Signs on the Horizons

by Michael Sugich

Ibn Ata’illah Al-Iskandari*

  ALL NIGHT LONG

  Sufi Abdallah cut a striking figure. He was a tall, handsome, powerfully built Pathan with an easy swagger, thick salt and pepper beard, a rakish smile and piercing eyes. It was said he worked sixteen hours a day – two consecutive shifts – as a shop foreman in a Birmingham factory. It was also said that he rarely slept, although I had trouble believing this. He led a Naqshbandi Sufi order in Birmingham.

  The Naqshbandiyya trace their lineage directly back to our Master Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, may God be well pleased with him, and their practice, reflecting the quiescence of their spiritual father, was inward and silent. It has been said that the Naqshbandiyya preserved Islam throughout the Central Asian republics during the repressively atheistic Soviet period because their spiritual practice could be carried out in silence, invisibly, without a trace.

  The Naqshbandis of Birmingham were anything but invisible. They were a flamboyant, vigorous bunch, mostly working class Pakistani emigrants who congregated with a wonderful sense of processional solidarity behind their towering, energetic leader, arriving at gatherings like the Eid prayers by the busload, brandishing banners and flags and carrying trays groaning with Pakistani food. They were far and away the most organized group of Sufis in Britain.

  I was always impressed by Sufi Abdallah and the men around him but wondered whether theirs was a case of style over substance. I had my chance to find out when a few friends and I were invited to attend a night of dhikr in London. We gathered at a modest brick row house in a working class neighborhood after sunset. We had tea and talked casually until the night prayer, after which a delicious Pakistani supper was served on tablecloths spread across the floor of the room we had gathered in. This seemed more like a social gathering and I began to think my suspicions about these Naqshbandiyya were justified.

  For us a meal after the night prayer usually signaled the end of an evening. These men, I discovered, were just getting started. A large circle was formed and the invocation began. The practice of the Naqshbandiyya revolved around the silent invocation of La ilaha illa ‘llah - "No god but God" – on the breath and with a rhythmic movement of the head down on the "La" and the "illa” and in a circular motion accompanied by a visualization of light. Although silent, it is an incredibly powerful practice.

  Sufi Abdallah led the assembly with single-minded intensity. The practice began slowly and accelerated gradually in unison until the group breathed as a single body, lost in remembrance. Time passed. We were swept away in this luminous circular breath. Time flowed. The invocation ended. It was dawn.

  We prayed the dawn prayer and the assembly broke up. I staggered out into the early morning air, ready to collapse. Sufi Abdallah walked out with me. On the working class street he looked down at me with a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle and gave me a pat on the back with his large hand, as if to say, "Nice try". He shook my hand with an iron grip. Unruffled, he was ready to head back to Birmingham to start his first shift. As we parted ways in the cold morning light, I realized that I had just experienced a case of substance over style.

  “Our abode is transitory,

  our life therein is but a loan,

  our breaths are numbered,

  and our indolence is manifest.”

  Sayyidina Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq*

  THE WEEPING EYE

  A hard rain drenched us as we made our way to the great mosque of Meknes amongst a group of Sufis that had gathered that day for the celebration of the Birth of the Noble Prophet (Mawlid An-Nabawi Sharif). Sufis from Morocco and Algeria had converged for the occasion. Moving with the crowd, djellaba hood covering my head against the rain, breathing in the pungent smell of wet wool, I was overtaken with the exalted sense of need and longing. I was surrounded by men for whom life in the world had no value but to remember the Lord of Creation. The rain reminded me of tears. I began to weep. The crowd stopped in a passageway leading to the Great Mosque. A faqir turned back to face me. He was also in tears but I saw that his tear ducts were distended, gaping open from constant weeping. He looked me in the eyes and pointed to the heavens. Then he turned his back to me and moved forward with the group.

  “It is with a stricken heart

  and anguished soul

  That, in longing for You,

  I rain tears like a cloud.”

