From childhood, we are told that patience is a virtue and that good things will come to those who wait. And, so, many of us work on cultivating patience.

This often starts by learning to wait for a turn with a coveted toy. As adults, it becomes trying to remain patient with long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, misbehaving kids or the slow pace of political change. This hard work can have mental health benefits. It is even correlated with per capita income and productivity.

But it is also about trying to become a good person.

It’s clear to me, as a scholar of religious ethics, that patience is a term many of us use, but we all could benefit from understanding its meaning a little better.

In religious traditions, patience is more than waiting, or even more than enduring a hardship. But what is that “more,” and how does being patient make us better people?

The writings of medieval Islamic thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali can give us insights or help us understand why we need to practice patience – and also when not to be patient.

Who was al-Ghazali?

Born in Iran in 1058, al-Ghazali was widely respected as a jurist, philosopher and theologian. He traveled to places as far as Baghdad and Jerusalem to defend Islam and argued there was no contradiction between reason and revelation. More specifically, he was well known for reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy, which he likely read in Arabic translation, with Islamic theology.

Al-Ghazali was a prolific writer, and one of his most important works – “Revival of the Religious Sciences,” or the “Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn” – provides a practical guide for living an ethical Muslim life.

This work is composed of 40 volumes in total, divided into four parts of 10 books each. Part 1 deals with Islamic rituals; Part 2, local customs; Part 3, vices to be avoided; and Part 4, virtues one should strive for. Al-Ghazali’s discussion of patience comes in Volume 32 of Part 4, “On Patience and Thankfulness,” or the “Kitāb al-sabr waʾl-shukr.”

He describes patience as a fundamental human characteristic that is crucial to achieving value-driven goals, and he provides a caveat for when impatience is called for.

1. What is patience?

Humans, according to al-Ghazali, have competing impulses: the impulse of religion, or “bāʿith al-dīn,” and the impulse of desire, or “bāʿith al-hawā.”

Life is a struggle between these two impulses, which he describes with the metaphor of a battle: “Support for the religious impulse comes from the angels reinforcing the troops of God, while support for the impulse of desire comes from the devils reinforcing the enemies of God.”

The amount of patience we have is what decides who wins the battle. As al-Ghazali puts it, “If a man remains steadfast until the religious impulse conquers … then the troops of God are victorious and he joins the troops of the patient. But if he slackens and weakens until appetite overcomes him … he joins the followers of the devils.” In other words, for al-Ghazali, patience is the deciding factor of whether we are living up to our full human potential to live ethically.

2. Patience, values and goals

Patience is also necessary for being a good Muslim, in al-Ghazali’s view. But his understanding of how patience works rests on a theory of ethics and can be applied outside of his explicitly Islamic worldview.

It all starts with commitments to core values. For a Muslim like al-Ghazali, those values are informed by the Islamic tradition and community, or “umma,” and include things like justice and mercy. These specific values might be universally applicable. Or you might also have another set of values that are important to you. Perhaps a commitment to social justice, or being a good friend, or not lying.

“Nizamiyyah University Nishapur,” Digital imagining, Dall-E, 2024.

Living in a way that is consistent with these core values is what the moral life is all about. And patience, according to al-Ghazali, is how we consistently make sure our actions serve this purpose.

That means patience is not just enduring the pain of a toddler’s temper tantrum. It is enduring that pain with a goal in mind. The successful application of patience is measured not by how much pain we endure but by our progress toward a specific goal, such as raising a healthy and happy child who can eventually regulate their emotions.

In al-Ghazali’s understanding of patience, we all need it in order to remain committed to our core principles and ideas when things aren’t going our way.

3. When impatience is called for

One critique of the idea of patience is that it can lead to inaction or be used to silence justified complaints. For instance, scholar of Africana studies Julius Fleming argues in his book “Black Patience” for the importance of a “radical refusal to wait” under conditions of systemic racism. Certainly, there are forms of injustice and suffering in the world that we should not calmly endure.

Despite his commitment to the importance of patience to a moral life, al-Ghazali makes room for impatience as well. He writes, “One is forbidden to be patient with harm (that is) forbidden; for example, to have one’s hand cut off or to witness the cutting off of the hand of a son and to remain silent.”

These are examples of harms to oneself or to loved ones. But could the necessity for impatience be extended to social harms, such as systemic racism or poverty? And as Quranic studies scholars Ahmad Ismail and Ahmad Solahuddin have argued, true patience sometimes necessitates action.

As al-Ghazali writes, “Just because patience is half of faith, do not imagine that it is all commendable; what is intended are specific kinds of patience.”

To sum up, not all patience is good; only patience that is in service of righteous goals is key to the ethical life. The question of which goals are righteous is one we must all answer for ourselves.

