On Palestine, Kashmir and Sufi Resistance
+ Get Access to the Full Transcript: Kashmiri Muslim Podcast on "Warrior Sufis"
Late last summer, I received an e-mail from a brilliant Kashmiri scholar named Ahmed bin Qasim, requesting a podcast interview to discuss my work on Sufi warriors. I told him his email meant more to me than an invitation to speak at a stuffy Ivy League university. Why? Because it felt like my work was making a tangible impact where it mattered the most. It felt significant that a bright, conscientious young brother from the beautiful, sorrowful land of Kashmir would reach out to me, another estranged, lone researcher of Palestinian descent working on themes of state repression and the forgotten imperative of principled resistance in Islam.
In our conversations prior to recording the podcast, I learned that both Ahmed’s parents have been held in separate Indian prisons: his father since 1993 (shortly after Ahmed’s birth) and his mother since 2018. His parents’ story reminded me a lot of the “forever prisoners” in Guantanamo Bay, whose ominous 22nd anniversary was marked last week on the January 11th, 2023: the day South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice. I talked about why that is significant in this Instagram post. It is hard to even imagine that Ahmed’s father has been in India’s prisons long before the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib even existed. When I talk about global injustice and the era of Muslim internment elsewhere on this Substack, it is the millions of untold stories like these that I am referring to.
Talking to Ahmed felt like I was talking to a fellow Falastini. His grounded, firm conviction had the signature sumud (resilient perseverance so characteristic of Palestinians) that it felt like I was talking to a political prisoner’s son or brother from the West Bank or Gaza. Whether they are languishing in Israel or India’s prisons, both Kashmiri and Palestinian prisoners have suffered egregious injustices at the hands of a totalitarian, occupying, ethno-supremacist states, most held without charge, suffering torture and untold brutality for decades. The story of both our peoples’ repression begins in the years 1947 and 1948, marking the creation of the India and Israel: resulting in the two-headed monster—almost mirror image—tragic occupations of Kashmir and Palestine.
Today, the two occupiers enjoy a strong, unholy love affair: both menaces fueled by supremacist anti-Muslim ideologies, Zionism and Hindutva. India has become one of Israel’s biggest arms exports clients, spending about $10 billion over the past decade. Not only that, Indian police forces have received training in Israel for “anti-terror” operations. Even a cursory glance at Zionist Twitter/X accounts will reveal that the biggest supporters of Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric are extremist anti-Muslim Indians. Since October 7th and the genocide in Gaza, the BJP has banned Kashmiris from attending or organizing pro-Palestine rallies, even Friday prayers have been banned in main mosques in Kashmir due to the state's fear that they may turn into sites of protest and solidarity with the people of Palestine.
As Western state repression reaches its bloodlusting zenith and the drums of a regional war beat at their loudest, I share below the transcript of the podcast I recorded with the Koshur Musulman. Recorded about a month before the Gaza genocide, we discuss the rich history of principled resistance in colonized Muslim-majorities communities. Listening to it again now brings a lot of the themes discussed to life. It is as if Gaza embodies the best of these virtues. Having historical context is imperative because Palestine (and now Yemen, South Africa and Namibia following suit) have rekindled the power our collective re-imagination of a different path forward, carving out a canvas of new possibilities with each totalitarian chokehold loosened.
