by : Muslim mystics believed suffering and solitude can make us better people…
“I’m a Muslim boy of Iran and the American South who is politically most at home in the Black church and spiritually most at home in Rumi.”
That’s how Omid Safi describes himself. A professor of Islamic studies at Duke University, he specializes in Muslim mystics, or Sufis, like the well-known poet Rumi.
Safi grew up in Iran, but he’s lived in the southern US for many years now, and he feels a deep affinity with leaders of the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, he sees certain parallels between their views and Sufi views on love and justice. He teaches courses on both sets of views.
I recently spoke with Safi for Future Perfect’s new limited-series podcast, The Way Through, which is all about mining the world’s rich philosophical and spiritual traditions for guidance that can help us through these challenging times.
Safi explained Sufism’s tradition of “radical love,” which involves both love for the divine and for our fellow humans, and what it would look like to be guided by that tradition today. What would Rumi do in a pandemic?
We also discussed how we might be able to lean into our suffering or solitude these days — how we can actually use it to our benefit, rather than trying in vain to escape it.
You can hear our entire conversation in the podcast here. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
