First appeared in Farmerphile, no. 12, April 2008
“Drunk without wine; sated without food; distraught; foodless and sleepless; a king beneath a humble cloak; a treasure within a ruin; not of air and earth; not of fire and water; a sea without bounds. He has a hundred moons and skies and suns. He is wise through universal truth—not a scholar from a book.”
The quote is from Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, better known to English speakers as simply Rumi, the great Sufi poet and mystic. The quote itself, taken from Idries Shah’s The Sufis (Anchor Books, 1964), is said to be Rumi’s definition of a Sufi, and I cite it here as a point of reference, in particular for the last line: “He is wise through universal truth—not a scholar from a book.” I do this to point out a curiosity, a seeming contradiction. That is that Philip José Farmer, known far and wide for both his many fantastical novels and stories and his ravenous appetite for reading, would choose to include the subject of Sufism in a significant number of his writings. Farmer is an omnivore when it comes to knowledge, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that he has read more widely in a broader array of subjects than the vast majority of his peers in the science fiction writing world. Why then Sufism, a mystical discipline that in its very definition decries book learning? One might believe the question to be a straw dog, but consider that at least seven characters in Farmer’s fiction are Sufis, with several other characters, including one based on himself, either serving as disciples to Sufi masters or flirting with the idea of becoming disciples. Clearly something in Sufi doctrine appealed to Farmer, but what?
Farmer’s initial interest in Sufism probably emerged from his enthusiasm for the life and works of Sir Richard Francis Burton. In the essay “The Source of the River” (Pearls from Peoria, 2006), Farmer states that he conceived the idea of the Riverworld from reading John Kendrick Bangs’ A Houseboat on the River Styx during the same period in which he read Burton’s the Kasîdah. Farmer calls the Kasîdah “my second spark of inspiration.”
The Kasîdah, or A Lay of the Higher Law was first published in a private edition in 1880 and was attributed not to Burton but to Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, a fictional Sufi personality created by Burton. In a move reminiscent of Farmer’s own fictional-author trickery, Burton himself annotated the book under the initials F.B., which stood for Frank Baker, one of Burton’s old pseudonyms (see Fawn M. Brodie’s The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton, W.W. Norton & Co, 1967). Farmer would later go on to use Hajji Abdu El-Yezdi as one of his own characters, most notably in Escape from Loki, in which the Haj is revealed to be one of Doc Savage’s many expert tutors. Farmer must have liked the symmetry of the Man of Bronze 
having been mentored by a Sufi, as the title of Lester Dent’s last Doc Savage novel, Up from Earth’s Center, is taken directly from Omar Khayyam’s famous poem, the Rubaiyat, which is said not be the celebration of hedonistic wine drinking that Fitzgerald’s translation makes it out to be but rather a Sufi parable for divine intoxication. Interestingly, Haji Abdu El-Yezdi also appears as the main character in Farmer’s unpublished and incomplete Lovecraftian fictional-author story “The Feaster from the Stars.” Even more interestingly, a certain Frank Baker also appears in the story.
But it is in the Riverworld series where Farmer explores his interest in Sufism in the greatest detail. Riverworld itself is a Brobdingnagian Sufi-themed allegory for life on Earth. Everyone who had ever lived awakens on the banks of a 10,000,000-mile-long river. For a brief interval, humanity is electrified by the question of why it has been resurrected. But before long the old habits, prejudices, and greeds set in. Then come wars, slavery, and the struggle for survival. Just as on Earth, the human inhabitants of the Riverworld quickly become distracted from the Real. Like the great Sufis storytellers, Farmer is fond of encoding many layers of meaning within his tales.
In placing Burton as the series’ main protagonist, Farmer not only seeks to draw an allusion to Burton’s role as a great explorer of the world, but also as a great explorer of the soul. Burton himself is a self-described master Sufi, indoctrinated into the mystical order during his travels throughout the Middle East. But by the time he is resurrected on Riverworld, Burton has lost the true faith. In a lengthy monologue in The Magic Labyrinth, Burton remarks that his observations of the Sufis, who proclaimed themselves to be God, led him to conclude that “extreme mysticism was closely allied with madness.” Then he exclaims,
“Great God! I will penetrate His heart, to the heart of the Mystery of the mysteries. I am a living sword, but I have been attacking with my edge, not with my point. The point is the most deadly, not the edge. I will be from now on the point.
“Yet if I am to find my way through the magic labyrinth, I must have a thread to follow to the great beast that lives in its heart…why didn’t I think of this before?—I am the labyrinth.”
Then, in a complete reversal of his criticism of the Sufis, Burton says, “…though I was deeply learned, I never understood that wisdom had little to do with knowledge and literature and nothing to do with learning.” In the end Burton cannot escape the fact that the Sufis’ wisdom is in truth his own. In fact, in describing his own self-truth, he almost verbatim quotes Rumi’s definition: “He is wise through universal truth—not a scholar from a book.”
