Interiority unbound: Sufi and modern articulations of the self

Abstract

This issue investigates the ways in which the Sufi repertoire of heuristic categories of intellectual and spiritual maturation (e.g. batin, spiritual growth, intuitional knowledge and inner awareness) may converge, intersect, and also diverge from modern epistemologies of the inner self. In doing so, the contributions touch upon two questions in particular. On the one hand, they discuss the relation between selfhood and the transcendent, describing not only how the self is built but also how it is somehow unbuilt in the relationship with the divine: rather than defined through its ‘inner’ boundaries, the self is seen as emerging continuously on the background of a wider horizon of existence, that is, the transcendent dimension of life. On the other hand, the authors highlight the overlaps between notions belonging to the Islamic tradition and modern discourses on interiority, tracing out the specific social and micro-political issues that lie behind this entanglement through key experiential notions such as dhawq, love, imagination, dreams and visions. In such a way, the papers tell about the strive of translating transcendence into new forms of sociality which may subvert, substitute or be alternative to institutionalised, established mundane and also religious forms of interaction and inter-subjectivity.

Key words:

• Selfhood
• interiority, sufism
• transcendence
• protestantism
• modernity

Notes

1. Such a clear distinction has lately been contested by an anthropological scholarship which, even though did not address Sufism directly, has long debated on how to account for the multiplicity of Islam’s local manifestations on the one hand, and the univocal identification in something called ‘Islam’ by all those inhabiting these local manifestations, on the other (Cf. Asad 1986; Eickelman 1982; El-Zein 1977; Marranci 2008; Varisco 2005).

2. These were instead the main traits of in-worldly activism of Protestant religion and for how they have been defined by Weber ([1930] 2005).

3. This insight is also due to conversations with Samuli Schielke.

4. In western discourses on modernity interiority articulates its boundaries with the exterior world in different ways and forms: i.e. in some ‘religious’ and more ‘secular’ traditions of knowledge (i.e., respectively, Protestantism and Freudian psychology) the inner forum is conceived as a unique de-materialized realm (Keane 2002). Interiority is constructed as abstract from any form of materiality, be it cultural expressions of the self or social conditionings and constraints. On another hand, other epistemologies of modern interiority stress its uniqueness in self-expression, namely in the capacity of mobilizing the outer world in idiosyncratic and creative ways (romantic self-expression, see Wilf 2011): here materiality has its say. This expressionist relation between inner and outer can be found in the new age spiritualisms, in which the relation of the self to the divine is articulated and experienced through materiality, the body and its affects. Otherwise popular ideas of the self, i.e. those linked to neuroscience, presuppose further connections between the interior and the exterior. However, what literature on Sufism highlights is that often Sufi movements have linked to a dominant liberal understanding of self and religiosity, grounded upon a conception of knowledge of the self and the world that assumes a polarity between the inner self and the outer world.