Twelve essays on Islamic contemplative traditions — a standard that needs no audience, an anchor to return to, and a mirror that is polished rather than painted.
Tasawwuf — usually rendered Sufism in English — is not a free-floating spirituality that happened to arise in Muslim countries. It is a set of contemplative traditions within Islam, structured around the Quran, the prophetic example and the law, practised now, by Muslims, in orders with living teachers. I am outside the religion, and this collection says so rather than presenting the material as universal.
That matters because removing the Islam is the standard English handling, and it is not subtle. Coleman Barks’s versions of Rumi are how most English readers have met this material. He does not read Persian, works from earlier scholarly translations, calls his work versions rather than translations, and has said plainly that he took the Islam out of it. Rumi was a professor of Islamic law. The figure in circulation is a universal mystic with the religion sanded off. This collection quotes from translators who read Persian.
And there is a debt. Sufi terms have appeared across this library already — hal and maqam in Not-Two, dhikr and muhasaba in Still Water, the camel in Mussar. I have been borrowing from this tradition for some time without giving it a collection of its own. This is that collection.
The seventh essay declines to reproduce the turning ceremony and says why first. The closing essay makes the full accounting of what was taken and what was left — including the objection that lifting portable structures out of a religious tradition is the same operation that produced the New Age Rumi, which is conceded rather than answered.
Every essay carries a section headed The case against, in the body rather than at the end.