Reflections on Religious Identity and Diversity in the Economy of Islamic Spirituality

Abstract

This essay proposes a reflection on the questions of identity vs otherness and unity vs diversity in the context of Islam with a focus on Sufi metaphysics and spirituality. Taking as starting points the notions of islām, tawhīd, and shirk it sketches the ways in which four major Sufi figures—namely Hallāj, Ibn ‘Arabī, Rūmī and Shabistarī, have extracted from these cardinal concepts the principles of a universalist outlook that may allow one to address contemporary issues of pluralism and religious conflicts from the point of view of the very foundations of the tradition itself.