Sufi Muslim dancing in prayer | 2026
Photo Credit: Shahin Alam via Pixabay, CC BY-SA 4.0
Overview
A lost library. A House of Wisdom. Thirty birds crossing seven valleys in search of their King. Part 9 built the empire. Now, Part 10 asks what the empire thought, and, perhaps more importantly, what it felt. The Golden Age reached two summits, and Part 10 climbs both. The first is falsafa (philosophy), as Muslim thinkers inherited the Greek achievement, translated it, and made it their own, from al-Kindi and al-Farabi to Avicenna, and through al-Ghazali’s critique and Ibn Rushd’s reply. The second is Sufism, the mystical path that seeks not to reason toward God but to be annihilated in Him. We trace the debate between reason and revelation, follow the Arabic vocabulary the age left to the sciences, and interpret the Sufi Way through Attar’s Conference of the Birds and the poetry of Rumi.
Assigned Reading
Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapter 7
Aslan, No god but God, chapter 8
Key Terms for this Section
Falsafa • Avicenna • al-Ghazali
Sufism • tariqah • nafs • fana • dhiker
10.1 | Falsafa: Reason Meets Revelation
Kalam & the Mihna
Part 6 told the story of Islam’s first great argument: the Rationalists, who read the Qur’an through history, language, and context, and the Traditionalists, who held that an uncreated Qur’an transcends logical analysis (cf. Part 6). Since that debate first reared its head during the Umayyad dynasty, the ebb and flow of rational and traditional discourse has moved through the Islamicate world like ripples in a pond.
That debate had names and institutions. The Mu’tazila (‘those who stand apart’) were the great rationalist school. They held that God’s justice required human free will, that reason was a God-given tool for discerning moral truth, and (most controversially) that the Qur’an was created in time rather than co-eternal with God.
Among their number were wide-ranging minds like al-Jahiz (d. 869), whose curiosity ran from biology to ethics to language, and Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1025), who built a systematic account of ethics grounded in human agency and accountability.
Against them, and eventually beyond them, stood the synthesis of al-Ash’ari (d. 936), who used the tools of reason but placed them in the service of revelation. His school gave classical Islam its characteristic account of causality: occasionalism, the view that no created thing truly causes anything. God is the direct author of every event, moment by moment.
For a brief and remarkable period, the rationalist position became state policy. The Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun, a lover of learning, made the ‘created Qur’an’ doctrine an official test in 833 (218 AH), an inquisition known as the Mihna (‘the trial’): judges and scholars were pressured to affirm it or lose their posts. One jurist, Ibn Hanbal, refused under imprisonment and became a folk hero for it. Asked whether the Qur’an was created, he answered only with the testimony of faith. By 848 the caliph al-Mutawakkil abandoned the whole experiment.
The lesson the Islamic tradition drew was lasting: reason had its place, but the state would not dictate the content of faith.
However, the ulama’s holy struggle with the Qur’an, though certainly significant, has not been Islam’s only textual debate.
As the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties spread their influence farther and wider, Muslim thinkers came into contact with the best ideas of the outside world. They were soon faced with the formidable intellectual traditions of the Hindus of India, the Buddhists of China, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and especially the ancient Greek philosophy of the West.
The caliph who presided over the Mihna is the caliph who threw those doors open:
al-Ma’mun stands behind both the inquisition and the translations.
Alexandria & the House of Wisdom
When the Ummah took Alexandria in 642 (cf. Part 9), it inherited one of the legendary homes of Western thought. The Library of Alexandria had been, simply put, the internet of the ancient world. It once housed more books than almost any other place had ever gathered.
But by 642 the Great Library itself was long gone, lost in stages over the centuries before (to fire, war, and neglect). The famous legend that the Muslim conquerors burned it is simply false. What the conquest actually inherited was still alive: Alexandria’s working schools of medicine and philosophy, and the Greek and Syriac books kept in the monasteries and schools of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.
And the timing was telling. About a century before the Muslims arrived, the Christian emperor Justinian had closed the doors of Plato’s Academy in Athens (529). The Greek East went on copying its manuscripts, but the Latin West had lost its Greek, and much of that learning fell out of circulation there for centuries afterward.
It takes only a generation to set aside a tradition of critical inquiry.
