Marrakech Sufi Gathering: The Sidi Shiker World Gatherings of Tasawwuf Affiliates.  I just returned from Morocco. The Royal Government paid for airfare, hotel, and food for a week. I was invited to present my poetry to a conference of nearly 2,000 Sufis. It doesn’t seem possible – but it’s true. I was there in the triple digit heat, sharing a tajine, heaped with rich and delicious food or an elevator with people from Lebanon or France. 

In 1998, my husband, Pir Shabda Kahn, and I went to the Sacred Music Festival in Fez, Morocco as leaders on a “sacred journey.” We returned the next three years with groups of American Sufis and visited sacred sites and caravan-ed on camels in the Sahara. Our good friend, who made this possible, was a man named Dr. Sidi Ahmed Kostas. Now he is the assistant to Dr. Ahmed Toufiq, the Minister of Religious Endowments and Islamic Affairs for the king. Around the Summer Solstice June 21, 2009, Dr. Kostas and Dr. Toufiq got the go-ahead from King Muhammad VI to assemble a Sufi Conference in Marrakech July 10-12. They had less than a month!   I got a personal phone call from Dr. Kostas while in England, waiting to go to Germany and teach from my forth-coming book: Married to Muhammad, Untold History of the Prophet’s Wives. Dr. Kostas wanted me to read my poetry at the conference. I said yes.

Dr. Kostas set out to invite Sufi groups from all over the world and on 10 days notice almost 2000 people accepted the all- expense-paid invitation of airfare, beautiful accommodations and banquet-meals – from Minister Toufiq on behalf of the King of Morocco. 100 Nigerians. Chinese and South Africans. Americans, Europeans, Middle Easterners. It was the Moroccan travel agent’s nightmare. The conference was tri-lingual, Arabic, French, and English, with simultaneous translation for all presentations. The weather – hot as West African summer; the hotels were well air-conditioned. Marrakech is as sophisticated as it is beautiful.  The reason for this whirlwind was echoed in the words of the presenters. Sufism is recognized as a hedge against fundamentalism in Morocco. Sufi teachers and their followers hold the notion of the true meaning of Islam as ” the inner state that causes the feeling of peaceful surrender to the protection, safety, and healing of the Divine.” The Sufi is one who carries the essence of love, harmony, and beauty, and pays attention to transforming the nafs (ego). He or she may be a warrior of the inner jihad (a phrase that means to contend, to challenge the unrefined self). Sufis are known to stand together and chant, la illaha illallah (There is no Reality but The Reality,) celebrating this in joyful assembly. My definition of Sufi mysticism is: “It is the fragrance over the flower of religion.”

The king, like his father before him, recognized it was in Morocco’s best interest to promote this fragrant fraternity for benefit, and bring together Sufis from everywhere to foster connection and mutual brother-sisterhood.

Dr. Kostas and a photo of the king

The Ministry further seeks to fund and promote publication and education toward this gentle reflection of Islam in the culture of Morocco. 

 Of the 2000 delegates, there were less than 50 women. Three of us presented; a Moroccan scholar, Dr. Zakia Zouanate, and an American scholar and long-time Sufi friend, Murchida Tasnim Fernandez, and myself.  Several times at the break I was the only woman in the vast, hotel restrooms. The women were a tiny minority, yet 

we made our presence felt. I had instant sisterhood with the few women I saw, nodding or introducing myself to Laurence from Paris, Ikram from Fez (in the photo on the left), Hafsa from Scotland, Fatima from Nigeria, Ora from New York.

 My poems were translated by Dr. Kostas, as we stood on the stage at the banquet close to midnight Saturday night. Dinner had just ended, but nights in Morocco seem to go on forever. Before I began to read, I thanked the King. (He was absent, but it’s not often you get chance to say, “I want to thank His Majesty, King Muhammad VI for his generosity ….”) Afterward, Dr. Toufiq expressed his appreciation to me for my work on the Mothers of Islam, and told me I was always welcome in Morocco. The next day, Arabic-speaking delegates called out to me in Arabic, smiled warmly, gave thumbs up or offered me their business cards.

 The conference swag was amazing; the women received silver or gold brocade slippers and a stylish silk scarf; the men, an elegant white hooded burnous, a briefcase, leather slippers, an Arabic language Qu’ran, and a beautiful sacred manuscript book.

 Because my name ends in a consonant, an Arabic “male indicator,” and my husband’s with the female “A,” our invitations read His Eminence Tamam Kahn and Her Eminence Shabda Kahn. Nice.

