The Ways of the Breathing Hearts
“Who is a Sufi?” I asked Pir Zia Inayat-Khan in March 2013, as we sat breathing together in Gersfeld, a small (West) German town, following a group of Inayati Sufis from Berlin, the capital of reunified Germany. Pir Zia (b. 1971) is the head of the transnational Inayati Order (Inayatiyya) (formerly the International Sufi Order with its headquarters in the United States) and the grandson of Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), a north Indian Sufi whose name frequently appeared during my fieldwork. Pir Zia listened to me attentively, paused momentarily to breathe, and looking straight into my eyes said, “A Sufi is someone who breathes well!” (29 March 2013).
A year later, in the summer of 2014, I asked Ayşe a different but related question, “What role does healing play in Sufi practice?” Ayşe is a lawyer in her forties, a first-generation migrant woman of Color1 from Turkey and a key figure in one of the most prominent Sufi networks in Berlin, the Haqqani-Naqshbandis. Sitting in her home during one of the hottest Ramadan months in Kreuzberg, Ayşe returned my question with another question, “Why do I suffer, and what should I do?” She answered it herself with an extended narrative of chronic depression in a society fraught with a long history of hostility against immigrants and Muslims. Ayşe described how her quest for healing eventually led her to Sufi practice (21 July 2014; chapter 2). Ayşe’s desire line to become a Sufi mobilizes the narratives of “breathing well” by talking back to anti-Muslim racism in Germany and against the secular Turkish Muslims, who consider Sufism “backward” or “brain-washing” (21 July 2014; chapter 2).
“The right-wing attacks our mosques,”2 Abu Bakr, a social worker, a white German Muslim Sufi, said before adding, “and our Muslim brothers do not consider us to be real Muslims!” In the spring of 2013, and at the beginning of my fieldwork, Abu Bakr3 and I sat together, sipping black tea at the Sufi Center in Neukölln. We were discussing the predicaments of the Sufis in the city. In the following years, especially since the so-called refugee crisis in 20154 and the more recent terror attack in Hanau in 2020,5 anti-Muslim racism in Germany has taken a sinister turn (chapter 6, Epilogue).
What does it mean to “breathe well” as a Sufi in a place where public expressions of religion are constrained, and Islam is increasingly marginalized? What is Sufism? How is Sufi healing practiced and experienced in Berlin and connected sites? Breathing Hearts documents various answers to these questions. This work is an account of navigating and breathing along with the ways of the heart and a chronicle of learning about Sufism and anthropology. This book is based on eighteen months of non-consecutive ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin and connected sites, several towns and villages in Germany, and a small town in Turkey. Between 2013 and 2015, I followed four Sufi networks that I label Sufi Muslims (Haqqani-Naqshbandi), universalist Sufis (Inayati),6 therapeutic Sufis (Tümata-Berlin),7 and nomadic Sufis who do not belong to a formalized network.8 Between 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I conducted digital fieldwork to follow how my Sufi interlocutors were making efforts to “breathe well” in the pandemic ruins of anti-Muslim racism fraught with intersectional breathing troubles (Epilogue).
“Islam belongs to Germany,” the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared in the aftermath of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 (Zeit Online 2015). In 2010, former German president Christian Wulff said something similar on the twentieth anniversary of the reunification of the former East and West Germany. He emphasized that Christianity and Judaism unequivocally belonged to Germany before accommodating Islam. Almost as an afterthought, he said, “But in the meantime, Islam also belongs to Germany” (Wulff 2010; Zand 2012).
The conservative and liberal politicians and heads of the German nation-state repeat these rhetorical gestures from time to time. But anti-Muslim racism is an everyday experience for anyone perceived to belong to the Islamic tradition in Germany. The right-wing populist-nationalist political party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) manifests it most visibly in their political agenda, agitating the non-Muslim majority against Islam by popularizing slogans such as, “Islam does not belong to Germany” (Der Islam gehört nicht zu Deutschland) (Zeit Online 2016). And the conservative and liberal forces are complicit in the right-wing project by not taking anti-Muslim racism seriously. Islam remains subordinate to the German state’s paradoxical commitment to dominant Christianity and political secularism.9
Anti-Muslim racism is a historical phenomenon and structural force in German society. Long before I began fieldwork and in the following years, the heightening of anti-Muslim racism was of grave concern among postmigrant10 Muslim communities in Germany (and in Berlin) (Lewicki and Shooman 2020; Özyürek 2015; Shooman 2014; De Néve 2013; Kühnel and Leibold 2007). When I arrived in Berlin in 2012, the talk of the town was the serial murder of Turkish, Kurdish, and Greek “migrants” in Germany by a far-right nationalist group.11 Today the anti-Islam rhetoric of populist nationalism continues to dominate the public imagination. It obscures the persistent structural inequalities and the plights of Muslim minorities. Ayşe and Abu Bakr had reasons to be concerned for their Sufi Muslim community. In the suffocating atmosphere of anti-Muslim racism in Germany and the rejection of Sufism by some Muslims, it is difficult to “breathe well” as Sufis, as breather-wayfarers in Berlin.
