The Heritage of Sufism
Adnan A. Husain
New York University

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Winter  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi (700-1300), vol. 1 of The Heritage of Sufism, edited by Leonard Lewisohn. 662 pages, bibliography, index. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999. $29.95 (Paper) ISBN 1-85168-188-4

The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (1150-1500), vol. 2 of The Heritage of Sufism, edited by Leonard Lewisohn. 430 pages, bibliography, index. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999. $25.95 (Paper) ISBN 1-85168-189-2

Late Classical Persianate Sufism (1501-1750), vol. 3 of The Heritage of Sufism, edited by Leonard Lewisohn and David Morgan. 548 pages, bibliography, index. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999. $42.95 (Paper) ISBN 1-85168-193-0



This three-volume collection of sixty-eight articles, based on a series of conferences held at SOAS of the University of London during the last decade, provides both a panoramic and kaleidoscopic view of aspects of the Sufi tradition in ‘Persianate’ literary and historical contexts from the beginnings of Islam to the eighteenth century. Contributions, from among the leading scholars of Sufism, range across a wide spectrum of relevant topics and issues. They include focused studies on the works and thought of individual Sufi masters, poets, and theosophers; considerations of the development of Sufi tradition in various periods and in specific contexts, especially of the formation of ‘schools’ of Sufi thought and practice and of crucial moments in the social and religious history of several important turuq and Sufi movements; and investigations of various genres of Sufi writings from hagiographic collections to adab manuals and poetry as sources elucidating both the wider social context of Sufi practice and its interpretive meanings within Sufi tradition.

Although most of the articles concentrate either on Persian language sources or on the somewhat indeterminate geographical domain of ‘Greater Persia’ (with the notable exception of the final volume, to be discussed further below), the category of ‘Persian’ or ‘Persianate’ Sufism remains elastic, yet coherent, enough to encompass articles that acknowledge the importance of writings in other Muslim languages and the practice of Sufism among non-Persians. Articles such as Damghani’s “Persian Contributions to Sufi Literature in Arabic,” Mason’s “Hallaj and the Baghdad School of Sufism,” Bowering’s “Ideas of Time in Persian Sufism,” and Radtke’s “The Concept of Wilaya in Early Sufism” from the first volume, inter alia, illustrate the thorough interplay between Arabic expression and Sufism before and throughout the flowering of Persian Sufi writing starting in the eleventh century. Similarly, scattered throughout the collection and concentrated in the third volume are essays addressing Sufism in Anatolia, Central Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent, from Karamustafa’s “Early Sufism in Eastern Anatolia” and Lawrence’s “An Indo-Persian Perspective on the Significance of Early Persian Sufi Masters” in volume one, and Holbrook’s “Diverse Tastes in the Spiritual Life: Textual Play in the Diffusion of Rumi’s Order” as well as several valuable articles on the Kubravi and Naqshbandi turuq in Central Asia in volume two, to the substantial, illuminating contributions in volume three on Mughal-era Sufi history and literature in both Persian and ‘Indian vernaculars.’ These essays do much to balance, sharpen, and justify the ‘Persianate’ rubric under which the set has been organized. Nevertheless, the rather general title “Heritage of Sufism,” as opposed to the specific subtitles, implicitly raises the question whether the editors meant to assimilate a Sufism to an essentialized “‘eternal’ spirit and abiding ‘genius’” of the “Persian psyche” (Lewisohn, v. 2, pp. 24-25, 36-38). Such an interpretive reflex, often seeking its authority in the poetic language of Henri Corbin, seems to emerge in several contributions throughout the series.

The collection as a whole emphasizes the continuities within a living Sufi tradition while acknowledging and representing its historical diversity and changing development. This feature is exemplified in the numerous studies on Sufi theory, doctrine, and practices and those focusing on the influence and reception of the works and ideas associated with Yahya Suhrawardi, Rumi, and Ibn ‘Arabi, particularly in the latter two volumes. Such an orientation bears fruit in the learned, sympathetic studies that only rarely border on apologetic, but it also captures a tension endemic to the study of Sufism between the transhistorical discourse of mysticism itself and its status as a historically bound experience and tradition of Muslim religious culture and society. This tension is, nevertheless, a productive one, reflecting the diversity of scholarship.

The first two volumes are direct reprints of previous editions published in 1992 and 1993, respectively, and have been available to scholars for some time. Moreover, the second volume has already been reviewed in this journal.[50] Consequently, beyond these general remarks about the collection as a whole, more specific discussion will be confined to the third volume. Late Classical Persianate Sufism assembles twenty-one articles in a valuable effort to combat scholarly assumptions of a decline in the vitality and originality of Sufism, symptomatic of a perceived general cultural decline before modernity and European intervention, that have conspired to neglect a closer examination of Sufi thought and practice in the period. Moreover, this volume uniquely addresses the ‘Persianate’ context, especially by exploring several facets of the meaningful Indo-Persian historical, linguistic, and cultural contiguities exemplified in the history of Sufism under the Safavid and Mughal dynasties. This contextualization is, perhaps, the volume’s most important contribution.

