Sufism and Gender: How Embodied Feminist Pedagogy Transforms a Tradition

Sufism and Gender: How Embodied Feminist Pedagogy Transforms a Tradition, explores how modern Sufis are redefining their teachings, pedagogy, and community dynamics in light of their commitments to trauma-informed care, gender justice, and anti-oppressive social values. Sufism and Gender begins with the premise that much of what we know to value in Sufism stems from its masculinist origins and its implicit, though exclusionary claims, that authentic Sufism requires embodying elite masculinities. Through research with contemporary Sufi women and feminist-leaning Sufi men, Sufism and Gender shows how leaders invested in un-suturing elite masculinities from Sufi values have found alternative models for conceiving of their most important teachings and practices. Each chapter examines how transformed readings of the self and body inform new approaches to the Sufi teaching relationship and community.

Sufism and Gender articulates this transformations in terms of a nascent approach to Sufi pedagogy emerging in contemporary communities and discourses. I call this new approach community-engaged self-cultivation. Drawing from various historical Sufi pedagogical models, this approach is defined by three main factors: a critique of patriarchy and the standardization of the lived experience of one social group as spiritually ideal for all practitioners; an emphasis on the students’ individual moral agency and inviolability of their conscience; and an ethic of reciprocity and mutuality manifested through diffused power relationships in Sufi pedagogy and community, and a rejection of the Sufi guide’s right to authoritarian or coercive power. Community-engaged self-cultivation is not itself a monolithic approach widespread across contemporary Sufi communities. Rather, I use it as an umbrella term to describe a web of transformative approaches to Sufism which begin with a reconfigured understanding of the self and body two centrally important loci of Sufi thought and practice. This reconfiguration then translates into a pedagogical approach and community formation that supports students in novel ways. Ultimately, these contemporary approaches to Sufism set aside the idea that witnessing God is contingent on conformity to an archetypical elite male Sufi ideal is being set aside. They embrace human diversity as ontologically connected to the goal of witnessing God as fully as possible while alive.