The citizens of a nation-state constitute imagined communities (Anderson [1983] 1991) centered around identity and difference, including some and excluding others. Commonly defined as “Islamic mysticism” and historically situated within the Islamic tradition, Sufism has a minority presence and is not seen as part of the imagined community called Germany. Labeled by followers as a way of the heart,12 Sufism in practice connects and separates the Islamic and non-Islamic presence here. It brings together and sets apart the Sufis from other Muslims and non-Muslim subjects. Sufism as a phenomenon exceeds the lines drawn between social fields marked as the religious, the therapeutic, and the performing arts. Sufis are unseen neighbors in Berlin, which I call a “city of mirrors,” where neighbors remain strangers and unseen (chapter 1). The project of making the minority presence of Sufi healing practices visible lies at the heart of this book.
“There must be something else,” said Gertrud, a seventy-year-old white German woman, a language teacher, and Heilpraktikerin (alternative healing practitioner). She reflected on a crucial moment in her life story when I asked her, “How did you come to Sufism?” Gertrud had been looking for a way out of the “cornered landscape” (eckige Landschaft) of postwar Germany (interview, 16 June 2014). Later, she joined Tümata-Berlin, a loosely formed network of friends, musicians, and healing practitioners who practiced music-and-movement therapy and organized Sufi whirling ceremonies (sema) in the city. In the moments of whirling, from right to left, allowing her body to resonate with the melody of the Sufi music, Gertrud felt that she could step out of the cornered landscape of German society (chapter 4). The expressive articulations of Sufi experience—are they only temporary escapes from a disenchanting reality or enactments of an alternative, the possibility of living otherwise?
Using the motto “new discovery of old traditions,” Raphael juxtaposed tradition and modernity in Sufi practice. He is a leading figure in Tümata-Berlin, a white German musician and physician practicing biomedicine and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). In the autumn of 2013, we were sitting in a café in Kreuzberg a few steps away from his office. Raphael explained how bringing the old and new medical traditions together made it possible to practice what he rather hesitantly called the “Ancient Oriental Music-and-Movement Therapy” (Alt-orientalische Musik-und-Bewegungstherapie, AOM). AOM is informed by the reimagined tradition of Islamic medicine and Sufi thought traveling across the Silk Road. Raphael said, “The music therapy [AOM] is based partly on historical data and partly derived from data [generated by] modern scientific and music studies . . . [and] it is also connected to Sufi thought” (interview, 25 September 2013).
Raphael is a long-term student of the Tümata founder, the late Rahmi Oruç Güvenç (1948–2017), a Turkish psychologist and Sufi teacher. Raphael’s everyday life consists of navigating biomedicine and alternative (Sufi) healing. In practice, he brings the sounds and movements of Central Asian Shamanism and Turkish Sufism into conversation with the reimagined golden age of Islamic medicine (chapters 1, 5, and 6). Are the Sufism-inspired therapeutic forms practiced by Tümata-Berlin only enacting popular (affirmative) orientalism, or are they also illustrative examples of participatory performances in the real, a “medicine of the imagination” (Kirmayer 2014, 41) (chapter 5)?
Healing in Sufi-Berlin mobilizes breathing bodies, ontologies, histories, subjectivities, and politics. It is about seeking answers to existential questions, as Ayşe asked, “Why do I suffer, and what should I do?” when confronted with chronic depression (interview, 21 July 2014). I asked Renate the same question I had asked Ayşe earlier (“What role does healing play in Sufi practice?”). Renate, a white (former East) German scientist active in the Inayati healing network, said, with a smile of relief on her face, “I can now say [the word] God without stress!” before emphasizing that “Sufism is not a religion” (interview, 7 May 2014). Renate disentangled the label “religion” and “spirituality” in her navigation of biomedicine and many forms of complementary and alternative medicines; before turning to Sufi breathing in her quest for healing a chronic orthopedic condition that had progressively disabled her. Growing up in the state-sponsored atheist and secularist society of former East Germany, with a visceral suspicion of organized religions and “dark churches,” Renate sought recovery in an Inayati Sufi network, considering Sufism “not religious” but “spiritual” (chapter 2).
Khidr, Pir Zia, Ayşe, Abu Bakr, Gertrud, Raphael, and Renate are some of my key Sufi interlocutors. Other than Pir Zia, they lived in Berlin at the time I met them. Their statements and narrated pathways are illustrative examples of the internal diversity of Sufi practice in Germany, especially in Berlin. How is Sufism enacted in what they practiced and experienced? If not restricted to the religious field, what else could Sufism be? Breathing Hearts does not resolve these dilemmas. The book situates these questions within two traditions of inquiry: Sufism and anthropology.
Breathing Hearts is the first book-length ethnographic account of Sufi (healing) practices and politics in Berlin. It examines the life worlds of the postmigrant people of Color, multiethnic immigrants, and white Germans to shift the conventional anthropological gaze through the sensibilities of a former physician and South Asian anthropologist-writer, breathworker, and a woman of Color living and working in Germany. The book offers a unique perspective to study Germany from a point of view of the postcolony (Varela and Dhawan 2015; Chaudhary 2006), with a humble yet critical shifting of the gaze, rather than the radical claim of “reversing the anthropological gaze” (Ntarangi 2010, 9). Studying Sufism as a murid (learner) parallels learning how to do ethnographic fieldwork, attending to the challenges of a dual apprentice as a methodological approach drawing from affective sensuous scholarship (Stodulka, Selim, and Mattes 2018; Stoller 1997) and hermeneutics of affective pedagogy13 (Selim 2020a). Dual apprenticeship moves beyond methodological atheism and agnosticism (Porpora 2006), not by “going native” in the conventional sense but by performing a methodological dance of stepping close and stepping away, immersing in Sufism to embody the practical logic of fieldwork and creating the “critical distance” in writing (Engelke 2018, 12; chapter 1).
