East and West: Sufism as a bridge
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Sufism, a living spirituality, irrigated for centuries the different cultural expressions of Islamic civilisation, in their singularities as in their universal values.
Of these poetic, literary, architectural or behavioural expressions, one could say with Plato: “Beauty is the splendour of the true.”
At the farthest reach of the East looms the West. And vice versa. “As the night winds round into the day, says the Qur’an, and the day into the night.” The wholeness of the world can only be perceived in the play of these oppositions and complementarities, this mirror play between the two hemispheres of our planet. But beyond their geographical disposition, East and West are above all cultural and symbolic continents.
The terms “mondialisation” or, worse still, “globalisation” express above all the will to domination of one cultural sphere over another, of a system triumphing through values and systems of organisation originating in the West.
That domination, whichever way it seeks to exert itself, is never much more than provisional, if not the fruit of an optical illusion.
Sufism, across the centuries, has managed to weave bridges between these two worlds and to make ideas, values and universal symbols travel between them in multiple colourings.
For only an authentic spirituality allies within man himself the East of the soul and the West of reason; it brings forth that divine light fed by “a blessed tree, an olive tree, that is neither of the East nor of the West” (Qur’an XXIV, 35).
Spiritual chivalry
Such is the case with certain values shared between East and West: those of “spiritual chivalry” (futuwwa), of the sense of elevation and nobility of human conduct. That by which man develops intrinsic qualities of humility, generosity, compassion, courage, integrity and many others besides, which allow him to be in the best possible articulation with the real and with rightness of action.
It is this spirit of “chivalry” that presided over the association, among artisans and trade guilds, between work, ethics and spiritual values. As with the knight, work, or action in general, is only the mount; it is directed by the spirit that gives it direction and finality.
Work is certainly a means of subsistence, but it is never “only that”. It is also one of the vectors of the development of our humanity.
The dimension of the feminine
Sufi culture also opens us to the essential importance of the dimension of the “feminine”, and of the values attached to it, in all societal development.
The figures of Layla, of Mayya, drawn from the pre-Islamic Arabic poetic heritage, from ’udhri and platonic courtly love, came to constitute the principal symbols of the universal love of the Sufis, expressed in the poetry of Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya, of Hallaj, of Ibn ’Arabi or of Rumi. They also came to form the texture of the artistic and musical expressions developed across the extraordinary diversity of Sufi cultures throughout the world, in Africa or Europe, in East or West, the middle and the extremes.
The spiritual romanticism of Sufism, whether expressed by men or by women, nevertheless accorded to women an essential symbolic signification, which is the prerequisite for the natural recognition of the importance of their place and their role within society.
A civilisation of love
In this function of mediation between East and West, between man and woman, Sufism also developed a capacity to find solutions of harmonisation and complementarity, a natural and fertile recognition of differences and diversity, where attitudes of rejection, contraction and conflict might take hold. It knows how gradually to replace, through a long process of self-knowledge and self-transformation, the logics of hatred with those of love.
The civilisational development of a society can be measured by its implementation of the means by which the simplest citizen can have access, through multiple channels, to the widest possible heritage of knowledge, culture and spirituality; but also by its capacity to refine and develop social bonds, or bonds with its environment, in the direction of the very greatest elevation and harmony, whether these relations are internal to those societies or define the philosophy of their international relations. “Civilisational development” means, in short, the possibility of creating today, in concrete, collective and societal modalities, a “civilisation of love and knowledge”.
The intensity of this “energy of love”, which circulates in its diverse colourings and expressions within society, constitutes for Sufism the very heart of all civilisation. It implies and encompasses the dimensions of equity and justice. It is this vocation that is also assigned to its dissemination and diffusion, recurrently, through the Fes Festival of Sufi Culture.
By Faouzi Skali.
Faouzi Skali
