Review
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Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi's Teachings on Psychology
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi’s Teachings on Psychology1
Dr. Riyad Asvat2
In a discourse on the 18th of August 2007 Shaykh Abdalqadir, may Allah be pleased with him, said: “I have written in my writings about a certain change which took place in the world in the middle of the nineteenth century, and I am not the only person to make that observation. Christians have made it, humanists have made it, historians have made it, sociologists have made it – that is that somewhere, in the century before last, there was a kind of split, a crack in consciousness, and it is like, after that, a kind of defeat of the human creatures occurred, and it was done in the high effervescence of something that was called Humanism. But at the very point they were declaring Humanism, people became subhuman. What is subhuman? It is that we have gone out of kilter, we have gone out of the pattern which, in the language of our ‘Ulama [scholars], is called Deen al-Fitra [Natural Religion]. The Fitra [the inborn natural predisposition of the human being to worship Allah] of the human-being has been totally dislocated because of the action of usury, the action of the fundamental motor of this social system actually cracks and breaks the Fitra. So the people are no longer able to have the Deen [Religion] which is Deen al-Fitra. Also, the Deen al-Fitra is Deen al-Haqq [True Religion], so you cannot have the Haqq [Truth], you cannot have Tasawwuf [Sufism] if you do not have this pattern of behaviour which means that in the transaction you are honest and act according to what has been commanded in the Book of Allah [the Qur’an] and by the Rasul [Messenger], sallallahu ‘alyhi wa sallam [may Allah bless him and grant his peace], and the First Community of Madinah. It is VERY important that we grasp this because what has to happen and will happen over the coming years of this new century, is there has to awaken a generation of men who want to taste that matter which is the subject of what we have been studying – that is Divine Love and Passion and Ecstasy of Allah, the Creator of the Universe. Without this, nothing can be achieved.”3
Shaykh Abdalqadir means that in pre-modern times a human being was defined as body and soul. Psychology for the Greeks meant the study (logia) of the human soul (psyche). In modern times Rene Descartes (1596-1650) claimed that the essential quality of being human was thinking and it was Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) who went on to explain how the process of thinking works. The human being was seen as a body with a brain and the soul was removed out of the secular domain, which for modernity was the only domain that mattered. Modern psychology became the study of the brain and the workings of its conscious and unconscious parts. Henceforth it became quite acceptable to be an atheist or have a private religion that did not impinge on the economic and political workings of society. The civic reality in society became capitalism, which is an elaborate ideology – an illusion – to cover up the crime of riba (usury). Capitalist ideology structures society through politics, state capture, economics, scientific materialism, public relations, the nuclear family, education and media. Shaykh Abdalqadir says that our civic reality is a “socially structured psychosis.”4
A deeper understanding of Shaykh Abdalqadir’s psychological teachings will become clear as we explore the following aspects: modern psychology; Islamic psychology; living in the shadow of Freud; going beyond Freud; Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir’s rewriting of the Oedipus legend; and breaking through the psychosis of capitalism.
The modern worldview based as it is on reason and sense perception, i.e. rationalism and empiricism, can be described as scientistic, that is, based on Scientism. Scientism or scientific materialism asserts that sciences, which are modelled on the physical sciences, are the only sources of real knowledge. Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley says that after Isaac Newton “there was no longer any need for God; everything was perfectly explicable without positing Divine intervention. God had been expelled from the physical universe.”5 Psychology like the other natural and social sciences modelled itself on mechanistic materialism.
Malik Badri (1932-2022) who is known as the founder of modern Islamic psychology was critical of behaviourism and psychoanalysis “the main schools dominating psychology in the West and the Muslim world.”6 Badri argues that Western behaviourists and experimentally minded-psychologists will claim that their theories about human behaviour are based purely on empirical, unbiased observation but “they will treat man as a materialistic animal with the sole motivation for adjustment with his physical and social environment … which is in itself an atheistic point of view. It is a ‘psychology without a soul’ studying a man without a soul.”7
Badri pointed out that Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) psychoanalytic theories promoted a distorted concept of man and an antagonistic stance towards God and religion. For Freud the concept of God is a man-made delusion born out of one’s childhood needs. In adulthood, having surpassed dependence on their parents, people create the fiction of the existence of God and belief in an absolute system of values belonging to Him, to preserve some semblance of law and order in society. Freud’s theories were based on scientism, that is, atheistic mechanistic materialism as Henri Ellenberger wrote: “Although Freud claimed to be scornful of philosophy, he definitely expressed philosophical ideas, in the sense of materialistic, atheistic ideology. His philosophy was an extreme form of positivism, which considered religion dangerous and metaphysics superfluous.”8 Freud described religion as an illusion and a universal neurosis and his influence went beyond the boundaries of modern medicine and clinical psychology. It left lasting impressions on philosophy, the social sciences, religion, art and literature. It is said that of all ideologists influential in America, Freud was the most important and his visit in 1909 was momentous.
