Conducted by Adam Liddle, Associate Editor of the Journal of Contemplative Studies.
JCS: For you, what is contemplation?
OO: That’s a big question. First, it’s helpful to consider the etymology of the word. In English “contemplation” comes from the Latin contemplatio, which originally referred to marking out a space for visual divination practices, auguries, and the like. So that was the original Latin meaning, but it was mainly used to translate the Greek theoria, which meant to look or gaze at sacred objects, particularly on pilgrimages. And so Plato used the metaphor of this pilgrimage of theoria in his dialogues as a kind of metaphor for ascending to witness the Forms. I understand contemplation in the Western tradition to come from this concept of theoria, particularly as articulated by Plato and the Neoplatonists. For Plotinus, theoria was how everything comes into being and the goal of life and existence: the One contemplates Itself, it “theoria-izes” itself, and that’s what produces existence, and our greatest joy and happiness is also in contemplating the One. So theoria in this context is more than just thinking; it’s a kind of existential engagement that is at once noetic and ontic—combining knowledge and being.
I work mainly on Sufism and Orisha traditions from West Africa. So for me, if I’m going to use the term “contemplation,” I need to understand its history and the role this term has played in English, Latin, and Greek and then I can then look for parallels and similarities in the languages and traditions I study. In the Sufi and Orisha traditions, there are many such parallels to theoria and contemplatio. Theoria, for one, has this visual metaphor embedded in it, much like the term al-mushāhada in Sufism, which means direct witnessing. Typically, this is direct witnessing of the Divine or the Self, which are ultimately the same thing.
One of the main Sufi traditions I work on is the Tijāniyyah, which is the most popular form of Sufism in West Africa. And the most influential contemporary Shaykh or master in that tradition, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, defined al–mushāhada as “the vision of the Real, by the Real, through the Real.” So the Real is witnessing itself through you, and you are nothing other than the Real. That’s al-mushāhada.
But there are a cluster of other terms that are similar to theoria or contemplatio in the Sufi tradition. You also have fikr, which is kind of like meditation. It’s the focused attention upon a thing for a purpose. Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse described fikr as what goes from you to God. The Qur’an, for example, repeatedly tells Muslims: tafakkurū fī ayat Allāh—to meditate upon the signs of God in creation. This could be the night and the day, the rain, the trees, the waves, the growing of plants, the turning of the seasons. You fix your attention so that the deeper meanings, the symbolism, of these things are revealed to you. So that’s somewhat akin to the way I see contemplation used in English in a general sense.
Fikr is also used in conjunction with the term dhikr, which is invocation or remembrance. It’s similar to a mantra practice in which the various names of God or formulae are focused on really, really intently. You say them over and over—like 100,000 or 200,000 times in a day. You might move from saying the names for God with your tongue to saying them with your heart, to a more subtle center further in. And this brings you to deeper levels of awareness and consciousness. So in the Sufi tradition, there is a constellation of terms that bear a family resemblance to the Greek and Latin, especially Neoplatonic, concepts of theoria and contemplatio.
Then on the Ifa side, in Yoruba traditions, there are also some interesting similarities to Greek traditions and theoria. Here too there is a focus on pilgrimages, festivals, divination, sacrifices, and on witnessing sacred spectacles. Even everyday practices of devotion to the Oriṣa (somewhat akin to “deities”), offering them sacrifices or “feeding them,” singing and reciting prayers or maintaining altars, performing divination to communicate with them—there’s a kind of witnessing and communion with the Oriṣa that is akin to both classical Greco-Roman and medieval Christian descriptions of contemplation. But unlike the view that many people today have about contemplation, a lot of the contemplation in Orisha traditions takes place in dynamic settings. People are dancing to music. People are singing. Some people think of moving your body as antithetical to contemplation, instead of a tremendous aid. In Ifa and other Orisha traditions, dancing, moving, singing, drumming are things that help us contemplate. The dances and complex polyrhythms and rituals are at once objects of contemplation as well as means of opening oneself up to more profound states of contemplation, of attending to what’s really real.
The Qur’an, for example, repeatedly tells Muslims: tafakkurū fī ayat Allāh—to meditate upon the signs of God in creation. This could be the night and the day, the rain, the trees, the waves, the growing of plants, the turning of the seasons. You fix your attention so that the deeper meanings, the symbolism, of these things are revealed to you.
JCS: You’ve been comparing Western contemplation and the etymology of it with these different traditions. And then you mentioned that we don’t really see in modern Western contemplation a kind of attention to dance and movement and music as contemplative. So how do we think about contemplation in Contemplative Studies beyond just a Western view of what it is, in a culturally nuanced, multidisciplinary way, bringing all of this together? Is contemplation a good term for us? And how does it encapsulate all of this? How can we bring this together in a meaningful way?
OO: I think we have to begin by acknowledging that the reason why “contemplation” is the central term here is the histories of global dominance and imperialism of Western European powers. If the Yoruba people had developed machine guns first, we’d be talking about ironu (a Yoruba term meaning “to look within”), or if the Ottomans had conquered Europe in the 16th century, we might be here talking about dhikr and fikr, and tafakkur. It’s important to recognize that from the outset.
Given that, we have to deal with the sociopolitical realities this situation has created. English is a dominant language, not just in scholarship, but on the internet, in entertainment, etc. So that’s where we are. So we have almost no choice but to use English if we want to reach as global and as diverse of an audience as possible.
But what we can do is use the English term “contemplation” as a window or a doorway onto a much richer, more nuanced, and fine-grained understanding of different categories and practices in different traditions. Even in the Sufi tradition, there are many commonalities between Sufism in South Asia and West Africa, but there are also important differences in practice, terminology, and theorization. Even within Sufism in West Africa, sometimes even within the same spiritual lineage, people in different branches of this lineage will do certain things very differently.
And that’s wonderful. And that’s a plenitude. That’s something we can benefit from and learn from.
So I think with Contemplative Studies, the first key to trying to move toward some kind of real plurality is first acknowledging the discipline’s own provinciality and locality, coming from a particular tradition with a particular history with a particular set of problems and all of that. And then that allows you to open yourself up to other traditions and kind of take them on their own terms at the same level as your own background and training.
Most of the people I work with in Sufi or Oriṣa traditions don’t care if anyone considers their traditions to be “contemplative,” or if they’re included in Contemplative Studies; they have their own categories, disciplines, and concerns. That’s not an issue for them. But it is for us in academia. What can we learn from their traditions? And what can we do in our settings to deal with the messed-up dynamics that have been and continue to oppress and marginalize these traditions and their people economically, politically, intellectually, and otherwise?
My own father was born a colonial subject, not a citizen, of the British Empire, and was sent to a boarding school because the policy was to distance people from their local cultures and customs in order to “civilize” them. We had a similar thing, although much more severe with the boarding schools here in North America.
In any event, this is a major issue because these traditions are not the ones out of which the modes of thought and life that are threatening millions of species and the habitability of the planet arose. So we need them; we can’t afford to ignore them. It would be one thing if the dominant hegemonic societies and paradigms were doing well. But they’re not doing so well. We’re not doing well at all by any metrics. Even where we seem to be doing well, it’s often because we’re relying on many other people doing much worse to support this wellbeing of a few (cheap iPhones and computing power rely on terrible exploitation in their supply chains from mines in Congo to factories in China).
So anyway, practically in terms of Contemplative Studies, I think it can take this realistic approach, acknowledging its particular history, and open itself up to other approaches with distinct histories, categories, practices, and emphases.
With Contemplative Studies, the first key to trying to move toward some kind of real plurality is first acknowledging the discipline’s own provinciality and locality, coming from a particular tradition with a particular history with a particular set of problems and all of that.
JCS: That’s great. You’ve already talked a little about how contemplation is relevant to your current research, but is there anything else you want to add?
OO: So I’m working on two things right now. One is a book manuscript and podcast about Sufi poetry. And the other is a book on Yoruba mythology with my brother, who works in the same field.
Poetry, you might say, is dynamic contemplation. One popular Sufi ceremony is called Samā’, which literally means listening, but it refers to something like a session in which people sing poetry and recite the Qur’an. In those ceremonies, most participants experience a profound introversion—a focus on one’s own heart and inner reality, and ultimately the Divine Reality. Some people go into ecstatic states (aḥwāl) or experience “openings” (futūḥāt) or undergo enlightenment. This recitation of poetry takes people to different states that would be difficult to access otherwise.
