Sufism Explained: The Inward Path of Islam and Its Orders
Sufism is the inward, mystical dimension of Islam, called tasawwuf in Arabic. This guide covers what Sufis believe about God and the self, how dhikr is performed, the stations of the path, the shaykh and murid bond, the major orders from the Qadiriyya to the Naqshbandiyya, the Mevlevi turning ceremony, and what Rumi, Ibn Arabi and Hafez actually taught.
What is Sufism, and is it a sect, an order or a dimension of Islam?
Sufism is the inward dimension of Islam rather than a separate sect, and Muslims who practice it call it tasawwuf. A Sufi prays the five daily prayers, fasts in Ramadan and follows one of the recognized schools of Islamic law, then adds a program of inward work on top of that obligation. What confuses outsiders is the tariqa, or order, which has an initiation, a lineage and its own set of litanies, and which from a distance looks like a denomination. It is closer to a training school. A Qadiri and a Shadhili living on the same Cairo street attend the same Friday prayer in the same mosque and follow the same jurisprudence; what differs is the wird they recite in private and the teacher they answer to. Classical writers laid the whole thing out in three tiers: shari'a, the outward law binding on every Muslim; tariqa, the method of inward purification; and haqiqa, the reality that method opens onto. Ibn Khaldun, writing his Muqaddimah in the fourteenth century, listed tasawwuf among the Islamic sciences beside jurisprudence and Quranic commentary. Ahmad Zarruq, the Moroccan jurist and Sufi who died in 1493, opens his Qawa'id al-Tasawwuf by weighing the competing one-line definitions of the word against each other. The thread running through them is that tasawwuf is the part of Islam that works on the heart.
The anchor text is the hadith of Gabriel, recorded in the collections of Bukhari and Muslim, in which a stranger questions the Prophet Muhammad in front of his companions. He asks about islam, the outward acts; iman, the articles of belief; and ihsan, which the Prophet defines as worshipping God as though you see Him, and knowing that if you do not see Him, He sees you. A fourth question, about the hour of judgment, receives the answer that the one asked knows no more than the one asking, and the visitor is afterward identified as the angel Gabriel. Sufi authors from the tenth century onward claimed ihsan as their subject, which is why they present tasawwuf as one third of the religion rather than an addition to it. Historically it began as loose asceticism in eighth-century Iraq, around figures such as Hasan al-Basri in Basra, and stayed personal and informal for roughly three hundred years. The organized orders with named founders, lodges and endowments belong to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, is usually credited with making Sufism respectable to the jurists, and his Revival of the Religious Sciences argued the case in the jurists' own vocabulary.
Is Sufism the same thing as tasawwuf?
Tasawwuf is the Arabic word for what English calls Sufism, and the two name the same discipline. Sufism is a European coinage of the early nineteenth century, and no single writer can be credited with it. The Latin form appears in Friedrich August Tholuck's Ssufismus sive Theosophia Persarum Pantheistica, published in Berlin in 1821, while English writers of the same decades were spelling it Sufiism. The word has carried baggage tasawwuf does not: it suggests a self-contained religion of mystics detachable from Islam. Arabic speakers say tasawwuf, Persian and Urdu speakers often say irfan or tariqat, and none of those words describes a separate faith.
Do Sufis consider themselves Sunni or Shia?
Most Sufis are Sunni, and the large historical orders grew inside Sunni Islam under the Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali schools of law. Sufism inside Shia Islam exists but is smaller and often goes by a different name, irfan, meaning gnosis. Iranian orders such as the Nimatullahi are explicitly Shia. Some Shia scholars accept irfan while rejecting the word tasawwuf and the order structure attached to it.
How many Sufis are there in the world?
Nobody has a reliable count, and any precise figure you see deserves suspicion. Order membership is often kept private, many Muslims follow a shaykh without formal initiation, and in several countries admitting affiliation carries real risk. The Pew Research Center put the question directly to Muslims in dozens of countries for its 2012 report The World's Muslims: Unity and Diversity, and the share answering yes swung wildly by country. Some of that spread is real. Some of it is that belonging to an order means one thing in Dakar and another in Cairo.