Although it was surpassed decades ago by quantum mechanics and relativity physics the philosophy of mechanistic materialism dominates in the physical sciences. The correlate for mechanistic materialism in the social sciences is structuralism. Freud’s structural model divides the personality into three parts—the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the unconscious part that is the container of raw drives, such as, for sex or aggression. The ego, comprising of conscious and unconscious elements, is the rational and reasonable part of personality. The superego is a person’s conscience and like the ego, the superego has conscious and unconscious elements. The role of the ego is to maintain contact with the outside world to keep the individual in touch with society. In order to do this it mediates between the conflicting tendencies of the id and the superego. When all three parts of the personality are in equilibrium, the individual is thought to be mentally healthy. If the ego is unable to mediate between the id and the superego, an imbalance occurs which manifests in the form of psychological distress.9
According to Abdalhamid Evans:
“Freud’s doctrine can be seen to have several major elements:
The Oedipus Complex, the notion that the element of fantasy plays a more powerful role in shaping the human being than event.
Positing the existence of the Unconscious which defined the human being in terms of his lowest elements and drives to which he has no access, and therefore no real control.
That society is right; it is up to the individual to adapt, the extent of his inability to adapt, marks the extent of his neurosis or illness.
Clearly influenced by the claimed scientific certainty, popularised by Darwin and Huxley, that the Divine had no part to play in life, Freud’s doctrine was also mechanistic, reductionist and atheist. Man not only has ape ancestry, but he is motivated by his lowest biological forces. Man is trapped, defined by his pathology.”10
Malik Badri who is widely credited for the Islamization of psychology was critical of the Muslim psychologists who copied modern ideas and practices without any form of criticism and filtering. He was critical of concepts that contradicted Islamic beliefs such as Freudian atheism, determinism, and extreme behaviourism.
Subsequent to the impetus provided by Malik Badri various contributions have been made to the Islamisation of psychology. The International Association of Islamic Psychology says that “Islamic psychology embraces modern psychology, traditional spirituality, metaphysics and ontology.”11 It has been defined by Paul Kaplick and Rasjid Skinner as the field of study that relates Islamic knowledge to benefit human beings “physically, spiritually, cognitively, and emotionally.”12 Alizi Alias adds scientific methodologies to the Qur’anic sciences in his definition with the aim of making “Muslim psychologists use soul as the general framework in interpreting psychological data (behaviour and mental processes) instead of the limited approach of biological, psychodynamic, behavioural , humanistic, and cognitive perspectives in psychology.”13 G.H. Rassool says that “Islamic psychology is the study of the science of the soul, mental processes, and behaviour according to the principles of empirical psychology, rationality, and divine revelation from the Qur’an and Sunnah.”14
Rassool states that in addition to the Quranic sciences relating to psychology, an Islamic psychologist’s applied competencies must include the ability to discuss how client-centred therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, Solution-Focussed Brief Therapy, Jungian therapy, narrative therapy, and pre-marital and marital counselling, are congruent with Islamic beliefs and practices. They should also be able to discuss “why psychoanalytic therapy is not congruent with Islamic beliefs and practices.”15
As we can see there is no homogenous understanding of what Islamic psychology may constitute. Abdallah Rothman tells us that: “the majority of research efforts within this movement over the past 10 years have focused on cultural or religious adaptations of Western models. A uniquely Islamic theoretical framework for an Islamic psychology has yet to be established.” Rothman has proposed an Islamic model of the soul for applications in psychology. In the Islamic paradigm, the soul of the human pre-existed this earthly life and will continue after death in the hereafter. Rothman views the purpose of human life as an opportunity to purify the soul and as such is a project of development which uncovers the fitra within oneself by purifying the soul. Therefore an Islamic perspective of psychology is inextricably linked to the process of cleansing the soul. In his model Rothman describes the nature, structure and stages in the development of the soul. For this development of the soul he proposes, based on the teachings of Imam al-Ghazali (1058-1111), tazkiyat al-nafs (purification of the soul), jihad al-nafs (struggle of the soul), tahdhib al-akhlaq (reformation of character), and muhlikat and munjiyat (virtues and vices, that is, refinement of character). In this model mental health becomes a moral issue related to the inner life of the person.
One of the key characteristics of all schools of psychology is that “they separate man from his lived environment. His anxiety, fear and lack of security in the world are all seen as inability to adapt to life itself. It is the fault of the individual; the social, political and economic status quo is never in question.”16 On this issue Shaykh Abdalqadir has pointed out that: “No aspect of the now ruined landscape that is called modernism was more ugly and destructive than the brilliant way in which ideology separated the man from his idea, and the political and economic from the elements of personality. It was denied that the human self was the vital animator of political and social patterns.”17Misunderstanding the writings of Imam al-Ghazali can give rise to an inward and outward dichotomy.18 Imam al-Ghazali had reacted to the rigid orthodoxy of the Islam that was practiced in the Iraq of his time with the aim of restoring the inward reality to practices which had become lifeless rituals. Those aspects of the teachings of Imam al-Ghazali relating to tazkiyat al-nafs, jihad al-nafs, tahdhib al-akhlaq, muhlikat and munjiyat must be undertaken simultaneously with the establishment of the shari‘a (Islamic Law and governance). Today the shari‘a has become eroded and is in danger of being lost. What is needed now is its revival. To this end Shaykh Abdalqadir has proposed the adoption of the Madinan paradigm19 which characterizes the three major strands of his thinking.20 These are: (i) eliminating the split between the inner and outer aspects of human personality; (ii) possessing the methodology for determining correct behaviour (usul al-fiqh); and (iii) affirming the relationship between political power and ideology, which in this context means belief.