  Faridu’d-Din ‘Attar*

  THE GLANCE

  Pir Aftab came to visit us in London. A spiritual master of a Naqshbandi Sufi order from Pakistan, he was sweet and cherubic with a thick black beard and turban. My heart was in a state of contraction. I sat at the back of the gathering, head lowered. He gave a discourse. I was too distracted with my own self-concerns to listen. My chest was constricted, my eyes burned. I looked up. For one split second, he looked me straight in the eye and smiled. His eye sparked with light. The light hit my heart. My eyes cooled. Peace descended over me. In an instant a crushing weight lifted from me in a single, fleeting glance.

  “People speak of the evil eye

  but they overlook the good eye.

  The good eye exists.

  Just as the one possessed of the evil eye

  can cause illness with a glance,

  the one possessed of the good eye

  can heal with a glance.”

  Habib Ahmed Mashhur Al-Haddad*

  THE NUBIAN

  BESIDE THE TOMB

  I landed in Cairo in the summer of 1976 and immediately tried to get a visa to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Consulate General was, and as of this writing, still is located in Garden City in a huge, run-down complex of buildings. At the time, which was the early years of Saudi Arabia’s oil boom, the Embassy was besieged by thousands of visa applicants trying to get into the Kingdom for work or to perform the Hajj or Umrah.

  The heat was oppressive. Crowds surged at the entrance, pushing to get inside the compound. Egyptian police in ill-fitting white uniforms and black berets beat the seething mob back with belts. The heat, the smell of sweating humanity and fumes from the surrounding streets was suffocating. When I finally managed to get through the gates there were incredibly long lines out in the courtyard leading to windows where visa applicants were meant to leave their documents. I was stuck in an interminable queue, which never seemed to get shorter because of new applicants continually cutting in line.

  Rather than risk an altercation, I had to resign myself to wait patiently at the back of a long, glacially slow line. Patience is not a virtue I have in large supply but I was stuck without an option. I decided that the only way to make the best of a bad situation was to use the time performing invocation (dhikru’llah) and decided to repeat a long form of the Prayer on the Prophet (Al-Salat ‘ala an-Nabi) 1,000 times. I stood in line for about three hours, sweat streaming down my face, trying not to breathe in the nauseating vapors, damping down my annoyance when yet another queue jumper pushed into the line in front of me, reciting the prayer on the Prophet over and over and over again.

  By the time I reached the front of the line, I’d repeated the dhikr 990 times and, needless to say, my frustrations and annoyances had gradually been displaced by the repetition of this calming invocation. I deposited my papers at the window and gratefully escaped the Saudi Consulate compound, hailing a taxi to take me to Sayyida Zaynab, the great mosque that encompasses the tomb of the granddaughter of the Prophet Mohamed, may God be pleased with her and may God bless him and give him peace. In the taxi I completed my 1,000th prayer on the Prophet. I paid the driver, got out and entered the Mosque. As I approached the precincts of the tomb of Sayyida Zaynab, an old Nubian dervish in a long white shirt and colored turban, sitting beside the tomb, head bowed in invocation, looked up as if he sensed something. He spotted me. His eyes brightened as if he recognized me. He cried out: "Allahl Allahl" His hands came up and he pulled them over and over wildly from me toward himself, as if he was trying desperately to gather something unseen from me into his heart. His face was incandescent. I nodded to him. He beamed ecstaticall
y. He then returned to his invocation.

  About a week later I entered Sayyida Zaynab again. I had not been performing the prayer on the Prophet or any other form of invocation as intensively as I had that day in the Saudi Consulate. I spotted the Nubian dervish and tried to catch his eye. I walked over and sat beside him in front of the tomb. I assumed we had a bond from the week before. He ignored me. When I finally did manage to catch his attention, he looked at me without a glimmer of recognition and returned to his invocations. Whatever he had seen the previous week, it certainly wasn’t me. I suspect that he had seen the prayer on the Prophet. But God knows best.

  “O Muhammad!

  How can we find you here among the ruins?

  How can we see you?”

  Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore*

  MEETING WITH

  THE MINISTER

  I first came to Saudi Arabia to legalize my marriage. My wife and I had been married in a Muslim ceremony in London without knowing that Saudi women had to get official permission to marry foreigners. By the time we found out about this alarming decree, my wife was already pregnant. We tried to find a solution through the Saudi embassy without success. Although we’d intended to settle in Makkah Al-Mukarramah, our suddenly illicit marriage and a child on the way made this idea untenable, to say the least, so after a sojourn in Egypt, we headed West for California where we registered a civil marriage and our first two children were born.

  In 1980 I decided to try to sort out our marriage situation, so that my wife could at least return home to see her family. I arrived in Saudi Arabia in the dead of summer and immediately tried finding out how I could go about getting retroactive permission for our illegitimate nuptials. Initial reactions were discouraging. Most people I talked to seemed to think the situation was hopeless. One Saudi industrialist shrugged and said, "You are married in the eyes of God. That is all that is important. Forget about trying to get permission from the authorities.” Finally I had some good news when I was introduced to a distinguished Saudi businessman who had served as Minister of Commerce under the late King Faisal. He said, "Of course you can get permission. You have two children.What are they going to do? They won’t refuse.” He told me exactly how to go about securing permission for our marriage. I was to petition the Minister of Interior, Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, or his deputy and younger brother, Prince Ahmed. "I prefer Prince Ahmed," he said. He told me how to write the petition.

  The next step was to find a way to reach one or the other of these two eminent and powerful men. Following the advice I was given, I managed to find out how to get to Prince Ahmed's office and the times he would meet petitioners. We turned up and were placed in an anteroom to wait. We waited several hours. Then one of the attendants closed the door to the anteroom and we heard the sound of people passing. Then the door was opened and we were informed that the Prince had left suddenly. It turned out that there had recently been an attempt on his life and he wasn’t meeting anyone. Of course no one told us this until after we'd been waiting. The next step was to find a way to reach the Minister of Interior himself.

  At that time the summer capital of Saudi Arabia was in Taif and all the government was in the mountain city. My brother-in-law had a friend from Taif who offered to help get me to the Minister. The friend was Bukhari, a Saudi of Central Asian extraction. He was very friendly and well meaning but also a little crazy and I was completely at his mercy. By this time it was Ramadan, the month of fasting, and during the day my new friend regaled me with stories about his sexual fantasies until I had to ask him to stop. When we would get to his house in the afternoons, he would light up a cigarette and eat – just being in his company made me feel like I was breaking my fast.

  A kindly Indian professor I met in Jeddah had generously lent me his car to use while he was away on his summer break and my helper from Taif insisted on driving me around the city in it. His driving was as reckless as the rest of his behavior but there was little I could do but ask him to slow down and drive more carefully. We discovered that the Minister received petitions at a weekly gathering (majlis) held at the government palace in Taif. We arranged to attend. On the eve of the majlis, my Taifi friend took my borrowed car out on an errand… and wrecked it. The whole front end of the Japanese car was smashed in. I had been trying to resolve our marriage situation for months by this time; I was running out of money and had had one setback after another but this was the last straw. I had this ominous feeling that I was in the wrong company in the wrong place at the wrong time and that I was never going to succeed. I normally don’t give up easily and am rarely prone to gloom but this episode took all the wind out of my sails. I became utterly and quite openly depressed and discouraged. All I wanted to do was to get out of that place. My guilty friend from Taif tried to cheer me up but I was inconsolable. He insisted I come with him to a breakfast (iftar) at the home of one of his friends. It was the last thing I felt like doing but I was staying at his house and couldn’t refuse.

  We arrived just before the sunset prayer at the gathering of young Saudi men. I was lost in my thoughts. How was I going to explain the car to the Indian professor? How was I going to pay for the repairs, if the car even could be repaired? What if, once again, we couldn't get my petition to the Minister? How much longer was this excruciating process going to take? My wife was stuck in California with our two babies and having a hard time coping. I wasn’t earning. How was I going to be able to support them? All these thoughts were running through my head at the fast-breaking. I was oblivious to everything around me.

