Sufi Research Articles

The integration of the heart-centered paradigm of Sufi psychology in contemporary psychotherapy practice.

Maktab Tarighat Oveyssi (M.T.O) Sufi Psychology provides a psychological method based on the teachings of the M.T.O Shahmaghsoudi School of Islamic Sufism. Sufi Psychology aims to address physical and spiritual aspects of patients in order to foster a sense of identity that is not limited to a diagnostic status or an emotional state. The present work provides an overview of what Sufi Psychology is and how it builds on current gold-standard psychotherapeutic practices. We also present data from a bottom-up, practice-based observational study in which male and female patients from various cultural and religious backgrounds received Sufi Psychotherapy and provided self-report measures of distress, perceived stress, hope, and resilience. Results from multilevel models fit to examine within- and between-person variance and change over time indicated significant reductions in therapeutic, relationship, psychological, spiritual, and critical distress. Hope and resilience were already high at baseline, and no significant changes in these measures were found. This work serves as a foundational model for future research and writings on Sufi Psychology, as the evidence base is extremely limited, with directives for research models to further demonstrate the efficacy of this treatment approach. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Theory of Evolution is a Scientific Fact: A Response from Mystic Literature

For a long period of time, the theory of evolution has been subjected to criticism in religious countries and politicians misuse this topic as to get support from religious communities. The theory of evolution is considered as a scientific fact by many evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkin, Daniel Dennet, and so on. For the theory of evolution, there are mountains of evidence that have been gathered through Carbon dating, Genome sequencing, etc. No theory has such strong backbone as much as theory of evolution has in terms of evidences. The world is approximately 6000 years old according to the teaching of the Bible and Darwin’s evolution theory mainly challenged to Christian belief during his period of time. This theory has also a great influence on Muslim countries nowadays. Now this evolution theory has been subjected to question if this theory should be included in the syllabus in Muslim countries. Despite the evidence from evolutionary biologists, this theory is given less prioritization, or to some extent, it is taken out from the syllabus in many countries. This trend has existence the current status quo. Poet and Philosopher Sir Muhammad Allama Iqbal gave the solution to the problem existing in the current context by synthesizing Islamic Sufism in response to the theory of evolution in his book, “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam “. This research uses a qualitative methodology, and the comparative and content analysis will be done to understand the existing problem within Muslim countries to teach the theory of evolution. This research finds that the theory of evolution makes sense as a scientific theory as explained by the evolutionary biologists, and this is suggested that Muslim countries may adopt Sir Allam Iqbal’s approach to deal with the theory of evolution if they find it necessary to include in the syllabus.

Analyzing Past Genocides to Determine Effectiveness of International Intervention in the Uyghur Genocide

Located in northwestern China, The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is Chinese territory populated predominantly of Sufi Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic groups. The largest ethnic group, amounting to approximately 12 million inhabitants, is the Uyghurs. Inhabited mainly by Uyghurs, Xinjiang is also inhabited by ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks. Nonetheless, Uyghurs only make up 0.12% of the entire Chinese population. The high concentration of ethnic populations in Xinjiang has been a concern for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which is largely monocultural to the mainly Han Chinese and Mandarin-speaking demographic. The CCP launched its “Strike Hard Against Violent Terrorism Campaign” in order to combat the growing issues of separatism and terrorism which has yielded the detainment of nearly 1.8 million ethnic inhabitants of Xinjiang. This paper will compare the Uyghur Genocide to 4 of the past notable genocides in the 20th Century and determine what level of international involvement would be most effective. This paper asserts that the Armenian Genocide displays the best guide in terms of international involvement, but highlights the circumstantial nature of addressing genocide, in that, due to the large scope of genocide not all genocide can be addressed the same exact way.

Imaginative links: Islam and dreams of a Saharan French empire

ABSTRACT French colonial expansion across North and West Africa brought contact with varied political and religious groups, particularly along the Saharan rim and in the western Sahel. Numerous French metropolitan politicians and colonial administrators alike saw the Sahara as a great connecting medium, a new-age mare nostrum that would serve as the centerpiece of an expansive overseas empire. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Xavier Coppolani and Robert Arnaud (or Randau) served as the leaders working across this seemingly impassable divide to invent a political, demographic, religious, and vividly Romantic homogeneity for the area and its people, one based almost entirely in the power of Sufi Islam. Such unifying concepts built on older Saharan traditions of politico-religious linkage while thriving in a moment of changing French metropolitan colonial theory. Ultimately beset on all sides by local, metropolitan, and imperial resistance, these attempts failed over time as they hardened stereotypes and overlooked important realities of human connection throughout the region. The complex and contradictory forces involved in the joining of disparate social and political entities in the Sahara offer substantial insight into the reality of colonial expansion and political formation.

