My Reluctant and Troubled Tribute to The Big Guy!

 

For all my seething resentment and anger towards him, I'd be deficient if I didn't also give Sheik Jamal a few 'props'. So here goes:

1. He always treated me with respect. He acknowledged my presence when I came into the room. I don't think he was ever harsh or discourteous to me...EVER. I mean, not once.

What's more is that he OPENED THE DOORS to Western Seekers, including me, to stay and study in extra apartments he had in his home on the Mount of Olives.  We weren't asked for rent. Only to help with the light bills.

Some of these visits lasted for many weeks.  Moreover, we were completely accepted by his family and often invited to come to THEIR apartment and spend time hanging out with them.

It was a priceless and very low-cost experience not only of the life of a Sufi Guide in a Palestinian context, but also an in-depth experience of welcome and acceptance into another family's affairs.

I'm not sure what Sidi's family thought of all the Westerners who showed up at his doorstep seeking the Wisdom of the East.  But we were always accepted. Our kids grew up with Sidi's kids, and some of them, including one of ours, got married to one of his later.

2. He was cordial to everybody. He complimented my parents when they came up and rather won them over at their first and only meeting. 

3. He listened to my point of view when I was there to present it to him. He was generous with his time to me and to everyone.  

( The other side of this was that he couldn't endure being alone very much. (Although when I asked him about this once he said, "I am ALWAYS ALONE, my Beloved". 

It was dramatic and kinda 'Emo', but he seemed perfectly sincere. I felt sorry for him in that moment.

When his wife died relatively in her late 50s-early 60s, he was seemingly adrift.  He married a young American disciple who didn't fit the standard profile of a Western lady Sufi AT ALL, at least in my eyes.

But Sidi was a Lover, and he loved to love and be loved.  The clash of cultures and ages couldn't have been more pronounced.  I don't know what to make of that whole subject.

While writing this blog, I've come to an important realization. A lot of the decisions that 'went against me' in our marriage had to do with my unwillingness and/or inability to 'lobby' for my interests.  Things might have gone differently if I had learned to INSIST and make my INSISTENCE KNOWN to Sidi.

And on the OTHER HAND...Aisha was aggressively willing to pummel Sidi with arguments for what she wanted.  She seemed to think his disagreements with her stemmed from his not understanding English well enough.  My impression was that she approached him with an agenda rather than an open heart, and he ended up letting her win the day, whether the action she wanted was the best idea or not.

Sidi was certainly capable, and usually willing, to compromise and take the least objectionable course of action. Such as naming our son in such a way as to be deferential to English ears and sensibilities. In fact, as I suggested in one of my chapters, Sidi was capable of anticipating and heading off problems like this where Aisha INSISTED that the Lord of the Universe be PERSONALLY INVOLVED in selecting the best name for our son, based on his pre-determined qualities that only God WOULD know, I presume.

But, as in the case of getting permission for her 'flight to Palestine' on the eve of Ibrahim's birth, Sidi yielded to Aisha. I couldn't think of a comeback position for my own preference to stay in America.  I was too stunned to come up with a retort to Aisha's furious rejection of everything 'Californian'.

I think it was as much a rejection of her 'role' as a 'housewife' that really depressed her.  Even though she did busy herself trying to find new 'brothers and sisters' to join Sidi's fuqara--a critical goal for her in life--she had had a major setback in the locality where we lived in as she had earned the ire of a competing Sufi Guide who ordered his followers to shun us, where they had otherwise been open and friendly.

So, rather than blaming Sidi, I should blame Aisha for her dramatic, impractical course of action that would ultimately be destructive to our life together as a functioning couple who needed to learn how to work out our issues TOGETHER. Rather than competing with each other to get what we wanted from the other by petitioning our Lord, Sidi.

And, on the other hand, the fact that we had the problem AT ALL may have more to do with our not knowing and loving the other person for long enough to merit our being married and attempting to make a family based on an intense few weeks we spent together in a highly charged environment with a Sufi Guide in Jerusalem.

As dramatic as that initial experience was, most of life is not dramatic.  It is humdrum and repetitive and fraught with interpersonal challenges we were unable to meet effectively and/or find sources of help that would be acceptable.  

