Sufi Mysticism in Art: Whirling Dervishes, Rumi, and the Persian Visionary Tradition
At the center of Islamic civilization, running through its heart like a hidden river, flows a current of mystical experience that the religion's more legalistic forms have often tried to contain and sometimes to suppress — and that has always found a way to express itself anyway, in poetry, in music, in the ecstatic turning of the body, and in some of the most exquisite visual art ever produced in the history of human civilization. This current is Sufism — tasawwuf in Arabic — the inner dimension of Islam, its esoteric heart, the path of direct experience of the divine that runs alongside and sometimes athwart the path of law and doctrine. The name's origins are debated: some derive it from suf (wool), referring to the coarse woolen garments worn by early Muslim ascetics; others from safa (purity); others from the Greek sophia (wisdom). What is not debated is what Sufism seeks: fana — annihilation of the ego in the divine Beloved — and baqa — subsistence in that unity, ...