What do Sufis believe about God, the self and the goal of the path?
Sufis hold the standard Islamic doctrine of tawhid, the absolute oneness of God, and add a claim about what that oneness means for a human being: God is utterly beyond creation and at the same time nearer to a person than that person is to himself. A verse Sufi authors return to constantly is Quran 50:16, in which God says He is nearer to a person than that person's jugular vein. The self is what blocks the view. The nafs, the lower self, pulls toward appetite and self-regard; the qalb, the heart, is the faculty that can know God directly but has rusted over through heedlessness. Polishing that rust is the working definition of the practice, and dhikr is the polish. The goal has a name: fana, annihilation of the self-centered self in God, followed by baqa, abiding in God afterward. What comes out the far side is a person whose actions no longer originate in ego, not a person who has vanished. Knowledge of this kind is called marifa, direct experiential knowing, and Sufi writers separate it sharply from ilm, the transmitted knowledge a scholar acquires from books and teachers.
The sharpest internal argument concerns how far the oneness goes. Ibn Arabi, who died in Damascus in 1240, produced a metaphysics his followers later summarized as wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being: only God has real existence, and creation is the disclosure of the divine names. The phrase belongs to his commentators rather than to his own working vocabulary, which is one reason the label and the man have to be argued about separately. Critics read the doctrine as pantheism. Ahmad Sirhindi, the Indian Naqshbandi who died in 1624, offered wahdat al-shuhud, unity of witnessing, in which the unity is an experience the traveler undergoes rather than a fact about being, so creation stays genuinely other than God. The argument has never been settled and still divides orders. On the afterlife, mainstream Sufism sits inside ordinary Islamic eschatology: resurrection, judgment, paradise and hell, with no transmigration of souls. Transmigration, tanasukh, is rejected by Sunni and Shia orthodoxy alike, and only minority groups at the edge of the Islamic world taught it. For how traditions that do teach rebirth describe it, see Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
What do fana and baqa mean?
Fana is the annihilation of the ego-self in God, and baqa is the abiding that follows it. Junayd of Baghdad, who died in 910, insisted the pair belong together: a traveler who reaches fana and stops there is unfinished, because the point is to come back and function in the world with the self no longer at the center. Modern writers often compare fana to ego death; Ego Death: What It Means, What Triggers It and How to Integrate It sets out where that comparison holds and where it fails.
Why do Sufis talk so much about the heart?
The heart, qalb, is treated in Sufi psychology as an organ of perception for God, not as a figure of speech for emotion. A hadith describes sins as black marks accumulating on the heart until it corrodes, and Sufi manuals build their whole method on that image: the heart is a mirror, heedlessness is the tarnish, remembrance is the cloth. The Arabic root of qalb also carries the sense of turning, which Sufi writers exploit constantly.
What is marifa in Sufism?
Marifa is direct, tasted knowledge of God, distinguished from ilm, the knowledge a person acquires by study and transmission. Sufi writers use the word dhawq, tasting, to make the point: you can read every book written about honey and still not know its taste. Al-Ghazali made that argument against himself. He had held the chair at the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad, and he wrote that none of his learning had given him the thing he was after.
What is dhikr, and how is it actually performed?
Dhikr is the repeated invocation of God's name or of a short Quranic formula, and it is the central practice of every Sufi order. The word means remembrance. Its warrant comes straight from the Quran, which at 33:41 instructs believers to remember God with much remembrance and at 13:28 says that hearts find rest in the remembrance of God. In practice a Sufi receives a wird, an assigned daily litany, from a teacher: a set number of repetitions of specific formulas at fixed times, usually after the dawn prayer and again at night. The commonest formulas are la ilaha illa Allah, there is no god but God; the single name Allah; and the pronoun Hu, He. Counting is done on a tasbih, a loop of thirty-three or ninety-nine beads, or on the fingers, and the number assigned is not arbitrary, since a shaykh may raise or lower it for a particular student. Group dhikr is the other half of the practice. In Arab orders the collective session is called a hadra, meaning presence, and it is performed standing in a circle or in two facing lines, the invocation shortening as the tempo rises until only the breath of the name is left.
The mechanics differ by order, and this is where orders diverge most visibly. Dhikr jali is audible, chanted aloud, often with the body rocking and the syllables timed to the breath. Dhikr khafi is silent, held in the heart with no sound and no visible movement, and the Naqshbandiyya made it their signature, mapping the invocation onto the lataif, a set of subtle centers associated with points in the body. Published lists disagree about how many there are and where they sit, and a figure repeated on a website is one branch's teaching rather than the tradition's, so none is given here. Breath-linked dhikr is old and well documented: the phrases of the formula are timed to the breath, and Central Asian manuals describe habs-i dam, a retention of the breath during recitation. None of it is set out here as a method. Breath retention carries real physical risk for anyone with a heart or lung condition, or in pregnancy, and these practices are transmitted under supervision, which is the tradition's own rule rather than an editorial one. For how a bead loop is handled generally, see Mala Beads: The 108 Count, How to Use One and Choosing Yours.
What phrases are used in dhikr?
The core formulas are la ilaha illa Allah, the declaration that there is no god but God; the name Allah on its own; Hu, meaning He; and astaghfirullah, I seek God's forgiveness. Many orders also work through the ninety-nine divine names, and most include salawat, blessings on the Prophet Muhammad, in the daily wird. The exact combination and count belong to the order and are given by a teacher rather than chosen.
What is the difference between loud and silent dhikr?
Loud dhikr, dhikr jali, is vocalized and usually collective, the syllables timed to the breath and often to a swaying of the body. Silent dhikr, dhikr khafi, makes no sound. The Qadiriyya, Rifa'iyya and Chishtiyya favor the loud form; the Naqshbandiyya built its reputation on the silent one and has long criticized audible dhikr as display. Each side quotes the same verses and the same hadith at the other. Neither has won.
Can you do dhikr without joining an order?
Any Muslim can perform dhikr, and the common practice of reciting subhan Allah, alhamdulillah and Allahu akbar thirty-three times each after the daily prayers requires no affiliation whatever. What an order supplies is a specific wird with assigned counts and a teacher who adjusts it. Sufi manuals warn against designing a heavy regimen for yourself, on the grounds that intensity without supervision tends to inflate the ego it was meant to reduce.
What are the stages and stations of the Sufi path?
The Sufi path is mapped as a sequence of maqamat, stations, and ahwal, states, and the difference between the two is the first thing a student learns. A station is earned and permanent: you work at it, consolidate it and keep it. A state arrives as a gift, lasts as long as God wills, and cannot be manufactured. Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, a tenth-century author whose Kitab al-Luma is among the earliest surviving handbooks, set out seven stations in order: repentance, watchfulness against the doubtful, renunciation, poverty, patience, trust in God and contentment. Later authors expanded the list enormously. Abdullah Ansari of Herat, who died in 1089, laid out a hundred stations grouped in ten sets of ten in his Stations of the Wayfarers. States, by contrast, are usually listed as nearness, love, fear, hope, longing, intimacy, tranquility, contemplation and certainty. No two manuals agree on the lists, and the classical authors admit as much. What they do agree on is the direction of travel: from repentance at the beginning to some form of certainty or union at the end, with the ego dismantled by degrees along the way.
Running alongside the stations is a map of the nafs, the lower self, in stages. Three come directly from the Quran: al-nafs al-ammara, the self that commands to evil, at 12:53; al-nafs al-lawwama, the self that reproaches itself, at 75:2; and al-nafs al-mutmainna, the self at peace, which at 89:27 is invited to return to its Lord. Later Sufi psychology, especially in Ottoman and South Asian orders, extended these to seven by adding al-nafs al-mulhama, the inspired self, al-radiya, the contented self, al-mardiyya, the self God is pleased with, and a perfected self at the end whose name and description vary from order to order. The scheme describes a change in what a person wants, not a change in circumstances. The commanding self does not disappear at the second stage; it stops being the only voice in the room. Attempts to line the seven up against modern psychology do exist. Robert Frager, a psychologist who is also a Halveti-Jerrahi shaykh, made one in his 1999 book Heart, Self and Soul. Traditional teachers stay cool toward that kind of translation, on the grounds that the nafs is a moral category rather than a developmental one, and that a stage you can be talked out of was never a stage.
What is the difference between a maqam and a hal?
A maqam is a station you earn through effort and then hold; a hal is a state that descends without warning and departs the same way. Al-Qushayri, whose Epistle, written in the middle of the eleventh century, became the standard textbook of the tradition, put it plainly: stations are acquisitions, states are gifts. So a teacher asks about your stations. States prove nothing about character, and a student who reports them often is describing his own vanity.
What are kashf and karamat?
Kashf is unveiling, the perception of things ordinarily hidden, and karamat are the graces sometimes attributed to saints: knowledge at a distance, answered prayers, unexplained provision. Sufi manuals treat both as side effects and warn students that fascination with them stops the path cold. The manuals attribute to Junayd the judgment that such things are veils, though the line reaches us through later compilers rather than through anything of his that survives. Whether any of it is trainable or testable is a separate question that Sufi doctrine does not set out to answer, and it has not been examined to a clinical or experimental standard.
How long does the Sufi path take?
Traditional orders answer in years rather than weeks. The Mevlevi novitiate ran to a thousand and one days of service in the lodge kitchen before a candidate was accepted, and the forty-day retreat, called chilla in Persian and arbain in Arabic, recurs across almost every order as the standard unit of intensive work. Teachers routinely tell students that the wird matters more than the retreat, because the wird is daily.
How does the shaykh and murid relationship work, and what is a silsila?
A murid is an aspirant who has bound himself to a shaykh, and the bond is formalized by bay'a, a pledge modeled on the oath the Prophet's companions gave him. In the ceremony the student places his hand in the teacher's, recites a formula of repentance, and receives a wird to perform daily. From that point the shaykh assigns practice, adjusts it, and holds the student to adab, the code of courtesy governing how a murid speaks, sits, eats and asks questions in the teacher's presence. Sufi literature is uncompromising about the necessity of a guide. The stock line, attributed to Bayazid al-Bistami and quoted ever since, is that whoever has no shaykh has Satan for a shaykh. The reason given is diagnostic rather than mystical: the nafs is skilled at disguising itself as piety, a person cannot see his own self-deception, and someone further along has to name it out loud. Authority is transmitted by ijaza, a written or spoken authorization to teach, and a shaykh authorized to initiate appoints khalifas, deputies, who run branches in other towns.
A silsila is the chain of transmission connecting a living shaykh backward, teacher to teacher, to the Prophet Muhammad. Every order maintains one, initiates memorize it, and it is recited aloud in some ceremonies. Most chains run through Ali ibn Abi Talib. The Naqshbandiyya is the notable exception, tracing its line through Abu Bakr, and it treats that difference as a claim about the sobriety of its method. Historians reading these chains find the early links thin and in several cases impossible to verify. Nile Green's Sufism: A Global History, published in 2012, treats a silsila as a claim a later community makes about its own origins rather than as a record kept at the time. A few orders also include an uwaysi link, an initiation received from a teacher already dead or never met, which by definition leaves no documentary trail. The relationship has an obvious failure mode. A structure built on obedience to one man, with adab discouraging challenge, is exactly the structure that shelters abusers, and Sufi communities in Europe and North America have produced their share of cases. Traditional literature answers that a false shaykh gives himself away by his conduct outside the lodge, which is true and not sufficient.
What happens at a bay'a ceremony?
The candidate sits with the shaykh, usually with the teacher's hand over his own, recites istighfar, the formula of seeking forgiveness, and repeats a pledge to keep the obligations of Islam and follow the guidance given. The shaykh then confers the wird. Some orders add a cloak, a cap or a recited silsila. Many treat the ceremony as unremarkable and impose no secrecy at all, while others keep the wird private, and nothing in it replaces the shahada or converts anyone to a new religion.
Can a woman be a Sufi shaykh?
Yes, and women have led Sufi communities throughout the tradition's history, though less often than men and unevenly by region. Al-Sulami, who died around 1021, compiled a biographical collection devoted entirely to early Sufi women, and Ottoman records document women running lodges. Contemporary practice varies. Some orders appoint women as shaykhas with full authority to initiate, others restrict them to teaching women, and a few appoint none at all.
What is a khanqah, a tekke, a zawiya and a dargah?
These are four regional names for Sufi institutions. Khanqah is the Persian and Central Asian term for a lodge where dervishes live, teach and house travelers. Tekke or dergah is the Turkish equivalent. Zawiya is the North and West African word, often attached to a founder's tomb. A dargah, in South Asia, is a shrine built over a saint's grave, and it is a pilgrimage site rather than a residence.
Which are the major Sufi orders, and how do they differ?
The orders named most often in histories of the tradition are the Qadiriyya, Naqshbandiyya, Shadhiliyya, Chishtiyya, Suhrawardiyya, Rifa'iyya, Mevleviyya, Bektashiyya and Tijaniyya, each named for a founder whose method it preserves. Prominence in the literature is not the same as size, and no membership census exists to rank them by. The Qadiriyya, attached to Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani of Baghdad, who died in 1166, is usually described as the oldest and the most widely spread, with branches from Morocco to Indonesia. The Naqshbandiyya, named for Baha al-Din Naqshband of Bukhara, who died in 1389, is the great silent-dhikr order and the one most insistent on strict conformity to the shari'a. The Shadhiliyya, founded by Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, who died in 1258 and taught in Tunis and Egypt, is known for a sober, largely urban style and for the aphorisms of Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari. The Chishtiyya, brought to India by Muin al-Din Chishti, who died at Ajmer in 1236, made music part of worship and built the shrine culture of South Asia. The Mevleviyya of Konya descends from Rumi. The Bektashiyya of Anatolia and the Balkans developed a heterodox character and a long institutional link to the Janissary corps. The Tijaniyya, founded around 1780 by Ahmad al-Tijani, became dominant across much of West Africa.
Four differences matter in practice. First, whether dhikr is loud or silent, which splits the Naqshbandiyya from almost everyone else. Second, whether sama, the listening to music and poetry, belongs in worship: the Chishtiyya and Mevleviyya built ceremonies on it, the Naqshbandiyya rejects it, and the Qadiriyya varies by branch. Third, the relationship to political power. The Sanusiyya in Libya, founded by Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi in the 1830s, and the Muridiyya in Senegal, founded by Amadou Bamba, who died in 1927, became social and economic institutions with real weight, while other orders kept deliberately clear of rulers. Fourth, how far the order withdraws from ordinary life. Very few are monastic. Most members marry, hold jobs, and come to the lodge on fixed evenings. Orders also branch constantly. A khalifa who develops a distinctive method lends his name to a sub-branch, which is why you meet compound names such as Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi or Halveti-Jerrahi. Shia orders, including the Nimatullahi and the Dhahabi in Iran, run a parallel history and have faced repeated episodes of state pressure since 1979.
Which Sufi order is the oldest?
The Qadiriyya is generally called the oldest surviving order, organized around the teaching of Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani in twelfth-century Baghdad, though the institution took shape under his sons and successors rather than in his own lifetime. Sufi practice itself is older than any order by roughly four centuries. The Suhrawardiyya and Rifa'iyya formed in the same period, which is why the twelfth century is treated as the institutional turning point.
