PAPER READ AT 2ND INTERNATIONAL SUFI CONFERENCE, CULTURE & TOURISM DEPARTMENT, GOVERNMENT OF SINDH, KARACHI, 10TH APRIL 2016.
First of all I would like to thank the Culture & Tourism Department for the invitation to speak at this, the Second Sufi Conference, today. My special thanks go to Mr Abdul Hamid Akhund, who always accords me more honour than I deserve. I would need a hundred years to repay his kindnesses.
At the outset, I have to make an admission. I am not a Muslim. But before the Government of Pakistan revokes my passport – or even worse, before the Government renews it – I should clarify that, when I say that I am not a Muslim, what I mean is that I am not a good Muslim. While I believe, I do not demonstrate my faith or follow its tenets as faithfully as I should.
As an imperfect Muslim, therefore, I stand primarily disqualified from even approaching Sufism. Why, then, am I daring to talk on it?
The only justification I can offer (Hamid Akhund's invitation apart) is that I am a human being with a soul. And that soul has failed, over the past seventy-odd years of my life, to make the imperfect vehicle of my body travel in the right direction. By now, particularly after seven decades, mind should have mastered matter. Instead, matter has made my mind its slave.
Since this is the second such Sufi Conference, and one out of hundreds convened on this subject, I know there will be nothing new that I can offer you, no fresh pearls pried out of the countless oysters of knowledge. All that I have available to offer you today is my own experience, my own perception, my previous hopes, my present disappointments, my own experiments in the laboratory of Life in search of the formula for achieving osmosis with God.
Who said it would easy?
None would remain in this world for a single moment.
But I am in this world and of this world, an imperfect being in an imperfect world. I am reminded every day – from global trade, global warfare, global warming - that I am more than a common man: I am a global citizen, the product of a planet that modernity has shrunk into a global village.
So where is Sufism to be found within this matrix of socio-cultural modes? Everywhere, or nowhere?
My dilemma as a Sufi novitiate parallels that of the customer who walks into a spiritual supermarket and sees brand names on the shelf but no visible products, discerns labels to vessels that are without content.
I am not sure how many of you have heard the name of Mr. Ved Mehta. Born in pre-1947 Lahore, he went on to study at Oxford and Harvard, after which he became a staffer for the New Yorker magazine. He has authored a number of books. I have been honoured to be his friend since our first meeting in 1978.
All of us have had moments when our faith has been dramatically, irrevocably reaffirmed. It occurred in my life when during one Umrah, I was seated in the Masjid-e-Nabvi, as close to the grave of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) as the Saudi shurtas would allow. I picked up one of the copies of the Holy Quran kept there by courtesy the Saudi Government. I opened it at random. It fell open at the Sura Al Maida. I looked down and read the words: 'To thee We sent the Scripture in truth, confirming the scripture that came before it'. Time had telescoped. I felt as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation between God and his last prophet.
In effect, thanks to the media, Sufism has become a sort of spiritual Do It Yourself exercise, like videos on yoga or television programmes on gourmet cooking.
As a person who has learned life through books, I found this disconcerting. I am the product of an earlier age when books were revered in society. I live in a world in which teachers are being replaced by terminals, books by I-pads, knowledge by information, and transcendental spiritual experience by repetitive religious ritual.
'It is erroneous to imagine that a Sufi can end up with the fruits of Sufism, which are inner light, certainty, and the knowledge of Allah, without having maintained an outer protective shell, which is based upon adherence to the requirements of the outer laws. The correct outer behaviour – physical behavior – is based on making supplications and doing the prayers and all the other ritual acts of worship established by the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in order to achieve watchfulness of the 'heart', with its accompanying moods and states.' .
The history of the 20th and 21st centuries has shown us that differences accentuate mankind's isolation within itself. They prevent us coalescing into one global community.
When I look into my soul, I realize that I can still be a more pious Muslim, observe the mandatory rituals, and even love my fellow human beings. What burns me, what sears my soul, though, is being asked to forgive my fellow human beings. I can survive without Love; I cannot live without Hate. Love needs the characteristics of a sprinter; Hate has all the stamina of a long distance runner.
No man ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.' Persons who did, a whole community that did, an entire nation that did, were South Africans who, under Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, conducted not war trials for crimes against humanity, but public acts of forgiveness. Never in the history of mankind have perpetrators and their victims confronted each other in hate and departed in absolution.
I had the privilege of meeting Archbishop Tutu in Johannesburg. He is a short, ebullient, modest man. I told him that in my mind's eye, he was more of a Christian than Jesus Christ had been. That startled him. I explained why. Jesus Christ forgave his enemies only once, and that too after he had been nailed to die on the cross: 'Father, forgive them for they not what they do.' Archbishop Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission over months and months of heart-tearing testimony forgave the White murderers of South African Blacks every single day.
How many of us here would have been able to relive our equivalent traumas this way, and then have the generosity of spirit to forgive? The MQM, the PPP, the PML-N, the Pakistan Rangers? Al Qaeda? ISIS?
How I wish I could apply it to my own life!
That is why I confess that I can never be a Sufi. I have not found the right Master; I am too irregular in my religious observances; I seek knowledge in books more than I do from esoteric experience; I cannot love mankind without discrimination; and I cannot forgo the self-pity of victimhood and forgive my enemies.
I have reached the twilight years of my life when my horizon is within view, but lies below the line of my clouded vision.
I have no time left to be a practicing Sufi. But I am consoled by the awareness that, in my advanced age, l am closer to God physically now than I have ever been spiritually in my greener years. I shall be meeting God soon enough. And if he forgives me with His infinite grace, admits me into His limitless Being, I will have succeeded in death what I ought to have spent my life doing – achieving Oneness with the only One.
Are you the God I am searching for?
How will I know it is you?
Prophets have been privy to your light.
We sinners are denied that sight.
To find our place in Your eternity.
A carrot-ended stick of damnation.
A five-time test of our devotion.
Illiterate in your divine dialect?
Accepted, convert into a dialogue.
 Rumi, Masnavi I, 2101, quoted in Juliet Mabey, Rumi: A Spiritual Treasury (Oxford, 2000).
 Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston, 1997),221-2.
 Martin Lings, What is Sufism? (Lahore, 1975), 45, quoting Ali Hajwairi, Kash al-Mahjub, Ch. III.
 Shaikh Fadhlalla Haeri, The Thoughtful Guide to Sufism (New Delhi, 2006),63.
 A.J. Arberry, Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam (1950), 13.
 Quoted in Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference (London, 2002),4.
The Holy Bible, Luke 23:24.
 Rumi, Masnavi IV, 3632-6, quoted in Mabey, op. cit.,67.