Born in Pakistan and raised in the United States, Sara received her MAIS in Women and Gender Studies with a focus in Sufism from George Mason University in 2012. Her master’s thesis – “Beyond Binary Barzakhs: Using the Theme of Liminality in Islamic Thought to Question the Gender Binary” – reflects on the works of Ibn Arabi, Rumi, and Bulleh Shah, presenting a fresh perspective on the experiences of those who identify as hijras or “third genders” in South Asia. Sara is currently a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s Women’s Studies PhD program, continuing her focus on Sufism as an epistemological approach to feminist theory. She is fluent in English, Urdu/Hindi, Punjabi, and is currently pursuing Persian. Sara comes to UMD with many years of professional experience working for international NGOs including United Nations platform committees.
Work-in-Progress;
Please do not quote without author’s permission
Luxocratic Critical Play via Sufi Threshold Theorizing:
An Attempt at Affirmative Intensity and A-dualistic Modes of Thinking
The Women’s
Studies Genealogies course syllabus begins with the lyrics from a Leonard Cohen
song: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering /
There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” I am reminded
of Rumi’s famous verse, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
Heading toward the end of my first year as a doctoral student in a Women’s Studies
program, my body is aching. I am happy here. Why is my body aching? The massage
therapist tells me the body cannot decipher between “good stress” and “bad
stress;” the body reacts the same way to both kinds of stresses, she explains.
Are my muscles so tense because I have been trying to give a perfect offering?
Or is it because I am the wound, the crack, where the light gets in.
All
day, I have been mulling over an article posted in the Facebook group “Islam
and Theory.” The article written by renowned postcolonial philosopher and
critical theorist, Hamid Dabashi, is titled “Can non-Europeans think? What
happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical
‘pedigree’?” It summarizes many of my frustrations with the current state of women
and gender studies. Dabashi highlights the Eurocentric nature of “philosophy
today,” including Judith Butler whose genealogy goes back to Derrida and
Foucault.[1]
He writes,
“Why is it that
if Mozart sneezes it is “music”…but the most sophisticated Indian music ragas
are the subject of “ethnomusicology”?...Why is European philosophy
“philosophy,” but African philosophy ethnophilosophy.[2]
In women’s studies, why are those
whose lineages go back to Eurocentric philosophers considered feminist
theorists, and those who fall outside this purview relegated to choose from the
labels of postcolonial feminist theorist or transnational feminist theorist?
The majority of the thinkers whose works we have covered thus far in my women
and gender studies classes are those thinkers whose works contain Eurocentric
DNA.
One
such thinker is Mary Flanagan, whose work Critical
Play: Radical Game Design begins with a quote by Michael Foucault[3]
and then goes on to repetitively make claims such as wordplay being a
nineteenth century phenomenon.[4]
Given Dabashi’s concern, one can easily spend more than a term paper critiquing
the limitations of Flanagan’s approach. On the other hand, given Karen Barad’s
notion of quantum leaps, the focus of this paper will not be merely circling around
the East-West dichotomy. Barad describes quantum leaps as,
Unlike any
ordinary experience of jumping or leaping, when an electron makes a quantum
leap it does so in a discontinuous fashion (belying the very notion of a “leap”…)
The electron is initially at one energy level and then it is at another without
having been anywhere in between.[5]
In an effort to move past discussions
of postcoloniality and neo-orientalism, a quantum leap is attempted in the
following pages. Rather than simply critiquing Flanagan as problematic through
a postcolonial lens, the purpose of this paper is to reflect on Flanagan’s
notion of critical play through the sense of play found in South Asian Sufi
poetry and vice versa. AnaLouise Keating’s threshold theorizing, Layli Maparyan’s
womanist LOXOCRACY, and Rick Dolphijn’s notions of negativity and dualism will
be interweaved throughout the paper.