Civilization is a fragile thing.
South of Europe, in the Islamicate world, the opposite happened. The Arabs had arrived with a single book, the Qur’an, and an enormous appetite for more! The governing Islamic view was that if something is good, then it must be from God — it doesn’t matter who first said it or where it came from.
Did the Hindus have a better number system? Adopt it. Did the Chinese have a specialized knowledge of the eye? Take it. Did the Greeks have a systematized notion of logic? Use it.
This is the ethic that produced what we now call the Golden Age of Islam. One of the early civilization’s principal virtues was its ability to assimilate, preserve, and even revive the crumbling achievements of the cultures around it. Where one civilization had let its inheritance lapse, another took it up, copied it, argued with it, and carried it forward. For several centuries, the momentum of that appetite was extraordinary!
The engine of that assimilation was Baghdad’s great translation project, housed in the caliphal library and research center remembered as the Bayt al-Hikma (the House of Wisdom), under al-Ma’mun’s own patronage. There, works of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Greek physicians were rendered into Arabic.
The translators themselves were largely Christians. The greatest of them, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), was a Nestorian Christian physician whose surviving catalog lists over a hundred works of Galen. Syriac-speaking Christians had been translating Aristotle for centuries before Baghdad existed. From its first page, the Golden Age was the work of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Muslims alike (cf. Part 9).
From the West, Islamicate scholars inherited philosophy, geometry, and medicine. Plato and Aristotle, all but forgotten in the Latin West, became influential voices in Islamic writing. The discourse the Greeks called philosophia (‘the love of wisdom’) entered the Islamicate world as Falsafa, and a philosopher became a faylasuf. The Golden Age is replete with it: an amalgamation of Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian traditions absorbed and enjoyed across the empire.
Avicenna & al-Ghazali
The first great figure of Falsafa was al-Kindi (d. c. 873), remembered as ‘the Philosopher of the Arabs,’ who insisted that the truths of philosophy and the truths of Islam could not finally conflict, since truth is one, whatever its source:
We should not be ashamed to acknowledge the truth and to take it from wherever it comes, even from peoples far removed from us. Al-Kindi, On First Philosophy (paraphrased)
A generation later, al-Farabi (d. 950) earned the title ‘the Second Teacher’ (Aristotle being the first). He described an ideal state ruled by a philosopher-prophet in the spirit of Plato’s Republic, and he explained prophecy itself in philosophical terms, as the perfection of the human intellect and imagination.
The summit was reached by Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037), whose Canon of Medicine was authoritative for centuries and whose Book of Healing and Book of Salvation laid out a complete cosmology for the Islamicate world.
Avicenna drew a famous distinction between the necessary and the contingent. Only God exists necessarily, by His own nature, while everything else exists only because something caused it. From the one necessary God, he argued, the whole cosmos flows in a timeless emanation, which led him to the conclusion that the universe, as an eternal outflowing of an eternal God, had no beginning in time. He also held that God knows the world in its universals rather than in every passing particular. These were dazzling ideas, and to many scholars they were alarming ones. They seemed to place the philosopher’s reason above the plain teaching of revelation.
Not every thinker of the age fit the mold. The physician al-Razi (d. c. 925), one of the great clinicians of the medieval world, carried a skeptic’s distrust of dogmatism into his science, insisting on disciplined observation over inherited authority — a reminder that ‘falsafa’ covered not one doctrine but a whole spectrum of temperaments, from the system-builders to the empiricists.
The reckoning came with al-Ghazali (1058–1111).
Al-Ghazali is the thinker who broke away from the authority of reason. A brilliant jurist and theologian who would end his life as a mystic, he decided that the way to beat the philosophers was to master their methods and turn those methods against them.
His Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers — a tahafut is a collapse) worked through about twenty of their key claims, and on three he charged the philosophers with outright unbelief (kufr): that the world is eternal (against creation by God’s free will), that God knows only universals and not particulars (against His omniscience), and that there is no bodily resurrection (against the promise of scripture).
Al-Ghazali’s attack on causation was the philosophical heart of it. Fire does not truly burn cotton, he argued. Rather, God causes the burning, and we merely mistake constant sequence for necessary connection. This is Ash’ari occasionalism pressed to its sharpest point, and it is no exaggeration to say it anticipated the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s critique of cause and effect by more than 600 years!
