Sufism

Sufism, the Islamic tradition named tasawwuf, is Islam's interiorization and intensification of faith and practice: the wayfarer's path through stations and states toward the annihilation of the ego in God and subsistence through God, the experiential knowledge the tradition calls tasting, pursued through the remembrance of God, the dhikr whose vocal and silent forms the orders transmit, under the spiritual master's direction. The path is held by its mainstream to be inseparable from the law, the sharia and the tariqa mutually dependent, and the tradition's own claim is that it is not a sect but Islam's heart, historically the spiritual glue of Islamic societies and the default mainstream until the modern era.

What Sufis do today: follow the law within a school, keep the daily prayers, and add the order's practices, the assigned litanies, the meditation on God's presence, the solitary retreat, the visitation of the saints' shrines whose festivals mark the calendar, and the poetry and music, Rumi's verses and the whirling ceremony of his order and the qawwali of South Asia, the Burda still sung worldwide. The saint and the master are central: the pledge to a shaykh begins formal discipleship, the chain of transmission traces through the founders to the Prophet, and the belief in the saints' miracles is a Sunni requirement by the classical scholars' account.

Where it came from, briefly: the early ascetics of Basra and Kufa in the eighth century, the woman who loved God and the systematizer of Baghdad, the classical mystics whose ecstatic pronouncements led to the famous execution and whose reconciler made Sufism defensible within Sunni orthodoxy, and the orders' crystallization in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under their eponymous founders, from the Qadiri through the Chishti and Shadhili and Mevlevi and Naqshbandi, the West African orders later. The modern era pressed hard: the combined onslaught of modernists and secularists and fundamentalists through the twentieth century, the Saudi-funded Salafi expansion from the 1970s, and the revival the anthropologists documented after the orders' near-disappearance, the twenty-first century's competition between Sufism and Salafism ongoing.

The contested status is the tradition's central tension, and the entry carries it as contested: the Salafi critique names the rituals innovations, targets the dhikr gatherings and the shrine visitation and the intercession, and accepts only a sharia-conformant Sufism, while the tradition's scholars hold the interiorization integral to Islam and the modern scholarship notes that the mysticism-versus-legalism framing was itself the Orientalists' construction, with even the founder of Wahhabism's family conciliatory toward authentic Sufism. No reliable global count exists, the affiliation informal and unmeasured, but the Pew surveys show no surveyed country with a majority rejecting Sufis as Muslims, and the strongholds, Senegal's order-structured religious life and South Asia's movements and Turkey's heritage and the Balkans' centuries-old orders, are living institutions; the western currents range from orthodox orders to the universalist movements that de-Islamicized the tradition, the scholars' Neo-Sufism label their own. Access is initiatory at the core, the pledge and the years of service the cost, while the sama gatherings and the shrines and the festivals of Konya stand open, much of Sufi devotional culture practiced by ordinary Muslims with no formal membership. Its counsel is the tradition's own: the remembrance is the work, the master is the guide no one proceeds without, and the goal is not experience for its own sake but the truth the law and the path both serve. Respect it as Islam's own tradition, learned in its own terms, and it speaks plainly, which is what its scholars ask of any account.