Quest Magazine

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd, Tim, "Viewpoint:  Questions, Unfoldment, and Evolution" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 52-53

By Tim Boyd, President

Ask a difficult question and marvelous answers appear.
                                                                        —Rumi

In my late teens I moved to Chicago. It was supposed to be just a three-month visit, not the forty-plus years that it turned into. At the time I was a college student attending school on the East Coast. The move was not precipitated by my love of the city or its cultural or educational resources. As a nineteen-year-old, I found myself filled with some burning questions that I was feeling but could not articulate. Beneath the surface something was growing. For one thing, there was a frustrating sense that nothing within my academic environment seemed to touch these hidden questions. I did not come from a religious family, so I did not have the ready answers and unquestioning certainty that some of my religious acquaintances seemed to enjoy. Although outwardly everything was going well, inside of me it was becoming a difficult time. Looking back, I realize that, in an unconscious way, a subtle sense of desperation was taking root in me — despair that maybe I would never find the right questions to ask and that maybe if I did, no answer would be forthcoming.

On a visit to Chicago during a break from school, I had a chance encounter that changed everything. My cousin introduced me to a gentleman that he and a group of other young people called “the Old Man.” Over the course of two conversations — the first, interesting, but not profound; the second truly life changing for me — I found myself in the presence of someone who could clearly see and name those deep, partially acknowledged questions with which I struggled.

Fast forward one year and I, along with four or five other young people, was living in the Old Man’s house. I had come to Chicago to learn from this teacher, and, being a college student, I had a particular idea of what that meant. But the familiar structures of the university turned out to be alien to his method. In fact, in the beginning it was hard to determine exactly what was his method. There were no lectures or reading assignments, no term papers or study groups. Strangely for me, every moment could unexpectedly arise as a teaching moment. People would come to the house to see the Old Man with all kinds of personal issues, and suddenly what might have begun as a simple social visit transformed into a profound glimpse into some previously unknown corner of life. At different times we would all sit around, and the Old Man would be telling stories about events or people in his life. His stories and experiences seemed limitless, and the characters and situations that populated his tales at first seemed fantastic to me, like a modern-day fairy tale. As the years went by, I met many of the people featured in his stories and listened to them confirm the same details. Different ones among us might chime in with our own stories. He was always interested and frequently would ask questions. Often he would fill in the missing pieces of our stories, the parts we preferred to keep to ourselves out of pride, or shame, or embarrassment. His repeatedly unerring accuracy in describing these unshared experiences soon led to a sense of ease with whatever we carried inside. Good, bad, or ugly, when seen without judgment, it seemed to heal.

From time to time in the middle of one of his stories, he would turn to one of us and ask, “Do you understand?” When it was me he was asking, this could be an uncomfortable moment. While the story line he was sharing seemed straightforward enough, often there seemed to be something more, something elusive that was not fully apparent. For lack of a better answer I would say, “Yes, I get it,” which was mostly true. I could describe what it was that I saw, and as far as I could tell that was all there was. Sometimes he would respond, “No, you don’t get it.” I might insist that I did understand and give an explanation of why. He would patiently listen, then say, “No, you don’t understand, but you will.” That future possibility, “You will,” has proven to be perhaps his most profound prophecy.

As the years rolled by, the subjects of many of those story sessions faded into the background. Although not actually forgotten, they were far from active in my memory. Like a seed slowly growing beneath the earth, ten or twenty years later, for no apparent reason, or in response to some random incident, suddenly a completely new understanding would burst to the surface. It is no great achievement to predict that a teenager’s understanding will grow into something more mature, but the highly specific eruptions of those forgotten “lessons” have been exceptional. If the Ageless Wisdom teachings are correct, each of us has latent powers and potentials within us — some ripe in this moment, others ripening, still others sleeping seeds awaiting a far distant future to begin awakening. Like good farmers, the wise teachers see the fullness of the fruit dormant within the seed, and nurture it into life.

In the teachings of Theosophy the concept of spiritual evolution figures strongly. Much like its counterpart, Darwinian evolution, it describes a lengthy process of continual change. Classical evolutionary theory, such as the Darwinian model, presents a view of gradual change over vast periods of time. However, in our personal experience, in addition to gradual unfoldment over a lifetime, we also have moments of profound and sudden breakthroughs — the “aha” moments spoken of in popular contemporary spiritual talk. At more profound levels this idea finds expression in the Theosophical concept of initiation — those ritualized moments of sudden and permanent expansion of consciousness.

These inner experiences are mirrored in the world of outer phenomena. They have been observed and accounted for in the theoretical structures of biological evolution as well as of quantum mechanics. In biology an additional theory called punctuated equilibrium has been made to account for the observation in the fossil record of sudden, nongradual shifts in life forms. In quantum physics the classic quantum leap, whereby electrons circling the nucleus of an atom move suddenly to a new orbit, is another example of nature’s unwillingness to conform to our models.

Although the two processes of spiritual and Darwinian evolution are similar, they are also fundamentally different. The Darwinian model describes a linear and progressive development of living forms. Small changes over long periods of time result in life forms that are more suited to ever-changing environmental pressures. Examples of the process are the appearance of human beings from their supposed simian ancestors, which to this day awaits a “missing link” in the chain of development, and the development of whales from an ancestral land mammal, which the fossil record does demonstrate. In Darwinian evolution the engine of change is “survival of the fittest” through the process of natural selection — the idea that the pressures and demands of the natural environment favor some changes over others. At its root this evolutionary approach is biological and concerned solely with physical forms.

Spiritual evolution focuses on consciousness and its process of unfoldment. While physical evolutionary theory is linear, the evolution of consciousness is cyclic. In a sense it ends where it begins. Spirit “descends,” associating itself with all degrees of material existence — mineral, plant, animal, human — ultimately returning to a condition of undivided Oneness, but enriched by its association with matter. As Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras, “the purpose of the coming together of Spirit (purusha) and Matter (prakriti) is the gaining of the awareness by Spirit of its true nature and the unfoldment of the powers inherent in Spirit and in Matter.” Hidden in Patanjali’s words is the understanding that the evolutionary process is solely related neither to form nor to consciousness. Both sides of the process are necessarily linked and continually influencing each other. The unfoldment of consciousness has two engines driving the process, described in The Secret Doctrine as (1) “natural impulse” and (2) “self-induced and self-devised efforts.”

