Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism By Alexander Knysh

Abstract

The title of this book suggests a chronological framework and a selection of content both broad and judicious. Consisting largely of a series of loosely linked essays, Knysh’s work counts rather as a kind of methodological prolegomenon to the actual writing of a history. It is marked, too, by a persistent emphasis on comparison between Sufism and other traditions, and the repeated invocation of European thinkers and theorists of varying stripes, such as Arnold Toynbee, Max Weber, Hayden White, Umberto Eco, and Michel Foucault. The book might also be described as a prolonged and inconclusive postscript to Knysh’s Islamic Mysticism: A Short History (Leiden: Brill, 2010). In the Introduction, the reader is plunged forthwith into the thicket of theory with a rhetorical question from Hayden White suggesting the ultimate unknowability of history as such (p. 1), and tasteless neologisms such as ‘emplotment’ soon follow. The reader gets a taste of what awaits: the ultimate indefinability and unknowability of Sufism as such. This being the case, the varying approaches of ‘insiders’—Muslim scholars, Sufi and non-Sufi, and ‘outsiders’—Western and Russian investigators are all, at least in principle, worthy of equal consideration. In frequency of invocation, ‘outsiders’ are even privileged over ‘insiders’, in that a citation from one of them serves to introduce or define the discussion of a particular theme. Knysh also claims a certain degree of authority for himself, albeit secondary, when he promises to convey ‘the major insights’ he has acquired ‘while working as an editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam’s third edition, ‘the seminal reference for the field of Islamic studies today’ (p. 14).