I just found out about the sufis and am curious. It seems like they are a confined mainly to muslim countires. Is this the case?
Also, what is a dervish? Why do they whirl?
ANy overview will be helpful.
Here’s a dervish site:http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/3858/dervish/dervish.html
I can’t remember too much about dervishes, but the sufi’s are the more mystical spiritual school of Islam. They are something like personal relationship with allah kinda stuff.
I don’t know much about them, but I do know that Sufi-ism is popular in the United States. Many American-born people with no Islamic background have adopted Sufi-ism.
I used to share a house with an American Sufi. I can’t say that I learned much about it from him. The only overtly “Sufi” thing I ever saw him do was listen to Sufi music while watching golf on TV with the sound off.
I know that here in NYC, there are at least two places of Sufi worshipping. (Called something like Hannahgah – the spelling is way off, I’m sure.) If you’re at your own local bookstore, you can check out books in either the religion section or the poetry section by Rumi, Hafiz, and other Sufi poets. (My favorite is The Subject Tonight is Love by Hafiz.) Sufis are known for Sufi dancing - large gatherings in which they dance and chant and bring about all sorts of crazy energy.
The Sufis are a very peaceful religion. One of the main ideas is that the closest that we as humans will ever come to the Truth (or God or the Force or whatever) is through human love. Because of this, a lot of older hippies seem to have been drawn into this religion.
So, being a Sufi has a lot to do with appreciating love, beauty, peace… but it’s also very difficult. You must not only follow the Koran, but you must also remember God in everything that you do. It is a very disciplined religion.
I just read over my post. (Should’ve previewd it first.)
It is very a very disciplined religion, but there’s something I forgot to mention: It has just about the best sense of humor of any of the religions out there!
"The Vegetables
Today
The vegetables would like to be cut
By someone who is singing God’s name.
How could Hafiz know
Such top secret information?
Because
Once we were all tomatoes,
Potatoes, onions or
Zucchini."
--- HafizI commented on this topic somewhere in the Ask the Muslim Guy thread in IMHO ( maybe the second or third page ).
To briefly summarize/re-state my comments from the aforementioned thread - Sufism is Islamic ascetism and mysticism. Basically a Sufi is one who seeks direct contact or communion with the divine.
One can be either a Sunni or Shi’a and still be a Sufi. Sufism is a philosophical approach to Islam, rather than a doctrinal or legalistic stance. It takes its justification from some passages in the Sunnah and Koran, but its true historical evolution, especially post-tenth century when it began to flourish as an ideal, probably derived from the influences of Greek monasticism and Zoroastrian and Hindu mysticism. A few fundamentalist sects of Islam regard it to this day as a ‘perversion’ of Islam ( Wahhabi Sunnism, for example ).
Sufism is not a single unified practice, but rather a catch-all category, with myriad different approaches, organized into different Orders. Some of these are/were hermetic and scholarly, some are/were little more than social organizations. Some are quite orthodox in their Islamic approaches, some so heteodox as to verge on the heretical. Some are peaceful, some, historically, were anything but. And so on.
The term Dervish is from a Turkish tranliteration of a Persian word meaning beggar, I believe. It refers ( I think originally, anyway ) to menidicant or monastic Sufis that practiced whirling, ecstatic dances or other rhythmic movement as a form of “meditation”, if you will. Part of the process of clearing the mind and achieving oneness with God.
- Tamerlane
Excellent summary, Tamerlane.
A book I enjoyed is Essential Sufism, edited by James Fadiman and Robert Frager. It is mainly a collection of sayings, parables, poems, etc., but it also has some basic information about Sufism. It also provided my first encounter with Rumi, the Sufi poet.
Sorry about that link. It should be Essential Sufism.
I have read several passages in Wisdom of the Idiots. Aside from the dervishes, it is remarkably like the Koan or Chuang Tzu stories. The intro said that it had something to do with ISlam, but not really, sort of. SO I was confused. IT is clear to me that it is a form of mysticism advocating poverty and very extreme charity.
Thanks for the explanation, Tamerlane. I wonder what brought this philosophy about, but imagine that I can intuit it. I went to a Buddhist Stupa (a Tibeten prayer building) recently and was apalled. IT involved many deities and more symbolism and pomp than a rococco cathedral. This is not the buddhis that I imagine the Buddha had in mind.
It made me think that after a religioon gets to a point, the mystics step in and bring it back to the essence. THis essence is remarkably similar across religions.