Teaching the Sufi Mysteries
•The Role of The Names of God
•The Role of The Sufi Path
•The Role of History
—Reading Questions and Character Worksheets for The Lover
—Reading Questions and Character Worksheets for The Jealous
The Role of the Names of God
To be made in the image of God means to have God’s ninety-nine Names as human character traits. Only humans carry them all. The rest of creation, from an atom to a bird to an angel, only carry a few of the traits each; the mix of character traits defining the core of each creature’s nature.
Carrying the entirety of the character traits is called “The Trust.” The Trust is such a burden that, as the Qur’an puts it, We offered the Trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains and they shook in fear of it, but the human being chose to bear its burden, and so they oppress and are ignorant (Q 33:72).
Carrying the Trust means that human beings must develop these character traits in a balanced way—meaning human beings should not use “power” to oppress, “love” to control, “compassion” to be a doormat or humiliate, or “vengeance” to be a vigilante—by choosing not to live in ignorance of human responsibility. Unfortunately, we end up doing just that, so do my characters.
Each of the Sufi Mysteries will highlight a particular character trait in human beings, how the characters struggle with it, learn to balance it, or give in to their worst impulses and harm others with it, as well as learn to understand God through it.
The Role of the Sufi Path
Most genre novels these days are written according to the arc of “The Hero’s Journey.” If you sign up for a how to write a novel course, this is what you will be taught. You’ll follow a “beat sheet” that tells you exactly when the action should go up and down and, in some cases, the kinds of experiences your characters should have.
The Sufi Mysteries are written according to the arc of a Sufi journey. The four books follow the struggles of a seeker on the first four levels of the path in the image. So my characters don’t always do what they might do in a typical mystery. Zaytuna may, for instance, recognize a clue because she has struggled with her soul or she may miss one because she is unwilling to be self-reflective. I know, I know, it’s not what typical mysteries do. But these are not typical mysteries. They are Sufi mysteries. The mystery is just as much about the human soul as it is about whodunit in the end.
Other clues abound, if you pay attention to the colours in Zaytuna’s dream in The Lover, you will see her journey laid out in the stones in the river she walks through and grasp the meaning and depth of her mother’s knowledge.
The four novels span the first four stages of the Sufi path for Zaytuna. At the first stage, in The Lover, she has a spiritual crisis and realizes that she must change. At the second stage, in The Jealous, she does the work of self-reflection and calling herself to task. At the third stage, in The Unseen, she experiences the world of dreams and visions, and uncanny experiences must be interpreted. At the fourth stage, in The Peace, she finally finds what she had been searching for.
But other characters follow the path in their own way. Tein takes these steps as well as an agnostic verging on atheist who nevertheless grew up with the Sufis of Baghdad and took their ethical teachings to heart. Ammar undertakes this same journey but on the Shia path and reflecting, always, on the lessons of Karbala.
The Key of History
Reading Questions and assignments for The Lover and The Jealous
But First, Useful Resources
Before we get into the reading questions and assignments, please note the website, especially the blogs and podcasts, have material that students may find useful.
I would assign this podcast where I discuss how I imagine history and bring it into fiction.
Reading Questions for The Lover
Social Diversity
Baghdad was as diverse a city as London or New York City during the Abbasid Period.
Who lived there?
What kind of work did they do?
What are their different religious perspectives?
What role does social status play in what characters can and cannot do and what is expected of them?
How does race play into social status?
Were there different cultural cues for the different characters different descents: Turkic, Persian, African, Arab, “European,” and more?
How did non-Muslims dress? In the year the book is set, Non-Muslims had relative freedom in dress and movement. That would not be the case under the next caliph, why?
How does gender play into social status?
How does Ammar, as a Shia, differ from the Sunni characters in the book?
How do different people dress?
Are people religious in the same ways?
How do the different characters articulate their relationship with God?
How do the different characters understand the nature of justice? How does this reflect the different notions of God’s will and human responsibility typical of the time?
When Burhan and Mustafa disagree on al-Qatafi’s treatment of a young enslaved woman, what exactly are they disagreeing about? Break down their arguments. What are their concerns?
Hadith Culture
How are the Hadith scholars portrayed? Consider everyone from Mustafa to Salman to Imam Abu Abdelrahman al-Azdi to Barbahari’s crew!
How do different characters display scholarly humility? Given that, what is scholarly humility and what role does it play in having authority among one’s colleagues and, just as importantly, with everyday folks?
How do they picture themselves and their role in preserving Muhammad’s legacy?
Do all of them see Muhammad in the same way?
How do the different perceptions of Muhammad affect how they act in the real world and what they think society should be like?
How did Mustafa explain the work of Hadith scholars to the crowd in front of the mosque? What do the women want when they urge him to explain himself?
What are the different ways people understand Ahmed ibn Hanbal’s legacy?
Where are the female hadith scholars? How does Zaytuna present their path to scholarship as distinct from men?
How are hadith scholars employed?
What were the different attitudes towards different types of employment? We’re all equally respected? What does that tell you about the broader social culture of the time?
Sufism
There were no Sufi orders during this period. How did the Sufis organize themselves?
Who could be a guide?
Where did they teach?
Is there any difference between how and where women taught then men?
Is there any relationship between where the ecstatic men taught and the women?How do the Sufis differ from the hadith scholars? What were their rituals like?