Before al-Ghazali, three intellectual currents competed for the Islamicate mind: the scholars of the law, the philosophers, and the Sufis. After him, only two remained.
Al-Ghazali then turned from argument to experience. He tells the story himself in his Deliverance from Error: in 1095, at the height of his fame, a crisis seized him, he became unable to lecture at all, and within months he had given up his chair in Baghdad and gone on the road as a Sufi.
Falsafa did not vanish. It received one more great defense. In Muslim Spain, Ibn Rushd (cf. Part 8) answered al-Ghazali with a rebuttal titled, pointedly, The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut), and argued (in his Decisive Treatise) that philosophy is the ‘twin sister’ of religion: the two seek the same truth, one in demonstration and the other in symbol.
In the Islamic East his reply did little to reverse the tide. But his commentaries on Aristotle (once translated into Latin) lit up the universities of Christian Europe, where thinkers like Thomas Aquinas wrestled with ‘the Commentator,’ and a whole school called Averroism grew up around him.
It is one of history’s ironies that philosophy receded as a formal discipline in the Sunni schools at almost the same moment that a Muslim philosopher was helping to reawaken it in the West.
10.2 | From Baghdad: Algebra to Coffee
Stars, Numerals, & Paper
In Egypt and beyond, Islamicate thinkers also folded the older naturalistic sciences into their curriculum: the astronomy and geometry that had measured a round world, fixed a calendar, and raised the pyramids. The naturalistic accounts of the world made by the Greek philosophers, the seedbed of what would one day become modern science, survived and thrived in the schools of the Abbasid empire.
From the East, the Islamicate world added Hindu numerals, pharmacology, Chinese paper, and a sophisticated, empirical view of astronomy. Tradition holds that papermaking reached the caliphate with Chinese prisoners taken at Talas in 751 (cf. Part 9). A paper mill is reported in Baghdad by the 790s.
Islamicate astronomy enabled navigators to reckon direction without the sun, and so Muslim sailors became the world’s night-navigators, guided by the stars to ports in China and southern Africa. The instruments and tables they perfected (the astrolabe among them) would one day guide European sailors to the New World. Six of our brightest stars still answer to Arabic names: Aldebaran, Altair, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Vega, Deneb!
But as far as they might journey, Muslim explorers and merchants always returned to Mecca for the hajj. They came from as far east as India and as far west as Spain, and at the center of it all stood the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. Its very centrality is why it became the greatest repository of knowledge on the planet — the Oxford of its day, the place to which scholars carried the writings and inventions of distant lands, and from which traveling pilgrims carried them home again.
If a new surgical technique for cataracts succeeded in Samarkand, within a year it could be practiced a continent away in Seville, Spain.
Nothing quite like this had happened before. Baghdad connected the world.
The Greeks had conquered a wide world, but their knowledge tended to flow one way — outward from Athens. The Romans built an immense empire, but their reach followed the coastlines their armies could hold. The Islamicate achievement was different in kind: to gather the world’s best ideas into one place, under one language and one restless appetite for learning, and to send them circulating back out again to every corner of the map with the next year’s hajj.
Algebra, Algorithm, & Zero
Such is the legacy of the rational thought that permeated the medieval Muslim world. We remain its inheritors every time we use its vocabulary. A whole family of Arabic words still serves the modern technician. There would be no math without algebra (al-jabr). There would be no computers without algorithms (from the name of the mathematician al-Khwarizmi) and ciphers (sifr, also the root of our “zero”). There would be no chemistry without alkalis (al-qaliy). No engineering without azimuths (al-samt) and zeniths (samt al-ra’s), or their opposite point, the nadir (naẓir).
Candy, Mocha, & Coffee
On the lighter side, the Islamicate world handed us kohl (kuḥl, the ground cosmetic, and, the same root that gives us alcohol), along with lacquer and magazine (makhzan, a storehouse). Damask fabric is named for Damascus. Mocha is named for a port in Yemen. Candy comes from the Arabic qand (a lump of crystallized sugar), and sugar itself is sukkar. In fact the very idea of the three-course meal and the dessert that ends it comes to us from the medieval Arab courts.