Sigmund Freud’s influence has been phenomenal, as noted by Pamela Thurschwell: “Freud’s theory, psychoanalysis, suggested new ways of understanding, amongst other things, love, hate, childhood, family relations, civilization, religion, sexuality, fantasy and the conflicting emotions that make up our daily lives. Today we all live in the shadow of Freud’s innovative and controversial concepts. In their scope and subsequent impact Freud’s writings embody a core of ideas that amount to more than the beliefs of a single thinker. Rather they function like myths for our culture, taken together, they represent a way of looking at the world that has been powerfully transformative.”21 For Freud human beings were cold, heartless and miserable. His views of society and civilization were also bleak and wretched. According to Freud human nature was inherently flawed and this flaw precluded any possibility of achieving a harmonious society or civilization.
The publication of the works of Freud in the U.S. by his nephew Edward Bernays (1891-1995) drew the attention of journalists, intellectuals, politicians and planners. They were fascinated by the idea that deep within human beings lay hidden and dangerous irrational fears and desires. They became convinced that unleashing these instincts would produce frenzied mobs as happened in the Russian revolution of 1917. In other words human beings could not be relied on for making rational decisions. The leading political writer of the time, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) said that since human beings were motivated by unconscious irrational forces it was time to rethink democracy. Bernays argued that he had already developed the techniques that Lippmann was suggesting. He called these techniques the engineering of consent, that is, by stimulating the inner desires of people and then sating them with consumer products he was creating a new way of managing the irrational forces of the masses. President Hoover (1929-1933) was the first politician to promote the idea of consumerism becoming the motor of American life. Bernays took Freud’s ideas and used them in economics and politics, that is, in marketing and public relations. He applied psychological theory in the interests of corporate capitalism. Robert Reich, U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 explained this phenomenon. He said that fundamentally there are two different views of human nature and democracy. The first is that politics and leadership are about engaging the public in a rational discussion and deliberation about what is best for them. Thereby treating people with respect in terms of their rational abilities to debate what is best. The second view is that people are “irrational, that they are bundles of unconscious emotion. That comes directly out of Freud and businesses are very able to respond to that. That’s what they have honed their skills to and that’s what marketing is really all about – what are the symbols, the images, the music, the words that will appeal to these unconscious feelings. Politics must be more than that. If it is not that, if it is Freudian, if it is basically a matter of appealing to the same basic unconscious feelings that business appeals to, then why not let businesses do it? Business can do it better, business knows how to do it. Business after all is in the business of responding to those feelings.”22
Business corporations brainwashed the public with the aim of not only making money through consumerism but also keeping them docile. Docile citizens made it possible for governments to pursue all manner of illegal and violent acts, wars in particular. Herbert Marcusse (1898-1979) studied psychoanalysis and was a fierce critic of the Freudians. He said that they had contributed to create a world in which people were reduced to express their identities and feelings through mass produced objects. The psychoanalysts had become the corrupt agents of the ruling class in the U.S. In 1950–51 Marcuse gave a series of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry. The result of this seminar was one of Marcuse’s most famous books, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Marcuse’s book was a response to the pessimism of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. Freud paints a bleak picture of the evolution of civilization as one of greater and greater repression from which there seems to be no escape. The death and life instincts are engaged in a battle for dominance with no clear winner in sight. Marcuse argued that human instincts or drives are not merely biological and fixed, but also social, historical, and malleable.
Marcuse said that in advanced industrial societies there is no longer a problem with acquiring the resources needed for existence or even the most favourable life for members of those societies. The problem is the unfair and unjust distribution of resources. The concept of scarcity in this age functions ideologically and supports the domination of the worker by the capitalist. Marcuse said: “It was one of the most striking phenomena to see to what extent the ruling power structure could manipulate, manage and control not only the consciousness but also the subconscious and unconscious of the individual. And this took place on the psychological basis, by the control and the manipulation of the unconscious drives, which Freud stipulated.”23
Going beyond Freud: Carl Jung, Medard Boss, R D Laing, Jacques Lacan and Shaykh Abdalqadir
Carl Jung (1875-1961), once hailed by Freud as his crown prince, broke away from him on acrimonious terms. “Whereas Freud had defined man in terms of his pathology, or his abnormal behaviour, Jung formulated a human psychic typology based on pairings of opposites, such as introvert and extrovert; thinking and feeling; sensing and intuiting. Within the Jungian framework, health, including mental health became a matter of balance.”24 Jung was never able to free himself of his Christian background and his search for spiritual meaning, however, did not result in his taking a specific spiritual path himself.
