Dr. Warren Larson Lecture: Suif Influences on Folk Islam
Dr. Warren Larson delivered a lecture on Sufi Influences on Folk Islam during a CIU course. Here, Larson presents the effects from the tradition of Sufism on Folk Islam.
Here starts the auto-generated transcription of Dr. Warren Larson Lecture, Suif Influences on Folk Islam
Again, more on history, and this time, a little bit more on Sufi influence. I did mention it last time, but I also want to, just begin with a little bit of a story from one of my students. You know, quite a few of our students take these classes, and then they they go out and they work, you know, and they send back some interesting stuff. I find it very interesting and I pray for them, so I’m hoping that, you too will do the same, send back any stories on folk practices to your old professor. It’d be much appreciated.
But one of my students wrote back something that I found very interesting, and he talked, and she talked about, use of the word. In other words, remember we used a couple lectures ago, you know, god be praised or god be thanked, something like that. And these students were out there in one of these places, I think in South Asia somewhere, and they came back home one day from being away for a little while and and their landlord had painted the the house. He’d painted it a purple, and, so they objected or at least they the painting was going on. They said, you know, we really want that house that we’re renting from you to be white rather than purple.
So they they they, were able to get it done in white. But then, the landlord, they say, these students of ours who had taken some Islam, they said that the landlord consented to get it white, but he had the last word on the foundation. Now listen carefully. The color was not the only surprise. The painter had written, Across one of the foundation stones.
When we saw it, we knew we could never paint over it. So, because they said, you know, such an act would be a great insult, Mar Shelah, loosely translated, means God allows it. Such a statement is often found on new houses. It serves several purposes. First of all, it acknowledges God as the source of blessings, and rightly so, but by so doing, such a phrase causes us to remember God as the giver of good gifts.
At the same time, mashallah is can deflect a judgment a judgmental attitude in a guest. If I were to question the appropriateness of something extravagant in my neighborhood’s possession, the fact that God allowed him to have such a thing, like a satellite dish or a luxury car or even a, a beautiful house, should soften any criticism and envy. It is the guard against envy that may be the greatest motivation for these words on your house. A felt need here amongst the number of people is the need to ward off the evil eye. Masha’Allah can do just that.
It can protect the processors of a new house like ours from a potential disaster and from a curse. So they’ll do it even, for, you know, foreigners or missionaries or whoever they are. I’ve seen this myself. One neighbor where I was in Pakistan built a beautiful house, and he it was much higher than houses in the immediate area. What did he do?
He wrote Moshala really up high so that, it would ward off any envy or jealousy. Now, so, we’re gonna talk now about Sufi influences, and, there’s a chart here, and I wanted to point out something about this chart. The main thing in this chart is that Sufi influence goes both ways. Just like fundamentalism goes both ways, you know, into Sunnis and Shiites and everyone else, it goes into both branches of Islam. Now in, in Islam, you have 2 major divisions.
You have the Sunnis, of course, which are the they have the, the lion’s share of of Muslims. 85% of the Muslims in the world are Sunnis. You have Sunnis here, and they have their 4 schools of law, Hanafis, Malaikis, Shaafis, and Hanbalis, and, we had Hanafis in South Asia, specifically Pakistan, but India as well. You have different schools of law in different parts of the Muslim world. The Muslim world is vast, and so, they have 4 schools of law.
In other words, there are some differences on what they’ve decided, like, you know, the punishment that should be given to, for this and that and the other thing. But notice that there’s a broken line here, Ahmadiyyas, that’s broken because they’re a heretical sect, and, you have about 4 4000000 of them in Pakistan. They’re persecuted more than the Christians are. The reason they’re persecuted is because they’re, they say, well, you know, you’re not really Muslims. You call yourself a Muslim, because they had a prophet who came after Muhammad, and that’s terrible blasphemy.
From the schools of law, you have the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic associations that have come out of that, like the Hamas, not the Hezbollah. They would be come out of the the Shiites. But on this side, of course, you have the Shiites, different brands of Shiites, the Alamites, the Ismailis, the Zaydis, better known as the Twelvers, the Seveners, and the Fivers, and then you have heretical sects there too, such as the Alawites, in Syria, believe it or not. They are really they’re really, heretical. So, I think the point here of the whole, the whole, discussion here is that Islam was spread through Sufi saints primarily.
Now, we were talking in the last slide about, about this Sufi spreading all over the place. In other words, Sufism actually has permeated both sides of Islam. But, you know, it’s quite interesting to think of the fact that Islam has not spread primarily across the 100 and 100 of years through force, through the sword, but rather through Sufi influence. This is true in in Persia or or which is now Iran and Western Asia. It’s true in Central Asia, India, Indonesia, and Africa.
I wanted to tell you a little bit of a story here about, Data Ganj Baksh. When my editor wrote this, she after data, she had a colon as if it was data, but it’s not data. It’s an Urdu word, and it refers to a saint in Pakistan, in Lahore, in that beautiful Mughal city of Lahore. It’s right next to a a mosque that’s the glory of the Punjab for its beauty. It’s the called the Badshahi mosque.
