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Thursday, January 24, 2013

Sufism: A Form of Escapism

http://www.carolradway.com/sufism/sufism.htm
By Larbi Arbaoui

Through fiction and fantasy, the human mind perpetuates and flies high to reach and embrace the clouds which draw dreams that may not be realized or require decades to become reality. Every one of us has experienced this fanciful daydreaming at a certain time in our life. We resort to this fabulous faculty every now and then in an attempt to escape harsh realities or to depict an exotic imaginary life as psychological comfort and a delusive response to the urgent desires of the deprived self.  This is the human mind, but sometimes in pertinent stark separation from the real world. Yet, when this process has become a life style, a mode of thinking and an approach towards one’s life, we start to think about extreme Sufism.

In our talk about Sufism, I don’t mean that branch which promotes individual discipline as a route to reach God through diligence in worship and self-purification of the heart of bad attitudes, avoiding forbidden things and keeping good moral character. I have to draw the dividing line between Sufism as a religious practice and as a thinking pattern that has to do more with escapism, and irrational thinking evoking defeatism and moral decadence.

In this regard, I mean specifically the people who whenever they feel discomfort or lack sufficient tools to change their conditions, resort to dreams and fantasies under the pretext of asceticism and mysticism. Those people, with their imagination that is in most cases beyond general standards of the rational and proper reflection, live in ivory towers being aloof from the real world.  They immerse into a world of their own perception and phantasms, which is subject to abstract laws that have nothing to do with common sense.

Some of these illusionists claim to have established physical contact with the divine as in the case of Sheikh Sidi Mohammed Ben Ali Elzimrani who is buried in Bab Ftouh in the city of Fez.  Through their religious journey in the pursuit of God and true practices, they believe to have had the secrets of the globe revealed to them and were foretold the keys of the unseen metaphysical world. Some of them believe to have intermingled with the “self” of God and belong to His kingdom after a long process of self-cleansing. However, their claims are much ado about nothing, since they can’t provide a practical way by which other people may undergo the same experiences. This is crystal clear evidence that those manifestations happen only in their mere dreams and are far from reality.

These attempts to transcend common sense and human understanding are explained as a total defeat and deficit to participate in the process of change and an inability to function positively in society. Here lies the crisis of intellects who fail to cope with the changes taking place in all the facets of contemporary life.  Instead of integrating into society and contributing to its progress, they prefer to turn to their dreams and myths that are a far cry from their real existence.  This chasm between the imaginary and real world is highly manifested through their thwarting of the concrete world in which they physically belong and by their mythical ideas.

Originally published in Morocco World News
Taroudant, Morocco, June 24, 2012

Sexual Freedom is Conducive to Social Disorder

By Larbi Arbaoui

The proposal to repeal the Penal Code Article 490, which prohibits sexual relations outside of marriage does not please everyone, and rather made so many gorges rise.

This proposal doesn’t provide a solution, but creates more problems and paves the way to endless social and ethical issues. Sexual freedom endorsed by few activists should not be understood as a mere political card aiming to kindle the rough of Islamist-led government. For human right activists, this provision of law is an obstacle to sexual freedom, which – they believe – is one of the freedoms that every individual has to be endowed with. But can we just stop at that level?

Sexual freedom advocated by the so-called human right activists is to be understood as an explicit sexual liberation movement aiming to increase the acceptance of sex outside social institutions, implicitly including heterosexual, lesbianism and homosexuality. These proposals, which are in stark contrast with Moroccan religion and culture, may lead other people to claim public nudity as unalienable personal rights, the normalization of homosexuality as an alternative form of legal sexuality and more likely abortion will be legalized. Before you come down on the side of a certain party, I would like to invite you to consider these facts, which are the result of sexual intercourse outside marriage.

Every year in Morocco, according to figures of the Moroccan Association of the National Institution for Solidarity with Women in Distress (Insaf), quoted by AFP, more than 80,000 children are born out of wedlock. Such alarming figures of homeless and abandoned children call into question the responsibility of everyone and the role of family.

What future is there for babies who are the result of a fleeting ephemeral pleasure? Who is to blame for children who have no chance to have a social status or to be recognized by their fathers? It is up to you to guess under what circumstances these children will be raised and educated so that they can function properly in their society.

Sexual freedom under the pretext of securing individual rights is in collision with the requirements of international human rights, which emphasize the respect of the specificities of a certain nation. These claims are very dangerous to the natural balance and stability of the society. Family is not only a social pretext, under which sexual rapport is practiced legally, but a social institution that affords protection and care for the babies and also a cultural unit which teaches human values and beliefs to the next generations.

Susan L. Brown from Bowling Green State University found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.” Any violation of family as a social and cultural unit is a knockdown to the history and human values.

People who have no respect for the family, social values and cultural considerations that characterize a certain people are likely to be driven by their uncontrolled sexual desires. I do believe, that sexual desires if not suppressed and controlled outside a social pretext, that will protect both partners, will naturally lead the whole population to chaos and will bring the society to a moral decadence. At the absence of regulations and explicit penal codes, such people, who advocate sexual freedom, will be immersed in an extreme indulgence in sensual pleasures that may be the cause of so many health complications and social disorder.

Originally published in Morocco World News
Taroudant, Morocco, June 27, 2012