In
her chapter “Language Games,” Flanagan explores language play techniques used
by artists.[6]
This is a process of creating a play space through “certain forms of language
invention” or “the use of words themselves as a medium.”[7]
She asks the following key questions: “How do [language games] subvert language
itself?” and “What kinds of language play can be unearthed from artists’ practices?”[8]
While most of Flanagan’s examples focus on ancient visual art’s use double
entendre to produce visual puns,[9]
her questions may be applied to South Asian Sufi poetry as well. “Language
plays with culture, especially language as used by artists, can help designers
find methods of consciousness raising, or tools for social commentary,”[10]
explains Flanagan. Sufi poetry’s use of double or triple entendre is one of the
ways in which language plays with culture, including challenging authority and
questioning hegemonic practices of religion. Language games as used by poets
can help both the poets and readers or oral transmitters use this subversion of
language as a method for consciousness raising or tool for religio-spiritual
and social commentary.
An
illustration of this is in the following verses taken from a Punjabi qawali (Sufi devotional song).
Padhi namaz te niyaaz na sikhayaa
You
read your prayer and learned no giving
Teriyan kis kam padhiyan namaazan…
Of
what use was all your praying?
Ilm padhya te amlaan na kita
You
gained knowledge and did not act upon it
Teriyan kis kam kityan vaadan…
Of
what use were your efforts?
Othay amlaan de honay ne navaday
Over
there, actions will be the judge
Kisay nai teri zaat puchni
In other words, the poet is using
critical language to question, what is the use of canonical prayer, or being
“religious,” if one does not learn to be giving or compassionate? What is the
use of attaining years upon years of education or knowledge, if one is not
transformed through said knowledge? What use is theory if practice is not
affected by it? The “over there” is referring to the day-of-judgment or the
afterlife. Zaat contains various
meanings depending on the context, but it is always related to identity. Asking
about a family’s zaat would be
referring to a caste or social class. Using it after the word for woman – i.e.:
aurat zaat – would be including all
those who identify with the gender performance of a woman. The last two verses
are a cyclical language play on words that critiques the binary of this life
and the afterlife. The poet is exclaiming to those who deem themselves better
based on race/class/gender, that none of this matters in the end, only one’s
actions will count; that is also to say, if only actions will count “over
there,” then only actions count in the here-and-now. The poet/singer/listener
are critiquing traditional understanding of religion by challenging identity
politics, through the use of language play.
This
critical language play takes place at the threshold between the poet’s words
(or the singer’s performance) and the reader or listener’s understanding – what
AnaLouise Keating refers to as “threshold theorizing.”[12]
Keating’s main concern in her work Transformation
Now: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change,” is that “oppositional
thinking erodes our alliances and communities.”[13]
Keating appropriately incorporates Gloria Anzaldua’s theory of nepantlera:
A type of
threshold person or world traveler: someone who enters into and interacts with
multiple, often conflicting, political/cultural/ideological/ethnic/etc. worlds
and yet refuses to entirely adopt, belong to, or identify with any single
belief, group, or location.[14]
Jalal al-Din Rumi, thirteenth
century Persian poet, was a world-traveler who was physically uprooted from his
home at a very young age and sent upon a journey from home to home, and
intellectually and spiritually uprooted upon his meeting with Shams, the muse
or Beloved who inspired much of his works in later life for which he is now known.[15]
He entered and interacted with multiple, often conflicting,
political/cultural/ideological/ethnic/etc. worlds and yet repetitively
expressed that he refused to adopt, belong to, or identify with any single
belief, group or location. His threshold position in life is reflected in the
threshold poetry as he consistently reminds us that “I am neither Muslim, nor
Christian…I am neither of this world, nor of the next.”[16]
The oft-repeated verse is nothing if not threshold theorizing: out beyond the
ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field, I will meet you there.
All the while remaining rooted in Islamic religio-spirituality, while
challenging the hegemonic understanding and practices of said religio-spiritual
context.
