Hurufism

Hurufism is a form of Islamic numerology based on the mysticism of letters, functioning as the Islamic equivalent of gematria, founded by Fazlallah Astarabadi, who lived from 1340 to 1394. It originated in Sufi circles in Astrabad, in what is now Gorgan, Iran, and spread through western Iran, Anatolia and the Balkans in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as Astarabadi began propagating his teachings in the mid-1370s. The movement interprets the divine countenance as manifest in humanity through a system treating the twenty-eight Arabic and thirty-two Persian alphabet letters as encoded divine truth, an esoteric interpretive method distinguishing it from more conventional Sufi orders.