Sufism

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Sufism, known in Arabic as taṣawwuf, is the mystical and inward current of Islam: a tradition of disciplined practice and devotion directed toward the direct knowledge and love of God, and toward the dissolving of the self that is held to stand in the way. Its adherents are usually called Sufis — a name most often traced to ṣūf, the coarse wool of the simple garments worn by early ascetics.

The tradition describes its own work with one image above all: the heart is a mirror, dimmed by forgetfulness and self-regard, and the path is the polishing of that mirror by remembrance until the Beloved is reflected in it without distortion. Everything else — the disciplines, the orders, the metaphysics, the poetry — serves that polishing.

The Name and the Path

The early masters themselves debated what the name meant. Hujwīrī, writing in the eleventh century, surveys the candidates: the woolen garment, the first rank of those standing before God, the poor companions of the Prophet’s mosque veranda, and ṣafā, purity — and concludes that none satisfies etymology because the thing named outruns derivation. He preserves an older teacher’s definition instead: “He that is purified by love is pure, and he that is absorbed in the Beloved and has abandoned all else is a ‘Súfí’.” The name, on this account, marks a state, not a sect.

The current took shape in the first centuries of Islam, among pious men and women who pressed the Qur’anic call to remembrance and renunciation toward an intensity beyond ordinary observance. Out of their circles came a vocabulary of the inner life: the tariqa, the path or way trodden under a teacher; dhikr, the rhythmic remembrance of God by repeated name and formula; and a series of stations and states through which the traveller was understood to pass. The goal was often named fanāʾ — the passing-away of the ego before the divine reality — followed by baqāʾ, an abiding in God. The early teachers set themselves to map this terrain; the Kashf al-Maḥjúb of Hujwīrī, which the library holds, is among the first sustained accounts of it written in a Persian hand.

Behind the whole architecture stands a single archetype: the Prophet’s night journey from Mecca to the farthest mosque — the site Islam venerates at al-Aqsa — and his ascent through the heavens into the divine presence. What the Prophet was granted in body, the Sufi seeks in the heart; the miʿrāj is the tradition’s standing portrait of what the path is for, and the manuals’ stations are its rungs rendered inward.

The Formative Centuries

The first generations were ascetics before they were theorists. Hasan al-Basri, who died in 728, preached in Basra a piety of grief and renunciation, and nearly every later lineage reaches back to him. It was a woman of the same city who turned that fear toward love: Rabia al-Adawiyya, a freedwoman who died around 801, is remembered praying that if she worshiped God from fear of Hell she should be burned in it, and if from hope of Paradise she should be shut out of it, so that nothing would be left in her worship but God Himself. In her the tradition recognizes its center of gravity — disinterested love, love without wages — and has told her story ever since as the measure of sincerity.

In ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad the inner life acquired schools. Junayd, who died in 910, taught sobriety: the ecstasies were real, but the mature mystic returns from them composed, keeps the law, and guards the secret from those it would harm. Against his school’s restraint stood the intoxicated strain of Bayazid Bistami, the Persian master who died around 874, whose reported utterances let the divine voice speak through a self burned down to nothing — sayings the sober school explained as the overflow of a state rather than a claim of the man.

The two tempers met their crisis in al-Hallaj, the wool-carder’s son from Fars. According to the earliest account he declared, in the teaching circle of the Sufi Shibli, “I am the Truth” — anā al-Ḥaqq — the most notorious of the ecstatic utterances, since al-Ḥaqq, the Real, is a name of God. After years of preaching, imprisonment, and a final trial under the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir, he was put to death in Baghdad in March 922: scourged, mutilated, and hanged on a gibbet, his corpse burned and the ashes thrown into the Tigris. The tradition’s memory of him divided on the spot and has stayed divided — to some a man justly condemned for blasphemy or for revealing the secret, to others the supreme martyr of love who paid the price of saying openly what union means. His execution is widely treated as a turning point: after Hallaj, Sufism learned discretion, and the work of reconciling the path with the law became urgent.

Al-Ghazali’s Reconciliation

That work found its master in Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), the most celebrated jurist-theologian of his age. At the height of a brilliant career in Baghdad he suffered, by his own account, a collapse: certainty drained out of philosophy, theology, and his own motives, and in 1095 he abandoned his chair and disappeared into years of retreat. The crisis and its resolution are told in his autobiography, the Munqidh min al-Dalāl, which the library holds as The Confessions; there he reports of the Sufis that the last stage “could not be reached by mere instruction, but only by transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of the moral being.” The path, he saw, is known only by walking it.

What al-Ghazali joined together was the lawyers’ Islam and the lovers’ Islam. His great Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn — the Revival of the Religious Sciences — rebuilt the whole of observance, from prayer to marriage to death, on the inward states each act exists to produce, so that the law became the body of which the path is the life. His Mishkāt al-Anwār, the Niche for Lights, read the Quran’s Light Verse as a map of divine illumination. After him, the broad Sunni consensus had a charter for holding scripture, theology, and mysticism as one religion, and Sufism entered its centuries of institutional confidence.

The Age of the Orders

Sufis taught that beneath the outward law of Islam ran an inward dimension, and that the two were not rivals but layers of one religion — the sharīʿa the road, the ḥaqīqa the truth it leads to. They held that the heart, polished by remembrance, could come to a knowledge of God they called maʿrifa, distinct from the knowledge of doctrine. Around such teaching grew the institutions that carried it: the orders, or ṭuruq, each tracing its lineage back through a chain of masters; the lodges where disciples gathered; and the cult of the saints, the awliyāʾ, whose tombs became places of pilgrimage. The poetry is the part that travelled furthest — Rūmī, ʿAttār, Ibn ʿArabī — verse in which the love of God is sung in the language of wine and human longing, and read by the tradition as allegory throughout.

From the twelfth century the loose circles hardened into the tariqa as institution. Its architecture is everywhere the same: a silsila, the recited chain of masters reaching link by link back to the Prophet; the bond of sheikh and murīd, master and aspirant, in which the disciple’s progress is guided rather than self-invented; and dhikr as the engine of the path — remembrance practiced communally in the lodge, carried by recitation of the divine names, by ordered breath, in some orders by music and movement, in others in total silence. The lodge — khānqāh, zāwiya, tekke — stood beside the mosque across the Islamic world for centuries.

The great orders map that world. The Qadiriyya, looking back to Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani of Baghdad (d. 1166), became the most widespread of all, from West Africa to Bengal. The Naqshbandiyya, rooted in Bukhara around Baha al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389) and the Central Asian masters before him, is marked by the silent dhikr — remembrance held wholly within the heart — and by a sober, law-minded temper; alone among the major orders it traces its chain through Abu Bakr rather than Ali. The Chishtiyya carried the path into South Asia from Ajmer, where Muʿin al-Din Chishti died in 1236, and embraced samāʿ — spiritual listening — as a door of the heart, the lineage from which qawwali descends. The Shadhiliyya of Abu’l-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1258) spread through North Africa and Egypt a path of inward intensity in ordinary dress, its classic distilled in the aphorisms of Ibn Ata Allah. And the Mevleviyya grew from the circle of Rumi at Konya — organized after his death by his son Sultan Walad — and carried remembrance into the turning ceremony, the semā: a rite of passing-away and return to servanthood, performed as worship and not as the stage show its photographs suggest. Its history runs through the lodges of the Ottoman world.

The Metaphysical Summit

The path’s intellectual summit is Ibn Arabi of Murcia (1165–1240), whom the tradition titles al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master. Settled in Damascus, he left an immense corpus crowned by the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, the Meccan Openings, and the compact Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, the Ringstones of Wisdom. His school’s keystone is the teaching later called waḥdat al-wujūd, the unity of being — a phrase his interpreters consolidated rather than the master himself — and as that school renders it, the teaching is not that the world is God but that nothing possesses being of its own: whatever exists is a self-disclosure of the one Real, as images exist in a mirror. Between the Real and the world stands the barzakh, the isthmus — the imaginal realm where meanings take sensible form, the country of vision and dream. And the path’s completion is the Perfect Human, al-insān al-kāmil: the fully polished mirror in which the Real contemplates all Its names, realized in the Prophet and held out as the end of the way. The same teacher wrote the love-poems of the Tarjumán al-Ashwáq, which the library holds in Nicholson’s rendering, with their famous profession — “My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks”.

The Poetry’s Reach

What Ibn Arabi argued, Persia sang. Rumi (1207–1273), transfigured by his meeting with the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, poured the path into tens of thousands of couplets; his Masnavi opens with the reed-flute cut from the reed-bed — bidding the listener hearken to “how it complains, / Lamenting its banishment from its home” — the soul’s own voice, exiled from its origin and longing back. A verse ascribed to the fifteenth-century poet Jami calls the Masnavi the Quran in the Persian tongue, and the order that grew from Rumi’s circle has treated it nearly so. Before him, ʿAttār of Nishapur (d. circa 1221) had written the Conference of the Birds, in which thirty birds cross seven valleys seeking the Simurgh and find at the journey’s end — by the pun the poem turns on, sī murgh, thirty birds — themselves beheld in him: “The Sun of my Perfection is a Glass / Wherein from Seeing into Being pass” runs the answer from the throne in FitzGerald’s version. After them, Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1390) perfected the ghazal in which wine, the cupbearer, and the Beloved carry human and divine senses at once and refuse to choose between them — verse the tradition reads as the path’s own tongue.

