Sufis' In Saudi Arabia
SUFISM IN SÀUDI ARABIA There’s not much love in the eyes of the low-level Saudi official clapping me into leg irons. And in the dank jail of the police station on the outskirts of Mecca, the mood is anything but playful. My accuser stands rigid at the open doorway leading out onto the midnight streets of the city’s suburbs. “So you’re a Sufi,” he’d barked at me minutes earlier, labelling me a member of the mystical Islamic sect that values a personal relationship with God over blind obedience to the Koran. I’m not, but that didn’t seem to matter much to my gaoler. I’d been picked up at the funeral of 60-year-old Sheik Mohammed Alawi al-Malki, Saudi Arabia’s leading Sufi, whose sudden death from complications arising from diabetes had sent shock waves through his community. A foreigner with a camera, mingling with members of a sect considered heathens by more rigid Islamists, was enough to arouse suspicion. My four hours in detention was only a small taste of