Entangled Late Soviet Sufism

The paper by Oleg Yarosh, “Entangled Sufism in the Late-Soviet esoteric milieu,” presented at the ENSIE meeting in Copenhagen on 25 June 2023, is now available as "Entangled Late Soviet Sufism" on the Research Blog of the German-Russian Research Project on New Age in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, at https://newageru.hypotheses.org/9971. 

The abstract reads:

The complex esoteric milieu in Soviet society, although centered around influential figures and groups in major cities of the European part of the USSR, was not homogenous. Less noticeable peripheral areas in the eastern parts of the Soviet Union also contributed to the esoteric milieu, often introducing unique teachings and practices. The dynamic interplay between these central and peripheral regions informed a multifaceted esoteric underground that developed despite the still oppressive late Soviet political climate. My focus lies on the Sufi current within this milieu, which evolved from the reciprocal entanglement process between center-periphery dynamics, encompassing Western esoteric currents, parascience, and popular Sufism in the Muslim-majority regions of the USSR.

New publication on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica

ENSIE member Liana Saif has just published "A Preliminary Study of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica: Texts, Context, and Doctrines" in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): 20-80, available https://www.academia.edu/63349047/A_Preliminary_Study_of_the_Pseudo_Aristotelian_Hermetica_Texts_Context_and_Doctrines 

Abstract 

The pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica are an understudied yet influential group of texts surviving in Arabic that claim to record conversations between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. I propose a ninth-century dating for these texts on the basis of textual and contextual evidence. In them, Aristotle instructs Alexander on two major subjects to aid his royal pupil’s military career and personal life: the cosmos, the genesis of everything in it, and astral magic. This study provides a preliminary analysis of the texts’ manuscripts and content, discussing what makes them Aristotelian and Hermetic and highlighting the resonances of Zoroastrian astro-cosmogenic doctrines.

Note that all ENSIE members are welcome to send details of relevant publications to info@ensie.site.

Special issue on Islamic Esotericism

The (open-access) journal Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism has just published a special issue on Islamic Esotericism (available here), edited by Liana Saif.

It covers

• theoretical issues (Liana Saif, "What is Islamic Esotericism?" and Mark Sedgwick, "Islamic and Western Esotericism"), 
• Islamic esotericism in the Muslim world (W. Sasson Chahanovich, "Ottoman Eschatological Esotericism" and Keith Cantú, "The Bengali Bāul Songs of Lālan Fakir"), 
• the Nation of Islam tradition (Michael Muhammad Knight, "The Supreme Wisdom Lessons and Problem Book" and Biko Gray, "Blackness, Islam, and Esotericism in the Five Percenters) and 
• an Italian Sufi order of Traditionalist origin (Francesco Piraino, "The Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya Shādhiliyya").

In detail, the special issue contains the following articles:

Liana Saif, "What is Islamic Esotericism?"

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue, and proposes "a theoretical framework for what can be called Islamic esotericism based on etymological and historical justifications." It covers both the tenth to thirteenth centuries and the Traditionalist understanding of Islamic esotericism.

W. Sasson Chahanovich, "Ottoman Eschatological Esotericism: Introducing Jafr in Ps. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s The Tree ofNuʿmān (al-Shajarah al-nuʿmāniyyah)."

Jafr fuses eschatology and esotericism, and the article takes the example of an Ottoman text that was pseudepigraphically attributed to Ibn al-ʿArabī. Chahanovich argues that "eschatological predictions were central to bolstering Ottoman imperial claims to universal sovereignty."

Keith Cantú, "Islamic Esotericism in the Bengali Bāul Songs of Lālan Fakir." 

Lālan Fakir was a nineteenth-century Bengali Sufi poet, and Cantú's article presents, translates and discusses five of his songs. The article ends by arguing that esotericism has "explanatory power outside of domains that are perceived to be exclusively Western."

Michael Muhammad Knight, "'I am Sorry, Mr. White Man, These are Secrets that You are Not Permitted to Learn': The Supreme Wisdom Lessons and Problem Book."

The Supreme Wisdom Lessons are part of the Nation of Islam tradition, and have been used in various ways. Knight places them and a related text, the Problem Book, "within their context of 1930s U.S. esoteric movements, thinkers, and themes."

Biko Gray, "The Traumatic Mysticism of Othered Others: Blackness, Islam, and Esotericism in the Five Percenters."

Gray develops the concept of "traumatic mysticism," and argues that the Five Percenters' "understanding of Islamic terminology, the meaning of the word 'god,' and their dissemination of their thought all articulate radical refusals of categorical distinctions."

Francesco Piraino, "Esotericisation and De-esotericisation of Sufism: The Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya Shādhiliyya in Italy."

The Italian Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya Shādhiliyya owes its origins to the Traditionalist Movement of René Guénon. Piraino shows the ways in which it was originally esoteric, and then argues that in recent years it has been undergoing "de-esotericisation," and that its "sectarian dimensions are gradually fading, allowing a dialogue with other Islamic communities."

Mark Sedgwick, "Islamic and Western Esotericism."

The article argues that there is an Islamic esotericism that matches Western esotericism very closely in terms of discourse and historical sources, but not in terms of structure--of relations with established religious and political power structures.

After ENSIE at ESSWE 7

The ENSIE panels at ESSWE 7 in Amsterdam went well (see photo of audience for first panel), though there were some cancellations for the third panel. An extra paper was added to this: Daniel Joslyn on "No Ordinary Fanatics," reporting the vicissitudes of the first ever trip to the US by Middle Eastern Sufis.