Part of my research now is looking at this practice and how it works. Why poetry? What is the role of the rhythm, the rhymes, and the metaphors? I’m not exactly putting people in fMRIs and saying, “This is your brain on Sufi poetry.” But the Sufi tradition understands the world as a world of metaphor. Everything is a metaphor for the one true reality, the one consciousness, the Real—that is to say, God. And one important metaphor used for creation is speech. God speaks everything into being, and creation is ordered, and ordered speech is poetry, so the entire cosmos is essentially a poem. In the words of Amir Sulaiman, a contemporary English-language Sufi poet: “It’s right there in the name: it’s a ‘uni-verse.’” Poetry is thus an echo of the continuous creative act and can work to take us back to “who we were before we were,” to use the Sufi saying.
Poetry is sometimes called licit magic in the tradition because regular magic is prohibited, but poetry can change your perception of reality, your mood, your thought processes with just a few measured words. It’s magic. Poetry combines your emotions, your body, and your intellect. It can reintegrate you with the rhythms of that cosmic poem and reveal all kinds of things to you—most importantly the nature of your true self or no-self.
So, I’m looking at how we might perceive the world as poetry and how we might move through a world in which everything is a sign, a metaphor. In a sense, everything is a dream, but it’s not like The Matrix, where you’re supposed to wake up and just get out of it. Instead, it’s like a poem you enjoy. It’s art. It’s an artifice, but one created with intention. It’s like an overflow of reality—you try to recognize it for what it is, understand its deeper meanings, and bask in this reality, not run away from it.
So anyway, that’s all to say that I am currently looking at Sufi poetry, how it works, and what it’s saying. I’m also looking at how poetry cultivates particular modes of being and consciousness.
JCS: So does the contemplative life involve this poetic way of understanding experience as an unfolding aesthetic?
OO: The aesthetics are super important. There’s a famous Ḥadīth that says, “God is beautiful and that he loves beauty.” Here beauty is not just a distraction or temptation, but instead a reflection of the Divine, it is the Divine.
But this can mess you up. The analogy that one of my teachers uses is birds flying into windows. The world is like that, a fun house of mirrors. You see the beautiful face of the Divine reflected everywhere, but if you just run toward it at full tilt, you’re going to keep smacking into it. You’re not going to get to kiss your beloved. So you have to learn to navigate the world of reflections of Divine Beauty. The sweetness we taste in sugar is a reflection or manifestation of Divine Sweetness, but if we just eat sugar all day, we’re going to get very sick. So it’s a process of recognizing and understanding the manifestations of the Real in every phenomenon and treating each with the proper adab or courtesy it demands. You can see God in a crouching tiger, but it’s still usually good adab or manners to give it a wide berth.
It’s just to engage with the world in this way: as reflections of the divine. And just as with reading a poem, you don’t just read it once and you’re done. If you’re really paying attention, you get something new every time. It’s a spring that keeps flowing.
This way of engaging with poetry, reciting poetry, and reciting the Qur’an shapes and cultivates how you interact with yourself, the world, and other people. The same is true in Ifa with the Odu, the 256 chapters of the sacred orature of Ifa. It really starts structuring how you perceive and experience the world, not just how you think about the world. You start experiencing reality as structured through these Odu, and you start seeing patterns and understanding things through the Odu. The world becomes, in a certain sense, intelligible—no less mysterious, but intelligible and beautiful.
You might move from saying the names for God with your tongue to saying them with your heart, to a more subtle center further in. And this brings you to deeper levels of awareness and consciousness.
JCS: That’s all really incredible. I’m excited to read more of your work. You also have a podcast coming out. What is the name of that podcast?
OO: Logic of the Birds. It’s actually a term from the Quran, Mantiq al-Ṭayr: Manṭiq in Arabic means both logic and speech, and Ṭayr means birds, and so you have the logic or language of the birds, which refers to poetry.
JCS: And is that out yet? Or is that forthcoming?
OO: Yes, it’s out. We have, eleven or twelve episodes up and another thirteen or so to upload.
JCS: Wonderful. So what are you excited about, then? You have all this great work you’re doing. What are you excited about for the future of Contemplative Studies?
OO: When we first entered into the current hegemonic world system, all of the other, non-Western intellectual traditions were categorized as religious. And they were suppressed, marginalized at home, and they were treated like objects of study in the colonial metropoles: things you think about, not places or traditions you can think from.
