Faculty of Arts & Science
Religious Studies

Spring 2013 – RELS 4400-B – Islamic Mystical Thought

(Series Topic) Tuesday 3:00-5:50pm

Instructor: Professor Atif Khalil (atif.khalil@uleth.ca)

Prerequisite: RELS2600 or permission of instructor

Sufism (tasawwuf) or the “jurisprudence of the Heart” (fiqh al-qalb), as Ghazali called it, has for much of its history formed an integral element of the Islamic tradition. Until the advent of modernity and Western colonialism, it was taught, as both a scholarly and meditative discipline, in all the major institutions of Islamic learning spanning from Morocco and Algeria in the West to India and China in the East. Although Sufism was a pervasive presence in the pre-modern world of Islamdom, it expressed itself in a variety of forms; these ranged from ecstatic love poems to sober psychological meditations, from provocative and elliptical aphorisms to analytic philosophical disquisitions.

In this course we shall examine these multiple expressions with a focus on questions about the Sufi understanding of the nature of love, the self, God, and ultimate reality. This shall be done by surveying the conceptual development and unfolding of the tradition through a close reading of primary texts of some of Sufism’s principle representatives, both classical and modern.

As an upper level seminar, students will be expected to participate in the class by sharing their reflections over the weekly readings. A significant portion of the course will be dedicated to group discussion. The final mark will be based on a mixture of group presentations, essays, and tests.