Liz Bucar, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The other bombing hit a mosque in Hangu in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province. The mosque was known to be frequented by members of the local police. The suicide bombers had tried to hit the police station first and been repulsed, so they turned to a soft target. There have been 300 attacks in this province this year.

The insurgent movement in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP), denied involvement. The TTP is closely allied with the Taliban who now again rule Afghanistan, and there are frictions between the Taliban and the current Pakistani government.

That the attack in Mastung targeted worshipers commemorating the birthday of the Prophet suggests that the perpetrators were members of ISIL, the so-called “Islamic State” group. When ISIL was ruling northern Iraq and eastern Syria, they banned celebrating Muhammad’s birthday as a sinful “innovation.” Their views on the matter are in accord with the fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia, where jurists such as Abdel Aziz Bin Baz (d. 1999) also forbade honoring the Prophet’s birthday. Small ISIL cells have carried out terrorist attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and have occasionally hit targets in Pakistan itself. In Baluchistan, the so-called Islamic State- Pakistan Province is active, whereas in Khyber Pushtunkhwa the rival Islamic State – Khurasan carries out attacks. The latter was likely the perpetrator at Hangu.

Pakistan’s own security has declined because of infighting among the country’s political elite since Prime Minister Imran Khan was unseated in a vote of no confidence on April 10, 2022, in which 20 former supporters in the parliament defected. Khan has castigated the parliamentary maneuver as an illegitimate plot, and is now in jail on corruption charges that his followers say are trumped up.

I’d say 98% of the Muslims in the world approve of commemorating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, which is usually given as the twelfth day of the third month of the Islamic calendar, Rabi’ al-Awwal in 570 CE, nearly six centuries after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

I wrote a book about the Prophet Muhammad, in which I discuss the likely circumstances of his birth, but more importantly his teachings on peace and reconciliation.

Purchase

It is a great shame that some do things in his name at which he clearly would horrified.

Admittedly, historians do not think large public celebrations of this day began until about the 1100s CE, some 500 years after the Prophet. Since that time, poetry and hymns have been composed for the occasion, and people have developed customs like giving children toy horses or staging parades in the streets and putting up illuminated chandeliers and lanterns over city streets. That is why some scholars consider it an innovation. But most of those see it as a good innovation. The fundamentalist Wahhabi and Salafi tendencies, in contrast, tend to see all later innovations not present at the beginnings of Islam as illegitimate.

In Pakistan, most people celebrate the entire Muslim month of Rabi` al-Awwal as the birth month of the Prophet. Marching bands, rides on caparisoned camels, and other activities of public “fun” are popular.

It is widely celebrated among American Muslims.

The major Sunni religious authority, the al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, Egypt, has repeatedly upheld the legitimacy of such celebrations. The considered legal ruling or fatwa says, “It is not permissible according to Islamic law to challenge the legitimacy of celebrating the anniversary of the Prophet’s birthday due to the forbidden things that may occur during it. Rather, we denounce the evils that may surround it, and we warn those who commit it – with wisdom and leniency – that these evils contradict the basic purpose for which these honorable occasions were held.”

Sufis, Muslim mystics, have sometimes engaged in ecstatic rituals on this anniversary of which the more sober clerics disapprove. You could compare this difference to one between, say, mainstream Presbyterian clerics and Pentecostalists.

Still, there is a broad consensus in both Sunni and Shiite Islam that commemorating the birth of the Prophet is a good thing, a moment of joy and celebration.

The ISIL terrorist group, which has wrought a vast swathe of destruction through Muslim societies and has also committed terrorism in Europe and the US, has a policy of acting harshly, “like wild beasts” (tawahhush). By attempting to outlaw perfectly innocent and uplifting religious practices like the birth of the Prophet, they set themselves up as superior to other Muslims and can use such prohibitions as a means of asserting power over others. Hence the bombing of the procession outside a mosque in Mastung. The good news is that the Muslims themselves have waged a concerted and brave campaign to root out this wicked heresy that has created so many orphans.

This year I want to point to some verses of Farid al-Din Attar of Nishapur (1145-1221). Attar was what we would now call a pharmacist, but also a perfume maker. So he was the one you would go to for the equivalent of Pepto Bismol to settle your tummy, but also for this season’s Chanel N°5. He was a highly successful pharmacist, said to have been besieged by customers. In his spare time he wrote spiritual poetry. He does not appear to have traveled much, but the city of Nishapur in eastern Iran under the Saljuq Empire saw a lot of dramatic events, including nomadic conquests– as Richard Bulliet explains. In 1221 when Attar Was 76, the Mongols invaded Nishapur from Central Asia, and he was killed.

