What I've Been Up To: Eid Special with Sufism, Game Shows and Heavy Metal
Since we have just finished Ramadan, this issue naturally has an Islamic flavour, but for those of my dear readers who are allergic to religion, there is also some cognitive science, heavy metal, and the BBC’s Survivor makeover, Go Hard or Go Home.
What I’ve Been Reading
For a long time, I’ve wanted to find a good biography of the Prophet Mohammed. By “good”, I mean sympathetic but not hagiographical, and academically sound without being dry. Eventually I found one, written by none other than Karen Armstrong: Muhammad: A Prophet for our Time. Armstrong is an intriguing character who deserves a whole article to herself; a former nun, she turned into a “freelancing monotheist” and now, apparently she is unsure even of her monotheism, saying “If anything, I'm a Confucian, I think." As someone who has flirted promiscuously with a variety of beliefs, I can identify with that, especially her much-quoted (and unsourced) saying that "religion isn't about believing things. It's about what you do. It's ethical alchemy." I won’t go into the details of the biography save to say that it’s eminently readable and emphasises Mohammed’s mission “to create a just and decent society, in which all members were treated with respect.” This is a good approach because you can’t really understand Islam without some background in the society from which, and in opposition to which, it sprang. While people tend to think of Islam as extremely patriarchal (and its manifestations generally have been), Armstrong emphasises that in his time, Mohammed was often seen as what today’s MRAs would call a “cuck”; he was mocked, for example, for his refusal to beat his wives. Something I didn’t know before reading this book is that some of his compatriots even objected to his saying “Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim” (“In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate”) because “rahman” and “rahim” are feminine adjectives (the latter as a noun means “womb”).
But while the origins of Islam are interesting, it is Sufism that really fascinates me. I wouldn’t describe myself as a Sufi - that would be pretentious even if it were accurate - but it has been a major influence. After living half my life in Turkey, how could it not be? My main Ramadan reading has been Sufism and the Way of Blame: Hidden Sources of a Sacred Psychology by Yannis Toussulis and Robert Abdul Hayy Darr. “Blame” here is a rather inadequate translation of the Persian word malam (from Arabic malamah), which could also be translated as “criticism”. The Sufi order known as malamiyya or malamatiyya are thus “the people of blame” partly because they were blamed or accused of heterodoxy or even heresy, but took on the term themselves because they were relentless in their self-analysis and self-criticism. In particular, they were concerned with what you do after attaining mystical states. The loss of ego involved in what Sufis call fana-fi-Allah - “annihalation in God” - can paradoxically result in ego inflation. For this reason, the Malamatiyya (or Melamiler, as they are known in Turkey) generally preferred to keep a low profile, wearing no distinguishing clothes (unlike most dervishes) and breaking minor religious rules only to avoid beng thought of as virtuous. From the nineteenth century onwards, they seem to have been quietly active in reform movements, and it is even rumoured that Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, was one of them. I’ve come across some contemporary members of the order online, and again,they seem to take the view of religion as “ethical alchemy” rather than a set of beliefs.
Unlike Karen Armstrong, Yannis Toussulis has not tried to write an accessible book for the general reader; rather, this is for someone who already knows a bit about Sufism and wants to learn more about its less well-known currents. For a general introduction, I recommend Idries Shah’s anthology The Way of the Sufi, bearing in mind that Shah himself has come in for a lot of criticism for his mythologising and theatricality (a topic Toussulis goes into). I would also recommend the lengthy YouTube interview with Toussulis, “Adventures of a Sufi Mytic”, which was actually what put me on to the book. It turns out that Toussulis is another eclecticist, arriving at Melamism after a long pilgrimage not only through other Sufi orders but also Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism.
What I’ve Been Watching
This naturally brings me to what I’ve been watching, and we are into yet more eclecticism with John Vervaeke’s marathon lecture series, Escaping the Meaning Crisis.
Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science, a discipline in which I have dabbled (my only heavyweight academic publication was in cognitive linguistics). He is also a philosopher with an interest in comparitive religion; in that respect, he’s a bit like Jordan Peterson, but without the douchebaggery. (Vervaeke quips in the interview that I mentioned in an earlier post that they knew and debated each other “before Jordan became a god.”) In accordance with this, the first half of Escaping the Meaning Crisis is a dazzling tour through the history of philosophy and religion, and the second half tries to make sense of it all in terms of cognitive science,and all of this is an attempt to do what the title says: discover a “psychotechnology” that will get us out of our current spiritual doldrums.
Now I’ve been critical of the idea that the modern age is in some kind of social and spiritual crisis; in fact, it was a major target in my post “Attack of the MOMS” (Malaise Of Modern Society). But Vervaeke is slowly winning me over. His description of how our previously unified view of reality broke down is compelling, but he doesn’t seek a return to traditional beliefs. Yet he is also critical of the New Atheists, and even more critical of the “pseudo-religions” of the twentieth century, most obviously Nazism, which he analyses brilliantly as a “gnostic nightmare”.
As I said, Escaping the Meaning Crisis is a marathon: there are 51 hour-long episodes, and they don’t make for easy listening (there is a podcast version, but I had to switch from that to the original YouTube videos because I couldn’t follow the argument without the diagrams he scribbles on the whiteboard). But Vervaeke is intellectually riveting, and the investment of time and mental effort pays off, at least if you’re the kind of person who likes that kind of thing. The lectures also involve learning a lot of new vocabulary, but that part of it is kind of fun, and now I am determined to find ways to slip phrases like “self-organising criticality” and “combinatorial explosiveness” into my conversation.
In lighter vein - and after an hour of escaping the meaning crisis, you do need something in a lighter vein - I became strangely enamoured of the BBC’s game show Go Hard or Go Home. I’m not a big fan of game shows, but for some time I got hooked on the Turkish version of Survivor, not least because I got sucked into it while teaching my games course, so I was intrigued by the design of the games and also the games the contestants played out in their personal interactions. But Survivor is inherently toxic because the contestants vote to eliminate each other, and the drama-loving audience vote on who is up for elimination. It’s like those weird experiments psychologists did back before ethics committees caught up with them.
Go Hard or Go Home is like a wholesome version of Survivor: the contestants are confined to an island, there are similar games, and they are eliminated. But there is no hunger - in fact, the food is delicioous - and they stay in a nice eco-hotel. The important difference though, is the purpose: the eight contestants are all couch potatos who want to get strong and healthy, and they are each trained to that end by a “warrior” (I guess “trainer” just isn’t sexy enough any more). And it’s the warriors who decide which of the two contestants who score lowest in the games get eliminated, based as much on their motivation as their perfomance. That small difference completely changes the relationship between the contestants, who are generally very supportive of each other; in fact, as the series progresses, it gets less like a game show and more like group therapy. There are still a few nice catty lines though, my favourite being “If you said it's a lovely sunny day, he'd say ‘You know I got terrible sunburn as a child, and I'm so traumatized by it.’”
That also highlights what may be a genuine difference between my generation and theirs. Not only are the warriors as far from my old PE teachers as I can imagine, acting as therapists as much as coaches, but the contestants seem to be typical Gen Z - in a nice way. The men talk about their feelings and shed tears as much as the women, everyone shares their hopes, fears and grief, and seems to be genuinely trying to be “the best version of themselves”. And while there is obviously competition, it is generally pretty good natured. I kept thinking “Aww, they’re so sweet!” And I meant that without a trace of sarcasm.
What I’ve Been Listening To
Given what’s happened so far, you were probably expecting some Sufi music in this section, so I won’t disappoint. Here is the British-born Azeri musician Sami Yusuf’s rendering of a poem by the fourteenth-century Sufi Nasimi.
And finally, as promised, some (rather melodic) heavy metal. This is Malaysian band Voice of Baseprot performing “PMS”. Not what you’d exepct from three hijabi girls.
(Click here if you don’t see the embedded video)