The path of love: Sufism in the novels of Doris Lessing (Zimbabwe)

As a major woman writer of the twentieth century, Doris Lessing is included in the canon and in all respectable anthologies, and yet, without the western readers' and critics' recognition of Islamic mysticism and its significantly strong influence on her fiction, her work remains vulnerable to misreadings and facile dismissals. This is the case especially in her space-fiction series which was criticized for its inconsistency of style and inscrutability of subject matter.; Yet, Sufism has enabled Lessing to mitigate the standard pessimism of twentieth-century apocalyptic literature. In so far as she is able to carry her characters beyond death to the safety of Canopus, to the Presence of the One, or onto an uncontaminated island where evolved beings can be born, Lessing is able to establish a rare twentieth-century facsimile of the medieval Sufi mystics' "city of extinction," that immaterial but most real city of nothingness where dwells the Beloved. Lessing's urgent prophecy is for her readers to shake themselves out of lethargy and into conscious Work in order to manifest their full potentials and thereby fulfill their destinies.; Following her immersion in Sufi study in the sixties, Lessing became more didactic in her novels in which analogies to Sufic experience are more overtly suggested and more clearly applicable. The Sufi Way has offered her a welcome avenue of escape beyond the limitations of psychology, psychiatry, politics, Communism, Jungianism, or any other "ism" she had tapped prior to her study of The Sufi Way. A significant change in Lessing's fictive technique in her post-Sufi novels is her use of parables.; Lessing has absorbed the Sufi message through a western filter that stretches from the inquiry and doubt with regard to the nature of God by the eighteenth-century rationalists, to the cessation of questioning matters of religion altogether in the twentieth century. Only when we recognize this filter can we properly appreciate the balance between the Sufi-like faith in a higher power and revelation on the one hand, and trust in the material world and art on the other that characterizes Lessing's novels.