That This Beauty Shall Prevail

In the humble expression of this poor servant,

let this be known:

Better to fall on the battlefield

than choke on my steak in the War Room.

For it is my intention, in this my lifetime,

here-now and in reality, as in eternity,

that Sufism shall defeat Islam, prevail over and replace it entirely

with knowledge of God, with love of God.

That the Sovereignty of Love shall prevail over

and replace Muslim bigotry, racism, misogyny, hypocrisy.

That the prayers of the Great Ones and faith of the Heart

shall prevail over and replace Muslim arrogance, ignorance,

aggression, and its most primitive brutality.

That music and dance, creative literature, reason,

beauty in all its variations, shall prevail over and replace

the Muslim's native bent toward pronouncing death-fatwas,

toward pathologically underdeveloped, grossly self-conscious

phobias against any nonconformity, as against all freedom

of self-expression, against any notion of critical self-reflection,

of maturity in relation to the rest of the world:

over this shall prevail the nectar of Rumi, the fragrance of Hafiz;

the madness of Kabir and of Rabi'a shall prevail over and replace

a Muslim mentality which shuns pork but evidently not cannibalism.

That the creative openness of Sufism which embraces all faiths

and all paths toward God shall prevail over and replace this Islam

of domination, delusions of supremacy, of bludgeoning with Shari'a

every Muslim who is "other" and every culture which is not of itself.

Verily, the song and movement of Dervishes,

the Movement and the Message of Sufism through the Ages

cannot be annihilated, it is here in spite of historic repression,

and shall prevail over an Islam which never could appreciate

Sufis, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Buddhists - and murders them

century for century.

O Beloved Lord and Cherisher of the worlds:

let these words not prove empty, no -

let this love be active, this harmony penetrate through hearts:

that this beauty shall prevail.

Let it so Be as I, Sheikh Samuel Inayat-Chisti, have said,

who shall raise the banner of Love on that battlefield

in whichever form that comes,

and shall not fall, after so many lifetimes of this, but shall prevail.

Insha'llah.

Light One . . .

Light one candle or as many as you like, it doesn't matter -
the flame will be the same anyway, with each it burns
more or less alike, but it burns.

Let it be slender and elegant, or plain, or ostentatious,
let it be tiny on a birthday cake, let it be round and massive,
or short and plump: but when I light the tea-candles to my Puja

I see that every flame is one.
If a flame is poor or dirty or foul,
either the surrounding air is bad or the candle sucks.
 
Just so is the soul,
and just so is the essence of any religion:
if that religion is understood to be a bond
between a soul and it's origin in this present incarnation.

Soul is just soul, and a flame is also just that.
I have never joined a religion, so can I never leave one;
and the one I was born into I needn't reject,

yet no religion can make me it's member
if that excludes me from any other,
as my faith knows and embraces all faiths.

The Bhakti Path or the Path of Sufis
has no members, and no membership,
so can neither be joined nor left.

Like the prodigal son who returns, begging
his father: "take me back!"
and Dad says, "oh get off it, when were you ever 'not mine'!"

Two flames meeting or a hundred flames,
a matchstick or a bonfire – and there are great-souls
and there are deeply underdeveloped ones.

Flame is one, soul is one, religion is one,
lovingkindness is one, beauty is one, Being is one -
all else is the scenery of incarnations.

I have been asked to pen something on Sufism in light of developments in Mali

Sufism dates back to the first Human Beings, it is neither a religion nor a philosophy, while giving them their life and depth and dimension, as it expresses from the source of both.

Whereas for a believer God is a reality, a Sufi apprehends God as THE reality, and arrives at this through direct experience of God and nothing less. She has donned the mantle of many faiths through the ages, lending each its peculiar form and the scent of love, harmony and beauty. And whereas Sufism is immeasurably older than Islam, which to the uninitiated appears to claim it for itself, the fact is that Sufis alone have given Islam all that is of value in it. Sufism is free and the Sufi belongs to no religion, it is the essence of all faiths.

