Islam is an Abrahamic tradition that, in its most historically prominent forms, centers nondual union with God as the formal and final cause of creation and prophecy. Sufism and other forms of Islamic mysticism remain enduring features of the Muslim landscape outside of the Islamist ideology of Wahhabism, such that the traveler to places like Istanbul, Iran, Bukhara, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia will encounter a Muslim culture whose life of communal prayer is rich and variegated, whose jurisprudential traditions are open to a surprising and sometimes even scandalous degree of religious and social pluralism, and whose saints have deliciously radical stories to tell about their love of and unity with God. This is the world that gives us the rich Persianate tradition of al-Ḥallāj and Rumi, the world of whirling dervishes and Aṭṭār of Nishapur’s Māqāmat uṭ-Ṭuyūr, better known in English as The Conference of the Birds. Consider al-Ḥallāj, who was famously said to have proclaimed Ana’l-Ḥaqq, “I am the Truth,” which allegedly led to his eventual execution. But al-Ḥallāj is today a famous saint among Sufis, and the small, persecuted community of Alevi Muslims proclaim in their Arabized Turkish enel hakk, “I am the Truth,” as well as Benim Kâbem insandir, “My Ka’ba is a human being,” at the end of each prayer service.1 For every seemingly dualist, violent, fundamentalist face of Islam that appears in Western media, there have been thousands upon thousands of Muslims historically whose religion has been more about the fundamental idea behind al-Ḥallāj’s confession or Rumi’s poetry, or the philosophy of Ibn Arabi or Al-Ghazali, than about the minutiae of ritual or moral law or the dream of a political empire using violence to achieve religious ends.2 (And if some Muslims are guilty of that dream, so are many Christians.)
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