The Ageless Wisdom makes the point that at a certain stage in our unfoldment, the balance shifts. No longer is consciousness strictly subject to the impulses of nature. The responsibility for further growth falls on us. In the words from the Three Truths in The Idyll of the White Lotus, each person becomes his or her own “Absolute Lawgiver. The dispenser of glory or gloom to himself. The decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment.” It is a liberating thought.

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 42

It’s always exciting when local news goes national.

In sedate Wheaton, Illinois, this happened in December and January, when Wheaton College suspended Professor Larycia Hawkins for making this statement on Facebook: “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” It didn’t help that Hawkins had started wearing the Muslim woman’s headscarf, known as a hijab, in solidarity with Muslims worldwide.

Wheaton College, one of the leading evangelical Christian colleges in the U.S., is best known as the alma mater of the late Billy Graham. Its administration did not agree with the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. The fact that Pope Francis appears to feel the same way was not an argument in its favor at the rigidly Protestant institution.

The administration first suspended Hawkins and then initiated termination proceedings against her. On February 6, the college announced that it and Hawkins" have reached a confidential agreement under which they will part ways."

As an issue of intellectual freedom and (not least) of Hawkins’s job, this is a grave matter. As a theological issue, it is a bit harder to take seriously. You might well ask whether any two people worship the same God.

Nonetheless, the controversy highlights the excruciating difficulties that pit the West (which is in many ways Christian at its core, no matter how post-Christian it may look) against the Muslim world. The many similarities between Islam and Christianity don’t solve this problem. Indeed the history of religions illustrates this sad fact: two people can agree about ninety-nine things and come to blows over the one thing they disagree about.

Our intention in putting out an issue of Quest on Islam was, at the very least, to improve the general understanding of this faith. (Thanks to TS member Dave Christensen, by the way, for suggesting this idea to Tim Boyd.) Although our readers are, I believe, far more sophisticated and well-read on religious issues than most people are, there is still a great deal of ignorance about Islam in the U.S.

Unfortunately there are many basic facts about the subject that we don’t have the space to explain in this issue. It becomes that much more daunting if you want to offer any historical perspective on current events. For example, why are the Israelis and Palestinians fighting so bitterly? Partly because a hundred years ago, the British promised the same piece of land to two completely different groups of people.

This was easy to do at the time, because World War I was raging, and the Ottoman empire (the ancestor of today’s Turkey) ruled Palestine. The Ottomans sided with Germany, so they were Britain’s enemies. While the war was on and it was by no means clear who would win, the British were quite happy to make any number of promises to help their cause. T.E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia, promised the land to the Arabs if they would rise up against the Turks. At about the same time, in 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued the Balfour Declaration. It said in part, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Exactly how this was all to be done was never quite settled. It still isn’t.

To say that the Middle Eastern problem is all the fault of the British is not my intention. The meddling of many other powers, including of course the U.S., must be taken into account, not to mention good old human ill will. My point is simpler: no matter whose side you’re on, it’s easy to become outraged at the Middle East situation without having the faintest idea of what is going on or why. As for me, I only know one thing certainly and infallibly about it: I have absolutely no idea of what should be done there. I defy you to prove me wrong.

Probably the most useful thing to remember in all this is that Muslims number around 1.6 billion worldwide (an estimate from 2010). That means that just about anything you could say about Islam and Muslims will be partly true and partly false.

A look at this issue proves my point. In it you will encounter Robert Frager’s sophisticated transpersonal Sufism, along with a portrait of the head of an Afghani Sufi order who dictates the lengths of his followers’ beards. You will find out about S.H. Nasr, the Iranian scholar who has influenced Prince Charles, and read Pyarvin Abbasova’s “Women in the Shadows.” Her memoir of growing up as a Muslim woman in Azerbaijan tells us that the tradition of hanging out bloody sheets on the wedding night — to prove that the bride is a virgin — remains alive in many parts of the world.

Thus, among 1.6 billion Muslims, you will find every kind of person: ecstatic saints and murderous fanatics; wild tribesmen and thoughtful, civilized professionals. Certainly the majority of Muslims are ordinary people, some corrupt, some kind and decent, who are making their way as best they can along the path of life, for which the roadmaps all end up seeming incomplete and defective.

I’m reminded of that line from the Roman playwright Terence: Homo sum; humani nil humanum alienum a me puto: “I am human; I regard nothing that is human as alien to me.”

Richard Smoley

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Frager, Robert. "Sufi Practice" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 70-74

By Robert Frager

The goal of Sufism is to make us into real dervishes, real Muslims, and real human beings. These three are essentially the same. Our goal is to come closer to God, and that is the same in all religions and all mysticism. The major difference between our practice and the practices of other spiritual traditions is we follow the shariat, the rules and the ways of worship of Islam.

Every tradition has an outer form and an inner meaning. But the outer form means nothing without the inner. Jalaleddin Rumi has become the best-known mystical poet in the West. His Western readers often don’t realize that he was a devout Muslim and also a professor of Islamic law and Qur’anic studies. Rumi wrote that the outer form of Islamic prayer is of no value without inner understanding. Those who follow only the outer form of prayer, which includes frequent kneeling and touching one’s forehead to the ground, are like chickens pecking grain. And the chicken is smarter, because at least it gets something from its efforts.

Remember, these are the words of a deeply devout Muslim. He understood that the outer must be accompanied by the inner. This is our tradition. We follow the outer because we hope it guides us to greater understanding, and we keep working to understand and practice the inner as well.

Remembering God

One of the central practices of Sufism is zikrullah. Zikrullah means remembrance of God. It is remembering what our souls knew before we were born. Zikrullah also means repetition. Much of our practice involves repeating God’s Names, or Attributes. In the Holy Qur’an ninety-nine Names are mentioned, but God cannot be limited to any finite number of Attributes.

