Sufism is sometimes the touchstone to gauge stereotyped personalities. Their responses to the mystical phenomenon of Islam, which its Salafi grand narrative expelled from the Right Path, are conditioned by their philosophy, aesthetics, universality and the ardent love to go beyond the limit of their egotistic selves. Considering this, Imam Ghazali and Imam Khomeini are not what the West has made them out to be, the former as an orthodox philosopher who appropriated all heterogeneous values including that of Sufism to the homogeneity of rigid religiosity and the latter as a ruthless political Islamist who knows nothing but issuing cruel fatwas.
See these verses:
A bird I am, this body was my cage
But I have flown leaving it as token.
(Imam Ghazali quotes from Margaret Smith’s Al Ghazali the Mystic)[1]
**
Just a sip from the Friend
And drunk, I will strip my soul
From the robe of existence.
(Imam Khomeini in his Jug of Love, to be brought by Other Books, Calicut, soon)[2]
Khomeni writes again:
Open the door of the tavern before me night and day,
For I have become weary of the mosque and seminary. (Ibid)
(What if an Edward Fitzgerald had spotted Jug of Love like he did Omar Khayyam’s Rubayyat? Khomeini would have been an epicurean drunkard not a fanatic Islamist in the annals of West’s history of Persia. Look how blind the Orientalist is, while he sees everything)
