Sufism

While the term“Sufism” has long been used within the academic literature to define themystic dimension of Islam, later works have questioned the orientalizing tendencies ofsuch a definition and have shown the deep interconnectedness of the phenomenon withsocial and political change in modern times. After an overviewof the history of the termand how it has been employed in seminal sociological and anthropological scholarship,the entry illustrates how a new body of literature has explored the interconnectednessbetween Sufism and modernity from different perspectives. It mainly explains Sufism’sresilience as a result of the flexibility of its foundational pedagogical and intersubjectivepatterns. Moreover, it highlights this particular tradition’s capacity for recreatingconnectivity at a translocal level, as well as for offering replies to questions that, thoughframed partly in new ways, address long-standing human problems.