But my personal favorite contribution from the Islamicate world?
Coffee. Qahwa. I could not have written this lesson without it!
The three-course meal even has a name attached: tradition credits Ziryab, a musician who came from Baghdad to Umayyad Córdoba in 822 and taught the city how to dine. And coffee as a drink is younger than the Abbasids. By most accounts it was first brewed in Yemen in the 1400s, by Sufis who wanted to stay awake through long nights of remembering God. Mocha (al-Mukha) was the port that shipped it.
Interesting that the age’s most famous drink belongs to its mystics.
Wisdom, logic, and reason have long been cornerstones of Islamic thinking, and the age shows them at full strength. But rationalism was never the only path open to a Muslim. There has always been another road.
An esoteric one.
10.3 | The Sufi Way
Rabia of Basra
So — is this all there is?
Islam had become a system that produced mathematics, science, and unprecedented wealth. From it came philosophy, domed cities, and coffee.
But was that really why God spoke through an angel to the Prophet Muhammad? For architecture and hot beverages? Is that the end of the Qur’an? Are tax revenues and commodities really what a Muslim is meant to contemplate while kneeling to pray in the tangerine-red beauty of a sunset? Shakespeare’s Hamlet says it well:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
For most people, the sheer productive energy of a city like Baghdad was more than enough to justify five daily prayers. The rich and comfortable lived charmed lives. For them, Islam was simply a culture that one inhabited: eat this, not that. Say this, not that. Make it to the mosque on Friday, and enjoy the rest of the week.
But for a rare few, this was not enough. It was not that everyone else was doing Islam wrong. It was that some exceptional Muslims wanted more. And so they began to experiment, to push at the boundaries of ordinary religious convention.
Some read the Qur’an deep into the night by candlelight, seeking its most esoteric interpretations. Some lost themselves chanting the name of God until they slipped into a trance. Some prayed the daily prayers dozens or hundreds of times over, waiting for the shift in consciousness that would bring them nearer to Him.
Consider the story of the freed slave Rabia of Basra (d. 801). The tradition tells that she spent her nights in prayer, and that her owner was so struck by her piety that he came to believe he was in the presence of a saint and set her free.
When he offered her a marriage to any man in the city, she confessed that she was already consumed by a deep and passionate love. Asked with whom, she answered simply: “With God.” Then she shared with her former master a poetry so enchanting that he became her first disciple:
O my Lord, the stars are shining and the eyes of men are closed, and kings have shut their doors and every lover is alone with his beloved, and here am I alone with Thee.
Rabia of Basra, trans. Margaret Smith (1928)
Wool & the Pearl
While the wealthy of 8th-century Iraq lived in splendor, the mystics went the other way. To them, all that comfort was an obstacle to experiencing the nearness of God. In deliberate contrast to the perfumed élite, they gave away their wealth, lived on bread and water, and wore simple garments of rough wool. The Arabic word for wool is suf, and so these mystics came to be called Sufis.
Sufism is neither a branch of Sunni or Shia Islam nor something wholly apart from them. It is the esoteric path within Islam.
The Sufis’ own account of the path begins at the beginning: with the Qur’an and the Prophet, handed down through unbroken chains of teachers. In most countries, Muslims who formally belong to a Sufi order are a small minority.
And yet in one sense Sufism is larger than either Sunnism or Shiism, for scholars have long noted in it ideas with parallels among Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Greeks, and Christians. Both accounts are true. That makes sense once we take seriously the two central Sufi claims: that the outward forms of religion (Sharia, fiqh, the Five Pillars) are not sufficient to the great task, and that, when you get right down to it, the reality of all things is One.
The great task of the Sufi is union with God. The Greek philosopher Plotinus (a student of Plato’s thought) had argued that all things emanate from a perfect One and will, in the end, return to it. Plotinus reached Muslim readers in Baghdad in an Arabic version that circulated under Aristotle’s name (the Theology of Aristotle), and the idea of the return to the One fascinated the philosophers there.
The Sufis set out to live this truth. They took hold of the Qur’anic teaching that God is One (tawhid) and everywhere present:
Whichever way you turn, there is the face of God. Qur’an 2:115 (paraphrased)
Above all, the Sufi sought a return to God, though how they imagined that return would scandalize the ulama and the rulers of their day.
