Manufacturing "Islam Lite": Sufism as "Good Islam"
How the politics of "good Muslim" vs. "bad Muslim" manufactures consent for genocide.
The lecture hall was almost empty. A few loyal souls had shown up … But the vast majority of the seats were unclaimed. Esfandi had for some reason entitled his lecture ‘Fire and Surrender in the Islamic Way’, as if not remembering, or even caring, that Islam was hardly a popular subject around here [Santa Barbara, CA]. If he’d substituted the word ‘Sufi’, there’d have been blondes in the back row. - Pico Iyer
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The affirmative denial “I am not religious but I am spiritual” that has achieved ubiquitous purchase in recent years crystallizes this logic of difference. The spiritual here refers to something ineffable that is not really religion but that owes its recognition precisely in relation to religion. Spirituality takes the form of secularized religion unencumbered from institutional, doctrinal, and ritual demands. The rebirth of religion as spirituality is made possible by the power of the secular imaginary within which religion represents something out there, always available for critique, moderation, and humanization. It is precisely such a secular notion of the spiritual that sustains the liberal demand for religious moderation, a demand that is made most frequently on Islam and Muslims today. - SharAli Tareen
Spiritual but Not Religious?
How many times have you heard the adage: “I am spiritual but not religious”? Perhaps you believe in this framing in describing your own approach to faith. But what does this sentence evoke? Is it an innocent, enlightened distancing from the confines of “organized” religion? You might not think much of it, but such framing drives the liberal bias towards “spirituality” as being a “good” category of practice as opposed to “bad” religion. It is a loaded proclamation. In SherAli Tareen’s words above, “spiritual but not religious” sustains a “secular notion of the spiritual that sustains the liberal demand for religious moderation, a demand that is made most frequently on Islam and Muslims.” While this phrase emerged from an era of critiquing organized religion and dogma—namely, that of Christianity— it primarily affects perceptions of Islam and Muslims.
Based on the logic of spiritual > religious, any Muslim who resists the status quo based on religious conviction—like the very religious communities in Gaza, Lebanon or Yemen—are immediately cast as suspect according to the liberal gaze. This framing provides fodder for imperial aims because it makes it more OK to exterminate “bad Muslims.”. Born out of the modernist, Protestant experience, the subjectivity of American and European views on religion in general and the perpetual “othering” of Islam, such rhetoric provides cover for the ongoing expansionist military policies towards Muslims abroad and the surveillance, incarceration and silencing of American Muslims domestically.
Think I am exaggerating? Allow me to elaborate. For this post, we will take a bit of a more academic deep dive behind the way Sufism has been manufactured as a “liberal”, “spiritual” (read: good) form of Islam and why that binary is dangerous and actually continues to feed genocidal policies against Muslim-majority communities.
In 1906, American spiritualist W.J. Colville wrote about the differences between “Mohammedans”; admitting that not all devotees of the Muslim faith are “narrow-minded or bigoted.” He highlighted that while “Sunees” are the least flexible in their interpretations of the Qur’an, the “Sheeah of Persia” are more enlightened and “elastic in their interpretations.” Like Orientalists before (and after him), Coleville would not be the first to tie Persian mysticism to a more favorable Western cosmopolitan approach to religion. Another Orientalist text on the Middle East refers to the “rigid monotheism of the Arab mind”1 compared to the flexibility of the mind of Persians and Indians. The Orientalist favoring of “Soofism” as less concerned with Islamic law and “Arab dogma” also viewed “mystics” as less likely to defy imperialist projects than other Muslim groups (which, if you’ve been following my work for sometime, is a huge falsehood, as Muslim Sufi scholars were once at the forefront of anti-colonial resistance.)