There was also an ENSIE meeting, at which it was reported that ENSIE now has 67 members, 58% of whom are based in Europe, most of the remainder being in the Americas. ENSIE only has 8 members based in the Middle East, but this may change.

Publications deriving from the ENSIE panels at ESSWE 6 in Erfurt and from ENSIE 1 in Venice are progressing satisfactorily. It is hoped to put together a special issue of a suitable journal based around a selection of the ESSWE 7 papers.

Plans for ENSIE 2--the second ENSIE conference, to be held in 2020--were discussed, and a proposal to hold the conference in Marseille was enthusiastically accepted. More details soon!

The Symbolism of Precious Stones in Islam

A new article by Luca Patrizi, “‘A Gemstone Among the Stones’: The Symbolism of Precious Stones in Islam and its Relation with Language,” has just been published in Historia Religionum 10 (2018), pp. 107-126, https://doi.org/10.19272/201804901009. The article is based on a paper that was presented at the inaugural conference of the ENSIE at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice in June 2018.

Abstract: The recourse to the symbolism of precious stones is attested in different religious contexts. While several specialists of Judaism and Christianity analyzed this symbolism in the context of the Old and New Testaments, as in the Jewish and Christian exegetical literature, its presence and nature in the Islamic sources so far did not gain the attention of the scholarly world. Yet in Islamic literature, this symbolism already occurs in its two main sources, the Qu- ran and the sayings of the prophet Muḥammad. Precious stones appear likewise in the title of a number of Islamic literary and religious texts, and some of these texts have been even structured according to the gemstones’ names. Their symbolism is used in particular in the Islamic esoteric literature, exerting in this way a strong influence on Western Hermetic and Alchemical doctrines. Numerous examples are to be found in Sufi literature, including in the works of two of its most important authorities, al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240). The symbolism of precious stones, as it is the case for the Jewish and Christian contexts, appears moreover in Islamic sources as closely related to the idea of language, as we intend to show in this article.

Sorgenfrei on Sufism and Islamic Esotericism

A new article, “Hidden or Forbidden, Elected or Rejected: Sufism as ‘Islamic Esotericism’?,” has been published by Simon Sorgenfrei in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations (29:2, 2018, pp. 145-165). Sorgenfrei asks two major questions. He first investigates to what extent Sufism can be identified with “Islamic Esotericism,” and argues that this identification is problematic. Why, then, he asks, is a problematic identification so widespread?

Sorgenfrei starts by discussing alternative conceptions of esotericism, focusing on the work of Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Kocku von Stuckrad. He argues that it is easier to apply von Stuckrad’s typological conception in the case of Islam than to apply Hanegraaff’s historical conception. Yet Sufism does not really fit von Stuckrad’s typology: it has not generally been secret, and has only occasionally been in any sense rejected knowledge. Although “claims to access to higher knowledge” are indeed the basis of a Sufi shaykh’s authority, there is much that Sufi tariqas do that is in no way esoteric.

That Sufism is, despite this, understood as esotericism can be explained in terms of the Western construction of the concept of “Sufism.” Sorgenfrei traces this from the early work of William Jones and John Malcolm through William James and the Traditionalists (whose take on Sufism he finds echoed in John L. Esposito’s Islam: The Straight Path), and Eranos. He also suggests that the rejection of Sufism by nineteenth-century Islamic reformists may have fed into this process.

Sorgenfrei’s article is timely. I think he is right about the Western construction of Sufism, and his arguments are confirmed by my own work in my recent Western Sufism. He is also absolutely right that Sufism has not generally been secret or rejected, and therefore does not fit that particular topological definition of esotericism. It may, however, still fit other definitions, as I intend to argue in a forthcoming article.

Mark Sedgwick

The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition

A new article has been published by Matthew Melvin-Koushki, "Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition," Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017), pp. 127-199:

Occultism remains the largest blind spot in the historiography of Islamicate philosophy-science, a casualty of persistent scholarly positivism, even whiggish triumphalism. Such occultophobia notwithstanding, the present article conducts a survey of the Islamicate encyclopedic tradition from the 4th–11th/10th–17th centuries, with emphasis on Persian classifications of the sciences, to demonstrate the ascent to philosophically mainstream status of various occult sciences (ʿulūm ġarība) throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Most significantly, in Persian encyclopedias, but not in Arabic, and beginning with Faḫr al-Dīn Rāzī, certain occult sciences (astrology, lettrism and geomancy) were gradually but definitively shifted from the natural to the mathematical sciences as a means of reasserting their scientific legitimacy in the face of four centuries of anti-occultist polemic, from Ibn Sīnā to Ibn Ḫaldūn; they were simultaneously reclassified as the sciences of walāya, moreover, which alone explains the massive increase in patronage of professional occultists at the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman courts in the runup to the Islamic millennium (1592 CE). I argue that the mathematicalization, neopythagoreanization and sanctification of occultism in Ilkhanid-Timurid-Aqquyunlu Iran is the immediate intellectual and sociopolitical context for both the celebrated mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory in the 9th/15th century and the resurgence of neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy in Safavid Iran in the 10th/16th and 11th/17th, whereby Ibn Sīnā himself was transformed into a neopythagorean-occultist—processes which have heretofore been studied in atomistic isolation.