Experimenting with a Sufi university: By Shahab Usto

Experimenting with a Sufi university

Dawn InpaperMagzine
(2 hours ago) Today

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By Shahab Usto

“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you Don’t go back to sleep.”
— Rumi

The Sindh government has announced plans to establish a full-fledged Sufi university at Bhit Shah. It is said that the university will start functioning early next year at the initial cost of Rs65 million. The curriculum includes, inter alia, arts, music, literature, linguistics and religion but the study of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, would be the primary academic pursuit.

Coming at a time when the province’s educational infrastructure lays in a shambles and the syllabus requires to be drastically revamped to complement the modern age of science and technology, the apparently backward-looking Sufi university is an interesting experiment raising many a good question.

Though difficult to simplify, Sufism may be described as a path (tariqa) that passes through many stations (muqamat) and ecstatic states (ahwal) to reach the level of the passing away (fana) where the Sufi attains the state of survival (baqqa) and thereby partakes the Godly attributes.

Obviously, helping students cover such an esoteric and rigorous path would require the university to introduce an unconventional syllabus, a specialised faculty, and a different methodology. How is the government crossing these hurdles?

True, the university’s intention may not be to create Sufis as such. But even to promote Sufism as a discipline in its own right, a noble cause in this increasingly materialistic and intolerant milieu, requires a bit of caution. For, cynical it may sound but in the given scholastic muddle and sectarian extremism, Sufism with its inherent emphasis on inter-faith and trans-sectarian amity could face a backlash. Just as the Reformation was not enough in Europe but a series of socio-political revolutions were required to create a space for the co-habitation of church and secular state, and by implication of the liberal and the orthodox sections, we also need a politically conducive atmosphere for the university.

Let’s not forget that the history of mysticism has been replete with the persecution of great mystics and their supporters — Maimonides, Averroes, Halaj, Dara, Sarmad and many more. They suffered because they were quintessentially anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and syncretistic. Therefore, their message of universal love and empathy never sat well with orthodox and autocratic mindsets.

The Sufi university may also face the brunt of autocratic and retrogressive mindsets which refuse to accept democracy, destroy the shrines, and persecute the non-Muslim citizens in the name of blasphemy. Our education Czars may also push the university to customise Sufism curricula to fit in the state’s security and ideological framework.

Moreover, what would be the fate of the university graduates in a society that welcomes only accountants, managers, doctors, scientists, engineers and the like? Admitted, the students would also receive training in other courses including information technology, linguistics, structuralism, psychology, neurology, and the like. But how would these courses make the core degree in Sufism attractive for a technology-services-dominated market that denies an easy access even to the qualified engineers and doctors? Would the Sindh government undertake to provide jobs to the graduates of the university?

If the students couldn’t get jobs, then it would be difficult to justify the university. Already, in the financially-strained province, illiteracy is rampant; thousands of schools are either dysfunctional or bereft of buildings, labs, furniture, electricity, water, and so on; the dropout ratio is high; the school teachers are underpaid and ill-trained; and its higher education budget has been slashed by 30 per cent, despite the low country-wide funding for research and development.

True, culture and heritage are important even in the developed countries, but not at the cost of modernity and progress. Germany is a case in point. Like us, it is also a land of mystics, poets and philosophers such as Meister Eckhart, Nicolaus of Cusa, Jacob Boehme, Goethe, or the recent Martin Buber. But without ignoring its past, Germany has fully embraced the present social and natural sciences. Indeed, modern Germany’s zeitgeist is embodied in its first-class educational system that has earned it a prominent place among the most stable and prosperous democracies.

And ditto for Chaucer’s Britain, Rumi’s Turkey, Shinto Japan or Confucian China. All these countries have moved from the medieval to modernity, literally holding aloft that symbolic tripod of the modern age — classroom, library and laboratory. The West is spending five to seven per cent of GDP on education. Even China and India are harvesting the fruits of education by producing, respectively, 600,000 and 350,000 engineers annually, far more than 70,000 engineers produced by US annually.

But our spending on education (only 1.5 per cent of GDP) continues to be 20 times less than that on defence, despite the fact that most of the guns that we buy are used against the “enemies of state” who sprout from our impoverished and mis-educated backwaters.

The aim of our national education policy (1998-2010) is to “enable” the citizens to become “true” Muslims but without informing as to how that objective will be achieved in the face of prevailing sectarian violence and doctrinal diversity. No wonder, our education suffers from a private-public-madressah divide causing the “culture wars”, social disparities, and political discontent.

In these circumstances, if the Sufi university is being founded, then its charter must clearly enunciate its objective as the promotion of a scientific and humanistic culture. The curricula must be geared towards enhancing rather than diminishing the prospects of the university graduates becoming productive and vibrant members of society. Churning out the batches of idealists and ideologues in this highly schismatic milieu won’t help the cause of the university; rather it would dent the legacy of great Sufis who strove and laid their lives for the moral, intellectual and material advancements of the entire humanity.

shahabusto@hotmail.com