Islam's Trojan horse.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Professor Johns' "scholarship" (Letters, March 2008) rings dismally familiar to my ears. It is an artificial fog, the sole purpose of which is to obscure, divert and elude the very relevant, pressing and alarming queries raised by Dr Stenhouse's earlier article.

These queries have still not been answered.

Pierre Ryckmans, Canberra, ACT.

SIR: In his letter commenting on my article "Islam's Trojan Horse" (December 2007) Professor A.H. Johns says that considering "Hasan al-Basri" as the "founder" of Sufism "beggars comprehension". Abu Sa'id Hasan, known as al-Basri, was born in 642, around eleven years after Muhammad's death. He is rightly acknowledged as the earliest of the Muslim ascetics to exercise a lasting influence on Sufism and is the earliest of those predecessors to whom Sufis look back with admiration and gratitude. W. Montgomery Watt, no slouch academically, described al-Basri as "the most prominent [Muslim] figure of the seventh and early eighth century". Still, I have no desire to quibble. I was not trying to write a history of Sufism, or to justify the use of the term Sufi to cover the variety of teachings and personalities to which it is attached.

2. I was not aware, until Professor Johns informed Quadrant readers, that the Naqshbandi Sufis (or Nakshibendi as they are known in Turkey) are my bete noire. They are of interest because Fethullah Gulen--whose teachings inspire the recently established Australian Catholic University Chair for the Study of Islam and Muslim--Catholic Relations--is a Nakshibendi Sufi, and because of their well-established tradition of political involvement. The founder of the Chinese Muslim independence movement, Ma Hua-long (killed by imperial troops in 1871 after leading a rebellion that cost an estimated ten million lives), was a Nakshibendi Sufi; as were Imam Shamil (died 1871), founder of the Chechnya independence movement, and Sheikh Mehmed Zahid Kotku (died 1980), one of the founders of the modern-day Islamist movement in Turkey.

3. That the Kharijites were puritanical, and that the early "Sufis" in their unwofldliness shared some of these values with them is far from "unsustainable". In these politically correct days the Kharijites find themselves friendless, yet despite their "anarchism" their emphasis on purity of conscience resonates with the Sufi doctrine that the most saintly Sufi is the qutb or axis upon which the whole order of the universe depends, Because they opposed "arbitration" they withdrew from supporting 'Ali in his fight to retain the Caliphate--and were given the name Kharijites. 'Ali, Muhammad's cousin and sonin-law, would have done well to listen to them. He was conned at the Battle of Siffin in 657 by Mu'awiya, who before the "arbitration" looked like losing to him. I do not think, nor did I say, that the Sufis were Kharijites.

4. I also did not say that there was a "line of continuity between al-Basri and the self-styled Mahdi" who took Khartoum and was a Sufi. I did, I admit, mention them both in the same paragraph. I could as easily have mentioned al-Hasan alBanna (founder of al-Ikhawan al-Muslimun and grandfather of Tariq Ramadan, who was only recently lecturing in Australia) or Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (who unleashed a bloodbath on Iran and the Gulf region in the 1980s). Both reportedly began their careers as Sufis. Closer to the present day I could have mentioned the Deobandi movement in India, Afghanistan and the UK (from which many of the leaders ...