Revelations on the Road to Damascus

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One little-known side effect of the early Islamic conquests, which began around 635 A.D. and within a century had extended the sway of Islam from the Straits of Gibraltar in the West to India and beyond in the East, was the sudden accumulation of vast amounts of wealth. Of one early Muslim warrior we read that at his death he owned 11 houses in Medina alone, as well as secondary residences in Basra, Kufa, and Alexandria, along with coffers brimming with plundered loot. Another left an estate of more than 30 million dirhams; a fortune when you consider that a single dirham consisted of approximately 3 grams of pure silver.


For the majority of the conquerors, however pious, this windfall, which served to propel the conquests, prompted no scruples. It was the richly merited bounty of Allah. For more scrupulous Muslims, however, the abrupt affluence was suspect. The Prophet Muhammad, after all, had lived simply, eschewing such luxuries as silk garments. And the prophet was the ultimate model of righteous living. For conscientious believers, booty could be considered ill-gotten gains; even worse, wealth and ostentation seemed profoundly irreligious. As the historian Ignaz Goldziher noted, “The treasures of Ctesiphon, Damascus, and Alexandria were not calculated to stiffen ascetic proclivities.” The overnight enrichment of desert tribesmen made possible the rapid burgeoning of Islamic civilization, but it also incited sharp reactions.


An ascetic movement arose whose devotees adopted garments of rough wool. The word for “wool” in Arabic is “suf” and those who wore this garb came to be known as Sufis. These early ascetics practiced stringent self-denial and a fierce rejection of the world (which one compared to a snake: smooth to touch but deadly poisonous). Fasting, silence, continual prayer, and incessant self-examination governed their lives.


Though some, such as the celebrated woman Sufi Rabi’a al-Adawiya, espoused a fervent doctrine of the love of God, others emphasized the overwhelming fear of God; they would have agreed with John Donne, who concluded one of his “Holy Sonnets” with the line: “Those are my best days when I shake with fear.” One of the dourest of these God-fearing mystics, the charismatic al-Hasan al-Basri, was said to have smiled only twice in his life, on both occasions at funerals, one of which was his own son’s.


This is hardly the brand of Rodeo Drive Sufism, inspired by such later Persian poets as Rumi – said to be “the most popular poet in America” – which we tend to encounter nowadays. Old-fashioned Sufis survive, but you have to search them out, often in the unlikeliest of places. One of these, it turns out, is Syria, and in “The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool: A Syrian Journey” (Sutton, 256 pages, $29.95), the English poet and essayist Marius Kociejowski shows vividly that amid the saber- and scimitar-rattling of recent times, Damascus proves surprisingly hospitable to this ancient form of Islamic spirituality.


Mr. Kociejowski is not a seeker after wisdom in the usual sense. In repeated encounters and conversations with his Syrian friends Abed, the “street philosopher,” and Sulayman, the “holy fool,” of his title, as well as in his account of their vicissitudes over the course of several years, he remains respectful but skeptical. He is a seeker of questions rather than of answers. Though Mr. Kociejowski says little about himself, we slowly grow aware that what draws him to Abed and Sulayman is not only curiosity and real affection but something profoundly destabilizing, a form of “holy madness” deeply rooted in both Christian and Muslim tradition.


The holy madman marches to the beat of a drum inaudible to the rest of us. His idiosyncrasies, even his blatant contradictions, obey the dictates of a hidden law. At one moment Sulayman, who ekes out a meager living at a roadside stand, appears indifferent to money; at another, he plunges feverishly into business, even going so far as to take up alchemy in an obsessive quest to transmute base metals into gold.


Abed, the footloose intellectual, goes crazy with unrequited love for a flirtatious French tourist. He is terrified of a loneliness that he feels driven to accept as willed by God. Of Sulayman, Abed (who has the best lines) says that he possesses “the unstoppability of the gentle,” a poignant tribute. Both men are linked in what Abed again calls an “extraordinary and pathetic survival.” But both, however demented they appear, draw on a deep trust in the same God who routinely disappoints them. This is the oldest of Sufi precepts. When a man told the prophet that he loved God, the prophet replied, “Prepare for affliction.”


Mr. Kociejowski intersperses his story of Abed and Sulayman with fascinating glimpses of a Syria rarely seen by outsiders. Not only Sufi masters but such loony apparitions as Abu Walid, who captivates visiting dignitaries with fantastically detailed, and wholly invented, anecdotes about his friendships with Field Marshall Montgomery or President Ford’s sister (!). There is also the embattled Jesuit priest Paolo Dall’Oglio at the monastery of Deir Mar Musa, whom Mr. Kociejowski visits and whose efforts to bring Muslims and Christians closer he movingly describes. His meeting with the scruffy but magnificent poet and dramatist Mahmud al-Maghut, perhaps the greatest living Arab poet, introduces an enigmatic apparition with a face “between a farmer’s and a Roman emperor’s.” These vignettes, accompanied by striking photographs and a wealth of citations from writers as varied as the Church fathers and the 14th-century philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun, give us a Syria too often obscured by the headlines.


Nowadays few Westerners take the road to Damascus; fewer still experience revelations along the way. A maxim beloved by the old Sufis runs, “The absence of perception is itself perception.” By this they meant, I think, that knowledge begins with recognition of the limits of our knowledge. Mr. Kociejowski traces these limits with exceptional delicacy. He offers no “Eastern wisdom.” His book is too searching, too admirably baffled, for that. Nor is it really a travel book, though it teems with interesting facts and useful information. Mr. Kociejowski’s true theme, astutely but lovingly rendered, is friendship. In this respect it’s worth remembering that in Sufi parlance, God himself is often called “The Friend.”


eormsby@nysun.com


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