Sufis, like other intentional communities14 of religious/spiritual practice, are rarely visible in the imagination of alternatives to late liberal capitalism. The growing religious/spiritual landscape is regarded as a market for buying and selling spiritual products (Zinser 1997, 62) for “religious/spiritual oriented healing and therapeutic” consumption, especially in the last two decades (Klinkhammer and Tolksdorf 2015, 3). What does contemporary Sufism offer beyond a set of salvation goods?15 This book aims to tackle this question, among others.
It is quite likely that no city in Germany harbors the same kind of super-diversity as Berlin does, although cities like Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, or Munich could claim to be more diverse.16 Visitors enamored of its present fame as a liberal cosmopolitan city are often unaware of the structural inequality and the hidden suffering experienced by its inhabitants. The healing landscapes in Berlin offer numerous practices drawn from diverse religious and alternative medical traditions.17 However, everyday reality in the “world capital of atheism” (Berger 2001, 195) is shaped by the hegemony of majoritarian Protestantism-inflected secularism and anti-Muslim racism today (Lewicski and Shooman 2020; Özyürek 2015; Shooman 2014; Jonker 2006).
Breathing Hearts is not a study of structural racism or secularism in Germany. This book situates Sufi practices and politics in the context of anti-Muslim racism and Protestant-inflected secularism in German society to widen the understanding of Sufism and healing in this particular setting. On the one hand, these structural forces exert an external burden on Sufi wayfarers looking for an “otherwise” (Povinelli 2014) within German society. On the other hand, the scriptural and literalist Islamic authorities exercise an internal burden on Sufi-identified Muslims, who are interested in Islam’s explorative and expansive enactments. The hegemonic secularism and the more prescriptive formations of Islam produce a double burden of secular and religious sufferings. These are everyday forms of social suffering resulting from “what political, economic, and institutional power [of secularism and prescriptive literalist religious authority] does to people and reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems” (Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997, ix). Breathing Hearts describes how Sufism, whether articulated as Islamic, universalist, therapeutic, or nomadic, offers an entangled web of (healing) practices through which such sufferings are exceeded, with more or less success (chapters 2, 4, and 5).
Many Sufis and scholars defined Sufism as “Islamic” mysticism, while the Sufi tradition has been contested from within Islam. In Berlin and elsewhere, in the global history of Sufism, its beguiling internal diversity has time and again produced contested ontologies in relation to the Islamic tradition, as an assemblage of terms and practices that hang together in its name.
“Sufism was invented in Berlin! You are in the right place to ask these questions,” Bernhard said with an ironic smile (13 October 2014). I stared at him for a few seconds before saying, “You mean the concept of Sufism, the word Sufismus?” Bernhard is a white German musician and writer, who traveled widely and wrote books about these travels and Sufi music. Bernhard has been a long-term inhabitant of Berlin—since the 1960s. He was a close friend of my primary teacher Khidr. We were drinking coffee at his flat, the backhouse of a building in Kreuzberg that survived World War II bombing. Bernhard narrated an instance of local knowledge-making, relating to a historical ontology of Sufism.18
Bernhard: Yes! Like many other –isms [ –ismus] born in that century. Capital-ism, Social-ism . . . This German guy Tholuck wrote in the 1820s a Latin text . . . Ssufismus sive Theosophia Persarum Pantheistica19 . . . Pantheistic tradition? He had no idea! So you don’t just call it Sufism!
Nasima: If not Sufism, then how would you call it?
Bernhard: Well, have you read Hujwiri? He was one of the first writers of what you call Sufism, around the eleventh century . . . He said it was tasawwuf . . . It is not about Suf or wool . . . Hujwiri also said there was a time when tasawwuf was a reality without a name, and now it has become a name without a reality! (interview, 13 October 2014)
What is Sufism? It is an ontological question that drives scholars to provide diverse responses.20 The origin stories of the term “Sufi” are shrouded in the veils and debates on its possible etymologies. As a derivative of ṣūf, the Arabic word for wool, the term indicates that the early Sufis might have worn wool garments (known as “wool-wearers”). Etymologically the word “Sufi” has also been associated with wisdom (Greek sophia) (Green 2012, 18), and the Arabic word for “purity” (sāfá) mentioned in the first (eleventh-century) Farsi treatise about taṣawwuf (Al-Hujwiri 1998, 30).21
The English word “Sufism” and its German counterparts, Sufismus and Sufitum, were first used by nineteenth-century orientalists to translate the Arabic word taṣawwuf (Dickson 2015; Khalil and Sheikh 2014; Schimmel [1985] 1995). Certain forms of religiosity in the Islamic tradition were designated with the Arabic word ṣūfi and its derivatives, since their mention in eighth-century Islamic literature (Chittick 2015). Sufism was associated with the ṭarīqah (path), referring to the diverse Sufi orders, and often used synonymously with ma’rifah or ‘irfān, derived from the notions of recognition and gnosis, as a form of knowing and recognizing (‘arafa) reality (Chittick 2015).