The Modern Arcs

The last two centuries put the orders under pressure from every side at once. Under colonial occupation they were often the spine of resistance — the Qadiri emir Abd el-Kader led Algeria’s defense against France in the 1830s and 1840s, and the Sanusi order organized Libya’s against Italy — while reformist and Salafi movements attacked the cult of saints and the masters’ authority as accretions upon a purer Islam, and modernizing states moved against the lodges as relics: in Turkey, the law of 30 November 1925 closed the tekkes and dissolved the orders outright, driving the Mevlevi rite underground for a generation before it re-emerged under state management. The argument between reformers and the orders reshaped Islamic life from West Africa to Indonesia, and runs on.

The same period carried Sufism westward. Inayat Khan (1882–1927), a musician trained in the Chishti line, taught in Europe and America from 1910 a Universal Sufism open to seekers of every faith; his A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberty (1914) was among the first Sufi books written for Western readers. Idries Shah (1924–1996) reached a far larger readership with books presenting Sufism as a timeless psychological wisdom separable from Islam — a presentation literary admirers found liberating and scholars of the tradition found loose in its sources and misleading in that separation. A different channel ran through the perennialist school: René Guénon died in Cairo in 1951 as Abd al-Wahid Yahya, an initiate of a Shadhili line, and the Sufi affiliations of Frithjof Schuon and Martin Lings carried that transmission forward. Alongside all of this grew the academic recovery: Reynold A. Nicholson’s editions and studies opened the texts to English readers; Louis Massignon’s lifework on Hallaj recovered the martyr for scholarship; Henry Corbin read Ibn Arabi’s imaginal world into the philosophy of religion; Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975) gave the whole tradition its standard one-volume portrait; and William Chittick and Carl Ernst have carried the philological and historical work into the present.

The living communities have paid for their visibility. In November 2017 gunmen attacked Friday prayers at the mosque of al-Rawda in Egypt’s North Sinai, a village congregation associated with a Sufi order, killing at least 235 worshipers; shrine demolitions and legal prosecutions of dervish communities in several countries belong to the same contemporary record.

The relation of all this to the wider esoteric world is real and easily overstated. Sufi maʿrifa sits beside the gnosis of late antiquity and the jñāna of Vedānta as another name for a transforming knowledge, and the Neoplatonic ascent of the soul has often been set alongside the Sufi path; some of that resemblance reflects genuine contact in the Islamic philosophical inheritance, much of it, on the house’s reading, independent arrival at a similar end. The resemblances are worth tracing and are not identities: each term is exact in its own setting, and Sufism is exact in being, first and last, a way of being Muslim. Within Islam itself its standing has been contested — embraced as the religion’s living heart, suspected by others as innovation — and that argument has never closed.

The Texts and the Scholarship

The primary texts are unusually accessible. The library holds Hujwīrī’s Kashf al-Maḥjúb and Ibn Arabi’s Tarjumán al-Ashwáq in Nicholson’s translations, al-Ghazali’s Confessions and Niche for Lights, Whinfield’s abridged Masnavi, and FitzGerald’s Bird-Parliament. Nicholson’s own survey, The Mystics of Islam (1914), the classic short introduction in English, is freely readable at sacred-texts.com, as is Inayat Khan’s A Sufi Message of Spiritual Liberty (1914), the founding statement of Universal Sufism. The standard scholarly portrait is Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 1975). William Chittick’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Ibn Arabi is the open-access door into the Greatest Master’s thought, and Jawid Mojaddedi’s Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Hallaj gives the execution of 922 and its afterlife at full scholarly depth; Carl Ernst’s Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (1985) treats the ecstatic utterances across the tradition.

→ In the library: Hujwīrī — The Kashf al-Mahjúb (Nicholson, 1911) · ʿAttār — Bird-Parliament (FitzGerald, 1889) · Rūmī — Masnavi i Maʿnavi (Whinfield, 1898) · Al-Ghazālī — The Confessions (Field, 1909) · Ibn ʿArabī — The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq (Nicholson, 1911) · Al-Ghazālī — The Niche for Lights (Gairdner, 1924)

→ Related: Gnosis · Jewish Mysticism · Meditation · Al Aqsa Mosque · Neoplatonism · Sufi Tariqa Institution · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Rumi · Traditionalism Perennialism