Voices of Islam (78 page)

56
Voices of the Spirit

background environment of the Vietnam War. We had Tibetan longhorns and conch shells and gongs and bells in our orchestra to authenticate our serious intentions, and a sense of radical spirituality based on Zen but ritual- ized into a drama of good versus evil to try to exorcise the specter of war from our collective consciousness. We listened to newly available UNESCO records of real monks from the Himalayas, with their deep-throated chanting also capable of intoning two sounded notes at the same time, punctuated by the clanging of cymbals and bells, and the deep bellowing drone of the long horns, with drums and the high-pitched melodies of double reed trumpets. It was a real cacophony of spiritual sound, recalling something indescribably ancient in which we bathed our senses for a time. We tried to include all of this in our theatrical performances, recollecting our cosmic source through action, poetic chanting, and stylized choreography at night by torchlight to an avid audience waiting for a spiritual experience; all of us, performers and audience, attuned to the transformative possibilities for our souls and totally expectant of a positive outcome for all of the energies we poured unstintingly into the proceedings.

At the end of this period however, and after the disbanding of the troupe at the tail end of the 1960s, I met a Muslim Sufi who introduced a few of us to Islam and the stories of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and his Companions, the revelation of the Qur’an, and the existence of a living, enlightened Sufi shaykh of instruction of well over a hundred years of age residing in Mekne`s, Morocco. I accepted the invitation to become a Muslim and simultaneously entered the Sufi Path at his hand with full confidence that this was a furthering and refining of everything I had superficially experienced so far, for it presented an immediate spiritual world of Light that I should not, in all consciousness, resist entering. By so doing, I was also accepting the invocatory formulas of Sufi (a long initiatory litany of invocations given by the shaykh, known as a
wird
), which signified a serious break with earlier practices and a total immersion in new prayers, both formal and informal, with their attendant courtesies and obligations that needed to be learned. This level of commitment and immersion was something new to me and beyond what I had experienced so far, even as an itinerant Zen practitioner. What was required was to take the new Light seriously, since it promised (and continues to promise) the total transformation of our lives to lives closer to human perfection.

To taste the community of the Sufis directly, of course, we were invited by the shaykh to a giant
moussem
(celebration) gathering in Mekne`s, Morocco, to meet him and his many disciples arriving on donkeys or by train or airplane from the deserts, the mountains, and even other countries to worship and acknowledge the divinity of Allah and praise with our deepest hearts His Messenger, Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, in days that were to be filled with invocation and worship almost nonstop. This took place in the shaykh’s
zawiya
or center, a smallish nondescript building with a mosque

Dhikr,
a Door That When Knocked, Opens
57

in it, near the Jama‘a Zaytuna mosque that was used by the general, not necessarily Sufi population. Here would be a time of intense
dhikr
of God, singing, ritual dancing, and repetitions of God’s Divine Name (His Greatest Name,
Allah,
and His 99 Names as well), throughout a protracted period of time.

In Islam,
dhikr
is an Arabic word that has a cluster of meanings. From the Hans Wehr Arabic dictionary we see that it means:
recollection, remembrance,

reminiscence, commemoration, naming, mentioning, invocation of God, mention of the Lord’s Name, and (in Sufi incessant repetition of certain words or formulas in praise of God, often accompanied by music and dancing.
1
But the
dhikr
of God encompasses so many things, all of which are a way of

remembrance. When we sat with the Sufis of Mekne`s and elsewhere we found that they recited the Qur’an in the
Warsh
style of recitation, in unison, in an elongated and rhythmically emphasized monotone that seemed to us like a rushing ocean with no discernable shores; the Qur’an came alive as its oral recitation was always meant to be, alive on the tongues of the believers. Its words and nontuneful melodies sank deep into our blood, filled the room, recited from memory by hundreds of men (separate from the woman in this case in the
zawiya
complex), with Russian Volga depth and seriousness and a free and sweeping sonic scope particular to the Maghribi (Moroccan) Muslims, and not just the Sufi . This incredibly wide-sweeping and over- whelmingly vast musical manner of recitation is what Moroccan children have been traditionally taught in their schools from childhood, so that some- one who is a
hafiz
of the Qur’an—one who knows it in its entirety by heart— was not (and hopefully today still is not) that much of a rarity in North Africa.

