At the Sufi Tavern: Adventures in African and Eastern Spirituality

This chapter complements the author’s “Looking at the West Looking at the East” in this volume. Using the playful metaphor of a “Sufi tavern,” the author takes the reader on a personal pilgrimage across the three Abrahamic faiths–Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–with their origins in the Middle and Near East and emanations southward to Africa, westward to the Americas, and all the way to India in the Far East. These anchorages are interspersed with encounters with the religions of the African diaspora, from Candomblé in Brazil (elaborated in the author’s second chapter in this volume) to Voudoun in Haiti. From the philosophy of “the said and the unsaid” of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Susan Sontag to the syncretic yet “unsayable” experiences of Haitian Voudoun and numinous encounters with Sufism, the author explores mysticism and Leo Strauss’ esotericism as connecting threads that straddle antinomies: East and West, revelation (religion) and philosophy; appearance and intuition; and psychiatry, psychotherapy, and faith. In a concluding pair of mystical encounters, the author offers a personal integration of the philosophy of love as a gloss on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “shortest shadow” in the blistering noon-day sun of a Carthusian Convent in southern Brazil with his fiancée where “one turns into two.” This is complemented with a visit to a Voudoun ounfò or temple in the Haitian quarter of Montréal-Nord, that stretches into a midnight marriage ritual where the “longest shadow” is cast. The closing message is that the East that we seek is here, at our side.