Part 1. Share. 1/4. Watch on. Intro to LGBTQ Lecture Series. Homosexuality, Islam & the Rights of LGBTQ People. Watch on. MPV endorses the human and civil rights LGBTQI individuals. We affirm our commitment to ending discrimination we support full equality. Sufism is a term used to refer to mystical religious ideas in Islam. It had evolved into a well-developed movement by the 11th century. Sufis stress the importance of traversing the path of the Sufi pir, enabling one to establish a direct communion with the divine. Fundamental to Sufism is God, man and the relation between them, which is Love. Sufism may be best described as Islamic mysticism or asceticism, which through belief and practice helps Muslims attain nearness to Allah by way of direct personal experience of God.While there are other suggested origins of the term Sufi, the word is largely believed to stem from the Arabic word suf, which refers to the wool that was traditionally worn by mystics and ascetics. Sufism in India adapted itself to the Indian traditions and borrowed many practices from folk worship. The terms Sufi and Sufism evoke complex layers of meaning, but they are nonetheless creative manifestations of religious life in Islam. Over cen turies, Sufism has become a distinctively Islamic way of seeking commu The Nature and Role of Sufism in Contemporary Islam: A Case Study of the Life, Thought and Teachings of Fethullah Gülen A Dissertation Submitted to The Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Heon Choul Kim August 2008 . ii i © Sufism - Mysticism, Poetry, Rituals: The mystics drew their vocabulary largely from the Qurʾān, which for Muslims contains all divine wisdom and has to be interpreted with ever-increasing insight. In the Qurʾān, mystics found the threat of the Last Judgment, but they also found the statement that God "loves them and they love him," which became the basis for love-mysticism. Sufism is the inward-looking, mystical dimension of Islam, emphasizing personal and emotional religious experiences. The theological orientation of Sufism, with its inward focus on spirituality, is such that its followers generally tend to shy away from more politicized forms of Islam. Sufism mixes mainstream religious observances with a range Sufi studies. Sufi studies is a particular branch of comparative studies that uses the technical lexicon of the Islamic mystics, the Sufis, to exemplify the nature of its ideas; hence the frequent reference to Sufi Orders. It may be divided into two main branches, the orientalist / academic and the spiritual. Sufism - Mysticism, Orders, Practices: Mystical life was first restricted to the relation between a master and a few disciples; the foundations of a monastic system were laid by the Persian Abū Saʿīd ebn Abī ol-Kheyr (died 1049), but real orders or fraternities came into existence only from the 12th century onward: ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (died 1166) gathered the first and still most Persecution of Sufis. Persecution of Sufis over the course of centuries has included acts of religious discrimination, persecution, and violence both by Sunni and Shia Muslims, [1] such as destruction of Sufi shrines, [2] tombs and mosques, suppression of Sufi orders, murder, and terrorism against adherents of Sufism in a number of Muslim tPcVGgc.