Sufism was defined as “Islamic mysticism”22 by scholars who defined Sufi practice as “a set of techniques by which Muslims have sought a direct personal encounter with the divine” (Green 2012, 1). Others have emphasized the difference between a “puritanical” Islam and experiential, bodily oriented “Sufi” Islam (see also Parkin 2007). The early Sufis belonged to the mid-ninth-century mystical movement that arose in the region of present-day Iraq (Melchert 2015; Karamustafa 2007; Green 2012). Until the later part of the eighth century, the term “Sufi” did not appear in Islamic discourse (Melchert 2015, 6). The early Muslim definitions of “Sufi” (wool-wearer) and “Tasawwuf” (becoming a Sufi) implicated ethical self-formation practices. These definitions were discussed by early twentieth-century historians in terms of the “rules of discipline and devotion which the novice (muríd) learned from his spiritual director (pir, ustadh)” (Nicholson 1906, 321). More recent historians of the early period of Sufism mentioned only a few texts that refer to ascetic practices of self-mortification. Only one text, however, mentioned the wearing of wool (Green 2012, 18).
Opposition to the Sufi tradition within Islam is as old as its origins (Sirriyeh 1999, ix). Sufi claims to the immanent experience of divinity were immediately contested by pious Sunni circles as early as 877–78 CE when Baghdad had its first anti-Sufi “inquisition” (Melchert 2015). Antinomian trends were present among specific Sufi movements and persist until today (Karamustafa 2015). In the Islamic tradition, Sufism received a mixed reception. On the one hand, it has been regarded as integral to Islam, often complementing rather than contravening sharia,23 a popular term for Islamic law (Ridgeon 2015a; W. Ziad 2015; Trimingham [1971] 1998). On the other hand, modern reformers either attempted to reform Sufism to follow the Sunnah more rigorously and become legally subordinate, or they discredited Sufism as bid’a (innovation) and persecuted the Sufis in Muslim societies (Sharify-Funk et al. 2018; Ahmed 2016; Sirriyeh 1999).
Sufism survived early and more contemporary oppositions. The Sufi tradition spread from its early Middle Eastern origins in multiple directions, to Central Asia, to the African continent, and Asia: spreading from Morocco to Bengal, China, and Indonesia; and further westward to Andalusia in southern Spain. In the twentieth century, Sufism arrived in Western Europe as the first Sufi networks began to establish themselves in the region (Green 2012). Defining Sufism as essentially “Islamic” except for “rule-breaking” (antinomian) groups, historian Nile Green (2012, 8–9) listed Sufi-designated supererogatory (“above what is required”) practices, such as:
chanted “remembrance” (dhikr) of God; meditation (muraqaba) on different aspects of the psyche and God; meditation of moral virtues (ihsan) through the observance of formal rules of etiquette (adab); . . . respectful interaction (suhba) [or sohbet] with their master . . . ritualized listening (sama’) [sema] to music and poetry as a means to reach ecstatic states (ahwal) . . . rituals of initiation into such a “Path” or brotherhood and its accompanying pledge of allegiance (bay’a) to a master marked the formal entry to discipleship.24
Shahab Ahmed (2016) described the urban Sufi structures as centers of practice (khānqāh, zāwiyah, tekkeh, merkez, etc.), describing the “barakah (spiritual power)–charged” tombs of the saints (mazār, dargāh, ziyāratgāh, etc.) and mentioning, among other practices, the public visitation (ziyārah) of Sufi shrines/tombs (2016). One of the defining characteristics of Sufism, in his analysis, is the aspiration for “higher Real-Truth” (ḥaqīqah) and the “perfect human” (al-insān al-kāmil) as a figure of aspiration for the novice (2016, 21).
Such Sufi conceptual vocabulary is an integral part of the idiom of speech for Muslims since Sufism was articulated in the major languages of Islamic self-expression through poetry, stories, and songs (Ahmed 2016).25 In the twenty-first century, Sufism continues to exist in diverse forms. The conceptual vocabulary of Sufism and the repertoires of its practices have circulated beyond the Muslim world. Ahmed referred to this wider temporal-spatial field as the “Balkans-to-Bengal complex” (2016, 32). Geographically speaking, Sufis today belong to the so-called Occident (the West)26 and the so-called Orient (the East).
Academic and popular orientalism have surely invented the term “Sufism” as such, informing the early knowledge practices about Sufism as a phenomenon.27 In 1821, the first doctoral dissertation on Sufism was written in a major European language (Latin), Ssufismus sive Theosophia Persarum Pantheistica (Sufism or Persian Pantheistic Theosophy) at the Berlin University (now Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) (Tholuck 1821). August Tholuck, a Prussian Lutheran theologian, based his dissertation on the firsthand reading of Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish Sufi literature. Unlike most orientalists of his era, Tholuck argued that Sufismus was “Mohammedan Mysticism” and established its Islamic ontology early on (1825, 35).
