The Sufi Scientist

In the past few days, whenever I think or hear about the idea of god, I cannot help but think that the people who established the idea really did mean to use it as a metaphor for the universe. It is omnipresent, for we are the universe. Every molecule in our body can be traced back to the stars that once gave birth to these planets. Everything around us, man-made or natural, is a product of the universe. And we are all connected. It is in us, around us in every protein interaction in our body making life happen. In every DNA molecule that gets replicated. In every zygote that becomes an embryo and every embryo that becomes a person. It is the very basis of life. We are in the universe, and the universe is in us. This is much more elegantly said by Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

We are one because we are all, the universe. Alif, what existed when nothing existed, and that which will exist when nothing will exist. We came from that and will go back to that eventually. In a sense, this notion has taken away my identity with it. I am no longer what I thought I was. I am the universe and the universe is me. Which is so beautifully illustrated in various sufi poems.

Amir Khusrows

Chaap tilak sab cheeni re, mohse naina milayke...,

Bal bal jaaon mein tohre rang rajwa,

Apni see kar leeni ray mohse naina milayke...

You have robbed me of my identity just with a glance.

My life is yours, the one who dyes everything,

You have also dyed me in your color. 

The concept of rangrez (the cloth dyer) is very popular in Sufi poems from the Indian sub-continent. Excuse my inadequate knowledge of Sufi poems from the languages of the middle east for I have the misfortune of not understanding Arabic and Persian and I feel translations do not do justice to the beauty of poetry. The rangrez is used as a metaphor for the Master, friend, guide (or in my mind, the universe). Because once you realize the master, you are dyed in its color. How appropriately it fits the point I want to put across.

Bulleh Shahs

'Ranjha ranjha kardi ni main, Aape ranjha hoyi,

Saddo ni mainu deedho ranjha, Heer na aakho koi

Ranjha main which, main ranjhe vich, Hor dhyan na koi,

Repeating the name of Ranjha, I have become Ranjha myself.
Call me ye Ranjha, let no one call me Heer .
Ranjha is in me, I am in Ranjha, no other thought exists in my mind

Excuse my poor translation skills, but isn't it quite the essence of what I was trying to say above? The way science and sufism gel in my head, I wonder if it was intended to be so. I just heard a Neil deGrasse Tyson talk called The Islamic Golden Age: Naming rights. He says, “… The fact is, of all the stars that have names; two-thirds of them have Arabic names… While the constellations are Greek and Roman, the names are Arabic, and this list just goes on and on, and on and on. So, where does this come from? How does this happen? How do you get stars with Arabic names? And it happens because, there was this particularly fertile period (800-1100 A.D.), that 300 year period, the intellectual center of the world, was Baghdad. Baghdad was completely open to all visitors, all travelers, Jews, Christians, doubters (which today we might call atheists), they were all their, exchanging ideas. All of them, and it was that period we had the advances in engineering, in biology, in medicine, in mathematics… Our numerals are called what? Arabic numerals (do we stop and think about that?)… They fully exploit the discovery of zero, create a whole field of algebra (itself an Arabic word, Algorithm is an Arabic word)… All this is going on and it’s all traceable not to some long 1000 year tradition in Islam, it’s traceable to this 300 year period… The most expensive beautifully carved astrolabes come out of this period… So navigation, cellestiallary information comes from here.”

Now, a very basic search into the history of Sufism on Wikipedia has the very first sentence, “Sufism is a mystic and ascetic movement which originated in the Golden Age of Islam, from about the 9th to 10th centuries.” I admit, the source of this information is questionable, but it is enough for me to speculate and muse. Is it not possible that the very basis of Sufism was new, breakthrough scientific knowledge of the universe? Is it not possible that learned men and women sat down and discussed the universe and realized that all of us in fact came from the same place and will finally go back to the same place? Is it just a co-incidence that Sufi concepts seem to be so scientifically accurate? Is it just a co-incidence that they both started at the same geographical area and the same time period? Is it not possible that we are misunderstanding their teachings as religious text and devotion when it is, in fact, scientific poetry?

Sufism. Scientific poetry. The poetry of the universe. How elegant, how real, how surreal.