Several points to make here. First, I would like to mention that one of my favorite books is “The Wisdom of the Idiots”, by Idries Shah. I may post a few of his stories. One short one is this:
A voice whispered to me in the dark last night, saying “there is no such thing as voices whispering in the dark”.
I think the analogy of a joke would be a propo here: if I have to explain it, the effect is lost in any event.
A second point I wanted to make, though, is that although I have been very much influenced by what I understand to be a Sufi approach to life, Sufi tradition itself says that all of their orders are prone to constant decay, forgetfulness, and getting lost.
I audited, briefly, a class on the Sufis in college. Perhaps two lecture in, the Professor–Hamid Algar–started talking about how Sufis were leading anti-colonialists. This clashed quite a bit with the understanding I had had. Then later, perhaps the same lecture, perhaps another, he commented that Islam had spread peacefully. I had to raise my hand at that point and ask: “what are scimitars for then?” Actually, I wasn’t that clever. I just pointed out that, as one example, Iran was not colonized by the Islamic ideology peacefully, at least according to my understanding. Another student, who is probably at this very moment working or trying to work for some arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, somewhat angrily told me to take a class in Islamic history. I then realized that I had interrupted what I would now call a session in what we could call Islamic “community organizing”, and stopped going.
The Mahdi of Sudan was a bloodthirsty, sybaritic pig. There was nothing kind or enlightened about him. In fact, his death was due to the diseases that swept his camp following his armies failure to bury or take care of in the slightest the thousands of corpses they had left lying around after their conquest of Khartoum.
He was called a Sufi. Suffice it to say that on my reading Sufis are not bloodthirty pigs.
Thus when we see this word in Iran, or Egypt, or Sudan or elsewhere, we need infer nothing. Inner reality is inner reality. The tradition is so full of this basic teaching that in many respects it could be said to constitute Sufism outright.
Many of you will have experienced Christians invoking love in a spirit of hate. The Islamic equivalent is invoking God in the name of injustice and evil, as did the Mahdi, and as do the Iranian mullahs at this very moment. You cannot hide evil. They seem not to realize this.