Sufism as Mysticism – Scientia Experimentalis and as Discursive Tradition – Sacra Doctrina

Abstract

This chapter proposes an archeology of the category mysticism, showing its different meanings in the Christian religious context, and then in human and social sciences. It argues that despite its essentialist uses in the 20th and 21st centuries, this category can still be relevant and effective. Instead of considering mysticism as a phenomenon separated from religion, limited to the private sphere, or composed by marginal religious movements, it suggests thinking of mysticism as an inherent dimension of religious phenomena. Furthermore, by re-elaborating the analysis of Maurice Halbwachs, Michel de Certeau, Victor Turner, and Moshe Sluhovsky, it describes the dialectic between mysticism - scientia experimentalis, and discursive tradition - sacra doctrina. This theoretical abstraction allows us to grasp certain aspects of religious life – such as ecstatic experience, symbolic exegeses, orthopraxy, linguistic and epistemological multiplicity and instability – as integral parts of religious life and not as the expression of exogenous causes, such as Neoplatonism, the New Age, modernity, etc. This theoretical abstraction proves useful in the description of Sufism, understood not as a “purely mystical” phenomenon, but one which participates in this dialectic between mysticism and tradition – scientia experimentalis and sacra doctrina. Indeed, we could ideally place the Sufi orders in this continuum.