Sufi Culture

Robert Mitri

Chap 7:

Ascetical pursuits of these Sufis, which tended to be more occasional and less wilderness-oriented than in Christianity, were divided by later theoreticians into a series of stations that roughly coincide with the Christians.They were the result of the Sufis own exertions scrutiny of with respect to even legitimate pleasures, voluntary poverty-and once they were achieved, the Sufi traveling along the path of perfection passed from the stations to the states, from the condition of the ascetic to that of the mystic.The Sufi Orders Like the parallel phenomena of religious orders in Christianity and Hasidic communities in Judaism, the starting point of the Sufi brotherhoods called like Sufism itself a way , a crucial fi in the passage from Pharisaic to rabbinic Judaism, engaged in discussions of mystical and apocalyptic themes Other clues also point to the rabbis of the post-70s era as the likely starting point to speculation about more intimate contact with God On somewhat closer inspection these and similar themes appear on occasion elsewhere in the Talmud, and from them and other, anonymous works written between 200 and 500 it possible to fashion a preliminary portrait of early rabbinic. The Talmud was, of course, a public text whose study was generally commended.In Islam mysticism became popularized in the Sufi orders; in Christianity by such clerics as Ignatius of Loyola and Francis de Sales, who in the late sixteenth century brought the monks spiritual exercises to the secular clergy and the laity alike; and idaism by the Hasidic movement, which in the eighteenth century divested Kabbalism of some of its more esoteric and inaccessible features to render it a kind of popular revelation.Suhrawardis work, with its assertion of Persias place in the history of wisdom, its attractive metaphysic of light, its developed theory of allegorical exegesis, and its valorization of experience over theoretical knowledge, provided a program for both the philosophers and the mystics of Iran, and a convenient bridge on which they might thereafter meet.That the meetings were frequent and rewarding is attested by the twin traditions of mystical poetry in Persian and the ill-charted but impressive course of theosophical and philosophical speculation during the reign of the Safavids in Iran Doctor Maximus The doctor maximus of Islamic mysticism is beyond doubt the Spaniard Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi, or simply Ibn Arabi.The doctors of Islam embraced the Revivification; the mystics meditated the Niche of Lights and found there all the themes that were converging in the Sufi consensus: the identification of Gods essence with a Light whose ontological radiance was creation and whose cognitive function was to illumine the intellects of the saints and prophets; the distinction between the plain and the concealed sense of Scripture, and the need of allegorical exegesis to elicit the latter; the elitism that distinguished the mystic from all others in Islam and the esotericism that made revelation of the realities to the nonadepts a dangerous and highly inadvisable enterprise.

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