But Burton is not the only Sufi to appear in the Riverworld series. The Japanese Piscator is one of two dueling Sufi masters in The Dark Design. Piscator serves mainly as a foil for Jill Gulbirra’s internal conflicts, placing himself in the role of mentor. Although Jill is too independent to realize she needs a mentor, Piscator is her guide nonetheless, plucking her from the waters as if she were one of the fish with which he is so obsessed.
The second of the dueling Sufi masters in The Dark Design is Nur ed-Din el-Musafir. Nur is Peter Jairus Frigate’s mentor, and because Frigate is Farmer’s mirror self, the interactions between the two characters are particularly revealing as to Farmer’s inclination to return so often to Sufi themes and characters in his work. Though Frigate is critical of organized religion, he is keen enough to see a difference in Nur’s teachings, at least at first. Despite having been an obsessive reader (like Farmer) during his earthly existence, Frigate realizes that Nur’s wisdom comes from a place deeper than personality. And like Farmer, Frigate believes in free will. He states, “God might not exist, but free will did. True, it was a limited force, repressed or influenced by environmental conditioning, chemicals, brain injuries, neural diseases, lobotomy. But a human being was not just a protein robot. No robot could change its mind, decide on its own to reprogram itself, lift itself by its mental bootstraps.”
Frigate, fearing rejection, hesitates to ask Nur to take him on as a disciple. Nur, though he tells Frigate he has potentiality, says he is not ready. This may illustrate Farmer’s own struggle between rational doubt (intellect) and the desire to enact his free will (spirit). And here we begin to see an explanation for Farmer’s interest in a mystical doctrine that decries the primacy of the intellect. Throughout Farmer’s writings, the question of free will—and the belief that free will does indeed exist, at least in a qualified sense—rises again and again. Whether it be Simon Wagstaff’s comic search for meaning in Venus on the Half-Shell or Kickaha’s wild and whooping optimism in the face of adversity in the World of Tiers novels, so often the Farmerian protagonist falls back on the idea that will is stronger than either nature or nurture—if, that is, will is enacted. As Farmer states in the introduction to The Grand Adventure, “We do have free will, but we don’t use it very often.”
Frigate does go on to become Nur’s disciple, but by the time of the last book in the series, Gods of Riverworld, he resigns from Nur’s tutelage. He does this so that he does not have to suffer the humiliation of being “flunked” by his master. Frigate’s irrational fear of failure and rejection is his chief psychological imperfection, a flaw which Nur warned him about early on. Though Frigate is intellectually aware that his fear is irrational and an impediment to his growth as a human being, he cannot overcome it. His mental bootstraps are just too tight, and in the end he joins Burton to play devil’s advocate with the man they both know is right. “Burton and Frigate felt uncomfortable,” Farmer writes in Gods of Riverworld. “They usually did when they talked to Nur about serious subjects.”
But the exploration of Sufi themes in the Riverworld series does not end on that sour note. In “Coda,” a story which is in fact the literary coda of the entire series—and also the coda of Farmer’s short fiction period, since it is the last short story he wrote and had published before his retirement—Farmer again introduces a Sufi master and disciple. This time it is Rabi’a el-Adawia, a female Sufi saint who lived 717–801 A.D., teaching the most unlikely of followers: the “pataphysician” Alfred Jarry, previously known on the Riverworld by his fictional personality Doctor Faustroll (see Farmer’s “Crossing the Dark River” in Tales of Riverworld, 1992 and “Up the Bright River” in Quest to Riverworld, 1993). Jarry, like Farmer and Frigate, has throughout his life questioned the world about him only to respond to his own questions with playful humor and a sharp wit. In a way, all three men—Farmer, Frigate, and Jarry—play the role of Doctor Faustroll. But also like Faustroll, who in the story has again becomes Alfred Jarry, something in them recognizes the immaturity of such a response. In “Coda,” Jarry finds a mysterious Artifact near the source of the River. The Artifact becomes his obsession, despite the fact that Rabi’a warns him the object is a distraction to the Path. Here again Farmer is playing out the same struggle between intellect and spirit that faced the character Frigate. But in the moment of truth, Jarry responds differently than Frigate. Jarry has not only seen his weaknesses, but he has conquered them. He knows beyond intellect who he is and that knowledge—that wisdom—allows him to enact a rare moment of free will. There could be no more fitting conclusion for the Riverworld series, in which Farmer’s characters
not only struggle to find answers, but also struggle to live The Answer. I would argue that “Coda” is not only one of Farmer’s most psychologically autobiographical stories; it is also one of his best.