There is no doubt, therefore, that the term “Sufism” inherits an orientalist genealogy.28 However, most contemporary Sufi studies scholars still find the term productive for an academic inquiry.29 Sufism is the subject of Sufi studies, and it is “neither anything more nor anything less than what the name itself denominates in any one instance of naming,” argued the editors of the inaugural issue of the Journal of Sufi Studies (Ohlander et al. 2012, 1). Using the term “Sufism” does not prevent the possibility of pluralizing the notion of Sufism. Following the multiple enactments in practice and narrativized experience assembled around the singular term, it is possible to organize its diversity.
“Libraries have been written on the phenomenon of ‘Islamic mysticism’ or ‘Sufism’” in the Muslim world (Knysh 2005, 106). In contrast, the academic study of Sufism in the Muslim-minority “West” and “Western” scholarship is a recent but generative development.30 Previously dominated by historical, literary, philosophical, and philological approaches, the anthropology of Sufism in the last decades has become a polyvocal interdisciplinary terrain.
“Sufism is Islamic mysticism,” Edward Evans-Pritchard (1949, 1) began his ethnography of the Sanusiyya Sufi order in the Cyrenaica (part of Libya under British colonial rule). Drawing on his (colonial) encounters during World War II, he described (Sanusiyya) Sufi practices, as “asceticism, living apart from the world, contemplation, charity, and the performance of supernumerary religious exercises producing a state of ecstasy in which the soul, no longer conscious of its individuality, of its bodily prison, or the external world, is for a while united with God” (1949, 2).
In the post/colonial history of anthropology, Sufi Islam has received significant attention with diverse lines of inquiry across generations of ethnographers (Evans-Pritchard 1949; Geertz 1971; Gilsenan 1973; Crapanzano 1973; Rabinow 1977). Anthropological scholarship on “Islamic mysticism” has focused on distinctive forms of local/regional religious expressions as rural folk Islam, positioning these expressions as antithetical to the urban, scriptural/scholarly faith (Mahmood and Landry 2017), among Muslims in Egypt (Gilsenan 1973, [1982] 2000), Morocco (Gellner 1969; Crapanzano 1973), Morocco and Indonesia (Geertz [1968] 1971), and West Africa (Cruise O’Brien 1971), among others. Anthropologists have described the Muslim and non-Muslim veneration of Sufi saints contested by other Muslims in India, a Muslim-minority society, which is home to one of the largest constellations of Sufism (van der Veer 1992). Increasingly, anthropologists challenged the divisive dichotomies of Sufi versus non-Sufi Muslims and began to focus on the interconnections between rural, urban, and transnational contexts of Sufism (Soares 2004, Werbner 2003).
In this book, I attempt to bring the Sufi tradition into conversation with anthropology as a dual apprentice. Shahab Ahmed’s framing of Islam as “hermeneutical engagement” (2016: 345–404) has helped me approach contemporary Sufi ontologies in this book as Islamic, even when non-Muslims practice Sufism. Amira Mittermaier (2011) engaged with the term “Sufi” in her consideration of “Sufism” as a historical tradition of Islam and by framing her key interlocutors as Sufi in contemporary Egypt. Her ethnography on (Sufi) dream practices in contemporary Egypt has brought “Western” anthropological theory and the Islamic tradition of thought together. In bringing classical and contemporary Sufi discourses together with anthropological theory, I have attempted to pursue a similar path. Esra Özyürek (2010, 2015) has situated the ambivalence of white Germans and converted Muslims toward immigrant and postmigrant Muslims in the spectrum of Islamophobia and Islamophilia. In this book, I follow the desire lines of Muslim and non-Muslim Sufis not in terms of conversion but in terms of their diverse engagements with Sufi practices and politics (chapters 2 and 4).
In the last few decades, Sufi actors, ethics, experiences, objects, sounds, movements, spaces, subjectivities, and practices across Muslim-majority regions have received considerable ethnographic attention. A wide range of studies explored distinctively localized (fakir) becoming, saintly affects, and place-making in queering religion (Kasmani 2012, 2017, 2022); postcolonial subjecthood and antinomian desire in Pakistan (Ewing [1997] 2006); ordinary ethics in Lebanon (Clarke 2014); feminine interior worlds and ethnographic listening in Senegal (Neff 2013); connection to the Elsewhere in Egypt (Mittermaier 2011); mystical experience in Syria (Pinto 2010); and the interpenetration of Shamanism and Sufism in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Indonesia, Iran, and Turkey (Zarcone and Hobart 2013; Sidky 1990).
In Muslim-minority regions with a significant historical and contemporary presence of Sufism (India), anthropologists have paid attention to ritual and spiritual healing (Basu 2014; Flueckiger 2006). Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu’s (1998) edited volume discussed ritual embodiment, embodied emotions, and sacred peripherality steeped in Sufi charisma and intersections with modernity, with case studies from South Asia, contributing to the debate about syncretism in Sufism. Sufism, they argue, is a “living, embodied, postcolonial reality” with diverse networks of “individual supplicants and devotional communities generated through voluntaristic loyalties which extend beyond local, regional, and even international boundaries” (1998, 3).
