Sufism

The Sufi orders took organised form in the later Abbasid centuries and spread across the lands the caliphate no longer governed.

Sufi orders spread with the trade, and sailors and fishermen made vows at the coastal tombs before a voyage.

After the Arab conquest, Balkh became a major center of Sunni Islamic scholarship and Sufism.

The harmonium is the standard melodic accompaniment of qawwali, Sufism's devotional singing tradition.

Sufi shrines and saints' tombs stand at ports around the whole rim and serve sailors making vows before a voyage.

Sufi teaching was part of the learning of Timbuktu and Djenne alongside Maliki jurisprudence and Quranic commentary.

The ney is the lead instrument of the sema, the turning ceremony of the Mevlevi Sufi order.

Sufism is where the developed doctrine of the friends of God and the chains that transmit it are found, though the category is not confined to Sufi circles.

The tomb of the founder of the Chishti order in South Asia, and the destination of an annual commemoration that draws pilgrims of several religions.

Dervish is the ordinary word for a member of a Sufi order who has taken its way of poverty, and the orders differ widely in what that has meant.

Sand divination was practised across the Islamic world by men who also belonged to Sufi orders, without being taught as part of any order's discipline.

Wrath is treated in Sufi teaching among the passions the traveller must govern before the stations of the path open.

The mosque was built by the Mouride order around the tomb of its founder and is the focus of an annual pilgrimage that is among the largest in West Africa.

The harmonium accompanies qawwali in the South Asian orders, a European instrument absorbed into a devotional form that predates it by centuries.

Envy is treated in Sufi teaching among the diseases of the heart that the discipline of self-purification works on.

Modesty is treated in Sufi teaching as an inward reticence before God as much as an outward restraint before others.

Sincerity is treated in Sufi teaching as the purification of intention, the work that makes an act worship rather than display.

A khalifa is a disciple authorised by his own living sheikh to teach and to initiate, which is how an order spreads without breaking its chain.

The patched cloak is invested on a disciple by the shaykh and is the outward sign that the chain of transmission has been passed on.

Arrogance is treated in Sufi teaching as the first disease of the heart and the one the whole discipline of self-purification is aimed at.

The founding song of qawwali, sung to open a gathering.

The marabout of West and North Africa combines the Sufi guide with the local holy man, and maraboutic lineages have been the ordinary form of Islam across much of the region.

The murid gives his pledge to a guide and undertakes obedience, and the relation of murid to murshid is the structure of every Sufi order.

The murshid initiates the disciple, prescribes his practice and stands in a chain of transmission running back to the Prophet. Without the guide there is no Sufi path.

The reed flute opens the Mevlevi ceremony, and the poem that begins with its complaint of separation is the best known statement of the order's teaching.

The science of the letters, in which the letters of the divine names are treated as bearing power, circulated widely in Sufi milieux without being a discipline any order requires.

Recited at mawlid and at the gatherings of the orders, and its verses copied out and carried as protection.

Sung by a lead voice and chorus with harmonium and tabla at the shrines of the Chishti order, where the music is understood to carry the listener rather than to entertain him.

The qutb, the pole, stands at the summit of the graded hierarchy of living saints that Sufi cosmology describes.

Ostentation is treated in Sufi teaching as the hidden opposite of sincerity, an act of worship turned toward an audience.

Patience is one of the stations of the Sufi path, a maqam through which the traveller passes rather than a disposition simply commended.

The turning ceremony of the Mevlevi order, an ordered rite with a fixed shape rather than an outbreak of feeling.

In Sufi usage the sheikh is the master of an order, and the word carries the whole authority of the office rather than general respect.

Gratitude is a station of the Sufi path, treated in the classical manuals as the recognition that every good is a gift and belongs to the giver.

The chain of transmission is what authorises a master to initiate, and a claim to guide without one is not accepted within the tradition.

Each order transmits its own wird from shaykh to disciple, with its sequence and its counts given rather than published. The atlas records that the transmission is closed and does not reproduce it.

The formula most associated with the gatherings, repeated aloud in company and counted.

The order is the institutional form of Sufism: an initiation, a rule of life, a distinctive litany and a chain of masters, historically endowed as waqf.

