The Power of Storytelling

Jordanian cartoonist Osama Hajjaj offers this commentary following the bombing of a Sufi mosque in the Sinai this past Friday.

The futility of thinking militant terrorism can be confined to one place is part of the tragedy, though it is also part of the solution, given that public resistance to ISIS and similar groups can only increase if there is no veneer of safety to allow for indifference.

That's human nature: I remember talking to an Irish woman during the Troubles in the Six Counties. She was from the south and said, "There was never any trouble like that when I was growing up," to which I responded, "Well, there were the border raids in the '50s. Sean South and all that."

Her response was "Well, that wasn't where we were," which seemed a silly statement given that the whole of Ireland is only the size of Indiana.

Later, I recounted her remark to Tomas Cardinal O'Fiaich, who was from Ulster, and he shook his head in sorrow that so many people could shelter themselves from the ongoing death in the North, while getting upset over the kidnapping and death of a racehorse.

If people can be so indifferent in such a confined space, we ought to cut Muslims a little slack if some of them have been able to compartmentalize the terror within the Arab world.

But that may be ending: This response from Afghan cartoonist Shahid Atiqullah is from well beyond Arabia.

Atiqullah's cartoon is particularly apt in combining the murder in Egypt with the destruction of statues, since the hostility towards Sufis from the Wahabbists of ISIS is, like that of the Taliban, as much directed at their symbols and culture as at the practitioners themselves.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but the conflict appears to be between the humorless practitioners and those who preach tolerance, and between those whose religion is based on taking up a harsh burden and those whose religious practices turn mindful discipline into a source of joyful release.

And I'll never take the side of those who equate joy and laughter with superficiality and a lack of spiritual rigor.

In fact, my opinion is that the more your spirituality requires you to keep your head down and obey, the more superficial it must surely be.

Meanwhile, I'm drawn to one particular aspect of Sufism, the storytelling tradition that mirrors that of Jesus and Confucius and all the zen masters who teach and perplex and amuse and challenge with parables and koans and, yes, jokes.

I first encountered Nasreddin Hodja, the legendary Sufi character, in a Reader's Digest piece when I was quite young.

The story was of a quarrel which broke out between a food merchant and a beggar. The beggar had been standing by the merchant's stall, smelling the soup, and the merchant was demanding payment, saying that the beggar had enjoyed his talent as a cook and he deserved compensation.

Nasreddin held up his purse and shook it three times, saying, "Let the sound of coins pay for the smell of soup."

He was also good at playing the fool, as in a story where he confesses that he lost a coin somewhere else, but is looking for it here "because the light is better."

An old joke perhaps even then, but, within the context of his overall philosophy, more of a koan than a gag: Why do we search for things where they might be easy to find, rather than where we know they are?

Perhaps the best response to the attack in Egypt is to overturn their joylessness, and the news sent me back to Sufi Comics, which I wrote about here five years ago.

As I said then, they don't offer quite the same rollicking humor of Nasreddin, but it is in there, and, even in more pensive pieces, they  provide a gentle form of teaching with stories and parables like this one:

And I like this next story, because, while the Great Man Disguised appears in many cultures, he's more often seeking to learn how people feel about him, than to do penance for it:

There are many others in the free book they offer for download, and more beyond that in the ones they sell.

I particularly like this next one because it's a good riposte to those objectivists who are equally as humorless and fundamentalistic as those who hate Sufi practices.

As an agnostic, I have no conflict either with the idea that thought and attitude matter, nor with the belief that there are things we can't put to double-blind experimentation, or, at least, not with what we know so far. But we do know this much:

It's not that we don't need science and medicine.

But we certainly need fools, in the classic sense.

It also reminds me of a story Frank Linderman, who collected authentic Blackfoot, Cree and Ojibwe stories, told of sitting around a fire listening to an old Blackfoot storyteller in the early days of the 20th century:

     He was telling tales of (creator-trickster-fool) Old-man, and while all the company laughed, I remained silent.
     "Why does not my brother laugh with us?" asked the old warrior.
     I had feared to laugh at the stories lest the Indian believe that I was not serious in my desire to leam of this strange, mythical character, and I told him that.
     "We always laugh when we speak of Old-man,'' he said. "You should laugh aloud with us when we speak of him. He expects it and always laughs with us from the past."

If you want to thwart ISIS, pursue the wise, comforting, challenging humor they wish to destroy.

 

Auction Update:

There are a little over four days left in the NCS Hurricane Relief Auction, and, while I assume there will be a rush of bids at the deadline, there's quite a bit of stuff up there still at a very reasonable price. A little original art will brighten up your place, especially knowing you helped people who needed it.

And, if you can afford to go after one of the major pieces, knock yourself out. It's a worthy cause, after all.

 

Now here's your moment of ... Sufism:

Comments

[WVFran]

THANK YOU for the introduction to Suficomics. They're wonderful, and somehow I missed that column 5 years ago!!

[Kip W]

I first read stories of Nasreddin Hodja in Children's Digest, when I was in grade school. Same place I first saw Tintin! I think Judge Dee was in there too, called Judge Ooka for some reason. Come to think of it, that magazine was a pipeline of interesting avenues, just a sample of each. I got one story from there that comes in handy every now and then, said to be a Chinese folk tale:

The laziest man in the world is waited on by his wife, hand and foot. When she has to go on a journey for her family, she worries that he won't eat, and comes up with the idea of making him enough nutritious biscuits to feed him for the whole time, and stringing them on a necklace for him, then leaving him under a tree. When she returns from her trip, she finds her husband is still under the tree, but he has starved to death, because he only ate the biscuits in front.