Sufism and the Comparative Mystics

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Sufism has served, more than almost any other tradition, as the meeting ground on which scholars and enthusiasts have set the world’s mystics side by side. The phrase points less to a doctrine than to a practice of reading: the recurring move, in and out of the academy, of placing the Sufi path beside Vedānta, Neoplatonism, Christian contemplation, and the gnosis of late antiquity, and asking what the resemblance means.

There were reasons it fell to Sufism to play this part. Islam sits at the geographic and historical crossing of the others — heir to Greek philosophy through translation, neighbor to Christian and Jewish mysticism, in long contact with India — so that Sufi texts often seem to speak several traditions’ languages at once. The vocabulary helped: maʿrifa, the heart’s direct knowledge of God, reads naturally beside the Greek gnosis and the Sanskrit jñāna; fanāʾ, the passing-away of the self, beside the union the Christian mystics described and the absorption sought in Advaita. The early Sufi handbooks themselves quote philosophers and ascetics from outside Islam, and the school of Ibn ʿArabī elaborated a metaphysics of the one reality that later readers found easy to set against Plotinus.

When European scholarship turned to the subject in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this comparative framing hardened into a habit. Translators such as Reynold Nicholson rendered the Sufi classics into English and routinely glossed their ideas by reference to Western mysticism; the perennialist current of the twentieth century, several of whose central figures took up Sufism in their own lives, treated it as a living instance of a wisdom held to underlie all faiths. The effect was to make Sufism the standard exhibit whenever the case for a shared mystical core was argued.

The likenesses are not invented, but their cause is genuinely in dispute, and the two explanations should be kept apart. Some resemblance reflects historical contact — the Greek inheritance absorbed into Islamic philosophy is documented, and channels of exchange with India existed. Much of the rest, on the house’s reading, is better understood as independent traditions arriving at similar formulations from their own premises, the convergence then sharpened by comparison itself, which translates every idiom into a neutral language belonging to none of them. 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, whatever it happened to echo elsewhere. What survives the comparison is a question rather than an identity — how much of the likeness was always there, and how much the comparing eye supplied.

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

→ Related: Sufism · Comparative Mysticism · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Rene Guenon · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud