What is Sufism?

The short version: Sufism is not a separate branch of Islam beside Sunni and Shia. It is a way of practising Islam, with its own disciplines, teachers and institutions, that most Sufis have understood as the inner dimension of the same faith and law that other Muslims follow. Its aim is nearness to God, reached through renunciation, remembrance and love. Its history has dates: the renouncers of the eighth century, the name in ninth-century Baghdad, the manuals of the tenth and eleventh, the orders of the twelfth and thirteenth.^[1]​^[2] Majority This page traces how that happened, and why Sufism has also always had Muslim critics.

Where the word comes from

The Arabic ṣūfī most probably means “a wearer of wool” (ṣūf), from the coarse woollen garment that marked an ascetic. Al-Qushayrī in the eleventh century and Ibn Khaldūn in the fourteenth already rejected the popular alternatives on grounds of grammar: ṣafāʾ, “purity”, or the ahl al-ṣuffa, the poor companions who lived on a bench at the Prophet’s mosque. Modern scholars agree.^[3]​^[1] Consensus

The thing is older than the word. In the generations after the conquests, some Muslims in Basra and Kufa turned against the wealth of the new empire. They fasted, prayed through the night, wept over their sins and distrusted the court. They were called zuhhād, “renouncers”, and they were not a sect: many were ordinary scholars of hadith and the Qur’an.^[1]​^[2] Consensus Ahmet Karamustafa argues that “Sufi” became the name of a recognizable group, distinct from the wider renouncers, only in Baghdad in the second half of the ninth century, and that Sufism in the strict sense begins there.^[2] Majority Sufi tradition itself traces its chains of masters back through al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and ʿAlī to the Prophet; that al-Ḥasan was a Sufi in the later sense is an anachronism.^[1] Majority

What Sufis practise and teach

The vocabulary came from the Qur’an. It speaks of God as “closer to him than his jugular vein” (50:16), of people whom God “loves and who love Him” (5:54), and of remembrance: “truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace” (13:28).^[4]​^[5]​^[6] Remembrance, dhikr, repeated formulas said aloud or silently, alone or together, became the central practice. Consensus on the verses’ use.

The Baghdad master al-Junayd (d. 910) gave the path its theory. Asked what Sufism is, he is reported to have said: “that the Real should make you die to yourself and give you life in Him.”^[3] Behind it lie two terms: fanāʾ, the passing away of the self in God, and baqāʾ, continuing to live in God and returning to the world. Al-Junayd insisted that the experience be governed by the law and sound belief, and kept quiet before the uninitiated.^[2] Majority

Not everyone kept quiet. Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī was remembered for sayings in which the speaker seems to speak as God, and al-Ḥallāj for anā l-ḥaqq, “I am the Real”. Al-Ḥallāj was executed in Baghdad in 922; Carl Ernst argues that court politics weighed at least as heavily as doctrine in his condemnation.^[7]​^[8] Majority His case taught Sufis to write carefully.

From circles to orders

From the late tenth century, Sufis wrote manuals arguing that their path was the inner side of Sunni Islam: al-Sarrāj, al-Qushayrī’s Risāla of 1045, al-Hujwīrī in Persian.^[3]​^[9] Consensus The best-known statement of the case came from al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), the most celebrated scholar of his day, who left his chair in Baghdad after a crisis in 1095 and wrote that “the Sufis are the ones who travel the way of God in particular”.^[10]​^[11] Historians add that the manuals had made the argument before him, and that his Iḥyāʾ was burned in al-Andalus under the Almoravids.^[1]​^[11] Majority

Institutions followed. From the eleventh century rulers and patrons endowed lodges, khānqāh, zāwiya, later tekke. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a master’s method of devotion was handed on by initiation along a chain of masters (silsila) reaching back to the Prophet: the ṭarīqa, “way”, or order.^[12]​^[13] Majority An initiate received the master’s cloak, learned the order’s form of dhikr, and joined a community whose lodges might run from North Africa to India under one name.^[13] Majority

