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Cordoba Initiative founder a leading American Sufi
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: August 31st, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/opinion/17dalrymple.html
Many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of Americas leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldnt be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or zikr) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. Such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West. The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.
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