With Gaza in mind, this history grows more important still, because the namesake of Hamas’ military wing is Izzidin al-Qassam, himself a representative of the Tijani order, which I expound on more in the podcast. Al-Qassam led the fiercest resistance to the British and Zionist colonization in the Revolt of 1936, arguably the fiercest resistance to Israeli occupation even before the Jewish state was founded in 1948. According to Rashid Khalidi:
[Al-Qassam] played a crucial role in winning the populace away from the elite-brokered politics of compromise with the British, and in showing them the "correct" path of popular armed struggle against the British and the Zionists.1
His eventual and heroic killing after a long manhunt by British forces galvanized different strata of Palestinian society, according to American-Muslim veteran journalist and historian Abdallah Schleifer. Now that this blog is no longer anonymous, you can expect me to share more freely a few personal caveats like this: Ammo Abdullah Schleifer was also a protege in journalism to my beloved late grandfather Mahmoud, who was the founder and editor-in-chief of Al-Manar newspaper and its English edition, the Jerusalem Star in 1965. My grandfather took him under his wing upon his conversion from Judaism to Islam in Al-Quds, but more on that later. For now, back to al-Qassam. On his unifying prowess, Schleifer writes:
Surrounded, he told his men to die as martyrs, and opened fire. His defiance and manner of his death (which stunned the traditional leadership) electrified the Palestinian people. Thousands forced their way past police lines at the funeral in Haifa, and the secular Arab nationalist parties invoked his memory as the symbol of resistance. It was the largest political gathering ever to assemble in mandatory Palestine.2
Historical accounts like this are so important: they bring deeper meaning and context to our present day. They shows us that the seeds seemingly buried both literally and figuratively more than a century ago did not simply decompose and wither away into oblivion. Despite the sorrow, compounded repression and the passage of time, those age-old seeds remain sturdy and prove they have taken root: both their timelessness and their urgency are evident today.
What is the secret behind la ilaha illa Allah and the resilience of Gazans and Kashmiris? What made al-Qassam the Tijani who he was? Was he the way he was because of his Sufism or in spite it? Read on, or listen to the full interview to find out.
A: In your article, The Saint and the Sword, you write about the struggles against colonization and oppression led by the Sufi leaders or warriors. But in the beginning of your article, you caution the readers when you argue that “in the time of the Sufi warriors, the “Sufi” label was a misnomer. In the precolonial era, tasawwuf was simply a normative expression of mainstream Islamic belief and practice.” You also quote Hamid Algar, who asserts that “in view of its practitioners, tasawwuf is coeval with Islam itself.” Could you talk to us about this?
F:بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
اللَّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلَىٰ سَيِّدِنَا مُحَمَّدٍ ❁ الْفَاتِحِ لِمَا أُغْلِقَ ❁ وَالْخَاتِمِ لِمَا سَبَقَ ❁ نَاصِرِ الْحَقِّ بِالْحَقِّ ❁ وَالْهَادِي إِلَىٰ صِرَاطِكَ الْمُسْتَقِيمِ ❁ وَعَلَىٰ آلِهِ حَقَّ قَدْرِهِ وَمِقْدَارِهِ الْعَظِيمِ
Thanks for having me, Ahmed, it is an honor to be on the Koshur Musulman podcast.
When we hear the word Sufi today, what images does it evoke? It might imply mysticism, asceticism, pacifism, docility, perhaps it connotes an aberration to the world of orthodox Islamic belief and practice.
However, at some point in time, before the secular, materialist rupture of integrated Muslim epistemologies, Sufism was a more porous, fluid… less essentialized category. It was simply a normative expression, part and parcel of what it meant to be Muslim. Hence, why I call it a misnomer. It was normal–and sometimes even expected–for example, for someone to adopt a school in law (fiqh) a school in creed (aqida) and also a school in tazkiya/ihsan/sufism, whatever you want to call it. At least this is talking about the historic Sunni experience.
On the whole, one could say that the pre-colonial Muslim experience was imbibed with tasawwuf style practices, like belief in the awliya, devotional poetry and group thikr, even if one did not have a shaykh or a silsila, things of this nature were respected and seen as the highest ideal of love and devotional excellence. There was also an added emphasis on gaining proximity to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, so for example, Dala’il al-Khayrat of Imam Jazuli was the most widely read devotional text after the Qur’an, for centuries, but this practice eroded on a massive scale and became relegated to the hidden recesses of discreet tariqa practices, so things like this became more private and more siloed.
