Graphic: One of the small tombs at Piran Kaliyar, the burial place of a saint near the city of Rourkee in north India.

I have shown "I am a Sufi, I am a Muslim" several times to classes, and consider it the best film on Sufism that I've seen recently, but it has both pluses and minuses. The film focuses on five settings:

1. The dargah ("tomb") of Shah Husein in Lahore, Pakistan, and an interview with a wandering dervish-singer there. Given his black clothing, this dervish may well be a Malatimiya Sufi, an order known for antinomian practices (specifically, smoking lots and lots of hash).
2. A Naqshbandi center at Mohra Sharif, an isolated mountain monastery in Pakistan. The film also shows the performance of a zikr (rhythmic melodic chant, usually of the name of God, to promote remembrance of God), and an interview with the grandson of the sajja-nashin (the Pir who is the spiritual leader at Mohra Sharif. The grandson gives some of his talk in Urdu, some later in English, and refers to centers in Europe and America.
3. A zikr at a Rifa`i Tariqa center in the city of Skopje, Macedonia. This is the most unusual and (in some aspects) disturbing, since some of the people doing the zikr shove spikes and darts through various parts of their bodies (tongues, cheeks, neck, torso, etc.). This zikr is interspersed with an interview with the Rifa`i shaykh who runs the center.
4. The Mehlevi whirling dance as another form of zikr. The music is haunting, dreamy, rythmic, and very powerful, but the commentary is lame. This shows the dance, but doesn't say much of anything about the symbolism of the dance itself.
5. An urs ("wedding," the name given to the celebration on a saint's death anniversary, which is conceived as the marriage with Allah) in Pakistan at the dargah of Nuri Buri. There are several singers here, but the featured performer is the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (d. 1997) who was arguably the greatest qawwali singer in the recent past. There are scenes of singing interspersed with interviews with Nusrat. The music here is absolutely fabulous.

The footage is excellent in this film, although the Rifa`i zikr is pretty intense, and the commentary on the Mehlevi zikr is weak. The biggest problem is that the narrator makes a few unfortunate generalizations in his commentary. As one example, he says (something like) "Sufism is the only form of Islam in which women get to play an equal part." Later on, we hear something like "Sufism gives Muslims an opportunity for emotional release, which they don't get in ordinary religious life." Do not believe these statements, they are not true. Still, the general portrayal is sympathetic.

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Last modified 20 December 2001