The message defends true Sufism by name against the charge of unbelief, and the Sufi orders read it as a defence of their standing within Islam.

The shrine of the thirteenth century ascetic gives the town its name and remains a place of local visitation.

The tomb at Konya is the mother lodge of the Mevlevi order and the destination of the annual commemoration of Rumi's death.

The friend of God is the nearest Islamic equivalent to a saint, and the tombs of the awliya are the centre of Sufi devotional life.

Astrological material circulated widely in the milieux where the Sufi orders grew, and some who wrote on it belonged to orders, but no order teaches it as part of its discipline.

Sufi teaching treats trust in God as a station in which reliance on secondary causes is progressively let go, so that the traveller acts without leaning on the outcome.

A Hanbali jurist whose teaching circle became the seed of the earliest Sufi order, with the mystical work sitting inside the law rather than beside it.

The Ba Alawi way of Hadramawt, which sets Sufi practice beside the scholarly and genealogical authority of the sada.

An afterlife of resurrection and judgement is affirmed doctrine in Sufism.

The Tijaniyya became the most widespread order in West Africa.

The Yasaviyya is the earliest Turkic Sufi order and a principal channel by which Islam spread among Turkic nomads.

The Naqshbandiyya became the most widely spread order of Central and South Asia.

Within Sufism the pledge is an initiation binding a disciple to a master and, through the master's chain of transmission, to the founder of the order. This is a different institution from the political pledge, despite the shared word.

Sufi prayer coordinates a formula with the breathing.

The shrine of Ali Hujwiri, author of the Kashf al-Mahjub.

Wandering dervish groups such as the Qalandariyya rejected settled lodge life and social convention as a discipline in its own right, a recurring current alongside the major organized tariqas.

The Mevlevi sema is the most disciplined instance, slow and prescribed to the smallest gesture.

Fana is the Sufi mystical practice and pursued stage of the extinction of the individual ego.

Fana and baqa, the passing away of the ego self and its subsistence in God, are central Sufi doctrine.

Muhammad is affirmed as the last of God's prophets in Sufism.

Hadith, alongside the Quran, are affirmed as a source of doctrine and practice in Sufism.

He is the earliest named Malay Sufi author, writing in verse and in prose treatises.

Ijazah, formal authorization to teach and transmit a Sufi order's practice, is foundational Sufi doctrine.

Barakah is affirmed in Sufism and is what the shaykh transmits, what the tomb of a friend of God holds, and what the visit to it seeks.

Barzakh is affirmed in Sufism, and in the Akbarian tradition the term also names the intermediate imaginal world, a second sense the wider tradition does not carry.

Sufism holds the division of innovation into good and bad, which is what permits the litanies, the audition and the visiting of tombs that the reformist critique attacks as innovation without qualification.

Fitra is affirmed in Sufism, and the path is described as the recovery of the original disposition rather than the acquisition of something foreign.

Haya is affirmed in Sufism and is treated in the manuals as one of the stations, the shame before God that follows on knowing one is seen.

Iman is affirmed in Sufism as the second of the three terms of the hadith of Gabriel, with ihsan as the third and the ground on which the Sufi claim to a discipline of its own rests.

The resurrection and judgement are affirmed in Sufism, and the Sufi literature adds to the doctrine the reading of death before dying as an anticipation of it.

Sabr is affirmed in Sufism and appears in every classical list of the stations.

Sufism holds the sharia binding, and the settled position since al-Ghazali is that the interior path is entered through the law and not around it. The orders that abandoned observance were the exception and were treated as such.

Shirk is affirmed in Sufism, and the Sufi enlargement of it is interior: the hidden shirk the tradition warns against is the self set up as a second object of regard.

Shukr is affirmed in Sufism and stands in the classical lists as the station paired with sabr.

The silsila, the unbroken chain of initiation running back through the shaykhs to the Prophet, is what makes a Sufi order an order rather than a circle of readers, and every established tariqa carries one.

Taqwa is affirmed in Sufism and is the first of the stations in most of the classical lists.

Tawakkul is affirmed in Sufism as a station, and the early ascetics pressed it to a degree the later orders drew back from.

Tawbah is affirmed in Sufism as the first station of the path, the turning without which nothing after it begins.