Of course, some manifestations of Sufi practice always had its intra-Muslim critics and detractors.
But the real reason why Sufism is so poorly understood and is surrounded by so many misconceptions and categorical traps, is largely due to the fact that it became demonized on a large scale in the 19th century in the colonial archives first, before it was vehemently ostracized by Muslim modernists, so you could say the colonial divide and conquer strategy was very much a matter of spiritual warfare too and one could say they were successful in that.
First the Sufis were demonized, because the strongest resistance to European colonization came from them. Then, they were rendered into compliance to the status quo in the 20th and 21st centuries. So what is the result of that? when you take the very heart, or, for lack of a better word, the “spiritual” core of Islam, what is left then? Reactionary idealoguing and harsh legalism, which is arguably very much the sibgha, or, the characteristic, of the ummah today.
A: We have seen how the dichotomy of Jihad-e-Akbar and Jihad-e-Asghar are deployed nowadays to construct this nonviolent and domesticated Sufism. So Jihad-e-Akbar, also known as Mujahada, involves taming your nafs, fighting against the oppressor within you, while Jihad-e-Asghar involves fighting against the external oppressor, or jihad in the battlefield. This binary is exploited by different political actors and also nation-states, where they render Jihad-e-Asghar as almost insignificant or trivial. Walk us through this dichotomy, are these two forms of Jihad mutually exclusive or are they mutually reinforcing or constitutive, where one enables the other, one leads to the other, one is impossible without the other, so they are in this dialectical relationship so to speak? Tell us about how the Sufi paragons, both in the past and in the present, practiced them in conjunction with each other.
F: I think there is a huge misconception when people talk about jihad al-akbar, or the struggle against oneself as being superior. Of course, it is, according to the Prophetic narration. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the two jihads are not mutually exclusive, and that these so-called Sufi warriors of yesteryear were the way they were, not in spite of their tassawuf, but because of it.
To understand this, we need not look further than Ibn Arabi’s own understanding of jihad, here coming from someone who is seen as the doyen/the father of Islamic mysticism, he comments on this false dichotomy in his Wasaya:
You must observe the greatest jihad, which is the jihad of your desires, for if you struggle with yourself this jihad, the other jihad against the enemies will be made easy for you, in which if you were killed in it, you would be among the living martyrs who are provided for by their Lord. Strive to shoot an arrow in the way of God.
The same sentiment goes for Imam Ghazali, who goes so far to say that the true outcome of zuhd (asceticism) is fearlessness on the battlefield! It is worth reading this quote says from his magnum opus, the Ihya’:
only hypocrites hate fighting for fear of death, but the ascetics who love Allah Almighty fought in the way of Allah as if they were a solid building.
For the longest time, the Muslim approach to jihad was more holistic. To give you an example, we see, in as late as the ottoman period, that most of the sufi lodges/tekkes had both spaces for that we would typically associate with spiritual refinement, thikr and solitude, but they also had military training wings for the disciples. Disciplining one’s soul and disciplining the body for both inner and outer warfare were seen as one in the same thing.
Just to make this more interesting for our listeners, I write in the Maydan article that in the Western pop culture positive associations between spirituality and combat are prevalent in films like Star Wars and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, but as soon as Muslim sages use their spiritual powers to fight evil, Hollywood is not interested, because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the “reel bad muslims.”
So there are so many incredible stories of sagely Muslim warriors that we do not talk about: we have examples from even the earliest renunciants of Islam, in the 8th and 9th centuries, such as Ibrahim ibn Adham, who was known for having such wara’, intense fear of God and piety that he would cry and repent for even eating one date from the floor that he thought belonged to him, someone like that, you’d imagine them to be just a wandering hermit! But, he in fact he was at the forefront of fighting the enemy that there are stories of him hurling himself in the roaring Mediterranean Sea with weaponry and fought the Byzantines on the frontier of Eastern Christendom in what is now Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. Considered one of the earliest sufis, Ibrahim ibn Adam died holding a bow and arrow in his arms.
