Thursday, November 10, 2016

Dogs of Arabs – 18

Continues from the previous post –

The literature of Sufism emphasizes highly subjective matters that resist outside observation, such as the subtle states of the heart. Often these resist direct reference or description, with the consequence that the authors of various Sufi treatises took recourse to allegorical language. For instance, much Sufi poetry refers to intoxication, which Islam expressly forbids. This usage of indirect language and the existence of interpretations by people who had no training in Islam or Sufism led to doubts cast over the validity of Sufism as a part of Islam. In addition, some groups emerged that considered themselves above the Sharia and discussed Sufism as a method of bypassing the rules of Islam in order to attain salvation directly. These, traditional, Muslim scholars disapproved.
For these and other reasons, the relationship between traditional Islamic scholars and Sufism is complex and a range of scholarly opinion on Sufism in Islam has been the norm. Some scholars, such as Al-Ghazali, helped its propagation while other scholars opposed it. W. Chittick explains the position of Sufism and Sufis this way:
In short, Muslim scholars who focused their energies on understanding the command guidelines for the body were, called jurists, and those who held that the most important task was to train the mind in achieving correct understanding, divided into three main schools of thought: theology, philosophy and Sufism. This leaves us with the third domain of human existence, the spirit. Most Muslims who devoted their major efforts to developing the spiritual dimensions of the human person came to be known as Sufis.

To accept that, amounts to acceptance that those devoted Muslims converted to Sufism and so no more remained Muslim.

This proposition calls those people who indulged in that exercise as Muslim scholars. I do not agree to that; instead, we had better call them as just intellectuals. Since, they were definitely no more Muslim. To call them Muslim is contradictory to the very concept of Islam. Muslim and Sufi are not the same as we have seen in the above observation. In Koran Mohammad has not given any direction about this third domain of existence. Therefore, all attempt to find this third domain of existence amounts to negating the gospel of Mohammad. Any justification by this argument will not be acceptable to any scholar of Islamic studies. All these arguments to usher in a place for Sufism within Islam are nothing but sacrilege.

This topic continues in next post -

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