Thus,
Rumi’s radical expression is further explained by what Layli Maparyan coins as
“LUXOCRACY,” a key element of the womanist idea.[17]
LUXOCRACY takes
as fundamental that all persons are unique manifestations of the One, the All,
the Creator, SOURCE. As such, each person’s Inner Light guides the
manifestation of that uniqueness across the span of a lifetime. The optimal
purpose of society is to foster, facilitate, nurture, protect, and coordinate
the expression of every person’s Innate Divinity simultaneously.[18]
Here, the term LOXOCRACY can easily
be re/placed with Sufism. The significance of activism being fueled by
spirituality is critical in both womanist thought and Sufi thought. Islamic
mysticism is a holistic approach to and expression of religio-spirituality that
posits each individual’s innate divinity. One way this is done is through
language play via Sufi poetry, among other forms of artistic expressions.
There
are many levels to this language-play and performance-play as critical-play. On
one level, Rumi uses paradoxical expressions to invite the reader or listener
into his game:
You
are a drop and an ocean, you are kindness and wrath
You
are sweetness and poison, O do not make me suffer more!
As Fatemeh Keshavarz explains in
her work Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case
of Jalal al-Din Rumi,
Paradoxes…depend
for effectiveness on a challenging and surprising quality. In order to
challenge and to surprise, there is need for an immediate audience eager to
participate in the game. Rumi not only invites his audience to share in the
lyrical experience but frequently acknowledges their presence.[19]
Paradoxes or invitations to
complete a poem are simply a few of the many ways Rumi lures the reader or listener
into participating in the critical play. On another level, what gives Rumi the
fun-factor is his “ability to make poetry an embodiment of his life, yet not
take it so seriously as to be overwhelmed by its grandeur. The fun and the
sense of play persists, even in illustrating matters as grave as the confusion
of destiny:”[20]
I
am drunk and you are drunk, who is going to take us home?
I
told you a hundred times drink a cup or two less.[21]
This sense-of-play that is so
critical to his work is one that is not divorced from the idea of a critical
play. Even though Rumi’s spiritual convictions are the core of his poetry, even
though the optimal purpose of his work is both an expression of his own Innate
Divinity and has served for ages to nurture the Innate Divinity of its readers,
listeners and storytellers, it does not prevent him from lacing it with humor,
irony, paradox and a beautiful sense of play that keeps readers and listeners
coming back for more, that push the readers and listeners to participate in his
game by either writing a few more verses or being awakened to their own sense
of Innate Divinity.
The
luxocratic critical play that is found throughout mystical philosophy is not
far removed from what Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin refer to as new
materialism’s approach to dualism.
…a cultural
theory can only be truly distinctive and original if its establishment does not
claim to be the next step in a discussion that is structured according to the
dominant lines of sequential negation and the narrative of progress…Simply,
opposing the narrative is…not an option. ‘An idea opposed to another idea is
always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. The more you oppose
one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought.[22]
If “cultural theory” is taken in a
broad sense, then the above holds true for both feminist thought as well as
religious theory, mysticism in particular. On one level, Sufism does not simply
oppose the narrative of hegemonic Islamic practices and legalities, it is a
critique that comes from within the tradition and yet pushes at its boundaries
– all the while whirling in luxocratic circles. On another level, mysticism
challenges the dualistic notion of human-versus-God; it pushes for a
non-dualistic approach to the relationship between the Inner and the Divine, or
the self and the Self. As Dolphijn explains,
…new materialist
cultural theories are not relational in a negative, reductive manner, but
rather are structured along the lines of an affirmative intensity, which in the
end turns into a non-dualism, a monist philosophy of difference…immanence.”[23]
It is almost humorous, albeit not
surprising, that what is being called “new” materialist cultural theory is
considered to be age-old perennial wisdom in the context of mystical philosophy.
Raimon
Panikkar, mystical philosopher and theologian, uses the notion of Advaita from Hindu philosophy to explain
non-duality. A-dvaita, or “not two,” is applied to the relationship of
everything within and without this world, including the human-God relationship.
Panikkar prefers to the term “a-duality:”
God is not the Self (monism) nor the Other (dualism). God is one pole of Reality, a constitutive pole;
silent and as such ineffable, but who speaks in us; transcendent, but immanent
in the world; infinite, but limited in things. This pole is nothing in itself.