The Islamic Perspective on Trilogy Epistemology: Bayāni, Burhāni, and ‘Irfāni

This article seeks to elucidate three significant Islamic epistemological ideas. Unquestionably, the Islamic world has been significantly impacted by the expansion of knowledge in the West. Islam has to be able to advance science for it to advance, particularly following the codification period during the Abbasid dynasty. The epistemology of Islam is impacted by the advancement of science in the West. Although the traditional Islamic intellectual riches had a unique epistemological framework, it is impossible to overlook the impact of Western epistemology on Islamic epistemology. But the traditional Islamic epistemology—that is, epistemology based on the Sufi tradition or Islamic mysticism—offers a rather strong foundation for the advancement of science in the Islamic world. Bayāni, burhāni, and ‘irfāni constitute the Islamic epistemology that is based on the heritage of Islamic mysticism.

From Sufism to Resolution: Examining the Spiritual Teachings of Tarekat Shiddiqiyyah as the Theology of Peace in Indonesia

<p>This research reveals an important phenomenon in maintaining peace in religious diversity and different understandings. All countries yearn for a harmonious and stable socio-religious system without any religious conflict. However, the exact formula has not been fully reached, including in Indonesia. There were conflicts based on differences in religious understanding that led to social-psychological pressure and acts of violence that led to regional exile. This research explores the regularity pattern of the socio-religious system implemented by an Islamic Sufism order of Tarekat Shiddiqiyah in Jombang, East Java. Thus, it can become a role model for the theology of peace in the archipelago and even globally. Several significant research results were found in this research. First, spiritual teachings applied by Tarekat Shiddiqiyah focus on practicing riyadhah (inner movements) and eliminating the feelings of envy, fanaticism, inappropriate claims, and unkind self-righteousness, which potentially become the leading cause of religious conflict. Second, the spiritual teachings elements of Tarekat Shiddiqiyyah reduce and resolve religious conflicts through several principles, including 1) the aspects of humanity through the principle of peace, 2) the concept of balance through the principle of correlation, 3) the concept of comprehensiveness through the principle of <em>Ihsan</em>.</p>

Identifying Khizr: On the Paths of Goethe and Iqbal

Abstract Through an analysis of the legendary Islamic figure Khizr in the works of Norman O. Brown, Muhammad Iqbal, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, this essay proposes world literature as a methodology for deriving possible alternatives to existing worlds. By tracing the dialectic of individual and collective selfhood in the figure of Khizr, the author delineates the fault lines that the encounter with this elusive figure portends for bourgeois imperialist regimes of identity. The counterpoint conveyed through the figure of Khizr is one that unveils paths toward practices of self-de-particularization and a symbolism of collective unity. Even in the twenty-first century, the figure of Khizr continues to serve as a potential for reawakening a linkage between Marxism, Islamic mysticism, the poetics of prophecy, the politics of nonidentity, and the philology of cultural contact zones.

Review: Varieties of American Sufism: Islam, Sufi Orders, and Authority in a Time of Transition, edited by Elliott Bazzano and Marcia Hermansen

Review: <i>Varieties of American Sufism: Islam, Sufi Orders, and Authority in a Time of Transition</i>, edited by Elliott Bazzano and Marcia Hermansen

On Types of Certainty: from Buddhism to Islam and Beyond

Studies the threefold hierarchy of certainty, from its origins in Mahāyāna Buddhism, through Islam, to 17th century China. This tripartite scheme may be traced back to the ancient Buddhist scheme of the threefold wisdom as systematized by Vasubandhu of Gandhāra in the 4th-5th centuries CE. Following the advent of Islam in the 8th century, it was combined with Qur'anic notions of certainty (al-yaqīn). Initially taken up by early Islamic mystics such as Sahl al-Tustarī and al-Ḥākim al-Tirmiḏī (late 9th-early 10th centuries), the notion of yaqīn was gradually systematized into the three-level hierarchy of “knowledge or science of certainly” (ʿilm al-yaqīn), “essence” (literally “eye”) of certainty (ʿayn al-yaqīn), and “truth or reality of certainty” (ḥaqq al-yaqīn), a hierarchy that bears a distinct resemblance to the Buddhist threefold path of wisdom as discussed by Marc-Henri Deroche. Half a millennium later, this threefold hierarchy of levels of certainty, remotely inspired by Buddhism and integrated into the philosophical Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī and his Persian disciple Jāmī, this complex of ideas may have resurfaced in 17th century China.