With Aisha, it was Sidi or the door out of her life.  It took her 14 years, but she walked out of my life because we weren't on the same wavelength about Sidi's Teachings.

AND, IMHO, because of historical personal baggage that she chose to address with a cultic religious 'cure' that didn't get to the heartfelt, pulpy core of her internal pain.  This also left her crippled in her later attempts to find satisfactory, adult, loving relationships with healthy, non-cultic individuals.

But, whatever, and all of that aside, this former Sufi, me,  got a lot of pulpy heartfelt pain to deal with, but at least it was different than being  ALONE my whole life.  And I did get to have a second major relationship in my life with a terrific person who loved me thoroughly, completely, through and through.

And I was always sorry Aisha never found that.  Though I wouldn't go so far as to say she made the WRONG choice in divorcing me. What would have happened had we stayed together? 

I'm just REALLY REALLY SORRY for the pain that was caused all around and the easiest way of dismissing/discharging that is to blame Sidi for setting it all off.

It was a wild, cinematic gesture.  Getting married by an Arabian Cult Leader in an Arab village only a couple of miles away from the World's Holiest City.  Would I do it again? It's hard to answer, 'No', because then my kids wouldn't exist.

4. He 'Gave People What They Wanted'

At some point, one of Sidi's sons sheepishly told me, regarding some obvious violation of the norms of common sense that Sidi undertook, that Sidi "Gives them what they want".

The implication was that Sidi would willingly tell his disciples a lie if it made them feel better.

Indeed, I saw this many times when I saw Sidi bolster someone's feelings through telling them how much Allah cared for them, or how special they were. He made it sound like he knew this DIRECTLY, based on his OWN SENSE of personal contact with God.  Somehow, one believed it, when he said it.

Was he sincere or was he manipulative? Maybe he was mostly the former and sometimes the latter? Don't really know.  The guy is still a mystery to me.

5. It's Not Easy Being God's Representative

Especially when your disciples EXPECT you to bring down answers from the Creator of the Universe. Answers which they would never DARE to arrive at on their own steam.

In fact, I wonder if this isn't an occupational hazard of the job of being a 'Spiritual Guide'?

Perhaps, despite your better judgment, you find yourself being seduced into rendering decisions that really were only, properly, unknowable to ordinary human beings?

I know that my ex-wife Aisha practically DEMANDED that Sidi make such decisions for us. Sometimes, Sidi would say something like, "My Beloved, what do YOU see?", or in his vernacular way of putting it, "My Beloved...what you see."

In other words, and I admit to putting words in his mouth, "My Beloved, just operate from your own understandings on this..."

The trouble was, that there was no clear line between those issues which would have to be decided on the basis of an individual's opinion or faith and an issue which God would have the final vote on. Thru Sidi, of course.

And it is easy to imagine Sidi 'faking it', as I believe he came to do, if only to get a questioner off his back.

6. He Gave Me A Wife and Children

Okay, a HUGE deep breath before I take on THIS subject...

The tone of this blog is definitely one of judgment AGAINST the presumptuous idea that one can simply put people together who are approximately the right age for each other, who come to your house/zawiyya for spiritual education.

I had barely scraped the dust off my shoes at Sidi's Retreat before he had initiated me with my own Arabic identity and paired me off in dramatic fashion with one of his female disciples.

It was a series of actions that would normally shock and offend. And, upon later reflection, they certainly shocked and offended me.

I later came to resent what I assumed to be Sidi's 'cynical arrogance' in our case, and in the case of many other couples, some of whom I came to know intimately. Some whose marriages 'succeeded' rather well, such as M. & A.'s, some whose marriages succeeded despite enormous challenges, and some who failed to varying degrees.

(Our own marriage, having lasted 14 years, might be judged by history as at least a 'partial success'. Although the way it ended and later simmered along unpleasantly, to the embarrassment of our mutual children, was no testament to any spiritual achievement on either of our parts.

ON The OTHER HAND....

If one wants to look at life in a magical way, one MIGHT have predicted my returning home from Jerusalem brideless, Sidi-less, and dying in a car accident while drunk driving...

Or, in any other numberless ways, I might have gone down the tubes.

I hadn't really been doing THAT well at managing my life.  I had a predillection for escapes--chemical, sexual, religious, WHATEVER.

