The report said 10 of the men were charged and told they would soon be tried while the rest were released and told they would be dealt with later.
The regime has been cracking down on Sufi groups over the past half-dozen as they have been growing rapidly in size. Many analysts see the attraction of Sufism as a kind of protest against the regime by religious Iranians who do not approve of a state-enforced faith.
The Nematollahi Gonabadi group has drawn the most repression.
Mostafa Azmayesh, a representative of the group outside Iran, told Radio Farda the 189 dervishes were called to the court In Borujerd March 5 and questioned on charges of “disobedience,” “insulting high-ranking authorities” and “disrupting public order.”
Azmayesh said the Basij militia in Borujerd attacked and demolished the main Sufi house of worship in the city in 2007. He said the dervishes injured in that raid later filed a complaint and that those who filed the complaint are among the 10 now charged.
According to Mohammad Faghfoory, George Washington University professor of religion, the Gonabadi Sufis are one of two main branches that emerged about 80 to 100 years ago out of the Nematollahi, an order originally founded in the Kerman area in the 16th Century.
Sufism is not illegal in Iran. But clerics throughout the Islamic world, both Shia and Sunni, generally frown on its practices. Its use of music and dance and its emphasis on mysticism are widely viewed by the clerical establishment as an impure approach to Islam.
In Iran, Sufism is believed to have grown by leaps and bounds since the revolution with the number of adherents reportedly rising from a few hundred thousand to a few million.
Azmayesh said the demonization campaign against Sufis began in 2005 with the publication of a series of anti-Sufi books. Azmayesh said the books argued that Sufis, who are active in Iran, Turkey and Syria, should be treated as second-class citizens in Iran because they don’t believe in the principle of “velayat-e faqih”—the Iranian regime’s notion that a supreme Shiite jurist should be the nation’s political leader—and they follow their own spiritual leaders.
But Iran’s Sunni dervish orders, such as the Qaderi dervishes, have not been targeted by state pressure. “According to a decision by Iran’s National Security Council, [officials] don’t act against the dervish orders in the Sunni-populated parts of the country because they say the dervishes prevent Al-Qaeda from growing in these areas,” Azmayesh told Radio Farda.
In addition to Borujerd, attacks on large numbers of dervishes have been reported over the last few years in Qom and Esfahan and on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf.
Sufism has been defined as a type of knowledge by the great Sufi masters. Shaikh Ahmad Zarruq, a 15th Century Sufi who wrote The Principles of Sufism, defined Sufism as “a science whose objective is the repairing of the heart and turning it away from all else but God.” Ibn Alibi, one of the best-known Sufi masters, defined Sufism as “a science through which one can know how to travel into the presence of the Divine, purify one’s inwardness from filth, and beautify it with a variety of praiseworthy traits.”