Here was true
dhikr Allah:
a gathering of folks for Allah’s sake, reciting the words transmitted by the Prophet Muhammad in the Qur’an every day of their lives, in unison, thus fi ing the mosques to their very rafters with the divinely revealed Word of God. In the Sufi
zawiya,
after the Qur’an recitation, they would sing songs from the
Diwan
(poetry collection) of our shaykh, many of them composed by the shaykh himself—songs of illumina- tive instruction—as well as many from other respected shaykhs of the Sufi Path. With mint tea served in little glasses in our midst, and the shadows of the
zawiya
with its high windows to cool the outside heat, and sandalwood incense permeating the atmosphere, somehow the essence of the remem- brance of God was sounded in us as if from a garden in Paradise, its reverber- ations deeply extending through the passageways of our lives forevermore.

When we fi arrived, we were greeted at the main
zawiya
in Mekne`s (the shaykh was suffering from a cold at the time, so we were not able to greet him until a few days later), and then after sunset we were trooped to a small ramshackle mosque at the poorest edge of town (the Prophet Muhammad said in an established hadith tradition: ‘‘Look for me among the poor’’), where a gathering of Sufi was already in full swing. This was such a heart- opening experience that I can still enter into it in my imagination 35 years

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Voices of the Spirit

later. We entered a packed mosque over a muddy ditch, whose minaret was just a few boards hammered together as a kind of tower one could not climb up into, and found men in
jallabas
shoulder to shoulder, singing the
Diwan
and invoking Allah and His Prophet with incredible beauty and joy. The house was truly rocking! This little mosque (only when I saw it empty did I see how really small it was) seemed like the fields of heaven, and when we had sung for about an hour or two and got up to stand in the dance that is known among Moroccans as the
hadra
(the Presence) or the
raqs
(the Dance), it seemed as if the ceiling was a flashing bright blue sky of a very exalted heaven rather than the low wooden ceiling of a ramshackle mosque under the cloudy black sky of the Moroccan night. This was indeed high-octane
dhikr
of the finest kind!

This was also direct remembrance of the heart and limbs, perhaps the active result of scholars’ ink but in full-bodied practice, not restrained in an atmosphere of dry scholarship. The atmosphere here was of passionately engaged participation, of all the theological reasons and back stories of Islamic recollection now made manifest and directly palpable. Here were rough mountain men in coarse woolen robes alongside elegant imams and scholars from Fez with their pressed gabardines and desert Sufi with long, narrow fingers clasping the hands of pale-skinned Americans and Europeans new to the experience. These knowledgeable veterans of the Sufi Path embraced us all with a sweetness and openness rarely encountered in our own countries of origin, a sweetness transcending languages and life experi- ences, a Londoner clasping the hand of a desert goat herder, a university graduate holding onto an ‘‘illiterate’’ imam’s hand who was the living protector (
hafi
) of the Qur’an by virtue of knowing it all by heart, word for word and perfectly pronounced (bringing into question, of course, as to which of the two was ‘‘illiterate’’ or which of the two was ‘‘educated’’).

This was a place of pure joy, of true ecstasy, of inner recognition of spiritual realities clothed always (according to the way of the Shadhiliyya Tariqa) in an outward sobriety, which meant that the ‘‘dance’’ was performed within strict limits, avoiding extreme expressions of joy (usually associated with Persian or Turkish Sufis, especially in the miniature paintings of their gatherings), such as the tearing of garments, swooning, or wildly entering into psychic states, all forbidden and controlled in our circles, thereby leading to deeper under- standings than those gained by the drunken momentary fireworks of thrilled tasting, which usually vanishes into thin air when morning comes.