However, ethnographic attention to Muslim-minority European and North American Sufism (and healing) as sites of Sufi practice is a relatively new development (see the following section). Sufism in “the West” is an emerging field within the anthropology of Islam. The porous boundaries of the religious field in which Sufism is often examined, are “permeable and increasingly empirically defined” (Dilger and Hadolt 2015, 137). Samuli Schielke (2010, 2) urged paying attention to the contrast drawn between Islam and the secular, suggesting that “something more” must be going on, because “there is too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam.”31
What is that “something more” than Islam in the anthropology of Sufism (and healing)? How can we discuss an Islamic practice that is not only practiced by Muslims but also non-Muslims, by postmigrants of Color, multiethnic immigrants, and white Germans, beyond the trope of “cultural appropriation” alone?32 How do we explore a phenomenon that is not restricted to the religious but entangles alternative modes of history-making, healing, bodily and aesthetic performances, and politics? How can we think about the anthropology of Sufism in partial connection to the anthropology of Islam, but not restricted to the problems defined by the sub-field of inquiry?
Breathing Hearts retains the ontological insecurity of not accepting or offering a ready definition of what Sufism is. Instead of being a hindrance, this is a productive force that recognizes the highly diverse practices and politics of Sufism in Berlin. As a phenomenon, Sufism triggers many debates regarding location, practice, theory, and interpretation. Yet, there is a consensus that in much of its history, Sufism enjoyed a global presence. And, therefore, its reception needs to be localized in the German language and the urban landscape of Berlin.
From Sufism in Germany to Sufi-BerlinWer sich selbst und andre kennt,
Wird auch hier erkennen:
Orient und Okzident
Sind nicht mehr zu trennen.
Whoever knows him/herself and the other
Will also recognize here:
The East and the West
Can no longer be separated.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe33
It is difficult to locate an exact moment for the origin of popular German interest in Sufism.34 As an object of knowledge, Sufism had arrived in Berlin long before it became a part of urban practice. As early as the fifteenth century, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) praised Ottoman Sufis for devotional asceticism, comparing them to Catholic monks, who, in his view, were more interested in worldly power (Sedgwick 2017).35 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, generations of orientalists discussed Sufi literature in German-speaking texts (Tholuck 1821; Schleßmann 2003). It took until the early twentieth century for Sufism in Germany to be established as a tradition of practice (Klinkhammer 2005, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c).
In 1910, German followers established a little-known Bektashi36 network in Berlin (Schleßmann 2003). In 1925, Sufi Bewegung (Sufi Movement), the first German “Universal” Sufi network, was established as an association by the local murids (disciples/students) of Hazrat Inayat Khan, the founder of a distinctive form of Sufism in North America and Western Europe (Schleßmann 2003). Three different streams of the Inayat-Khan-inspired Sufi networks are currently active in Berlin: the International Sufi Order (ISO) (renamed Inayati Order (Inayatiyya) in 2016), the International Sufi Movement (ISM), and Sufi Ruhaniat International (SRI). I refer to them as the Inayati Order (Inayatiyya), Inayat-Khan-inspired Sufi Movement,37 and Sufi-Ruhaniat. I use the Inayati designation when discussing these networks in general and the practices common to all three streams, for example, the Inayati healing ritual (chapter 5).
In the late 1990s, there were about twenty-seven places of “Sufic devotion” in Berlin (Jonker 2006, 74). This number might be higher if we include the smaller, non-registered Sufi friend circles. Some networks aligned themselves exclusively with Sufi Islam, for example, the Haqqani-Naqshbandis, MKMT (Mashihat der Kubrevi-Mevlevi Tariqat), and Tariqa Burhanya (Falasch 2006). Others adhered to a more “universalist” ontology of Sufism beyond the regulatory practices of Islam. The Inayatis, the Sufi Tradition of Omar Ali-Shah, and Reshad Feild’s Chalice fall into this category, including most nomadic Sufis. In contrast, Tümata-Berlin focused on Sufism’s therapeutic dimension rather than the division of Islamic/universalist ontologies. Several Sufism-inspired networks were engaged in healing, aesthetic practices, and public performances.38
The first comprehensive review of contemporary Sufi networks in Germany ended with notes of caution (Schleßmann 2003). Ludwig Schleßmann criticized the labeling of Western/German formations of Sufism as “pseudo-Sufism” (Hoffman 1995, 319–23; Elwell-Sutton 1983) in contrast to “authentic” Sufism in Muslim-majority countries.39 He urged Sufi teachers in Germany to be careful about the “pathological cases” who might need medical treatment instead of Sufi teaching, while arguing that German “scientific medicine” should recognize that “in spiritual work lies a great potential for the healing of ‘soul-sickness’” (Schleßmann 2003, 190).
Schleßmann (2003) offered his dichotomous classification of Sufism in Germany as universal and traditional Sufi communities focusing on universalist and sharia-centered perspectives, respectively.40 This book, however, shows that these identities and practices cross over to include other identities and practices within the Sufi networks. In Berlin, Sufism is not only restricted to Islam but circulates beyond the confines of the Islamic tradition and religious practice, diffusing into the therapeutic fields, performance arts, and politics (Klinkhammer and Tolksdorf 2015; Selim 2015a, 2015b; Klinkhammer 2009a, 2009b). Most Sufis are presumed to have a “migration background” predominantly from Muslim-majority societies. But a growing number of Muslims and non-Muslims with super-diverse backgrounds belong to the constellation of Sufi practice. Although Sufism is framed as Islamic, not all Sufi networks associate themselves with a Muslim identity. The differentiation of Islam and Sufism has to do with the “balance of truth” (Ahmed 2016, 24) since Islam’s earliest days and its continued “inner epistemological struggles” (Parkin 2007, 54). In their local enactments in Germany, Sufism has followed its distinctive trajectory connecting Islamic and non-Islamic spaces.
