Retrospective historical accounts of sufism’s early centuries typically portrayed an orderly development of sufism, smoothing over messy and awkward episodes to demonstrate the compatibility of sufism with what had become the Sunni Islamic mainstream and a 12-er Shi‘i orthodoxy. Legendary accounts, a common aspect of historical narratives, created a coherent picture of sufism. Early sufis became effectively connected to what in later centuries was considered proper sufi practice and behaviour. It made for a step-by-step and orderly story. Let’s not forget, however, that what we think we know about early sufi history is exponentially less than what we do not know.

In this chapter I will outline a history of sufi practice and how a specialized, technical sufi vocabulary came into being. To some extent such a narrative details how personal subjective experience was shared collectively over time and how sufis discovered principles of transpersonal human development on the basis of these shared experiences. Sufis, like contemplatives in other religions, observed a sequence of developmental stages, preliminary to advanced, and the dynamics associated with each of these stages. This enabled conscious cultivation of experience that, in turn, was repeatedly verified over centuries and became a set of parallel guidelines, the process of becoming a sufi.

But this inner subjective evolution of sufism did not happen in a vacuum. There was an outer socio-religious history in which sufi contemplative practice developed alongside the developing Islamic context of Muslim contemplatives. The Islamic context impacted directly on the interpretation, if not the content, of contemplative experiences. In particular it determined, on the linguistic and conceptual level, the vocabulary that sufis used to report their experiences, which was in part derived from the Qur’an. Islamic contemplative currents, jostling with jurist and theological understandings of religious possibilities in increasingly Islamic societies, took a few centuries to become labelled as ‘sufism’. The resultant practice and discipline of sufism necessarily developed harmoniously in parallel with what was to become mainstream Sunni Islam.

The religious strand of early sufism was, therefore, intimately intertwined with the story of Islam and an understanding of Islamic history will help to illuminate the development of the knowledge strand also. It was in 610 that Muhammad received his first revelation, in a cave outside Mecca, and he continued to receive revelations until his death in 632. For the first 12 years, Muhammad’s small Muslim community was persecuted in Mecca until they migrated to nearby Yathrib (later named Medina, ‘the city of the Prophet’) in 622. By the time Muhammad died, ten years later, the disadvantaged Muslim minority had become triumphantly successful – having converted, at least nominally, the majority of the population of the Arabian Peninsula. A vast expenditure of intellectual and spiritual energy by billions of people has been channelled in the direction of Islam since Muhammad’s experience that night in a cave, when a voice called out repeatedly, ‘Recite!’ In 656 the compilation of what Muslims have considered the verbatim word of God, known as ‘the recitation’ (the Qur’an), became standardized in its consonantal form by the third caliph after Muhammad, ‘Uthman. Recorded memories of the Prophet’s sayings and behaviour, the hadith, were compiled and edited for accuracy of transmission two centuries later. Using these foundational sources, Muslim jurists developed a set of laws and ethical guidelines (the sharia) to order the ritual and social life of the Muslim community. Over the first few centuries, more specialized religious sciences developed, including Arabic grammar (to interpret the Qur’an), theology and jurisprudence. Sufism as a religious science, with a specialized vocabulary and literature, also developed alongside these other religious sciences, forming the knowledge strand of early sufism.

The formation of the Umayyad dynasty, centred in Damascus, began in 661, with regular armed conflicts over political and religious leadership continuing beyond 680, when the Prophet’s grandson Husayn and other family members and followers were massacred at Karbala, in Iraq. Pious Muslims, proto-sufis if you will, surfaced historically in Basra. The legendary Hasan al-Basri (d. 728) is the best known of these early renunciate contemplatives. After a major civil war, lost by the Umayyads, the new Abbasid dynasty began in 749–50 and the capital was moved to Baghdad in 762. During the next 100 years or so Baghdad, the capital of a huge empire, became a major centre of sufism.

The practices of sufism were not restricted to Iraq, since the Islamic Empire stretched 6,000 kilometres as the crow flies, from Spain in the west to the Talas River in present-day Kazakhstan in the east. In the middle of this expanse we find two centres of Islamic contemplative activity in Iran’s eastern province of Khurasan, situated between present-day eastern Iran in the west and Tajikistan in the east, which is why Afghanistan and Tajikistan are Persian-speaking countries today. One group of pious contemplatives, known as ‘the Blameworthy’, lived in the city of Nishapur, in northeast Iran. Further east in present-day Tirmidh (Tirmiz), in Uzbekistan, the Hakimiyya focused on the teachings of Hakim Tirmidhi (d. 912). There were other sages (hakims) in the region, but they were known as scholars or theologians. By the end of the tenth century, the vast majority of these pious contemplatives, from Iraq to Central Asia, had become known as sufis. This is the geographical strand of early sufism.