What do you think Junayd did to Zaytuna? How did it change her? What was Junayd’s concern?How does Junayd’s outlook speak to the shift in that period from more ascetic or ecstatic practices to ones that represented a more middle-ground, socially-engaged path?
Who represents other outlooks?
Why is al-Hallaj so dangerous?
Why is Zaytuna and Tein’s mother’s name never mentioned?
What was Zaytuna and Tein’s mother’s life like on the road? What would men’s life have been like?
What is the difference in religious authority between Junayd and the woman in the graveyard?
How do you think women’s lives might have been different from men’s given their social responsibilities? What about enslaved men and women?
Does it seem surprising that the early Muslim community was openly mixed-gender?
In Zaytuna’s dream sequence, what do the different stones and colours represent?
How does the dream correspond to her character’s development spiritually?
Character Worksheet for The Lover
Your character: How does Silvers describe the clothing of your character?
What does their clothing tell us about their social status/place within society?
What is the gender and race of your character?
How does these affect how your character acts and interacts in the novel?
What is your character’s profession?
What were their past professions?
How does their profession affect how your characters acts or interacts in the novel?
How does your character express their piety?
To the Prophet?
To the Prophet’s family?
To the scriptural sources (the Qur’an and Hadith)?
What does Islam seem to mean for your character?
Are they Shi’ite? Sufi? Hanbali (i.e. protoSunni)?
Do they follow the ritual and ethical obligations of the religion
How do they seem to understand the meaning of these obligations?
Do the characters act in ways that surprise you?
How do they express their piety in relation to other characters?
How do the topics of love and justice operate in the novel? How are the characters motivated by these ideas?
How do they understand them in relation to their own conceptualization of Islam?
Reading Questions for The Jealous
Authority
What are the different official legal institutions? What are the different unofficial legal powers?
What are the different personal legal understandings? How do these approaches differ in approach to the circumstances laid before them?What roles do the different legal institutions play?
Which are “secular” and which are “religious”?
What are the rules or methods by which people in power in the various legal institutions, or as individuals, come to their conclusions?
Who has the right to control the lives of whom and why? What are some of ways in which some people either possess the right to control others or believe they have the right to control others?
How are those forms of control justified?
What do the different expressions of masculinity have to do with control over others?
Masculinity
What does it mean to be “a man” in the novel? How do Tein, Ammar, and Judah perceive their masculinity?
What are the specific ways in which Mustafa, Tein, Ammar, and Judah differ in their understanding of masculinity?
How do they act those ways out with each other, in response to institutions, and with women?
What are some of the personal reasons they may differ?
What is Uncle Nuri’s advice to Tein on how to be a man?
Does being perceived as having African heritage “compromise” a black man’s masculinity?
Gender and Race
It has been argued that there was no concept of “consent” until the modern period (see Brown, Slavery in Islam), therefore people in the past did not experience others’ control over their bodies negatively. It was just ‘how things were’.
Obviously, the novel disagrees with this assessment, making a distinction between expectation and experience. Based on historical accounts of the experience of women and enslaved people, as well as Saadia Yacoob’s scholarship on the legal scholar al-Sarakhsi who was concerned about lack of consent in sexual relations, I argue it is possible to not expect to have control over one’s body and have a range of experiences with regard to it.
Given the novel’s perspective, how do different characters who have no legal expectation of control over their own bodies experience it?
How do some characters try to mitigate the difficulties of those expectations? Do those mitigations challenge the systems of control?
How is race determined by the different characters?
How does that differ from how we understand race now? How does race determine how a character is treated or “managed” by society?
How do the women differ, not in femininity, but in society’s expectations of their roles as women? Consider all the social variables.
Ethics
All the preceding questions address ethics to some degree. The novel is at its core an exploration into the ethics of remembering the past and the way the characters construct their present.
Pay attention to who is listening to whom in the novel and who is ignoring whom. Nearly character in the book is either listening or not listening to someone. What are the outcomes?
What is the relationship between masculinity and ethics? Namely, consider who gets to decide what is ethical and what is not in different pockets of society. Now consider who has the power of the state and official institutions behind them.
How do different characters struggle with their soul’s shortcomings? What do they expect from themselves? Compare Zaytuna’s Sufi path and Ammar’s Shia path of repentance.
Each of the characters imagines their struggle differently. In other words, each has a “keynote” or example of what it means to be good or ethical. What are those?
What does it mean for different characters to be held to account for what they’ve done?
Character Worksheet for The Jealous
What is the gender, race, and social class of your character?
How does these identities affect how your character acts and interacts in the novel?
What kind of clothing does your character wear?
What does their clothing tell us about their social status? What is your character’s profession?
What were their past professions?
How does their profession affect how your characters acts or
interacts in the novel?How does your character express their piety?
Find two or three key scenes in which your character and another character are at odds or in agreement with others with regard to their understanding of Islam and how it should be lived?
What are the emotional, intellectual, or situational keynotes in the scene that illustrate your character’s position?
How is your character motivated by their understanding of Islam?
What are the “sources” of knowing what it means to practice Islam or be a good Muslim to your character? How do they differ from other characters in their understanding of how to interpret those sources?
What role do religious institutions of authority play in these interpretive choices?
What do characters have to gain or lose in interpreting the sources one way or another?
Is your character Shia? Sufi? Sunni?
How do they follow the ritual and ethical obligations of the religion
How do they seem to understand the meaning of these obligations?
Do the characters act in ways that surprise you? Link what surprises you to their social status, their community relations, and their gender or race.