Sufism and Spirituality

Alongside law and theology, Islamic civilisation developed a sustained tradition of inward discipline concerned with purification of character, remembrance of God, and the cultivation of sincerity. Its practitioners ranged from ascetics who withdrew from public life to jurists and poets who held prominent positions while writing on spiritual states, and its orders became major social institutions across Africa, Anatolia, and South Asia.

This collection gathers the figures through whom the encyclopaedia covers that tradition: Rabia al-Adawiyya, whose verses on disinterested love of God shaped its vocabulary; al-Ghazali, who reconciled it with orthodox theology and jurisprudence; Abdul Qadir Gilani, whose name attaches to the Qadiriyya order; Ibn Arabi, its most systematic and most contested metaphysician; Rumi, its best-known poet; and Shah Waliullah, who worked to integrate spiritual practice with hadith scholarship in eighteenth-century India. To these are added the four masters through whom the orders took institutional form east of Iran: Mu'in al-Din Chishti of Ajmer and Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi, under whom the Chishtiyya became the dominant order of the subcontinent; Bahauddin Zakariya, sent from Baghdad to establish the Suhrawardiyya at Multan; and Baha' al-Din Naqshband of Bukhara, whose insistence on silent remembrance defined the order that carries his name.