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Sufism

Mystic practices in Islam

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Lab · Class 6–12Buddhist Art at SanchiLab · Class 8–12Devotional Paths

The wayfarer (salik) is traditionally described as progressing through various stations (maqamat) and states (ahwal) along a path of spiritual purification and closeness to God. Sufi literature gives particular importance to fana' and baqa', describing spiritual transformation in terms of the effacement of the ego and subsistence through God, while distinguishing these concepts from hulul, the doctrine of divine indwelling. The culmination of this path is associated with ma'rifa, or direct experiential knowledge of God, and dhawq, the mystical "taste" of spiritual reality.

While commonly described as "Islamic mysticism", this designation captures only one dimension of the broader discipline. Nile Green notes the "narrowing and prescriptive tendencies" of the model of "mysticism", arguing that it can "castigate or exclude much of what it was meant to explain." He therefore proposes understanding Sufism as "primarily a tradition of powerful knowledge, practices and persons," rather than reducing it to the "mysticism of a marginal party of God-seekers."

William C. Chittick describes Sufism as "the interiorisation and intensification of Islamic faith and practice", anchoring it to ihsan, the third dimension of religion in the Hadith of Jibril, alongside islam and iman. Annemarie Schimmel defines Sufism as "an interiorization of Islam" and "a personal experience of the central mystery of Islam", namely tawhid, the Oneness of God.

As Mannopov, Rajavaliev, and Juraev argue, Tasawwuf is not a deviation from orthodoxy, but a structured path to moral and spiritual excellence, integrating law with love, action with insight, and outward form with inner transformation.

Ibn Khaldun situated Sufism within the Islamic religious sciences:

Sufism belongs to the sciences of the religious law that originated in Islam. It is based on the assumption that the practice of its adherents had always been considered by the important early Muslims, the men around Muhammad and the men of the second generation, as well as those who came after them, as the path of truth and right guidance. The Sufi approach is based upon constant application to divine worship, complete devotion to God, aversion to false splendour of the world, abstinence from the pleasure, property, and position to which the great mass aspire, and retirement from the world into solitude for divine worship. These things were general among the men around Muhammad and the early Muslims. Then worldly aspirations increased in the second [eighth] century and after. At that time, the special name of Sufis was given to those who aspired to divine worship.

The vast breadth of this tradition is reflected in the difficulty of reducing it to a single definition. Sidi Ahmad Zarruq, a Moroccan Sufi master and jurist, stated that there are nearly two thousand definitions of tasawwuf, yet these diverse formulations ultimately distil into a single core essence.

From its earliest literature, Sufi masters have emphasised that the spiritual reality of tasawwuf predated its name, affirming that the name is meaningless without the reality it signifies.

Ali ibn Ahmad al-Bushanji (d. 348 AH) laments:

"Sufism is a name without a reality, but it used to be a reality without a name."

Al-Hujwiri (d. c. 465 AH):

"In the time of the Companions of the Prophet and their immediate successors this name did not exist, but its reality was in everyone. Now the name exists without the reality."

Sufism, unlike what is often called Christian mysticism, was the "spiritual and intellectual glue" that held together the culturally and ethnically diverse societies of the Islamic world. It retained its pervasive, default mainstream status until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it faced a combined onslaught from Western modernists, secular nationalists, and fundamentalist reformers. Agrarian reforms, new systems of taxation, and the secularisation of education under Westernised governments also severely undermined Sufism.

As John Renard emphasises:

"The history of Sufism is not the story of some aberrant sect or cult... It is integral to the history of the global faith community of Islam."

The extent of this decline varied from country to country, but by the 1950s Sufism had experienced "a dramatic loss of appeal" among Muslims. However, Sufism not only survived but in recent decades has undergone a revival and revitalisation, to the point that Knysh suggests it could lead to a "full-blown Sufi revival".