Rumi Watered Down
Perhaps one of the most popular American exposures to Sufism has come through the English-version poetry of the famous 13th-century scholar and jurist Jalaluddin Rumi, known simply as Rumi in the mainstream. Versions of Rumi’s poetry are the best-selling poetry books in America to date. Madonna sang versions of his poetry as adapted by guru Deepak Chopra. Donna Karan used recitations of his poetry as a background to her fashion shows. Directly after September 11th, The Soul of Rumi, 400-pages of poetry translated by Coleman Barks, made the best-sellers list. For an age-old Muslim poet hailing from modern-day Balkh, Rumi’s popularity in the mainstream typifies the American fetish towards Sufism. (Read “The Erasure of Islam from Rumi’s Poetry”, here).
On social media, this ad for “Rumi Spice” might pop up on your feed: which boasts itself as being “Michelin-quality spice from Afghanistan that supports Afghan women.” Rumi. Spice. Oppressed Women. Ah, nothing sells better than that sensationalist trifecta that continues to exoticize and dehumanize Muslim women who are in dire need of saving from savage brown men. Rumi’s American, consumerist fame is further sustained in the world of “feel good spirituality” accounts that feed collective narcissism in the garb of ancient wisdom, where quotable self-help quotes amidst the backdrop of pretty sunsets attributed to him circulate rather widely.
While some of the memes and quotes are more often accurate or are close translations to Rumi’s original work, most are not, which points to an active process of transforming a 13th-century Muslim jurist into a watered-down hippie New Age mystic. In an article that is no longer online, “Facebook Rumi: How a Muslim Mystic Became a Popular Meme,” Professor Omid Safi notes that the contemporary misappropriation of Rumi rests mainly on themes of “eroticism,” and on a “foolishness” that replaces real wisdom. The appetite for Rumi points to a hostility towards “organized religion”— even though “Rumi who taught in a madrasa himself.” (Safi)
Safi regards the modern-day “Social Media Rumi” phenomenon “as a sign of contemporary individualistic, feel-good consumerism that is interested in individual experience more than any type of spiritual transformation.” Safi and other Persianists and scholars of Sufsim, stress the need of situating Rumi back into the Islamic tradition where he belongs. Safi reminds us that Rumi was “profoundly connected to the Prophet,” reminding us that he saw himself the “offspring of the soul of Muhammad.” Indeed, even the Sufi order based on Rumi’s teachings, the Mevlevi order, has been romanticized in the West as “whirling dervishes”, when in fact, their teachings emphasize serious commitment, ritual, community, and discipline, values that are on the brink of extinction in most Western societies today.
But what does this ongoing fascination with Rumi the Persian Sufi tell us? Why is it relevant to our present moment?
Weaponizing Sufism
To answer this, let us go back about two decades. In a 2003 conference entitled “Understanding Sufism and its Potential Role in US Policy,” a right-wing DC think-tank, the Nixon Center, hosted a well-known Sufi scholar, Hesham Kabbani and Bernard Lewis, the prominent historian and scholar of the Middle East, who played an influential role in shaping Western policy toward the region, and whose scholarship is credited as being a driving force behind U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
At the conference, he remarked: “But Sufism is remarkable, as it reflects something more than tolerance due to its universal nature.” Lewis references the poetry of Rumi and Ibn Arabi to commend Sufism’s superiority over “Islam proper” because it holds the idea “that all the religions are basically the same: all religions have the same purpose, the same message, the same communication, and they worship the same God”.2
The demand of “sameness” that Lewis patronizingly expects of Muslims implies that Sufis are less likely to take critical political stances against Western imperial projects: read: they’re more like us, the good guys. But his words reveal something even more disingenuous: if the conference were truly about spirituality as an antidote to violence, then why didn’t it promote both Christians and Jewish expressions of mysticism as antidotal to “extremism”? Why would Kabbani, Lewis and the think-tank hawks that organized this conference place the entire onus on Islam to catch up to the superior universal standard of sameness enshrined in Christianity and Judaism? More importantly, according to Lewis’ favorable view of Sufis, since they are somehow “less Muslim,” (ie. better) it makes it more OK to exterminate those who are “fully Muslim.”
