Philosophy

Sufism and the Comparative Mystics

The long habit of reading Sufism alongside other mystical traditions — and the disputed question of whether the likenesses mark shared roots or independent arrival.

A scholar setting two mystics side by side has to choose a table to lay them on, and for more than a century the table of choice has been Sufi. Sufism has served, more than almost any other tradition, as the meeting ground on which the world’s contemplatives are arranged for comparison — the recurring move, in the seminar room and outside it, of placing the Sufi path beside the non-dual metaphysics of Vedānta, the descent-and-return of Neoplatonism, the union sought in Christian contemplation, and the saving knowledge of late-antique gnosis, and asking what the resemblance means. The phrase points less to a doctrine than to a habit of reading. Its proper object is not Sufism itself — that path, its orders, and its doctrine belong to their own treatments — but the comparing, and the long unresolved argument over what the comparing has found.

Why the lot fell to Sufism

There were reasons it fell to this tradition to play the part. Islam, the faith within which Sufism grew, sits at the geographic and historical crossing of the others. Its scholars inherited Greek philosophy directly, through the ninth- and tenth-century translation movement at Baghdad that carried Plotinus and Proclus into Arabic — a documented channel treated in its own right under Islamic philosophy and Islamic Neoplatonism. The Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus’s Enneads circulated under a misattributed title as the Theology of Aristotle, so that emanationist metaphysics entered the Islamicate world already woven into the philosophical canon. To the west and north, Sufism developed alongside Eastern Christian asceticism and the negative theology of the Greek Fathers; in the same centuries Jewish mysticism was forming in the same Arabic-speaking milieu, close enough that a Judeo-Sufi pietism grew up around the descendants of Maimonides in Egypt. Eastward, the long Indian frontier gave sustained contact with the contemplative traditions of the subcontinent. A Sufi text, in consequence, often seems to speak several traditions’ languages at once — not because it borrowed indiscriminately, but because it was composed at the junction where those languages met.

The vocabulary that invites comparison

If position made Sufism available for comparison, vocabulary made it irresistible. The technical lexicon of the Sufi path maps, term for term, onto the keywords of the traditions set beside it, and that mapping is the engine that drives the whole enterprise. Maʿrifa — the heart’s direct, tasted knowledge of God, sharply distinguished from ʿilm, the knowledge that reason and report supply — reads almost as a translation of the Greek gnōsis, the knowing that transforms the one who knows, and of the Sanskrit jñāna, liberating knowledge of the real. Fanāʾ, the passing-away of the self’s attributes, lies open beside the unio of the Christian mystics and the absorption sought in Advaita; baqāʾ, the subsistence that follows it, beside the contemplative’s return to active life. The negative path is shared too: when the early Sufi masters insist that the divine Essence is unreachable, that what can be said of God dissolves at the threshold, they speak the idiom of apophatic theology that runs through the Cappadocian Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Eriugena. The Sufi handbooks themselves invited the exercise. The earliest Persian manual, Hujwīrī’s eleventh-century Kashf al-Maḥjūb — the Uncovering of the Veiled — and the contemporaneous Risāla of al-Qushayrī catalog the stations and states of the path with a precision that reads like a comparativist’s own table of equivalents, and the literature quotes Greek philosophers and pre-Islamic ascetics by name.

A caution travels with each of these pairings, and the discipline of the comparison lives in honoring it. The mappings are real as resemblances and treacherous as identities. Fanāʾ in its classical Junaydian sense is not the collapse of servant into Lord but the replacement of the servant’s attributes by God’s, an asymmetry that orthodox Sufism guarded against the heresies of ḥulūl (indwelling) and ittiḥād (fusion); to read it as Advaitin non-difference is to discard the distinction it was built to preserve. The four great soteriological termini — Christian theōsis, Sufi fanāʾ and baqāʾ, Vedantic mokṣa, Hermetic rebirth — are structurally parallel and doctrinally non-fungible, each staging a maximal closeness between the human and the ultimate, and each erecting a load-bearing internal distinction precisely to keep that closeness from collapsing into merger. This is the work the careful comparison does and the loose one skips.