Islam, as a religious tradition, followed the trajectory of other world religions with founder-figures (for example, Buddhism and Christianity). Each founder-figure had a set of extraordinary experiences of non-ordinary consciousness and shared these insights with those around him. When he died there was an institutionalization, a crystallization, of these experiential insights. Max Weber called it the ‘routinization of charisma’, charisma being as vague a concept as mystic/ism. Thus a religion came into being that was suitable for the default consciousness level of the masses, manifesting in doctrines, rituals and ethical principles.

In the Islamic case, there were a few centuries of intense endeavour and conflict after Muhammad had his revelations, resulting in the demarcation of two major orthodoxies – the Sunni majority and the Shi‘i minority – in addition to some other minor orthodoxies. If one’s beliefs and religious praxis fitted into these boundaries, then one was recognized as a Muslim; otherwise one was outside the community. The primary boundary marker stemmed from the Islamic attestation of faith declaring there to be one God, with Muhammad being the last prophet. These are non-negotiables in an Islamic worldview. Such doctrinal boundaries usually go hand-in-hand with political power, so Muhammad’s extraordinary experiences eventually became institutionalized in politics of one kind or another – minus most, if not all, of the inner experience.

Counterbalancing these doctrinal–political imperatives, sufis, like their contemplative counterparts in other religions, formulated a methodology to emulate the founder-figure’s extraordinary experiences. They developed a set of practices above and beyond the ritual practices incumbent upon Muslims. Over time, sufi groups also became institutionalized, consolidating into lineages and funded sufi lodges. In some cases, major sufis became political leaders or advisors to influential political leaders. This is the path of an institutionalization of a contemplative practice. In the shuffle from extraordinary experience to institutionalization, experience usually is the first to go. On the other hand, one can argue that this institutionalization preserved the practices of sufism, isolating sufis to some extent from the outside world and thus allowing them to further develop transformative disciplines. Century after century, sufi contemplatives have been able to preserve their practices, while modifying them for local conditions, enabling these practices not only to survive, but arguably to become more sophisticated over time.

Early in the history of sufism we find opposition between jurists and sufis, where jurists often have the clout of the rulers to enforce their version of Islamic practice. Jurists, trained to interpret the Qur’an and the hadith, have tended to focus on the outer ritual dimensions of worship (the islam dimension of Gabriel’s Hadith) to an utterly transcendent God. On the other hand, sufis’ non-ordinary experience of God and God’s attributes verify God’s utter immanence. Both groups, as well as those sufis who are also religious scholars/jurists, appeal to the Qur’an. The sufis cite the Qur’an (50:16 and 55:26) stating, ‘God is closer to you than your jugular vein’ or that ‘wherever you look you see the face of God’. Jurists cite more numerous verses demonstrating God’s transcendent aspect. This creates a standoff, since a great variety of conflicting perspectives can be justified through recourse to scripture. I have chosen this example because understanding sufism is greatly enhanced if one takes a ‘both … and …’ approach. Is God immanent or transcendent? Both. God is beyond the beyond the beyond, which includes both the immanent and transcendent.

The issue between jurists and sufis goes deeper and is intimately connected with different levels of knowing. Think of the gap between hearing about strawberries and tasting a strawberry. There is a major difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it experientially. Then consider the gap between reading about love and experiencing love. This is the difference between rational understanding and post-rational/transrational experience. Although sufis understand the everyday rational jurists’ understanding of Islam, jurists who do not have any experiences beyond their book learning have no idea about sufis’ experiences and ways of knowing. As Abu’l-Qasim Qushayri (d. 1072) says:

An aware jurist who knows that he does not understand sufi experience, simply does not comment on something he cannot grasp. But a narrow-minded and less aware colleague might, and many did, vehemently oppose sufis. An uneducated sufi would defer to jurists in their nuanced knowledge of Islamic practice. The burden was placed upon the sufis to practice and publically declare their experiences in a socio-culturally acceptable manner, because the vast majority in society had no clue of what the sufis were about. Harmonizing sufi activities with the developing set of Islamic societal norms took centuries.

Sufis started attracting attention by communicating divine inspirations and being associated with the unusual events that happened around them (miracles). Some religious scholars found this kind of sufi activity contrary to one of the dogmatic corollaries of Muhammad’s being the last prophet, namely that prophets are in essence different from all other non-prophet humans. Muslims were to follow the example of the Prophet – his sunna – but when sufis started having inspirations from God, these inspirations (ilham) needed to be of a lower, non-prophetic order than prophetic revelation (wahy), otherwise the finality of the Qur’an would have been called into question. If events in Muhammad’s presence appeared to bend the normal laws of nature (mu‘jizat, miracles), then if similar phenomena happened around sufis, they must have a non-prophetic quality and were called karamat. Otherwise it could imply the status of prophethood to someone after Muhammad, who is considered the last prophet according to Islamic dogma. These are some examples of how sufis ironed out discrepancies between their religious experiences and religious dogma. It is ironic that religious experience, originally a revolutionary event, not only becomes institutionalized with standard rituals and dogma, but the new institutions curb further religious experience which may upset the new status quo. Sari Saqati (d. c.867, Baghdad) declares: