CONSTRUCCIÓN DE CÁMARAS DE HORMIGÓN. UNIDAD: PZA

The Chair expressed surprise at this point that Sufi was apparently a negative term in Muslim communities. In response, several participants declared that it was increasingly used as an insult, that Sufism was increasingly seen as beyond the pale by many heritage Muslims, and that it was therefore increasingly difficult for converts to engage with that tradition. The presenter interjected to point out that he maintained an intellectual and spiritual connection to Sufism, and that it was dangerous in any case to become trapped in dichotomies such as Sufi vs. non-Sufi. What was required instead was ‘a holistic understanding of human faculties’, including those ‘higher faculties ignored by our materialist culture’ and reductive education; in this, Sufism had a role to play. Another convert simply felt that these were not issues that should be dividing Muslims. But still others insisted that the discourse of Islam was narrowing in their communities.

participants’ own sympathies and descriptions of the division they saw in Muslim communities, returned the conversation to the concept of ‘naïve sincerity’ and its discontents. Several participants revealed that their initial exposure and adherence as new Muslims were to the Salafist approach. One attendee described his post-conversion period as one of zealotry rather than ‘naïve sincerity’. He was encouraged not to speak about dreams and to disregard Sufis as unserious. Yet he now believed that many people did come to Islam through dreams and found himself more comfortable with the company of Sufis than with many others. There were many bad ways of learning Islam that, once adopted, must be unlearned. This, he concluded, was the process of a convert’s maturation. Another participant divulged that he too was a zealot when he ‘crash-landed’ into Islam. Hardly understanding the various labels thrown around by more experienced Muslims, he quickly realised that the people he had fallen in with were extremely negative on the subject of Sufis. ‘Sufi’ was, in fact, their ‘catch-all term’ for other Muslims who disagreed with them. A third speaker also described the deep intolerance he had witnessed when, as a younger convert, he was heavily influenced by the Salafist movement. However, it was possible, he suggested, that he was simply exposed to the kind of character who embodied intolerance in any movement, rather than to a particularly bigoted doctrine.

A more sympathetic portrait of Salafism was painted by a participant who felt that the divisions drawn thus far were unrepresentative. He described his English city as a nucleus for Salafism in Britain, and acknowledged that Sufism was seen there almost as ‘a fifth column’. Yet he would describe the behaviour of many Salafists as Sufi-like (for instance, he had not been taught to disregard dreams, but merely to take them to a person of knowledge), and he reminded others that Sufis too had been known to resort to violence. For his part, he was thankful that in his early years he had learned how to process knowledge. The fate of a new convert, he asserted, was to be the object of constant recruitment from all quarters. It required inner strength not to capitulate and to find one’s own path. He had seen converts ‘come hard and then disappear’, moving from fervent shahadah to discouraged apostasy. Fifteen years ago, he himself would have been uncomfortable sitting in a room with other converts of such different persuasions. It took him time to become sufficiently at ease with himself before he could navigate such diverse Muslim spaces. Now the aspect of fellow Muslims that frightened him was ‘literalism’. Thus, though he was not a fully- fledged member of the Salafist da‘wah (call to Islam), he could not recognise the characterisation of Salafism made by other participants and would warn against such flippant statements.23

6.6 ‘Naïve’ vs. ‘Innocent’ Sincerity

In relation to the negative perception and reception of Sufism, two concepts were reintroduced from previous conversation: White privilege and ‘naïve sincerity’. One participant pointed out that Sufism suffered from its association with educated white people who, privileged enough to choose among various spiritual options of the 1960s, picked this path. Class and racial resentment were the result. Earlier, moreover, in response to the use of ‘naïve sincerity’ to describe a zealous embrace of Islam, the Chair suggested a change in terminology. He proposed the reformulation of ‘innocent sincerity’, since far more than ‘naivety’, ‘innocence’ connoted childhood, the stage at which all basic questions could be asked and boundaries pushed. Were he to convert to Islam, the Chair declared, he would not wish to lose this innocence immediately. The same notion of innocence and play in the convert’s approach to Islam appealed to another participant, who insisted that as new Muslims they needed above all to be realistic. ‘We are children coming to the din’, he said; doing so required humility, critical thinking, courage, and a clear model to follow. The participant who had coined the phrase ‘naïve sincerity’, meanwhile, was not opposed to the revision of ‘innocent sincerity’ and in fact enjoyed its ‘sibilant sound’. But he drew a more severe conclusion from the preceding discussion, warning against the lazy mode of thinking that rendered many labels pejorative and millions of people dismissed. As new Muslims, he urged his fellow participants to avoid groupthink, to include dissenting voices, and to refuse the repudiation of any great tradition of the din. His young convert’s attitude was altogether relaxed: ‘I do my thing, you do your thing, and we’re cool’.

7. ‘ B E C O M I N G M U S L I M ’ A N D T H E R E S P O N S E S O F FA M I LY & F R I E N D S

7.1 Themes

An older convert in attendance gave the symposium’s final full account of ‘Becoming Muslim’, a narrative encompassing the second half of the twentieth century, the disorientation and eroded confidence of the upper class at the end of the British Empire, the various social and cultural upheavals that marked the 1960s, and a lost sense of community and purpose re-emerging through the convert’s embrace of a beautiful Islamic tradition.