The school of Ibn ʿArabī against Plotinus

One body of Sufi thought carried the comparison further than any other. The metaphysics elaborated by the followers of the Andalusian master Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), later named the doctrine of the oneness of being — waḥdat al-wujūd — describes a single Real whose self-disclosures are the cosmos, the created order standing to its source as the forms of light stand to light. To a reader formed on the Enneads this looked like a Muslim recension of Plotinus: the One overflowing into the many, the many yearning back toward unity, the visible world a graded descent from a source that remains undiminished in the giving. The comparison is not a modern imposition. It was made within the tradition’s own English reception by the very translator who founded it: glossing Ibn ʿArabī’s love-odes, Reynold Nicholson noted that “Ibn al-ʿArabí, like Plotinus, holds that ‘deification’ is attainable,” reaching for the Alexandrian to explain the Andalusian.

The school’s defenders, then and now, insist the likeness is partial. Wujūd in its full sense belongs to God alone; creatures are loci of theophany, the cosmos annihilated and re-created at every breath, God never self-disclosing in the same form twice. The realized knower must hold incomparability (tanzīh) and similarity (tashbīh) at once — a two-eyed vision that refuses to settle into the flat monism a hasty Plotinian reading would supply. Where Plotinus’s One is beyond being, the Akbarian Real is Being itself; where the Enneads climb away from multiplicity, Ibn ʿArabī finds the divine names articulated within it, and the Law binding at every station. The set-piece comparison of the two is durable precisely because it is so nearly right and so instructively wrong, and the place to test it is the Akbarian system on its own terms, not in the resemblance alone.

How the comparison became a habit

When European scholarship turned to Sufism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the comparative framing hardened from an occasional move into a reflex. The English-language tradition was effectively founded by Reynold Nicholson at Cambridge, whose editions and translations — the Kashf al-Maḥjūb (1911), Ibn ʿArabī’s Tarjumán al-Ashwáq (1911), the monumental six-volume Mathnawí of Rūmī (1925–1940) — remain in use. Nicholson rendered the Sufi classics into a dignified scholarly English and routinely glossed their ideas by reference to Plotinus, to Christian mysticism, to pantheism, to the Vedānta. His survey The Mystics of Islam (1914) reads the path through categories drawn as much from the European study of mysticism as from the Arabic and Persian sources, and his successors — the German Arabist Annemarie Schimmel chief among them, whose Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975) became the standard one-volume portrait — inherited the comparative frame even where they refined its conclusions. The effect was cumulative. By the mid-twentieth century the educated Western reader met Sufism already glossed, its fanāʾ introduced as the Muslim analogue of the via unitiva, its drunkenness paired with the Dionysian, its poetry of divine love translated into the vocabulary of comparative mysticism before its own terms had been heard.

A second current ran alongside the philological one and pressed the comparison toward a thesis. The twentieth-century perennialist or Traditionalist school held that the world’s authentic religions converge, beneath their exoteric differences, on a single esoteric metaphysical truth — and several of its central figures took up Sufism not as an object of study but as a way of life. René Guénon, who gave the school its intellectual armature, settled in Cairo in 1930, entered a Shādhilī order, and died a Muslim under the name ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥyā; Frithjof Schuon founded his own Sufi ṭarīqa in the West. For them Sufism was not one exhibit among many but the living proof of the case: a path still walked, within a great revealed tradition, toward a summit they held identical with the summit of every other. This made Sufism the standard witness whenever the argument for a shared mystical core was advanced — and, to its critics, the place where the argument’s circularity showed most clearly, the framework discovering in Sufism the universality it had brought along.

The dispute over cause

The likenesses are not invented, and the discipline of the subject lies in keeping two explanations of them apart. Some resemblance reflects documented historical contact. The Greek inheritance absorbed into Islamic philosophy is a matter of record — translators, manuscripts, a datable transmission — and through that channel a genuinely Neoplatonic vocabulary entered the milieu in which Sufi metaphysics matured. The Indian channel is real if harder to weigh: centuries of exchange across the frontier, the eleventh-century scholar al-Bīrūnī’s careful study of Indian thought, and the long coexistence of Sufi orders with the contemplative traditions of the subcontinent furnish documented occasions of contact, even where any specific doctrinal loan resists proof. For these two streams the explanation is transmission, and it can in principle be traced.

