Sufism, Pluralism and Democracy. Edited by Clinton Bennett and Sarwar Alam

Abstract

In the West, the popular image of Sufism often involves a religious practice focused primarily on interior growth, a devotional style that functions at some distance from and in tension with both mainstream Islam and political power. Clinton Bennett and Sarwar Alam have collected nine essays that explore these assumptions in different contexts, focused chiefly on questions of religious pluralism and democratic processes. No edited volume restricted to a portable weight could purport to be a comprehensive survey of Sufi involvement in the political sphere; the dilemma lies in selecting papers that illuminate the main theoretical questions. For starters, editors must face the thorny issue of what “counts” as Sufism apart from the well-known Sufi orders. Bennett and Alam have taken an inclusive approach, including Heon C. Kim’s piece on Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet, a Turkish movement whose participants emphatically do not consider their movement a tarikat, and Milad Milani’s article on Javad Nurbakhsh, an Iranian spiritual leader who went into self-exile after the 1979 revolution. Contributors rightly dispute the (happily fading) thesis of the decline or the demise of Sufism, both because the orders have shown themselves to be surprisingly resilient globally and because currents of Sufi spirituality prosper outside these established brotherhoods.