The Nature of Sufism: An Ontological Reading of the Mystical in Islam

Milad Milani
Paperback, 176 pages
9781032079059

This book explores how Sufis approach their faith as Muslims, upholding an Islamic worldview, but going about making sense of their religion through the world in which they exist, often in unexpected ways. Using a phenomenological approach, the book examines Sufism as lived experience within the Muslim lifeworld, focusing on the Muslim experience of Islamic history. It draws on selected case studies ranging from classic Sufism to Sufism in the contemporary era mainly taken from biographical and hagiographical data, manuscript texts, and treatises. In this way, it provides a revisionist approach to theories and methods on Sufism, and, more broadly, the category of mysticism.

Contents
1. ‘Introduction’ to Sufism
2. The Journey Through Islam: a phenomenological analysis of the Sufi tariqa and the experience of the ‘master’
3. ‘Being Sufi’
4. Jesus as Sign
5. Absent Christ, present God
6. Break with the past: transgressing restrictions of the category and scholarship on ‘mysticism’
7. Conclusion: The ontological question for Sufism