Another Orientalism? the Case of Eva De Vitray-Meyerovitch and Rumi

This article turns to the trajectory of an often ignored figure in the history of French Islamology, Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch. Through the trajectory and circuits of de Vitray's life and thought, it explores the ambiguity of a forgotten variety of twentieth-century French Islamology, one which attempted to make itself into a mystical study of mysticism and follow the internal logic of its object of study. This article considers the aspects of de Vitray's life and thought that cannot be purely reduced to the circuits of imperialism, or predestined to be a spiritualist search for the “mystical East” as the inferior other of the “rational West.” It looks at the possibility of partial disidentifications from the Orientalist commitment to the European imperialist project, “moments of departure” from classic Orientalism. These can be found in the moments of identification with the mystics who are studied by Islamologists like de Vitray. The East, here in the form of Islamic mysticism, no longer functions as “a career” but rather enables possessive and colonial epistemological attitudes to be defied. Through de Vitray's biography, trajectory and works, I suggest that the Orientalist “type” she represents introduces a form of double-translation that does not make the studied object immediately available for colonial use or scholarly possession, but rather generates a transformative conversion of the translator and scholar whose position of mastery is “cast into dust,” to use Rumi's words, and is transformed into a position of discipleship.

Kitab Rukun Istinjak: Integration of Fiqh and Sufism in the Early 19th Century of West Borneo Hinterland

Kitab Rukun Istinjak [Book on the Procedure for Cleaning the Private Parts after Relieving Oneself] is a manuscript that originated from interior Borneo of West Kalimantan in the early 19th century. The text describes the concepts of fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence], which provides not only technical explanations for the implementation of rituals but also a description of philosophical concepts for the consumption of the heart/soul. The context of the private collection of manuscripts is for a minimal audience, namely the sālik [follower of Sufism] who study and practice the teachings of Sufism in the way of Nūr Muḥammad [Light of Muhammad]. This Rukun Istinjak manuscript records Islamic teachings, which show the integration of Islamic jurisprudence into Islamic mysticism, which initially developed in hinterland Borneo. Even though the text indicates the existence of Sufistic-style Islamic teachings adopted by the indigenous Muslim community of West Kalimantan in the Putussibau area, in particular, there are no clues that explain their affiliation or relations with a specific tariqa order.

A Mystical Reading of D. H. Lawrence's "Shadows"

Though D. H. Lawrence was not a mystic or a mystical poet, his poem "Shadows" is a mystical poem par excellence. However, this aspect has never been given its due of study. Due to the depth of the inexpressible mystical experience, mystical poets resort to symbolic language to render their experiences. This paper aims at exploring the poet's mystical experience in this poem and it is divided into two sections. The first section is introductory; it attempts to shed light on mysticism, its meaning and nature to reach at an acceptable definition of "mysticism". The second is devoted to a detailed analysis of the mystical experience and the main mystical symbols in the poem such as water, autumn, darkness, dry tree, blossoms, and the phoenix. The paper also shows the diversity of the poet's sources of this experience by relating it to Christian and even Islamic mystical thought or even to Indian mysticism. It also attempts to point out the major influences on Lawrence, namely those of the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, Islamic mysticism and Indian Mysticism. The last part of the poem is the conclusion which sums up the results of the study.

The Sufi and the Transcendentalist: An Encounter of Dialogue, Love and Sublimity

ABSTRACT Since time immemorial, Sufi saints in the Islamic tradition, and American transcendentalists of the Christian orthodoxy, have embraced love in their writings and prolific literary productions. They struggled so valiantly to ward off tension and conflict and bypass duality and binarism from their philosophies of life. Either folk believed in the potential of love to transform the very essence of individuals, for love per se is regarded – at least by them – as a fire and an emerald; it is the cause of creation and the source of all inspiration. By juxtaposing love with humaneness and by placing the two at the front of all religiosity, Sufis and the American transcendentalists sought to build for themselves an avenue for dialogue that accepts and never rejects different cultures and belief systems. This article, which is grounded in comparative literature, is an excavation for the numerous similitudes between Islamic Sufism and American transcendentalism. Rumi and Emerson, the two legendary poets, so popularized in the West and the East, are put forth in this enquiry to unpack their pivotal contribution to and leadership in the spirituality of love and unity.

Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook

Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook

Genealogy and different types of ascending and descending arc theory in Islamic mysticism

Genealogy and different types of ascending and descending arc theory in Islamic mysticism

Analyzing the Schechner's concept of Actuals with an approach to the concept of “VAGHE’E” in Islamic mysticism

Analyzing the Schechner's concept of Actuals with an approach to the concept of “VAGHE’E” in Islamic mysticism

Islamic Mysticism and it's Elements in the Poetry of Abdur Rahman Baba

Abdur Rahman Baba, a Pashto Poet, has not been discussed in international literature, very little. The aim of this study is to look deep into the poetry of Abdur Rahman Baba, to find out Islamic Mystical elements like love and subjugation towards Allah, devotion towards Prophet Muhammad, the last messenger, then love, care and concern for humanity. Few characteristics and thoughts from the philosophy of a well-known Islamic Mystic and scholar Maulana Rumi have been used to give a theoretical structure to this paper. These three points were tried to extend from his poetry. The verses were selected and examined through lenses of Islamic Mysticism and the way they are embedded in his poetry.By the end of this research paper, the readers will come to know about the Sufi poet Abdur Rahman Baba and his contribution to the local literature