The first Attribute we repeat is la ilahe ilallah. This phrase literally means “There are no gods; there is God.” A common mistranslation is “There is no god but Allah.” This came from Christian missionaries, who believed there is no way to salvation except through their own version of religion. They thought that Muslims believed the same way and that we denied the truth of other religions, which is not true at all. In Islam there is acceptance of other prophets and scriptures. In fact we believe God sent down 124,000 prophets, one to every people.

La ilahe ilallah means Unity. Multiplicity is a delusion. There is one God, and God is Unity. This holy phrase means there are no truths, there is Truth; there are different realities, but only one Reality. There is nothing worthy of worship, except for the One who is worthy of worship. These are only a few of the different layers of meaning of la ilahe ilallah.

The first half, la ilahe, “There are no gods,” asserts that all our conceptions of God are limited and distorted. Whatever we can imagine or say of God, God is far more than that. The second half, ilallah, tells us “There is God.” It reminds us God exists and God is beyond our experience and understanding.

In Islam we think of Allah as the most important Name of God. It is considered the “proper name” of God and, more than any other Name, it captures the essential nature of God. It is an essential part of our zikrullah.

We also repeat in zikrullah the Attribute Hu. This refers to God without attributes, pointing toward the essential, unnamable nature of God. It is considered by some Sufis to be a universal spiritual sound, similar to Om in the Hindu tradition.

We also chant Hai, which means “Life.” God is the essence of Life, and everything in creation vibrates with this Name. If anything ceased chanting  Hai it would immediately cease to exist. Every cell in our bodies is constantly chanting Hai. Our breath chants Hai. Tugrul Efendi, our head sheikh, commented that although we are all constantly chanting Hai with each breath, we are not aware of what we are doing, and so it is not worth much.

When we pray and when we practice zikrullah, we attempt to experience at least a taste of who we are meant to be. Rumi wrote that God formed human beings by putting an angel’s wings on a donkey’s tail, in hopes that the angelic part will lift the animal nature to something that is beyond both. It is an image that stays with me as a description of who we are. If we could remember the image, it would probably keep us from becoming too egotistical.

The Role of a Teacher

People often ask if we really need a spiritual teacher. Can’t we do it all ourselves? One answer is that it is very difficult to see ourselves clearly. We can see our trivial faults, for example our tendency to be a little short-tempered or the fact that we eat too much and do not exercise enough. But the deeper problems in our personalities are harder to see. Why don’t I trust more? Why can’t I keep my mind on my prayers?

There is an old Turkish Sufi saying, “You can bandage your own cut, but you can’t take out your own appendix.” The sheikh is there to help you with your appendix, with the major changes you are seeking to make in your life.

You need a spiritual teacher who has the wisdom and ability to guide others through their spiritual challenges. And the greatest challenges generally involve issues that we don’t understand clearly, so we need to trust someone to guide us through them.

Of course trust and authority can be misused. There are power-hungry teachers and naïve, passive followers. That happens in every spiritual tradition. In fact another old Sufi saying refers to this: “Counterfeit coins prove that real coins exist.”

One of the advantages of Sufism is the silsilah, or chain, of each Sufi order. This is an unbroken chain. Each teacher has been the student of a teacher of the previous generation. Good teachers do not allow their students to become teachers in turn unless the students have developed a certain degree of wisdom, self-control, and ability to guide others. Also, if a teacher begins making serious mistakes, word is likely to get back to other teachers in their order. So there are people who can try and correct that kind of problem. In other traditions, self-proclaimed gurus have done tremendous damage to their students. From our point of view, that is very dangerous.

Authority and power are always potentially dangerous. All spiritual communities are filled with imperfect members. No one here is perfect. A wonderful yoga teacher once wrote, “The ashram is designed to save you from the world. What will save you from the ashram?”

In our tradition it is much more demanding to be a dervish than to be a sheikh. At one level, a sheikh is only a position, although it is a position with responsibilities, and hopefully the sheikh receives divine help in fulfilling these responsibilities. A dervish, by contrast, is someone who always seeks to serve and to remember God. Those are major duties.

There is a wonderful story about Rumi and his teacher, Shems. The two men are sitting outside having tea. Rumi’s wonderful writings have spread throughout the Islamic world and the number of his followers has increased tremendously. A man comes galloping in on horseback. He jumps off his horse and runs to Rumi. The man bows deeply and says, “The teacher you sent to us has died. Please send us another sheikh.” Rumi laughs and says to Shems, “Aren’t you glad he asked for a sheikh? If he asked me to send them a dervish, either you or I would have had to go.”

As I mentioned earlier, a Sufi order is traditionally referred to as a silsilah, or chain. I prefer the metaphor of a pipeline. Each sheikh is a section of pipe connected to the section before it. What flows through the pipeline is the blessing and the wisdom that flow from the great saints throughout the generations of Sufi teachers, all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad. What flows through the pipeline is not the sheikh’s. It is something that flows through each sheikh. My old Sufi master, Muzaffer Efendi, used to say, “If it comes from me, don’t take what I say too seriously. What comes from me personally is not worth that much. But if it doesn’t come from me but comes through me, then you should listen.”

Mysticism

Mysticism goes back to the dawn of human history. We forget that for thousands of years human beings have experienced and been inspired by the unseen world. The unseen world is not merely what people experience after death. It is here. We get too rational about religion and spirituality. Mysticism is not rational. It is arational, actually beyond rationality. Rationality can only take you so far. Years ago Huston Smith wrote that the rational approach is similar to the old anti-aircraft searchlights of World War II. The beam of light could only illuminate a tiny portion of the night sky. It is a very small part of the total. The vast majority of the sky is not illuminated, no matter how bright the beam is. Similarly, Western scientists think that the only reality is what they are illuminating in their rational searchlights, and that all the rest doesn’t exist.

