[Skybird]

Originally Posted by P_Funk

Maybe because he doesn't want to be chased out of his own beliefs by extremists. Having the courage to reconsider your beliefs against the grain of the majority and stand by them openly is something that many people can't do. As recently as the last few days my feelings about my own views are shifting, as they always are. Having a belief or a philosophy about the world is a river that runs along the same banks but still changes in character as the water erodes the walls into new subtler shapes.

I suppose wanting to be "muslim" is his identity and he sees no shame in it. It could be like wanting to be an American when many people around the world show disdain for them. Of course we hear about Americans who backpack with Canadian flags on their gear to avoid harassment (not sure how accurate that really is). He is just wearing his true colours on his sleeve though others have tarnished it. It could be something like that.

I see that different. True Muhameddanism is Muhammed's Islam - not Sufism. I fail to see Sufism up untilt he 12rd century being fully covered and backed up by Quran, Sharia , Hadith. so I want to ask him: you have been closer to true Islam when being with those you now call extremists, you left them, but still want to be associcated with this ideology, while at the same time you revealed the inhumanity in it. Why don't you turn your back on being called musim?

I compare it to a Nazi who realised by entering a Nazi orgnaization how sick it is, and thus he left it and now argues for freedom, tolerance and liberty - while insisting on still being called a Nazi. that is queer. And it is inconsequent.

One can also argue if today's Sufism is really what sufism orginally was about. because Islam's mystic tradition (that is what sufism was, like Chan for Buddhism, and the Chrisztian mystics for christianity) very much was wiped out when the Mongoles overran Persia and Bagdhad was seized and obliterated - as good as all of Sufism'S teachers and representatives were slaughtered during that event. Centuries later only a new thing named suifism emerged. But what cam,e of that I have seen in an Eastern-Anatolian monestary: it was an adventurous mixture of cultic superstition, unreasonable and very queer explanations that in no way I could bring toigether with Zen or Mystic, and disgusting practices of self-inflected physical injuries, which left no real injuries (needles through your tongue and such), but where understood to be what it mystic experience really is about, so - it they had taken cult and turne3d cult into content, missing the essence of mystic experience and spirituality completely. Before that visit I thought like you, that sufism is Islamic mystic. I have corrected that. Dancing derwishes I have not seen, and their concept of a derwish being the "son of all time" sounds a bit more promising to discuss. However, i wonder how much their dances today is only tourist attraction anymore.

Teaching in riddles, as kurtz said, in itself is no sufficient condition to classify something as "mystic".