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Sufi studies


Sufi studies is a particular branch of comparative studies that uses the technical lexicon of the Islamic mystics, the Sufis, to exemplify the nature of its ideas; hence the frequent reference to Sufi Orders. It may be divided into two main branches, the orientalist/academic and the spiritual.

The earliest Europeans to study Sufism were French, associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Quietist movement. They were Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville (1625–1695), a professor at the Collège de France who worked from texts available in Europe, François Bernier (1625–1688), the physician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb who spent 1655-69 in the Islamic world (mostly with Aurangzeb), and François Pétis de la Croix (1653–1713), a diplomat who spent 1674-1676 in Isfahan, where he studied Rumi's Masnavi-ye Manavi and visited the Bektashi order.

D'Herbelot's great work, the Bibliothèque orientale (published posthumously in 1697), included an entry on Sufism (as tasawwuf) and detailed entries on Al-Hallaj, Najmeddin Kubra, and Abd-al-karim Jili. There were a number of references to the Masnavi and to Rumi (as Gellaledin Mohammed al Balkhi), and there may also have been entries on them.


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