Sufism and Peace

A grand literature conference with the theme Sufism and Peace has just been completed at the National Library in Islamabad, Pakistan. About 200 delegates from 35 countries participated. One of the largest delegations came from Sweden, thanks to the fact that Peter Curman last year received the Quaid-e-Azam Award, one of the highest honorary awards you can get in the country. He received the price of 16,000 euros for both his writing and for his work to allow literature to meet across borders. The conference had the aim to investigate whether the Sufi teachings, a spiritual view of the direction of Islam, can contribute to peace in the violence struck country. Sufism has also sought to be advanced by intellectuals in the West as a possible conciliatory force and the way to open dialogue between secular Western culture and Islam.

Sufism became popular in medieval Persia and the countries that today constitute Pakistan and Afghanistan, not least by poets as Rumi and Hafiz. They taught Islam in local languages, and preached a message of tolerance towards other faiths. Mainly, however, Sufism is a spiritual movement that focuses on achieving unity with God. Even today there are active Sufi orders across the Muslim world. Sufism is by no means irrelevant to understanding the subcontinent’s relationship with Islam. In one of the best lectures throughout the conference, Polish Jolanta Sierakowsky-Dyndo described the Sufi influence on the clan-based societies of Khorasan in the Middle Ages. It is expected that there then were about 800,000 active Sufis in the countries we now call Iran, Pakistan and India. .

The conference agreed on a declaration that said a multicultural society was a way to embody the ideals of Sufism. But discussions at the conference pointed in different directions. One of the closing speeches of the Swiss sociologist Patrick Haenni won great approval. He wanted to emphasize that a discussion of religious extremism must also take into account social factors and identified three contemporary phenomenons within the Muslim culture, which he said were at least as important as Sufism to promote dialogue: their own intellectual movement, with names like Samir Kassir and Edward Said, a moderate political Islam often inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, and finally the emergence of an individualistic and modern ”post-Islamism” in the West.

The conference has been widely reported in Pakistani media, not least because all delegates were invited to the presidential palace, where both the education minister, himself practicing Dervish, President Asif Ali Zardari and Peter Curman gave speeches for the participants at the conference, parliamentarians and ambassadors from several countries, including Sweden’s ambassador Ulrika Sundberg..

Here is a link to a report on the conference in Swedish: retrogarde.org

Text by Carl Forsberg, Manager of Medieverkstäderna (Media Workshop) at Nätverkstan. Parts of the article was published in the daily Göteborgs-Posten last week.