Afterword

Following the events of September 11, 2001, I decided to speak and write as much as possible about the West’s relationship with the Islamic world. I felt that my experiences in Afghanistan would offer helpful insights to those trying to come to terms with the September 11 tragedy. At the time of the attacks, I had been a Muslim for ten years and had been continuously involved in the Afghan-American community. During the ten years since I had last worked in Afghanistan, I continued to study Sufism and the history and doctrines of Islam. I had watched the rise of a literalist and militant Islam taking hold of the Islamic world: I was not surprised by the attacks of September 11.

In November of 2001, I participated in a townhall-style meeting organized by friends, taking place at the community center near my home. Like all Americans, the members of the audience were still in shock from the events of a couple of months earlier. The realization had set in that our world had fundamentally changed. The government had just announced plans for US military action against Afghanistan, to unseat the Taliban. I was introduced at the meeting as a specialist on Afghanistan and Islam.

“My name is Robert Darr, and I am a Muslim convert,” I began.

This was the first time that I had publicly identified myself as a Muslim outside of the Islamic community. I had considered this—my religion— to be a personal matter and it had never struck me as important to be open about this before September 11. I hadn’t gone out of my way to conceal the fact that I was a Muslim; it just wasn’t part of my public identity. Nor had I been using my Muslim name, Abdul Hayy, “servant of the Living One,” in my daily life. I only used this name in a special context, one that was also more personal. The name Abdul Hayy had been suggested for me by Jamaluddin Rahmatullah at the end of my stay in Afghanistan, to describe my particular relationship with God. My spiritual experiences in Sufism had brought me face-to-Face with this ever-existing, life-giving aspect of Divinity. Existence in itself is called “Living” in the Qur’an. Like the Native Americans, the Sufis name people according to some noteworthy quality appearing in them. Abdul Hayy described my relationship with God, so it was the name I received.

When I announced that I was a convert to Islam, the faces in the hall suddenly focused in on me. My town is not culturally diverse and I was probably one of the few Muslims living there. The white, upper-middle class audience peered at me with curiosity. Here before them, after all, was an adherent of the religion that had suddenly changed their world, their lives. Fortunately, they are generally gracious people who are quite open-minded. They listened attentively and sympathetically as I spoke about my years in Afghanistan, and showed them slides of the many people I had met there. There were photographs of children in war-torn Afghanistan and also the refugee children who were resettled in camps along Pakistan’s border.

I explained how deeply these children had been emotionally scarred by the loss of family and country. We could all see the psychological trauma in their faces. I told the audience how many thousands of children like these had grown up in misery, often malnourished and inadequately sheltered, with only their cultural values and religion to sustain them. I explained how during the 1980s and 1990s, most of these children were tutored in the local Pakistani religious schools or in smaller madrassas operated by the Afghan Islamist parties established in Pakistan.

It was from this generation of children that the Taliban had drawn their recruits. The leaders of the Taliban were older men, hardened by almost two decades of incessant warfare, much of it among themselves. When the Taliban rose to power, the Russians had already left and the Afghan Marxists were facing defeat. It should have been a hopeful time of reconciliation and reconstruction. Sadly, ethnic and sectarian strife predominated and peace was still out of reach. All over Afghanistan, powerful opportunists, many with no pretense to virtue or religious faith, had taken over. Life for just about everyone in Afghanistan had been a daily hell of terror, anguish, destitution, and chaos, for years under the Marxists and for years in a civil war between Afghan groups. It is not difficult to imagine how the Taliban emerged in this atmosphere of lawlessness and constant strife. They promised, above all, to bring law and order. They promised that with Islamic law, people would be able to return to a dignified life.

The Taliban did, at first, deliver on their basic promises. Once they took complete power though, problems quickly arose because of their literalist application of the Sharia, the Islamic religious law, and in matters of religious freedom and human rights.