For at least the first 18 months or so of our marriage, I was drug and alcohol free.  It was a HUGE development, and one I didn't even really acknowledge at the time.

But the fact that I was now a 'family man' with a brand-new 8-year-old step-daughter DID, at the time, seem like a significant 'step up'.

I was more or less happy.  We lived in a cute Eichler home (my ideal!), and though the location was Walnut Creek, a rather Republican-ish town in the SF Bay Area, it was also close to UC Berkeley, where I had taken some courses and also enjoyed visiting for concerts and public events.

Up until the day in 1983 that Aisha single-handedly decided I had no choice but to follow her to Jerusalem, where she insisted she HAD to be to deliver our first son, I would have gladly told the world that I was glad Sidi picked my wife for me.

Aisha's remarkable 'betrayal' changed everything for me.  Though I didn't consciously realize it, I was very angry with her for it. 

It put me under impossible pressure.  Either to find work in a foreign country without  any paperwork (at least in the beginning)--and at a time when there was 14% unemployment!

Or somehow to have a marriage with two distinct home bases.  One in the UK and the other at my parents' home in the Bay Area.  I had no transferable, saleable skills.  Not really.

All over an ill-considered diary entry by a precocious 'tween.

Although I DO have to say, EVEN IN THAT CASE, there was a 'salvific' moment for Theresa. In that whatever was bugging her in the Walnut Creek school where we placed her miraculously got cured by our putting her in a 'proper English girls school' where, for a few short weeks, she really 'found' herself.

And when I FINALLY convinced Aisha to come back the the States, we miraculously found ANOTHER 'almost perfect' Catholic All-Girls School with high standards and an international reputation in Marin County where she continued her flourishing development.

She has a great life today doing work in education and with teenagers that she loves. She is a wonderful artist and the best of moms.

In a sense, the trip 'worked' for her, but it shook me to my core and made me feel like I was only living on borrowed time until the next crisis. Of which there were several.  But mainly, there just wasn't enough love in the picture to save the day.

After Aisha announced she was leaving me, there wasn't a day in the many months we remained in the house that I didn't cry for myself, for my lost marriage, for the children who would soon be leaving me, for the gorgeous hilltop architect's home atop a wooded valley in an idyllic West Marin town.

Anyway, though she finally gave up on the idea a few months after our son was born, the period abroad had brought home not just that Aisha had different desires as to how to live her life than I did, but that she really was NOT in love with me.  At least, not to the extent that I thought I was in love with her.

For example, when Aisha told me she wanted a divorce, it was LITERALLY THE FIRST TIME I had ever considered that might be a solution to our relationship problems.  Problems that both were abetted and created by my own substance and sex addictions.

So certain was I that our marriage was FOREVER, that I never worried about whether Aisha was happy or not in it.  I figured she HAD to stay in it because of what I TOOK to be her absolute loyalty to Sidi.

What I hadn't figured on was that she had an independent streak a mile wide.  Nor had I realized that Sidi would never punish a disciple by ejecting them from the fuqara.  For whatever reason, he always encouraged people to come, to join in.  

Perhaps he wanted people because it made him and his family more secure politically and financially.  Perhaps he wanted to expand the only authentic Religion of Mankind, Islam.  Perhaps he wanted to do both, and perhaps he succeeded.

Perhaps we have to allow, as Nur-id-Deen Durkee so eloquently did, that Sidi had a larger effect than almost any other person in the promotion of Islam in America.

That could be an exaggeration, but I wasn't anywhere near the center of the action in the 20-years Sidi repeatedly criss-crossed America with a translator in tow.

7. He Paid Me the Ultimate Compliment

Several years after the Divorce, I arrived at Zorba and Theresa's home in Marin and came upon Sidi there. He greeted me cordially, as he always did, and we engaged in small talk.

Even in America, Sidi always maintained an aura of Islamic deportment, at least in public.   He had a fatherly, compassionate vibe and seemed genuinely interested in you.  He could always be relied on for a comforting, supportive word--usually bringing up the idea that every human being is a child of God, deserving of God's Love and a peaceful, meaningful life.

Despite what I would hear about his sexual exploits, I always found it difficult to conjure up a picture of Sidi seducing one of his Western disciples.  It was a mental stretch, brutal to integrate with this figure of quiet but powerful religiosity that he always presented.