Much of the rest is better understood as independent traditions arriving at similar formulations from their own premises — convergence rather than descent, then sharpened in the retelling by comparison itself. Apophatic registers, languages of participation, the asymmetry between the finite seeker and the infinite sought: these recur because the contemplative situation recurs, not because one tradition copied another. And the convergence is partly an artifact of the comparing. To set fanāʾ beside theōsis beside mokṣa is already to have chosen a frame, and the frame foregrounds the likeness and mutes the load-bearing differences — the Christian’s grace-not-nature, the Sufi’s servant-Lord asymmetry, the threefold disagreement within Vedānta itself over whether liberation is identity, qualified union, or proximity. The most rigorous comparative work proceeds by establishing first what each tradition will not surrender, and only then asking what cross-traditional structure survives. Flatten the distinctions and the result is not a deeper unity but a thinner one.

The practitioners, for their part, rarely set out to be comparative. The Sufis understood their path as a way of being Muslim — exact in its own terms, anchored in the Qurʾān and the example of the Prophet, calibrated by the Law — whatever it happened to echo elsewhere. Ibn ʿArabī could write that the heart capable of every form is “a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,” and mean not that the creeds are interchangeable but that the one Reality is worshipped under all of them; the line is hospitable, not relativist. To read such a tradition honestly is to grant that its self-understanding is itself evidence — that a path’s insistence on its own vocabulary is not an obstacle the comparison must clear away but a datum the comparison must account for.

The scholarship of the comparison

The earliest sustained English access to the material is itself the first layer of the comparative habit. Nicholson’s The Mystics of Islam (1914) is available in full (sacred-texts.com), and his editions of the Kashf al-Maḥjūb and the Tarjumán al-Ashwáq, both 1911, are hosted in full here — the latter carrying the very gloss in which Sufi metaphysics is read through Plotinus. For the Akbarian system on which the Plotinus comparison turns, William Chittick’s open-access Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Ibn ʿArabī is the precise door, distinguishing waḥdat al-wujūd from the monism it is often mistaken for; his larger studies, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989) and The Self-Disclosure of God (1998), translate thousands of pages of the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya and supply the apparatus that makes the comparison testable rather than impressionistic.

The standard modern survey is Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 1975), which inherits the comparative frame while disciplining its excesses. The genealogy of the perennialist thesis that made Sufism a star witness is set out, against the school, in Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2004) and in Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy (2012); the term philosophia perennis itself was coined not by Leibniz, as is often repeated, but by Agostino Steuco in 1540, a point established by Charles Schmitt’s foundational study in the Journal of the History of Ideas (1966). On the philosophical question beneath the whole enterprise — whether mystical experience is cross-culturally common with traditions supplying only the labels, or shaped from within by each tradition’s concepts — the field divides between W. T. Stace’s common-core thesis (Mysticism and Philosophy, 1960) and Steven Katz’s contextualist reply (“Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” 1978), with Robert Forman’s defense of a contentless “pure consciousness event” (1990) as the contested middle. The most exacting recent comparative treatment of the Sufi terminus against the Vedantic and the Christian is Toshihiko Izutsu’s Sufism and Taoism (1983) and Reza Shah-Kazemi’s Paths to Transcendence (2006) — the latter itself written from within a perennialist frame its critics flag as presupposing its conclusion.

What the comparing finds

Run carefully, the comparison ends not in an identity but in a translation. The comparing eye works by carrying each path’s idiom — maʿrifa, gnōsis, jñāna; fanāʾ, unio, mokṣa — into a neutral tongue that belongs to none of them, a metalanguage of “the mystical” in which the four termini can be laid on one table and read against each other. That tongue is a real instrument and a real distorter: it makes the structural parallels legible, and in the same motion it strips the case-endings that each tradition uses to mark exactly where its closeness to the ultimate stops short of merger. The documented channels — the Greek through translation, the Indian through long neighborhood — explain part of what the eye then sees; the rest is convergence the eye has sharpened by the act of looking. And the Sufis remain, after every rendering, legible in their own script: a tradition that learned to say gnōsis in Arabic without ever ceasing to mean it as Muslims, and whose precision in saying so is the thing the neutral tongue can register but never quite reproduce.

→ In the library: Hujwīrī — The Kashf al-Mahjúb (Nicholson, 1911) · Ibn ʿArabī — The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq (Nicholson, 1911)