Murchida Tasnim on Sufi Ethics

 On Saturday, the international press was everywhere. I gave two interviews, one to Italian TV and the other to a journalist and photographer from Brussels. You could spot the women reporters in their casual hot weather clothes, while most delegates wore traditional robes called djelabas and some kind of head covering. The Nigerians dazzled – in vivid colored caftans and hats. The day we went to the desert, it was well over 105 degrees and all who went – nearly 2000 of us – ate lunch in tents with ceiling fans and a couple portable ACs. We were there all day. The women staged a take-over and claimed the large tent designated for us and provided with pillows, couches and a computer. Sleepy men left and went elsewhere. At 7:30 we all returned for dinner in a bus caravan accompanied by a police escort all the way into Marrakech, flashing lights and all.

 The night before, we were driven to a palm garden just outside the city and entered the circle of tents on red carpets, lined with drummers and men playing long trumpets. We sat in chairs at tables of ten in twelve traditional Moroccan tents placed around a carpeted open space, desert style. The couscous and chicken arrived with a procession of tajine-carrying waiters. After dinner we listened to live Turkish music as the moon rose over the dark palms.                                                

 I return with new names and e-mails in my address file, my

Ahamed, Khalifa, and Sheik Tijani

luggage perfumed with amber from the souk, and most valuable –the gift of friendship. In this time when most people in the world are withdrawing financial largesse, when programs falter, I was conscious of how generosity on the scale of this event may bring expansion, blessing and God willing, insh’allah, the peaceful benefit of the open hand and heart.

For Italian broadcast of this event and 3 seconds while I answer the question, “What is Sufism?” see:  http://video.sky.it/videoportale/index.shtml?bcpid=1513658495&bctid=29219701001

 ”Sufism: the Heart of Islam” with Wendy McLaughlin. I mentioned Karen Armstrong, Muhammad, A Prophet for our Time; Martin Lings, Muhammad, His Life Based on the Earliest Sources; and Reza Azlan, No god but God. These all have general material on Muhammad’s wives and daughters. I forgot to mention the classic: Nabia Abbott, Aisha, the Beloved of Muhammad.

If you search farther into the primary sources – Muhammad Ibn Sa’d, The Women of Medina; Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari (in thirty-some volumes); A. Guillaume’s translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (The Life of Muhammad); and the Alim, CD ROM (for Hadith). Gordon Newby wrote A History of the Jews of Arabia.  From here on, road leads into road…. Ya Fattah (may the way open!)

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[FLASH - The poetry issue  of  The Sound will be posted here as a pdf on Monday, January 12.]

On Nonsense and Metaphor, by Philip Dacey

 T.S. Elliot believed the modern inclination is for what he terms “melodious raving.” We tolerate poets, he said, who don’t know exactly what they are saying but manage to say well whatever it is they are saying, who sound good and sound well…

 Nonsense is the vehicle of the unconscious. The unconscious is revolutionary. Leaping poetry and deep imagist poetry are nonsense poetry. Robert Bly: “There ought to be a National Crazy Day once a year when we could all act crazy and stop putting the burden of our craziness on other people, who get so much of it they wind up institutionalized.” Nonsense poetry is equivalent to cleaning up your own mess. Yeats’ Crazy Jane and Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer are eating their own grief…

 Nonsense is an option at any point in the composition of a poem. It may or may not be exercised. It is a wrong turning that is a right turning.

New Yorker magazine poetry event. October

Metaphor is nonsense. Nonsense is metaphor. “Nonsense as a critical activity is and is about change; is an aspect of and is about the ongoing nature of social process.” (Susan Stewart, Nonsense.) It constitutes a challenge to the established order that has become disordered by reason of its being established, an unresponsive institution. “You must change your life.” [the last line from Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo. Here are the first lines describing Apollo’s statue: ]

 We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low

gleams in all its power…

 Rilke’s angels are agents of nonsense. Nonsense poetry is not coterminous with light verse. The disenfranchised gravitate to nonsense, instinctually. The lingo of subcultures is a retreat that is simultaneously the forging of a weapon for self-empowerment.

“…poetry is a game of chicken played with words instead of automobiles. The aim is to steer as close as possible to nonsense without hitting it.”

[excerpts from "In Praise of Nonsense," published in Milkweed Chronicle: A Journal of Poetry and Graphics (Fall 1980).

