Something of the real difference
between pilgrim and tourist can be detected by comparing their effects on the
places they visit. Changes in a place a city, a shrine, a forest may be subtle,
but at least they can be observed. The state of the soul may be a matter of
conjecture, but perhaps we can say something about the state of the social.
Pilgrimage sites like Mecca may serve as great bazaars for trade and they may
even serve as centers of production (like the silk industry of Benares) but
their primary "product" is baraka or mana. These words (one Arabic, one
Polynesian) are usually translated as "blessing", but they also carry a freight
of other meanings.
The wandering dervish who sleeps at a shrine in order to dream of a dead saint
(one of the "people of the Tombs") seeks initiation or advancement on the
spiritual path; a mother who brings a sick child to Lourdes seeks healing; a
childless woman in Morocco hopes the Marabout will make her fertile if she ties
a rag to the old tree growing out of the grave; the traveler to Mecca yearns for
the very center of the Faith, and as the caravans come within sight of the Holy
City the hajji calls out, "Labaika Allahumma!" "I am here, O Lord!"
All these motives are summed up by the word baraka, which sometimes seems to be
a palpable substance, measurable in terms of increased charisma or "luck." The
shrine produces baraka. And the pilgrim takes it away. But blessing is a product
of the imagination and thus no matter how many pilgrims take it away, there's
always more.
In fact, the more they take, the more blessing the shrine can produce (because a
popular shrine grows with every answered prayer.) To say that baraka is "imaginal"
is not to call it "unreal." It's real enough to those who feel it. But spiritual
goods do not follow the rules of supply and demand like material goods. The more
demand for spiritual goods, the more supply. The production of baraka is
infinite.
By contrast, the tourist desires not baraka but cultural difference. The tourist
consumes difference. But the production of cultural difference is not infinite.
It is not "merely" imaginal. It is rooted in languages, landscape, architecture,
custom, taste, smell. It is very physical. The more it is used up or taken away,
the less remains. The social can produce just so much "meaning," so much
difference. Once it's gone, it's gone.
The modest goal of this essay is to address the individual traveler who has
decided to resist tourism. Even though we may find it impossible in the end to
"purify" ourselves and our travel from every last taint and trace of tourism, we
still feel that improvement may be possible.
Not only do we disdain tourism for its vulgarity and its injustice, and
therefore wish to avoid any contamination (conscious or unconscious) by its
viral virulency, we also wish to understand travel as an act of reciprocity
rather than alienation. In other words, we don't wish merely to avoid the
negatives of tourism, but even more to achieve positive travel, which we
envision as a productive and mutually enhancing relationship between self and
other, guest and host, a form of cross-cultural synergy in which the whole
exceeds the sum of parts.
We'd like to know if travel can be carried out according to a secret economy of
baraka, whereby not only the shrine but also the pilgrims themselves have
blessings to bestow.
Before the Age of Commodity, we know, there was an Age of the Gift, of
reciprocity, of giving and receiving. We learned this from the tales of certain
travelers, who found remnants of the world of the Gift among certain tribes, in
the form of pot latch or ritual exchange, and recorded their observations of
such strange practices.
Not long ago there still existed a custom among South Sea islanders of traveling
vast distances by outrigger canoe, without compass or sextant, in order to
exchange valuable and useless presents (ceremonial art-objects rich in mana)
from island to island in a complex pattern of overlapping reciprocities.
We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken
over by the Commodity, even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to
have vanished from the map, even though tourism seems to have triumphed. Even
so, we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks,
unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even "secret" pathways still linked to
the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers' routes for free spirits,
known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.
Perhaps the greatest and subtlest practitioners of the art of travel were the
Sufis, the mystics of Islam. Before the age of passports, immunizations,
airlines and other impediments to free travel, the Sufis wandered footloose in a
world where borders tended to be more permeable than nowadays, thanks to the
trans nationalism of Islam and the cultural unity of Dar al-Islam , the Islamic
world.
The great medieval Moslem travelers, like Ibn Battuta and Naser Khusraw, have
left accounts of vast journeys, Persia to Egypt, or even Morocco to China, which
never set foot outside a landscape of deserts, camels, caravanserais, bazaars,
and piety. Someone always spoke Arabic, however badly, and Islamic culture
permeated the remotest backwaters, however superficially. Reading the tails of
Sinbad the Sailor (from the 1001 Nights) gives us the impression of a world
where even the terra incognita was still, despite all marvels and oddities,
somehow familiar, somehow Islamic. Within this unity, which was not yet a
uniformity, the Sufis formed a special class of travelers. Not warriors, not
merchants, and not quite ordinary pilgrims either, the dervishes represent a
spiritualization of pure nomadism.
