War-in-War against the Sufis

Within the long war between the Sunni and the Shi'a branches of the Islamic world, there is an ongoing war against the Sufi interpretation. The massacre that took place in the Sinai last week, more than 300 worshipers gunned down in a mosque, was a Sunni attack against the Sunni (Sufi) people. The Shi'a, in their own sphere, also exterminate the Sufis and destroy their mosques and shrines.


In Lybia, the rebels bulldozed the shrine of al-Shaab al-Dahmani, a revered Sufi sage. In Mali, they demolished mausoleums and libraries in the ancient Saharan town of Timbuktu which were UNESCO world heritage sites. Sufi worship halls have also been turned to rubble in Iran, where the Islamic government is has jailed thousands of Sufi followers. In Egypt, Sufi shrines have been torched and the Sufi chanting ritual called zhikr has been banned.

The Sufis are targets of the fundamentalist Islam that sees their kinder, gentler interpretation of the religion of Mohamed as a challenge to their own rigid orthodoxy. Sufi practices, like the whirling of the Mevlevi dervishes in Turkey, first practiced by Rumi himself, employ music, dance and spiritual recitation to awaken the God who Sufis say is asleep in the human heart. The poems of Rumi in translation are well known and loved in the West. What is unknown is the the bloody persecution of his followers in our days of resurgent, hardened, fanatic Islam.

I think that the pacifist, inner-orientated, purification-seeking philosophy of the Sufi is doomed. The stiffening of the Islam will lead toward its unification and toward a new round of clashes against the Christian world. The contact with this hardened Islam has already induced a hardening of Israeli Judaism, and in the long term, I presume, it will cause the resurgence of a hardened Christianity in the West.

(On the other hand, I always have another hand, the hardening of Israeli Judaism may have internal causes; and the hardening of Western Christianity may never happen.)