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Philip Dacey, author of ten books of poetry as well as many chapbooks, lives in New York City. He earned a B.S. from St. Louis University in 1961, an M.A. from Stanford in 1967, and a M.F.A. in 1970 from the University of Iowa. Dacey served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria in the mid 1960s and has taught at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, Miles College, and Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. In 1985 Dacey was a distinguished poet in residence at Wichita State University. Awards include a Fulbright lectureship in creative writing in Yugoslavia (1988); two National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowships (1975, 1980); YM-YWHA’s Poetry Center Discovery Award (1974); three Pushcart Prizes for poetry (1977, 1982, 2001); first prizes for poems in Yankee, Poet and Critic, Prairie Schooner, and Kansas Quarterly, and many regional awards. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Esquire, The Nation, American Review, Paris Review. His books include The Deathbed Playboy (Eastern Washington U. Press,

1999), The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (Turning Point, 2004), and The New York Postcard Sonnets: A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan (Rain Mountain Press, 2007). He also co-edited, with David Jauss, the anthology: Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (Harper & Row, 1986). 

I’m writing to the High School students I met at Dodge: Riley, John, Abigail, and Samantha. There were two others, but I didn’t get their E-mail. I am writing to ask them to send the poems they are writing have written and are thinking about writing so I can publish them in The Sound, the newsletter I edit.  I wish someone had written me when I was in high school, when poetry was as much a part of my identity as music. When my life blew up every couple of days. When all I had was the school “Full Cry” to submit to.

Ed Hirsh said at Dodge: “I had the idea if you started talking about poems you love, the subject of poetry would deliver itself. …The poems that changed me – like Neruda’s odes– in those poems feeling came first, then the rest. …Spirit and desire have to be embodied in poetry.”

I like that he speaks of “embodying” rather than just talking about, or mentioning. A much stronger commitment. And some of us are powerfully committed to WORDS.

Download last years Poetry Issue of The Sound – here.

This image appeared on the glass of the coffee table, bringing  outside leaves into the room. An Arabic shadda  – added in photoshop – turns the upside down autumn skyscape into a joyful word for Unity.

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Here are the references from the radio show: Sufism: the Heart of Islam with Wendy McLaughlin. I mentioned Karen Armstrong, Muhammad, A Prophet for our Time; Martin Lings, Muhammad, His Life Based on the Earliest Sources; and Reza Azlan, No god but God. These all have general material on Muhammad’s wives and daughters. I forgot to mention the classic: Nabia Abbott, Aisha, the Beloved of Muhammad.

If you search farther into the primary sources – Muhammad Ibn Sa’d, The Women of Medina; Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari (in thirty-some volumes); A. Guillaume’s translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (The Life of Muhammad); and the Alim, CD ROM (for Hadith). Gordon Newby wrote A History of the Jews of Arabia.  From here on, road leads into road…. Ya Fattah (may the way open!)

The CD’s played on the show are: White Shade Cloud and The Woman with Muhammad - to order contact www.marinsufis.com   click on - music for sale and Hear a sample! There will be a link to Wendy’s show here soon.

Damascus. One my favorite places on earth. May it be protected! See May archive for my visit to the Mosque of the Grand Mufti.

My good friend Wendy Taylor Carlisle and I spent four soggy but word-happy days at Dodge a couple weeks ago. I gathered sixty-some pages of notes on the four days of poetry. The website states that almost 20,000 people attended! Student Day claimed a registration of 5,000 high school students from all over the country. I spoke with youth poets from Maryland, New Jersey, and Jacksonville, Florida. Several offered to send poems to The Sound – the newsletter I edit – for the January poetry issue. Here are words from master poets Robert Haas, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lucille Clifton when they spoke to the young writers:

Robert Haas

Just imagine a place where American High School students and American writers could get together and talk about poetry!

The order in which you present information is crucial. Robert Frost wrote: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” A translation might read, “There is something that does not love a wall.” That simple inversion would lose the poetic beauty of the phrase. It can strike the reader -  yes, but in examining what is meant, the order of the words makes it hard to pin that down…

Sometimes it’s good to take down barriers, sometimes it’s good to put them up. [He says later on referring to a Wallace Stevens poem] – That poem hypnotized me because it felt emotionally true.

Why is poetry so powerful? An answer to that might be: Whole worlds we acquire with a word – just buried inside one word!

Naomi reading at Dodge

Naomi Shihab Nye:

 Here’s an idea: hand out business cards with the names of your five favorite poets.

 Whatever the experience, you can always find a poem that’s been to that moment before you.