In the collection of Attar’s work, “50 Poems” can be found a depiction of the infant Jesus as a symbol of innocence, the sort of innocence that is the secret infancy of which adults have lost sight. In the Qur’an it is alleged, as in the pseudepigraphic infancy gospels of late antiquity, that Jesus spoke from the cradle. Attar uses this image to make Jesus the essence of innocent infancy:

The secret infancy has all the traits of Jesus;
like Jesus it speaks with sweetness from the cradle.
As the rose sweated from my Beloved’s face
a pure moistener like rosewater entered my mouth.

In the same volume, we find:

Firstly they became dust beneath the feet of dogs,
lastly like the wind they bowed their head to their Lord.
Attar whose words gave life to the soul,
found that Jesus became their companion.

Here Jesus is a symbol of humility and the putting aside of ego so as to become as dust before God. When they reach that estate of self-effacement, they discover that Jesus has become their companion.

Attar’s great classic was The Conference of the Birds, of which the best translation is that of Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi. He also wrote the “Divine Book,” translated by J. A. Boyle, and lyric poetry as well.

In the Ilahi-Nama (Boyle translation), Attar says:

“Like the Prophet David play this melody; like Jesus breathe the love of thy friend.”
“And had not Jesus been the Word of God, how should he in his glory have been the Pure Spirit?”

David was famed for his melodic Psalms, and Jesus for exemplifying God’s love (God is called “the Friend” or the “Beloved” by Sufis).

Jesus is also a symbol of self-denial. Attar depicts him in “The Conference of the Birds” as riding on a donkey and deploys this image as a symbol of the higher self mastering the carnal self, and purifying the soul with love:

The Self, that whirlpool where our lives are wrecked;
As Jesus rode his donkey, ride on it;
Your stubborn Self must bear you and submit –
Then burn this Self and purify your soul;
Let Jesus’ spotless spirit be your goal.
Destroy this burden, and before your eyes
The Holy Ghost in glory will arise.
Welcome, dear nightingale – from your sweet throat
Pour out the pain of lovers note by note.

An anecdote about Jesus is also attributed to Attar, saying that once Jesus was passing through a small town and some of his coreligionists taunted and reviled him. He replied by praying for them. An observer was astonished and asked him why he had not lashed out against them. Jesus replied, “I can only spend what I have in my purse.”

That is, he had no rancor in him, only love and forgiveness.

(The Conversation) – Most Muslims celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad on the 12th day of the third month of the Islamic calendar, Rabi’ al-awaal – which starts on the evening of Oct. 7 in 2022. Muslims view the celebration, called Mawlid al-Nabi or simply the Mawlid, like many other Islamic celebrations: as a sign of respect and adoration of Muhammad, whom they believe to be God’s messenger.

According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was a righteous man born around A.D. 570, whom God designated as his final prophet. He learned God’s message by heart and recited it. Later on, the verses were written down to preserve the text – what is now the Quran.

Most countries with majority Muslim populations, from Pakistan to Malaysia to Sudan, commemorate the prophet’s birthday each year. The most colorful celebrations are carried out in Egypt, with Sufi dhikr poetry commemorating the prophet, and games, toys and colorful sweets given to kids.

Yet not all Muslims will mark the holiday. In a few countries, like Saudi Arabia, it’s just like any other day. The focus of my research is how Muslim societies relate to their faith, including their sense of social justice and their expectations of governments. While most Muslim countries encourage commemorating the Mawlid, the opposite is true in communities shaped by the ultra-conservative Wahhabi school of Islam, whose global influence has rapidly expanded in recent decades.

Wahhabi disapproval

The Wahhabi movement was started in 1744 by Muhamed Ibn Abdel Wahab, a religious scholar and reformer in what is today Saudi Arabia. Muhamed Ibn Saud, a political leader considered the founder of the Saud dynasty, legitimized his authority by seeking Ibn Abdel Wahab’s religious opinions. Ibn Saud was eager to wrest more power from the Ottoman Empire, which controlled much of the peninsula at the time.

Since then, Wahhabism has spread across the Muslim world in countries such as Yemen, the post-Soviet states, Tunisia and Egypt – especially after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which spurred Iran’s rise as a regional power and prompted Saudi Arabia to try and compete.

An austere school of Islam, Wahhabism often encourages the literal interpretation of the Quran and is especially suspicious of any practices they see as idolatry. For example, Saudi authorities have clamped down on worship at saints’ tombs and razed some holy sites entirely. In extreme cases, Salafis – a related school of Islam – have claimed that the relics and statues of ancient Egypt should be destroyed. In Saudi Arabia, the religious police, called mutaween, guard the prophet’s burial grounds in Medina during pilgrimage seasons to prevent visitors from touching it or praying close to it.

