Big Arcs: The Fate of Sufi Women in The Sufi Mysteries Quartet

“Farewell to men!”
—Hasna al-Abida (early mystic woman)

Each novel has its own mystery to solve, but series has narrative arcs that carry over all for novels, coming to completion in the fourth, The Peace. One of these big arcs is the fate of pious and mystic women in the Sufi community. In short, as threats to the Sufi community from other religious communities grew over time, as Sufis started to argue for their place among the scholars (those who have specialized knowledge about God and teach it), and as Sufism became more mainstream, women’s public involvement came to be managed, more sober, more moderate to broader cultural norms. Eventually, their involvement would be almost entirely erased from the sources that would become the “how-tos” on Sufism to this day. The early practices in which women wandered in ecstasy, taught mixed-gender gatherings openly, and even, as Hasna al-Abida did, foreswore men, did not come to an end but seem to have moved to edges of Sufism, or beyond it.

Each novel marks the development of these concerns over time. I condense the history and the concerns, after all, the four novels mark a period of just over one year. But there was a move, during Junayd’s time (late 9/early 10th century), and under his guidance, to moderate the public expression of Sufism to be more in line with scholarly trends. Junayd was not reacting without reason. There were threats of heresy that would lead to executions during this period. But it would not be until Qushayri (d. 1074) and his Risala that moderation would be enshrined and gendered, ultimately developing into what we understand to be Sufism today. And that Sufism was not one in which women were simply sidelined or silenced, but rather elite men—and the elite male experience—became central to the theology and practice of Sufism itself. It became what Zahra Ayubi has called, “gendered morality.”

In The Lover, we hear the history of Zaytuna and Tein’s extraordinary mother, the ecstatic preacher and guide, al-Ashiqa as-Sawda, a woman who wandered teaching wherever God overcame her before settling in Junayd’s community in Baghdad with her children. Her history and her dialogue is wholly adapted from the sources on these women’s lives. But she goes unnamed, only her nickname is given, and her history is held back, to mark the disappearance of these women from the later sources. In the following passage, Tein and Zaytuna remark on it.

“Zay, do you think people will tell stories about her someday?”

“Sorry Tein. I’ve got the lamp but no oil. We’re stuck in the dark. What did you say?”

“Stories. Will people tell stories of mother? Will anyone know her name?”

“Why did she never tell us stories of her life before she wandered?” Zaytuna asked. “We know nothing about who we come from. Our family. We’ve got nothing other than her drum and the beads.” 

“If we should’ve known,” he said, “she’d have told us. She left all that behind.”

“For God.”

“Maybe for a different reason.”

“I wish I could’ve asked her.”

“Listen, Zaytuna. I meant will the Sufis tell stories about her?”

“I’ve always heard the aunts and uncles tell stories of the women. Mustafa said he heard an auntie reciting mother’s poetry recently. I can’t imagine them forgetting about her, forgetting about the women. If they go the way of the scholars, though. Women are no better than donkeys and dogs to the likes of them.” 

“Mustafa is not like that,” Tein insisted. 

“True, but it seems like the ones who are get control of everything.”

My hope is that readers would be left wanting to know her, mourn her, mourn the loss of women’s histories and the loss of a Sufism in which women—despite the risks—were openly central to the path.

In The Jealous, we start to see the beginnings of a more orderly system in Junayd’s community. YingYue—the young Chinese spiritual prodigy we meet at the end of The Lover—becomes a guide for women new to the path and working hierarchally underneath the elder women like Auntie Hakima. al-Juwayri is always beside Junayd, acting as his junior in helping to run the community and first in line to take over for him when he dies. Except for regions like Khurasan (in which singular leaders guided devoted followers), in the early days of piety, mystic, and Sufi teaching, this orderliness was unusual. Those who wanted to learn wandered from teacher to teacher, whatever their gender, and learning from all. Although they go unmentioned in the first three books, there were less sober and orderly gathering places for early mystics and Sufis in Baghdad at the time. The community was divided somewhat between the moderate types who felt ecstasy and public teaching should be controlled and those who experienced ecstasy publicly and would preach in the streets. These two poles are depicted in the tension between Junayd and Nuri in the novels, but the books also show that despite these divisions they were a community, a family, nonetheless.

In The Unseen, in which marriage is a theme for many of the characters, we begin to get a sense of how things are changing and some of the elders, like Auntie Hakima, are none too happy.

“Your uncle has told me about your dream, but I knew before he said so.” Auntie Hakima looked across the courtyard at Junayd with an impatient expression. “No need to recount it.”

“Oh...,” said Zaytuna, worried.

“It didn’t use to be that a woman on this path had to pass through love of a man first before she arrived at God’s doorstep, but times change.” Auntie Hakima propped her elbow on her knee, and her sleeve fell back from her arm. “We might roam free, if that was our way.”

Her face took on a cast of nostalgia so sweet Zaytuna wanted to follow her there, even though she and Tein had lived the hardships of it themselves with their mother. Instead, she was surprised that the mere mention of an ecstatic woman’s life on the road did not bring old resentments over her childhood, each demanding to be attended to with bitter thoughts and sharp words.

“Troubled by men, to be sure,” Auntie Hakima continued. “But we called the people to us in the streets and the graveyards, whispered to them about our Lover, and drove them mad with love to God Himself. We were free so that no creature could come between us and God.” She poked Zaytuna’s knee with one finger. “We’re to follow a middle way now! It seems all the young companions are to be married.” She looked over again at the uncles and younger men sitting with Uncle Abu al-Qasim, and added sharply, “Whether or not it’s a good idea.”

…

The old woman picked up her shaking hand and held it still. “Everything is changing. We are to be like the scholars. We are to fit in. I understand the risks. We frighten people with our loving God so deeply and could end up back before the High Court answering to charges of heresy like before.” She sighed. “He’s not wrong. And without your uncle Nuri here, who will stand up for us and save us from the executioner?” Tugging Zaytuna’s hand, she asked, “But I wonder where all this is going? Will there be a day when the men say to us women that God will not love us unless a creature of this world, one of them, approves? Will the gates of Paradise be barred to us without a husband’s permission?” Auntie Hakima gripped her hand so hard that her fingers hurt, sounding the way her mother did when angry at this world, for God’s sake, “The idolatry! Zaytuna! The idolatry!”

Zaytuna would not accept it. She considered the aunts and uncles she had grown up with and the brothers and sisters on this path and refused to believe they would make a man the lord of a woman’s salvation instead of God. “They would never.”

“Of course, they would not. But I fear what will come after us. This middle way is meant to stop us weeping and wandering, so we fit in with the rest of the Muslims. Nothing will be the same.” She let go of Zaytuna’s hand and slapped her own thigh, drawing herself out of her worry. “Enough of that. Now, your dream.”

In The Peace, we will see more of the risks of immoderate mystical practices through the figure of al-Mansur al-Hallaj so readers understand fully what was at stake. I also plan to show that it becomes more and more difficult for women to lead independent lives of the spirit and how expressions of ecstasy itself are gendered by the social norms of the person experiencing it.

In the end, I want readers to see how such losses happen in history for day to day reasons, large and small, and how the doctrine, practice, and even articulations of ecstasy itself that we accept now as “facts” of the path were always facts of human experience.

If you want to know a bit more about Sufi women and the path then and now, I’ve got a blog on that.

Image is “Shaykh Safi al-Din Dances in Ecstasy”