We forget. Most of us have had much too much education, and of the wrong kind. Modern education focuses almost completely on the head. It ignores the body, the heart, and the soul. We forget that there is a whole other world filled with different energies, blessings, and wisdom. These things are real.

One of the great blessings of hajj — pilgrimage to Mecca — is seeing other people from different parts of the world, from very different cultures. Many of them had minimal formal education, and when they circle the Kaaba, which is also called “the house of God,” they don’t think that is a metaphor. They are circling the actual house of God. For them God’s presence is real. They are in a powerful spiritual state. Many spend their working days on their feet, herding, hunting, etc. They cut right through the crowds of people around the Kaaba. When I was on hajj, I was a little annoyed at first. I felt they were knocking everyone out of their way, but then I realized they didn’t care. It was not personal. They were in an inspired state, and if others weren’t, they couldn’t keep up. I felt tempted to give up my degrees and fancy education if only I could have the same kind of pure, concrete faith.

It is a balancing act. On the spiritual path we should never throw our rational minds away. God gave us intelligence, and we are supposed to use it on this path. It is an absolute mistake to fail to use discrimination and good judgment. But we should not use a certain kind of limited rationality to dismiss everything that is beyond rationality.

Ram Dass once said we are the closest to God when we are the most confused, because when we are confused, our opinions and theories do not stand between us and divine reality.

Self-Control

We do have an animal nature, and there is nothing wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with a donkey. It is a wonderful creature, as are all animals. But we are not meant to be donkeys. We were born with other capacities.

We are meant to develop as human beings, especially to come to understand and control our egos. Some Sufi teachers have recommended we train our egos the way the Arab horses were trained. In the West we have a cruel and primitive tradition of “breaking” horses, breaking their spirit to make them docile. The old Western approach to child rearing was similar, symbolized by the phrase “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

The intelligent and compassionate way to train an animal or raise a child is through love, patience, and understanding — not through brutality and domination. Modern horse whisperers are highly effective because they understand horses. They guide horses rather than beating them. They shape a horse’s behavior by understanding how horses think and by understanding the basic patterns of equine behavior. The problem is usually the owner, not the horse. A well-known dog whisperer said, “I’ve never met a problem dog. I work with problem owners.”

We can work with our egos in a similarly patient and compassionate way. We can start by seeking to understand our egos. We were all self-centered as young children. It is a natural phase of human development, and ideally we grow out of it. But sometimes we don’t. Maturity and growth don’t happen automatically. It takes real effort to mature out of our basic narcissism. And, with so many things, we inevitably revert back to old patterns from time to time. Freud was absolutely right when he wrote about regression. At times we do revert to childhood patterns under pressure.

In working with our egos, we can tell ourselves it is OK to let go of some old patterns, patterns that made perfect sense when we were younger. Often we don’t need those patterns when we are older. Educating our egos is an art, and it requires consciousness and compassion.

I don’t believe in hair shirts or other kinds of extreme asceticism. One of my colleagues was the Jesuit director of novices for this county[r1] . When he moved into the director’s office, he found several boxes in the closet. One had hair shirts, and another had whips and chains. So we are not that far from the medieval notion that we grow spiritually by physically torturing ourselves. I am convinced that this kind of asceticism is a gross distortion of healthy self-discipline, and does far more harm than good. In fact I doubt it does any good at all.

One reason to avoid asceticism is that the ego is so clever that we are likely to become proud. We say to ourselves, “I torture myself more than anybody else I know. I’m certainly the most spiritual and the most worthy person here.” Our egos will always appeal to our pride. We can’t educate our egos by this kind of immature behavior.

Gratitude

The great scholar and Sufi teacher Imam al-Ghazzali writes about eating as an example of practicing gratitude. We take eating for granted. First of all, we have a hand with five fingers, including an opposable thumb that allows us to use utensils to bring food to our mouths easily. Do we ever realize what a blessing this is?

When we put a piece of food in our mouths, we grind it up with our teeth so we can digest it easily. Just as a farmer grinds grain, we grind our food. But grinding alone is not enough. If the food remained dry, we couldn’t swallow it. We would choke. God has also given us saliva, which moistens our food and begins to break it down in our mouths. We are also blessed with a working stomach, an extraordinary organ that digests all kinds of different foods.

Then the circulatory system carries the nourishment that comes from digestion to every cell of our bodies. Our circulatory system is truly extraordinary. It comes within a fraction of a millimeter of every single cell in our bodies. If it did not, those cells would die from lack of nourishment. We can also be grateful that we are healthy enough to digest our food, that we don’t have to take it in intravenously.

Al-Ghazzali also wrote that we should consider how our food gets to us. For example, the farmer plants wheat. The farmer’s work rests on hundreds of thousands of years of human agriculture. For how many centuries have farmers experimented with ways of effective farming? Agriculture does not happen automatically. Our agriculture is based on centuries of trial and error and the work of untold numbers of farmers. Unsung geniuses have figured out effective ways to plant, harvest, and prepare food. Human cultures have kept that wisdom and passed it from generation to generation. Without culture great ideas and inventions would have been forgotten. We take our culture for granted, but it is priceless. It brings us the wisdom of thousands of years and keeps the wisdom of the geniuses who are born every generation.

If the farmer puts the seed into hard clay, it will not germinate. Something has to break up the earth. We have learned to till the soil, preparing the earth to grow seed. This brings us to a whole set of other human achievements, such as the invention of metallurgy and the development of plows. Before that, early farmers learned to use digging sticks to break up the earth so seeds could germinate. Farmers today rely on sophisticated machinery, which developed as a result of the development of whole industries, from mining to electricity to the automotive industry. Then there is harvesting, grinding, and knowing how to prepare the wheat so we can digest it. We can’t eat raw wheat!

These are examples of human effort. Consider also the rain that God brings down. Without water the earth would be an arid desert. We also need the sun. Seeds will not grow in frozen earth.

When we consider what it takes for a seed of wheat to turn into a wheat plant, we see it is not a small thing at all.

Think about how grateful we should be for a piece of bread or a bowl of rice. God’s blessings are in everything we eat, and so are thousands of years of human history. Think of how many people are working today to manufacture the thousands of elements that go into the production of any kind of food.

