By Euro-Muslims Editorial Desk
Those who do not know too much about Sufism tend to perceive it as a strange, exotic, secret, and perhaps interesting phenomenon. In an attempt to discover the manifestations of Sufism in Europe, Euro-Muslims Editorial Desk has conducted the following email interview with Professor Mark Sedgwick, author of the book Sufism: The Essentials. Professor Sedgwick is coordinator of the Arab and Islamic Studies Unit, Aarhus University, Denmark. Sedgwick's research focuses on junctions for the transfer of religions and traditions in the late premodern and modern periods.
IslamOnline.net (IOL): How did Sufism reach Europe?
Sedgwick: It depends a bit on what you mean by Europe! The Balkans are in Europe too, and Sufism reached them through the Ottoman Empire and Islam. And it's still there, despite all the upheavals of the last hundred years. But if you are thinking of Western Europe — France, Germany, England, and so on — awareness of Sufism first appeared in the seventeenth century.
Sufism first reached Western Europe in writing, in two ways. Some Western Europeans who had been in the Muslim World wrote about it, either very briefly (and often not very accurately) or at more length. Seventeenth century descriptions were the briefest ones. The earliest descriptions at more length come from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and they often misunderstood what Sufism actually was. Frequently, writers confused what they saw and heard in the Muslim World with religious ideas that were then fashionable in Europe.
The other written form in which Sufism reached Western Europe was through translations of Persian Sufi poetry. The great German writer Goethe was incredibly enthusiastic about these and even declared that the Sufi poet Hafiz was his only true brother! Quite an endorsement! I think Goethe was probably more important than anyone else in making Sufi poetry as popular in Europe as it has become.
IOL: When did Sufis begin to appear in Europe?
Sedgwick: The first actual flesh-and-blood Sufis began to appear in Western Europe just before the First World War. The earliest I have heard of was Ivan Aguéli, a Swedish painter who was living in Paris and was interested in art and other so-called modern movements spreading there at the end of the nineteenth century, such as radical socialism, animal rights, female liberation, magic, etc. He became a Sufi on a visit to Cairo and invited some other modern Parisians into Sufism when he went back home. That led to all sorts of strange and interesting things which I wrote about in my book Against the Modern World.
Then, during the period between the two world wars, Sufism became very popular in certain circles. Sometimes, ideas that really had nothing to do with Sufism as found in the Muslim World ended up getting described as “Sufi”, in the sense of strange, exotic, secret, and mysterious. Since there were few real Sufis in Western Europe at the time, people could get away with claiming that almost anything was Sufi.
IOL: Real Sufism. What do you understand by real Sufism and what does this label stand for in Europe?
Sedgwick: Well, I shouldn't have used the word real — it's not exactly a scholarly concept. Scholars like me aren't meant to judge the real from the fake: that's the job of the mufti or the sheikh! But I think one can still distinguish between what a typical Sufi from the Muslim World would react to with "yes, of course!" and with "but what a bizarre idea!"
Real means different things to different people. Everyone always claims that their understanding of anything, including Sufism, is the real one. So, since there were, and are still, several different versions of Sufism in Europe, there are several different real versions too — including ones that a Sufi from the Muslim World would be very surprised by.
IOL: What do traditionalist Sufism (rooted in the Qur'an and classical Sufism) and neo-Sufism (Islam-free Sufism) have in common?
Sedgwick: The name! In extreme cases, that is. What you call Islam-free Sufism is just one of the versions you can find in Europe — there is Islam-lite as well, and that has rather more to do with what you call traditionalist Sufism and what I would call something like Sufism as found in most places in the Muslim World.
IOL: Is the Sufism present in Europe more likely to be local or global? Please give some examples of both orders restricted to one country and branches of major Sufi orders outside Europe.
Sedgwick: It can be local, global, or both. Most of the major orders from the Muslim World are now present in Western Europe. The Naqshbandiyya, for example, can usually be found anywhere where there are a lot of Turks, and there are a lot of Turks in Western Europe now. So, they are pretty global. Then, there are what one might call local groups, in the sense that they exist in the West but not in the Muslim World, like the so-called Sufi Order International — but even they aren't exactly local, because they exist in several different countries. Very few things are truly local nowadays.
Something that I always find very interesting is the way in which things can be global and local. The Boutchichiyya, for example, is both. In Morocco, where it originates, it is definitely Moroccan, so one would call its French branches global. But some of its French branches are very French, so they are local as well as being global.
IOL: Which are the main influences on Sufism in European countries and what was their impact?
Sedgwick: It depends [on] what sort of Sufism one is talking about. Some Sufi orders in Europe try very hard not to be influenced by Europe and to do as much as possible exactly what they would do in the Muslim World — that is perhaps one of the points of Sufism in Europe for some people: that it keeps undesirable European influences out. Others — the more Islam-lite ones, for example — are very much influenced by all the various European currents, whether attitudes to religion in general or philosophical ideas or ideas about gender relations.
But I think that, in recent years, the major influence on Sufism in Western Europe has been Sufism in the Muslim World. One result of globalization is that many more orders in the West are now connected to orders in the Muslim World.
IOL: What roles has Sufism assumed in Europe?
Sedgwick: For some, just the same roles as it does in the Muslim World — spiritual, religious, and also social — though the social can also be religious, when it's a matter of spending time with people who love Islam and follow its rules carefully. For others, it's part of what some people call the shopping basket of religious ideas that many people put together. Numerically, the largest group is probably those who read Sufi poetry, often without knowing anything much about Islam, and perhaps not even realizing that what they are reading is connected with Islam. For them, it's just beautiful — a sort of beauty they probably would have difficulty in explaining.
IOL: How do you evaluate Sufism's influence on Europe?
Sedgwick: I'm not sure that Sufism has had an influence on Europe as a whole. It has certainly had a widespread influence on millions of people through Sufi poetry, but as I said, it's hard to say quite what that influence is — if the people influenced in that way can't explain it, it's certainly hard for anyone else to. Then, for certain individuals, it has had a tremendous influence: it has led them to convert to Islam. But that's an influence on individual Europeans, not on Europe.
IOL: Please introduce to our readers some famous European Sufis.
Sedgwick: Probably the most famous at the moment is Doris Lessing, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her variety of Sufism is pretty much Islam-free, though. Then, there was Ivan Aguéli, the early Sufi in Paris, who is nowadays pretty famous in Sweden — actually, famous for his paintings, which get some people interested in his Sufism. I don't think there are any Sufis whose names are known across Europe, though. There are lots who are known in particular circles in particular countries.
IOL: How have Sufism and Sufis been seen by Europeans?
Sedgwick: I think it depends. Islam is so unpopular with so many Western Europeans nowadays that any association of anything with Islam is often purely negative, and that goes for Sufism too. But, then, there are also some Western Europeans who realize that there must be more to Islam than the demonstrations and bombs and other horrifying things they see on their television screens — who are shown by Sufism the more spiritual side of things. Then, there are Europeans who still think of Sufism as strange, exotic, secret, and really interesting, without knowing anything much about it. But for those who want to find out, it's becoming easier and easier nowadays.
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