Listeners might be surprised to learn that even Mawlana Rumi, the West’s most popular poet, the most sanitized, de-Islamized Sufi figure arguably in the world, was a staunch jurist, who fought the Mongols in battle, who requested from his disciple, on three separate occasions, for the fastest horses so he can ride to the border and defend his homeland from imminent attack, and he rejoiced when they were defeated.
These examples should not be surprising. The fact that Rumi and jihad are paradoxical is a problem. Because we should ask, what is the point of Sufism? what does it really look like to purify ones ego and increase one’s imaan? Is it simply to find a Shaykh and increase in one’s dhikr? To live a quiet life, to try our best to be “good people” and keep an insular, private meditative life? Is that the only aim of islam? Well, we know that there should be no hermithood in Islam. Embodied Islam entails that if one truly knows/worships God fully, then one must know that there is nothing worthy of being worshiped but God alone.
I think the Kashmiris, as a collective whole, and perhaps this characteristic stems from the vestiges of the Sufi saint Sayid Ali Hamdani who brought Islam to Kashmir, understand and embody this reality very well with their slogan: Azadi Matlab Kya (“what do you mean by freedom”)? la ilaha illa Allah. It is as simple as that, but also very profound.
History and scripture have shown us that, to truly embody la ilaha illa Allah is a radical act and is the ultimate Qur’anic lesson: when one truly worships God alone, and smashes the idols of falsehood and the inner trappings of one’s desires, then one will automatically become subject to profound consequences, submission to Allah will inevitably lead to a transformative bearing on one’s actions and one’s society.
If one fears negative backlash from others, from rulers, from society, and curtails the truth and is afraid of speaking a just word in fear of worldly consequences, then one is not really a Sufi, and should distance themselves from claiming that mantle.
A: Speaking of Kashmir, in Kashmir, we have seen that the Indian state has tried to construct a local “good Kashmiri Islam”, that they label as Sufi Islam, and in statist discourse, Sufi Islam is presented as non-violent, peaceful, and not having anything to do with questions of resistance against colonization. This Sufi Islam is presented as authentic Kashmiri Islam, as indigenous to Kashmir, and it is contrasted with the Islam of the Kashmiri Muslims who revolt against the Indian colonial power and their Islam is not seen as external to Kashmir, it is seen as inauthentic. Now the Indian state has engaged in this epistemic remaking of Islam into pro-state forms that either validate India’s rule in Kashmir, or at least impede its colonial designs. So the Indian state tries to domesticate Islam where they move it from a position in which it potentially threatens India’s colonial power in Kashmir to a position in which it can only support its continuity. To the extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the vision of good that is preached from the pulpit and the vision of the good espoused by the colonial state. Recently, there was an individual who visited Kashmir, and he was hosted by the Hindu nationalist BJP government. Now he was said to be the descendant of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jeelani, who Kashmiri Muslims love and admire a lot. Now this supposed descendant of Sheikh Abdul Qadir visited Kashmir. He was embraced by the Hindu nationalist government and his presence was used to construct this legitimacy for India’s colonial administration, especially its Jammu and Kashmir Wakf Board, which is basically an institution that manages Islam for the Indian state in Kashmir. By management I mean it deprives and divests Islam of all its liberative potential and just turns it into a legitimating tool for the state. Now the fact that the Indian state has embraced and has relied on what it calls Sufi Islam in the context of Kashmir, results in this notion among some people that tasawwuf does not have anything to do with anti-colonial struggle or struggle for collective justice. But your writings say this construction of a statist Sufi Islam is not exclusive to Kashmir, but has a broader historical genealogy. You say that Tasawwuf was once seen in the colonial era as the heart of the “Islamic peril”, tell us more about this. You argue that colonizers felt particularly threatened by the turuq, by the Sufi silsilas. Tell us more about this.