We don’t worry about our food. We are blessed with abundance of all kinds. We take for granted the security we feel from having so much food in our homes. How many meals do we have at home? Think of all the food in our refrigerators and freezers, the canned foods and dry foods we have at home. Do we ever think to be grateful for the security this brings?

Most of us have never been truly hungry, except for the little bit of hunger we experience during Ramadan. We think that is a big deal, but during Ramadan we have a big breakfast before dawn and a bigger fast break after sundown. How about those who go days without eating, who worry about how they will get food for their next meal? This was the situation of many people for thousands of years. Even today many are starving, many are constantly worried about obtaining food for their next meal. Imagine the pain of parents who cannot feed their children.

We should also be grateful for our Sufi community. We have many others we care about and who care about us. Recently the dervishes in New York experienced days without power because of a major storm. Some of those without electricity moved in with those with power. Everyone gathered at their center for meals in the evenings, because the center has a gas-powered generator. The New York dervishes fed their neighbors as well, because most of the neighbors had no power. It is a tremendous blessing to be part of a generous and loving community, to have so many others we care about and who care about us. That is real wealth.

Let’s reflect in this way about how much we have to be grateful for. Some Sufi teachers have recommended that we feel gratitude with every breath. Muzaffer Efendi (God rest his soul) used to say that we can practice feeling gratitude three times with every breath — when we breathe in, between the in-breath and out-breath, and when we breathe out. With each breath we have three opportunities for feeling grateful, three opportunities for remembering God.

There are some who actually do that. It is helpful for us to know that this is possible, that a human being can attain that level of spiritual practice. We get lost in the world. We can counter that tendency through remembering la ilahe ilallah, which is to look at all that engages and attracts our attention and realize it is temporary, is not eternal. It goes in the blink of an eye. And then we can remember ilallah, there is that which is eternal, which is truly valuable, that which is beyond price, that which our hearts are all yearning for. We could use this formula to keep reminding ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with the world. Muzaffer Efendi used to comment that many Sufi teachers have said the world is bad, the world is our spiritual enemy and it distracts us from God. My Efendi would laugh and say, “That is not true . . . the world is our spiritual enemy if we put it between ourselves and God. The world does not insert itself in there. We put it in there. The world is our spiritual ally if we use it to remind ourselves of God, and if we use the world as an opportunity to serve. Then the world is an extraordinary spiritual gift.”

We are in the world to serve others and to serve all of God’s creation. Service is the practice of spirituality throughout our daily lives. Every time we speak with someone is an opportunity for service. That includes not only interacting with people but with animals as well, and not only with living beings but with the earth, the air, and the water. It is part of our practice to serve all of creation. Our practice is to remember God as much as possible, in all circumstances, and to serve others, remembering God is in them. God is in everything in creation.

That is our goal — to be in the world and remember God. We are not monastics, and we don’t treat living in the world a s a second-rate spiritual choice. To us being in the world is a wonderfully rich, rewarding, and demanding spiritual practice.

We are different from the angels in that we have the capacity for failure. Angels are structured so that they are always in a state of remembrance; they are always seeking to carry out God’s will. We, on the other hand, can fail. And this makes our successes much more valuable. My teachers have said that a human being who is self-centered and narcissistic is lower than the animals. The animals do love in their own way.

A human being who learns to love God and serve God’s creation is said to rise higher than the angels, because that achievement is done through human effort and choice, as well as through God’s blessing. When we pray and perform zikr (remembrance) we are experiencing ourselves as the people we are meant to be.

Robert Frager, Ph.D., founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where he directs the Spiritual Guidance Masters Program. Ordained a Sufi sheikh in 1985, he is president of the Jerrahi Order of California. His books include Sufi Talks: Teachings of an American Sufi Sheikh (Quest Books, 2012), Love Is the Wine (editor), and Essential Sufism (coeditor).

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Lizzio, Kenneth P., "Mubarak Sahib: A Firsthand Portrait of an Afghani Sufi Master" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 75-79

By Kenneth P. Lizzio

Afghanistan has long been known as the redoubt of mysterious and awe-inspiring Sufi schools. Today, when the nation has been subjected to decades of warfare, one could wonder what may have happened to these schools and to the masters who taught them.

In this account, Kenneth P. Lizzio describes one such man, Pir Saif ur-Rahman, known as Mubarak Sahib (“blessed master”) to his disciples. (Pir means spiritual guide.) Head of the Naqshbandi order of Sufis, he was forced by persecution to flee to Pakistan in 1978. He never returned to his homeland and died in 2010.

Lizzio lived and studied in Mubarak Sahib’s school for several months in 1994–95. This article is excerpted from his book Embattled Saints: My Year with the Sufis of Afghanistan, published in 2014 by Quest Books and reviewed in Quest magazine, fall 2014. Reprinted with permission. —R.S.

Who was Mubarak Sahib?

As I think back, the answer to this question is not about the kind of individual he was. By this I mean the pir’s personality held no special attraction for me or, I believe, for any of his other close disciples. It is a common fallacy that disciples view the spiritual master with a kind of childlike fascination. In the khanaqah (lodge), we did not spend our idle time talking about him in rapt wonder. Nor did we invest his every act with portentous magical significance. For his part, he did not talk about himself and regarded questions about his personal life and his upbringing as frivolous, unless, of course, there was a moral or historical lesson to be derived from it.

In fact, many disciples were quite objective in their assessment of the pir. One said he was a “good cleric, though not exceptional” and not a particularly good writer. He certainly did not publish works of distinguished literary merit, as had Sirhindi, Rumi, and many other Islamic mystics. There were even times when he could be the simple, rustic Afghan. Like many Afghans, he possessed an almost magical regard for Western medicines. Medication was a panacea to be taken willy-nilly for any ailment, or for no ailment whatever as a preventive regime. The pir was not immune to this cultural idiosyncrasy, of which his European doctor was constantly trying to disabuse him. He could be politically naïve too, a common failing of those who traffic in spiritual matters.

