# Sufism The mystical and ascetic dimension of [[Islam]] - not a sect, not a branch, and not a denomination in the sense that [[Sunni Islam]] and [[Shia Islam]] are. Sufism cross-cuts both, and for most of Islamic history it was not a marginal current but the ordinary devotional texture of Muslim life across West Africa, the Balkans, Anatolia, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Its marginalization is recent, and it is the direct product of the 20th-century Salafi revival funded out of the Gulf. That reversal - a mainstream reduced to a minority within a century - is the single most useful thing Sufism teaches about how religious traditions actually change. ## Founding and core beliefs The word *tasawwuf* probably derives from *suf*, the coarse wool worn by early ascetics who rejected the wealth of the Umayyad court. The movement began in 8th-century Iraq as a reaction against imperial luxury, matured into a sophisticated mystical theology, and was decisively legitimized when al-Ghazali (1058-1111) - the most respected jurist-theologian of his age - argued in *The Revival of the Religious Sciences* that the inner path and the outer law were not rivals but complements. After Ghazali, Sufism was not a fringe. The core claim is experiential: that the goal of religion is direct knowledge of God, attained through disciplined practice rather than through law or doctrine alone. The characteristic practices are *dhikr* (rhythmic remembrance of the divine names), often with music and movement; the master-disciple relationship; the *silsila* or chain of transmission back to Muhammad; and veneration of saints and their tombs. Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) supplied the most ambitious metaphysics - the unity of being - and Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) the most enduring poetry. ## Major divisions Sufism organizes into *tariqas*, brotherhoods named for a founding master: - **Qadiriyya** - the oldest and most widespread, from 12th-century Baghdad; enormously influential in West Africa. - **Naqshbandiyya** - Central Asian in origin, sober and law-observant in style, historically the most politically engaged; the Ottoman and Mughal courts both drew on it. - **Chishtiyya** - South Asian, associated with music and with the shrine culture of the subcontinent. - **Mevleviyya** - the Anatolian order founded by Rumi's followers; the whirling *sama* ceremony. - **Tijaniyya, Muridiyya, Shadhiliyya** - major African orders; the Muridiyya in Senegal is simultaneously a religious brotherhood and an economic institution. ## Demographic footprint Because Sufi affiliation coexists with Sunni or Shia identity rather than replacing it, there is no clean count. Sufi orders remain socially dominant in Senegal, [[Sudan]], and much of West Africa; strong in Egypt, [[Turkey]], the Balkans, Central Asia, Pakistan, and India; and suppressed to varying degrees in [[Saudi Arabia]] and the Gulf, in [[Iran]], and under Salafi-influenced governments elsewhere. ## Right-wing politics tributaries **As a target.** Salafi and Wahhabi doctrine treats shrine veneration and saint intercession as *shirk* - associating partners with God, the gravest offense in Islam. The practical consequence has been systematic destruction: shrines demolished in the Hijaz after the Saudi conquest, in Timbuktu by Ansar Dine in 2012, in Iraq and Syria by the [[Islamic State]], and the November 2017 massacre at the al-Rawda Sufi mosque in Sinai that killed more than 300 worshippers. The largest campaign of anti-Muslim religious violence in the modern era has been conducted by Muslims against Sufis, a fact that sits awkwardly with civilizational-clash framings on all sides. **As a policy instrument.** From the mid-2000s, US think tanks - most prominently a 2007 RAND report on building moderate Muslim networks - recommended actively promoting Sufism as a counterweight to jihadi Salafism. The move institutionalized what Mahmood Mamdani called the "good Muslim, bad Muslim" frame: American security policy sorting a religion into acceptable and unacceptable variants and funding the acceptable one. It rarely worked as intended, partly because state sponsorship is corrosive to the legitimacy of the sponsored, and partly because the Sufi-versus-Salafi binary is far less clean than the policy papers assumed - the Naqshbandiyya has produced militants, and plenty of Salafis are quietists. **As aesthetic import.** Rumi is, by most counts, the best-selling poet in the United States - almost entirely in versions that strip the Quranic references and the Islamic frame. The reception is its own small case study in how a tradition can be simultaneously beloved and erased: the same public that reads Rumi at weddings supports the policies catalogued in [[Islamophobia]]. Sufism also feeds the syncretist "spiritual but not religious" strain in tech-right and adjacent circles, where it functions as an unaffiliated wisdom-source rather than as a Muslim practice. ## Connections - [[Islam]] - the parent tradition. - [[Sunni Islam]] and [[Shia Islam]] - Sufism cross-cuts both rather than sitting beside them. - [[Wahhabism]] - the movement most directly responsible for Sufism's modern marginalization. - [[Islamic State]] - the most violent contemporary persecutor of Sufi communities. - [[Islamophobia]] - the frame within which Sufism gets designated the acceptable Islam. - [[World Religions Timeline]] - the chronological spine. ## See also [[Islam]] | [[Sunni Islam]] | [[Shia Islam]] | [[Wahhabism]] | [[Turkey]] | [[Religions Hub]] - [[Islam Timeline]] — the tradition's internal chronology; this branch's key dates sit in Eras I–IV