Thinking through the heart: Islam, reflection and the search for transcendence

Abstract

The paper explores the dynamics of internalisation and externalisation of the self in relation to transcendence within reading practices of key Islamic texts in the Suffa community in Istanbul. Based on fieldwork and textual analysis, it illustrates how the imagination of the self as part of a cosmological framework is central to exercises of meditative reflection (tefekkür) within this community. The paper engages with emerging anthropological and philosophical scholarship on transcendence and argues that only some resonance can be traced between Sufi-inspired conceptions of the self at Suffa and their so-formulated modern equivalents. By highlighting the place of the imagination and transcendence in Islamic practice, it obliges us to rethink current debates within the anthropology of Islam by going beyond self-enclosed models that emphasise processes of subjectivity and self-fashioning.