The term “Western esotericism” seems to exclude Islam, as the West and Islam are often taken as binary opposites, and as some scholars have suggested that Western esotericism is so Western that it is essentially distinct from non-Western phenomena. 1 Others have argued that while Western and non-Western esotericism may be hard to distinguish in structural terms at a theoretical level, it is...
By the 1930s, there were several notable new religious movements in Europe that claimed Sufism as the origin, or as one of the major origins, of their teachings and practice. This chapter shows the early twentieth-century Western understandings of Sufism built on and derived from earlier understandings that saw Sufism as a form of Deism, as an incarnation of romantic concepts of individual...