KONSEP KOSMOLOGI MENURUT JALALUDDIN RUMI DAN IMPLIKASINYA TERHADAP CARA MEMPERLAKUKAN ALAM SEMESTA

The talk of cosmology is a very interesting matter. Because studied by scientists, theologians and also Sufis. Cosmology according to Annaemarie Schimmel is categorized as Islamic mysticism. Jalaluddin Rumi is a Sufi figure who studies cosmology. Jalaluddin Rumi is able to explain or interpret the secrets of God and His creation by using poetry (in the form of imagery) with high love. The purpose of this research is to study or analyze Jalaluddin Rumi's concept of cosmology and its implications for how to treat the universe. This research is a research library (library research), using the description method. Then the analysis uses the historical continuity method. And continued with the internal communication method, with this method the works of Jalaluddin Rumi were analyzed. The result of this research is cosmology according to Jalaluddin Rumi that Allah SWT created this universe as a mirror of Himself, because all of this creation is none other than His tajalli. Allah, who was previously a hidden treasure, then manifests, appears and appears in His creation. Then Rumi also said that the motive for the creation of nature by God is love. It is love that prompted God to create nature. The implication of how to treat the universe is that humans must protect nature such as taking care of themselves, communicating well with nature, and not destroying the existing order of life.

Modernleşme Sürecinde Tasavvuf ve Günümüzde Tasavvuf Kültürünün Taşıyıcıları

Modernleşme, on yedinci yüzyılda Avrupa’da başlayan, aydınlanma kültürünü ve kapitalizmin hayat tarzını dünyaya yayan toplumsal bir yaşam tarzıdır. Modernleşme ile birlikte başlayan çoğulculuk ve bireyselleşme süreçleri dinî bütünlükte ve kurumlaşmış dindarlıkta bir gevşeme ortaya çıkarmıştır. Modernleşmenin dinin anlam dünyası üzerindeki sarsıcı etkisi tasavvuf hareketlerinin geleneksel yapılarını ve kurumsal kimliklerini zayıflatmış ve fertle devlet arasındaki bu ikincil yapıların sosyal fonksiyonlarını yerine getirme becerilerini zayıflatmıştır. Çalışmada modernleşme sürecinin tasavvuf hareketleri üzerindeki etkisi ve günümüzde bu kültürün taşıyıcılarının kimler olduğu problemine odaklanılmıştır. Çalışmanın amacı, bilinç kalıpları içerici ve davranışları yönlendirici bir paket olarak gelen modernleşme sürecinin geleneksel dinî kurumlar üzerindeki dönüştürücü etkisini anlamaktır. Tarama yöntemiyle elde edilen nitel verilerin Berger ve Luckmann’ın tezleri çerçevesinde ele alındığı bu çalışmada, Cumhuriyet dönemi ile birlikte geleneksel formları aşan, modern kamusal yapılarla uyumlu ve bireyselleşmeyi belli düzeyde hoş gören yeni dinî grupların ortaya çıktığı ve bu grupların günümüzde tasavvuf kültürünün paydaş taşıyıcıları olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.

Liberal Articulation of Islamophobia

This article seeks to examine academic scholarship on Islamophobia in the West that attributes anti-Muslim racism to a crisis of multiculturalism and proposes the recuperation of the liberal multicultural ethos as a countermeasure to redress Islamophobia without investigating its complicity with racism. Through an analysis of Pearl Abraham’s novel American Taliban (2010), I probe an ambivalence at the heart of the liberal multicultural project of recognition (for the other) and argue that despite its claims of libertarian principles of justice and equality, multicultural recognition becomes the ideological backdrop against which changing contours of Islamophobia are articulated. This is unpacked through a fissure in Abraham’s narrative which, on the surface, draws upon the Hegelian principle of intersubjective recognition in order to critique the illiberal paradigm of Islamophobia and its concomitant framework of the clash of civilizations. Yet, it remains complicit with anti-Muslim racism through the generation of another Manichean frame that shifts reductive constructs of dangerous alterity to the Muslims who follow the normative tradition of Islam. At the same time, it offers positive recognition to Sufi Muslims who are aligned with secular liberalism. With a critical focus on Abraham’s novel, this paper deploys G.W. F. Hegel’s concept of ‘becoming’ with Gregory Lipton’s ‘critique of the secular reconstruction of Sufism in order to explore the complicity of multicultural recognition with Islamophobia, and, thus, it nuances the existing Western scholarship.