Hakim Bey: Jihad Revisted
Submitted by Reverend Chuck0:JIHAD REVISTED
by Hakim Bey
In the mid-'90s I was invited to a big philosophy conference in Libya. I wrote a little paper on the influence of "Neo-Sufism" on Col. Qaddafi and his Green Book. I wondered if the Libyans would even allow me to read it. After all, Q came to power in 1969 by overthrowing a king who was also a Sufi master. Perhaps he had repudiated the influence of Sufism on his own life and thought?
Turned out the Libyans loved the paper and told me I was correct: in a sense the Libyan Revolution had been directed against corrupt Sufism on behalf of reformed Sufism. Unfortunately, Q himself never showed up at the conference to confirm or deny this, but I'm sure they were right.
Neo-Sufism arose in the 19th century in response to the corrupt authoritarian Sufism of colonial times and partly in response to colonialism itself. Anti-French resistance in Algeria was spearheaded by the great Emir Abdel Kader, guerilla chief and brilliant Sufi shaykh in the school of Ibn Arabi.
Neo-Sufis broke with the medieval concept of the all-powerful "master." Instead, they sought initiation in dreams and visions. In North Africa, the Sanussi Order and the Tijani Order, amongst others, were founded by seekers who'd been empowered in dreams by the Prophet Mohammed himself.
The Neo-Sufi orders were also conceived and shaped to some extent as reform movements within Islam, in competition with modernism & secularism on one hand and Salafist/Wahhabi neo-puritan "Islamism" on the other. Education & health and economic alternatives to colonialism were stressed in the Sanussi Order in Libya. And when armed struggle against Italian rule erupted, Sanussi fuqara (dervishes) led the uprising.
After independence, the head of the Order became King Idris I. Young Moammar Qaddafi, born in a Sanussi village to Sanussi parents, attended a Sanussi elementary school and high school. In England for military training in the '60s, the young officer read Colin Wilson's The Outsider and absorbed some New Left ideas, including "council communism" and the notion of the Spectacle. (See The Green Book, esp. the section on sports.)
Libyan Islam is not "fundamentalist," as so many Americans seem to believe. In fact it's anti-fundamentalist. The Islamists hate Q as a heretic, innovator & crypto-sufi. The Libyan ulema (religious authorities) declared the Ahadith (the Prophetic traditions) to be non-canonical, an extremely "liberal" position. There is still a Council of Sufi Orders in Libya, and the Sanussi Order still exists ("Just not the royal branch of it," as a Libyan delegate told me).
Elsewhere in the Islamic world, however, Neo-Sufism largely failed to provide a paradigm for contemporary spirituality or politics. "Westernization" and its reactionary double "Islamism" have swept the field. The old Sufi ideals of tolerance, difference, cultural depth, the arts of peace--as the Tunisian poet Abdelwahab Meddeb asserts in The Malady of Islam (Basic Books, 2003)--are despised by both secular modernists and rabid neo-puritans.
Mebbed also points out that the Islamists by no means adhere to "anti-materialist values." They adore technology and Capital as fervently as Westerners--provided it's "Islamic" tech and "Islamic" money, of course.