The orders took the names of masters who often had not founded an institution themselves:

• the Qādiriyya, after ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (c. 1077–1166), a Ḥanbalī preacher in Baghdad;
• the Suhrawardiyya, organized by ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (1145–1234);
• the Chishtiyya of northern India, after Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī (1143–1236) at Ajmer, known for music in worship and for refusing court service;^[14]
• the Shādhiliyya of North Africa and Egypt;
• the Mevleviyya, organized after Rūmī’s death in 1273 by his son Sultan Walad, whose turning ritual made them the “whirling dervishes”.^[12]​^[15] Consensus

Rūmī (1207–1273) and Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) gave Sufism its best-loved poetry and its most ambitious metaphysics. The label usually attached to Ibn ʿArabī’s teaching, “the unity of being” (waḥdat al-wujūd), was not his own; it came from followers and, above all, from his critic Ibn Taymiyya.^[16] Majority Sufism’s place in the spread of Islam in India is told in Hinduism §10.

Saints, tombs and the critics

By the twelfth century Sufi masters were widely regarded as awliyāʾ, “friends of God”, through whom God’s blessing worked during their lives and after their deaths. Their tombs became places of pilgrimage, with vows, prayers and festivals on the death-day.^[13]​^[14] Consensus

That is where the critics concentrated. Jurists had long objected to music and dance, claims of miracles and masters who seemed to stand above the law.^[1] Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) argued in a treatise of 1310 that travelling specifically to visit the tombs of prophets and saints was a forbidden innovation; yet he did not reject Sufism as such, treated early masters such as al-Junayd as authorities, and may himself have been affiliated with the Qādiriyya (§8).^[17]​^[1] Majority

His arguments against shrine pilgrimage were revived in eighteenth-century Arabia by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, whose followers destroyed tombs and shrines where they ruled (§10).^[18] Consensus In 1925 the Turkish republic closed the Sufi lodges and shrines; the orders continued in private (§11).^[19] Consensus Today the argument continues, between Muslims who see Sufism as the heart of their tradition and Muslims who see its saint cults as a departure from it. Political

Women in Sufism

The renunciant movement gave women one of the few religious roles in which they could be recognized in their own right. Al-Sulamī, before 1021, recorded dozens of women devotees and Sufis, some of whom instructed men.^[20]​^[21] Majority Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya of Basra became the emblem of a love of God that seeks no reward. Little can be known about her: the best-known stories, such as the torch and bucket to burn paradise and quench hell, come from ʿAṭṭār’s Memorial of the Saints, about four centuries after her death.^[22]​^[23] Majority

Common misconceptions

• “Sufism is a third sect, beside Sunni and Shia.” Most Sufis have been Sunni, following one of the schools of law; there are Shia Sufi orders too. Sufism is a path within Islam, not a separate community.^[1] Majority
• “Sufism came from India, Christianity or Neoplatonism.” Older scholarship proposed foreign sources; most historians now see the renouncers drawing their language from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example while absorbing some of their neighbours’ piety. Specific borrowings remain disputed.^[1]​^[24] Contested
• “The ‘sober’ and ‘drunk’ schools go back to the ninth century.” Jawid Mojaddedi showed that this typology was created in eleventh-century handbooks and projected back onto the early masters.^[25] Majority
• “Rūmī was a universalist poet outside Islam.” Rūmī was a teacher of Islamic law and religion, and his Masnavī is steeped in the Qur’an; the detachment comes from modern English translations.^[15] Majority

What scholars disagree about

When Sufism begins. With the eighth-century renouncers, as the tradition’s chains of masters imply, or in ninth-century Baghdad, as Karamustafa argues.^[2]​^[1] Contested

Whether al-Ḥallāj died for heresy or for politics. Massignon read his death as a self-offering; Ernst stresses the court rivalries behind the trial.^[7]​^[8] Contested

The full story is in The Mystics: Sufism.