Re: What is islam???
Perhaps the following might help understanding what what was shown in the videos. What you witnessed in the videos is called ‘hadra.’
Forbidden Forms of Dhikr
(Source: Various Questions (4))
Q. Shaykh Bouti, for example, is known to have participated in the hadra. The same is also related of Shaykh `Abd al Fatah - as one of my teachers told me - from his students, such as Shaykh Mamduh and Shaykh Muhammad Rasheed.
Is there any ‘proof’ available for this?
A. To begin with, the hadra of the Ulema is not like the hadra of the Awamm. Read the classic discussions of sama and replace the latter with the word “hadra.” See for example Ibn al-Hajj’s discussion of the samain the Madkhal and al-Suhrawardi's inAwarif al-Maarif. These were major Sufi Fuqaha'. In the eyes of the true inheritors in Damascus, the Hadra there is fraught with infractions and is mostly a hadra of the Awamm which the Masters themselves nowadays have issues with, long before the objections of an outsider.
Secondly, besides the above problem, among the Ulema who might be present at a hadra there might be actual Sufis and there might be mere sympathizers who are passing through. Dr Buti may well have kissed the hand of some senior Sufi Shuyukh and stood in the hadra, just as Sh Taqi Uthmani may well have attended many Mawlids and Sh Abd al-Fattah has several Sufi silsilas among his ijazas. All this “proves” little.
It would be a mistake to blur the difference since, when it comes to brass tacks, there are divergences between the two groups. An example of this is the firm rejection I’ve witnessed, by Shadhili teachers such as Sayyid Mustafa Basir and Sayyid Muhammad al-Ya`qubi, of many of the comments Sh Abu Ghudda made in the margins of Imam al-Harith al-Muhasibi’s Risalat al-Mustarshidin.
Another example is the scandal Dr Buti caused in Syria when he called the Naqshbandis’ concept of rabita “shirk”. One of the kurdish Shuyukh of Qamushli wrote in a few days a quite useful book to correct him, although this age is no longer prepared to reap the benefit of such correctives. The `Awamm (in society and on the Internet) become tied in knots at the idea of “a fight between Ulema”. It only worsens matters when some among the latter, also, are far from prepared to be corrected, not to mention the pupils.
A further complication is that the non-Sufi Ulema of Damascus are a type of oxymoron, because they drank in tasawwuf from their environment. So, as Dr Wahba Zuhayli does, they may firmly defend what their minds comprehend, such as Tawassul and the celebration of Mawlid, but not what they do not comprehend, such as the Hadra and the Rabita, or even some of the karamat of the Awliya.(*) They may be seen in self-contradictory positions, either in good faith or because their understanding varies according to context and company but Allah knows best.
(*) When Dr Samer al-Nass spoke at length about the karaamaat of Shaykh Ahmad al-Harun in the talk devoted to him in Jamial-Tawba, Dr Hisham al-Burhani interrupted him on the pretext that he "was not focusing enough onilm!" which I thought was ironic since most of those karaamaat contained pointed lessons in Tawhid.
A final, related complication is modernism. Among their countless innovations of accommodation, the Ikhwan al-Muslimin invented a Diet Tasawwuf based on patchwork. They picked and chose. Worse, they did so according to a deliberately egalitarian vision, free of the spiritually-grounded authority (and manhaj) of the founding Awliya and their Turuq inheritors. This resulted in people like Sh Yusuf al- Qaradawi discoursing on “the real Sufism” and so forth against the Sufis themselves. This, and a post-Wahhabi, post-La-Madhhabi Azhar, is the backdrop from which your friends like Webb and “the Transtalors” take their cues, regurgitating worn-out issues over which they can accuse the Fuqaha, Sufis and Asharis of "taassub" to coat over their own talfiq and lack of adab.
Was-Salam.
GF Haddad
and they call themselves religious. They can’t even distinguish between culture and religion!