Modern Muslims by Steve Howard

Author:Steve Howard [Howard, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2016-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

5

Communicating Islamic Reform

Small Media, Big Ideas

On the east bank of the Blue Nile is the village of Hilaliya, not far from the region in which Ustadh Mahmoud was raised. We visited the tomb of a holy man there, a wali, who was celebrated for the miracles he performed that attracted followers to his maseed, a Sufi school for Qur’an study. We saw the site of his best-known miracle, the ghar, an underground cell, which he constructed for his long periods of fasting and contemplation of God. To get to this underground cell is a feat unto itself. You crawl through a hole in the dirt floor of a room above the cell, and then descend down a rickety steep and narrow staircase. In an act that I suppose could be called “Sufi tourism,” we climbed down into the cell and listened to one of the disciples of this wali’s tariqa explain that he was able to endure longer and longer passages of time in the cell, eventually reaching ninety days, without food or water—nothing but God. While I might have referred to this visit facetiously as “Sufi tourism,” neither Ustadh Mahmoud nor his followers would have used that term. The intention of our visit was not to “enjoy ourselves” but rather to appreciate the intense spirituality of men who lived close to God in this region in the past.

When we climbed down the staircase to the cell we found a simple angareb rope bed, where the holy man would lie during his periods of seclusion. There was also a tube to provide air from the upper reaches of the building to the cell, through which the holy man could breathe. The performance of miracles like this attracted adherents to the maseed in Hilaliya and came at a time of nineteenth-century Islamic revival in Sudan—and the great competition for the souls of Sudanese.

Everything else about this phenomenon we left to Allah aa’lim, “God knows best.” The Republican perspective on these exploits of the Sufis was that the old Sufis’ focus was far more on the actions of devotion than on ideas. My own view of the practices of these old Sufis was that their efforts to recruit followers in this manner were the origins of Sufi method, an exuberant or rigorous illustration of a path to God’s knowledge. But Khalid El Haj told me on that visit to Hilaliya, “These were static views of ibada, what one had to do in the performance of religious duties, rather than on making progress in the performance of that ibada.” Nevertheless, other Republicans on our group visit to Hilaliya that day voiced the view that the approach of these old Sufis was basic to the development of Republican thought. The intensity of prayer, the strict focus on God, the attention to one’s practice of Islam, were all components of what became the Republican idea. “These were our roots,” one brother told me, indicating why Republicans—for the most part—demonstrated respect for the awlia, the holy men of the past.

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