Yoga and Islam || Mark Whitwell

It was Tirumalai Krishnamacharya’s life’s mission to see Yoga travel through all the lands to all the people. His statement was that yoga is required for a person to enjoy and actualize the religious ideals of culture: no matter what culture, language group or religious point of view they belong to.

Therefore, Christians need Yoga, Buddhists need Yoga, Muslims need Yoga, Hindus need Yoga, Jewish people need Yoga, atheists need Yoga. Anybody with spiritual or religious ideals, or even a person with a sense of scientific awe, requires an actual practice. Otherwise, the beautiful language of text will remain abstract and ‘other’ to your life.

When I went for lessons with Krishnamacharya’s son Desikachar in Chennai in the 1970s, I witnessed all kinds of people coming and going from their home. In Chennai, 20 percent of the population were Muslim. My teachers were earnest Hindus but they were always very loving and respectful of any individual and their culture.

When a Muslim student visited they would use no Hindu language or mantras. They chose language from the Qur?a?n for the student’s invocations and applied the breathing and moving principles into the Muslim prayer cycle. They called Islam "your religion of Love."

My teachers were continuing on the centuries old tradition of sharing between Yoga and Islam. Since the fourth century BC Yoga had travelled from North India all over South Asia and was picked up by many different religious groups.

Untitled (Persian, sitali), 12.6 x 7.8cm (painting), In 16.22a, Bahr al-hayat translation no. 11

In particular, it was the specific tantric intelligence that developed between the 8th and the 14th century, which saw the human body as a duplication of the divine cosmos, which was useful to esoteric traditions within Islam.

The scholar Carol Salomon describes how:

"The Ba?uls, like the Sufis, assert that the Prophet taught two types of doctrines, one exoteric (za?hir), recorded in the Qur?a?n and meant for the general public, and the other esoteric (ba?tin), only hinted at in the Qur?a?n and aimed at the select few who are able to grasp its meaning and who pass it down from heart to heart. Shari??a?t, Islamic law, is for followers of the exoteric path, while Ma?rifat, mystic knowledge, is for followers of the esoteric path" (1).

For Muslims who privileged the esoteric path of direct experience, Yoga was a supremely useful means to participate in the Absolute.

Headstand (Persian, akunchan), 9.6 x 7.8cm (painting), In 16.20a, Bahr al-hayat translation no. 8.

An example of the spread of Yoga into Islam is the mid-16th century the Persian text Ocean of Life (Bahr al-hayat). The text was composed by Muhammad Gwath Gwaliori. who was a prominent Sufi spiritual master. As Carl Ernst writes "to teach his disciples hatha practices compatible with Sufi goals of spiritual transformation." The text contains many beautiful paintings and poetic descriptions of asana and pranayama.

The text describes headstand as a means to burn up undigested food within the house of fire. The poetry of this description matches Krishnamacharya’s much later teaching of inversions as a means to draw the obstructions that collect at the base of the body into the agni, the fire of life.

From the ancient world into modern times

After studying with Desikachar and Krishnamacharya, my friends and I continued to share Yoga with Muslim communities around the world. I met with many wonderful students across Indonesia, Palestine and Turkey some of whom were scholars of the Qur?a?n and have gone on to become important teachers of Yoga in the Muslim world.

I found that of all faiths it is Islam that is the most Yogic. The principle of a whole body prayer and supplication to the One is already understood.

One woman in Palestine reported that when she started her Yoga practice she realized that her religion was indeed a religion of Love. She did her practice of moving and breathing as a whole body prayer to Allah; as her personal relationship to that which is Great.

Prior to that she had noticed that her daily prayers tended to be a rote behavioral practice that she did because everybody in her society was doing it. With the intelligence of the tantras, her five times a day prayer cycle transformed from an exoteric practice to an esoteric one. Her life became direct participation in God not a search or an appeal for God. This is what Yoga does for religion of all kinds.

Yoga also transforms intimate relationship into a spiritual practice of giving and receiving. After our workshops ended there would be a quiet sharing of this technology between partners. The practice quickly sensitizes a person to the male-female polarity of their own embodiment: the union of Siva-Sakti, Yin-Yang, Strength and Receptivity. (Regardless of gender, this union of opposites is the nature of every person.)

Untitled (Persian, sunasana), 11.5 x 7.7 cm (painting), In 16.27b, Bahr al-hayat translation no. 22.

By participating in the union of opposites in one’s own embodiment, the desire to enact the union of opposites without follows naturally. These women would teach their husbands how to bring the inhale (receptivity) to the exhale (strength); how to be both strong and upright whilst also being soft and responsive.

The patriarchal imbalance that has skewed our embodiment and culture towards male force only is not isolated to Islam. It is a worldwide pathology of strength that cannot receive playing out in all bodies. These women found that Yoga was able to heal their specific inheritance of relationship dysfunction. This quiet esoteric teaching of intimate connection within and without went through the community under the radar of religious orthodoxy.

The Paradox of T. Krishnamacharya

There was undoubtedly a tension in Krishnamacharya’s life between his orthodox religious Vaishnava family culture and his practice of Tantra: the union of opposites. He was a religious man who was seeking for God and waiting to have a vision of Vishnu. He became miserable because he never got it.

We can resolve that tension for the world by taking Yoga out of the orthodox context of religious seeking and understanding it as direct participation in the Given Reality, only: participation in God not the seeking for God. This understanding is coming through now and dissolving the tension between religious orthodox seeking that has ruined humanity and the tantric intelligence of participation in what life actually is: the nurturing force that is all Life and that brings life through.

The beautiful paradox of this shift in perspective is that as our practice moves from seeking to participation the religious texts and doctrines that we know and love come alive in our everyday life. Krishnamacharya would say: The inhale is to be with God. The exhale is to give yourself to God. It is that simple.

1. Salomon, "Ba?ul Songs," 191
2. Image Sources for the Bahr al-hayat can be found here https://asia.si.edu/essays/ocean-of-life/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book "The Heart of Yoga," Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood "pay what you can" model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.

Mark Whitwell has taught yoga for over three decades across the globe, and is the founder of the Heart of Yoga foundation, and the Heart of Yoga Peace Project.