Sufism: bridge between East and West
9.05.2010 | All Blog Posts, Prayer and Relationships, Prayer, Compassion, and Justice, Those Who Show Us the Way
Here’s an excellent essay by one of my favorite authors. Muslims in the Middle. New York Times, August 16, 2010
William Dalrymple’s book, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, helped inspire my own pilgrimage in 2007. That tale is told in my little e-book, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting Word/The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-First Century Pilgrim (available for free download here).
In this essay, Dalrymple explores why the mystic arm of Islam, Sufism, makes a perfect bridge between East and West, moving beyond Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and secular extremism. It’s an apt corrective to so much of the mis-information being bandied about today, especially as September 11 draws near once again.
I commend not only Dalrymple’s essay (reprinted from the New York Times), but also the website diversejourneys.com, and more, the Rand Corporation’s 2007 Report, Building Moderate Muslim Networks.
9.08.2010
Thank you, Chris, for being the voice of reason in this often unreasonable world. We are admonished to “Love one another as Christ loved us,” if only Christians would truly take this to heart, love our Muslim brothers and sisters, and those of other faiths, this would truly be a better world. We each can make a difference, one person at a time, one love at a time.
9.08.2010