Conservatives frown upon adoration of the prophet. Wahhabi puritans consider the Mawlid heretical, citing a saying of the prophet, called a hadith: Every heresy is a misguidance, and every misguidance will end in hell. The word for “heresy” here, “bid’ah,” is often used to condemn Muslim practices seen as innovations, like celebrating the prophet’s birthday.

Celebrating with awe

Critics of Wahhabism argue that it compromises people’s relationship with God by cutting off instinctual human behavior, like wanting to honor a prophet.

As opposed to the literal and conservative focus on the oneness of God, which Wahabis emphasize, most Muslims observe the prophet’s birthday as a sign of love, respect and awe.

The Mawlid is celebrated in many ways and forms in the Muslim world, whether it is quietly observed by fasting and reading the Quran, or by kids dressing up in bright colors and getting a tiny horse or a doll made out of sugar. The practices vary, but the one thing they articulate are the admirable qualities of the prophet and how dear he is to his followers.

Deina Abdelkader, Associate Professor of Political Science, UMass Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Protesters gathered outside Kesra Hospital in Tehran where Ms. Amini was taken (though we now know she was pronounced dead on arrival). They chanted anti-government slogans, such as “From Kordestan to Tehran, women are oppressed” and some women unveiled.

These scenes were repeated at Ms. Amini’s funeral itself, where hundreds of mourners gathered and some shouted slogans such as “Death to the dictatorship!” against the Islamic Republic and its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Women tore off their headscarves and held them up to the sky while chanting, according to Firaz Dağ at the Germany-based Kurdish web site, Nûçe Ciwan .

The controversy is multi-faceted, since it concerns women’s rights but also the rights of the Kurdish minority of mountainous western Iran. There are about 6,730,000 Kurds in Iran, about 8% of the population. Kurds are majority Sunni and many are Sufis, and they have often chafed under Shiite Iranian rule. At some points in recent years police in the province have detained dozens of Sunni religious activists in Kurdistan.

At Ms. Amini’s funeral, her grandfather read from the Kurdish poet Shirku Bikas a poem entitled “Tehran does not laugh for Anyone.” He concluded, “We will not fall short, we will not kowtow.”

Although protesters insisted that Ms. Amini had been beaten or tortured, Tehran police said she died of a heart attack while in a waiting area and showed video of Ms. Amini speaking to a police official and then returning to her chair, when she collapsed. Iran’s hard line president, Ebrahim Raisi, has called for an inquiry into her death.

As a social historian, I would just observe that women in their twenties are the healthiest group in any human population, so that they are far more likely to die of accidents, homicide or suicide than from any medical condition. The Tehran medical examiner has said that he should have autopsy results in three weeks. My guess is that Ms. Amini was beaten on the head, which caused a traumatic brain injury and bleeding in the brain or caused a brain aneurysm. That would explain her abrupt collapse. The likelihood that she had a heart attack is virtually nil unless she had a congenital condition from birth, which her parents deny.

Al Jazeera English reports that “the reformist Etemad Melli political party urged Iran’s parliament to cancel the law on the mandatory hijab and suggested President Ebrahim Raisi do away with the morality police.”

Al Jazeera also said that famed Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi issued a rare rebuke, calling Amini’s death while detained by police “a crime.”

It remains to be seen whether the incident has a long-term effect on Iran’s often vital women’s movement, which constantly struggles against religiously-backed male chauvinism and misogyny.

In keeping with this Easter theme of joy, today I am sharing my translation of Poem 4 in the Persian Divan of Hafez of Shiraz (d. 1390 A.D.), who invokes the image of a Christ ascended into the heavens who breaks into an ecstatic dance. The amazing and cryptic verse goes this way

It’s no surprise that in the sky Hafez’s verse
set Venus singing, at which Christ broke into dance.

There are other Easter-like themes in Persian poetry. Muslims believe in Jesus and his miracles, such as raising Lazarus from the dead. In a celebration of the coming of spring, a poem attributed to the astronomer Omar Khayyam says,

Now that the world verges on being happy,
the high-spirited plan to make merry outside.
Each branch is putting out shoots as white as the hand of Moses,
and every breeze wafts the life-giving breath of Jesus.

Rising from the dead is obviously relevant to the holy day.

(For my book of translated poems from the Rubaiyat, see this link.)

But let us turn to Hafez.

Hafez lived in turbulent times, with the gradual fall of the Mongol dynasty and the rise of regional rulers. He sometimes had a high position at court, but for most of the last twenty years of his life he had fallen out of favor. His forte was the lyric poem (ghazal). Some of his verse is touched by mystical Sufi themes, but much of it is secular love poetry or explores themes in what Hamid Dabashi has called Persian humanism. He is a severe critic of the hypocrisy of the Establishment, including the Muslim clerics. To tweak the latter, he praises wine-drinking (frowned on by puritan Muslims) and rascals, as well as wandering Sufi holy men (qalandars).

