Islam

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Islam is the monotheistic religion that takes its bearings from the Qurʾān, the scripture Muslims hold to be the direct speech of God delivered to the prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. The Arabic word names the central act it asks for — submission, the surrender of the human will to the one God, Allāh — and a Muslim is one who makes that surrender. It stands with Judaism and Christianity in the Abrahamic line, claiming not to begin a new faith but to restore the original one preached by a long succession of prophets from Adam through Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, of whom Muhammad is held to be the last.

The historical outline is firm. Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and, by the tradition’s account, began receiving revelations near 610; his migration to Medina in 622 marks year one of the Islamic calendar. Within a century of his death in 632, Arab armies carrying the new faith had reached Spain in the west and Central Asia in the east. The Qurʾān was gathered into its received written form within a generation; alongside it the community preserved the ḥadīth, reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds, which together with the Qurʾān ground the sharīʿa, the elaborated law of practice. The familiar frame of obligation is the five pillars: the profession of faith, the five daily prayers, almsgiving, the Ramadan fast, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Islam is not one settled thing. The early dispute over leadership of the community hardened into the lasting division between Sunni and Shia, and within each, schools of law and theology multiplied. One strand in particular bears marking out: Sufism, the religion’s mystical and inward dimension. Sufis sought not merely obedience but maʿrifa — a direct, experiential knowledge of God — and built around it a discipline of poverty, remembrance, and stages of the soul’s ascent. The great figures of that tradition, al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī, Rūmī, wrote some of the most searching religious literature in any language, and it is largely through them that Islam enters the comparative study of mysticism.

That comparative pull is worth marking as such. The Sufi maʿrifa, the gnosis of the Hellenistic schools, and the contemplative knowing of the Christian mystics are often set side by side, and the family resemblance is genuine — each names a knowledge meant to transform rather than merely inform. They are not interchangeable. Sufism is a development internal to Islam, disciplined by the Qurʾān and the law even where it presses past them, and its language of union is spoken within a strict monotheism that the comparison can blur. What the wider tradition holds in common is the first claim: that there is one God, and that the whole of a life is the answer given to him.

→ In the library: Al-Hujwiri — Kashf al-Mahjub (Nicholson, 1911) · The Confessions of al-Ghazali (Field, 1909)

→ Related: Qur An · Kaaba · Abraham · Christianity · Gnosis