In fact, it did more than scandalize. In 922 (309 AH), Baghdad executes the Sufi al-Hallaj, who had cried out ana’l-Haqq, ‘I am the Truth’ (the Truth being one of God’s own names). To the authorities it is blasphemy. To the Sufis it is the opposite of pride: a man so emptied of himself that only God was left to speak.
For if ‘all is One,’ then the distinctions the ulama guarded so jealously are, for the Sufi, rather beside the point. Superficial differences over a deeper unity. To the Sufi, every religion is like a hard clam shell. What matters is the pearl inside. And what is that pearl, beneath all the orthodoxy and orthopraxy? In a word: LOVE.
For this reason the Sufis set aside much of the outward machinery of religion, the externalities (zahir), as beside the point, since no human mind can adequately comprehend God anyway. What the Sufi seeks lies beneath (batin) all of that. Love is the substance behind Sharia. Love is the face behind the veil. Love is the pearl beneath everything we call “religion.”
The social élites of Baghdad, needless to say, did not agree, for the Sufis undercut the very reason the ulama existed and exposed the extravagance of the aristocratic perfumed parlors as hypocrisy.
The Sufis did not want merely to be pointed toward God.
They wanted to drown in Him.
As the Sufi adage has it:
If you cannot change the king, you must work to change yourself.
The orders themselves answer in a three-step formula of their own: sharia, tariqa, haqiqa. The law, the way, the truth. In Rumi’s framing: the law is the candle that shows the road, the way is the walking of it, and the truth is the arrival.
The Way & the Pir
The vocabulary of that inner work reaches back to Genesis. Jewish mystics long connected the animating breath of God at creation with the love that moved Him to create. When God formed Adam, He breathed life into him. That breath (Hebrew ruach, Arabic ruh) is what the Sufi seeks to be filled by. It shares parallels in Hindu prana and the Daoist qi.
I have fashioned him, and breathed into him of My spirit. Qur’an 15:29 (paraphrased)
But there is a struggle in reaching for God’s ruh, and it is waged against the nafs, the ego or lower self. The Sufi seeks a kind of Buddhist extinguishment of the nafs. But for a Muslim the point of releasing the ego is precisely to attain union with God. The Qur’an gives the soul three stations:
• the soul that commands evil (12:53)
• the soul that reproaches itself (75:2, cf. Part 8)
• the soul at peace (89:27)
This inner struggle is itself the Greater Jihad (cf. Part 3): the Believer’s struggle against everything that keeps him from righteousness. The jihad of the Sufi is the interior battle between the nafs (ego) and the ruh (the Spirit of God) for possession of the qalb, a word that does not translate cleanly into English. Qalb carries the senses of ‘intuition’ and ‘apprehension.’ It sits closer to ‘heart’ than to ‘mind.’
The journey from the self-centered outer life to the selfless attainment of the divine reality is called the tariqah (‘the path’), the Way. In time the word also named the orders that walk it: the Qadiri, the Naqshbandi, the Chishti, the Mevlevi.
There are many schools of tariqah, but all agree on one thing: the traveler needs the direct supervision of a master, a Shaykh in Arabic (the clan title of Part 2), or a Pir in Persian (‘elder’).
Not all Muslims are Sufis, but all Sufis are Muslims first and foremost. Without proper guidance, the tourist who picks up a book of poetry one day and calls himself a ‘Sufi’ stands opposed to the storied Islamic schools of Sufism, which have risked life and limb to preserve their teachings. Anyone drawn to this path should tread it with respect, context, and the Shahadah.
Every tariqah has stages. They are not studied the way one studies a math equation. There is no website or set of talking points that will carry a person into selfless union with the Divine. This is the reason for a Pir (Elder).
The student (the murid, ‘one who seeks’) is led from one ineffable experience to the next by the master’s guidance. Like the Shahadah, it is finally something a believer must do herself. Even the Pir cannot walk the path for her. As the Persian poet shared:
I am a dreamer who is mute,
and the people are deaf.
I am unable to say,
and they are unable to hear.
Saadi of Shiraz, 13th century
10.4 | The Conference of the Birds
The Seven Valleys
In the 12th century a Persian Sufi gave the whole journey its most beloved parable. It may be my favorite book.