F: Yes, the 19th century was the quintessential era of Sufi warriors, it was also arguably the most calamitous for Muslims around the world because they were facing military incursion of disproportionate might and power. Many, if not most modern military struggles in the Muslim world today can be traced back to a Sufi leader or order as many of them took the lead in resisting European colonial and communist imperial powers in the nineteenth century.
Of course, not all Sufis fought and resisted these incursions/nor did they all do it in the same ways, so we shouldn’t romanticize or generalize about them too much. But once upon a time, war on terror style rhetoric was ironically directed towards Sufi lodges and dervishes. In Algeria in the 1830s, under French colonization, through the resistance of Emir Abdul Qadir and Lala Fatma Nsoumer and others, the French made an enemy of all Sufi brotherhoods, at least until the opposite was proven, so they took painstaking efforts in classifying each brotherhood, lodge or shaykh as either “docile” or “rebellious” and they feared the potential danger of these so-called “secret societies.”
This dual demonization and domestication effort was a global phenomenon. In Somalia just a few decades after the Algerian struggle, just look at how the Italians talked about Sayyid Muhammad 'Abdille Hassan, dubbed him the “Mad Mulla” (1856-1920) who was a learned Shaykh, and a renowned poet who led the most significant anti-colonial campaign against the colonial British and Italians. Imagine this, one of the Italian's greatest fears was the spread of 'Dervishism', it struck fear in the heart of colonizers and had come to connote revolt.
These figures were terrifying for the colonizers because they had a Global, ummatic concern. A figure most people associated with Hamas, and not with Sufism, is Izzidin Qassam, he was a Shadhili then Tijani Sufi shaykh was not actually Palestinian. He was born in Syria then he heard about the Italian colonization of Libya so he went to Alexandria, Egypt and waited at the port there for weeks to travel to Libya and defend it from colonization, but the boat never came. Then he heard about the British colonization of Palestine and switched course and ended up there. He established his Zawiya in Haifa and would lead weekly mawlid sessions there.
So from East to West Africa, from Central to South Asia, these “mad mullahs” and “hostile dervishes” represented the greatest threat to colonial and imperial encroachment, they were “bad Muslims” but the Sufis of today have been sanitized of this principled past, and have capitulated into compliance under the thumb of totalitarian state control, which is the only entity allowed to “approve” certain religious categories. Mahmood Mamdani’s thesis of “good Muslim, bad Muslim” was always at play, for more than two centuries or more now.
The ironic thing now is that the so-called Sufis of today, while they are seen as the “bad muslims” of the umma due to charges of being a “heretical sect” they are also seen as politically suspect, because in the interest of repressive governments, they are seen as the quintessential “good Muslims” who are domesticated and frozen in the dichotomy of “spiritual, not violent”.
I think the “war on terror” was the lead cause of this.
To distance themselves from “bad Muslims,” contemporary Sufis readily betrayed their ancestral legacy of principled resistance and being truth tellers, and have allowed themselves to be made malleable to fit the interests of the powers that be, with the exception of a rare few, it is typical to see various figures and groups today vie to get closer to the echelons of power and claim to do this to protect the so-called “stability” and “security” of the ummah, all by cherry picking weak narrations from the fiqh corpus that were inserted to protect the interests of the those in power in the age of Muslim empires.
Most Muslim groups today (Sufis or not) dont realize they are just pawns in the age-old game of external power and control, they’ve relegated themselves to insular devotional groups and became stunted politically and subservient to tyranny, thereby betraying the ideals of both the greater and lesser jihad in the process.
A: Now we have all heard of Omar Mukhtar or Imam Shamil. But your focus specifically has been on West Africa. You have written about this fascinating individual, though not as well-known, Shaykh Umar Futi Tal. You have done your research on his life. Tell us about him, how he combined the mujahadah against one’s nafs andjihad against the French.
