Quote from Sufism: The Formative Period

Sufism: The Formative Period

by Ahmet T. Karamustafa

University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, California, 2007.    202 pages

Sufism, the major mystical tradition of Islam, emerged from within renunciatory modes of piety (zuhd) during a period that extended from the last decades of the second/eighth to the beginning of the fourth/tenth century. The earliest mystical approaches appeared in the first half of this period, but these were likely disparate and heterogeneous in nature and, more significantly, they remain obscure to modern researchers owing to sparse documentation. From the mid-third/ninth century onwards, however, Sufis of Baghdad came into full view as members of a distinct mode of mystical piety. In the same time period, other mystical movements took shape elsewhere, notably in lower Iraq, northeastern Iran, and Central Asia. Mystics who belonged to these latter movements were not initially known as Sufis, and in their thought and practice, they differed from Baghdad Sufis and from each other in many ways, but they gradually blended with the Baghdad mystics, and in time, like them, they too came to be identified as Sufis."  (p. 1)

"The diffusion of Sufism to regions beyond Iraq during the course of the fourth/tenth century and its fusion with indigenous mystical trends went apace with the emergence of a self-conscious Sufi tradition. The situation in Syria, lower Iraq, Egypt and North Africa is less than clear, but in Iran, especially Khurasan, and in Transoxania, the need to introduce Sufism to new audiences seems to have contributed to the construction of a coherent narrative about Sufism, as exemplified in the surveys of Sarraj, Kalabadhi and Sulami."  (p. 83)

-- quote submitted by Jennifer K.

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