The poem I’m presenting today is a love poem. It has some stock images. In Persian poetry, the nightingale is the lover of the rose and sings its song for its benefit. Parrots love lumps of sugar (qand) and so are beloved by sugar merchants. Beautiful lovers are graceful and compared to gazelles, so the lover is on a sort of desert hunt. This kind of poetry also has some stock themes, such as the cruel indifference of the beloved to the lover’s advances.

This ghazal ends, however, with an original image, of a Jesus who dances across the heavens.

Soft morning breeze, please tell that elegant gazelle
that she has led us through your deserts and high hills

It is not strange that the poor sugar merchant would
be full of yearning for the parrot who loves sweets.

My rose, did beauty’s vanity prohibit you
from seeking out this love-enraptured nightingale?

You hunt the wise with virtue and benevolence;
you cannot snare the canny bird with nets and traps.

I don’t know why she gives no sign of knowing me–
that tall moon-faced girl with the smoldering black eyes.

When you are seated with your darling sipping wine
Recall to mind the lovers braving stormy gales.

Your beauty is quite flawless save that there is no
fidelity or kindness in your lovely face.

It’s no surprise that in the sky Hafez’s verse
set Venus singing, at which Christ broke into dance.

در آسمان نه عجب گر به گفتهٔ حافظ

سرود زُهره به رقص آورد مسیحا را

The poem is about a cruel beloved, who is cold and heartless and rejects the advances of Hafez. The poet, instead of being broken by this rejection, insists on the cosmic power of his heart’s poetry, which inspires the music of the planet Venus, which in turn sets Jesus to dancing.

Jesus dancing is a symbol of the unity of the lover with the divine beloved, and of the victory of true, spiritual love. With this symbol, Hafez celebrates love beyond love.

In his own wonderful translation of Hafez’s poetry, the great Persian scholar Dick Davis made a stab at explaining these last two lines. He wrote,

” The planet/deity Venus is associated with music (her attribute is a harp or lute) and sensuality, Jesus with asceticism and spirituality; Venus is feminine, Jesus masculine; Venus as a deity belongs to the pre-Islamic, pagan world, Jesus represents a religion recognized by Islam as legitimate. Their dance, which Hafez implies his poetry brings about, is a uniting of the physical and the spiritual, the feminine and the masculine, the pagan and the religiously legitimate; it also represents the cosmic “dance” of the turning of the heavens. Presenting the “lesser” of two figures (here the pagan, the feminine, the sensual) as the guide of the one who is apparently the “superior” is common in Sufi anecdotes. Together with the association of Jesus with Venus, which would be somewhat shocking to the religiously orthodox, this gives a Sufi feeling to the end of the poem.”

Davis has forgotten more about Persian poetry than I will ever know, and I think these insights are very valuable.

I wonder, though, whether Hafez would have associated Venus (here called Zohreh) with paganism. I think the reference is just to the planet. Venus was also a level of heaven, the third, which Muslim spirituality associated with Jesus. This music could be the music of the spheres, the Pythagorean idea that the movement of the celestial bodies creates a heavenly symphony.

In the hyperbole of this poem, Hafez’s poetry inspires the music that the planet Venus makes, setting Christ to dancing. The Mevlevi Sufi order of Jalal al-Din Rumi, who lived a century before Hafez, used a whirling dance to achieve ecstasy, and Hafez may well have imagined Jesus as a whirling dervish here, the ultimate symbol of spiritual ecstasy that contrasts with the petty games human lovers play here below.

Muslims believe in Jesus, but see him as a prophet rather than as the son of God, and many do not believe he died on the cross. They do accept that God took him up to Himself, however, so that is one overlap between Christian and Muslim belief. (I think the Qur’an accepts the crucifixion, but that is a story for another day.)

So in Hafez the ascended Christ becomes a symbol of the bliss of unity with the beloved. The joyous dancing Christ in heaven, for all its strangeness from a Christian point of view, is nevertheless a powerful Easter image.

