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Rereadings and Transformations of Sufism in the West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Thierry Zarcone
Thierry Zarcone*
Affiliation:
CNRS/EHESS, Paris
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In his study of the conversion of Westerners to Islam, a Turkish sociologist revealed in 1996 that it happened that a significant proportion of the converts had adopted that religion under the influence of Islamic mysticism, or Sufism. Now Sufism, located at the meeting-point of the written and oral traditions of Islam, offers an original commentary on the Quran and a spiritual practice based on psychosomatic exercises close to yoga. Interest in Sufism among Westerners was revealed at the end of the nineteenth century and became considerable from the 1930s onwards, resulting in the foundation in Europe of Sufi groups directed by converts who very quickly became shaykhs (shaikh). These first groups, to which new ones were added, are still active today, although somewhat bruised by numerous divisions. The reasons for conversion to Sufism among Europeans, for the most part from intellectual milieux, rest on concerns of a spiritual dimension linked to the climate of religious crisis which the modern West has experienced since the end of the nineteenth century. To which should be added in recent decades the fashionable exoticism fostered by the development of means of transport and communication which have brought East and West closer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 187 , September 1999 , pp. 110 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

References

Notes

I am grateful to X. Accart, J.-P. Brach, J.-P. Laurant and N. Luca for their corrections and suggestions.

1. Ali Köse, Conversion to Islam: A Study of British Converts (London and New York, 1996), p. 142.

2. Sufism did, moreover, precede the appearance of the structure of orders by several centuries. In a study of the mystical Ottoman milieu of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, I have attempted to demonstrate the relationship of Sufism - the mystical ideology - to the order, that is, Sufi sociability. See Thierry Zarcone, Mystiques, philosophes et franc-maçons en Islam: Rizâ Tevfik, penseur ottoman (1868-1949) du soufisme à la confrèrie (Paris, 1993).

3. Information on the main Sufi orders is to be found in A. Popovic and G. Veinstein, Les ordres soufis dans le monde musulman (Paris, 1996).

4. On this question, see Mark Sedgwick, ‘Traditional Sufism', Aries 22 (Paris, 1999), pp. 3-24.

5. Augustin Berque, ‘Un mystique moderniste: le Cheikh Benalioua', in IIe Congrès des Sociétés savantes de l'Afrique du Nord (1936), pp. 719-720.

6. The group founded by this shaykh has been settled above all in London since the 1970s. It also has offshoots in the United States and in Europe (France and Germany). The order gathers many of Muslim descent, from Cyprus and the Indian sub-continent, and a significant number of British and German converts.

7. Tayfun Atay, Batï'da bir nakshi cemaatï. Sheyh Nâzïm Kibrisï örnegi (‘A Naqshibandiya community in the East. The example of Shaykh Nazim Kibrisi’) (Istanbul, 1996) pp. 181-194. This book is a Turkish translation of T. Atay, ‘Naqshbandis Sufis in a Western Setting', D. Phil. thesis, University of London (SOAS), 1995.

8. See Guénon's two works, La crise du monde moderne (Paris, 1927), translated by Arthur Osborne as The Crisis of the Modern World (London, 1942), and Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps (Paris, 1945), translated by Lord Northbourne as The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times (London, 1953).

9. Ian Dallas, alias Abd al-Qadiri, established his group first in England in 1970, where he led a community of 200 families at Wood Daling Hall, outside Norwich, Norfolk (Ali Köse, Conversion to Islam, p. 178) then in the United States and at Granada, Spain.

10. Personal communication from this theologian on Sufism sent in 1967 to the Turkish author I. Hakkï Akin and published in a book cited by Mustafa Tahralï in his article, ‘Batï'da ihtida hadiselerinde tasavvufun rolü' (‘The role of Sufism in questions of conversion to Islam in the West’), in Uluslararasï birinci Islam sypozyumu (Izmir, Dokuz Eylül Universitesi, 1985), pp. 141-162.

11. Letter sent to Pierre Collard, an extract from which is published in his article, ‘René Guénon et la religion musulmane', Renaissance traditionelle, 29 (Paris, 1977), p. 4.

