Arnaud Desjardins among the Sufis of Afghanistan
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When he was a producer and director for French television (an activity that served as the pretext and the means for a personal spiritual quest among the masters of the great traditions of Asia), Arnaud Desjardins approached the Sufis of Afghanistan, to whom he devoted two hour-long films in 1973. These were the last films he ever made. The text below recounts Arnaud Desjardins’s encounter, first with a country that captivated him at once, and then with the Sufi masters. It sums up the two chapters devoted to Afghanistan in the biography of Arnaud Desjardins written by Jacques Mousseau. That biography, entitled Arnaud Desjardins, l’ami spirituel, was published in January 2002 by Perrin.
Love at first sight is felt first; it justifies and explains itself afterwards with clumsy, incomplete arguments. From his very first journey to Asia in 1959, Arnaud Desjardins was captivated by Afghanistan, which he crossed on his way to India at the wheel of a Peugeot estate. The stony deserts furrowed by acrobatic horsemen, the men in baggy trousers and turbaned heads, the women in chadors, the nomads in ample garments sewn from pieces of coloured cloth, laden with heavy silver and copper jewellery on their arms and necks, the kindness of villagers who hold out handfuls of dried fruit and glasses of scalding tea to the stranger: all this captured his heart for ever.
He was so captivated that in 1960 he gave up pushing on to India and concentrated on Afghanistan. His reading had taught him that the country harboured, in its towns and even more in its villages, Sufi masters, depositaries of an eternal faith and wisdom. He toyed with the idea of devoting a film to them. The documentary he made that year, Afghanistan, and the first tale he shot in 1962, La Route de Kaboul, followed by a second in 1966, Djouma du Nouristan, pleased the authorities and earned him the status of a true friend of the country. Yet those same authorities, so amiable and smiling towards him, denied the very existence of the Sufis. Such figures were myths, they belonged to ancient history, they had vanished for good. The regime of the day was intent on forging a modern image of Afghanistan.
An opening
In 1967, on the return from a stay in India, Rawan Farhadi, the director of political affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with whom he was friends, asked him: ‘Are you still interested in the Sufis? Then I’ll tell you the truth: some still exist. I have obtained from the Minister of Information a letter authorising you to travel freely in Afghanistan and to make contact with the khanaqa. It is then for the Sufi masters to welcome you or to turn you away.’
A door had opened a crack. His friend gave him a piece of advice: ‘Don’t take one of your friends from the ministry as your guide. You wouldn’t be received. The Sufis keep their distance from all powers. I can see only one person to accompany you, a scholar who has translated Molière into Persian. He lives in old Kabul and his name is Mohamed Ali Raonaq. He is an eccentric who does as he pleases. It’s up to you to win him over.’
Arnaud met him in a workshop where he repaired radios. The two men took to each other, but Raonaq warned him: ‘I am Muslim, a believer, but not practising. I don’t believe in the sincerity of our mystics. I think they are charlatans who profit from the credulity of their fellows.’
For sixty days they criss-crossed Afghanistan in a Land Rover, gleaning addresses here and there. There was no need to be announced. You had to go to the people. If Allah willed it, the encounter would take place. Besides, the Sufi master does not live withdrawn from the world: he is a shopkeeper or a craftsman, or even practises a modern trade such as garage mechanic. Established in his century, he scrupulously observes the Qur’anic principles. He is of irreproachable honesty, has received thorough doctrinal training, and is recognised by disciples for his spiritual elevation. They gather around him in the khanaqa, once a week, on the night from Thursday to Friday, to hear his teaching and practise the dhikr.
A first approach
The first master they called on was away. His wife offered tea to the visitors and invited them to lunch. When the master came home, he proved warm and grew cheerful when Arnaud asked questions of a spiritual kind, which Raonaq translated with his arms folded on his chest to mark his withdrawal from the conversation. The atmosphere cooled when Arnaud Desjardins, timidly as it was, mentioned his film project: ‘Photographs, sometimes. But a film, no, I cannot envisage it,’ the master replied.
When he left the shaykh, the chill had long since dissipated. After their philosophico-religious exchange, the master rested his hand at length on Arnaud’s shoulder. It was a compliment.
All the masters whom Raonaq and Desjardins subsequently met returned the same refusal. In Charikar they were received by Khalifa Saheb, with an energetic, emaciated face, prominent cheekbones, an eagle-beak nose and a white beard. When night had fallen, his disciples pressed shoulder to shoulder in a dhikr that lasted until dawn, the first Arnaud attended, and it impressed him deeply. In Mazar-i-Sharif, Shaykh Samar-ud-din answered new questions that Arnaud had been turning over since the first answers he had heard. The most enchanting figures he met were sometimes shopkeepers in tiny villages. In the Christian West, they would certainly have been monks in monasteries. Arnaud realised that, with its five obligatory daily prayers, islam had turned the world into a vast monastery.
