Sufism

Sufism is the mystical heart of Islam, the inner dimension of a tradition whose outer form is often presented as pure law and submission. The word Sufi likely derives from suf (wool), referring to the rough woolen garments worn by early Muslim ascetics who rejected the material comforts of the Abbasid court. From these beginnings grew one of the world's richest mystical traditions.

The Sufi path centers on the annihilation of the ego-self in God, fana, and the subsequent subsistence in God, baqa. This is not the destruction of the individual person but the dissolution of the illusion of separation between the individual and the divine. Al-Hallaj (857–922 CE) was the tradition's most radical voice: Ana al-Haqq, I am the Truth, he declared, and was crucified for it. What he was saying was not that he, the individual Al-Hallaj, was God, but that the divine ground and the ground of his own consciousness were one. This is Eckhart's my ground and God's ground are one ground. This is the Upanishadic I am Brahman.

Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) gave Sufism its most complete philosophical expression in Wahdat al-Wujud, the Unity of Being. There is nothing in existence except God, he wrote. Every phenomenon is a self-disclosure of the divine reality. Ibn Arabi's instruction not to attach exclusively to any creed, because each is only a partial expression of the whole, is the perennial philosophy stated by one of Islam's greatest mystics.

Rumi (1207–1273) is Sufism's greatest poet and perhaps the most widely read mystic in the modern world. His Song of the Reed, the image of the individual soul as a reed cut from its divine source, making music from its very wound, is one of the most beautiful and precise images of the spiritual condition in any tradition.

A note on framing: the presentation of Sufism as a tradition separate from, or in tension with, Islam is largely a Western construction. When nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholars encountered the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz, they needed to reconcile its beauty with their preconceptions about Islam. The solution was to treat Sufism as a purer, separate stream, a move that conveniently stripped it of its Islamic religious context. More recently, Wahhabism and Salafism have reinforced this separation from the other direction, casting Sufism as a deviation from correct practice. In Arabic, the tradition is Tasawwuf, and it is understood within Islam as the interior dimension of the faith, not a departure from it. The scholar William Chittick has documented this history at length. Where this site presents Sufism, it does so as Islam's mystical heart, not a tradition adjacent to or separate from it.