F: West Africa is, in my view, is one of the most optimal landscapes in the world today that still keeps the path of principled resistance alive, which is why I decided to focus on this for my PhD. Last fall at Stanford, I even taught a class on Islam in West Africa entitled “Beyond Decolonization” where we studied the writings and lives of West African scholar exemplars like Usman Dan Fodio and Ibrahim Niasse, to show that they represent a model for principled resistance that lies power beyond knee-jerk reactionism to tyranny, one that transcends culture wars, wokeism and Marxism, and instead points to a methodology of cultivating a living, breathing connection with the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
This living reality is encapsulated and embodied in figures like Shaykh Umar Futi Tal (d.1864) who spent 55 years teaching and founding a community for the Tijaniyya order, amassing to the size of Western Europe! He is known in the Western academy more for being a “radical sufi militant”, but in my research it shows that he was forced into a life of military resistance only in the last decade of his life.
We all know this Hadith Qudsi, wherein Allah says: “whosoever shows enmity to a wali (friend) of Mine, then I have declared war against him.” Stories like this are typical in hagiographies of awliya on the battlefield: legend has it that his spiritual prowess by way of his wilaya (friendship with God) was so strong that he could obliterate an enemy combatant by way of a deadly stare alone.
Appropriately, his magnum opus is aptly entitled, “Spears of the League of the Merciful against the Spears of the League of Satan the Accursed.” The text is not a military manual as the title may suggest. Rather, it is a compendium of Sufi ethics, on building good character traits and cultivating a living connection with the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ by sending abundant, constant, salawat on him.
For scholars like Tal and others, their faith armed them with figurative weaponry that possessed a metaphysical importance that far outweighed the physical weaponry of his earthly enemies. The strength of Sufi warriors like Tal came from an unyielding trust in God as the ultimate ghalib (victor). The resistance must be internal first and sometimes in came in the form of resistance by the tongue, through writing or speech, or resistance by the hand, through warfare or building a state or an institution. But today, even the weakest form of resistance, the silent resistance of the heart, is gone. There is only utter shamelessness.
Here it is important to stress that resistance did not always result in physical combat. Another West African leader who is a great embodiment of this is Shaykh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke who founded one of the largest Sufi orders in Senegal, the Muridiyya, and terrified the French colonial forces in Senegal without ever shedding a single drop of blood. He spent most of his life in exile and under house arrest but was still able to resist French colonization because he abhorred their unjust presence and saw it as his duty towards Allah to resist them based on the Prophetic injunction to deploy a true word in front of a tyrannical ruler, which we know from the hadith to be the greatest form of jihad.
A: Amazing how Sheikh Umar Futi Tal disrupts this idea that some propagate, that tazkiya of one’s nafs and struggle against oppression and tyranny cannot operate together, that you cannot do them in conjunction with one another. Now, you say that this history of Sufi warriors presents a powerful antidote to both Islamophobic and Muslim attitudes towards justice-seeking. Could you explain what you mean by this? You have said that these Sufi warriors did not resist oppression despite their tasawwuf but because of it. Could you tell us more about this?
F: A lot. An intellectually honest study of the historic significance of these pious warriors has the potential to disarm (pun intended) a lot of the simplified essentializations that relate to Islam and justice-seeking.
On a very basic level, it defies this stereotypical understanding of sufism as inherently “pro-authoritarian” or “quietist ”, it expands the possibilities of seeing Sufism beyond the prism of the charismatic guardians that profess to be the truest representatives of tasawwuf and so-called traditionalist Islam. You said it yourself, these people actively resisting, we should look to them, because like I said before, whether they carried physical weapons or not, for the saintly warriors of light, their combat starts on the unseen level, and more often than not, they work silently in the service of the unheard, without seeking positions, prestige or fame.
I think there, honestly brother, is no shortage of such figures today, maybe we do not know of these people because they are usually not ones co-opted by corrupt governments like the UAE, Egypt, India or Saudi Arabia, but these people are real and they are out there.
Our teachers say you never know who might be a wali, because they are all around us, they may not be in big turbans with their fancy aqiq rings, but they exist.
It could be that woman selling fruit under the scorching sun, a young Palestinian man wearing ripped jeans doing i’tikaf at al Al-Aqsa every single night, it could be anyone. As Muslims, we need to dwell in that domain is where Allah is the ultimate Victor and where Allah has the ultimate calculus and not be fooled by the world of forms. That is the true essence and aim of tassawuf.
So this history is a powerful antidote to Muslim ignorance about Sufism because it defies the secular logic of wanting Islam to be a merely private, quietist, regulated force. It is also a counter narrative to those who say, resisting tyranny in our day and age is “irresponsible” because we are the “weaker party.” I’ve hear some ulama say this, and you know what it sounds like to me? It sounds like what pro-Ummayad and later Salafi scholars said the same thing about Imam Hussayn, who refused to bow down to the tyranny of Yazid by saying “the likes of me will never obey the likes of you” and he was martyred for taking that stance.
So these scholars who criticize resistance do not understand the Qur’an properly, because that implies that someone like Imam Hussayn, Umar al-Mukhtar or Emir Abdul Qadir “lost” in the material sense, [astaghfirullah] that they were no match to the bulldozers, machine guns, the imprisonment, exile, or even death. But Islamically speaking, these figures did not lose. They actually won the favor of Allah and glory for all eternity.
So when we say that Rumi was a warrior and Izzidin al-Qassam was a Sufi, it confuses people, right? But it orients us to something very important: both these figures realized it is not enough to work on purifying the heart and work and one’s ego. It is not enough to establish an insular community and a polished worldview that cares more about the books of dead men than the anguish of Muslims living in refugee camps or in the prisons of taghut regimes of our times.
They properly understood and activated the Qur’anic edict, that “Allah does not change a condition of a people until they change themselves.”
So you see then, this topic is not really about Sufism or Sufi warriors per se, it is about a better understanding of what principled resistance from an Islamic point of view can look like. It defies the logic of Islamophobia as well, because it cannot co-opt Islam’s spiritual core as a defenseless domain.
Just look at the Battle of Badr, the battle of Karbala, to more modern day stories from Kashmiri, or Palestine, or Uyghur resistance, we know that the arch of the moral universe will always bend toward justice, towards haqq, the patient, disenfranchised, the oppressed, towards the cries of those unseen and unheard.
We also know the Pharaohs and Yazids, the Modis and Netanhyahus will never win.
That is a central Qur’anic promise.
So it is rather unfortunate that [some] contemporary Sufi groups have, for the most part, dissociated their consciousness from these high principles, and chose to distance themselves from their spiritual ancestors’ legacies, because they realize full well that these legacies, if they are revived, can really shake up the dormant status quo, and talking about these issues is dangerous to the powers-that-be, why? Because a huge, well funded network of authoritarian governments are working so hard to refashion Sufism as “Islam light” or Sufism as “good Islam.”
But, you know what Ahmed, this will not work. Because the light cannot be extinguished by their narratives and empty words. Because knowledge is power. So yes, learning more about these pious warriors can be a powerful and restorative antidote against both Islamophobic and intra-Muslim ignorance about justice-seeking in Islam, and it even promotes a better understanding of Islam and Sufism in general.
In this spirit, I'll end with a salute to the valiant People of Kashmir, telling them to stay steadfast, and be patient, stay true to Azadi. Their fortitude reminds me of this quote from the Lion of the Desert, Umar al-Mukhtar, who, when he was sentenced to hanging by the Italians, said:
إن الحكم إلا لله، لا لحكمكم المزيف إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون
“Dominion belongs to Allah, not to your phony judgment, to God we belong and to Him is our return.”
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, 2013, p. 195.
Abdullah Schleifer, "Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt". In Edmund Burke (ed.). Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East. 1993, p.166.