The articles are organized into several useful categories―“Persianate Sufism in Historical Perspective,” “Sufism and Society in Safavid Persia,” “Sufism and Ishraqi and Akbarian Philosophy,” “Esoteric Movements and Contemplative Disciplines,” “Persianate Sufism in India, Central Asia and China,” and “Persianate Sufi Poetry in Iran and India.” This perspective outward from Iran derives, in part, from the suppression of other, competing turuq and polemic against Sufism in Safavid Iran, which resulted in the migration of many prominent shuyukh to India and elsewhere. These issues are treated in articles grouped in the section Sufism and Society in Safavid Iran. Among these, Newman’s erudite “Clerical Perceptions of Sufi Practices in Late Seventeenth-Century Persia: Arguments over the Permissibility of Singing (Ghina’)” deserves special attention for its subtle re-interpretation of polemics against Sufism in terms of socio-economic and political factors rather than as a simple example of ‘Shi’i fanaticism,’ by exposing the intra-usuli context related to Safavid court factions and their religious policies and interests in which these writings were generated. Some otherwise useful, careful articles, nevertheless, accentuate Safavid anti-Sufism and explain it by reifying the image of a perduring, dichotomous conflict between legist and mystic, Mulla and Sufi, sharpened by an essential Shi’i hostility. In fact, volumes two and three miss an opportunity to integrate into the discussion more fully the religious developments from the late Ilkhanid to the early Safavid era when new relationships between Sufism and Shi’ism seem to appear in the radical religious milieu that fostered the ghulat movements from which the Safavids emerged. Further considerations than those offered by Norris’s study of the Hurufis in volume two, “The Hurufi Legacy of Fadlallah of Astarabad,” and Morgan’s provocative conjectures in “Rethinking Safavid Shi’ism” might also have helped contextualize the surprising analogues to earlier ghulat movements implicit in Andreyev’s interesting “The Rawshaniyya: A Sufi Movement on the Mughal Tribal Periphery.”

Consequently, a major theme of the volume is the preservation and re-orientation of Sufism under the Safavids and, in particular, by the “School of Isfahan.” Evaluations of the writings and thought of Safavid era theosophers and their relation to earlier Sufis like Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi are the subject of four useful essays by Nasr, Lewisohn, Netton, and Juzi. These essays also help redress the prevailing portrait of withering, derivative theosophical inquiry produced in the period.

This view beyond Safavid Iran, however, stimulates some of the most interesting and useful essays. Chittick’s “Travelling the Sufi Path: A Chishti Handbook from Bijapur” and Murata’s “Sufi Texts in Chinese” bring to light and under consideration bodies of Sufi literature as yet neglected and, even, little known, particularly in the case of the Chinese texts and translations of Persian Sufi classics. Both Ernst’s “Chishti Meditation Practices of the Later Mughal Period” and Hermansen’s “Contemplating Sacred History in Late Mughal Sufism: The Case of Shah Wali Allah of Delhi” reach beyond considerations of Mughal Sufi thought and practice to address more interpretive and historical issues. Ernst’s interesting article poses the fundamental question of what constitutes a tariqah and studies Chishti discussions of inter-Sufi and inter-religious meditation practices. Hermansen’s ambitious essay addresses concepts of spiritual decline to revalue the historiographical issue through an assessment of Shah Wali Allah’s characterization of spiritual history and religious progress, though this provocative essay could be strengthened by a clearer account of the value of post-structuralist literary criticism’s application to the subject. The essays of Schimmel, Shackle, Weightman and Ghomi on Sufi Poetry are valuable, especially Shackle’s “Persian Poetry and Qadiri Sufism in Later Mughal India: Ghanimat Kunjahi and his Mathnawi-yi Nayrang-i ‘ishq,” which contextualizes the work in popular mystical lyrics and its recensions in and influence on Sufi writing in other subcontinental languages.

Volume three does not pretend to a comprehensive, encyclopedic account, which explains the conscious emphasis on Iran and India and the absence of articles on Ottoman Sufism and sole contribution of DeWeese on Central Asia. It does suffer from some problems of editing and proofreading (missing citations in the bibliography and containing a number of typographical errors) that are inconsistent with its overall scholarly excellence and somewhat unsatisfactory given its relatively high price. Unfortunately, similar problems in the earlier volumes were not corrected before their reissue in this series. All the volumes, however, are works of enormous value and will serve together, as a set under the title The Heritage of Sufism, as an excellent resource providing indispensable work on the many aspects of Persianate Sufism.
[50] By Jamal Elias, in MESA Bulletin 29 (1995): 117-18.