Man tashabbaha bi qaumin fa huwa minhum—whoever imitates a people becomes one of them—is the prophetic saying at the center of Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference. Of the many ways in which this report is interpreted through Islamic history and analyzed through this compelling book, I was most captivated by the didactic and salutary potential of imitation as a spiritual practice. So I was excited when The Muslim Difference delved into this possibility in Chapter 6, “A Person Belongs with the One He Loves.” In this short but provocative section, Patel engages with a number of Sufi luminaries who saw “imitation as a technology of self-cultivation” (145). While many of Patel’s interlocutors in this rich and expansive book looked askance at imitation as potentially duplicitous, deceptive, or dangerous, this was not a universally shared skepticism. For some, emulating our spiritual superiors could be a form of training and growth on the Sufi path. In focusing on this chapter and the didactic power of imitation, I hope to pick up a key thread in Patel’s rich tapestry that explores the many ways in which Muslims theorize internal and external difference.
Among the thinkers cited in this chapter, Patel includes the founding figures of the Suhrawardī Sufi order, Abū Najīb al Suhrawardī (d. 1168) and his nephew Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al Suhrawardī (d. 1234), who were among the most prominent Sufis of Baghdad in their time. As it happens, these two Suhrawardī masters are also old companions of mine. Seeing their names took me back to a graduate school term paper I wrote (many years ago) about didactic friendship for a class on Islamic texts with R. Stephen Humphreys. The questions I explored in that paper concerned what a fellowship of imperfect Sufi seekers learn from each other and how they learn it, given that they were perforce companions within a teacher’s circle. I was interested in the etiquette of companionship (ādāb al ṣuḥba) and how Sufis at different levels of spiritual accomplishment and ability might learn interactively as they associate outside of the more obviously hierarchical and structured relationship between guide (murshid) and disciple (murīd). After all, these are the people with whom one is likely to be in constant company, both during and outside of audiences with the principal teacher. These companions are not like the guide whose perfection would be a distant aspirational model for those in the early stages of the Sufi path. Companions among fellow seekers are people like us who snore, interrupt, sometimes smell peculiar, take the best food during communal meals, and exhibit less-than-perfect manners and mannerisms as they too strive for self-improvement. Perhaps, just as it is often said that we learn more from our failures than from our successes, we might learn a great deal from imperfect people, especially when perfection seems unattainable to a Sufi novice or even a layperson with a penchant for spiritual practice. We learn from our reactions and impulses, to whom we are drawn and from whom we recoil. All of this is important information for a practitioner at any level, providing opportunities for insight into one’s character and the virtues most in need of cultivation.
The ādāb al ṣuḥba (etiquette of companionship) texts authored by the Suhrawardīs and others facilitated the transition of Sufism from a marginal, esoteric, community based around a charismatic leader to a social institution through which that leader’s authority is routinized and extended. After all, adab as an ethical code is, of necessity, enacted in relation to others. Whether the “other” is God, the guide, or the community, the very nature of adab reveals that a central concern of the Sufi is the right conduct of companionship. As Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) writes in his famous work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, the shortcomings of a brother provide an excellent opportunity for self-awareness and spiritual progress. Confronted with a challenging companion, “patience is best of all, since your object where your brother is concerned should be to correct yourself by having consideration for him, fulfilling your duty towards him, and bearing his deficiency patiently—not merely to enjoy his help and fellowship” (from On the Duties of Brotherhood, 58). Inspired by other aspirants as well as by the guide to contemplate and improve, even a minor interaction (whether positive or negative) can provide an opportunity for self-cultivation through self-correction. It is not just unethical to eschew a difficult companion or associate only when they are helpful and pleasant, it would be a missed opportunity to practice the key Sufi virtue of patience (ṣabr) and to reflect on ourselves scrupulously (wara’).
Much has been written, especially since Foucault, about the technologies of the self, the ways in which people come to cultivate particular ideals of being in the context of their epistemic locations. Following Talal Asad and his interlocutors, studies proliferated that consider how religious traditions produce authorizing discourses and inculcate affective responses. Yet as Patel points out in The Muslim Difference, Muslim intellectuals have long grappled with the same questions. They have also theorized about the nature of the self in relation to other selves. The scholars considered by Patel ground their analyses of how imitation works in different sources than most contemporary critical theorists, delving into the Qur’an and Hadith literatures, and interpreting them through Islamic hermeneutics, such as the literature on adaband akhlāq (etiquette and ethics) that permeate the Sufi literary corpus. In the contemporary academy, decolonial modes of scholarship recognize such works as themselves theoretical, rather than as merely source material for the critical theory emerging from the Euro-American academy. In The Muslim Difference, Patel invites us to think with these scholars from the past and to recognize how their conceptions of how imitation works as a form of spiritual self-cultivation resonate with contemporary trends in the anthropology of religion.
Returning then to the Suhrawardīs and their discussions of the power and purpose of companionship and the role of imitation (tashabbuh) among friends, both Abū Najīb and Abū Ḥafṣ argued that even the most superficial forms of imitation, such as a style of dress or wearing a particular garment, can have a transformative impact on the imitator and therefore should not be discouraged. Despite the potential that such imitative practices could be deceptive, dissimulative, or hypocritical, the Suhrawardīs both argue for the agentive power of the material aspects of imitation and the moral suasion of exemplary companions. This imitation is actually self-cultivation, associating with good company and engaging with inspiring things works on a person, drawing them deeper into the Sufi path on multiple levels. It also makes it possible to begin the journey along the ṭarīqa (road or path) toward ḥaqīqa (ultimate reality) without imposing barriers to entry for those not yet spiritually realized or fully committed. For the Suhrawardīs, the positive potential of opening the Sufi path to a wider audience and accepting people with a larger variation of capacities and aptitudes outweighed the possible dangers. Patel points out how much the Suhrawardīs sought to expand the boundaries of the Sufi community, rather than establish or police its limits, inviting potential aspirants to try it out to whatever degree possible. Indeed, we often practice the habits that we strive to embody more fully, knowing that it takes time, effort, and energy to feel authentic and integrate these habits into our lives and characters. This theory also suggests, in keeping with Charles Hirschkind for example, that this type of associative, mimetic learning, helps to sediment particular virtues in the characters of the aspirants, producing an “affective-volitional structure” that works on them consciously and unconsciously. Imitation, in this sense, is a means of becoming better.
Considering companionship in this expansive and didactic mode recalls Patel’s chapter title “A Person Belongs with the One He Loves” (144) and the story from Abū Ḥafṣ’s ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (The Perceivers of Gnosis) that elaborates on that quotation from a prophetic hadith. In this narrative, a person asked by the Prophet what he had prepared for the Day of Judgement replied with his only virtue “I love God and His Messenger,” to which Muhammad replied, “a person belongs with the one he loves” (149). Patel offers Abū Ḥafṣ’s own interpretation, that such an impulse towards love and imitation of the beloved is redemptive, in spite of myriad shortcomings and failures. This is just one of many ways to conceptualize imitation that Patel explores in The Muslim Difference. The scope of the entire book sweeps across the history of Islam, an ambitious time frame, but remains coherent as each chapter reflects on a different period, intellectual(s), and interpretation of imitation. Offering his readers ways to enter into a conversation that draws together the Suhrawardīs and other major Muslim thinkers (such as the al Ghazālī brothers, Ibn Taymiyya, Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī, and Rashīd Riḍā) along with René Girard, Marcel Mauss, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, Patel disrupts the common, extractive direction of scholarly inquiry. Like the Suhrawardīs, he softens the boundaries between intellectual realms, the ʿulūm al dīn (religious sciences) and Euro-American critical theory, often seen as so distinct as to be alien discourses. Patel leads us to a generative space of inquiry, offering multiple routes (ṭuruq) of exploration as we seek to understand human nature and the human quest to know ultimate reality (ḥaqīqa).