He did, it seemed, consider himself 'a very poor slave' of his Beloved Allah. Although perhaps this made his diversions from strict morality all the more disturbing to me, because it was so hard to imagine them.

In any case, before long, probably at my instigation, the subject of my ex-wife, Aisha, came up. His face curled into a grimmace and he say to me, unbidden, "My Beloved, you are worth TEN of her!"

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Here was I, the proverbial 'Prodigal Son', who in no wise promoted his mission or that of the larger Islamic religion, and he was praising me, instead of acknowledging his loyal Canadian 'daughter' who was, at least on the surface, so utterly devoted to him.

I took it at the time as a cynical chess move to prop my deflated ego up by making a cynical dig at my Ex. I was hurt on her behalf — not pleased.

And I was a little upset that he would think I WANTED to HEAR such a verbal slap-down of one of his apparently most loyal supporters.

As time has gone by, however, I have come to see that many people came to Sidi with their endless personal needs and dispositions.  He must have found it tiring and repetitive.  And to have to have it all PEFECT as my wife always expected the answers from God to be. Perfect. They would make everything ELSE make sense.

There HAD to be a plan--that was Aisha's idea.  That God had a plan for everybody but not everybody could see it.  Especially those who were just beginning.

I am not sure if Aisha believed that, but I think she did. And I think it is a fundamentally flawed idea on many, many levels.

But the worst aspect of it is that it takes the power away from the person in question and places it in another.

It may be relatively easy to 'read' many aspects of a person just on sight or with a few words.  But fundamentally, everybody has to work their own salvation.  With all the love and help and support they can get. Agreed.

But nobody can tell another person what their future SHOULD be or who they SHOULD marry.  Nobody has that information.  It's just not available. Not anywhere.  It just evolves.  One picks the best direction and follows it to wherever it leads.

I felt that Aisha was impatient and had to have the Path known in advance, if that makes sense.  That is why she was always pestering Sidi for answers no human being should ever be expected to have.

And the funny tbing was, I never questioned it.  I half-believed it myself.  But only half.

Aisha, my Ex, had a need to have ABSOLUTE RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY on specific subjects.  She called him frequently throughout our marriage on the smallest question. She sought out new students for him and introduced them to him over the phone.  He would give them new Arabic names right over the phone.  Our house was a 'Sufi Conversion Factory' as well as a family home.

She needed a special, spiritual, and  Arabic name for each of her children, chosen by Sidi,, who would presumably have received the name directly from God or the Spiritual World.

This was certainly the case of our first male child, though Sidi and I conspired on a practical basis to pick a name for him and later pretended to her that it was chosen by 'The Angels'.

By the time our last child arrived, I was delighted to see that his had apparently shifted a bit, and the two of us came up with a name well known to both Arabic and English speakers alike, and one that did not refer to Islamic History in particular.

As I thought back over our marital history and the number of evenings Aisha had called Sidi on the phone explaining a given decision and demanding a judgment from him, I would well understand how she may have exhausted his patience with her.

Especially when, as time went on, she grew more opinionated and confident in her own beliefs about the Path.  At least how it pertained to her.

It was my opinion, though not my direct observation, that Aisha withdrew into a self-designated role as "Secretary of the Fuqara," which allowed to remain aloof from the politics and other machinations of the later arrivals, who also set up 'Alternate Fuqaras' incorporating 'New-Agey' concepts of 'Energy Healing' and the like. 

But the final blow to Sidi's patience with her (if that was indeed the issue) must have come when she publicly refused to obey his directions to re-commit herself to the marriage with me.

What also appeared to happen was that Aisha increasingly pulled back from gatherings organized by other subgroups and focused on publishing a new book every year.  This allowed her to feel importantly connected to Sidi.  She frequently consulted with her son-in-law Zorba, Sidi's son, for help with translation projects.

And there is no doubt the books DID help to advance the cause of the fuqara as it gave everyone the same, voluminous source material.  Allowing the Energy Mastery/Sufi University folks to organize online and in-person classes, seminars, and unaccredited Master's and Doctorate programs with various, sometimes silly-sounding categories like Healing Sounds of the Abrahamic Faiths.