Arnaud had given up on bringing out his camera. Yet he shrank from no effort, no journey, if a master was pointed out to him. With each sage he met, he took up the discussion where he had left it with the previous one. He set out aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism with which he had been steeped in India. All of them retorted with a parallel trait of their own doctrine. He convinced himself that the great religious traditions converge around an identical core. At the end of an entire night of exchanges, one Sufi master exclaimed: ‘Yak ast do nist: One is, two is not!’ Arnaud recognised in it the non-dualism of the Hindus, so difficult for a Westerner to conceive, and more difficult still to live.
Little by little, Mohamed Ali Raonaq changed his attitude imperceptibly: ‘I myself was filled with wonder at the words I was translating. I was gradually becoming a disciple. I was receiving in spite of myself.’ At the end of their reconnaissance trip, which was not meant to have a sequel, Arnaud told him: ‘Perhaps my role was to convert you to your religion, and that alone.’
The authorisation
In 1972, six years having passed, Raonaq, who had kept up contacts with the Sufis, noticed a change in their speech: ‘Have you heard from your European friend? What has become of him? He had spoken of making a film.’ And one day the long-awaited words were uttered: ‘He may come now.’
‘I interpreted this change of attitude as a call,’ Raonaq said. ‘The Sufis sensed a threat and the approach of hard times for their brotherhoods.’ Informed by his friend in Kabul, Arnaud Desjardins hastily mounted an expedition with the French television services. He set out in the depths of winter. In Kabul he found his interpreter again, who told him after a few minutes of conversation: ‘Forgive me, it’s time for prayer… Yes, yes, I have changed.’
None of the masters met in 1967 had disappeared. Arnaud found them again one after another and could finally film them. In Mazar-i-Sharif he recorded a dhikr that lasted a whole night. The shaykh’s younger brother implored the Almighty’s forgiveness. The torsos swayed faster and faster, carried along by the musicians.
‘After fifteen years of patience,’ Arnaud says today, ‘I had my reward. No other filmmaker could have made the films I managed to obtain.’
The difficulties were legion. Sometimes the filming location had no electricity. Sometimes the voltage was wrong. Arnaud selected the scenes that could be admitted and understood by Westerners, as he had done in India, out of respect for the beliefs and rituals of those who received him: ‘I understand governments fearing the false interpretations that can be made of certain customs.’
The end of a golden age
The shoot ended in Kabul. Arnaud Desjardins had arranged to meet Raonaq one morning at 8 o’clock to film the facades of old houses that might serve as cutaway shots. In the city centre he saw tanks drawn up in formation. During the night, Prince Daoud, cousin of King Zaher Shah who was holidaying on the Italian Riviera, had staged a coup d’état and proclaimed the Republic, covertly backed by the USSR. The planned shots would never be filmed.
Raonaq came to Paris for the editing of the films. The first part of the diptych, Maître et disciple, was broadcast on 26 October 1974 on FR3; the second, Au cœur des confréries, a week later, on 2 November. These two films have never been seen in Afghanistan.
In Kabul, the communists quickly overthrew Prince Daoud and seized power. They hunted down the Sufis, deemed reactionaries. A power whose doctrine is wholly materialist cannot bear the presence of people who devote their existence to spiritual seeking. The communists first rounded up and burned religious books, then turned on the people.
Of the twenty masters appearing in Arnaud’s films, eighteen were assassinated, often in atrocious conditions. One brotherhood wanted to revolt, weapons in hand, when the police came to arrest its members. ‘No, no violence, it is our destiny!’ said the pir. The whole brotherhood was murdered in prison. The cruellest fate was certainly that of Shaykh Abd-ul-rad-Fayaz of the Kandahar mosque. The communists seized him, put him aboard a small plane and threw him into the void above the courtyard of the sanctuary.
How to explain the foreboding of the great Sufi masters in 1972, less than a year before the coup d’état that ushered in thirty years of tragedy? It did not save them, nor their families, nor their disciples. Yet it is a concrete sign of a lived dimension that wholly escapes common sense and takes its source in the deepest spiritual possibilities of man.
The films
The documentary made by Arnaud Desjardins comprises two quite distinct parts:
- Maître et disciple is a didactic film that evokes the pillars of islam through the daily life of an Afghan Muslim. It also sets out the foundations of the various Sufi paths: their belonging to the tradition of islam, the individual and collective practices of dhikr, the relation of the shaykh with his disciples. Arnaud Desjardins’s voice-over commentary is sober and precise, and allows every kind of audience to grow familiar with an unknown universe. The appearance on screen of certain masters is dazzling: their inner radiance shines through their faces with incredible brilliance.
- Au cœur des confréries essentially shows the main phases of a collective ritual as practised in the turuq of Afghanistan thirty years ago. The commentaries fade to make room for the music, the songs and the invocations. The difficulty of the filming conditions is perceptible, and one senses to what extent this film is a genuine technical tour de force. The spiritual states experienced by the disciples, filmed at length, may be overwhelming for an unprepared audience.
These two films are available on DVD from Alizé Diffusion.
By Jacques Mousseau.
