persin sufism

The Sufi phenomenon is not easy to sum up or define. The Sufis never set out to found a new

religion, a mazhab or denomination.

They were content to live and work within the framework of the Moslem religion, using texts from the Quran much as Christian mystics have used to Bible to illustrate their tenets.

Their aim was to purify and spiritualize Islam from within, to give it a deeper, mystical interpretation, and infuse into it a spirit of love and liberty.

In the broader sense, therefore, in which the word religion is used in our time, their movement could well be called a religious one, one which did not aim at tying men down with a new set of rules but rather at setting them free from external rules and open to the movement of the spirit.


This religion was disseminated mainly by poetry, it breathed in an atmosphere of poetry and song.

In it the place of great dogmatic treatises is taken by mystical romances, such as Yusuf and Zuleikha or Leila and Majnun.

Its one dogma, and interpretation of the Moslem witness: 'There is no god by God', is that the human heart must turn always, unreservedly, to the one, divine Beloved.


Who was the first Sufi? Who started this astonishing flowering of spiritual love in Lyrical poetry and dedicated lives? No one knows.


Early in the history of Islam, Moslem ascetics appeared who from their habit of wearing coarse garments of wool (suf), became known as Sufis.

But what we now know as Sufism dawned unheralded, mysteriously, in the ninth century of our ear and already in the tenth and eleventh had reached maturity.

Among all its exponents there is no single one who could be claimed as the initiator or founder.
Sufism is like that great oak-tree, standing in the middle of the meadow: no one witnessed its planting, no one beheld its beginning, but now the flourishing tree speaks for itself, is true to origins which it has forgotten, has taken for granted.


There is a Sufi way, a Sufi doctrine, a form of spiritual knowledge known as 'irfan or ma'rifat, Arabic words which correspond to the Greek gnosis.

Sufism has its great names, its poet-preachers, its 'saints', in the broad, irenical sense in which the word can be used. Names Maulana Rumi, Ibn al 'Arabi, Jami, Mansur al Hallaj are household words in the whole Islamic world and even beyond it.

Has it a future? Perhaps we may say that if, in the past, its function was to spiritualize Islam, its purpose in the future will be rather to make possible a welding of religious thought between East and West, a vital, ecumenical commingling and understanding, which will prove ultimately to be, in the truest sense, on both sides, a return to origins, to the original unity.

When one speaks of the Sufis as 'mystics', one does not necessarily mean to approve all their teaching or all their methods, nor indeed, admit the genuineness of the mystical experiences of this or that individual. But whatever one's preconceptions or reservations, it is difficult, after a careful study of their lives and writings, not to recognize a kingship between the Sufi spirit and vocabulary and those of the Christian saints and mystics.