Sufi conference in Morocco highlights global citizenship

I'm not a fan of The Unz Review; I don't share or endorse the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias expressed by many of its columnists. However, it does sometimes publish interesting items, such as the following by Kevin Barrett, a convert to Islam, originally on Substack, on September 28, 2023 (bold, link in original):

Since I came to Islam in 1993, I have attended plenty of Sufi get-togethers, both here in Morocco and back in the USA. They are generally modest affairs (except for the food, which can be pretty lavish). Typically a couple of dozen people at most gather in a circle if it’s a mosque, or a rectangle if it’s a Moroccan sala, to perform dhikr, a kind of chanting, swaying group meditation. After an hour or two of dhikr, sometimes including an exhortation or discussion led by the shaykh, a communal meal is enjoyed. And I do mean communal—people reach in to eat off the same plate and drink out of the same glass.

I spent the day yesterday at a very different kind of Sufi gathering: a big academic-style conference sponsored by corporations, NGOs, and presumably the Moroccan government. Entitled “Sufism: Religious and Civic Values for Global Citizenship,” it was hosted by the Boutchichiyya Zawiya in Madargh, Morocco, and coordinated with the Mawlid an-Nabi (the Prophet’s birthday, celebrated today).

Sufism, often defined as “Islamic mysticism,” has had a long, ambivalent relationship with institutional forces and with power in general. Organized into tariqas or brotherhoods, some Sufis have supported rulers, others have opposed them, while the majority have oscillated between offering friendly and critical feedback. Today, some politically-engaged Muslims view Sufism negatively because, they say, it promotes quietism and navel-gazing rather than engagement with the formidable challenges facing the community. But historically, that’s just not true. Sufis have generally been about as activist (or not-so-activist) as anyone else.

Personally, my “truth jihadi” activism is inspired in part by Moroccan malamati Sufism. The malamatis (“people of blame”) don’t mind being vilified, because they don’t care about anyone’s opinion but God’s. The Moroccan malamatis have traditionally specialized in speaking truth to power, often in shocking ways. Middle Eastern malamatis, by contrast, traditionally did stupid things like filling wine bottles with water and chugging from them in the mosque to give the false impression that they’re obnoxious drunkards. (Since the last of the Middle Eastern malamatis got chased out of town a long time ago, you’re unlikely to see any on your next trip to Baghdad or Damascus.)...

...The serious business of the conference involved the notion of global citizenship (citoyenneté globale). In French and English, that sounds a bit like your status under the forthcoming world government being set up by the likes of George Soros and Klaus Schwab. But the Arabic phrase, موطنة شاملة, has rather different connotations. The word for citizenship, موطنة, stems from the notion of وطن (national homeland) and might be translated as “national homeland-belonging.” And the word شاملة means “inclusive” or “comprehensive.” So موطنة شاملة (an inclusive/comprehensive homeland-belonging) sounds, to my ears at least, markedly different from citoyenneté globale. While on one level the conference slogan could mean moving toward “world citizenship,” on another it can imply moving toward an even stronger attachment to national homelands than exists today.

Various Moroccan speakers at the conference, including Dr. Larbi Taouaf of Mohammad 1 University in Oujda, made it clear that one of the references of “national homeland-belonging” was to Morocco’s unique version of national-unity-in-diversity. Morocco, Dr. Taouaf explained, has spent many centuries forging an inclusive national identity bringing together a great many languages and ethnicities. The unifying factor, he suggested, is Islamic religious and spiritual values (which of course promote coexistence and dialogue with other faiths). By contrast, the postcolonial West’s experience of promoting secular-based “diversity” and “multiculturalism” and “pluralism” has only existed for a few decades and doesn’t seem to be working out very well.

Morocco’s approach, Dr. Taouaf said, differs from today’s Western liberalism in that it is “against identity politics in the public sphere.” In other words, Moroccans and their government don’t much care what you do or say in private, but have no compunction about placing limits on your ability to become a public nuisance. (When an American speaker apostrophizing “tolerance” ill-advisedly brought up the fraught issues of gender and sexuality, the next speaker, a Moroccan, subtly but pointedly rebuked him by citing the famous Qur’anic dictate to “command good and forbid evil.”)

It seems to me that rather than asking their hosts whether Morocco is liberal and democratic enough, Western visitors should ask themselves: Is identity-politics-based liberal democracy really the best way to run a country? Case in point: Today’s Washington Post features three excellent articles on how liberalism (say anything you want on social media, including incitements to violence) plus democracy (whoever riles up the voters the most wins) plus identity politics (Hindu fascism) is producing hell-on-earth in Modi’s godforsaken India...

...Meanwhile, back at the conference: How can Sufism, rather than “liberal democracy,” promote good citizenship around the world? I would answer that question by arguing that the mystical dimension of religion, rather than the exoteric and especially the identity politics dimension, is what inspires devotion to the good, the true, and the beautiful, thereby inspiring good behavior. If Hindus in India, for example, spent more time meditating on the Upanishads, and less time lynching Muslims and Christians (and voting and campaigning for people who promote the lynchings) they would be both better mystics and better citizens.

People are more likely to follow rules of good behavior if they can directly sense, intuit, or even know that there is a divine Reality behind those rules. Mysticism teaches direct encounters with the Reality at the heart of religion.

Just as mysticism promotes globalism, it also promotes universalism; those who so-called contemplative spirituality, for instance, come across people from other religions who report similar experiences, leading to the conclusion that the experiences must be coming from the same source--which is why it's dangerous to rely on the shifting sand of subjective experience rather than on the solid, unchanging truth of the Bible. This mysticism is contributing to the deception characteristic of the end times prior to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.