The new mysticism in Egyptian yoga halls ... Westernization of Sufism in the era of globalization

Imran Abdullah

From the picturesque green fields in Switzerland and the Netherlands, an international Sufism movement was launched at the beginning of the twentieth century by Anayat Khan, who was a musician, singer and pupil of Indian mystical methods educated in Hyderabad, before moving to the West with a classic Indian music.

But he soon turned his school into an official organization under formal law and called it the "International Sufi Movement" in 1923, and his ideas focused on "unification" and issues of love, beauty and coexistence, before the movement opened branches in the Netherlands, France, England, Germany, America, Canada and Australia, and mixed with a passion for advertising Khan is a musician with his own mystical ideology.

Although the movement originated in the West and adopted the concept of "Western Sufism", it was keen to emphasize the global nature of the Sufi mission beyond the limits of Islam itself, according to Alex Philippon, the academy specializing in Islamic mysticism and social sciences at the French University of Science Po.

Egyptian version
In her report, which tracks "The Prosperity of Sufism in the New Age in Egypt," journalist and writer Dalia Shams traced examples of the Sufi meditation "Sufi meditation" influenced by this Western Sufi movement.

In her report published in the magazine “Orian 21,” the author tells the story of the Egyptian-American Sonya Hassan who returns from Chicago to Egypt to organize “mystic meditation” sessions after being influenced by the American experience of the “University of Spiritual Healing and Mysticism”, which was founded by her Palestinian-born teacher, Sheikh Gamal Al-Rifai Al-Shazly, who died in the states United 2015.

Sofia organizes mysticism sessions in yoga halls or cafes, and says she integrates mysticism with meditation sessions, to alleviate the increasing pressures of life left behind by the post-Egyptian revolution in 2011. The session takes about an hour and a half and costs 200 Egyptian pounds ($ 12.5).

Expatriates are waiting for Sonia's annual return sessions from the United States to benefit from the sessions in which Surat Al-Fatihah reads and praises in a manner consistent with the rhythm of breathing with participants sitting cross-legged in a semicircle in a modern apartment scented with Indian incense, according to the French magazine report.

Sonia mixes the English language in which her sessions are presented with some Arabic words, and she benefits from the experience of training and meditation and the sciences of "energy" and human development, and the author says that the spiritual trainer tries to meet "the needs of those looking for alternative spiritual paths outside the traditional framework of religion called by the most strict religious."

Western Sufism
Philippon believes that this "Western Sufism" began to spread in Islamic countries by responding to the "liberal and western bourgeoisie" that reject the usual forms of Islamic discourse, while in this international Sufi discourse you find an acceptable way to reach Islam and is consistent with modernity and the spirit of the era of globalization.

Philip quotes Anayat Khan as his definition of Sufism as "the essence of all religions and the spirit of Islam".

The French Academy visited a Sofia camp organized by the movement in the Swiss Alps in 2006, and noticed that this pattern of Sufism is linked to globalization and modernity, according to its study published in the French "Islamic and Mediterranean Worlds" journal.

While popular mysticism is common in Pakistan, Western-influenced and liberal elites are adopting an alternative model in which "individual and self-reinvention is being undertaken within a framework of non-authoritarian religiosity," according to the Philippon study.

The researcher says that while the political and fundamentalist forms of Islamism are viewed with skepticism in the West, Sufism is "acceptable as long as it is not explicitly Islamic", adding that the Sufi tradition moved to Pakistan in the context of a liberal current that develops its relationship with individual religiosity, and freely quotes spiritual traditions from East and West in a compromise way.

Sufi meditation sessions of this kind are not studied in Quranic and Hadithic texts.

In return, the participants study the words of Anayat Khan and the poems of Jalaluddin Rumi and listen to music and poetry, while the Sheikh evokes experiences related to the search for divine love, and the participants recite a collective male in a certain way that they consider "a treatment for the soul" and a drug for the soul.