That the pir had a personality there can be no doubt, but in way that a person has skin: it was incidental to the being that resided within. The “being within” abided in a state of unitive consciousness. It was probably not a state he lived in continuously, a consequence of both phenomenal existence and the mysterious working of grace. The pir dedicated his life to showing others that such consciousness resides in each individual willing to pursue the Naqshbandi path. It is in this sense that he was extraordinary. He showed, as do all spiritual masters, what it meant to be fully human.

To be fully human meant being fully Muslim. At times the pir was the Old Testament lawgiver, the righteous exemplar of the shari‘a, the body of rules guiding the life of a Muslim. To live in imitation of the prophetic sunna (the life and example of Muhammad) was, for him, the alpha of life. It informed his waking and sleeping activities to such a degree that there was hardly another person existing apart from it. He lived in imitatio Muhammadi.

He never forgot the slightest thing said in passing or jest, to be called upon when he needed to make a point. In time, I learned that he said very little not intended in some way to edify or instruct in the sunna. He was an indefatigable ombudsman, chastising disciples for carelessness in their dress and length of turban or beard. He never failed to scrutinize and correct the appearance or comportment of everyone who came within his orbit. Our pants were too long, our turbans too small, our stays too brief. Once when the pir was introduced to some Iraqi students from Lahore, it was near midnight. While the rest of us were tired and anxious for bed, the pir began to lecture them on the proper dress for a Muslim, raising his right leg aloft to show the proper length of his pants. In one sense, he was instructing them individually. In quite another, I suspected even so small and insignificant a gesture was intended for all of Iraq. Another time he ordered a man out of the mosque who had entered improperly, leading with his left foot instead of his right.

One time an old Afghan man, impoverished and decrepit, came into the mosque during suhbat (the practice of keeping company with a Sufi master). He slowly crawled on his belly like a reptile toward the pir, sobbing and moaning. It was a heartbreaking display, and I imagined the man must have just suffered a great loss in the war. I expected the pir to take pity on the wretched figure before him. Instead he chided him for his abject behavior. Later, I was told that this kind of behavior—pir worship—was forbidden by the sunna. It was also the kind of thing that the pir’s critics falsely accused him of encouraging in his followers.

Another time, a disciple came to ask him to make an amulet to improve the disciple’s relationship with his wife. Whereas the pir freely made them for persons who were ill, in this instance he refused, for such an amulet, according to the sunna, was viewed as meddling in one’s personal affairs.

His daily routine was not just dictated by the sunna; it was the sunna personified. Each day the pir woke before dawn, performed ablutions, and recited twelve supererogatory prayers known as tahajjud. He also performed two prayers after every ablution. He then recited an Arabic prayer formula, “I ask forgiveness from God,” 626 times. If he missed this prayer, he would make it up sometime during the day.

Then, with his copper-plated staff in hand, he crossed the narrow drive that separated his house from the mosque to lead the morning prayer. He was always impeccably attired in an immaculate white turban and a colorful khirqa (cloak). At this hour he was usually solemn and, except to issue instructions sotto voce to his attendants, he said nothing. Upon entering he would glance at those in the mosque, seemingly making a mental photograph of everyone in attendance. He took his place in front of the mihrab, or prayer niche, and led us in prayer. After prayer he recited suras from the Qur’an, which he required his disciples to do as well.

After the Sura Yasin was read by the qari (reciter), a large white chair was drawn from one side and placed directly in front of the mihrab for one to two hours of exercises. Until late in his life, the pir always sat on the floor with his disciples, but with increasing age and weight, he had begun to use a chair most of the time. He occasionally struggled to his feet when rising, but for the most part remained remarkably agile for a man in his seventies.

Dhikr, sometimes spelled zikr, is a Sufi practice of repeating the names of God. During dhikr sessions, the pir was a tireless orchestrator, directing disciples to form a more even circle in front of him, correcting their posture, or calling for adjustment of the lights. On weekends when many more disciples were present, he often ate breakfast in the mosque so as to extend the time for disciples to be in his company for suhbat. If he returned to his house to eat, as he did during the week, he conducted exercises there with his female disciples, who were not permitted in the mosque. When the sun rose, he performed four more prayers.

By late morning, if not at home with visitors or family, the pir could usually be found in one of the langars, or common dining areas, again conducting exercises. The purpose of these informal gatherings was not to socialize; only rarely did the conversation take the form of idle chitchat. Occasionally, a visitor came to request a special dispensation from the pir, such as a prayer or counsel. The pir always regarded these sessions as opportunities for the disciple to further his spiritual advancement. Once, when I decided to forgo the session and go for a walk, he upbraided me sharply for missing the session.

Despite the purposeful nature of suhbat, the pir was relaxed, talking animatedly about a variety of issues — trouble he was having with the fundamentalists, how he was betrayed by a disciple, doctrinal points of hadith (sayings of the Prophet) or fiqh (jurisprudence) — all the while interjecting his talk with quotes from the Qur’an, Sirhindi’s letters, or Rumi’s Mathnavi, which was a kind of Persian Qur’an for him. Sometimes he would send an assistant to fetch a text from which he wished to read. His knowledge of the texts was prodigious, and he always seemed to know precisely the page he wished to cite. One time a disciple was reading from the voluminous Mathnavi while the pir was talking to us. Whenever the disciple misread a word — which was embarrassingly often — the pir corrected the disciple from the side of his mouth, in such a way as not to break stride in his conversation. We were all astonished.

Around lunchtime, the pir returned to his house, where he read three suras from the Qur’an. Then he might spend time with his large family in suhbat with the women. After a short rest, he prepared for the noon prayer, after which he recited more suras. Noon prayer was usually followed by an intense one- to two-hour dhikr session. As with the morning suhbat, the pir was constantly at work during dhikr, directing someone to move closer to him, or others to spread out and make room for late arrivals, giving bay‘a, an oath of allegiance administered to initiates, or chiding those looking around instead of focusing on him or one of the khalifas. (A khalifa, or successor, is one whom a Sufi master has designated to teach.) Usually these dhikr sessions were so long that they stretched into the afternoon prayer. He would close a session by reciting, along with the advanced disciples, the Naqshbandi prayers known as khatm-i khwajagan as well as individual prayers to Ahmad Sirhindi, Bahauddin Naqshband, and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. At the conclusion of dhikr, he returned to his house, where he performed six more prayers and then recited two more suras from the Qur’an.

He returned to the mosque for the evening prayer. Afterward, he called for another session of dhikr. On Thursday night, he ate dinner in the mosque with disciples so that those visiting for the weekend could get as much time as possible in suhbat with him. Dinner was followed by the night prayer. One never knew at what time the night prayer would take place; we were always kept in a state of vigilance until the alert was sounded that he was heading for the mosque, the call “Salat!” (prayer) reverberating throughout the khanaqah. Sometimes the pir would wait until midnight to lead the prayer. After prayer he recited still more suras. Before retiring for the night, he recited the Naqshbandi prayers of contemplation. Three times each year, including the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, he prayed all night. During Ramadan, he recited the entire Qur’an.

I never saw the pir even once do something that contradicted the teaching or appeared to stem from a personal whim or selfish mood. Even though each disciple was at a different stage of development, the pir’s treatment of others was consistently measured by the extent to which they lived up to the teachings. Perhaps for this reason, he treated the more advanced practitioners more harshly than beginners. Once one of his most senior khalifas was giving the Friday sermon. Mubarak Sahib was in his house. When he came out to lead the prayer, the pir excoriated the khalifa in front of the congregation for thirty minutes for misquoting the Qur’an. He had been listening intently to the loudspeaker the entire time. His own angry tirade was broadcast over the loudspeakers too. The khalifa was deeply shamed. There was never any special treatment at the khanaqah or favored treatment for advanced disciples. What Mubarak Sahib said to one, he said to all.

One Friday afternoon, for no particular reason, there was almost no one present for prayer. I later remarked to Ihsan, a Swiss doctor who was one of the khalifas, how disheartening it was that more Muslims did not come to the khanaqah.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Whether there is one disciple standing behind him or one thousand, Mubarak Sahib will still come each day to the mosque and lead the prayer.”

During my time with the pir, I did not fully realize what an extraordinary man he was, paradoxically because he was so accessible to me. He was a husband, a father, a farm manager, a community head, an imam and religious counselor, and a spiritual master. A refugee saint and warrior, he had been driven from his country and witnessed the death or dismemberment of thousands of his disciples. In fleeing to Pakistan, he found little relief. Indeed his problems only increased as he ran head on into militant fundamentalists. Yet despite all these hardships, he remained undaunted. He fulfilled his office with an energy that belied his age and a host of ailments that included rheumatism, arthritis, high blood pressure, gastroenteritis, peptic ulcer, sciatica, and migraine headaches.

So much was the pir at the disposal of his disciples, male and female, that it left little time for his family. His youngest children, anxious to see more of their father, often wandered into the mosque during suhbat. By then, the children were already inured to the disciples’ bizarre behavior. Standing behind his chair, they would playfully touch the tail of his turban while disciples shook and groaned on the floor in front of him. The pir never displayed any affection or attention to his children at these times, his spiritual work with disciples being uppermost in his mind.

It was not hard to see how the heavy demands of his office and the privileged life his children enjoyed had corrupted some of his sons. The pir, fully aware of their shortcomings, did not hesitate to berate them in front of the congregation as “worthless to me.” This indictment was made as much in his capacity as father as in that of a religious leader for their failure to live up to the shari‘a. Despite his dissatisfaction with them, he refused to disown them. “What can I do?” he once said, “They are my family.” Given his exacting standards, however, their failings must have been a sore point in his life.

Mubarak Sahib owned a vehicle and a fax machine, but he placed no real value on them or on the larger intellectual and scientific world from which they issued. If these modern conveniences had been taken away, he would have felt not the slightest loss. I am certain of that. He was simply not interested in what the West had to offer — not its scientific achievements, and certainly not its intellectual and social achievements.

For the pir, Islam was a complete world, a total way of life. It offered a social and political system, legal injunctions, and intellectual and moral guidelines for a community of believers linked to one another and, ultimately, to God. The path to this life was not to be found in modern progress or scientific discovery. The path was laid down by the Prophet in the seventh century. It was thus to the past that Mubarak Sahib looked, historically, morally, intellectually, and most important, spiritually. The grace he received and transmitted was a living confirmation of the essential rightness of his chosen path. He lived so fully the sunna of the Prophet, within and without, that in reality there was only the living embodiment of the teaching. As someone once described his Japanese Zen teacher, the pir was seamless.

A few years before his death in 2010, the pir went to a village in Afghanistan to seek treatment for an ailment. When villagers heard that he was in town, they flocked to his house in the hope of sitting with him in suhbat. Even though he was sick, he sat with his disciples into the wee hours of the morning. His life was one of constant service to his disciples, whom he called “my moral children.”

The title Mubarak Sahib was not a mere honorific given to a religious authority but an affirmation of a being who bestowed a real, tangible blessing power on all who approached him sincerely and availed themselves of it. He was an impeccable exemplar of his religion and an inexhaustible source of baraka (spiritual power), and disciples said that when he passed, there would be no Naqshbandi pir alive capable of matching his exacting moral standards or the power of his baraka.

It seems paradoxical to revere a man for the fastidiousness with which he imitated a religious ideal and for his inner spiritual realization. For these imply that the person transcended individual existence as the rest of us live it. But that has always been the unspoken, the unutterable, message of the Sufis.

As the tariqa (Sufi path) was to the shari‘a, so was there an another side to the stern lawgiver: the mystical ecstatic. Early on, when I complained to a khalifa that the pir was constantly criticizing me, he said, “Don’t you understand, he loves you?” Indeed, if I was absent from the khanaqah more than two weeks the pir would, upon seeing me again, inquire as to my health and why I was not coming more often; this despite the fact that in the intervening period he might have seen more than a thousand individuals and dealt with as many problems.

He was so attentive to each disciple that each felt that he was the object of his special attention. During sessions, he intuitively knew when I wanted to sit up front with the khalifas, even when there were dozens of other disciples in the mosque clamoring for the same attention. At these times, he would beckon me to the front with a warm smile. If he was demanding of his disciples, it is because he worked relentlessly to close the gap between where we were and where we needed to be in order to participate in the ecstatic life of the spirit.

When the pir learned that my departure from Pakistan was imminent, he ordered his closest pirs to sit with me in tawwajuh so that I might know his spiritual universe and share my realization with others. (Tawwajuh is a practice whereby a Sufi concentrates upon a disciple as a means of transferring spiritual grace.) He never showed disappointment or disapproval of me, even long after I had lost faith in myself to experience dhikr. He never asked me for a single thing, even though he gave so much of himself. All he asked was that I follow the Naqshbandi path. I know that he wanted me to be his khalifa in America, a task I was unfit to assume, but a goal for which he never lost hope. Perhaps in some small way this book is a kind of fulfillment of that wish.

Of course, I cannot claim to know the innermost state of any man, least of all a mystic like Mubarak Sahib. There were things he did that were well beyond my ken. Several times individuals — nondisciples — showed up at the khanaqah in a state of what could only be described as possession. Foaming at the mouth, fitful, shaking, they seemed beyond help. After examining them, the pir usually pronounced them to be suffering from physical or psychological afflictions and had them taken to the hospital for treatment.

One time, however, a man came to the pir whom Ihsan insisted was suffering from epilepsy. With wild, feverish eyes and spittle lining the edges of his mouth, the man made bestial whoops like a wounded animal. This time the pir’s diagnosis was some sort of psychic possession, and he proceeded to treat him. When the man departed the next day, he was completely healed of his horrific condition and walked off placidly as if nothing had happened. “You think he was suffering from epilepsy or some other disease, but he was possessed by jinn [spirits],” the pir said to me and Ihsan. “But you people [meaning Westerners] don’t believe in such things.” The pir had turned the tables on us, and benighted belief was our error, not his.

There is an entire body of esoteric sciences in Sufism that I was told existed, but which I never studied. The pir sacrificed black chickens for supplicants. He created lockets with magic charms and talismans for the weak and the needy, some of whom were disciples but most of whom were simply desperate victims of the war, poverty being their plight as refugees. Whether he was simply trying to give these people moral support or there was more than met the eye, I could not say.

In the khanaqah disciples never talked about the pir’s ability to perform miracles. Such talk was regarded as sensationalist and as a distraction from spiritual work on ourselves. For the most part, he did not perform miracles. Sirhindi taught that miracles were not necessary for a saint and advised Sufis to conceal their activities in this regard. In the khanaqah, the one exception to this prohibition was stories concerning the strange workings of the pir’s baraka, stories that were not myth — the usual anthropological interpretation — but a reality confirmed every day in the khanaqah.

One such incident occurred near the end of my stay. It was the afternoon prayer and I was sitting at the back of the mosque. The mosque was full. I was despondent that after ten months as a Naqshbandi I had made no progress. Unable to control my sense of failure, I began weeping silently. I was seated directly behind someone, so that the pir — unaccustomed to looking at the congregation during prayer anyway — would not notice me if he were to turn around. As soon as the prayer ended, he immediately turned around and, staring blankly into the crowd, began calling for me.

“Ahmad, Ahmad, where are you?” he asked. “Are you all right?” He was looking around and still had not found me in the congregation.

At that point, my face dry, I held up my arm. “Baleh, Mubarak sahib, khailikhub-am, merci [Yes, I am fine, thank you],” I said.

But I remained distraught. After so many months of immersing myself in the Naqshbandis’ rigorous spiritual exercises, I knew I would soon be returning to the United States without ever having tasted that intoxicating wine I had so desperately sought. In a way I had prepared for years for my spiritual adventure, intensively studying Persian and the history and culture of the region. But the real learning, the spiritual, had eluded me.

Was I too much an academic, too analytical, too critical, too intellectual? Did I erect unconscious barriers to the pir’s teaching because it required me to live in the Khyber, which I abhorred?

The great Sufis have said that the first true step in the spiritual path is ikhlas, sincerity. This means that one really begins the spiritual journey when and only when one realizes that the demands of the ego for fulfillment through money, career, and other forms of worldly gratification are a fruitless quest, a fool’s game. Coming to the end of himself is what made the conversion of Ismael, a German disciple, to Islam so unqualified, so complete. Only then can one shed the old self and begin to move toward the divine mystery. On the other hand, did not the Naqshbandis offer a taste of the spirit for people just like me as a way of getting us over our lingering egoic attachments? Perhaps I just needed just a bit more time, like Ihsan.

The answers were not clear then, or even now. Indeed, several years later, a deep sense of disappointment still pervades my memory of that special time at the khanaqah. I lived in a spiritual community that needed no intellectual defense, no justification to the world of modern intellectual skeptics or that of backward religious fanatics. We knew who Mubarak Sahib was and what he embodied: the highest human endeavor — the pursuit of the Divine. And we all sought in our own way and in our time to participate in that life.

On my last day in the mosque, I informed the pir of my imminent departure. He suddenly redoubled his efforts to awaken my dhikr. First he drew me close to him, performing dhikr exclusively with me. Then he instructed Habib ur-Rahman, a pir who was a disciple of his, to work on me intensively. Taking me to a corner of the mosque, Habib fixed a wild gaze on my heart region, mustering what looked like his total spiritual force to awaken me once and for all. After several minutes, a pain arose in my heart; after a few more minutes it had become so acute that it felt as though a knife were being thrust into it. The pain was so great I had to ask him to stop.

It was our last time together.

Kenneth P. Lizzio is a specialist in Islam with a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies. He has taught anthropology at Winthrop and James Madison universities. He has also served as a democracy officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Rwanda, Indonesia, Guyana, and Macedonia and has held other posts in the Middle East and Africa. He is presently working on a book about Morocco.