According to the Koran, God's Wide Earth and everything in it are "sacred," not
only as divine creations, but also because the material world is full of "waymarks,"
or signs of divine reality. Moreover, Islam itself is born between two journeys,
Mohammad's hijra or "flight" from Mecca to Medina, and his hajj, or return
voyage. The hajj is the movement toward the origin and center for every Moslem
even today, and the annual Pilgrimage has played a vital role, not just in the
religious unity of Islam, but also in its cultural unity.
Mohammad himself exemplifies every kind of travel in Islam; his youth with the
Meccan caravans of Summer and Winter, as a merchant; his campaigns as a warrior;
his triumph as a humble pilgrim. Although an urban leader, he is also the
prophet of the Bedouin and himself a kind of nomad, a "sojourner"an "orphan."
From this perspective travel can almost be seen as a sacrament. Every religion
sanctifies travel to some degree, but Islam is virtually unimaginable without
it.
The Prophet said, "Seek knowledge, even as far as China." From the beginning,
Islam lifts travel above all "mundane" utilitarianism and gives it an
epistemological or even Gnostic dimension. "The jewel that never leaves the mine
is never polished," says the Sufi poet Saadi. To "educate" is to "lead outside,"
to give the pupil a perspective beyond parochiality and mere subjectivity.
Some Sufis may have done all their traveling in the Imaginal World of archetypal
dreams and visions, but vast numbers of them took the Prophet's exhortations
quite literally. Even today dervishes wander over the entire Islamic worldbut as
late as the 19th century they wandered in veritable hordes, hundreds or even
thousands at a time, and covered vast distances. All in search of knowledge.
Unofficially, there existed two basic types of wandering Sufi: the
"gentleman-scholar" type, and the mendicant dervish. The former category
includes Ibn Battuta (who collected Sufi initiations the way some occidental
gentlemen once collected Masonic degrees), andon a much more serious level the
"Greatest Shaykh" Ibn Arabi, who meandered slowly through the 13th century from
his native Spain, across North Africa, through Egypt to Mecca, and finally to
Damascus.
Ibn Arabi actually left accounts of his search for saints and adventurers on the
road, which could be pieced together from his voluminous writings to form a kind
of rihla or "travel text": ( a recognized genre of Islamic literature) or
autobiography. Ordinary scholars traveled in search of rare texts on theology or
jurisprudence, but Ibn Arabi sought only the highest secrets of esotericism and
the loftiest "openings" into the world of divine illumination; for him every
"journey to the outer horizons" was also a "journey to the inner horizons" of
spiritual psychology and gnosis.
On the visions he experienced in Mecca alone, he wrote a 12-volume work (The
Meccan Revelations), and he has also left us precious sketches of hundreds of
his contemporaries, from the greatest philosophers of the age to humble
dervishes and "madmen," anonymous women saints and "hidden Masters."
Ibn Arabi enjoyed a special relation with Khezr, the immortal and unknown
prophet, the "Green Man," who sometimes appears to wandering Sufis in distress,
to rescue them from the desert, or to initiate them. Khezr, in a sense, can be
called the patron saint of the traveling dervishes and the prototype. (He first
appears in the Koran as a mysterious wanderer and companion of Moses in the
desert.)
Christianity once included a few orders of wandering mendicants (in fact, St.
Francis organized one after meeting with dervishes in the Holy Land, who may
have bestowed upon him a "cloak of initiation" the famous patchwork robe he was
wearing when he returned to Italy), but Islam spawned dozens, perhaps hundreds
of such orders.
As Sufism crystallized from the loose spontaneity of early days to an
institution with rules and grades, "travel for knowledge" was also regularized
and organized. Elaborate handbooks of duties for dervishes were produced which
included methods for turning travel into a very specific form of meditation. The
whole Sufi "path" itself was symbolized in terms of intentional travel.
In some cases itineraries were fixed (e.g. the Hajj); others involved waiting
for "signs" to appear, coincidences, intuitions, "adventurers" such as those
which inspired the travels of the Arthurian knights. Some orders limited the
time spent in any one place to 40 days; others made a rule of never sleeping
twice in the same place. The strict orders, such as the Naqshbandis, turned
travel into a kind of full-time choreography, in which every movement was
preordained and designed to enhance consciousness.