Medard Boss (1903-1990) studied under both Freud and Jung and found that their theoretical frameworks did not correspond to lived experience. “Dissatisfied with the so-called facts of subject and object, the psyche, the body and the external world, the intrapsychic entities of id, ego and superego etc., none of which reflected an individual’s lived experience of his own life, Boss was powerfully attracted to Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) concept of man as ‘Dasein’ (lit. being-there).”25 Boss belonged to the School of Daseinsanalysis whose primary concern was the practical application of Heidegger’s phenomenology to the theory of neuroses and psychotherapy. Boss had managed to interest Heidegger personally for the concerns of psychotherapists, and to make him participate in a corresponding training program. This led to a discussion and critique of the metapsychology of Freudian psychoanalysis and C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology. In the daseinsanalytical view biology can only grasp a partial aspect of human existence and metapsychology of the positivistic school relinquishes the ground of visible reality. Gion Condrau explains that this “has consequences for therapy. In a certain sense, Daseinsanalysis can be seen as a further development of psychoanalysis. The external setting has been kept more or less unchanged. There are, however, substantial differences concerning the interpretation of symptoms, aseinsa (sic), and dreams. In those areas, Daseinsanalysis proceeds phenomenologically; it does so without causal-genetic interpretations and, instead, inquires more intensely into the meaning and meaning-content of the observed phenomena. The concern of Daseinsanalysis is to see (sehen), not to explain (erklären). The importance and meaning of this “Seeing” becomes manifest in the theory of neuroses and psychosomatic diseases.”26
It was the psychoanalytic examination of Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) that de-structured the Freudian claim to a scientific basis for his system. According to Freud there is a fundamental contradiction both within the social order and within the individual subject that makes a harmonious existence within society impossible. He attributes this to the unconscious drives within the human being. Laing, however, blamed the family for mental illness and the responsibility fell on society, the family being the social witness of it. Shaykh Abdalqadir says that Lionel Trilling correctly noted that: “The schizophrenic person characteristically has what Laing calls an ‘ontological insecurity’, a debility of his sentiment of being … It is the family, which is directly responsible for the ontological break, the ‘divided self’ of schizophrenia: Laing is categorical in saying that every case of schizophrenia is to be understood as ‘a special strategy that the patient invents in order to live an unliveable situation’, which is always a family situation, specifically the demand of parents that one have a self which is not one’s true self, that one be what one is not. We may put it that Laing construed schizophrenia as the patient’s response to the parental imposition of inauthenticity.”27
The most important psychoanalyst after Freud, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), reinterpreted Freud’s work in terms of linguistics which were developed by French writers in the second half of the twentieth century. For Lacan the psyche can be divided into three registers that control life and desires. The three major concepts, which correlate to the three main moments in the individual’s development are: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.28 “Lacan emphasised the primacy of language as constitutive of the unconscious, and he tried to introduce the study of language (as practiced in modern linguistics, philosophy, and poetics) into psychanalytic theory.”29 Lacan’s method was to bring psychoanalysis into concordance with religion and philosophy. One very significant divergence between Lacan and Freud is the concept of what Freud called das ding, the Thing. Das Ding is a void, a primordial loss, around which the subject is structured. For Freud the fundamental loss is the loss of the mother, that is, the subject desires to be with the mother. This is problematic for Lacan who argues that if one achieves this goal and is reunited with the mother then the animating foundation of the subject would disappear. In other words if your subjectivity is predicated on this loss, and you have achieved your desire and thereby overcome your loss your subjectivity would disappear. According to Lacan what we really desire is to never recover our loss, to circle around our loss over and over again. Therefore our relationship to this void is constitutive of our subjectivity. It is around this void that the subject is created. It is here that Lacan discovered the paradox that lies at the heart of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis claims that our desires lie within the unconscious but when we look into the unconscious we find a void upon which our subjectivity is predicated. Omnia El Shakry says that the: “psychoanalytic tradition acknowledges the opaque core of the subject, something beyond the unconscious and beyond symbolization, known as das Ding – a chasm, an impossible primordial object around which the subject circumambulates, a ‘traumatic particle of internalized exteriority.’ As a commentator of Lacan notes, das Ding is ‘a gap in the abeyance (abe´ance) of religious men and mystics’.”30 Lacan described this chasm/void/abyss, which he called objet petit a, “as the cause of desire. … It is what a subject seeks in love or passion beyond the possible gratification of instinctual wishes.”31 El Shakry summarizes Lacan’s thinking as follows: “To clarify, from a Lacanian perspective, concepts of unity belong to the domain of the Imaginary (the domain of psychic reality) and provide the Symbolic order (the structure of signifiers, discourse, and society) with its efficacy. Yet the mystic, in assuming that they partake of a divine and transcendental unity (for example through a mystical union with the Beloved), mistakes the Symbolic order for the Real (that which never becomes available for subjectivation).”32 Lacan had referenced the Muslim Andalusian Sufi and philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240) on a number of occasions, even noting his own alignment with Ibn al-‘Arabi’s position on symbolic knowledge over the "rationalism" of Ibn al-Rushd (1126-1198). Unfortunately, Lacan received the teachings of Ibn al-‘Arabi by way of the renowned orientalist Henry Corbin (1903-1978). This is where we can see the influence of Ibn al-‘Arabi and Corbin’s interpretations of his writings on Lacan. From a genuine Sufi perspective there can be no “mystical union with the Beloved,” something that Corbin never understood.33 Lacan, as we noted before, discovered a void/chasm/abyss, which he called objet petit a. Had he received the teachings of Ibn al-‘Arabi from a Sufi shaykh, overcoming the paradox would have been a possibility for him. As Shaykh Abdalqadir says, Islam allows us to deal with “paradoxes and mind-stopping clashes of contradictions.”34 Transcending the paradox requires an experience that is called fana fillah, the annihilation of the self in Allah. Shaykh Abdalqadir says that fana fillah: “is the meaning death, based on the cessation of the attributes, even life itself. It is arrived at by the most fine process of withdrawal from the sensory by the means of the Supreme Name [Allah] until even the Name, the last contact with awareness disappears. From the depth of the Original Void the secrets and the lights emerge. The seeker will pass through the heavens, each with its own colour and meanings. Light upon light. Until the great tajalli35 which unveils the secret and indicates Allah.”36
Although having failed to fully comprehend the meaning of the paradox in psychoanalysis (das Ding/ objet petit a) that he had encountered Lacan rightly posited that modern people filled this void with capital, that is, capitalism. Capital is the object that has been elevated to the level of das Ding/objet petit a. In psychanalytic terms as explained by Slavoj Zizek (b. 1949): “the structure of capitalism mimics the structure of enjoyment. The homology is not so much between the concept of surplus value [profit] and the concept of surplus jouissance [enjoyment] as it is between the way capitalism responds to its constitutive lack and the way the subject of desire relates to the constitutive lack embodied in the objet petit a.”37 In theological terms we can say that people have turned money into a god and capitalism has become their religion. Unfortunately, Lacan like Marx did not work out that capital was money created out of nothing and as such capitalism is a psychosis and not a system.