In an unlikely turn, Farmer combines his interest in Sufism with his fascination with feral human literature in “Hayy ibn Yazqam by Aby ibn Tufayl: An Arabic Mowgli” (Farmerphile, no. 4, April 2006; Up from the Bottomless Pit and Other Stories, Subterranean Press, 2007), a paper presented in 1990 before the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. In his study, Farmer concludes that Hayy ibn Yazqam, the hero of this “Sufi didactic story,” is quite a different sort of feral man than Tarzan or Mowgli, stating that he “untiringly pursues a quest for the Creator, the One, the Truth, the Ineffable, the Way.” While Tarzan does ingeniously extrapolate his own mythology in “The God of Tarzan” in Jungles Tales of Tarzan, the ape-man’s journey through life is ultimately not a quest for meaning. Tarzan knows who he is and is content; he is an ineffable part of Nature, and that understanding is in itself his theology.
Farmer’s interest in Sufism may also be seen in The Unreasoning Mask, in which a strange green robed man appears to Captain Ramstan of the alaraf drive starship al-Buraq. Ramstan, an agnostic Muslim, suspects that the green robed man is none other than al-Khidr, a mysterious Sufi prophet who is said to show up at times of great importance. The name of Ramstan’s ship, al-Buraq, literally means “the lightning” in Arabic, which would seem to describe the ship’s ability to instantaneously travel between two points; but al-Buraq is also the name of the winged ass which the Koran says carried Muhammad to heaven and back, and the name is certainly also meant to be indicative of Ramstan’s journeys throughout the Pluriverse.
Al-Khidr also appears as a character in Farmer’s “St. Francis Kisses His Ass Goodbye,” a tale in which St. Francis of Assisi falls victim to a time travel experiment from the future and is unwittingly transported to the twentieth century. Many Islamic and Biblical scholars believe al-Khidr to be analogous to the prophet Elijah, who is known in eastern European folklore as being responsible for bad weather, and indeed it is during a thunder-cracking tempest that St. Francis is plucked from the thirteenth century and deposited in the future. It is here where al-Khidr, calling himself “Kidder,” appears to the shocked friar, helping him make his way to the scientists whose experiment will end in a world wide disaster if St. Francis is not sent back to his past with the exact matter-mass which he brought with him to the future. In the end St. Francis is left wondering if the vision of the six winged, crucified seraph which he experiences years later in his own timeframe might not somehow have been connected with his trip to the future. The reader might also ponder two other questions: Were St. Francis’s stigmata the result of scientists from the future returning to take back some extra mass he had carried with him to the past? And when St. Francis encountered al-Khidr, did he in reality encounter himself? That is, did St. Francis encounter an advanced future version of himself who, because of his faith and labors, has gone on to a higher plane of existence and become a cosmic individual with the important task of managing world-scale crises? One should note that Farmer did not pair up St. Francis and al-Khidr arbitrarily. Idries Shah, in his The Sufis, makes a powerful argument that St. Francis of Assisi had knowledge of Sufi doctrine, and that he based much of his own teaching upon it.
In closing I feel obliged to point out that St. Francis of Assisi is also a hero of Tom Corbie, the protagonist of Farmer’s Peoria-based P.I. mystery novel Nothing Burns in Hell. When disturbed by the loud noise of his neighbors, Corbie states,
“I thought of vengeance vile and violent. Yet, I was trying to climb a high peak of spiritual development. Though I wasn’t a Catholic, my hero and role model was St. Francis of Assisi. But it seemed to me I was a pumpkin trying to change into a gilded coach in a place where midnight never came. How much free will does a pumpkin have?”
Here Farmer returns to old ground, the question of free will. It is a subject that, as I have tried to illustrate in this essay, is inextricably tied up with Farmer’s interest and flirtations with the subject of Sufism. But Farmer is not interested in the question academically. He knows it is a question that belongs to the realm of essence, of soul, not transient personality. And because of this often self-doubting recognition, Farmer reveals not only that he possesses a humility that might be worthy of St. Francis himself, but also that he might bear a mystical pearl of wisdom which he most likely doesn’t even know he has.
Copyright © 2008 by Christopher Paul Carey. All rights reserved.
That new book I mentioned above is actually 85 years old this year, but it hasn’t been published for decades. I’m speaking of A. Merritt’s 
Prominent gamer Joe Kushner recently picked up the first Eric John Stark Planet Stories book, 
James Enge, author of the new sword and sorcery novel 
Christofer Marley has been treacherously slain. It appears that he died in some sordid brawl, but the murder is in fact the hidden act of one faction of the divided Prometheans, secret conspirators who serve Queen Elizabeth I. Marley’s death leaves no writer to pen the magically potent plays that keep the queen on England’s throne. But his co-conspirators hope to use another playwright: a promising young talent named Will Shakespeare.