Transethnic Sufism in Germany spanned from an Orientalist preoccupation with mysticism toward a more contemporary tradition-oriented authenticity (Klinkhammer 2009b). The Haqqani-Naqshbandi is one of the largest Sufi networks in Germany (Schleßmann 2003). In addition to its organizational history in Germany (Schleßmann 2003), sociologists and religious studies scholars studied conversion (Wohlrab-Sahr 1996, 1999) and group interaction of the male members (“born-Muslims” and “converts”) of this network in a German city called Mittelstadt (pseudonym), examining ritual action and sociality of the “Sufi-milieu” between 1996 and 1997 (Hüttermann 2002, 253). Jörg Hüttermann discussed how the transnational network navigated their milieu in the context of modernity and globalization.41 The transnationality of this German network was studied in terms of its connection with its counterparts in Syria, Lebanon, the United States, and France (1999–2003), conceived as the “Haqqani Universe” (Böttcher 2011, 26).42
Tümata Sufi rituals designed by Rahmi Oruç Güvenç were explored as an eclectic system of practices, as the result of “transfer processes” drawing ritual elements from diverse traditions: classical Sufi movements and music; Central Asian, and Central European folk music (Langer 2011, 11). The shift of ritual elements into another context in the case of Tümata was not only geographical (from Turkey to Germany) but covered spatial, religious, and social transfer processes (Langer 2011, 11). Tümata’s religious-therapeutic performance in a clinical setting of Heidelberg (Germany) has been studied to make a similar argument of the transfer process from the ritual to the clinical context (Langer 2015). Tümata’s repertoire was understood as an example of ritual dynamics that enable the adaptability of Sufi practices across rural Anatolia, urban Turkey, and Western European contexts (Langer 2011,2015).43
The Inayati Sufi networks received a lot of scholarly attention to their historical trajectory, eclectic practices, and syncretistic focus but mostly in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia.44 Zia Inayat-Khan (2006), a scholar-Sufi, examined the hybrid history of the Inayati networks in North America and Western Europe but detailed only the developments in Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Marcia Hermansen’s (1996, 2005, 2007) discussion of Universal Sufism placed it in the context of religious healing and female leadership, but her focus was entirely on the US context. In contrast, Celia Genn (2007, 2008) described the Inayati formation as an expansion of the Chishtiyya’s diaspora and discussed the role of Inayat Khan’s Indian heritage in shaping his transnational Sufism. In the German-speaking region, a notable exception is the ethnographic study of Inayati female visions and leadership in Austria (Kuehn and Pokorny 2019).45
To my knowledge, neither the Haqqani-Naqshbandi network in Berlin nor Tümata-Berlin had been studied ethnographically to track their enactments of Sufism.46 The contemporary Inayati networks in Berlin and Germany seem to have escaped systematic ethnographic attention as well. The Sufi networks that accept Sufism as historically derived from within the Islamic tradition but do not have an intrinsic relation to the shari’a-centered regulatory practices of Islam are often neglected or categorized as either “New Age” (Lassen 2009, 148) or “pseudo-Sufism” (Hoffman 1995, 319). Gerdien Jonker, for example, was dismissive of the real/virtual “hidden presence” of “neo-Sufic organizations” and “Universal Sufism” in Germany, considering them to be a “mixture of new age therapies, Shamanism, musical performances, and artistic endeavors” (2006, 71–72).
Only certain Sufi networks, especially those operating with prescriptive authority and in line with literalist and reformist enactments, seem worthy of academic attention. Perhaps this explains why the Haqqani-Naqshbandi led by Turkish-Germans, “born-Muslims” and “converts” received more scholarly attention as the representatives of Sufism in Germany, while the Inayati networks remained classified under the label of “religious trends since Enlightenment” (Rademacher 2003, 574), separated from the section on Sufism as “Islamic mysticism” (Schemeit 2003). Given the early presence of the Inayat-Khan-inspired Sufi movement in Berlin in 1925, I find this analytical and empirical gap surprising.
Anthropologists, historians, sociologists, religious and Islamic studies scholars have provided a rich, living archive of historical, organizational, and descriptive information about several Sufi networks in Germany. Their foci, however, remain exclusively actor-centric. Sufism is not articulated as an object of anthropological inquiry nor studied in a specific urban location through long-term ethnographic fieldwork. Sufi practices, when studied, are domained as essentially religious practices. Apart from summary descriptions of what Sufi networks do, detailed descriptions of practices and experience-near narratives are not foregrounded. The epistemological standpoints of these scholars are either a form of methodological atheism or agnosticism. Learning, as a methodology, was not considered to be an option. The connections between Sufism, healing, and alternative medicine have been rarely examined in Germany.47 None of the existing literature explicitly problematizes secular and religious suffering in Germany. Islamophobia makes occasional appearances (Özyürek 2015), but the persistence of anti-Muslim racism does not figure prominently in the scholarship of Sufism in Germany as the sociopolitical context in which all Sufi and Muslim actors and practices operate.
