Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine 199meaning “elected,” or suffa, meaning “purity,” though both of these
must be rejected on etymological grounds. Others have suggested that
Sufi is a corruption of the Greek word sophia: “wisdom.” This is also
unlikely, though there is a tempting symbolic connection between the
two words. For if sophia is to be understood in its Aristotelian sense as
“knowledge of ultimate things,” then it is very much related to the
term Sufi, just not linguistically.
As a religious movement, Sufism is characterized by a medley of
divergent philosophical and religious trends, as though it were an
empty caldron into which have been poured the principles of Chris-
tian monasticism and Hindu asceticism, along with a sprinkling of
Buddhist and Tantric thought, a touch of Islamic Gnosticism and
Neoplatonism, and finally, a few elements of Shi‘ism, Manichaeism,
and Central Asian shamanism thrown in for good measure. Such a
hodgepodge of influences may frustrate scholarly analysis, but it also
indicates how Sufism may have formed in its earliest stages.
The first Sufis were loosely affiliated and highly mobile individu-
als who traveled throughout the Muslim Empire seeking intimate
knowledge of God. As these “wandering darvishes” grew in number,
temporary boarding houses were constructed in high traffic areas like
Baghdad and Khurasan where the mendicants could gather together
and share what they had learned during their spiritual journeys. By
the eleventh century—around the same time that the Abassids were
actively persecuting the Shi‘ah for their heterodox behavior—these
boarding houses had become permanent structures resembling clois-
ters, a few of which gradually evolved into sophisticated schools, or
Orders, of mysticism.
The Sufi Orders centered on a spiritual master who had with-
drawn permanently from the Ummah to pursue the path of self-
purification and inner enlightenment. Called Shaykhs in Arabic and
Pirs in Persian (both of which mean “old man”), these Sufi masters
were themselves the disciples of earlier, legendary masters whose
unsystematic teachings they had collected so as to pass them on to a
new generation of disciples. As each disciple reached a level of spiri-
tual maturity, he would then be charged with transmitting his master’s
words to his own pupils, and so on. It is therefore easy to see why
Sufism appears like an eclectic recipe whose ingredients have been