As for the very different poetry of the Rubaiyat, which nevertheless shares some Persian poetic concerns, see

See my just-published The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian

Order from

Bloomsbury (IB Tauris)

or Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, who will ship it to you

or Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, who will ship it to you

or Barnes and Noble, who will ship or do curbside delivery.

or Amazon

Reviews:
“’To read Juan Cole’s deft, plain-spoken translation of the Rubáiyát
is to find companionship, to rejoin a thousand-year human
conversation about how to endure, enjoy, and find a fleeting beauty
in everlastingly dire times. The lucid, cogent and mind-opening
Epilogue is a kind of grace, a gift freely given, from one of our
most astonishing and generous intellects.’”
– Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Moonglow (2017)

“’Omar Khayyam is a Persian treasure and Juan Cole’s new
translation brings him anew to Western audiences who
for centuries have been both delighted and educated by this
medieval sage! Reading The Rubáiyát is a thrill – you feel the
echoes of the 12th century seamlessly into our 21st, as this is
a holy book of wisdom and magic. In another perilous era for
Iranians, it’s wonderful to see this enchanting volume make
its way through the world yet again!’”
– Porochista Khakpour, novelist, essayist and author of Brown Album (2020)

( Middle East Monitor ) – Before discussing two great Sufis, Abd Al-Ghani Nabulusi and Ibrahim ibn Adham, it is essential to note that Sufis from across the globe are passionate about Masjid Al-Aqsa. In the 17th century, there were over 70 zawiyas (Sufi spiritual centres) in Jerusalem.

Both Masjid Al-Aqsa and the city of Jerusalem have been central in the imaginations and daily lives of Sufis. Many Sufis have invested their thoughts and some of their lives in extolling the virtues of Masjid Al-Aqsa. Many Sufis travelled over long distances from as far as Indonesia, Southern Africa and Bosnia to visit Al-Aqsa. Some made Jerusalem their home. Sufis have also been at the forefront of strengthening Muslim faith through the love of Al-Aqsa.

In the late 17th century, Al-Nabulusi of Damascus set out on a spiritual journey to Al-Aqsa. His memoirs of the road to Al-Aqsa reveal the honour bestowed on his group by those they passed. All along the route, people thronged to meet him, not only because of his scholarly credentials, but also because he was heading to Al-Aqsa and the holy city of Jerusalem. It was a reminder of tracing the footsteps of pious predecessors like the companion of the Prophet, Abu Dhar Gaffari. It was also to reignite the connection made by the Prophet on the night journey of Al-Isra when he travelled from Mecca to Jerusalem.

Al-Nabulusi’s journey, which took nearly ten days, was finally rewarded with the sight of glorious Al-Aqsa. Al-Nabulusi writes how he dismounted his ride on seeing the walls of Jerusalem and walked the last few miles. Every step reminded him of the companions of the Prophet and pious predecessors, who trod the ground and the great prophets like Ibrahim, Suleyman, Daud and Isa, who resided in Jerusalem. These, and many other prophets, received revelation from the Creator here, and some are buried in the holy grounds.

The spiritual ecstasy he experienced when, finally, Al-Nabulusi entered the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa is detailed in his diary. He connects the Dome of Rock to the believer, not only through its physical beauty, but also its sanctity.

He wrote: “How beautiful is the frequented mosque wherein I attended the five daily prayers. My eyes were dazzled by the subtlety of its pleasure and my heart to its doors used to race. One feels the reverence of the prophets and saints in it, and whoever reaches it loses his way out.”

Earlier, in the 8th century, a spiritual awakening for Prince of the Kingdom of Balkh Ibrahim ibn Adham occurred – similar to the attraction to Al-Aqsa that Al-Nabulusi experienced.

[Jalalu’d-Din] Rumi writes that ibn Adham was awakened one night by a voice that changed his heedlessness. He abandoned his palace and privileged life devoted to worldly pleasures. After wandering for a while, he finally came to Jerusalem. He used the walls of Al-Aqsa as his pillow for the night. Here, in the sanctuary of Al-Aqsa Mosque, he attained peace that the dinars of the princely estate and the luxury of palaces could not provide.

In sacrificing a kingdom to obtain the love of the Creator, ibn Adham is reported to have achieved a very high spiritual status. Many miracles are recorded to have taken place through him.

Regarding ibn Adham, Sheikh Akhtar writes: “The royal person robed in a beggar’s gown. The royal honour clothed in poverty. When the soul of the king of Balkh became pure and clean, when it became afflicted with the pain of divine love, it became acquainted with the treasures of poverty. The soul of the king once freed from the world became a recognised soul in the court of the Creator.”

The sacrifices of the great Sufis and their devotion to Al-Aqsa remind us of the need to (re)connect with Al-Aqsa Sanctuary to strengthen our spirituality. Aqsa Week should be used to revive our love for the glorious Al-Aqsa Sanctuary.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Ismail Patel is the author of The Muslim Problem: From the British Empire to Islamophobia. He is also Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds and the Chair of the UK based NGO Friends of Al-Aqsa.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Medical marijuana is permitted in Israel, though people complain about the fewness of dispensaries. Recreational marijuana is forbidden. Marijuana is illegal in Israel not because of Jewish or Islamic law but because of the British colonial heritage. It is Western Victorian prudery.

