathways many times and worked to refine translations from the roots. The main difference between these translations and previous ones is that they presume that the names describe living spiritual experiences rather than simply metaphysical categories of a thought-form called “God.”

  Past translations have also used exclusively masculine language, which the Arabic original does not justify. For instance, even though the Arabic word Allah is usually gendered masculine, both the words sifat (referring to each divine quality of the One) and dhat (the divine essence, a sort of homeopathic combination of all possible qualities) receive the feminine gender. A number of classical Sufi writers have commented on this gender play in the Arabic of the Qur’an, which is virtually impossible to translate, given that English tends to make qualities and concepts grammatically neuter and only gender “persons.”

  All translations of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, or Aramaic into English are by nature limited. Likewise, no one translation in any other language can hold all of the meaning of the pathways of the heart in Arabic. These translations are also limited by my own experience. They do offer the benefit of being internally consistent (the same roots are translated in the same way) and linguistically sound (different Arabic words are not translated in using the same English word, as they are in some previous translations).

  When you use this book with an attitude of devotion, you benefit from a very strong line of transmission for these practices. In many of these sacred names, we see forms of phrases used for thousands of years in the Middle East, including by the Hebrew Prophets and Jesus. According to one scholar, early Middle Eastern Christians used as a similar practice 130 different names or attributes of Jesus in Syriac Aramaic, a language related to Arabic.

  Normally, lists of the pathways of the heart are limited to ninety-nine qualities. Because the Qur’an contains more than ninety-nine such qualities of names of the One, different lists vary. This collection uses one of the most common lists as a basis. In addition, I have added chapters for the Arabic name of unity itself (Allah) and for the traditional phrase with which one begins an endeavor (bismillah). By one tradition, the names of Reality are countless, but starting with ninety-nine different ways of knowing yourself makes for a good beginning.

  Do I Need a Teacher?

  This book intends to serve as both a handbook for those on the path and a way to begin for those who are not. The effects of a spiritual practice vary according to whether it is intoned, spoken, sung, chanted, or breathed; whether it is done sitting, standing, walking, or lying; with a definite rhythm or tempo or without. The best way to do a spiritual practice is the way in which one’s spiritual guide has given it, and in no way is this book meant to be a substitute for seeking such personal guidance. The relationship with a teacher and the blessing (or baraka) created by two people in a spiritual relationship remain the most active forces on the Sufi path. In the form in which we have them, the direct transmission of the Arabic sacred names that appear in the Qur’an is through the Prophet Muhammad. This provides both a blessing and a protection, and some Sufis believe that one can directly receive a transmission from a teacher whom one has never met in the flesh.

  Many different Sufi teachers and groups now reside in the West. In one appendix, I have listed brief biographies of all the Sufi
s mentioned in the book. In another, I have detailed some of the Sufi groups, with which I am personally familiar, that carry on the transmission of these teachers today. In addition, the bibliography mentions a few of the many books on the various viewpoints on the background of Sufism. If this book is your first exposure to Sufi practice and you find some affinity with it, I would recommend going further. If you are already a practitioner, haven’t been put off by what I have said so far, and want to renew your practice, you are welcome—marhaba! If you come with an eye to criticize, you will no doubt find many deficiencies, all of which are due to my own limitations, and not those of my teachers.

  How does one go about looking for a teacher? First, do not imagine that a Sufi teacher will “fix” all your problems. A Sufi teacher does not operate the same way that a psychotherapist would (although many teachers today are also trained in some form of Western therapy). Rumi illustrates the way of the Sufi teacher in the following story: