Heart-Centered Paths: A Comparative Study of Hesychasm and Sufism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Insights into Sufism: Voices from the Heart
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020
Sufism has long constituted one of the most powerful drawcards to people embracing Islam. This book considers a broad range of questions relating to Sufism, including its history, manifestations in various countries and communities, its expression in poetry, women and Sufism, and expressions among popular spirituality. In addition, the volume challenges the long-held view of Sufism as being necessarily peaceful, through a consideration in one paper of Sufis engaging in violent Jihad. The book works at the interface between the scholarly and the practical, using rigorous methodology to ensure that its findings are reliable, while also giving attention to how Sufi thinking impacts the daily lives of Sufis. This represents an original and important dimension of this study, given the significant role played by Sufis throughout Islamic history in enriching discussion of intellectual and charismatic questions, as well as informing popular practice among "Folk" Muslims.
SUFISM AS A MYSTICAL PATH TO GOD
Sufism is the mystical tradition which is intimately related to the ascetical and spiritual of aspect of Islam. It has a rich and long history with different religious, cultural, social and political currents and forces at work. In Islam, Sufism is often ed the 'religion of the interior' as opposed to the 'religion of the exterior' which is living in accordance with the demands of the Islamic law (sharia), jurisprudence (fiqh) and Hadith (tradition). In this article my concern is to examine how Sufism is a mystical way to God-experience in Islam, with some background information about the movement and critical observations of general nature.
Theology in action: gaining interdisciplinary insights from a Sufi perspective
Practical Theology, 2020
Although practical theology is by nature interdisciplinary, its primary focus has been to acquire insights regarding Christian concerns. Only recently has there been an attempt to include voices from other religious traditions, and even nonreligious worldviews and secular culture. The enriching potential of these new perspectives is promising. To further fill this gap, this paper introduces the world of two Islamic Sufi communities and examines the relationship between theology and practice from their point of view. The investigation reveals a remarkable divergence between these two groups regarding theological emphases and the resulting practical implementation. While Sufism is unique in the sense that it endows the spiritual leader with remarkable authority to determine theological truth and its appropriation on behalf of the community under his leadership, the example remains relevant, for it offers new awareness of the interplay between theory and action. Even though there is a reciprocal relationship between beliefs and their concrete embodiment that blurs any firm boundary lines, the cumulative evidence does point to the hierarchical preeminence of practices. For this reason, this exploration specifically aims to deepen the reflection on the importance of the body in relation to religious learning, identity formation, and personal transformation. The overall results confirm the importance of extending the field of practical theology to include considerations from multiple faiths.
Returning to God through His Names: A Fourteenth-Century Sufi Treatise
In William Granara, Roy P. Mottahedeh, Wheeler M. Thackston & Alireza Korangy (eds.), Essays in Islamic Philology, History, and Philosophy. De Gruyter 204-228 (2016) Following the institutionalization of the Sufi orders, the ritual practice of dhikr took on a central role. In this paper I show that under the influence of the speculative Sufism that had taken root in the orders, dhikr came to be theorized as a method of return: a graded process that could lead its practitioner back to humanity's divine origin through various layers of existence. The core text at the heart of my analysis is the perennially popular Sirr al-Asrār (or Bayān al-Asrār), which in modern editions and translations has been misattributed to ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166) but which in fact was written by Yūsuf al-Kūrānī (d. 768/1367), a Kurdish Sufi who settled in Egypt. Beginning in the sixth/twelfth century, Sufism underwent a fundamental transformation with two principal facets. The first of these was the emergence of an institutional framework of Sufi orders, structured by a system of master-disciple relations and based in endowed lodges. The second was the formulation of holis-tic doctrines that incorporated and adapted elements from a range of intellectual and religious traditions. The former development gave Sufism significant influence over popular religiosity, while the latter reconfigured the meaning of key Islamic concepts and practices.1 My aim in this article is to shed light on this transformation by examining the theorization of dhikr, formalized remembrance and contemplation of God, as developed in an eighth-/fourteenth-century Sufi text. My analysis reveals that the emergence of dhikr as the primary Sufi ritual within the nascent Sufi orders was underpinned and supported by a theoretical foundation rooted in a Neoplatonic cosmology of emanation. Within this framework, the increasingly internalized recitation of specific divine names allowed the Sufi seeker to gradually overcome the distance separating the person uttering the name from the one named and thus to return to humanity's original abode in the realm of divine presence.
