Sufi mysticism and pantheism

Plato's successors developed the concept of pantheism, belief that identifies God with the universe

What we call Sufi music owes its origins and essence to the theories of Plato, called Aflatoon by Muslims. The Athenian philosopher also probably gave the world the idea of heaven, a perfect and eternal place that entered Islam and Christianity through his influence.

Plato’s successors developed the concept of pantheism, the belief that identifies god with the universe. A formless neutral being and not the angry old man of the Old Testament.

This line of thinking then produced the mystics, like the Sufis, who yearned for union with the universe. If there is nothing that separates man from the essence of the universe, it should be possible to merge with it. Sufi music is hard to define but it has two primary characteristics: it is sung at high pitch and it expresses that yearning for union. The two characteristics are connected. This music's practitioners like Kailash Kher and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan sing high, reaching up, attempting or emulating union.

How did Sufism come to the Muslims from the Greeks? Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato's student Aristotle all came during the high watermark of the Athenian civilisation. This was ruined by wars with neighbouring Greek states, especially Sparta. The declining civilisation was crushed by the Macedon king Phillip and his son Alexander, who had been tutored by Aristotle. It moved with the Greeks to Alexandria in Egypt, ruled by the greatest of Alexander's successors, the first Greek pharaoh Ptolemy. The centre of Greek learning from the third century BC onward was Egypt and here the ideas of Plato and Aristotle and the neoplatonics (like Plotinus, who wrote on mysticism) were further developed.

When the Arabs under Omar conquered Egypt in 642, they engaged with this material intellectually. These works they translated and without the Arabs, Plato and Aristotle would have been lost forever. What is called the Enlightenment was the reentry of Greek philosophy into Europe, made possible by the Arab scholarship.

The Christian church was greatly interested in Aristotle, particularly his explanation of how god was eternal, a theory that was worked on by Thomas Aquinas, who attempted to bring reason to the Catholic faith.

It was the Muslim mystics who integrated Plato’s pantheism into their Abrahamic religion. The most important of these mystics was ibn Arabi of Spain, a man studied even today in the West. After him, Sufi mysticism was taken up by others who formed the orders (Chishtiya, Qadiriya, Naqshbandi et cetera) which we are familiar with on the subcontinent.

The Hindus had independently developed pantheism through Acharya Shankara and his non-dualism, or advaita. As that name suggests, Shankara arrives at the same pantheist ideas. Guru Nanak’s Sikhism thinks of god as being nirgun, or without attributes and formless. This also alludes to the same thing and it is perhaps why Punjabi music so easily connects with Sufi music.

We have looked at how the Greeks influenced the Muslims, and this is easy to see because of the historical record. India has been more influential on Greek thinking than is acknowledged. This is mainly for a lack of documentation. Most of this engagement happened before the advent of writing, or certainly before the written word was popular.

The most important Greek thinker was Pythagoras, who is said to have travelled to India about 700 years or so before Christ, meaning before even the Buddha and Mahavir. From India, the Greeks acknowledge, he took back two things: vegetarianism and the idea of transmigration of souls (ie, rebirth). Pythagoras was an eccentric character and refused to eat beans, presumably because they were seeds and capable of transformation and therefore “living”. He was also deeply interested in music and its theories and it would be interesting to examine how the modes of Greek music connect with Indian patterns.

The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1509, showing Plato (left) and Aristotle

The animism of Indians has attracted them to pantheism effortlessly. It is a very easy idea for us to imagine and accept and there is no internal resistance Indian faiths offer to it, though it demotes the idea of a powerful god.

Islam’s hard monotheism has always been uneasy with pantheism. The Sufi Mansoor al Hallaj was executed for heresy when he claimed “I am the truth.” This was outrageous because only from God can truth emanate. In India the split of Islamic thinking is between the Barelvis, who are shrine-worshipping Sufism followers, and the Deobandis, who are hard monotheists.

The idea of mysticism is so powerful and attractive that pantheism and polytheism creep into religions in many ways. Where the two collide, it is usually pantheism that wins.

Saint Paul, the founder of Christianity, was pragmatic and understood that to get the Mediterranean world to accept the messiah, he would have to make compromises. This is why he broke with the defining Judaic traditions of circumcision, eschewing pork and monotheism. As the message of the Christ went west, through Turkey to Greece and then Rome, the very popular polytheism of the Roman empire was adopted by Christianity in the form of saints and the Holy Trinity. Pure monotheism would not allow this trifurcation of the Godhead. It is Muhammad who returns the strict conditions on circumcision, pork and monotheism to the Semitic tribes (it is strange that we easily refer to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, when the reality shows it to be Judaeo-Islamic).

The saints, who are imagined as kind and gentle benefactors keen to deliver material benefits, can be appealed to through votive offerings. The popularity of polytheism on our subcontinent of many gods then imposed its own saints on Islam because a single, angry god was unbearable.

All humans are drawn to the idea of union, because we sense there is a lack of ultimate meaning in individual existence. It explains the longevity and popularity of pantheism, alive even today in Sufi music, when most religious ideas have fallen away or become ritual.