Sūf

Sūf

Sufism (Arabic: التصوف, romanised: al-tasawwuf) is a diverse Islamic spiritual and ethical discipline concerned with spiritual excellence (ihsan), purification of the self and heart (tazkiya), sainthood and closeness to God (wilaya), and remembrance of God (dhikr). While commonly described as "Islamic mysticism", this designation captures only one dimension of the broader discipline. Nile Green notes the "narrowing and prescriptive tendencies" of the model of "mysticism", arguing that it can "castigate or exclude much of what it was meant to explain." He therefore proposes understanding Sufism as "primarily a tradition of powerful knowledge, practices and persons," rather than reducing it to the "mysticism of a marginal party of God-seekers." Sufism, unlike what is often called Christian mysticism, was the "spiritual and intellectual glue" that held together the culturally and ethnically diverse societies of the Islamic world. It retained its pervasive, default mainstream status until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it faced a combined onslaught from Western modernists, secular nationalists, and fundamentalist reformers. Agrarian…