Haaretz reports that MK David Amsalem, of the far right wing and racist Likud Party, ridiculed Abbas for changing his position: “You are trampling on Islam. They gave you a few dimes, promised you a few jobs and suddenly Islam permits it (cannabis).”

Amsalem, like most Israeli politicians, clearly knows nothing about Islamic law or Islamic history. In fact, the use of marijuana was widespread in the premodern Muslim world. If the United Arab List in the end balks at legalizing marijuana, it will be because of modern fundamentalism, not because of Islamic tradition.

The great tradition of medieval Muslim medicine valued marijuana. Avicenna in his classic Canon recommended it as an analgesic for headaches, and the great physician al-Razi (Rhazes in the Latin west) prescribed marijuana as a treatment for “ear problems, dandruff, flatulence as well as epilepsy,” according to Maziyar Ghiabi and his colleagues.

Avicenna’s Canon was central to Renaissance science in its Latin translation and its influence lingered in some medical schools in Europe and Russia into the nineteenth century.

Ghiyabi et al. also note that some groups of Muslims, especially the itinerant holy men called Qalandars, regularly incorporated marijuana into their spiritual practices, in the same way that some American Indians used peyote in their religious lives. In my research on Islam in premodern India, I found that marijuana or bhang was used by major Sufi orders such as the Suhrawardis. That is, there are major Muslim spiritual traditions of recreational use of marijuana.

The medieval Egyptian historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) said that marijuana or hashish had first been brought to Egypt in 1230 or 1231 by a Sufi or Muslim mystic, and that it became wildly popular. He said he knew of no fatwa or considered religious legal opinion against it in his own time. Hashish came to be grown all over Egypt and even in parts of Cairo. The Mamluk government tried to set a minor fine for its cultivation, but apparently no one paid any attention to it. By 1412 it was widely used, and the upper classes took pride in consuming it, without there being any stigma attached to it. It continued to be grown after the Ottomans took Egypt in 1517. In medieval and early modern Egypt, recreational marijuana was a normal part of the life of Muslims.

It was only in the early 19th century in Egypt that the mercantilist, modernizing government of Albanian military man Mehmet Ali (Muhammad Ali) Pasha, who had become the Ottoman viceroy, tried to ban marijuana on the grounds that it reduced workers’ productivity and made them lazy.

So, yes, anti-marijuana attitudes are in part a reflection of modernist concerns and have nothing to do with medieval Muslim practice. Fundamentalist Muslim legislation against marijuana is largely a modern phenomenon.

The Qur’an does not mention marijuana or hashish. It does discourage alcohol, though since the Muslim scripture does not specify any punishment for its use, many Muslim jurists over the centuries declined to punish its use.

Some Muslim thinkers wanted to forbid marijuana on analogy to alcohol, since both are intoxicants and both affect moral judgment. This analogy, however, was rejected by most jurists, as Maziar Ghiabi and his colleagues point out.

Some clerics did rule against the use of marijuana as an intoxicant. But as Ghiabi et al. note, Islamic law permits believers to do what they urgently need to do (darura). If you are thirsting to death in the desert and the only drink available is wine, then it is permitted to drink it. Likewise, even some medieval thinkers admitted that if someone had an urgent medical need for marijuana,, that would be permitted.

Contemporary Muslim jurisprudence notes that there are two substances in marijuana, CBD and THC. It is the THC that gives you the high. Legal thinkers urge that marijuana high in CBD and low in THC be used for pain killing, but say that if there is a medical need that can only be met (e.g. nausea from chemotherapy) by marijuana high in THC, that would be permissible.

So the joke is on David Amsalem, who just spoke out of ignorance of the finer points of Islamic law and of the actual history of the Muslim world. If Mansour Abbas and his party, which is influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, do end up supporting the legalization of marijuana, they would be in the long tradition of Islamic medicine going back to Avicenna. And note that al-Maqrizi said there was no fatwa at all against marijuana use in the 1200s to the 1400s, which was ubiquitous in medieval and early modern Egypt, so the great Muslim jurists of that era appear not to have even attempted to forbid it.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

i24 How Israel is Getting High (Medical Cannabis Revolution)

I carried out my research on the educational and charitable shrine-complex of the great Sufi saint Ahmad-i Jam (d. 1141 AD) at Turbat-i Jam. The fruit of this research is my new book,

The Sufi Saint of Jam: History, Religion, and Politics of a Sunni Shrine in Shiʿi Iran. (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Click here .
The question I asked myself when I first visited Jam is “why has this shrine survived while other Sufi shrines in the Islamic world have gone to ruin?” I have visited numerous Islamic institutions (viz., mausolea and mosques) from India to Morocco that had been popular and prominent in pre-modern times; many had since slid into disrepair. Saint cults and Sufi praxis had withered or evaporated. For example, the tomb of Naqshbandi shaykh, Abu Nasr Parsa (Balkh), and shrine of the Hanbali Shaykh al-Islam of Herat, ʿAbdallah Ansari, were in ruins (both have since been renovated by Aga Khan charities). Ahmad-i Jam’s shrine was in poor shape as reflected in photographs taken in 1934 by Robert Byron (Road to Oxiana); and 1977 by the eminent archaeologist, Warwick Ball. Yet at Turbat-i Jam stands an indubitably Sunni shrine in a Sunni-majority city. Shrine-complex, saint/relic cult, and Jami mystical (Sufi) community were prospering in Shiʿi-majority Iran.

