Sufism

Sufism, tasavvof in Persian, often also called erfan, ‘knowledge’ in the sense of inner knowing, is the mystical dimension of Islam. Its followers, Sufis or darvishes, seek to purify the self (nafs) and to draw near to God through love, discipline and remembrance. A seeker, the morid, takes a guide, the pir or morshed, and follows a tariqat, a path, handed down in a chain of masters that reaches back, in each order’s own telling, to the Prophet. The stages of the way, the maqamat, run from repentance to trust and contentment, and the end is often described as fana, the passing away of the self in God.

Sufis gather in a khanqah or khanaqah, a lodge, for zekr, the remembrance of God by repeating His names, sometimes silently and sometimes aloud. Many orders also practise sama’, ‘listening’: music and poetry heard, and sometimes danced, as a way into the presence of God. Among Kurdish Qadiris the daf, the great frame drum, carries the rhythm.

Saints of the Iranian world

Some of the early masters came from Iran: Bayazid Bastami of Bastam; Hallaj of Fars, executed in Baghdad in 922 for words read as blasphemy, ana’l-Haqq, ‘I am the Truth’; Abu Sa’id Abu’l-Khayr of Mayhana in Khorasan, whose quatrains and sayings shaped Persian Sufi verse; and Khwaja Abdullah Ansari of Herat, whose shrine at Gazurgah still draws visitors. Many of the great orders were born in the Iranian world. The Kubrawiyya began with Najm al-Din Kubra in Khwarazm. The Naqshbandiyya takes its name from Baha al-Din Naqshband of Bukhara. Shah Ne’matollah Vali founded the Ne’matollahi order, and his domed shrine at Mahan, near Kerman, is one of the loveliest in Iran. Sheikh Safi al-Din of Ardabil founded the order from which the Safavid dynasty rose; his shrine and lodge are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The poets

Persian poetry and Sufism grew up together. Sanai of Ghazni opened the way for the long mystical poem. Attar of Nishapur wrote Mantiq al-tayr, ‘The Conference of the Birds’, in which the birds set out to find the Simorgh and the thirty who arrive discover that they themselves, si morgh, ‘thirty birds’, are what they sought. Rumi, born in the lands of Balkh and buried in Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the ghazals of the Divan-e Shams; after his death his followers formed the Mevlevi order, famous for its whirling sama’. Hafez of Shiraz, whose relationship to the Sufi orders is still debated, filled his ghazals with the language of the path, the tavern and the pir-e moghan, the Magian elder.

Sufi orders remain active in Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Kurdistan and the diaspora. Members of the Ne’matollahi Gonabadi order have faced pressure in Iran: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented mass arrests after clashes in Tehran in February 2018, and Amnesty reported the execution of a Gonabadi dervish, Mohammad Salas, that June after a trial it called grossly unfair. For most who follow the path, Sufism is a matter of the heart, kept in a lodge, a poem and a weekly gathering.