| November 29, 2007 | Thursday | Ziqa’ad 18, 1428 |
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Sufi linkages
ACCORDING to the most common secularist clichés, Islam spread in India through Sufi mysticism while it conquered the West by the sword. This could be true up to a point but the Arab conquest of Sindh, and the later Turko-Afghan and Mughal incursions can by no stretch of imagination be regarded as peaceful, much less mystical in nature.
Now an Indian scholar and former professor of English literature at Aligarh Muslim University has argued that Islamic cultural approaches in the West may not have been necessarily adversarial. On the contrary, says Professor Masoodul Hasan, there are marked linkages between Islamic mysticism and a perceptible Sufi influence in Chaucer and subsequent English poets and writers.
Professor Hasan’s new book, Sufism and English Literature: Chaucer to the Present Age, celebrates a large number of writers including Shakespeare and John Donne who reveal Sufi influences. He also looks at the engagement of non-English English writers like Bapsi Sidhwa and Tehmina Durrani with Sufi idioms.
Hasan begins his journey with metrical romances, the earliest specimen of secular literature of medieval England. One of the theories places their origin to the Northern European scalds and bards, while another opts for their Arabian and Oriental origin.
Take courtly love and chivalry, which were the characteristic themes of metrical romances. Hasan says they owed their origin to the Troubadours, a term derived from the Arabic word tarb, meaning the lutanist. The Moorish verse forms of Zajal and Muwashehat influenced their poetry.
Futuwa was the older Arabic version of chivalry, and numerous scholars have established its linkage with Sufism. The ‘futuwa’ is derived from the Arabic word fata, which means “a man still young and vigorous, valiant in warfare, noble and chivalrous.”
Its semi-legendary model was the ancient Arab chieftain Hatim Tai; but in Islam, Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, is considered the fata par excellence, as evident from the popular axiom (la fatta illa Ali) — Ali alone is the true knight.
Almost all the Sufi orders trace their spiritual descent from Ali, and as such, the early Sufis and Arab Chevaliers shared a common code of conduct and rituals.
Persian scholar Saeed Nafisi describes their rituals, gears and ceremonies of initiation and these details are strikingly similar to the features and conventions of western chivalry as represented in the Arthurian romances.
That Arthur enjoyed a great reputation in Britain is readily understandable; but Hasan finds his greater fame in Asia intriguing. He ponders the suggestion that there were two Arthurs instead of one — the historical Arthur who ruled in Britain in the early sixth century, and the allegorical Arthur, the joint product of folklore and poetic imagination.
About Arthur as the paragon of chivalry, ever on the move to help and guide the lesser knights in their predicaments Hasan wonders if Khidhr could be his fictional progenitor.
Sir Richard Burton, who translated the Arabian Nights, was a self-avowed dervish. He observed the interchangeability of the dervish with the Elizabethan clown featuring in some Shakespearean plays, Mulla Nasruddin being one such character. The fool in King Lear mixes sense with nonsense, and absurdity with wisdom, behaving impudently like the traditional qalandar.
Even Lear’s ominous remark that “nothing will come out of nothing” resembles the enigmatic, prophetic expression of qalandars. The lovelorn Duke Orsino in The Twelfth Night seeks comfort in music, and exclaims:
If music be the food of love, play on,/
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,/
The appetite may sicken and so die…/O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound/That breathes upon a bank of violets,/Stealing and giving odour.
Years before, Jallaluddin Rumi who died in 1273, had sung the music-love phenomenon in these words:
Oh, music is the meat of all who love,/Music uplifts the soul to realms above./The ashes glow, the latent fires increase,/We listen and are fed with joy and peace.
In Sonnet XXI Shakespeare lauds the man-candle-star image:
And then believe me, my love is as fair/As any mother’s child, though not so bright/As those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air.
Rumi employs the same sequence in one of the verses in his Diwan-i-Shams Tabriz:
From these stars like inverted candles, from these/Blue swings of the sky/There have come forth a wondrous people, that the/Mysteries may be revealed.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXI again professes:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake;/Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat/To play the watchman ever for thy sake.
Rumi chides and exhorts the seeker in the Diwan in similar words:
Alas for this life so light, beware of this slumber so heavy; /Oh soul, seek the Beloved, O friend, seek the Friends/O watchman, be wakeful, it behoves not a watchman to sleep.
According to Hasan, some of Shakespeare’s plays, more specifically The Tempest, seem to allegorise a Sufic version of spiritual perfection. Twelve years of ascetic life and mediation on the lonely island regenerate and bestow on Prospero the power to command the elements of nature. Great Sufi masters are known to have spent long spells of retirement and solitude before attaining sanctification and supernatural powers of clairvoyance.
John Donne (1572-1631), the best known of the English metaphysical poets, admired Spanish art and literature. Donne was probably aware even if vaguely of the salient features of the thought of the great Sufi mystic of Spain, Muhyuddin Ibne Arabi who exercised far-reaching influence on Medieval European thought.
Ibne Arabi was inclined to perceive the divine through the medium of female beauty, and to see the female as the revelation of God’s mercy and creativity.
Religious tolerance and underlying unicentricity of faiths form the core of Donne’s Satire III (of religion). Advocating tolerance and rejecting dogmatism, he observed:
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; /To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,/Cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will/Reach her, about must, and about must go;/And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so;/Yet strive so, that before age, death’s twilight,/Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.
Four centuries earlier, the Andalusian mystic, Ibne Arabi, had opened out his heart in these words:
My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,/
And a temple for idols, and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba, and the tables of the
Tora and the book of the Koran/
I follow the religion of Love, whichever way his camels take./ My religion and my faith is the true religion./We have a pattern in Bishr, the lover of Hind and her sister, and in Qays and Lubna, and in Mayya and Ghaylan.
Throughout the book, Professor Hasan keeps discreetly quiet on the raging subject of the times, the clash of civilisations. And yet the main body of his 330-page work seems to quietly question, as few others have done, the very premise of that nefarious thesis.
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