 Poetry is the cheapest art. You don’t have to be rich to write,  but you will be rich because the language can give you so much. Time slows down when you write a poem: think of this, notice that…take inspiration  from things on the perimeters of your life, ask questions and wonder. Curiosity helps keep poetry alive. Poets aren’t ever bored. There is so much to think about!

Lucille Clifton:

 There are all kinds of ways of being smart. 

 I want to write about what it is to be human, about us recognizing in each other a kind of sameness. This culture is afraid of difference. There are lots of different names for deity, and deity answers [to them all].

 Walt Whitman didn’t have an MFA. I think one has to feel in order to be a fine poet; connect spirit, feeling, and intellect, or just write greeting cards.

Cleverness is often in the way of poetry!

 If someone doesn’t teach you something, go out and learn it. The more you learn, the more you are able to cope with surprises.

 If you leave reason out sometimes you can have important things, but if you leave heart out, your writing doesn’t live.

Poetry wants to speak for those who have not yet found a voice to speak.

The greatest poet writing in my time is Stanley Kunitz.

Our mission as poets is to let the poem become what it wants to be.

The Woman with Muhammad: poetry and spokenword

Original poems read by Tamam Kahn recorded live at CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies), December, 2005

Coleman Barks has written about Tamam’s efforts, “Finally we get to meeet the First Women of Islam!” All spokenword beats are courtesy of DJ Solomon. Some poems are accompanied with music by Shabda Kahn and Irina Mikhailova. Recorded by Shabda Kahn, and mixed by Al Shabda Owens. Photo and artwork by Shabda. ©completeword productions, 2008.

Price: $15

Media type: CD

to order contact www.marinsufis.com         click on - music for sale and Hear a sample!

Hafsa’s Qu’ran

 Marwan, governor of Medina… sent a courier to Hafsa

asking for the folios but she refused him…

                                                            hadith from Anas ibn Malik

Tell The Governor I say no,
I don’t accept command or bribe
I do not vacillate
and you can leave, now go.

I am the Prophet’s librarian.  And this
is the book: al-Kitab. The only set
of Abu Bakr’s folios, first copy of God’s kiss.
Its ink still hums against my very skin.

The Mother Who Reads, the Prophet’s librarian,
how blessed I am by al-Kitab,
which, after the last companion’s gone
may wash believers in the Word-of-God

Arabic, a printed alembic architecture of light
recorded on palm stalk, on camel’s
shoulder-bone, or held in memory;
copied to parchment then, and
swaddled with a length of green cloth, first

Qu’ran passed from my father
down to Uthman, then to me. Between the leaves
is Revelation. How can someone like you understand,
Marwan? You set yourself to be the one

to grab and shred and burn
this first Qu’ran (may copies rise and multiply),
as soon as I am shrouded in clean cloth
and lowered into earth.

(written by Tamam for the Seven Pillars inauguration weekend)

No less than the prophets, Hagar speaks

He had to take us there, way out in Beersheba,
the land of nothing. His face was a hungry moon,
gaunt and white. He couldn’t look at me.

A woman doesn’t start a nation with a baby
and a mule; not alone she doesn’t, so Sarah helped
with her story of that jealousy that pushed me out

like I pushed Ishmael. I knew before my baby came.
I’d seen the well, foresaw
the black stone, had the tearing pain,

the time of doubt. I ran between
the hills, but that was in a vision. After that the time
had come to run and I was fierce

and mad with thirst for all I left behind and
as I ran I yelled at God, I called on God,
I said – Give it and hold nothing back. After Ishmael

unearthed the Well of Zamzam with his heel,
after the caravans found us, after Mecca
burst awake around us, after

Abraham returned to wake the Ka’ba,
then I could relax. My gift from God
is larger than I am. I doubt they mention it.

It’s plain, pinned at both shoulders,
the woman’s hair and face talcumed with dust.
A revolution, exile –
she, rumpled and threadbare,
ahead: a decade of colorless fabric, rough
patches. What does a wife wear
or a daughter
while she changes history?

Something nice, like the tunic
pictured in a textile manuscript,
excavated with tweezers,
flattened and guessed at,
a linen shift with dark woven bands,
running shoulder to hem.

You make up the colors, then see them
brighten in a washing tub, her hands
twisting and wringing out the cloth.

Now see her pull it over her head and arms,
then work it down her wet braids and body
as it settles with a shrug.
Dripping and decorated. Cooler.
Water birds with red legs are hand stitched
in bands at the wrist.
She can walk to the market like this,
barefoot and dripping.

Dress code came later.