The saint’s tumulus is located before the arch (iwan) and shaded by a pistachio tree. Photo © 2021 Shivan Mahendrarajah.

Ahmad-i Jam’s shrine burgeoned from a hospice (khanaqah) teaching the Islamic Sciences (ʿulum al-din), to a sprawling complex of spiritual, sepulchral, and educational buildings: colleges, hospices, mosques, domes, museum, library, offices, and gardens. The architectural ensemble reflects diverse designs, from the Mongol age to the modern. The shrine’s eclectic architectural ensemble was refurbished under the aegis of Iran’s Cultural Heritage Organization (Sazman-i miras-i farhangi). The shrine has two thriving seminaries (hawza, madrasa), one for males and one for females.

How does Ahmad-i Jam’s refurbished shrine-complex reflect on the proffer above, the alleged sectarianism of the Shiʿi regime?

One reason for the shrine’s sparkle is that the Islamic Republic views Sunni spiritual and sepulchral edifices as integral components of Iran’s national heritages. I have traveled throughout Iran and visited sacred sites of every major Iranian faith. Each site is photographed and logged. Pre-Islamic and Islamic sites, including the twenty-four accepted and fifty-seven tentative UNESCO World Heritage sites are preserved by Miras-i farhangi. This includes the tomb for Judaism’s Esther and Mordecai in Hamadan; Roman Catholic and Armenian monasteries and churches; and the renowned Zoroastrian fire-temple in Yazd.

Refurbishments to shrines, mosques, churches, fire-temples, and synagogues do not involve just the dispensation of public funds by the Iranian government. Technical expertise provided by Miras-i farhangi—architects, engineers, craftsman, artisans—is the sine qua non for the restoration of heritage buildings. Hence the criticality of the state’s active support for cultural preservation.

Other reasons for the Islamic Republic’s initiatives to appease Iran’s eastern Sunnis stem in part from covert operations by its enemies.

Firstly, Baluch nationalistic movements in Sistan & Baluchistan Province created serious social and political problems for the governments of Iran and Pakistan since before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Sunni institutions in Zahedan (viz., libraries and seminaries) have been funded lavishly by Tehran.

Secondly, as Shireen Hunter observed, the United States “opted for regime change [in Iran] through destabilization and began, among other things, encouraging Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities, especially in Kurdistan, Sistan, and Baluchistan, to rebel against Tehran. In this effort, the United States was supported by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.” The Iranian government attempts to counter Wahhabi and CIA instigation by dispensing public funds to Sunni communities; for example, by sponsoring libraries and madrasas, and restoring cultural buildings. The state tries not to interfere with local religious practices. The Sunni prayer leader (imam-jumaʿ) of Jam is the chief of Ahmad’s shrine. Jam’s Shiʿa minority have their own imam-jumaʿ or leader of Friday prayers.

Thirdly, by promoting and funding Sunni seminaries within Iran, and integrating them with the Islamic Republic’s educational bureaucracies, Tehran retains oversight of curricula. This is clever and pragmatic: if Iranian Sunnis travel overseas to secure training in Islamic Studies, they will be corrupted by Wahhabism or subverted by Tehran’s enemies and returned to Iran to create mischief. At interviews at Jam, Sunnis expressed satisfaction that Iranian Sunnis were not among the “foreign fighters” of ISIS.

I analyzed the 2017–18 curriculum at Hawza-yi ʿilmiyya Ahmadiyya, the Jami seminary for boys; and compared it to the curriculum taught at the shrine in the Timurid period. The contemporary program is within the mainstream of Sunni pedagogy.

In sum, the Islamic Republic of Iran employs nationalistic and pragmatic approaches toward its Sunnis. Iranians (not just state officials) are justifiably proud of Iran’s multi-confessionalism and its lively cultural mosaic. Renovating Ahmad-i Jam’s shrine is as logical as preserving a Zoroastrian fire-temple or Shiʿi mosque. The Islamic Republic can doubtless be sectarian when it benefits Tehran’s agenda, but it has put the emphasis on pragmatism in dealing with its Sunnis in the east.

Twitter: @S_Mahendrarajah