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All processes of society are based on it [family], all individual development.
-Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor
Family is a major theme throughout Doris Lessing's fiction, and alternative family structures and relations in particular are central to her novels The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Ben, in the World (2000). A Sufi reading of these novels illustrates that Lessing deploys elements of Sufism to represent non-normative families and kinships. While Memoirs depicts the collapse of the traditional family and the rise of non-normative forms, Ben, the sequel to The Fifth Child (1988), focuses on human relations within the context of the family. In her fiction, Lessing is preoccupied with family not as an institution to be discarded, but rather as a social concept to be critiqued and reconfigured for the benefit of individuals and societies. Her involvement in Sufism inspires the ways in which she problematises and reconfigures the family.1
Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer maintain that "Lessing's fiction and non-fiction demand a reformulation of some of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and how we relate to that world" (1). In this essay, I argue that family is one such "taken-for-granted" institution that Lessing seeks to reformulate in her fiction, through Sufism. Lessing's use of Sufism in Memoirs and Ben is not just mystical but also political, in the sense that it challenges a patriarchal configuration of the family. A Sufi reading of family in Lessing's fiction allows us to see that she seeks to liberate the family from dominant ideology rather than to liberate individuals from the idea of the family. Whereas family ideology indoctrinates individuals into gender roles and hierarchal relations, through Sufism Lessing introduces non-normative human relations that aim to create new forms of family.
Lessing's Sufism, entirely influenced by the teachings and writings of Idries Shah (1924-1996), is a manifestation of Western Sufism. Her interest in Shah's work surfaced in the early 1960s, a period when she was wary of the limitations posed by the political movements of communism and feminism. Sufism has long been promoted in the East as a mystical branch of Islam, but Shah's adaptation is free from any dogma, religion and traditionalism, "explaining [Sufism] in a more accessible...