Badshahi means king. So right next to that mosque is a shrine, and it’s Dhat Ganj Basha is the sort of the names given to that Sufi saint. And the reason why he is so popular is because the Muslims say that he spread Islam in that area, just by healing and praying for people and, associating with them. 1 of my friends, went there on a regular basis when he was doing his MA in English. He helped to helped teach my wife me and my wife, Urdu, not English, but Urdu in Pakistan, and he was very good in English.
And he’d taken he’d done his MA in English, And, he was telling me that the reason he passed his MA exams, obviously very stiff, was that that that Sufi saint helped him, Doctor Ganj Bakhsh, because he would go there every every week, when he was doing this MA. And, the saint helped him. So you see, what you have then is, is we’re still talking history and, the, the animistic beliefs and and symbols, were there, ahead of time. And and and, again, it’s it’s it’s I guess, it’s a bit repetitious, but, low Islam has basically adapted beliefs and principles, symbols. High Islam has interpreted the symbols, like the Hajj.
I I what by that, I mean that, and we mentioned this in the last last lecture, that the pilgrimage was there before Mohammed. He took it and he whitewashed it and he and he brought some things into, in fact, he brought a lot of it into into Islam so that you have today, the pilgrimage is one of the 5 pillars of Islam. I have a question here. It’s really one of the forum questions. Are there any Islamic symbols being reinterpreted today?
For example, how do veiled women want to be perceived? Is it working? So, we can you can discuss that in the in the forums, so I won’t go into detail here, but what about other symbols? Are there Islamic symbols being reinterpreted today? Obviously, the beards and burkas are, beards meaning that, you know, when we see beards, we generally think Taliban, but Muslims are trying to get across to us that beards don’t necessarily mean extremism, and I think they’re right, except that if you walk through a, through an airport with a beard today in the western world, you’re probably gonna get pulled over.
And so the Muslims are trying to reinterpret that and and certainly, But there are other symbols too. If you were to Google Islamic symbols, things would might come up like the, the crescent moon. When some people in the West see the crescent moon, I think they mistakenly think that that signifies a moon god, and that’s where it came from. I don’t think that’s true, but they are that’s the impression that they give. So there are quite a few Islamic symbols, and you can maybe think of more, that are are with us.
And, Muslims sometimes are trying to reinterpret them, and on the other hand, sometimes we take their symbols and, try to reinterpret them ourselves. For instance, if you see a Muslim in, you know, in the west west with, his with, you know, his dress on if he if he walks into a church, probably. People are gonna take that symbol and, and they’re going to think extremism, which is not necessarily true. This is just a picture of a shrine, that and there are shrines all over the place, all over the Muslim world. But, this is really what I wanted to, to talk about, in the end and to show the relationship between orthodox Islam.
I have a question there because, you know, we’re not we can’t be too dogmatic in saying what Orthodox Islam is, but we can also see from this chart that there is a type of Sufism that is higher, more noble, if we can say that, than what is generally practiced in folk or popular Islam. What do we mean by that? Well, we mean by that that, in Sufism, there was some there is evidence of some, nobility and love of God, that you don’t always see down here in folk or popular Islam where there are quite a few charlatans, quite a few, people in it for the money writing, you know, blessings out of the Quran and selling them and something like was going on in the Roman Catholic church at the time of of Martin Luther, corruptions that that he reacted against and others did as as well. But but I what I’m trying to say is that there were were periods in the history of Islam when Sufism was more prominent and, also, we can say that that in some cases, there is degeneration or deterioration today, and a lot of stuff goes on in popular Islam that is not the best.
But there is an overlap as I suggested before, and so let’s, keep that in mind. I wanted also to share something with the bible from the bible that I was just thinking about this morning as to why Muslims get into this. And I was thinking of, Psalm 90, and you will know the psalm. It’s the psalm of Moses. And Moses there in that psalm, I think the only one that he wrote, he talks about, you know, the things that that really worry people in in as far as I can see.
I was reading this this morning and I was struck by some of the things he says. He says for example, he says that, you know, our lives are so short. He says that, our days pass away under your wrath. We finish our years with a moan. The length of our days are 70 years or 80, if we have the strength.
Yet the span is but trouble and sorrow. So Moses talks about the brevity of life, and he and I think he also talks about, the fact that our sins are quite obvious. He says, we you you, in verse 8, you’ve set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. So our days are short, our sins are obvious, and, and I I think you could go on to say that not only are our days short, but in many ways, they are, life is is, a bit of a routine, and it is often boring. And so then he goes on to say at the end, of this Psalm 90, he says, satisfy verse 14, satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy, and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as you have seen trouble. So you know what? We need God. We need his presence. We need a personal relationship with him and we struggle with this as human beings, and Muslims do too.
They struggle with all kinds of things, and and so they they, get into counterfeits because of their loneliness, because of their boredom, because of the brevity of their life, often more brief than ours, and so they get into folk practices because of their need for God. You know, when we see these things, it should give us a greater burden for them, not a condemnation, even when we see extremism, a sorrow for them, a grief for them, a burden for them because really they need the Lord just like we do. I remember a song we used to sing, haven’t heard it for many, many years, people need the Lord. So that’s really, what we think of, in reference to Muslims.