Ambiguous Sufi Lives, 2022
The people in this study share a longing, an aspiration, to draw closer to Allah, to be forgiven, to be more truly Allah’s, and to give themselves, their moments, their works, and their inner and outer lives back to Allah, the one who grants them every breath, every moment, and every heartbeat. But their lives with Allah are not always harmonious and often rather ambiguous, troubled, confusing and filled with contradiction and inner tension. They rarely manage to be the kind of dedicated, perfect practitioners and lovers of Allah that they long to be, and often fail to live up to the ideals and moral-spiritual goals of the tradition of Islamic self-refinement that they engage with. Besides being on the ṭarīqa, the Sufi path towards Allah, most of them are also regular people (sometimes extraordinary) with ups and downs, economic and work-related challenges, marriages and family relations that are not smooth, plans and dreams that fail, ambitions for self-assertion that remain unfulfilled, habits and character traits that they dislike, life experiences that they struggle to make sense of. The lived experience of these common life tensions constitutes the outset of this dissertation. It looks at how and by what means an individual subjectively appropriates the ideals of a spiritual tradition, how the moral-spiritual telos and the modes of agency of tradition are internalised and inscribed unto the body and the self, transforming it into what Gavin Flood has called the ascetic self of tradition, a common denominator of scriptural-cosmological ascetic- religious traditions
The Key in the Dark: Self and Soul Transformation in the Islamic and Sufi Spiritual Traditions
Chapter 6 in the anthology Modern Psychology and Ancient Wisdom: Psychological Healing Practices from the World's Religious Traditions, Second Edition, edited by Sharon J. Mijares, published by Routledge: New York and London, 2016. This chapter discusses psycho-spiritual theory and practice from the Sufi and Islamic spiritual traditions. It begins with contextual history and background concerning the place of what modern Western social theory calls “psychology” within “traditional” Islamic healing and Sufism. The chapter next proceeds to introduce Sufi and Islamic personality theory via the best-known component of its psychology: Sufi stories and poetry. The middle part of the chapter discusses in detail the view of the soul and self in Sufi and Islamic psychology. This is seen as a multilayered, multifaceted reality, more akin to a community than an individual. The chapter then examines practical psychotherapeutic techniques used by Sufi teachers in various lineages, including meditation, contemplation, breathing awareness, body awareness, sound, music, and movement. To conclude, the chapter mentions recent efforts to merge traditional Sufi and Islamic personality theory with Freudian, Jungian, humanistic and somatic psychotherapeutic approaches as well as with postmodern models of holistic health.
Unveiling the Divine: Encountering the Face of Allah in Sufi Mysticism
This thesis describes the mystical experience in Islam where the Muslim mystic (Sufi) encounters the Face of God (Wajh Allah) through spiritual practices and beliefs. In the process of researching and writing this thesis, the author conducted a literature search using various sources on interpreting the subject from the mystical, fundamentalist, and rationalist perspectives. This thesis is slated to be a reference and resource for those seeking to understand the mystical side of Islam, which is often misunderstood to be outside the fold of the faith and an innovation that does not originate within Islam itself.
Rethinking Conceptual Sufism: A Synthesis of Islamic Spirituality, Asceticism, and Mysticism
Meis Al-Kaisi, 2021
Far from being a school or a sect, Sufism is an ideology, a mode of life, a set of principles, and a 'faith in practice.' Sufism has been addressed and presented by scholars countless times. It has been primarily defined as either Islamic mysticism or as the spiritual dimension of Islam. Yet, as much as mysticism is ineffable as much as the published research is full of tangled definitions that only scholars can comprehend. The traditional approach to the study of Sufism makes the topic burdensome and mentally unattainable to the learned public. This article explains Sufism without using complex terminology or intense presentations of mystical states and stations. It is a scholarly attempt that is ultimately designed to provide a straightforward definition of Sufism. It presents Sufism in a threefold manner, as a synthesis of three Islamic principles: Islamic spirituality, asceticism, and mysticism. Each of the three dimensions is explained in an Islamic context to demonstrate the validity of the Sufi trends as being purely Islamic. Spirituality, asceticism, and mysticism are all discussed within the frame of Tradition, that is, the Qur'ān and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad.