What Is Sufism? The Inward Path Within Islam

Sufism is not a sect or a separate religion, and its practitioners are Sunni or Shia Muslims who observe the ordinary obligations of the faith while additionally following a path of inward purification. The Arabic name for it, tasawwuf, is usually derived from the coarse wool garments worn by early ascetics. The standard self-description distinguishes three layers: the outward law, the inner path and the ultimate reality, with the second building on the first rather than replacing it. Its practitioners have generally insisted on that point sharply, because the recurring accusation against them has been antinomianism, the idea that spiritual attainment excuses a person from religious obligation, and the great teachers spent considerable effort rejecting it. The aim is variously described as purifying the heart, dying to the ego before physical death, and attaining direct knowledge of God rather than knowledge about God.

It begins as an ascetic reaction. Within a century of the Prophet's death the Muslim community had acquired an empire and enormous wealth, and a current of renunciants emerged who preferred poverty, night prayer and fasting, of whom the best remembered early figure is Rabia of Basra, a woman who reframed worship around pure love of God rather than fear of hell or hope of paradise. Ecstatic figures followed, including Bayazid Bistami and al-Hallaj, the latter executed in Baghdad in 922 for uttering a phrase taken as claiming identity with God. The tension between this and mainstream scholarship was resolved intellectually by al-Ghazali, one of the most respected theologians in Islamic history, who in the eleventh century abandoned a prestigious professorship for a decade of wandering and returned to write a synthesis arguing that the inward path was not merely compatible with orthodox Islam but necessary to it. His authority made the current respectable, and from the twelfth century it organised into orders.

The path is structured and taught rather than improvised:

• •Dhikr, remembrance, the repetition of divine names or phrases, silently or aloud, individually or in a group, which is the central practice of every order
• •The relationship with a shaykh, a teacher who has been authorised by their own teacher in a chain of transmission running back to the Prophet, without whom the tradition regards the path as dangerous
• •Stages and states, a mapped sequence of stations such as repentance, patience, trust and contentment, worked through in order, alongside states that arrive unbidden
• •Sama, listening, meaning devotional music and poetry, which some orders embrace and others reject, and which is the origin of qawwali in South Asia and of the turning ceremony of the Mevlevi order
• •Retreat, fasting and disciplines of sleep and speech, undertaken under supervision
• •Visits to the tombs of saints, which in many regions is the most visible popular expression and the most contested

From the twelfth century onward the tradition organised into brotherhoods named after founders, each with its own chain of transmission, liturgy and emphasis, and these became the main institutions of Islamic spirituality across the world. The largest include the Qadiriyya, the Naqshbandiyya, the Chishtiyya of South Asia, the Shadhiliyya of North Africa and the Mevlevi of Anatolia, whose ceremony of turning gave Western observers the phrase whirling dervishes. The orders did far more than teach: they carried Islam into West Africa, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, often adapting to local culture in ways that made conversion gradual, and their lodges functioned as hospitals, schools, guest houses and, at various points, centres of resistance to colonial rule. The literary output is among the most substantial in world religion, including Rumi's Masnavi, the poetry of Hafez, Attar's Conference of the Birds, Ibn Arabi's enormous metaphysical works and Yunus Emre's Turkish verse, which between them shaped Persian, Turkish and Urdu literature.

The tradition has always had critics within Islam, and the criticism sharpened enormously from the eighteenth century. Reform movements, above all the Wahhabi current in Arabia and the Salafi movements that followed, condemned tomb visitation, intercession through saints, music in worship and the authority of a living master as innovations without warrant, and where such movements have held state power they have destroyed shrines and suppressed orders. The hostility is not only theological but violent: Sufi mosques and shrines have been bombed repeatedly in Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, and an attack on a Sufi mosque in Sinai in 2017 killed more than three hundred people. Secular modernisation has also hurt, since Turkey banned the orders in 1925 and Soviet Central Asia suppressed them for decades. Despite this the tradition remains enormous, with Sufi orders central to religious life across West Africa, South Asia, Turkey and Indonesia, and with qawwali and shrine devotion among the most popular religious practices in the Muslim world.

Sufism is the inward, experiential dimension of Islam rather than a separate sect, built on the ordinary obligations of the faith and adding a disciplined path of purification under an authorised teacher. It began as an ascetic reaction to imperial wealth, was made theologically respectable by al-Ghazali in the eleventh century, and organised from the twelfth into orders that spread Islam across Africa and Asia and produced Rumi, Hafez and Attar. Its central practice is the remembrance of divine names, and it has been attacked by reformist movements for shrine devotion and music.