This brings us to the psychological teachings of Shaykh Abdalqadir who, as an ‘alim (Islamic scholar), Western scholar (he has a Doctorate of Literature from the University Science Malaysia) and Sufi shaykh of instruction (in the Shadhiliyya Tariqa), not only served his disciples as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist but supervised their development in its totality. Shaykh Abdalqadir explains that within the Islamic paradigm: “What happens in life happens simultaneously on three levels, the outward, the inward and the hidden.”38 The outward means the physical level, the inward means the psychological level and the hidden means the spiritual level. The hidden In Islamic cosmology relates to the Unseen.
In his book The Entire City, Shaykh Abdalqadir quotes Max Ernst who made the following observation: “You see, Freud had not isolated the Unconscious located in the cortex of a man, what he had done was stumble only half aware of a whole domain. He had discovered anew the Unseen.”39 Shaykh Abdalqadir also quotes another writer of note, D.H. Lawrence who said: “We have actually to go back to our own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted reflection of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the true unconsciousness, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to live.”40 In order to explain the different aspects of the human being Shayh Abdalqadir provides us with clear definitions of Islamic cosmology and the corresponding dimensions of human personality. He explains that there are three realms in Islamic cosmology mulk, malakut and jabarut and three corresponding dimensions of human personality nafs, ruh and sirr and the sciences appropriate to each dimension are ‘ilm al-‘aql, ‘ilm al ahwal and ‘ilm al-asrar. The nafs (the body and brain of the human being) inhabits the mulk (the kingdom of solid forms) and the means by which it apprehends its realm of existence is through ‘ilm al-‘aql (the science of the intellect). The ruh (soul) inhabits the malakut (the kingdom of unseen forms) and the means of apprehending its realm is ‘ilm al-ahwal (science of states). The sirr (innermost consciousness) inhabits the jabarut (kingdom of power or lights) and apprehends its realm by means of ‘ilm al-asrar (the science of the innermost consciousness). The ruh and the sirr exist in the ghayb (Unseen realm) as do the angels and the jinn. Beyond these three dimensions is knowledge relating to Allah, Who is beyond space, time and phenomena. The stages of knowledge of Allah are fana and baqa. Fana (also referred to as fana fillah) means annihilation in Allah, the cessation of personal actions, attributes and essence. Baqa means subsistence in Allah, when the believer returns to mankind after annihilation in Allah.
The Sufi shaykh of instruction guides the disciple (murid) on his/her suluk (the journey to discover one’s own possibilities). The Shaykh achieves this by using a method, that comprises of shari‘a, tariqa and haqiqa and within which all the levels of being can be explored. The branch relating to the physical is shari‘a, literally road, the laws of Islam. The branch related to the ruh and sirr is called tariqa, the path of transformation of the self as outlined by the Sufi shaykh. After this is knowledge relating to Allah and this knowledge is called haqiqa, the highest stages of which are fana and baqa.
We will now focus on the psychological aspects of human beings as expounded by Shaykh Abdalqadir. This is what is referred to as inward by Shaykh Abdalqadir. This inward also refers to the nafs, the body/ brain nexus of the human being. Shaykh Abdalqadir's psychological teachings not only go beyond that of Freud but also go beyond those of Jung, Boss, Laing and Lacan. There are two key characteristics of all these other schools of psychology. Firstly, in their attempts to be scientific they view human beings as objects who are limited to the criteria of measurement and proof. Secondly, human beings are separated from their environment. Their anxieties, fears and lack of security are all seen as the inability to adapt to life. The blame is laid on the individual and the political, economic and social status quo is never questioned.41 Shaykh Abdalqadir says that as a consequence of this, men “are inhibited from confronting the Leviathan [capitalism, democracy and the fiscal state]. Conditioned and prepared not to resist let alone overthrow the system, it is now openly realised that contemporary man experiences himself as helpless. Told that their freedom lies in individuality, they have been convinced that their isolation is a gift of the social order. Do not make waves. Stay in the middle, the extremes destroy. Philip Rieff, a leading Freudian psychoanalyst, openly committed psychoanalysed modern man: ‘to an active resignation in matters as they are, to a modest hope, and to a satisfiable desire. … Psychological man … like his predecessor, the man of the market economy … understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going!’ Liberty has been reduced to an active resignation. Equality has been confirmed by a universal granting of credit. Fraternity is assured now we are all debtors. Your debt is personal. Your religion is personal. Your ballot is secret. History, your history, has come to an end.”42 In his rewriting of the Oedipus legend Shaykh Abdalqadir indicates the way to resistance and freedom.