Sufis may traditionally be Muslims, but Muslims are no Sufis, rather they have persecuted Sufis for centuries into the present, and we will be seeing more of this.

The Sufi can coexist in real mutual appreciation with anyone, embracing all forms and requiring none, but the Sufi cannot coexist with bigotry, racism, all manner of hypocrisy, faking, mass manipulation, supremacism, slothful indifference. Having said that, I have to point out that the Sufi can coexist with every kind of ignorance, as she does this all the time.

The most profound expression in English of Sufism in our time, is in the following invocation, whose value is - as with all things given by Sufism - only in the practice and realization of it:

“Toward the one, the perfection of love, harmony and beauty, the only Being, united with all the illuminated souls who form the embodiment of the master, the spirit of guidance.“

Now the spirit of guidance which demonstrates Sufism as the Source and not the effect of any religion, not the “mystical side-show“ of any faith, as bookish academics so often portray it – this spirit of guidance is most beautifully expressed in the part of this Sufi prayer addressing it:

“. . . Thy light is in all forms, Thy love in all Beings: in a loving mother, a kind father, an innocent child, a helpful friend, an inspiring teacher. Allow us to recognize Thee in all of Thy holy names and forms: as Rama, as Krishna, as Shiva, as Buddha. Let us know Thee as Abraham, as Solomon, as Zarathustra, as Moses, as Jesus, as Muhammad – and in many other names and forms, known and unknown to the world. . . .“

It should be clear by what is happening in Mali, in Pakistan, and certainly elsewhere, that Sufism - which proposes an ever forward movement of conscious Human development, both embracing tradition and yet traditionally, even notoriously breaking with it, both disappearing into any surrounding culture it finds itself sharing a corner of the planet with and maintaining an unwavering position in deference to the truth, to the light, indifferent to and independent of dogmas, institutions and ideologies of every brand or intensity.

What shall be the difference between Islam and Sufism, then, when they both have a penetrating power? Where Islam penetrates with dogma, sectarian warfare, supremacist tendencies – the Sufi penetrates with light, and her interests lie in effacement in God over religion.

Sema at Fort Dix, a Rendezvous With Rumi

Ft. Dix NJ,  Feb. 1986.

We're Companies Alpha, Bravo, Charlie.  I'm with Bravo.  We're all on "bivouac" training.  That means, we're out in the woods somewhere, freezing our asses off, combining my own rain poncho with that of my buddy's (Vince N., Civil War freak), to make a tent for two.  Our M-16s and "combat gear" remain in our tents as we go to chow.  One company after the other.  We're up.  Alpha and Charlie are finished, or at least Alpha, I don't know where Charlie is - probably in the trees sniping - a little Vietnam humor there.

Some other dude and I show up a tad late for instructions of how this buffet works:  There's a big concrete slab outside the Drills' tent (a real tent) - on this are a couple of long tables set up with grub.  Sorry - chow, grub went out with WWII.  At the end of the chow line are 3 big water drums set up, one with soapy water, one with plain hot water, one with...whatever.  And that was the rub:  We'd missed out on the instructions and weren't clear as to which drum came first when you dipped your chow-smeared mess kit and utensils to wash them clean.  And like a day out of my 12 years of Sufi training, there were consequences for missing out on instructions and not being clear about the micky-mouse rules.

Out came a big Alpha Drill Sgt. with dark hair and glasses (we spec-wearers all carried the field-approved "rape-prevention-glasses," or RPGs, which were like the black horn-rimmed '50s model - later at Monterey's Defense Language Institute with my David Niven-regulation moustache the glasses made me look like Groucho Marx in "You Bet Your Life", or like the glasses-nose-moustache you buy at gag shops...which we did there at DLI when I became captain of our running team and I led with my own face, 16 other guys carrying the gag number, so that you had 17 "Sams" running the two mile race for Bravo Company at DLI...we always came in second, but as that was the start of a new gag each month we had more fun than the other companies and everyone loved it - but I digress and I didn't want to do that.  Another story, so back to ours: Ft. Dix, the woods)... Out came this Drill from the other company, and barked at me and this other guy for using the water drums in the wrong order: Penalty!

For the penalty to come across I have to explain:  of the basic principles of a soldier, one of the first we learned, after the Greek one about never leaving your buddy's behind, was never to leave your post (for example when on guard duty) until your relief comes or you are dismissed.  This I could understand and relate to - after all, how many years of Sufi training... So this in itself was for me, a no-brainer.  And in context here, it recalled for me the term "Post" in regard to the Mevlevi Sema, where the dervishes turn in reference to the Sheikh in the Sema functioning as Post.

"Hey, you!  Yeah, you!  The dumb one with the glasses."  That was certainly me he had in mind.  We both had to go back and get our respective combat gear (as if for guard duty): flak vest, M-16, Kevlar-helmet, combat belt, the whole 9 yds. - and return pronto to "guard this drum" as if to keep others from falling into the same mistake, which was pretty humorous as we were the last two anyway.  But alright, thought I, I'll bite - I'll play your silly little game.  You have me for 8 weeks.  So I returned, the other guy didn't.  Drill wasn't even around anymore to check.  I just followed instructions, and a little something told me to treat my Drills as "Sheikhs".........see what all those years do to you?  So the following actually occurred, exactly as it reads - my thoughts, what was occurring, the timing, the effect on me.

In full gear, I turn my "guard duty of this stupid drum" into a circumambulation around my Post, or around that imagined Sheikh sitting on the red sheep skin.  I am entering dervish-heaven.  I "march" around this drum in a sema rhythm, my mind is absorbed in zikr and Mevlevi music and overtones.  I don't know anyway how long the jerk's going to make me do this stunt so I'm resigned utterly to possible hours of it.  (The total running time of this unique meeting of dimensions if not universes, was indeed a solid half hour.)

As I'm doing this a truly extraordinary event takes place about 50 yds. distance or more.  These "grunts," these hormone-stupid numb-nut kids in Charlie Company are about to add their own, albeit profane - and that's the Rumi-inspired beauty of it! - Hadhrat (Sufi ceremony of zikr, or remembrance through repetition), and all for the benefit of my psychotic fantasy that we are maybe not in Ft. Dix after all, but Istanbul or Konya.

Someone among them had a birthday and received a cake from home.  Nice.  One of their Drills, a short guy with eyes right out of Doonesbury, was about to pass out to each of them a slice of cake.  That meant, they all had to line up in an orderly fashion, in formation, and receive that slice from his hand.  In their very grunt-mentality they created a loud festive atmosphere.  Now think for a moment of what it sounds like when dervishes recite zikr in an overwhelming rhythm and some ecstatic God-intoxicated idiot among them shouts "ya Allah" or such out of turn, and yet in no way disturbing the procedure but on the contrary embellishing it with........mood.

 This was neither being imagined, nor hallucinated!  As I did my "Turn" they began to chant, yes, chant in one united husky college-fraternity voice:  "Piece of cake!  Piece of cake!  Piece of cake!"  Just like one might have heard "Allah-hayy, da'im-hu!" or similar.  This was already sending me into fits of quiet ecstasy.  Their Drill "became" a Sheikh handing out prasad, plain and simple.  Period.  But that's not all.  In the midst of this chant, one or another would suddenly shout out above the other voices, "fuckin'-ay!...........fuckin'-ay!"  This went on.  And on.  I was beside myself with joy and ecstasy.  It was purely God-inspired, I felt so un-alone and un-forsaken, I wished it would continue without end.

Then as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.  They had their cake....yes, and ate it.  And at that exact moment, as I was sort of coming down from my peak, the big Drill who'd put me there came out of his tent, he'd forgotten the whole affair, told me to quit and go, asked me where the other guy was, I told him he never returned, he shook his head and that was it.  I could have apparently ducked out as well, but didn't, and received this very off-color blessing form the Sufis in the Unseen.  All directed and arranged by that clever sonofagun we call God, and it should be no wonder that I am in Love.