His co-host, Shaykh Kabbani reiterates Lewis’ understanding of Sufism as a universal equalizer. He begins his speech by also referencing Rumi and Ibn Arabi by citing their sayings:
I am a Muslim, but I don’t know if I am; I don’t know if I am a Christian or a Jew or an Austrian or an Eastern or a Western or an upper or lower. I don’t know if I am from the four elements of the world. I don’t know if I am from heaven or from earth. I don’t know if I am an Indian or a Chinese or a Bulgarian. I don’t know if I am Iraqi or Syrian. I don’t know if I am from Roroshan or Aswohan. I don’t know if I am from this world or that – but I am a body and a soul. My ego is my soul. When I mention two it means me and God.
Based on his interpretation of the above lines, Kabbani concludes that “Sufism works as a social power to bring people together” and assures his audience that “Sufis’ main goal was never to become the leaders of a country, but rather to become its social workers,” In performing for the Homeland Security personnel/think-tank hawk’s gaze, Kabbani ignores examples of numerous Muslim leaders in anti-colonial struggles such as Salahuddin Al-Ayyubi, Umar Futi Tal, Abdul Qādir Al-Jaza’eri, and Idris As-Senussi, who were all Sufis as well, but were involved in political rebellion and sometimes kingship/caliphate rule. (Kabbani also overlooks the legacies of scholarly warriors in his own spiritual lineage, the Naqshbandiyya, who, in Baghdad, formed a now-defunct army under the name of Jaysh Rijāl al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandiyya to combat the American invasion in Iraq, but I digress.)
Kabbani presents a selectively rosy picture of Sufism which has not always been as pacifist as he describes. Muslim informants such as Kabbani—and today, those who serve at the pleasure of the UAE government such as Abdullah Bin Bayyah, Hamza Yusuf and others—will readily rubber stamp a version of Islam that is malleable to the modernist, Protestant-based understanding of religion. A “good” pacifist, quietist, “cultural” Islam, as a opposed to a “bad,” Islam that resists oppression and state-tyranny. The irony is—rather than being docile, mild and meek—this form of quietest Islam is actually more politically radical than that of run-of-the-mill Islamists, because quietist Islam protects and promotes the extremist, fundamentalist policies enacted by nation states, their security apparatus and militaries. “Good Islam” hence provides ironclad theological cover for full blown state terrorism to be unleashed on innocent people. In thinking they support the Islamic ideals of civility and peace, they actually promote the anti-Islamic project of torture, debauchery and injustice.
The Union of Mysticism and Liberalism
It is important to locate the conflation of mysticism with moderation in the work nineteenth-century and twentieth-century scholars of Islamic studies at American universities. Scholars like Wilfred Cantwell Smith (d. 2000), Fazlur Rahman (d.1988), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b.1933), H.A.R.Gibb (d.1971) and Annemarie Schimmel (d. 2003) would be the first to distinguish between Islamic practices deemed modern (legal debates, reform movements), and others seen as perennial (Sufism, metaphysics); transcending the test of time and thus are beyond compartmentalization into any one religion.3
But even so, in a television interview on an Arabic-speaking channel with Professor Annemarie Schimmel, she was asked why “Westerners are so fascinated with Sufism,” to which she attributed the appeal of the theme of love: “they (Westerners) are interested [in Sufism] because they see in it the love for God as a central role and not so much the shari’ah” and added that this love for Sufism is actually misguided “because a good Sufi should follow shar’iah and all that it entails.” Schimmel here reflects a core teaching in the Islamic intellectual tradition, such as the saying by Imam Malik—the founder of Maliki legal school—who was known to have said: “Whoever studies tasawwuf (Sufism) without fiqh (jurisprudence) is a heretic, and whoever studies fiqh without tasawwuf is corrupted, and whoever studies tasawwuf and fiqh will find the truth and reality of Islam.” According to Imam Malik and Schimmel then, the obvious is stated: it’s not really Sufism if it’s not rooted in Islam.
