Sufism and Social Integration: Connecting Hearts, Crossing Boundaries

Description

Sufism is of the utmost importance in the Islamic world today where it confronts the challenges of modernism—and now post-modernism—on the one hand, and what has come to be known as fundamentalism on the other, both of which are anti-Sufi while being on a certain level opposed to each other, although in a deeper sense they are two sides of the same coin. This seminal work consists of essays on contemporary Sufism in many different parts of the Islamic world in light of present-day challenges, especially that of modernism and the role of Sufism in bringing about the integration of the individual and of society and in creating social cohesion. This is a book that not only provides a great deal of knowledge about contemporary Sufism, but is also an antidote to the current malady in the West of trying to depict contemporary Islam as a whole as a source of violence and disequilibrium in this chaotic world that modern man has created. —From the Preface by Seyyed Hossein Nasr