At the same time, what is called Neo-Sufism has emerged, seeking to suck Islam out of Sufism, or at the very least heavily minimise it, or reinterpret it as one of the great traditions of humanity pointing towards the same universal truth, a kind of perennialism.

Sufis also played an important role in the spread of Islam through their missionary and educational activities. Although the overwhelming majority of Sufis, both pre-modern and modern, remain adherents of Sunni Islam, some strands of Sufi thought transferred over to the ambits of Shia Islam during the late Middle Ages after the Safavid conversion of Iran under the concept of irfan.

Sufism can be defined as a historical-syncretic body of teachings and practices that transforms, rearticulates, and systematises —through a unique interpretation that occasionally diverges from classical theology and jurisprudence— concepts derived from pre-Islamic traditions (such as Indian asceticism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Eastern Christian monasticism) regarding self-knowledge, the cultivation of physical and spiritual discipline, and philosophical inquiry into the meaning of existence by grounding these elements in Islamic concepts and models. Although Sufis were opposed to dry legalism, with the exception of certain antinomian groups —such as the Bektashis, Malamis, and Qalandaris— mainstream sufis strictly observed Islamic law and belonged to various schools of Islamic jurisprudence and theology. Despite a relative decline of Sufi orders in the modern era including attacks and accusations from fundamentalist Islamic movements (such as Salafi-Wahhabist groups) who view the Sufis as those who have deviated from the deen, Sufism has continued to play an important role in the Islamic world. It has also influenced various forms of spirituality in the West and generated significant academic interest.

Language and terminology

Woolen clothes were traditionally associated with ascetics and mystics. The original meaning of ṣūfī seems to have been "one who wears wool (ṣūf)" symbolising asceticism and detachment from worldly life, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam calls other etymological hypotheses "untenable". Al-Qushayri and Ibn Khaldun both rejected all possibilities other than ṣūf (wool) on linguistic and documented grounds. Later, mediaeval scholars like Al-Biruni believed that the term 'Sufi' gradually evolved from the Greek term σοφός (sophos), which means wisdom or knowledge with an assessment also forms the basis for the views of certain orientalists regarding the origins of Sufism.

Some sources, however, consider the word to be of Arabic origin and offer related Islamic- explanations; these explanations traces the lexical root of the word to ṣafā (صفاء), which in Arabic means "purity", and in this context another similar idea of tasawwuf (lit. 'to make oneself a Sufi') as considered in Islam is tazkiyah (تزكية, 'self-purification'), which is also widely used in Sufism. Others have suggested that the word comes from the term Ahl al-Ṣuffa ("the people of the suffah" or "the bench"), who were in tradition a group of impoverished companions of Muhammad who held regular gatherings of dhikr sat at the Prophet's Mosque considered by some to be the first Sufis. Classical Sufi texts, which stressed certain teachings and practices of the Quran and the sunnah gave definitions of tasawwuf based on ethical and spiritual goals and qualities as a teaching tool for their attainment. In modern scholarly usage, the term serves to describe a wide range of social, cultural, political, and religious phenomena associated with Sufis.

Some teachers, especially when addressing more general audiences or mixed groups of Muslims and non-Muslims, make extensive use of parable, allegory, and metaphor. The term Sufism was originally introduced into European languages in the 18th century by Orientalist scholars, who viewed it mainly as an intellectual doctrine and literary tradition at variance with what they saw as the sterile monotheism of Islam. It was often taken as a universal mysticism in contrast to legalistic orthodox Islam. In recent times, the historian Nile Green has argued against such distinctions, stating that in the mediaeval period Sufism and Islam were more or less the same. Although approaches to teaching vary among different Sufi orders, Sufism as a whole is primarily concerned with direct personal experience, and as such has sometimes been compared to other, non-Islamic forms of mysticism (e.g., as in the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr). Some modern scholars have used other definitions of Sufism, such as the "intensification of Islamic faith and practice" and the "process of realizing ethical and spiritual ideals".

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