Islam’s forgotten bohemians

Interesting article on supposedly non-existing humor in Islam on Aeon.

Islam’s forgotten bohemians

With its subversive poetry, rejection of politics, and ecstatic rituals, Sufi Islam continues to surprise and to thrive

Excerpt:

Sufi poetry abounds in humour, learning and bawdiness. The Persian narrative poems of Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi, contain so many sexual innuendos and downright brazen images that Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, the Cambridge don who translated them in the early 20th century, blushingly rendered those parts into Latin. Materterae si testiculi essent, ea avunculus esset is, in Rumi’s rawer vernacular: ‘If an aunt had any balls, she’d be an uncle.’ Another of Rumi’s more notorious tales involves sex with a well-endowed donkey. Such sections have been omitted from Rumi’s poetry anthologies that the enthusiasms of Madonna pushed into the US bestseller lists a few years ago.

Dirty jokes don’t fit with current impressions, learned or popular, of Islam. It’s a dangerous excision. Omitting the rich history of this avant-garde encourages the misapprehension that present-day conservatives have some superior claim to cultural and religious authenticity over today’s Muslim liberals.

More popular, in past and present, than these bawdy tales was the lyrical tradition of Sufi poetry, in which the poet as vagabond speaks the raucous language of the demi-monde, adopting the guise of the homeless wino. In the words of the medieval poet Jamali Dihlavi, the Muslim is the seeker wandering the earth in search of the beloved of whom he once caught the briefest glimpse:

Listen, my boy, to the tales of a tavern-haunter,
So you can roam down the same road yourself.
Whoever becomes a bandit on God’s highway
Will turn to tavern once he’s seen the light.

Dihlavi cut a similar figure to the more familiar Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet who, like Dihlavi, plumbs the depths of self-negation before finding simpler, physical ways to lose himself. Like many of the Sufis, Rimbaud immortalised in verse his tortured humanity before walking off into the sunset and disappearing into Africa.

full article