How do the Chishti and Naqshbandi orders differ?
They sit at opposite ends of the sama argument. The Chishtiyya of South Asia made listening to sung poetry a formal act of worship, produced qawwali, and kept an open door to non-Muslims at its shrines. The Naqshbandiyya practices silent dhikr, avoids music entirely, and has historically pressed rulers toward stricter application of Islamic law. Both are Sunni, both are large, and members of each generally regard the other as legitimate.
Are there Sufi orders in Africa and the West?
West Africa is one of the strongest Sufi regions on earth. The Tijaniyya, Qadiriyya and Senegalese Muridiyya shape religious life across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria and beyond, and the Murid city of Touba draws enormous annual pilgrimages. In Europe and North America, branches of the Shadhiliyya, Naqshbandiyya, Halveti-Jerrahi and Nimatullahi operate openly, alongside universalist groups descended from Inayat Khan that accept members of any religion.
Who are the whirling dervishes, and what does the sema ceremony mean?
The whirling dervishes are members of the Mevlevi order, formed in Konya in what is now Turkey by the followers of Jalal al-Din Rumi after his death in 1273 and organized by his son Sultan Walad. Their turning ceremony is called the sema, from the Arabic word for listening. It is worship rather than dance, and Mevlevis object to the word performance for much the same reason a congregation would object to it about a Mass. Every element carries a stated meaning. The semazen wears a tall felt hat, the sikke, described as the tombstone of the ego, and a black cloak, the hirka, described as the tomb; dropping the cloak at the start is stepping out of the grave. The white skirt beneath, the tennure, is the shroud. He turns counterclockwise on his left foot, around the axis of his own heart. The right palm opens upward to receive from God and the left turns down toward the earth to pass it on, and the head is tilted to the right, held over the shoulder rather than upright. Nothing in the posture is decorative.
The ceremony follows a fixed order. It opens with the Naat-i Sharif, a eulogy of the Prophet Muhammad set to music by the Ottoman composer Itri in the seventeenth century, followed by a drumbeat and then an improvisation on the ney, the reed flute, which points straight at the opening lines of Rumi's Masnavi about the reed cut from the reed bed and crying for home. The dervishes then walk three circuits of the floor, the Devr-i Veledi, greeting one another as they pass. Four selams follow, each a section of turning with its own rhythmic cycle and stated meaning, running from recognition of one's own servanthood to the return to the world of service. The composition as a whole, an ayin, is named for the single makam it is set in, so the mode belongs to the piece and the cycles belong to the sections. Quranic recitation and prayer close it. Turkey closed the dervish lodges under Law 677 of November 1925, and the Mevlevi ceremony survived partly by being reclassified as cultural heritage, which is also how it became a hotel-ballroom attraction. UNESCO proclaimed the Mevlevi sema ceremony a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005, then moved it onto the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008 when the two schemes were merged.
Do all Sufis whirl?
No. Turning is the signature of the Mevlevi order and a handful of related groups, and most Sufis never do it. Far more common is the hadra, a standing collective dhikr in a circle or in facing lines, with rhythmic movement and chant but no spinning. The Rifa'iyya is known for standing dhikr of that kind. Silent orders such as the Naqshbandiyya sit still and make no sound at all.
How do dervishes avoid getting dizzy?
Years of training, and a turn built for control rather than speed: a fixed pivot on the left foot while the right foot pushes, at a constant unhurried rate, with the gaze soft rather than locked on a point. The vestibular system adapts to a rotation it repeats often, which is why trained dancers and skaters tolerate spins that would floor a beginner, and Mevlevi turning itself has not been measured against that work. Novices practice for months on a board with a nail set between the toes of the left foot before turning in a ceremony. Dizziness is not the goal, and losing control of the turn counts as a fault.
Can visitors attend a sema ceremony?
Yes, though what most visitors see is a staged version arranged for an audience. Konya hosts a large annual program each December around the anniversary of Rumi's death, called Sheb-i Arus, the wedding night, and lodges in Istanbul hold regular ceremonies. Ritual sema still takes place inside Mevlevi communities. The difference is visible: ritual sema is embedded in prayer and recitation, and nobody applauds at the end.
What did Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Hafez and the other Sufi poets teach?
Sufi poetry teaches one thing in a hundred forms: separation from God is the human condition, and love is the way back. Rumi, who lived from 1207 to 1273 and wrote in Persian, gave the theme its most famous image in the opening of the Masnavi, where a reed flute cries because it was cut from the reed bed. That poem runs to roughly twenty-five thousand couplets across six books and mixes doctrine with folk tales, jokes and obscenity in a way most English selections quietly remove. Ibn Arabi, born in Murcia in Muslim Spain in 1165, wrote mainly prose and taught that every existing thing manifests a divine name. One passage from his Tarjuman al-Ashwaq is the piece anthologists reach for first: the heart has become capable of every form, a pasture for gazelles, a cloister for monks, a temple for idols and a Kaaba for pilgrims. Hafez of Shiraz, who died around 1390, wrote ghazals of wine, taverns and a beloved whose identity he refused to fix. Rabia al-Adawiyya set the theme four centuries before Rumi. In eighth-century Basra she is credited with the first sustained teaching of love of God sought for its own sake, with no hope of paradise and no fear of hell. Almost everything told about her comes from Attar's Memorial of the Saints, written some four hundred years after her death, so the teaching is better attested than the biography.
The wine, the beloved and the tavern are the standing argument. Persian Sufi poetry runs on images that are sensual on the surface and read by the tradition as descriptions of divine intoxication, and there has never been agreement about how far the surface reading is also true. Attar's Conference of the Birds, written in the late twelfth century, is more didactic: thirty birds cross seven valleys to find their king, the Simurgh, and discover the word means thirty birds. Sanai and Saadi worked the same ground in Persian, Yunus Emre in Turkish, Bulleh Shah and Shah Abdul Latif in Punjabi and Sindhi, and their verses are still sung by people who have never opened a Sufi manual. English readers should know that the most popular Rumi versions in America, by Coleman Barks, are reworkings of earlier English translations rather than translations from Persian, and they thin the Quranic content considerably. Reynold Nicholson's complete Masnavi and Franklin Lewis's study Rumi: Past and Present, East and West are the standard correctives. For the general problem of reading a translated wisdom text, see Tao Te Ching: What It Teaches and How to Read It.
What is the Masnavi about?
The Masnavi is a six-book Persian poem of roughly twenty-five thousand couplets, built as a chain of stories that interrupt each other and open out into commentary. Rumi dictated it to his disciple Husam al-Din Chelebi over roughly the last fifteen years of his life. The poet Jami, writing in the fifteenth century, called it the Quran in the Persian tongue, praise for its density of scriptural reference rather than a claim about its standing, and Persian speakers have repeated the line ever since. Its subject throughout is separation from God and the return to Him.
Was Hafez actually a Sufi?
Nobody has settled it, and Iranians argue about it constantly. Hafez used the full Sufi vocabulary, mocked hypocritical Sufis inside his own poems, and never attached himself to any documented order. His favorite figure is the rend, the disreputable free spirit who drinks and is nearer to God than the pious fraud. Some read him as a mystic writing in code, others as a poet borrowing mystical imagery for its power.
Why is Rumi so popular in the West?
Rumi arrived in English stripped of Islam, which made him easy to adopt. The widely repeated claim that he is the best-selling poet in America circulates without a solid source behind it, though his reach is genuine. The versions that sold were free adaptations rather than translations. They omit the Quranic quotation and legal reference that fill the Persian, and what remains sounds nondenominational enough for a wedding reading.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a non-Muslim practice Sufism or join a Sufi order?
