Friday, December 31, 2004
DIVINE FEMININE IN ISLAM
This is a continuation of my post from last Wednesday that reported on an article at crescentlife.com that reported on "Islam and the Divine Feminine". Here is the author's website sent in by a reader. Certainly paints a novel picture of Sufism.
Here in one of the webpages linked you will find the article "The Return of Lilith: Reintegration, the Dark Feminine, and Sufi Islam" which says in part:
These days, one of the most powerful archetypes being revived in feminist religion is Lilith, archetype of the "dark" inner feminine. For ages she had been cast aside and denigrated by patriarchal religion as a demoness, but now she is being looked at with renewed interest. To anyone following Lilith's career, it would be interesting to learn how she already had been rehabilitated centuries ago in Islamic Sufi guise. She is known to Muslims as Layla — of Layla and Majnun fame.
And:
In Christianity and Islam, something went wrong. Jesus and Muhammad were very kind to women and tried hard to remove patriarchal oppression of them. But after them, their followers reinstated patriarchal misogyny full force. However, feminist mystics like me can still retrieve the original feminist spirit from the source of the religion and bring it back to the forefront.
The good news is that Sufism has recovered and reintegrated the Dark Feminine side in the person of Layla, whose name comes from the same Semitic root as Lilith, meaning 'night'. Layla is the name for God as a beloved Woman in Sufi poetry, and Her name shows the embrace of the positive side of the night as the Dark Mother, the love that overwhelms and heals the fear of the darkness. Kali means 'black' and Lilith/Layla refers to the blackness of night, the power of the ultimate Divine Feminine to dissolve all forms.
We must adore the Divine Feminine in all women and must never give into the temptation to demonize women.
Is this the modern face of Sufi Traditionalism? My, my...I bet this author would be very much in tune with Cheryl Rose's Black Madonnas tour. She would certainly find kinship with China Galland and her book _Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna_.
She mentions the Traditionalist author Henry Corbin in her article:
In Sufism, the "darkness" of Layla does not come across as something nefarious or threatening. It can even be luminous-the experience of the "Black Light" (see Henry Corbin, _The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism_).
When a religion dips into sacred sex, temple prostitution is a logical arrangement so that Tantra can be practiced. The author has a link on her home page for an article on "Islam and Tantra". Aleister Crowley demonstrated where the practice of Tantra takes faith. The article itself is an example of comparative religions, and in this case Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Sufism are all discussed. This kind of interreligious dialogue has the potential of uniting Traditional religions into a degenerate worldview.
Thanks to a reader for sending in the link.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