12. J.-P. Laurant, Le sens caché dans l'oeuvre de René Guenon (Paris, 1975), pp. 234-235.

13. J.-P. Laurant, ‘Le Soufisme', in René Guénon et l'actualité de la pensée traditionnelle: Actes du colloque de Cerisy-La-Salle, 13-20 juillet 1973, Braine-le-Combe (de Beaucens, 1977), p. 96.

14. Letter published by Mario Manara, ‘De la confusion en plus: Planète-Plus et les prétendus disciples de René Guénon', Rivista di studi tradizionali, July-Dec. 1970 (Turin), p. 207.

15. See Initiation et réalisation spirituelle (Paris, 1967).

16. Ibid.

17. Extracted from a letter from Guénon to Alain Daniélou of 27 August 1947, cited by Robert Baudry, ‘De la Loire au Nil, ou l'itinéraire spirituel de René Guénon', in Loire littérature: Acte du colloque d'Angers du 26 au 29 mai 1968 (Angers, 1989), p. 346 note 5. In a letter written in 1934 Guénon asserted that there was nothing of the convert about him, and that his personal status could not in any way serve as an example and had not had a beginning in the proper sense of the word (Études traditionnelles, 87, Paris, 1986, n. 491, pp. 4-9).

18. ‘La "Non-conversion" de René Guénon (1886-1951)', in Jean-Christophe Attias (ed.), De la conversion (Paris), pp. 133-139.

19. For the position of Guénon and his followers vis-à-vis this trend, see Antoine Faivre, ‘Histoire de la notion moderne de tradition dans ses rapports avec les courants ésotériques (XVe-XXe siècles)', Aries. Symboles et mythes dans les mouvements initiatiques et ésotériques (XVIIe-XXe siècles): filiations et emprunts (Paris, 1999), pp. 7-48.

20. See for example Robert Amadou, ‘René Guénon et le soufisme', in René Guénon et l'actualité de la pensée traditionnelle, pp. 103-109; Pierre Collard, ‘René Guénon et la religion musulmanne', Renaissance traditionnelle, 29 (Paris, 1977), pp. 1-14; Giovanni Ponte, ‘Se convertir à quoi', Renaissance traditionnelle, 37 (Paris, 1979), pp. 17-31.

21. J.-P. Laurant, ‘La "Non-Conversion" de René Guénon', p. 239.

22. See Tayfun Atay, Batï'da bir nakshi cemaatï.

23. Shaykh Nazim, La preuve de la générosité (Avignon, 1997).

24. Mario Manara, ‘De la confusion en plus', p. 207.

25. J.-P. Laurant, Le sens caché dans l'oeuvre de René Guénon, p. 235.

26. Mark Sedgwick, ‘Traditional Sufism'.

27. This work was published at Paris in 1948.

28. Ibid. p. 25.

29. J.G.J. ter Haar, Follower and Heir of the Prophet: Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624) as a Mystic (Leiden, 1992), pp. 122-131.

30. This was published for the first time in France in the periodical, La Gnose in 1911. A new translation of the text was made by Michel Chodkiewicz (Paris, 1982).

31. See Frithjof Schuon, De l'Unité transcendante des religions (Paris, 1948), pp. 45-46.

32. Charles-André Gils, ‘Le maître d'or. Apperçus complémentaires sur la tradition hermétique', Vers la tradi tion, 74 (1998-1999), p. 3

33. L'attestation de foi. Première base de l'Islam (Casablanca, 1994), pp. 64-66.

34. The Spanish community has been described by Francisco López Barrios and Miguel José Haguerty, Murieron para vivir (Barcelona, 1983). See also L. Rocher and F. Cherqaoui, D'une foi a l'autre: Les conversions à l'islam en occident (Paris, 1986), pp. 175-186.

35. Ali Köse, Conversion to Islam, pp. 175-188.

37. Ismail Kara, ‘Tarih ve Hurafe: Çagdash Islam düshüncesinde tarih tel£kisi' (‘History and Traditions: Con sideration of the History in the Modem Islamic Thought’), Dergâh (Istanbul), 105 (1998), p. 24 (in Turkish). On the commentary of Ibn Arabi in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Thierry Zarcone, Mystiques, philosophes et francs-maçons en Islam, pp. 154-164.