"We are the Sufis"

I have wanted to post this blog for some time, but life has gotten in the way.  Too many experiences and meetings with amazing people and of course the teaching of my class twice a week.
  Before I left Indonesia five years ago, I had wanted to meet some real Sufis, the subject of my first research proposal.  My friend, Pak Habib, fulfilled that desire the very last week of my stay, on our trip to Lamongan to meet the former jihadist fighter, Ali Fauzi.  We stopped at a Sufi shrine, where men and women were gather to pray.  I was invited into the inner circle of the shrine.  By the very end of my visit, I asked Habib, where were the Sufis while I was here?  His answer is the title of this blog, "We are the Sufis."

  Now that I am teaching in a multi-religious, very open and inclusive center of religious studies, I am constantly reminded of the importance of the Sufis.  In fact, one of my friends who works at the Center has written her M.A. thesis on Sufi women, a very interesting contribution to the class.  She shared her thesis with us, and we got to read how she had come to interview three women identified with Sufism in some way.  We heard so many of the themes that we had come across in the medieval women mystics of the Christian tradition: emphasis on experience, intuition or inner knowing, memory of God, body memories.
 This background was vital when we visited a "pesantren," an Indonesian boarding school for children and high schoolers, where a variety of subjects, in Islam and the Qur'an, as well as a broader curriculum are taught.  We met and talked for two hours to the "kyai," the leader of the pesantren.  He was a man trained in psychology, and also brought to the conversation his own emphasis on being at the center where he said the "essence" or "reality," is, not only around the periphery where interpretation and commentary arise.  That was so very consistent with the essay by Bro. David Steindl-Rast, "Mysticism: the Core of Organized Religion," http://csp.org/Steindl-Mystical.html, that we had begun our class with.  I looked at Najiyah, the woman who written her thesis on "Women, Spirituality, and Power" after interviewing the kyai's late wife, and we both felt the coherence immediately.