Global Sufism

The globalisation of Sufism as practices, ideas, cultural and aesthetic artefacts is a central feature of the contemporary world and even beyond just the spatial and mental conceptions of the ‘Muslim world’. From the memes based (loosely) on the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi through to the weaponisation of Sufi leaders in the ‘war on Islamist terror’ and onto non-religious voice coaches (without even the understanding of either the language or the music) analysing qawwalis from South Asia that are consumed far beyond there (as is also the case with ‘Sufi music’ within the wider category of ‘world music’ both in Anglophone and Francophone contexts), Sufism has become the very fabric of our world – sometimes in recognisable ways, contested, reconstructed, and even ‘reconfigured’ (the term beloved of the editors of this volume). The present volume should also be read alongside some other recent studies of contemporary Sufism, and the ways in which they cross boundaries are restructured and engage with politics and society such as Mark Sedgwick’s (one of the editors) work on Western Sufism (Oxford, 2016) and his book on the traditionalists, Against the Modern World (Oxford, 2004) as well as the recent volume edited by Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh entitled Sufism East and West (Brill, 2019) which in particular complements this volume nicely – Asani’s piece on Sufi rock as well as Diaz’s piece on the Moroccan Budshishiya mirror and speak to the piece on Sufi rap in this volume.