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir’s rewriting of the Oedipus legend
Freud rejected his religion of Judaism and focused his attention on Greek mythology, in particular, the Sophoclean version of the Oedipus legend. Shaykh Abdalqadr notes that: “No greater confusion was cast on one particular corner of Greek studies than that achieved by the Freudian assessment of the myth of Oedipus.”43 This is in reference to the story of Oedipus as told by the celebrated Greek playwright Sophocles (497/496 – 406/405 BC). The story is as follows: Laius, the king of Thebes, was warned by an oracle (someone who could communicate with the divine) that his son would kill him. When his wife Jocasta gave birth to Oedipus, Laius had the child’s feet bound together and ordered that he be exposed to the elements and left to die. A shepherd took pity on the infant and gave him to King Polybus of Corinth and his wife who brought him up as their son. As a young man Oedipus visited Delphi where he was told that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. On hearing this he resolved never to return to Corinth. On his way to Thebes he had an altercation with a group of men and he killed them unaware that one of them was King Laius, his biological father. Arriving at Thebes he found that it was plagued by the Sphinx, who asked all those who passed a riddle. Those who answered wrongly were killed. Oedipus answered correctly and the Sphinx killed herself. As a reward he was made king of Thebes and married the queen Jocasta, his mother. Later when the truth became known Jocasta committed suicide and Oedipus blinded himself with pins from Jocasta’s dress and went into exile. Freud believed that this was the miserable destiny of all human beings.
Shaykh Abdalqadir explains that: “The Sophoclean crushing of independence by refusing transcendent freedom to the riddle reading hero, and warning that life is an inescapable and predesigned trap is a primal model of statism, whose modern version refuses immanent freedom to the overman [life affirming and creative human being] and warns that the psyche is an inescapable and pre-designed trap.”44 Oedipus is trapped within the social situation which is designed by the god Dionysus, and in which the self is imprisoned. As an alternative to the Sophoclean narrative, Shaykh Abdalqadir has written a play called ‘Oedipus and Dionysus’ in which he transforms the ominous and miserable ending into an act of liberation. Abdalhamid Evans says: “In Oedipus and Dionysus, our hero sees the jaws of the trap in place around him, he sees what will happen, but he recognises that the terms that are presented to him, not only offer him no escape, but are actually false. He simply refuses that definition of existence, He refuses the role of victim. He walks away free.”45
Regarding his play Shaykh Abdalqadir says: “‘Oedipus and Dionysus’ is an action directed to the restoration of the dynamic imaging and meaning projection that indicates man’s freedom utterly outside dialectical ideology. It is on going back to the sources of the Oedipal legend that it is possible to realise that there is a version of the tale which is devoid of the Sophoclean framing. Oedipus as decoding hero releasing the people from the curse of the irrational power of vengeance is utterly transmuted at the end of the classical period into the Sophoclean model of a doomed breaker of taboos, a hubris infected enemy of the city state. The ancient powers of Olympus, nationalized as it were, come to serve the politics of democratic rule.”46
The essential themes of Oedipus and Dionysus are firstly, the abolition of the state and secondly the relation of economics and politics to the elements of personality. The state is structuralist (like all aspects of modern life) and for it to continue the human being has to be stripped of freedom and turned into a mechanical robot. Human beings cannot behave like mechanical robots unless they are made to believe falsehoods. This is our reality, we are made to believe things to be real that are actually false making us subject to mass psychosis. Psychosis means to lose touch with reality, that is, to perceive the world and how it works in a way that is false. Mediating between ourselves and the reality of the world around us is our brain, that is, our intellect. The intellect creates a series of structured pictures by which we understand the world around us. We are told that capitalism and democracy are the best systems that have ever been devised. Yet capitalism is an illusion that is camouflaged as free trade and oligarchy masquerades as democracy and self-determination. Our belief that capitalism and democracy are the best ways of arranging our economic and political lives is therefore psychotic.
Why are our beliefs of capitalism and democracy psychotic? The money supply, the venous system of capitalism, is illusory because it is invented out of thin air. The creation of money out of nothing is no secret and just in case we have forgotten the statements made by the founder of the Bank of England, William Paterson in 1694, they issued another statement in 2014 stating that the most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. In fact the statement continues to say that everything we know about banking is not just wrong, it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money because money is really just an IOU. Our money supply, therefore, is a fraud (fractional reserve banking), riba (usury/unjustified increase) and theft (fiat money inflates prices stealing the wealth of future generations). Through fractional reserve banking banks have morphed into giant corporations which in turn enabled the rise of the commodity (including the military industrial complex), media and information technology corporations. The corporations have captured the apparatus of the state and its decision making processes through, political donations, “philanthropy”, corruption, bribery, the exploitation of externalities (making governments pay for infrastructure, education, research and development) and manipulation of the legislation and regulation processes for their benefit. The corporate elite who own over 60% of the world’s wealth, form the oligarchy that controls the political process and the politicians. To believe that democracy exists is a psychosis.
Breaking through the psychosis of capitalism
Shaykh Abdalqadir says: “The horror of this modern age is not the annihilation of millions in Nazi Death Camps and Stalin’s Gulags, nor is it the obliteration of a whole society in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not the slaughter and torture of the innocents. The horror of this age is the somnambulistic helplessness of the masses to ACT in order to stop the global holocaust. It is this unarguable condition of mankind which permits us to define the technique society as a psychosis.”47 Shaykh Abdalqadir has demonstrated that the psychosis is capitalism which is rapidly self-destructing. The biggest of the capitalist empires is the USA which has now lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa to do its bidding. The empire will limp along while continuing to lose influence until the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency. As this happens the United States will plunge into a crippling depression forcing a massive contraction of its military machine. In the meantime American society is disintegrating whilst a coalition of transnational corporations is emerging that is forging a supranational nexus to supersede all nations and empires. At the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 2021, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for a total overhaul of all human collective behaviour, thinking and traditions. This is what is called the Great Reset of capitalism and forms the basis of a strategic partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF) which was ratified in a meeting held at United Nations headquarters by Guterres and World Economic Forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab. The WEF represents the world’s largest corporations and is promoting the idea that global capitalism should be transformed so that corporations no longer focus solely on serving shareholders but become custodians of society by creating good outcomes for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and other ‘stakeholders’. There are now over one hundred global standard-setting multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs) establishing guidelines and rules for a wide range of products and processes such as health care, cyber security, and climate change etc. We are witnessing the emergence of global corporate totalitarianism and the US like all other countries will be used to further the goals of capitalism. The Great Reset is a coup d’état, a corporate takeover of global governance.
Capitalism is not a system, but it has an elaborate ideology that hides its true usurious reality. The antidote to capitalism is Islam, the primary model of which is ‘amal ahl al-Madina (the practice of the first three generations of Muslims in Madina). In his seminal work, Root Islamic Education Shaykh Abdalqadir says that in the Madina of the Prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, the social contract was “at its healthiest and most balanced.”48 This phenomenon was recorded by Imam Malik ibn Anas in his book Al-Muwatta which is a book primarily about action (‘amal). Madina was a nomocracy (law-governed society) and since the act of governing is predominantly associated with the production, distribution and consumption of resources, the authorities have to guarantee justice and equity in the financial affairs of all citizens. Therefore the central function of governance is to facilitate the movement of wealth to all sections of the community and this circulation of wealth is guaranteed by the Shari‘a. In economic terms Islam demands freedom and justice in trade and commerce. Islamic law promotes the circulation of wealth and inhibits its stagnation, thereby impeding the development of the type of oligarchy that we see today.
Shaykh Abdalqadir outlines the following first steps to Islamic revival:
“Firstly, the jama‘at [community] must form itself into a legal entity like the rebel humans did with trade unions, but this is step one to a new life.
Secondly, the local leaders, by their wealth and influence in the land, have to be taken, enjoining them to right action. Islam has no priesthood, imams take prayer, governance is a social capacity.
Thirdly, move constructively from capitalist modalities – currency, banking, taxation – to free exchanges between men and groups.
Fourthly, remember physical and military opposition are the lifeblood of capitalist atheism. The revival of Islam is dependent on step by step turning away from kufr [unbelief] and finally, submitting to the natural religion.
Fifthly, this programme of life will be founded on the movement from money as pure electronic stored units of numbers to real wealth – gold, silver and commodities. This will lead to the abolition of capitalist supermarket distribution, that is of goods, and paper money and the restoration of hand to hand trade locally and usury free container caravans around the world. The abolition of value added tax, of sales tax, would be the first indication of the kuffar [disbelievers] abandoning their hypocrisy. The gold Islamic dinar and the silver Islamic dirham are the signs of our emergence.”49
Capitalism is collapsing incredibly quickly by the actions of Allah - He has declared war on usury (riba) – and it is by our actions that Allah will revive Islam. The following are Shaykh Abdalqadir’s words spoken by the psychiatrist Dr. Frieda Ludendorff, a character in his novel The Ten Symphonies of Gorka Konig: “We must act in our total freedom, totally conditioned, historically, biologically, environmentally, psychologically, physically, and yet in a ground of Being which is our unique and untouchable reality. We may do or we may not do – that is not our demand for freedom – we will do what we must do and we did do what we have done and we are doing what no one else can do and this is our uniqueness before Being and our immortality and our heaven and our hell and our agony and our bliss. I am already dead and buried for my past cannot even be dug up and I am unborn for my future is not even discernible, and now, although almost intolerable, is my one glorious reality, victory and only Truth.”50
Shaykh Abdalqadir is telling us that our “one glorious reality, victory and only Truth” is now. This moment that we are living in. He, may Allah be pleased with him, explains by saying that: “if a man ignores his hal – if a man is ignorant of the states he is passing through – he ignores his waqt, he ignores the time that he is living in, in that instant. If he does not know his state he does not know the moment he is living in. If a man ignores his waqt, he ignores his nafs. If a man ignores his nafs, he ignores his Rabb [Lord]. While it is not a Hadith, the great Sufis say it and the great ‘alim Ar-Razi, who was almost a rationalist quoted it often – the famous saying: ‘He who knows his self, knows his Lord.’”51 This, of course, does not mean that you are Allah. It means that the way to Allah is annihilation of the self in Allah.
