Informed Comment -  24 Killed,90 wounded;Qadiriya Shrine Damaged in Blast

Reuters reports that 33 bodies were found in the streets of Baghdad on Monday. Karrada took mortar fire, which left 8 dead and 35 wounded. McClatchy reports that on Sunday night, guerrillas had taken 40 persons hostage
in Salahuddin Province, in a bid to counter the operation of a new
anti-Salafi tribal council. There were other bombings, shootings and
assorted mayhem in Baghdad, Mosul and some other places.

But
one above all took the cake. Guerrillas detonated a huge bomb in front
of the shrine of Abdul Qadir al-Gilani (Jilani, Kilani) in central
Baghdad on Monday, killing (according to Reuters, above) some 24
persons and wounding 90 according to late reports. The bombing damaged the dome and the base of the minaret of the mosque attached to the shrine.

Shaikh Abdul Qadir al-Gilani (d. 1166 A.D.) was a great mystic who founded the vast Qadiriya Sufi order.

An Ottoman mystic, Shaikh Muzaffer Ozak Efendi, later wrote of him,

‘
“The venerable ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani passed on to the Realm of Divine
Beauty in A.H. 561/ 1166 C.E., and his blessed mausoleum in Baghdaad is
still a place of pious visitation. He is noted for his extraordinary
spiritual experiences and exploits, as well as his memorable sayings
and wise teachings. It is rightly said of him that ‘he was born in
love, grew in perfection, and met his Lord in the perfection of love.’
May the All-Glorious Lord bring us in contact with his lofty spiritual
influence!” ‘

The Qadiri Sufi order is very important in Iraq, Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan and India, among other places.

The
shrine was likely attacked by radical Sunni Salafis, with several
objects in mind. First, Salafis hate Sufi shrines (see below). Second,
the Salafi Jihadis in Iraq are trying to mobilize all Iraqi Sunnis
behind them, and do not want rivals from among the Sufi orders and
tribal shaikhs. Third, the Salafi Jihadis want to throw Iraq into ever
greater chaos, such that they strike at all national symbols. Fourth,
they are probably hoping that at least some Sunni Arabs will blame
Shiite militiamen for the attack, or will blame the Shiite government
for not preventing it, so that the bombing has the effect of
heightening sectarian tensions further. The guerrilla attack on the
Shiite Askariya Shrine in Samarra in February, 2006, set off an orgy of
sectarian violence, and was the most successful single act of terrorism
the guerrillas have ever carried out.

One saving grace is that
Sufis are oriented toward symbolic meaning, and physical places are
therefore not central to their worship. One famous medieval Sufi,
al-Hallaj, famously thought that it was better to visit God in your
heart truly than to undertake a perfunctory pilgrimage to Mecca. (The
orthodox were outraged.) It is a little unlikely, therefore, that there
will be a backlash from this bombing in Nigeria or Senegal or India.
For Iraqi Sunnis, likewise, it seems a little unlikely to produce
further violence, since the imam himself blamed the radical Salafis
(takfiris), themselves Sunni.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that
Muhammad al-Isawi, the prayer leader and preacher at the mosque
attached to the shrine, said, “I send condolences not only to myself
but to all Iraqis for what befell this mosque for everyone, for Sunni
and Shiite, for Turkmen and Kurd. Who venefits from blowing it up? We
must be patient and resigned and deny any opportunity to the enemies,
the Takfiri terrorists.” [Takfiris are radical Salafis who declare
Sufis and other non-Salafis to be non-Muslims and deserving of death.]
He added, “They have idled the charitable works in the mosque, which
provides food to widows, orphans and the needy; it also contains a
library, to which seekers after knowledge resort. It was, truly, a
cowardly act.”

There are lots of strands of Sunni Islam.
Many of them are better thought of as tendencies than as sects in their
own right. If we make an analogy to Christianity, so there are
scriptural literalists (fundamentalists), and there are mystics seeking
union with God, and there is everything in between.

The mystics
organized into orders or brotherhoods (tariqa) are called Sufis. (The
etymology of ‘Sufi’ is disputed. Some say it refers to the early
mystics’ preference for woollen (suf) cloaks. Others say it is derived
from the Greek Sophia or wisdom.) The mystics typically get together on
a Thursday night (or other occasion) at the mosque and sit in a circle
and chant spiritual verses and listen to the teachings of their
spiritual master or shaikh (in Persian, pir). Some Sufi meetings, with
their chanting and rhythmic dancing, resemble Pentacostal services in
Christianity. When the shaikh died, often a shrine grew up around his
tomb, which was thought a center of blessings and people would come
there to touch it and be cured of infertility and other woes.

Sufism
was so successful as an organized movement from about the 1100s that it
took over Islam, and there were very few Muslims who were not in some
sense Sufis in the period 1200 through about 1850. From the mid-1700s,
Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab in Arabia began attacking Sufism. The attacks
were taken up and refined by the Salafis (revivalists) of the late 19th
and early 20th century. It began being argued, under Wahhabi and Salafi
influence, that it was wrong to attend at shrines, wrong to seek the
intercession of saints, wrong to chant and to dance for God. Modern
Wahhabism (mostly a Saudi Arabian phenomenon) and Salafism (much more
widespread) have a “Protestant” character to them, emphasizing
puritanism and the casting down of all images (iconoclasm) and saints’
shrines.

Sufism has rapidly declined in much of the Muslim
world. The Sufi orders still have a central place in society and even
politics in Senegal. The Sufis of Morocco are not inconsiderable. But
they no longer are in the mainstream in Egypt and are minor affairs in
Palestine, Syria and Jordan. The Sufis of the Hijaz in western Arabia
are said to be having a bit of a revival, but Wahhabism has reduced
them to a shadow of their former selves. Aside from Morocco, Iraq may
have been the Arab country with the biggest Sufi presence, both among
Sunni Arabs and among Kurds (a lot of Kurds in Iraq, Iran and Turkey
are Sufis and some are Qadiris).

Some of the Sufi orders,
including branches of the Qadiriya, have at one time or another joined
the Sunni Arab insurgency (a major guerrilla leader at Falluja was a
Qadiri shaikh). Other branches of the Qadiriya have, however, been
quietists and avoided politics (the shrine keeper is in that category,
another reason that the shrine may have been hit).

There is a whole web site on al-Gilani and his order by an adherent.