The dance itself is strong and ecstatic, the motions of the body, including bowing forward, while taking deep breaths on the words
Hayy
(The Living One), then leaning back on the Divine Name,
Allah.
This is the first phase. Then at a signal of the leader, who takes his place in the center of the circle, the second phase begins with standing in one place while still more deeply breathing the repeated single name of The Living One (
Hayy, Hayy, Hayy
), breaking slightly at the knees and stiffening straight again, as if boldly shaken

Dhikr,
a Door That When Knocked, Opens
59

up and down by the overwhelming force of an inspired state. During this time one concentrates on the
dhikr
of the heart, letting the body loose within its physical limits, but focused on the Divine Name, even imaginatively writing it in Arabic on our hearts and writing it again and again with each breath. Then, at the very end of the
hadra,
the energy turns to a throaty whisper, until finally the words
Muhammadun Rasulullah
(Muhammad the Messenger of God) are intoned to signal the finish of the
hadra
and everyone sits down on the floor where they stood.

It is said by the Sufis that at the beginning of the
hadra,
we do the
dhikr,
but in the second part Allah Himself does it and we are spiritually taken over—we are no more, we have been annihilated in Allah. Afterward, in the calm that follows such a vibrant storm, someone recites the Qur’an in the most gorgeously melodic way, which is like cool water from a mountain spring poured over us to fl throughout our limbs and consciousness. A person of some wisdom and experience (everyone usually knows who this is in any gathering) then gives a teaching, again not a scholarly discourse, but one that seems to have come on the wind, from the heart of the speaker as well as from all those present, filled with the wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and his almost palpable presence among us, and all the teachers over the centuries that have proceeded from him. After that everything is calm and peacefulness; we relax and talk among ourselves, and on this fi st night in that ramshackle mosque on the edge of town, tables were suddenly brought into this vast but cramped space and a wonderful meal was served, somehow, between all those tightly packed men grazing now with open hearts in the fields of heaven.

This form of standing
dhikr,
the
hadra,
is not performed by every Sufi
tar- iqa
(the Path or Order, the transmitted line of teaching through various shaykhs with its particular practices and obligations) in exactly the same way, and in some cases, is dispensed with or even frowned upon. The most famous ‘‘dance’’ of the Sufi of course, is that of the whirling dervishes of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi of Konya, Turkey, where men in wide white skirts and tall felt hats turn to a slow and solemn but rhythmic music and singing, including musical instruments, particularly the wailing and poignant
ney
flute and dry taps of drums. Other standing
adhkar
(the plural of
dhikr
) may vary in form and intensity, such as the lines of Egyptian Sufis with whom I have stood, who bowed and repeated the divine phrases but did not follow quite the same phrases as I was used to from the Moroccan experiences. Some of the
turuq
(the plural of
tariqa
), notably the Naqshbandi, prefer silent
dhikr,
without outward performance, although I have heard recently that due to the depth of today’s corruption some Naqshbandi shaykhs are instructing their disciples to intone outwardly as well. The varieties of
dhikr
may be endless; one evening we were with a shaykh from Bosnia who led us in the many different forms of standing and dancing
adhkar
from all the
turuq
in his homeland with which he was acquainted, some in spiral lines leading into

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Voices of the Spirit

the center and then out again. And then there are Sufi groups, particularly in the West, that have seemingly eschewed the basic practices of Islam but do various ‘‘dances of peace,’’ which are somewhat deracinated and improvised but artful, to bring people to a place of inner tranquility.

What I learned in those first few years as a Muslim and ever after in my life, coming as I did from my California experiences with various practices of remembrance, including the very ancient Hindu and Buddhist ones, was that the Prophet Muhammad, the final revealer of God’s Way to mankind, brought the specific science of
dhikr
to us and taught his Companions and family and all who met him directly to remember God in every circumstance and with every breath. All of the specific formulas of
dhikr
are based on the key to entering into Islamic knowledge,
La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun Rasulullah
(‘‘There is no god but God [Allah], and Muhammad is the Messenger of God’’). This simple statement is recited on the tongues of Muslims all over the world, day and night, incessantly, because it miraculously contains all one needs to know to live a life of compassionate meaning from birth to death.