Footnotes
1 This article appears in Islam & Technology and Science, Diwan Press, Bradford, 2025, p. 179
2 Dr. Asvat, former lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, is author of Sufism - the Living Tradition: Sufi epistemology encounters modernity in the tariqa of Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi and The Political Teachings of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi.
3 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, The Book of Hubb: Love of the Divine, Madinah Press, Erasmia (South Africa), 2007, pp. 63-64
4 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, The Entire City, Orhan Books, Cape Town, 2015, p. 226
5 Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley, https://aishabewley.org/darkness.html
6 Malik Badri, The Dilemma of Muslim Psychologists, MWH London Publishers, London, 1979, p. 3
7 Malik Badri, The Dilemma of Muslim Psychologists, p. 5
8 H.F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, London, 1970 p. 525
9 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-psychology/chapter/reading-freud-and-psychoanalytic-theory/
10 Abdalhamid Evans, The Evolution of European Psychology, Sixth Conference of Islamic Fiqh, Granada, August 1992
11 G. Hussein Rassool, Islamic Psychology: the basics, Routledge, Abingdon (Oxon), 2023, p. 51
12 G. Hussein Rassool, Islamic Psychology: the basics, p. 51
13 G. Hussein Rassool, Islamic Psychology: the basics, p. 51
14 G. Hussein Rassool, Islamic Psychology: the basics, p. 52
15 G. Hussein Rassool, Islamic Psychology: the basics, p. 89
16 Abdalhamid Evans, The Evolution of European Psychology, Sixth Conference of Islamic Fiqh
17 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, Oedipus and Dionysus, Freiburg Press, Granada, 1992, pp. 9-10
18 Refer to Aisha Bewley, Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-‘Arabi, http://aishabewley.org/QadiAbuBakr.html
19 ‘Amal ahl al-Madina - the practice of the first three generations of Muslims in Madina. Refer to Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, Root Islamic Education, Madinah Press, London, 1993
20 Refer to Riyad Asvat, The Political Teachings of Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir al-Sufi, Diwan Press, Bradford UK, 2023
21 Pamela Thurschwell, Sigmund Freud, Routledge, London, 2000, p.1
22 Robert Reich, Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self, 2004, Part 4
23 Herbert Marcuse, Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self, 2004, Part 3
24 Abdalhamid Evans, The Evolution of European Psychology, Sixth Conference of Islamic Fiqh
25 Abdalhamid Evans, The Evolution of European Psychology, Sixth Conference of Islamic Fiqh
26 Gion Condrau, https://i-f-da.org/what-about/
27 Lionel Trilling, quoted by Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, in The Entire City, p. 225
28 https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.html
29 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Lacan
30 Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2017, p. 58
31 Lewis Kirshner, Rethinking Desire: The Objet Petit A in Lacnanian Theory, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, February, 2005, p. 2
32 Note 136, Ch. 2, Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, p. 143
33 https://www.openhorizons.org/henry-corbin-the-errors-and-wisdom-of-a-20th-century-orientalist.html
34 Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Sufi, Introduction to Tawasin al- Hallaj, tr. A. Bewley, Taj Company, Delhi, 1982. For further discussion of this subject refer to Riyad Asvat, Sufism: The Living Tradition, Madinah Press, Kuala Press, 2015, pp. 49-50
35 “Self-manifestation, prescencing, self-disclosing, the unveiling of a spiritual reality in the realm of vision, a showing forth of the secrets of the One in existence.” Aisha Bewley, Glossary of Islamic Terms, p. 224
36 Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Sufi, The Hundred Steps, Madinah Press, Kuala Lumpur, p. 78. Italics are the author’s own.
37 https://bit.ly/4kXGWzp
38 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, The Entire City, p. xi
39 Max Ernst, quoted by Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, in The Entire City, pp. 302-303
40 D.H. Lawrence quoted by Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, in The Entire City, p. 302
41 Refer to Karim Bettache, How Capitalism Shapes the Mind: Have we overlooked an "invisible hand" that’s shaping our psychology? Psychology Today, posted 9 October 2023
42 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, The Time of the Bedouin: on the politics of power, Budgate Press, Cape Town, 2006, p. 242
43 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, Oedipus and Dionysus, Freiburg Press, Granada, 1992, p. 34
44 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, Oedipus and Dionysus, p. 80
45 Abdalhamid Evans, The Evolution of European Psychology, Sixth Conference of Islamic Fiqh
46 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, Oedipus and Dionysus, p. 79
47 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, The Interim is Mine, Budgate Press, Cape Town, 2010, pp. 135-136. Capitals are in the original.
48 Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Sufi, Root Islamic Education, p.3
49 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO70G3zrR3g
50 Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Sufi, The Ten Symphonies of Gorka Konig, Kegan Paul International, London, 1989, p. 112
51 Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, The Book of Safar, Madinah Press, Cape Town, 2009, p. 47
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