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| http://www.carolradway.com/sufism/sufism.htm |
By Larbi Arbaoui
Through fiction and fantasy, the human
mind perpetuates and flies high to reach and embrace the clouds which
draw dreams that may not be realized or require decades to become
reality. Every one of us has experienced this fanciful daydreaming at a
certain time in our life. We resort to this fabulous faculty every now
and then in an attempt to escape harsh realities or to depict an exotic
imaginary life as psychological comfort and a delusive response to the
urgent desires of the deprived self. This is the human mind, but
sometimes in pertinent stark separation from the real world. Yet, when
this process has become a life style, a mode of thinking and an approach
towards one’s life, we start to think about extreme Sufism.
In our talk about Sufism, I don’t mean
that branch which promotes individual discipline as a route to reach God
through diligence in worship and self-purification of the heart of bad
attitudes, avoiding forbidden things and keeping good moral character. I
have to draw the dividing line between Sufism as a religious practice
and as a thinking pattern that has to do more with escapism, and
irrational thinking evoking defeatism and moral decadence.
In this regard, I mean specifically the
people who whenever they feel discomfort or lack sufficient tools to
change their conditions, resort to dreams and fantasies under the
pretext of asceticism and mysticism. Those people, with their
imagination that is in most cases beyond general standards of the
rational and proper reflection, live in ivory towers being aloof from
the real world. They immerse into a world of their own perception and
phantasms, which is subject to abstract laws that have nothing to do
with common sense.
Some of these illusionists claim to have
established physical contact with the divine as in the case of Sheikh
Sidi Mohammed Ben Ali Elzimrani who is buried in Bab Ftouh in the city
of Fez. Through their religious journey in the pursuit of God and true
practices, they believe to have had the secrets of the globe revealed to
them and were foretold the keys of the unseen metaphysical world. Some
of them believe to have intermingled with the “self” of God and belong
to His kingdom after a long process of self-cleansing. However, their
claims are much ado about nothing, since they can’t provide a practical
way by which other people may undergo the same experiences. This is
crystal clear evidence that those manifestations happen only in their
mere dreams and are far from reality.
These attempts to transcend common sense
and human understanding are explained as a total defeat and deficit to
participate in the process of change and an inability to function
positively in society. Here lies the crisis of intellects who fail to
cope with the changes taking place in all the facets of contemporary
life. Instead of integrating into society and contributing to its
progress, they prefer to turn to their dreams and myths that are a far
cry from their real existence. This chasm between the imaginary and
real world is highly manifested through their thwarting of the concrete
world in which they physically belong and by their mythical ideas.
Originally published in Morocco World News
Taroudant, Morocco, June 24, 2012