Perhaps the decades of suffering and chaos that led to the complete breakdown of all the usual structures of society led to the failure of the Taliban, who were themselves uneducated and unprepared for such chaos. Too few among them had the kinds of administrative and technical skills needed to rebuild a nation. In their attempt to remake Afghanistan, the Taliban relied principally on what they had been taught by literalist mullas in the madrassas. Their only guide was a skewed version of Islam. The Taliban government became, because of this, the pariah of the international community. Their “Islamic state” progressively deteriorated into one of the most bizarre governments ever known. During their few years in power, the Taliban committed genocide, in the name of Islam, of the Hazara people in central Afghanistan. They revoked most of the rights of women: to work, travel freely, study, and even to laugh in public! They instituted a list of other strange laws affecting all of the Afghan people, laws whose common purpose seems to have been the abolition of enjoyment. The Taliban gave safe haven to the hundreds of jihadis that had come from all over the Islamic world to fight the “infidels” in Afghanistan. These mostly Arab jihadis shared the Taliban’s literalist and militant interpretation of Islam.

I presented this summary of Afghanistan’s recent history to American audiences at a number of talks following September 11. I hoped it would help them understand how the complex set of circumstances occurring halfway around the world had tragically intersected our own lives. The questions and comments from these audiences revealed fear, sorrow, and anger. But all over the United States, people wanted to understand the Islamic world.

Meanwhile, in the Afghan-American community, there was shock and fear of retaliation. Thankfully there were no widespread reprisals. I began spending time advising Afghan friends on how to deal with possible consequences in the aftermath of the September 11 disaster. At the time, I was deeply involved in projects to support traditional Afghan art and literature in the immigrant Afghan community. Our foundation, the Afghan Cultural Assistance Foundation, was in the middle of a time-consuming and expensive project to ornament the mosque in Hayward, California, with handmade calligraphic tiles. Because of this, I worked closely with the mosque’s members and directors. I also continued my activities with Afghans interested in the Sufi way, traditionally a strong part of Afghan religious life.

Since 1992, I have been a student of the Afghan Sufi Raz Mohammad Zaray. He is an older man who has been immersed in Sufism his whole life. This has been my longest apprenticeship in Sufism. It would take another book to explore the story of my spiritual studies with him. For many years he has stated publicly that Islam is in trouble. He often speaks about how literalism and narrow-mindedness cloud the Muslims’ understanding of Islam. He frequently criticizes the literalists for denying the transformative power of Islam to open people’s hearts to directly witness the presence of God. During the decade before the September 11 attacks, he was my teacher in both the practice of Islam and in Arabic. He taught me to read the Qur’an and hadith, the two main scriptural sources of Islam. Because of my experiences in Afghanistan and my studies with Raz Mohammad Zaray, I found myself called upon to advise Muslims about their worries.

I explained to Afghans that in my view, rather than withdrawing from the greater community out of fear, Muslims should come forth whenever possible to speak about the traditional, peaceful teachings of Islam. In my many conversations with Raz Mohammad Zaray, we often explored the history of Islam. We considered the historical periods of Islamic tolerance as well as times of rigidity and intolerance. During the positive periods of history, such as the golden age of Islamic culture in Spain, the benefits of tolerance and collaboration enriched the whole world with advances in the sciences, technology, and medicine. The scientific and technological culture of the modern West is, in fact, indebted to medieval Islamic civilization.

As with Christian history, periods of enlightened and tolerant Islamic civilization were followed by others characterized by brutality and narrow-mindedness. Whenever this shift to narrow-mindedness took place, we observed that it was to the detriment of Muslims as well as the cultures with which they interacted.

We live at a time when this struggle within the Islamic world over how to coexist with other cultures has intensified to a point that new thinking among Muslims about the Islamic identity is bound to occur. Despite the widespread view that the West has been guilty of injustices, it is now clear from reactions all over the Islamic world that the majority of Muslims do not support the espousal of violence by Islamist militants. The truth is that Muslims, like people from most religions, want to practice their faith and also benefit from the cultural and scientific advances of modern civilization. They are quite aware that Islamist “purists” want to put an end to secularism, and most Muslims want no part of this. The vast majority of Muslims are moderates who merely want to see a redressing of historical injustices.

