Summary
In Lybarger’s Chicago material, the mystical, music-embracing current of Islam that Jubran discovered on a concert tour in Spain and made the basis of a pluralist, self-directed Muslim identity against the suburban reformist milieu (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.201-202).
Details
- Jubran encountered North African practitioners of Sunni Islam “including Sufism” in Spain, recorded Sufi anashid (hymns) with a Sudanese Sufi group mixed with Algerian Sufis, took to Turkish Sufi groups, and after returning to Chicago sat in musically with the Jerrahi order, whose form of Islam was “very open and Sufi oriented and very spiritual and accepting” (PDF p.201 / printed p.180).
- He practised dhikr (“remembrance” of God through chant, song and dance) and fasted and observed “on my own terms”; Sufism enhanced his understanding of music itself as a spiritual practice, and his path was prevalent, he held, during the Islamic period in al-Andalus (PDF p.201-202 / printed p.180-181).
- His Sufi cosmopolitanism extended to Palestine: Sufis there doing work “trying to bring people together”, an Al Jazeera documentary on a Jewish scholar who translated Rumi into Hebrew and learned sama’ (Sufi ritual practice with musical instruments, chant and dance) with dervishes in Konya, Turkey, and a Palestinian Sufi order in al-Nasira (Nazareth) (PDF p.202 / printed p.181).
- In the book’s Introduction notes, modern orthopraxy is said often to view the Islam of rural communities and of Sufi practitioners as perpetuating incorrect practice and introducing un-Islamic ideas, deliberately or through ignorance of core texts and doctrines (Introduction note 11, PDF p.222 / printed p.201, citing Riesebrodt 1993).
Related pages
Syncretic secularity · Secularism · Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile