Found this yesterday when searching for his recording “I Am the Greatest” on youtube rather than dig out the 45. It is a movingly beautiful recording.
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I heard that too.
It’s a fascinating thing to study, Sufism, with significant populations of followers in Sudan, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Mauritania. It holds my attention in a way that Salafism never can.
If you have not already heard of Idries Shah, he’s got a lovely collection of wonderful contrarian Nasrudin stories to rival anything Kipling et al. have written. Crazy wisdom indeed.
Among the many flavors of Islam, Sufism is the one that gives me the most hope for women taking their place in Muslim societies as equals, with much wisdom and insight to offer as any awake human can.
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Don’t forget in Albania, too and Turkey… Sufi orders are pretty much everywhere you can find Islam:
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I’m down to my last few likes, but your comment definitely deserved the loss of one!
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Yeah Sufis are kinda everywhere. Egypt. India. Pakistan. Iraq. Israel and Palestine. Four branches in Yemen, Sufis are in Iran and Syria even—places where they are actively persecuted, as one can well imagine.
My hopes go with the Sufis, who may yet balance out the Wahabis and Salafis of the world.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/01/islam-sufism-salafism-ties-extremism-reform.html
My gratitude goes to the Sufis, who introduced coffee to us:
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There’s also Ahmadiyya, which is also opposed to the Wahabis and Salafis. They’re not as big a group as the Sufis though.
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Wow, fascinating. Had never heard until now.
Thank you for teaching me something new.
(from that wiki link)
… Aside from the belief in all prophets in the Quran and the Old Testament, the Community also regards Zoroaster, Krishna, Buddha, Confucius as prophets…
I sure hope they are able to find a middle way and avoid getting stomped on in places where intolerance and zealots are making it hard for pluralism to exist.
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I’ve read his book The Sufis, which I heartily recommend. I was actually thinking of Shah when I started my post, but I decided it would be more amusing to present Trump as defending Islam rather than claiming, as Shah did, that Sufism transcended Islam. (Interestingly, this view of Sufism also crops up in Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series.)
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Maybe somebody posted this already.
Gives me goosebumps every time
Oh really? Cool. I confess to never having read any of this series, and it may be time now to check my library’s catalog for it. Thanks for this.
There is of course Frank Herbert’s Dune series, which has a synthesized “Zen-Sunni” (as the author wrote it) religion in it, but it’s gotten such a makeover that mostly what I recognize are terms and words more than the actual practices.
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It’s been quite a while since I read the Riverworld series, but as I recall the references to Sufism do not play a major part in the narrative. Religion certainly doesn’t figure as strongly as in the Dune series. (Despite everyone being “born again.”) It’s still well worth reading though, especially the earlier books.
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