In The Conference of the Birds, Attar (his pen name means ‘perfumer’) tells a tale of the birds of the world gathering around the hoopoe (the bird that carries Solomon’s letter in Qur’an 27) on a journey to see the Simurgh, the mythical King of the Birds.
First, the birds must swear an oath of obedience to their guide, for the road ahead is treacherous. But the spiritual power of the Pir (his baraka) is equal to it.
The birds must cross seven perilous valleys along the Way:
• Quest | they renounce their love of the world and turn from their sins
• Love | each bird plunges into a sea of fire
• Mystery | each must break off and follow a separate path
• Detachment | all “lust for meaning” disappears
• Unity | the many are merged in “the oneness of diversity”
• Bewilderment | the birds escape duality itself and let go of every desire for certainty
• Poverty & Nothingness | having destroyed the “mountain of self” and abandoned intellect for love, they are consumed by the spirit of the universe and rise, cloaked in oblivion, to meet the Simurgh
Thousands had set out. Only 30 birds remain at the end.
And what do they behold on the throne? Themselves. For Simurgh can be heard in Persian as ‘thirty birds’ (si murgh, Attar’s pun), and the seekers discover that what they sought, they were.
Fana & Rumi
While the destination matters, for the Sufi the journey matters even more.
It is the task of the Pir to purify the student as an alchemist purifies gold, burning away every impurity until only the pure and dazzling metal remains.
And, as in Attar’s parable, it is the task of the murid (student) to seek self-annihilation: fana, ‘passing away.’ Its classical partner is baqa, ‘abiding’: the self passes away, and what abides is God. The Sufis teach that only in the extinguishing of the self can one truly find God here on earth.
The greatest voice of that teaching is Rumi, and even the name tells a story. It means ‘the Roman,’ for Islamicate Anatolia was known as Rum — the land of eastern Rome.
Jalal al-Din (1207–1273) was born, by most accounts, in or near Balkh (today, Afghanistan), went west as a boy ahead of the Mongols (cf. Part 11), and settled in Konya, where he taught, danced, and wrote from his heart. The Mevlevi order takes its name from his title, Mawlana, ‘our master.’ As the greatest Sufi poet once wrote:
I want to be
where your bare foot walks,
because maybe, before you step,
you will look down at the ground.
I want that blessing.
Jalal al-Din Rumi, 13th century
Dhiker: Remembrance
Some come to Islam as the rich tradition of their family. Some come for the logic it offers and the order it brings to a life. And then there are the rare few who seek sheer transcendence: to be engulfed by joy and by an immediate sense of connection with God, here and now.
The history of Sufism, however, has often collided, sometimes violently, with the orderly workings of mainstream Islam. The Sufis were frequently unwelcome to share their practices at the noon prayer of the local mosque. It is partly for this reason that acts of dhiker (‘remembrance’) became the central Sufi practice. The practice has its own verse:
Truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find rest. Qur’an 13:28 (paraphrased)
The forms of dhiker run from the spoken to the danced:
• vocal dhiker: most common: the repeated chanting of the Shahadah or a verse
• silent dhiker: quiet and meditative
• artistic dhiker: often taking the form of calligraphy
• musical dhiker: in Pakistan, the spirit-filled devotional concerts called qawwali
• dancing dhiker: most famously the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey (the Mevlevi sema), who spin in circles, orbiting their Pir as they contemplate the Divine
All of these exercises, of body and mind, serve a single purpose: the annihilation of the self (fana) and the walking of the path of love all the way back to God.
The two summits of Part 10 stand closer together than they may at first appear.
The philosopher’s One, from which all things emanate and to which they return, and the mystic’s One, in which the seeker seeks to be dissolved, are recognizably kin, which is why al-Ghazali, having exhausted the arguments, went looking for the experience.
Reason built the ladder. The Sufi attempt to climb past its top rung.
To this day the great Sufi orders endure, from Turkey to the Balkans, from West Africa to South Asia (Turkey banned the dervish lodges in 1925, and the sema continues there as a state-celebrated ceremony). They gather for dhiker, honor their lineages of Pirs, and keep alive within the house of Islam the conviction that beneath the law and the learning lies a pearl.
And that the pearl is love.
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