By contrast, the more heterodox orders (such as the Qalandars) adopted a "rule"
of total spontaneity and abandon "permanent unemployment" as one of them called
it an insouciance of bohemian proportions a "dropping-out" at once both
scandalous and completely traditional. Colorfully dressed, carrying their
begging bowls, axes, and standards, addicted to music and dance, carefree and
cheerful (sometimes to the point of "blameworthiness"!), orders such as the
Nematollahis of 19th century Persia grew to proportions that alarmed both
sultans and theologians. Many dervishes were executed for "heresy."
Today the true Qalandars survive mostly in India, where their lapses from
orthodoxy include a fondness for hemp and a sincere hatred of work. Some are
charlatans, some are simple bums, but a surprising number of them seem to be
people of attainment...how can I put it?...people of self-realization, marked by
a distinct aura of grace, or baraka.
All the different types of Sufi travel we've described are united by certain
shared vital structural forces. One such force might be called a "magical" world
view, a sense of life that rejects the "merely" random for a reality of signs
and wonders, of meaningful coincidences and "unveilings." As anyone who's ever
tried it will testify, intentional travel immediately opens one up to this
"magical" influence.
A psychologist might explain this phenomenon (either with awe or with
reductionist disdain) as "subjective"; while the pious believer would take it
quite literally. From the Sufi point of view neither interpretation rules out
the other, nor suffices in itself, to explain away the marvels of the Path. In
Sufism, the "objective" and the "subjective" are not considered opposites, but
complements. From the point of view of the two-dimensional thinker (whether
scientific or religious) such paradoxology smacks of the forbidden.
Another force underlying all forms of intentional travel can be described by the
Arabic word "adab". On one level "adab" simply means "good manners," and in the
case of travel, these manners are based on the ancient customs of desert nomads,
for whom both wandering and hospitality are sacred acts. In this sense, the
dervish shares both the privileges and the responsibilities of the guest.
Bedouin hospitality is a clear survival of the primordial economy of the Gift -
a relation of reciprocity. The wanderer must be taken in (the dervish must be
fed) but thereby the wanderer assumes a role prescribed by ancient custom and
must give back something to the host. For the Bedouin this relation is almost a
form of clientage Ð the breaking of bread and sharing of salt constitutes a sort
of kinship. Gratitude is not a sufficient response to such generosity. The
traveler must consent to a temporary adoption, anything less would offend
against "adab".
Islamic society retains at least a sentimental attachment to these rules, and
thus creates a special niche for the dervish, that of the full-time guest. The
dervish returns the gifts of society with the gift of baraka. In ordinary
pilgrimage, the traveler receives baraka from a place, but the dervish reverses
the flow and brings baraka to a place. The Sufi may think of himself (or
herself) as a permanent pilgrim but to the ordinary stay-at-home people of the
mundane world, the Sufi is a kind of preambulatory shrine.
Now tourism in its very structure breaks the reciprocity of host and guest. In
English, a "host" may have either guests or parasites. The tourist is a parasite
for no amount of money can pay for hospitality. The true traveler is a guest and
thus serves a very real function, even today, in societies where the ideals of
hospitality have not yet faded from the "collective mentality." To be a host, in
such societies, is a meritorious act. Therefore, to be a guest is also to give
merit.
The modern traveler who grasps the simple spirit of this relation will be
forgiven many lapses in the intricate ritual of "adab" (how many cups of coffee?
Where to put one's feet? How to be entertaining? How to show gratitude? etc.)
peculiar to a specific culture. And if one bothers to master a few of the
traditional forms of "adab", and to deploy them with heartfelt sincerity, then
both guest and host will gain more than they put into the relation and this more
is the unmistakable sign of the presence of the Gift.
Another level of meaning of the word "adab" connects it with culture (since
culture can be seen as the sum of all manners and customs): In modern usage the
Department of "Arts and Letters" at a university would be called Adabiyyat. To
have "adab" in this sense is to be "polished" (like that well-traveled gem) but
this has nothing necessarily to do with "fine arts" or literacy or being a
city-slicker, or even being "cultured." It is a matter of the "heart."
"Adab" is sometimes given as a one-word definition of Sufism. But insincere
manners (ta'arof in Persian) and insincere culture alike are shunned by the
Sufi. "There is no ta'arof in Tassawuf [Sufism]," as the dervishes say; "Darvishi"
is an adjectival synonym for informality, the laid-back quality of the people of
the Heart and for spontaneous "adab", so to speak. The true guest and host never
make an obvious effort to fulfill the "rules" of reciprocity they may follow the
ritual scrupulously, or they may bend the forms creatively, but in either case,
they will give their actions a depth of sincerity that manifests as natural
grace. "Adab" is a kind of love.
A complement of this "technique" (or "Zen") of human relations can be found in
the Sufi manner of relating to the world in general. The "mundane" world of
social deceit and negativity, of usurious emotions, unauthentic consciousness ("mauvaise
conscience"), boorishness, ill-will, inattention, blind reaction, false
spectacle, empty discourse, etc. etc. all this no longer holds any interest for
the traveling dervish. But those who say that the dervish has abandoned "this
world", "God's Wide Earth"would be mistaken.
The dervish is not a Gnostic Dualist who hates the biosphere (which certainly
includes the imagination and the emotions, as well as "matter" itself). The
early Muslim ascetics certainly closed themselves off from everything. When
Rabiah, the woman saint of Basra, was urged to come out of her house and
"witness the wonders of God's creation," she replied, "Come into the house and
see them," i.e., come into the heart of contemplation of the oneness which is
above the manyness of reality. "Contraction" and "Expansion" are both terms for
spiritual states. Rabiah was manifesting Contraction: a kind of sacred
melancholia which has been metaphorized as the "Caravan of Winter," of return to
Mecca (the center, the heart), of interiority, and of ascesis or self-denial.
She was not a world-hating Dualist, nor even a moralistic flesh-hating puritan.
She was simply manifesting a certain specific kind of grace.
The wandering dervish, however, manifests a state more typical of Islam in its
most exuberant energies. He indeed seeks expansion, spiritual joy based on the
sheer multiplicity of the divine generosity in material creation. (Ibn Arabi has
an amusing "proof" that this world is the best world. For, if it were not,
then God would be ungenerous which is absurd. Q.E.D.) In order to appreciate the
multiple waymarks of the wide earth precisely as the unfolding of this
generosity, the Sufi cultivates what might be called the theophanic gaze: The
opening of the "Eye of the Heart" to the experience of certain places, objects,
people, events as locations of the "shining-through" of divine light. The
dervish travels, so to speak, both in the material world, and in the "World of
Imagination" simultaneously. But for the eye of the heart, these worlds
interpenetrate at certain points.
One might say that they mutually reveal or "unveil" each other. Ultimately, they
are "one" and only our state of tranced inattention, our mundane consciousness,
prevents us from experiencing this "deep" identity at every moment. The purpose
of intentional travel, with its "adventures" and its uprooting of habits, is to
shake loose the dervish from all the trance-effects of ordinariness. Travel, in
other words, is meant to induce a certain state of consciousness or "spiritual
state" that of Expansion.
For the wanderer, each person one meets might act as an "angel," each shrine one
visits may unlock some initiate dream, each experience of nature may vibrate
with the presence of some "spirit of place." Indeed, even the mundane and
ordinary may suddenly be seen as numinous (as in the great travel haiku of the
Japanese Zen poet Basho) : a face in the crowd at a railway station, crows on
telephone wires, sunlight in a puddle.
Obviously one doesn't need to travel to experience this state. But travel can be
used, that is, an art of travel can be required to maximize the chances for
attaining such a state. It is a moving meditation, like the Taoist martial arts.
The Caravan of Summer moved outward, out of Mecca, to the rich trading lands of
Syria and Yemen. Likewise, the dervish is "moving out" (it's always "moving
day"), heading forth, taking off, on "perpetual holiday" as one poet expressed
it, with an open heart, an attentive eye (and other senses), and a yearning for
meaning, a thirst for knowledge. One must remain alert, since anything might
suddenly unveil itself as a sign. This sounds like a bit of paranoia although "metanoia"
might be a better term and indeed one finds "madmen" amongst the dervishes,
"attracted ones," overpowered by divine influxions, lost in the Light.
