Sufism

The central practice most associated with Sufism is dhikr, the remembrance of God, most often the rhythmic repetition of God's names or of set liturgical formulas, performed individually or communally, sometimes accompanied by controlled breath, movement or music depending on the order. Sufi orders (turuq) organize this and other practices around initiation: a student (murid) is formally accepted by a living teacher (shaykh or pir), who authorizes specific practices, assigns a personal litany (wird or awrad) suited to the student's stage, and guides progress along a graded path historically described in terms of stations and states.

Specific advanced litanies and practices, including some of the greatest and most powerful divine names, are traditionally restricted to initiated members at appropriate stages and are not transmitted through general publication, a restriction scholarship on Sufism describes rather than sets aside. Sufi orders vary considerably in style, from the sober, legally conservative practice of orders such as the Naqshbandiyya to the ecstatic, sometimes musical practice associated with the Mevlevi order's turning ceremony, but the reliance on a living teacher and a specific initiatory chain (silsila) linking that teacher back to earlier masters and, ultimately, to the Prophet Muhammad, is common across the tradition.

Early Sufism was not organized into formal orders at all but consisted of loosely connected ascetic and devotional circles in cities such as Basra and Kufa from the eighth century CE, developing a shared vocabulary of stations, states and mystical love of God over the following centuries through figures including Junayd of Baghdad, who emphasized sober, doctrinally careful mysticism, and al-Hallaj, executed in 922 partly over ecstatic statements later Sufis read more sympathetically. The transition to formal orders, each with an eponymous founder, a defined initiatory chain and often a physical lodge, took place chiefly between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, a development J. Spencer Trimingham's history treats as Sufism's decisive institutional turn. Orders founded in this period and shortly after, including the Qadiriyya, Naqshbandiyya, Chishtiyya, Shadhiliyya and Mevlevi, spread along trade and pilgrimage routes across the Islamic world, becoming central to the Islamization of large parts of Central and South Asia and West Africa, and to popular devotional life more broadly.

Sufism's modern history includes both suppression, as in Turkey's 1925 ban on Sufi lodges, and continued vitality, with major orders still active worldwide and Sufi poets such as Rumi enjoying an additional, largely separate afterlife in modern Western popular spirituality that scholars including Nile Green treat as its own distinct phenomenon, related to but not equivalent to living Sufi practice within Islam.