SUFISM AS AN INSTITUTION OF THE MUSLIM SOCIETY(part 1)

Introduction:

Origin and development of Sufism:

Sufism has been described in many different ways but they all agree on its essential Islam.

 R. A. Nicholson in his little introduction to Sufism, The Mystics of Islam (1914), remarks: character as being the inner, esoteric, mystical, or purely spiritual dimension of the religion of states that it is "a subject so vast and many-sided that several large volumes would be required to apprehension of divine realities'," and although referring to it as "Islamic mysticism"

, he further Sufism, the religious philosophy of Islam, is described in the oldest extant definition as 'thedo it anything like justice.

"More than 35 years later his student, A. J. Arberry, in his brief introduction to the subject, Sufism (1950), similarly states that sufism is "the name given to the mysticism of Islam" and "the mystical movement of an uncompromising Monotheism." 

It was this author that first maintained that although sufism was the recipient of many influences from Neoplatonic and other sources, that it was in essence derived from the Quran and the hadith, and attempted to view "the movement from within as an aspect of Islam, as though these other factors which certainly determined its growth did not exist."

 This approach became generally accepted and was echoed by later scholars.

 The 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Martin Lings, writing in an article on sufism (1968), defined sufism as "the name by which Islamic mysticism came to be known in the 8th or 9th century A.D.," and stated: "It is only in secondary respects that there can be said to have been any development in sufism, or for that matter in Islam as a whole, since the time of the Prophet."

Companions of the Prophet (SAWW), they were people of principles practising certain disciplines and meditations for the sake of purification, the realization of Divine love, and the understanding of reality.

These individuals met on the platform, or suffa, of the mosque where Prophet Mohammed (SAWW) used to pray. They would meet there almost everyday to discuss the ways to inner knowledge, the truths of revelation, and the meanings of the verses of the Quran. Thus, the platform of that mosque in Madinah became the first gathering place of one of the most influential groups in the history of mankind's spiritual civilization. 

They were called ahle suffa, the People of the Platform.These individuals cultivated the seed of a school of spiritual practice based on knowledge of the self, and thus free of the trappings of tradition and superstition, a knowledge of the inner heart apart from the customary beliefs of their contemporary society as well as those of future civilizations.

 It is from this group that all the schools of sufism that have ever existed owe their origin, for by pursuing the path of unsullied inner knowledge they were the founders of sufism, and the binding link between its subsequent developments.Towards the end of the first millennium CE, a number of manuals began to be written summarizing the doctrines of sufism and describing some typical sufi practices.