  When the meal was finished, our young host asked me to come with him, for what reason I didn’t know. He took me into another room in the house. Here his father was sitting alone. He held prayer beads, which he was working. His face was serene and luminous. His presence was healing. I realized immediately I was in the presence of one of God's rightly-guided servants (salihin). He said to me, "My son has told me about your predicament. Your affair is in the hands of your Lord. Remember, these princes, these men are slaves of God. They have no real power. They can only do what God decrees. Put your trust in God and He will take care of you.” He then instructed me to recite the formula, Ya Al-Ali, Al-Khabir (Oh the Exalted, the Aware) ceaselessly and to recite Sura Yasin forty times during the night. When I left his presence my heart had calmed and my spirits had lifted.

  I immediately began repeating the invocation he recommended and, when I was alone at night recited Sura Yasin. My recitation was slow and halting, so I only managed to recite Sura Yasin half the number he prescribed before setting off for the Ministry of Interior to attend the majlis of Prince Naif.

  On the way I continued repeating the invocation silently and praying for success. As my wife's official guardian, my brother-in-law accompanied me to present the petition for our marriage. On the ride over to the Ministry he was laughing and joking, but when we reached the majlis hall he discovered that what we were doing was no laughing matter.

  Petitioners were pushed roughly into a long line. As each petitioner reached the front of the line two very large and powerful mixed blood {muwalid – half Arab-half African) guards in white robes carrying holstered guns and bandoliers stepped forward on each side and grabbed his arms so he couldn’t move.

  Less than a year earlier, the Holy Mosque in Makkah had been seized by fanatics and turned into an armed fortress in an attempt to overthrow the Saudi government. A bloody two-week siege left hundreds dead and the Saudi government badly shaken. Security had been intensified.

  My brother-in-law wasn’t ready for this degrading procedure and became highly agitated. But I had been reciting Qur'an and invocation all night long and my heart was absolutely tranquil by this time. I was like a dead body in the hands of the guards.

  When our turn came, my brother-in-law, his arms pinned to his sides, approached the Minister. I stood two paces behind him similarly constrained. He handed over the petition to an aide who handed it to Prince Naif. My brother-in-law blurted out our situ
ation: that I was an American and married his sister and that we had two children. The Minister looked up puzzled and said "So what's the problem?" My brother-in-law said, "The-didn't have official permission." Prince Naif nodded in recognition and looked past my brother-in-law and into my eyes.

  Desert sheikhs and princes raised to rule are taught from an early age to read petitioners’ faces. They see so many people they have to gauge character in a glance in order to make snap decisions. I learned this from a friend of mine who had been a ruler in Southern Arabia. Our eyes met.

  My heart was serene. I looked at him calmly with no fear or emotion of any kind, nodded respectfully and smiled. He "read" me. He smiled back. He then looked to my brother-in-law, gestured to the side, and said, "Istirih" ("Take your ease"), which meant that we were to sit to the side and wait. He read the petition carefully and signed it. Our marriage was approved.

  A few days later my crazy helper delivered my borrowed car completely repaired, as if nothing had happened. God is the most Generous of the Generous and the Most Merciful of the Merciful.

  My brief Ramadan encounter with a simple man of God the night before had turned the tide and transformed what seemed like a hopeless ordeal into an unexpected success. I lived for twenty-three years in the sacred precincts of Makkah, and my compassionate benefactor who came to my rescue and gave me good counsel and a remedy for my disconsolate heart was a pivotal instrument of this incredible blessing. May God reward him and cover him with Mercy.

  “O child of Adam, have no fear of one who holds power, when My Power endures permanently.

  My Power is permanent,

  and it shall never be depleted.”

  Hadith Qudsi*

  WORK

  Throughout the 1980s I travelled frequently to India on assignment as a travel writer. I was headed back to the subcontinent to begin work on a travel book I was planning. I was to be part of a delegation of travel writers from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Srinagar was to be one of the stops on our extended itinerary. I mentioned in passing to my Shaykh, Habib Ahmed Mashhur Al-Haddad, may God be well pleased with him, that I was on my way back to Kashmir and he said, "You know there are many great Sufis in Kashmir." I loved Kashmir and had visited there as a travel writer many times over the years but it had never occurred to me to seek out the company of Sufis. This time I made it my intention to make an effort to meet one of the Sufis of Kashmir.