In the Orient, the insane are often cared for and admired as helpless saints,
because mental illness may sometimes appear as a symptom of too much holiness
rather than too little "reason." Hemp's popularity amongst the dervishes can be
attributed to its power to induce a kind of intuitive attentiveness which
constitutes a controllable insanity, herbal metanoia. But travel itself in
itself can intoxicate the heart with the beauty of theophanic presence. It's a
question of practice, the polishing of the jewel, removal of moss from the
rolling stone.
In the old days (which are still going on in some remote parts of the East),
Islam thought of itself as a whole world, a wide world, a space with great
latitude within which Islam embraced the whole of society and nature. This
latitude appeared on the social level as tolerance. There was room enough, even
for such marginal groups as mad wandering dervishes. Sufism itself, or at least
its austere orthodox and "sober" aspect occupied a central position in the
cultural discourse. "Everyone" understood intentional travel by analogy with the
Hajj, everyone understood the dervishes, even if they disapproved.
Nowadays, however, Islam views itself as a partial world, surrounded by unbelief
and hostility, and suffering internal raptures of every sort. Since the 19th
century Islam has lost its global consciousness and sense of its own wideness
and completeness. No longer therefore, can Islam easily find a place for every
marginalized individual and group within a pattern of tolerance and social
order. The dervishes now appear as an intolerable difference in society. Every
Muslim must now be the same, united against all outsiders, and struck from the
same prototype.
Of course, Muslims have always "imitated" the Prophet and viewed his image as
the norm and this has acted as a powerful unifying force for style and substance
within Dar al-Islam. But "nowadays" the puritans and reformers have forgotten
that this "imitation" was not directed only at an early medieval Meccan merchant
named Mohammad, but also at the insan al-kamil (the "Perfect Man" or "Universal
Human"), an ideal of inclusion rather than exclusion, an ideal of integral
culture, not an attitude of purity in peril, not xenophobia disguised as piety,
not totalitarianism, not reaction.
The dervish is persecuted nowadays in most of the Islamic world. Puritanism
always embraces the most atrocious aspects of modernism in its crusade to strip
the Faith of "medieval accretions" such as popular Sufism. And surely the way of
the wandering dervish cannot thrive in a world of airplanes and oil-wells, of
nationalistic/chauvinistic hostilities (and thus of impenetrable borders), and
of a Puritanism which suspects all difference as a threat.
The Puritanism has triumphed not only in the East, but rather close to home as
well. It is seen in the "time discipline" of modern too-late-Capitalism, and in
the porous rigidity of consumerist hyper-conformity, as well as in the bigoted
reaction and sex-hysteria of the Christian Right. Where in all this can we find
room for the poetic (and parasitic!) life of "Aimless Wandering", the life of
Chuang Tzu (who coined this slogan) and his Taoist progeny, the life of Saint
Francis and his shoeless devotees, the life of (for example) Nur Ali Shah
Isfahani, a 19th century Sufi poet who was executed in Iran for the awful heresy
of meandering-dervishism?
Here is the flip side of the "Problem of Tourism": The problem with the
disappearance of "aimless wandering." Possibly the two are directly related, so
that the more tourism becomes possible, the more dervishism becomes impossible.
In fact, we might well ask if this little essay on the delightful life of the
dervish possesses the least bit of relevance for the contemporary world. Can
this knowledge help us to overcome tourism, even within our own consciousness
and life? Or is it merely an exercise in nostalgia for lost possibilities, a
futile indulgence in romanticism?
Well, yes and no. Sure, I confess I'm hopelessly romantic about the form of the
dervish life, to the extent that for a while I turned my back on the mundane
world and followed it myself. Because of course, it hasn't really disappeared.
Decadent, yes, but not gone forever. What little I know about travel I learned
in those few years I owe a debt to "Medieval accretions" I can never pay and
I'll never regret my "escapism" for a single moment. But I don't consider the
form of dervishism to be the answer to the "problem of tourism." The form has
lost most of its efficacy. There's no point in trying to "preserve" it (as if it
were a pickle, or a lab specimen) there's nothing quite so pathetic as mere
"survival."
But beneath the charming outer forms of dervishism lies the conceptual matrix,
so to speak, which we've called intentional travel. On this point we should
suffer no embarrassment about "nostalgia." We have asked ourselves whether or
not we desire a means to discover the art of travel, whether we want and will to
overcome "the inner tourist," the false consciousness which screens us from the
experience of the Wide World's waymarks. The way of the dervish (or of the
Taoist, the Franciscan, etc.) interests us, not the key, perhaps but...a key.
And of course it does.