It does not exist except in its polarity, in its relation. God is relation, intimate internal relationship with everything.[24]
This relation/ality always plays in
threshold spaces. LUXOCRACY’s stress upon the idea of all, living and
non-living, being related to the SOURCE, through diving into the depths of
one’s Inner Light, also challenges ordinary dualistic modes of thinking. Panikkar’s
nuanced approach does not simply further perpetuate the false dichotomy of
monism versus dualism, but rather gives us the notion of a-duality for our
careful tinkering.
This
a-duality is an undoing, an unlearning, of the most profound and the most
simple kind. Flanagan concludes, “…a game is an opportunity, an
easy-to-understand instrument by which context is defamiliarized just enough to
allow…‘a magic circle’ of play to occur.”[25]
The de/familiarizing is an un/doing,
an un/learning. The luxocractic circles connecting our inner with the outer,
our self with the other, our inner-outer with the Divine, are whirling about at
the threshold of our thoughts. The counterclockwise circling of the whirling
dervish is simply a symbolic performance of the everyday games we play with
ourselves and others.
This paper has
been a personal and academic struggle to move past the duality of colonizer and
colonized, to take a quantum leap into the a-daulistic efforts, to move past
reductive modus operandi, and walk along the path of an affirmative intensity.
Juxtaposing the space limitations of the paper with the depth of (simply a few
of) the concepts convened in this Women’s Studies Genealogies class, I hope a
light has shone through the sliver of a crack of my thoughts. It is not easy
work, as Anzaldua reminds us, being a nepantlera.
It is certainly not easy work being a nepantlera
being pushed to take quantum leaps.
Works
Cited
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007.
---. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological
Relations of Inheritance:
Dis/continuities,
SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida
Today
3.2 (2010): 240-268.
Bulleh Shah. “Othay Amlaan.” Perf.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ahy97wMys&list=PLxsBpYnhH7PLa-WO4iSnl3n34HNKlvaW8.
[My trans.]
Dabashi, Hamid. “Can non-Europeans Think?
What
happens with thinkers who operate
outside the
European philosophical 'pedigree'?” Al-Jazeera.com, 15 Jan 2013.
Web. 31 Mar. 2014.
Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der
Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews &
Cartographies.
Ann Arbor: Open
Humanities Press, 2012.
Keating, AnaLouise. Transformation Now! Toward a
Post-Oppositional Politics of
Change. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2013.
Keshavarz, Fatemeh. Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal
al-Din Rumi. Columbia:
University of
South Carolina, 1998.
Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009.
Panikkar, Raimon. The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery.
Trans. Joseph Cunneen.
Minneapolis:
Fortress, 2006.
---. “A-dualism, advaita.” panikkar
written words. Raimon-Panikkar.org, n.d. Web. 28
[1] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html
[2] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114142638797542.html
[3] Mary
Flanagan, Critical Play (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2009) 1.
[4] Flanagan
118.
[5] http://humweb.ucsc.edu/feministstudies/faculty/barad/barad-derrida-today.pdf
[6] Flanagan
117.
[7] Flanagan
117.
[8] Flanagan
117.
[9] Flanagan
118.
[10] Flanagan
118.
[11] Bulleh
Shah,“Othe Amla”(Perf. Nusrat Fateh
Ali Khan) My trans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_ahy97wMys&list=PLxsBpYnhH7PLa-WO4iSnl3n34HNKlvaW8.
[12] AnaLouise
Keating, Transformation Now! (Urbana:
U. of Illinois Press, 2013) 10.
[13] Keating 8.
[14] Keating 12.
[15] Fatemeh
Keshavarz, Reading Mystical Lyric (Columbia: U. of South Carolina Press, 1998)
4-6.
[16] William
Chittick, The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi
(Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005) 78.
[17] Keating 73.
[18] Keating 74.
[19] Keshavarz
46.
[20] Keshavarz
47.
[21] Keshavarz
47.
[22] Rick
Dolphijn, New Materialisms (Ann
Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012) 120.
[23] Dolphijn
121.
[24] http://www.raimon-panikkar.org/english/gloss-A-dualism.html
[25] Flanagan
262.
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