In her paper, the Transformation of Indo-Persian “Mysticism” into Liberal Islamic Modernity, Corbett-Hicks suggests that the Cold War intersection of multi-national strategic interests and Orientalist knowledges birthed the “union of liberalisms and mysticisms.” Arguing against subjective narrative tropes, especially as they pertain to the study of Islam, Talal Asad suggests that scholars must investigate “the construction of specific historical narratives” around which their scholarship on religion is based. Asad presents us with useful tools for reading religion in new ways, especially when it comes to reading the liberal bias toward Sufism and the ways it gets manufactured and obscured in modernist, Protestant, Orientalist narratives.
To remedy this, we must cultivate an awareness that any discussion of Islam will ultimately be colored by a process of racialization. In her masterful work, The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzwa deals with the 19th century Orientalist view of Islam as a “Semitic” or Arab nationalist religion and how this perception would actually expel Islam outside the fold of world religions. This othering is why Islam it seen as backwards, belated and derivative from Jewish or Christian theologies. Masuzawa notes that representations of Islam as an Arab “invention” and a more rigid “byproduct” of Judaism, would help propel negative stereotypes against Muslims for centuries to come. In this pervasive climate of genocidal Islamophobia, I would say, boy, was she right.
Masuzawa cites the work of German Orientalist scholar Otto Pfleidere who sees Islam through a racialized lens; Islam as Arab, and Sufism as Arian:
A peculiarity of Persian Islamism, not less interesting, is Sufism, a mystical speculative tendency, some of which was deeply pious and given to flights of high thinking. Certain is that this was not a genuine product of Arabian Islamism, even though it must remain undecided whether it owes its origins to ancient Persian, Indian or Neo-platonic Gnosticism. (Pfleidere, p.202)
Masuzawa warns of the danger of representing Sufism in light of the “European imagination by the ethereal image of a ring of whirling dervishes in white,” pitted against the inherent rigid barbarism of “Islam proper.” Under the guise of nuance, by cherry-picking “positive” aspects of Islam, Orientalist scholars push for Islamophobia’s less-assuming twin, a type of Islamophilia. A project of manufacturing “good Islam” that still projects a sense of Western superiority over Muslims. When Sufism is divorced from the core of Islam, it implies that Sufism emerged despite Islam’s rigidity, not as an integral—organic—part of it.
The Orientalist fetishization of Sufism, then, appears to be advocating for something other than Islam altogether. Because, while laudatory accounts of Sufism may seem refreshingly positive, they are actually calling for a form of Islamic spirituality that is “more or less coeval with Christianity or, if not quite that, with something yet nameless but very much like Christianity of the future.” (Masuzawa, 204)
The Dangers of the “Good Muslim”
The essentialized categories of a more “mystical” or “Sufi” ie. “good,” version of Islam, pitted against a more “normative” and inept Islamic practice has massive—ultimately violent— implications: in Mahmood Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, he critiques the binary framework that divides Muslims into "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims” for their egregious effects on foreign policy.
“Good Muslims” are those seen as “spiritual but not religious”, modern, secular, pro-Western, and politically compliant. They talk about women’s rights, they are proponents of non-violence, and they vote blue no matter who. “Bad Muslims” are framed as fundamentalists, extremists, or threats to Western ideals and security. Mamdani argues that this categorization has been used to justify political intervention and military action in Muslim-majority countries. Furthermore, this rhetoric reflects a colonial mindset, where compliance with Western interests (Sufism) is rewarded and dissent (Islam proper) is punished.
We’ve already read previously on this Substack who the main driver and primary beneficiary is behind the creation of the category of “Islamic Terrorism”: none other than the Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been trying to manufacture consent for ethnically cleansing, occupying and invading the Middle East since the 80s. With the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon and Palestine well under way, one can very clearly see how lethal, poisonous and destructive the rhetoric of “good Muslim” “bad Muslim” can be. It can kill.
The project of manufacturing a neutered, aberration, liberal version of Islam single-handedly shapes and drives American foreign policy. The ongoing War-on-Terror/CVE/the Patriot Act/Muslim Ban/Abraham Accords sustains the campaign of mass violence towards Muslims. Both Democrats and Republicans push the same essentialist logic and strategies: by locating compliant “State Department types,” the “good” Muslim bedfellows who will readily serve as politically obedient partners (*ahem* pawns), Sufism becomes just one of many acceptable brands of a “watered down” Islam—a defanged, incomplete version of Islam—denying it the fullness of belonging a more holistic expression and deeper history.
While they are so ready to sell their soul for measly crumbs and “a seat the table,” Muslim native informants tend to forget that these efforts reveal two faces of the same coin: that Islamophilia towards one manufactured group of “good Muslims” is nothing more than Islamophobia towards all Muslims.
Today—with the Abraham Accords and other State Department efforts to “combat Islamism” with help of native informants and oppressive Muslim governments—the promotion of an aberrant, state-sponsored form of Islam in the form madkhali Sufism4 has been ensured. The hallmark identifiers of this Frankenstein Islam is accepting normalization with Israel and Great Power imperialism in the Muslim world.
With Trump back in power, prepare to see more efforts to “Promote Peace in Muslim Societies”, and initiatives towards a “less violent” more “civilized” form of Islam to be bolstered. I urge you to view these efforts for what they are: nothing but expendable tools in the pernicious game of colonial control. No matter how hard they try to justify it, informants who take part in such efforts do not realize that they are being played. Not only that, their collusion is deadly because as it hides under the fig leaf of “virtue”, “tradition” and “orthodoxy” to pit themselves against the politics of “modernists” “marxists” and “bad Islamists”—or any Muslim who resists state repression. By doing so, they thereby throw all Muslims under the colonialist bus and manufacture consent for genocide.
Whether post-9/11 or post-Oct. 7th, whether it is pushing for “Sufi Islam”, “Salafi Islam”, “Plain Vanilla Islam” or what have you, the problem lies in just that: the arrogant act of pushing, shaping and regulating Islam. What Orientalists, government officials and native informants cannot seem to fathom, that it is regulation and the desire to control Islam that is the source of tyranny and mass violence, not Islam or any version of it.
Any government efforts that try to quell so-called Muslim radicalization via a counterterrorism agenda through cozying to Sufis or any other group forgets that the desire to control Islam is much easier than the hard work of introspection. It is much harder to do the work of re-examining the core political issues and grievances that actually affect the lives of most Muslims worldwide: interventionist foreign policy and support for occupation, invasion, dehumanization, starvation, and mass killings of over 1 million Muslims and counting since 9/11.
Whether it is in the old-school “clash of civilizations” rhetoric in the likes of Colville who spoke about the differences between “Mohammedans”, “Sunees” and the “Sheeah of Persia” or Netanyahu, who justified Israel’s senseless ethnic cleansing campaign by warning Westerners that the “Judeo-Christian civilization is fighting for its life,” the obsession with regulating and pacifying Islam and Muslims has now reached its genocidal zenith.
The decades—if not centuries— of Orientalist fascination, exoticism, othering and demonization have come home to roost. Pitting any version of “good Islam” against a “bad Islam” has manufactured the rhetoric, logic and consent necessary to exterminate “bad Muslims”—who today in Gaza are babies, mothers, fathers—en masse.
It is time for those who, for so long, relied on the minstrel-esque act of performing the “good Muslim”—those who have enjoyed political expediency and upward mobility on the backs of their oppressed brothers and sisters—to repent and seek amends for their ways. It is also time for those who knowingly or unknowingly partake in manufacturing spirituality as a tool for colonial collusion—to take a good look at themselves. They might just find that—beneath the feel-good inter religious dialogue, the yoga lessons, the meditation retreats, the spirituality coaching—that their whole lifestyle has inadvertently manufactured consent for genocide.
Hicks, Rosemary R., Comparative Religion and the Cold War Transformation of Indo-Persian “Mysticism” into Liberal Islamic Modernity, Secularism and Religion-Making, ed. Dressler and Mandair, AAR, Oxford University Press, 2011, 141.
Dressler and Mandair, Secularism and Religion-Making, 149.
On Madkhalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madkhalism