Paying Attention to the "Other Islam"

Why have some Muslims, particularly those called fundamentalists or puritans, objected to Sufism?
There are two objections. There is the theological objection, which begins with Ibn Taymiyya in the 13th century and continues with Wahhabisim starting 250 years ago, and that simply says that the Sufis elevate the saints or the sheiks or the Prophet himself to the equivalent of God, that this is like the Christians who view Jesus as a divine being, and that this is against the Islamic principle that only God is worthy of worship. That is the theological objection.

But in the 19th century, you have a situation in which the Ottoman Empire is heavily involved with Sufism; you also have the Persian Empire, which became Shia under Sufi guidance. These empires are the leading Islamic states at the time, and there was a group of Islamic reformers who looked at the situation of Islam, and especially the weakness of Islam faced by the West and the problems of western imperialism, and they said, "Well, Islam is weak because of the superstitious practices of praying over graves, the dhikrs, following sheiks, believing in saints."

So you have two streams that object to Sufism, the stream of puritanism and the stream of reformism. And course they could hook up and combine, as they did in Wahhabism.

As you point out in your book, Wahhabis are probably the biggest foes of Sufism.
I've said for a long time you can have two visions of Islam as a religion, just as we can have two visions of Christianity as a religion. You can view religion as a fairly narrow set of doctrines that require fairly rigid obedience in which the emphasis is on strictness, discipline, and outward adherence. Or you can see religion in civilizational terms. If you think the world is impressed when a young Muslim commits an act of terror, you are wrong, because the world is much more impressed by cultural achievements. The picture of the Taj Mahal means a lot more than a headline about a bombing to make people respect and become interested in Islam. The biggest difference to me is that Wahhabis don't view Islam civilizationally. They're against decorating mosques, against music, against anything beyond saying the prayers, going to the mosque on Fridays, keeping the prayers limited, maintaining this extremely puritanical, fundamentalistic, and limited view of religion as a set of doctrines according to which you live life in a very limited manner.

If you see that there is a variety of Islamic cultures, if you accept, for example, that most Indonesian women are not going to cover their faces, if you see that each of the Islams, the Islam of the Kazakhs or the Islam of the Moroccans, has a specific cultural character that is still Islam and believes in one God, one Prophet, and one Koran but also accepts that there is much else that goes with it, that's the Sufi mentality.

Why has the United States, and particularly the public-diplomacy arms of the government, been so poor at recognizing and highlighting the importance of Sufism, Sufi leaders, and Sufi organizations and, where possible, supporting them?
First of all, it's a daunting task for any westerners to engage with these issues. I've been engaged with them for a long time, and it's hard to sort them all out. There is no denying that in the State Department and in the legacy of public diplomacy in dealing with the Islamic world, there has been a bias in favor of dealing with the official authorities, with the clerics, with the Saudi structures, with the Wahhabis and others who claim to represent a normative Islam and who have behind them the vast oil wealth and the special role of Saudi Arabia as an ambiguous but long-standing partner of the United States. Public diplomacy has not attracted people who know or have much interest in this, and also there is a bias in academic study toward a normative and official Islam.