The current problem has been at least a century in the making, and was caused by the loss of the political and military stature of Islamic nations and their subjugation to Western colonialist and imperialist powers. Looking back over just the last fifty years, one can see Muslim discontent and rage growing against the West, and against Britain and the United States in particular, because of an almost unilateral support of Israel and what appears to Muslims as a sustained, self-interested meddling in the politics and economies of Muslim nations. It is this rage that has fueled Islamic militarism. This rage will not disappear until the West truly addresses and mitigates its own role in creating and sustaining the discontent felt throughout the Islamic world. This process will undoubtedly take many years but it must begin in earnest if we are to curb the growth of Islamic militarism.

It is only in the last few decades of Wahabi and other literalist influences on Muslim institutions that we have witnessed an extremism that is neither scripturally nor historically justified. Some of these extremist actions, like the suicide missions carried out by people identifying themselves as “martyrs of God,” are clearly not justifiable in the name of Islam, and are in fact heretical, no matter what injustices against Muslims are invoked as a rationale for these actions.

History provides a mirror in which Muslims can examine instances of the superb adaptability of Islamic culture, as well as historical cases of rigidity and militarism. With regard to the latter, it is of interest to note that many of the doctrines of the Wahabi sect of Islam are derived from Ibn Taymiyyah, a thirteenth-century literalist who opposed not only metaphorical and visionary interpretations of the Qur’an, but any change or innovation of Islamic practice from its application in Arabia at the time of the Prophet. Abdul Wahab, the founder of the Wahabism, quotes Ibn Taymiyyah frequently in his writings which dominate the theology of the modern-day sect named after him. The difference today is that money, many billions of dollars of oil money flowing into the Arab world, has funded a well-organized proselytization campaign of these Wahabi ideas throughout the Islamic world. These literalist presentations of Islam have also been hybridized with strands of political thought from the twentieth century.

The study of Afghanistan’s culture and history is very helpful to understanding the full range of Islamic doctrine and practice. Afghans have for centuries produced a rich literature of all forms of Islamic thought. Sufism has been a major force in Afghanistan for a millennium. Afghan mystics like Rumi, Sana’i, Chishti, Ansari, and others have left the world with a far more creative and flexible version of Islam than the restrictive and negative message we hear today from the literalists.

For those mystics and the millions of people around the world who follow the Sufi way, the Qur’an is a scriptural guide that shows individuals the path of knowing God directly within themselves. The message of the Qur’an is not taken by these Muslims only in its overt, literal meaning. The Qur’an is regarded as a comprehensive divine communication intended to inform all levels of human life: physical, mental, and spiritual experience. Traditionally, in places like Afghanistan, a Muslim first learns the outward practices of the faith. He or she might then pursue the teachings of Sufism, after being established in the fundamentals of religious practice. The fundamental practices of Islam include adherence to an ethical code that is the basis for a peaceful community and a support for the challenges of spiritual life.

Sufi spiritual practices, far from being “heretical innovations,” as many Wahabi and other literalists would have it, are derived directly from the Qur’an and hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet. Meditation and contemplation have been practiced since the appearance of Islam to help bring aspirants into an intimacy with God’s message in the Qur’an. The resulting spiritual clarification has historically allowed for deeper levels of Qur’anic understanding and exegesis.

An important part of advanced Qur’anic study is the use of the scripture to activate the aspirant’s visionary capacity. With the exception of the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and a few others, there has been little exploration, let alone any widespread spiritual cultivation, of this visionary faculty in modern Western culture. Fortunately, Westerners at least have the writings of those like Jung and Campbell to help with an understanding of this side of Islamic thought and practice.

The Qur’an, considered to be the word of God revealed to Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel, is a record of visionary inspiration occurring at the highest prophetic level. The Qur’an’s visionary language addresses our own spiritual imagination with an invitation to orient ourselves toward spiritual truth. The work of Jung and Campbell add to the centuries of writings by the Sufis which allow us to understand why strict literalism is untenable in the application of divine revelation, Islamic or otherwise. The reason is simple enough: scripture is the record of visionary revelation, a process of analogical and metaphorical inspiration that overrides the logical processes used in the ordering of things, whether words or rules. Revelation occurs not through a rational process but through a prophetic receptivity called inspiration. Although prophetic inspiration is understood to be limited to the prophets chosen by God, the capacity for personal spiritual inspiration is held, in Islamic spirituality, to be at the heart of each individual. Scripture is the record of the revelatory inspiration of the prophets, a synthesis of the visionary prophetic experience and its translation into the language of the receiving culture.

