[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
""Ibid., 32/33.
265
Shock-Teaching
Q: Could you tell us a Sufi shock-teaching technique?
A: Sufi teaching techniques strongly feature the challenging
statement, made in order to cause a multiple effect upon the hearer.
Mansur Hallaj, notoriously, said: 'I am God!' for precisely this
reason.
If someone in the West says, in slightly more contemporary
language: 'Hitler was a great man!' the shock of this will cause
the hearer to react, instantly.* In some people it will make them
realise for the first time what it is like to hear such a statement,
what the people who used to say this were like. It will also cause
some to realise that, perhaps, the question as to Hitler's greatness
or otherwise is irrelevant to their own situation. It will make some
realise that they are obsessed by this 'greatness' or otherwise,
revealing how their opinions can be triggered by the use of a
phrase. In some it will show how almost any sequence of words
can be used to 'programme' people and to cause 'belief' or 'opposi-
tion'.
This is the technique sometimes used by Omar Khayyam and his
school.
Unless this is understood, of course, Khayyam cannot be under-
stood, because some academics take his words at their face value.
When he says: 'Every violet is a beauty-mole from some former
beloved', they must imagine that this is reincarnation or poetic
imagery, when it is in fact 'shock'. The theory of reincarnation
was a heresy in his culture.
The Sufi literature is full of this kind of experiential teaching-
" Although Hitler died in 1945, almost universally regarded as a monster,
the shock-effea of calling him 'great' had, for many people, worn off
in a generation. A German teacher found that many young compatriots
knew little about their former leader by 1977. Many of them, too, thought
that he had in fart been a great man. Time (New York) iS April, 1977,
p. 13.
266
material. Its presence effectively filters out the superficial and the
shallow.
People are conditioned to like certain remarks and to dislike
others. This is almost always useful, until one gets to the point
where hypocrisy takes advantage of the prevailing postures and
enables people to manipulate situations and evade reality. Again,
there are examples available in every culture in which people are
not permitted by convention to say certain things which are true,
because if they do they are regarded as immodest, boastful or
hostile to others. This sort of preservation of the status quo
may be good or it may be bad. Sometimes it produces 'tunnel
vision'.
In, order to act upon such situations, or to point out the limita-
tions of coercive custom, some of the greatest Sufis have not
shrunk from risking the most extreme opprobrium. I do not think
that their contribution in this respect has yet been equalled.
SILENCE AND SPEECH
One good example is found in Hujwiri's Revelation of the Veiled
(Nicholson's translation, 1911):
'I have read in the Anecdotes that one day when Abu-Bakr
Shibli [one of the most eminent of the ancient Sufis] was walking
in the Karkh quarter of Baghdad he heard an impostor saying:
"Silence is better than speech".
'Shibli replied: "Thy silence is better than thy speech, but my
speech is better than my silence, because thy speech is vanity and
thy silence is an idle jest, whereas my silence is modesty and
my speech is silence." '
Anyone who imagines that Shibli was acting in this way because
he had a bad temper, or that he was impatient or straying beyond
modesty is in need of such Sufi shock-teaching, since such an
individual would not yet have learnt that there is a possibility that
someone whom he regards (through conditioning) as out of order
may in reality be uttering what is in fact an exact description of
prevailing circumstances.
The main objection to supposedly immodest words is that they
have a bad effect upon the person who speaks them, or teach
267
observers to be 'immodest" and not humble. In the case of such
a person as Shibli, his status was (and is) such that the former is
not possible, and the latter interpretation could not occur: since
Shibli was known to be wholly veracious.
This attitude may seem odd to people not accustomed to it.
'Oddness of appearance is not contradiction of fact' as the saying
goes.
It is conditioning, as much as ignorance, which perpetuates the
ignorance of humanity stressed by Khalili* when he speaks of the
world and humanity's place in it:
Performers and spectators of the arena are we
Bewildered at our work and at the world's
We, little playthings in the hand of Time:
Made to dance each time its tune is played!
'Khalilullah Khalili: (Persian) Quatrains, Baghdad: Al-Maarif Press,
1975.4748.
268
Emotional Expectations
Q: Why does a Sufi group go on, sometimes for years, reading
books, meeting and apparently not getting anything done, without
any measurement of its progress, and without a sense of how things
are going?
A: Such a group has to 'wear out' emotional expectations. It
also has to provide circumstances in which the irrelevant and
customary associations, characteristics brought in from other
systems may be displayed and observed, so that everyone can see
what is central and what is not. If the members of the group are
not seeing these things, it is not a Sufic group at all. Much of its
visible work is that of a 'preparatory group'. This does not mean
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]