Contemplative Studies is exciting to me because it’s a breach in this wall of provinciality and narrowness. And so the wisdom, the practices, and the insights from these other traditions are now finding a space to breathe and move in the academy that once tried to destroy or fossilize them. They used to be treated like objects in the Natural History Museum. You go out into the wild, you shoot a buffalo, you bring it back, and you say, “Here’s a buffalo.” That’s what a lot of scholarship was. But these boundaries are breaking down, and that’s really exciting to me.
It’s exciting for two reasons. One, it’s never good to be stupid and provincial and arrogant. Two, Contemplative Studies may offer important remedies to our current crises. We’re facing massive environmental, economic, and political crises. There are a crises of meaning, of connection, of mental health, profound spiritual crises. And the dominant societal and intellectual paradigms have been unable to solve them.
And so these traditions provide alternative ways of looking at and addressing these. And they really seem to work quite well. I’m not saying precolonial societies were all perfect or idyllic, but many of the traditions which they cultivated powerfully address the crises that our current modes of life have created. So the field of Contemplative Studies is really exciting in that regard. It gets us to rethink some fundamental things and helps us learn from traditions that we (in the Academy) long marginalized or looked down upon.
Unlike the view that many people today have about contemplation, a lot of the contemplation in Orisha traditions takes place in dynamic settings. People are dancing to music. People are singing. Some people think of moving your body as antithetical to contemplation, instead of a tremendous aid.
JCS: Last question: What books do you have for us? What are some of your favorite books in Contemplative Studies? What are you reading?
OO: So I have to divide this question up into Contemplative Studies books, and then, I guess, contemplative books. I didn’t even know what Contemplative Studies was until a colleague of mine, Louis Komjathy, asked me to speak on a panel at a Mind and Life Conference. My intro to the field was through Komjathy’s book. And I still think it’s a good intro to the field.
Kevin Hart, who I think did an interview for this series, too, recently gave the Gifford Lectures, which were published as Lands of Likeness. I found that helpful because it focused a lot on poetry, even though the poetic traditions he’s dealing with are in some ways very different from the ones I deal with.
Another colleague of mine, Cyrus Zargar, has a book called Sufi Aesthetics that deals with the Sufi practice of witnessing beauty in an insightful way. There’s a new book coming out soon with Fons Vitae press that is an English translation of a Persian Sufi commentary that Seyyed Hossein Nasr wrote on the Tao Te Ching that I’m excited to read. It’s based on a collaborative project Nasr did with the great Japanese scholar Toshihiko Izutsu back in the 1970s, but was only published recently in Persian in Iran, where apparently it has been a best seller, so I’m excited to see this latest example of dialogue or exchange between two different “contemplative” traditions.
And then, what am I reading? Ibn al-Fāriḍ. His poetry is just unbelievable. It’s miraculous in Arabic. People say that the Arabic language was perfected in the Qur’an, but Arabic poetry was perfected in Ibn al-Farid’s work six centuries later. I’ve been reading a lot of his poetry for projects recently.
But the Persian poet, Hafez Shirazi, is probably my favorite poet of all time in any language. People do divination with Hafez’s collection of poems. You basically ask a question, and you open the collection, and the first verse your eye falls on answers the question. And you read the rest of the poem for context. My wife and I do that a lot.
Someone I mentioned before in the interview, Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse, was probably the most important and popular Sufi master on the continent of Africa in the 20th century. He has several lovely collections of poetry that I’m working on reading and translating.
Rumi’s Masnavi is also an incredible contemplative work. It’s deceptively complex; he turns simple folktales and stories into the most sublime spiritual lessons, always shifting perspectives. I often listen to or read that before I go to sleep. I could keep going with recommendations, but I’ll also mention Chuang Tzu. His ability to pack profundity into such short, seemingly simple stories and sentences is unmatched.
I also mentioned that I’m working on this project of Yoruba mythology with my brother. In English people use the word “myth” to mean something that’s not true, like MythBusters. But Yoruba myths are stories that are always true. So these myths are funny, interesting, dramatic, but they’re also really, really profound. I often tell them to my children as bedtime stories. The older I get, the more I think about them and the more I learn from them. So those are the things I’m reading and thinking about now.
For anyone looking to learn more about Yoruba traditions, I would highly recommend Rowland Abiodun’s book, Yoruba Art and Language. It is, to my knowledge, the best introduction to the Yoruba world-sense, and, through a focus on visual and verbal arts, it provides some really fine insights into that world and its “contemplative” traditions.
JCS: I’m so excited for your new publications to come out and to explore all the other texts and poetry that you recommended. That sounds amazing.