The religious literalist, lacking spiritual clarity and fluidity, stands on the shore of this ocean of visionary meaning, facing off with his nemesis standing on the shore of modern secularism. Modern secular culture often ignores, dismisses, or proposes to “deconstruct” documents of revelatory inspiration like the Qur’an using the intellectual, analytical tools it has invented. Using these limited intellectual tools, the modern secularist can no better understand the scope of revelation than can the literalist believer. It is only with the cultivation of our own powers of imagination and through our capacity for visionary experience that we can understand the importance of religious scripture. It is only at this level of visionary understanding that there can be an authentic, not just well-meaning, acceptance of other people’s religions. This is because the “inner vision” sees the manner in which Spirit has revealed itself in each scripture.

 Sufis initiate this process of opening the “inner eye” by drawing attention to the fact that all people are born with some visionary capacity. All people experience their own visionary capacity at least to some extent, for example, in their dreams. Dreams do not censure or limit meanings to what the same person, waking, might consider rational or logical. Although it may seem that trivial, unrelated images often appear in dreams, most people can also remember dreams that have brought them important insights. Dreams can bring us face to face with our deep yearning for meaning, hidden under the preoccupations and diversions of daily life.

Sufis cultivate the visionary capacity to a much greater degree through spiritual practices that allow the mind to dissociate from rigid fixations. The heart-mind is restored to its function of reflective clarity, which enables a broad perception of reality compared to the limitations of habitual fixations and reactions. Historically, this process of clarification has been likened in many traditions of spirituality to the polishing of a mirror, in which the images of all of creation and their true meanings are to be found reflected. This purification of consciousness, called “the polishing of the heart” by the Prophet Muhammad in a famous hadith, was thought to activate the “inner seeing,” meaning the visionary capacity.

Muslims of the last millennium were taught that the visible world that we inhabit is the physical manifestation of an unseen world, latent with meaning. This idea of visible and hidden levels of existence is found in the Qur’an as well as in hadith literature. These scriptural statements were thought by early Muslim scholars to accord with Platonic and Neoplatonic teachings, which were absorbed into Islamic theology and philosophy early on. Muslim mystics considered human beings to have the innate capacity to perceive the invisible world. They just needed to clarify their perceptions sufficiently to be able apprehend it. The Qur’an has always been considered by Sufis and other Muslims to be the visionary guide for this process. The Qur’an expresses itself in visionary terminology; God speaks about His own nature and the nature and destiny of humanity using allegorical imagery from the natural world. He calls the events that people witness in the world and within themselves ayat, a word meaning “signs,” the same word He uses for the “verses” of the Qur’an. In other words, not only is the Qur’an a book of His signs, but the world outside of ourselves and that of our internal experiences are a Qur’an, an unfolding of “signs.” The Qur’an describes the cosmos as a manifestation of unseen divine words, similar to the logoi of Greek thought. The “inner vision” has the capacity to witness the connection between these levels of manifestation that bridge the divine words and the words of cosmic manifestation. The heart of the gnostic Muslim is the sapiential bridge between these levels.

This visionary understanding of the Qur’an is not only a challenge to the literalists, but also to thinkers who view scripture as merely symbolic, in the intellectual sense of representing ideas metaphorically. These thinkers do not acknowledge the transformative power of visionary metaphors that spiritually dominate the hearts they illuminate. It is also a challenge to some modern Muslim science writers who attempt to offer a scientific basis for Qur’anic statements about natural phenomena.

The Sufi would argue that the Qur’an teaches us how to orient our deepest selves toward the presence of God in the world around us and in ourselves. It kindles faith in an originating Spirit and provides the means to experience that Spirit which pervades all of creation. Islam means surrender. This is a surrender to the Spirit that is beyond this world, yet manifests everywhere within the world around us, despite the diversity of the world’s forms.

This is the Islam that I discovered and surrendered to after my many years of travel and study. Its essential teachings are just as relevant to my life in twenty-first century America as they were to Muslims in the time of the Prophet. This is the Islam of an open heart, a heart firmly dedicated to both truth and mercy.

Robert Abdul Hayy Darr
(Photo: Leonard Bearne)