Rethinking Conceptual Sufism: A Synthesis of Islamic Spirituality, Asceticism, and Mysticism (original) (raw)

Understanding Sufism: A Multi-Dimensional Phenomenon

Journal of peace, communication and Development, 2022

This article is about Muslim Sufism which is practical form of Islam. It stressed the inner search of Allah and shuns materialism. Sufism is always under severe attack. It is reality that illiteracy has shadowed the real face of Islam and started some un-Islamic rituals which supported the stance of hard liners. In this article with the help of Quranic verses and sayings of Prophet F D F A , I have tried to prove that Sufism is not out of Islam. When worldly minded people over took the control of Muslim world, some high ranked pious people appeared on the scene to purify the religion. This article gives a brief history and sayings of notable Muslim scholars about Sufism.

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.

The concept of Sufism in the light of Qur'an and Sunnah (An Analytical Research

2020

In this research paper, it has been analyzed the concept of Sufism in the light of Quran and Sunnah. "Sufism and Islam can't be isolated similarly that higher awareness or arousing can't be isolated from Islam. Islam isn't a recorded marvel that started 1,400 years back. It is the ageless specialty of enlivening by methods for accommodation. Sufism is the core of Islam. It is as antiquated as the ascent of human consciousness." Numerous researchers and legal scholars may get issue together with the above articulation. They see Sufism as an unsuitable bending of Islamic convictions and lifestyle. They discover the ceremonies and practices just as the convictions of numerous Sufis repulsive to the lessons of Islam. They contend that Sufism has achieved disarray in the brains of its devotees driving them away from the straightforwardness and virtue of the radiant confidence. Numerous Orientalists, then again, don't acknowledge that Sufism has an immediate connection with Islam and reject the possibility that it has advanced from the cognizance propelled by the Qur'an or the lessons of Muhammad. They assert that its starting point is immovably implanted in the supernatural quality of the Jew and Christian recluses and priests of the time and that their conventions roused as well as directed the advancement of Sufism.

The Nature of Sufism: An Ontological Reading of the Mystical in Islam

Routledge, 2021

This book explores how Sufis approach their faith as Muslims, upholding an Islamic worldview, but going about making sense of their religion through the world in which they exist, often in unexpected ways. Using a phenomenological approach, the book examines Sufism as lived experience within the Muslim lifeworld, focusing on the Muslim experience of Islamic history. It draws on selected case studies ranging from classic Sufism to Sufism in the contemporary era mainly taken from biographical and hagiographical data, manuscript texts, and treatises. In this way, it provides a revisionist approach to theories and methods on Sufism, and, more broadly, the category of mysticism.

Sufism in the Modern World - Special Issue of 'Religions' (2024)

MDPI, 2024

Since the advent of the “modern” age, the main mystical trend of Islam, namely Sufism, has become the target of novel, multifaceted criticism in the Muslim World. The strong denunciation of “folk” Sufism by Muslim purists and fundamentalists of the eighteenth century onwards—who often consider mystical Islam to be a major part of, and reason for, the deviation from an imagined, pristine Islam—was followed by a fresh wave of Sufi antagonism by a group of Muslim modernists and secular thinkers from the nineteenth century, who regard Sufism as something belonging to the past and thus incompatible with the present. Notwithstanding these intense and multifarious critiques, Sufism has remained an active part of Muslim life and culture in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority areas, even extending its presence to new spheres such as Europe and America. The current Special Issue analyzes and examines different aspects of such vibrant activity and scrutinizes the dynamics of the beliefs, practices, institutions, interpretations, conceptualizations, and aesthetics of Sufism in the modern world. It offers its readership a broad and multidisciplinary perspective on the contemporary vitality of mystical Islam and addresses the issue through various academic fields such as religious/Islamic studies, intellectual history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, gender studies, and minority studies. Contributors to this volume have demonstrated that Sufism, like Islam itself, should be understood and studied “in context” and with regard to its constant change-in-continuity.

“Definitions of Sufism as a Meeting Place of Eastern and Western “Creative Imaginations.”

Sufism East and West: Reorientation and Dynamism of Mystical Islam in the Modern World, ed. by Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh, Leiden and Boston, E.J. Brill, 2019, pp. 53–75, 2019

The very category “Sufism” can easily become a site of heated ideological debates and, as will be shown, politically and theologically driven contractions and expansions. This is hardly surprising, because all scholarship begins and ends with definitions of the subject(s) explored. Although, as one scholar has opined, “Sufism is perhaps the most difficult of the terms to define,” its definitions feature in practically every academic study or religious tractate directly or indirectly relevant to the subject. To say that, in addition to one or the other facet of Sufism per se, each such definition reflects the intellectual or devotional position of the defining subject is to state the obvious. Scholars are not neutral observers: they always “take a stand within the world,” deeply immersed as they are in its flow and flux and, as a consequence, eager to fashion the subject of their investigation, consciously or unconsciously, according to their own personal predilections. Hence the profusion of various, often conflicting definitions of the same phenomena, on the one hand, and the persistence of certain elements out of which these definitions are being constructed, on the other.