Slight detour

Posted under convert, marriage, tasawwuf by rahma

 I’m fairly certain that traveling the path of tasawwuf with a sheikh is something I need to do  (I’m never 100% certain about anything.  Ask the husband - I drive him crazy with “I’m pretty sure…” “I think…”  “maybe…”).  The husband, on the other hand, is totally not convinced.  Despite the fact that I’ve prayed istikhara about this and feel that this is what Allah (swt) wants me to do, he isn’t buying it.

We sat down to have a talk on Wednesday, this time about the possibility of me going to a dhikr session.  He wanted to know what kind of dhikr would be said, and upon learning that it was not something directly said by the Prophet (saws), he got worked up.  Now, the husband is really serious about his deen.  That’s one of the things I love about him, and one of the reasons I married him.  The thing is though, he’s serious about Islam in a quasi salafi/ibn Hazm loving/no qiyas/no bidah hasana kinda way, where as I’ve developed my practice of Islam in a more traditional/madhab oriented manner. 

Imam Shafi’i wrote that:

New matters are of two kinds: something begun that contravenes the Qur’an, sunna, the position of early Muslims, or consensus of scholars (ijma‘): this innovation is misguidance. And something begun of the good in which there is no contravention of any of these, and is therefore something new (muhdatha) but not blameworthy. For when ‘Umar (Allah be well pleased with him) saw the [tarawih] prayer being performed [in a group by Muslims in the mosque] in Ramadan, he said, “What a good innovation (bid‘a) this is,” meaning something newly begun that not had been done before. And even though it had, this does not negate the foregoing (al-Dhahabi, Siyar a‘lam al-nubala’. 23 vols. Beirut: Mu’assassa al-Risala, 1401/1981, 10.70).

While many of the practices of the Shadhili Tariq are directly from the sunnah of the Prophet (saws) - emphasis on fard and sunnah prayers, reading a porition of the quran every day, making all the sunnah dhikr, as well as a strong strong strong emphasis on following the sharia and getting rid of all the haram in your life - others, such as the wirds, the gatherings of the tariq and the hizbs, fall into the bidah hasana category.

And, it’s that stuff in the later category that drives the husband up the wall.   He’s not been brainwashed or brow beaten into his beliefs.  He’s come to his position after quite a bit of study with a knowledgable teacher, and he’s not easy to convince that he’s wrong.  Despite presenting him with well written and well reasoned articles about the permissibility of bidah hasana and religious practices that are bidah hasana, he’s just not seeing it.

Thus, we come to the slight detour in the road.  During our conversation, I explained how I felt something was lacking in how Islam had been presented to me - haram haram haram haram, do this, don’t do that.  The “spiritual” aspect was completely absent.  I had gone looking for this on my own, and found some things that helped me draw closer to God (like some of my favorite books of all time, Purification of the Heart and Sufism and Good Character), but that I really felt drawn to taking a tariq and traveling down the path with the guidance of a sheikh to help me to know Allah (swt).

Alhamdulilah, the husband is totally sympathetic with this.  So now he’s on a mission - a mission to prove to me that “ahl al sunnah wa jamaa” has everything I’m looking for and that I don’t need sufism to help me.  He’s writing up some articles and we’ll look for some books to buy that we’ll study together during this next month.  If, at the end of the month, I still feel that sufism is what I need, the husband will grudingly support me in my taking the tariq.  He won’t be happy about it, but he’s not forbidding it either.

Alhamdulilah.  I *heart* my husband.