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 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.

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.

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.

→ 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)

→ Related: Gnosis · Jewish Mysticism · Meditation · Al Aqsa Mosque · Neoplatonism