Sufism in Modern Research

Abstract

Much research on Sufism has been done since A.J. Arberry published, in 1950, his booklet History of Sufism,in which he traced the approaches to the phenomenon called Sufism, that is, the mystical dimension of Islam, from the very beginning of Orientalist studies in the West. It is well known that the first to investigate Sufism as an independent phenomenom was the German Protestant theologian F.A.D. Tholuck in his book Ssuffismus sive theosophia persarum pantheistica (Berlin 1821), a book whose very title shows that Sufism was understood — and blamed — by him, as by many later scholars, as a pantheistic interpretation of Islam. The sources which he used were mainly later Persian works and their symbolism and language, taken at face value, could yield such an impression indeed. But with the availability of more and more Arabic and early Persian sources, Tholuck’s ideas were dismissed finally to a large extent. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was especially the Neoplatonic component in Sufism that was emphasized; gnostic and Christian influences were also held responsible for the growth of this strange and beautiful exotic plant in the “dry soil” of Islam, or else it was considered to be a reaction of the Aryan race against the intellectualism and legalism of the Semites; possible Vedantic influences, and even Buddhist and Central Asian strands in this manifestation of Islam have been discussed to our day.