Friday, March 6, 2015

Sufism - Wikipedia

My experiences with Sufism (Islamic Mysticism) is mostly limited to studying Jalal Al Din Rumi who is likely the most famous Sufi Mystic while I was in college. A friend of mine was getting his master's degree in the History of Comparative religion in the early 1970s. 

He told me the following story: Jalal Al Din Rumi was sitting around the campire in the middle East somewhere and he suddenly said, "There is nothing within this cloak but God". Now, if you know anything about Islam you can be instantly killed for saying something like this. So, all the men there with him instantly drew their knives to kill him. However, when they stabbed him there was nothing inside his cloak but air.

The point of the story is that what Rumi said was true so he wasn't there to be killed.

So, it is a lot like Obi-Wan Kenobi when he is "killed?" by Darth Vader. There was nothing inside his cloak but air.


To read about Sufism please click on word button in next line:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism   Cached
Sufism (Arabic: الصوفية ‎ al-ṣūfiyya; Persian: تصوف ‎ taṣawwuf) is a concept in Islam, defined by scholars as the inner, mystical ...

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