Traditional Sufi orders require their members to be Muslim, because tasawwuf is defined as the inward dimension of a religion whose outward practice it assumes. A shaykh in Fez or Lahore will expect the shahada, the five daily prayers and the Ramadan fast before initiation. A second category exists: universalist groups descended from Inayat Khan, who taught in Europe and America from around 1910, along with several successor organizations, accept members of any religion or none. Both are real, they are different things, and confusing them causes most of the argument.
Where does the word Sufi come from?
The likeliest derivation is suf, the Arabic word for wool, after the coarse woolen garments early ascetics wore in eighth-century Iraq. Classical authors also proposed safa, meaning purity, and ahl al-suffa, the People of the Bench, the poor companions who sheltered beside the Prophet's mosque in Medina. Al-Biruni suggested a link to the Greek sophia, wisdom. Arabic philologists reject that one on morphological grounds, since the s of suf is the letter sad and a borrowing from Greek would have given sin. Al-Hujwiri and al-Qushayri both surveyed the candidates in the eleventh century and declined to pick a winner.
Why do some Muslims consider Sufism heretical or un-Islamic?
The objections are specific rather than general. Critics attack the veneration of saints and tombs as compromising tawhid, the monist reading of Ibn Arabi, the use of music in worship, the authority a shaykh holds over a student, and the ecstatic utterances of figures such as al-Hallaj, who was executed in Baghdad in 922 and is remembered for the phrase ana al-Haqq, I am the Truth. His trial ran for years and the charges against him were political as much as doctrinal, so the utterance alone does not explain the sentence. Ibn Taymiyya, who died in 1328, pressed several of these criticisms, and on the evidence of his own writings he was himself attached to the Qadiri line, which historians have used to argue that his target was particular practices rather than tasawwuf as such. The eighteenth-century Wahhabi movement went much further and rejected the structure outright.
Is Rumi's poetry about human love or about God?
Both readings have serious defenders, and Rumi's own frame makes the question harder rather than easier. The Divan is written in the name of Shams of Tabriz, the wandering teacher whose arrival in Konya in 1244 transformed Rumi and whose disappearance a few years later devastated him, so the poems address a human being and God at once. Persian mystical convention treats the human beloved as a window onto the divine Beloved rather than a replacement for it, which is why the tradition itself sees no contradiction here.
Is music allowed in Sufi worship?
It depends on the order, and the disagreement is old and unresolved. Al-Ghazali defended listening to music and poetry under conditions in his Revival of the Religious Sciences, arguing that the effect depends on the state of the listener. Ibn al-Jawzi, who died in 1201, attacked Sufi musical assemblies in his book on the deceptions of the devil. Today the Chishtiyya produces qawwali, the Mevleviyya maintains an entire musical liturgy, and the Naqshbandiyya permits no instruments at all. All three consider themselves orthodox.
What is the difference between a Sufi shaykh and an imam?
An imam leads congregational prayer and may also be the scholar and administrator attached to a mosque, a public post that usually carries a salary. A Sufi shaykh guides individuals on the inward path, assigns litanies, and holds authority only over people who have pledged themselves to him. One man can hold both roles. In Shia Islam the word Imam carries an entirely different weight, denoting the divinely designated successors to the Prophet, which is a separate usage altogether.
How do you find a legitimate Sufi teacher in the West?
Start by asking which order the teacher belongs to, who authorized him to initiate, and who else can confirm it, since a genuine silsila is documented and freely stated. Then look at ordinary things. Does the teacher keep the five daily prayers and the Ramadan fast? Can you speak with students of ten years' standing, and with people who left? Is money requested beyond modest running costs? Is criticism tolerated? Mosques, Islamic centers and academic Islamic studies departments can usually say whether a group is known and by whom.
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Related topics: sufism, sufi beliefs, whirling dervishes, sufi orders, islamic mysticism, rumi sufism, dhikr practice