In contrast, Breathing Hearts combines ontological and existential approaches to explore Sufism (and healing) in the context of anti-Muslim racism. This book contributes to the global scholarship on Sufi healing that otherwise draws from Muslim-majority contexts. Making the hidden religious and secular suffering in German society visible and exploring the ontologies of Sufism, this book questions the commonplace definition of Sufism as Islamic mysticism to articulate Sufism as breathing, wayfaring practices across religion, medicine, and arts. In this regard, Breathing Hearts differs from the preceding works significantly: in terms of the object of ethnographic inquiry, the methodology of dual apprenticeship, and the theoretical foregrounding of a postsecular imagination of healing.
It was in the autumn of 2012. I had not begun my official fieldwork yet. I saw a poster hanging in Bergmannstraße (Kreuzberg) announcing an event, Weg des Herzens (Way of the Heart), offering Sufi music, poetry, and stories for a donation of five to ten euros. The event was to take place in a small room in another neighborhood of the same district.
On the announced date, I entered a brightly lit room.48 The leading musician, a Turkish-German man of Color, sat with a long reed-like wind instrument (ney). He wore a light brown felt hat, a loose white shirt, and long trousers. Around him sat several musicians, one with a tablā (paired percussion instrument commonly used in South Asian musical traditions) and an older man with an acoustic guitar. A white German woman with heavy make-up and glittering ornaments recited a few poems by Mevlana Rumi.49 A bearded man (Hafiz, a Turkish-German person of Color) wearing a green turban and a long-sleeved khirqah (traditional Sufi attire) read stories out loud from Attar’s Conversations of the Birds.50 Later, he and a white German woman (Claire) started to whirl. Claire wore a long white skirt, a long-sleeved shirt, and a white cap—emulating the Mevlevi attire. The leading musician joined the whirling while drumming and reciting Allah’s names. In the end, they broke out into a sweat and bowed down with hands crossed over their shoulders. The woman who had recited poems earlier walked to the audience, collecting donations on a metallic plate.
The Weg des Herzens concert marked the beginning of my urban expedition. In subsequent years, I met Hafiz and Claire time and again. They were crucial interlocutors in my early efforts to find Sufis in the city. I began to understand what the whirling and collective breathing were about, why certain sound instruments were used and not others, why specific clothes were worn, who these people were, and how and which stories were retold. I was an audience to numerous events with the “Sufi” label attached to them that invoked the metaphysical (breathing) heart as a key metaphor. Serendipity brought me to the way of the (breathing) heart. I walked along with its signposts in the city.
“From London to Moscow, Berlin is the spiritual center,” the Haqqani-Naqshbandi Sheikh Eşref Efendi described the city beyond its secularist imagination, “even if the city is not spiritual, some people in this city are spiritual, and their light is strong enough for Berlin” (Hildebrandt 2014, 00:02:02–00:02:18). Berlin used to be known as the “world capital of atheism” (Berger 2001, 195) more than two decades ago. By the time I arrived, Berlin had assumed a postsecular identity, marked by the growing religious/spiritual and therapeutic landscape that marks a “postsecular city” (Ley 2011). In 2011, the urban policymakers introduced the Long Night of Religions, marking a public space in the city for religious diversity, where Sufi Muslims and universalist Sufis participated from time to time.51
The postsecular frame articulates a palpable Zeitgeist (Gorski et al. 2012). It juxtaposes the religious, the secular, and the transition from both to something else. A postsecular society brings its focus to the renewed public presence of religion in previously secularized societies (Habermas 2001, 15).52 In a postsecular city, the boundary-making “lines and roles of religion and science, faith and reason, tradition and innovation are no longer rigidly enforced” (Beaumont and Baker 2011, 2). The “post” does not refer to a condition beyond secularity. It offers a subversion of the hegemonic master narrative underlying secularity, “occluding, or belittling, whole dimensions of possible religious life and experience” (Taylor 2007, 199). The term postsecular imagination, in addition, articulates the condition of retaining the “best features” of (state) secularism and “preserving the inspiring, generative, imaginative features of religious thought and practice, such as faith, awe, wonder, transcendence” (Ratti 2013, 7). Postsecular imagination questions received pieties, engaging with the possibility of thinking beyond the new orthodoxies of nationalism, secularism, and religion (2013, 7).
The secular is an epistemic category and secularism functions as a political doctrine (Asad 2003, 1). The history of the nation-state of Germany lays bare a fractured and unfinished formation of secularism (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012; Jonker 2000).53 As a secularist society, Germany understands religion to be one option among others and renders it contestable, while foregrounding Protestant Christianity in public life. While secularization refers to societies becoming less religious (e.g., due to modernity), secularism (in Germany and elsewhere) is an ideological positioning advocating for the loss, or ontological separation, of the religious from other spheres of life.
The postsecular framing also questions the secular bias in social analysis (El Amrani 2021). Religion, medicine, and modernity are not in a “zero-sum relationship” (Giordan and Pace 2012, 1). The postsecular frame accommodates “the de-territorialization of the sense of belonging” (2012, 1). The weakened ties to the religion of birth and inherited and acquired traditions shape identity. The “democratization of the sacred” empowers individuals and collectives to talk back to “institutions that have always codified and controlled it” (2012, 4–5). Two distinct trends exist in the ambivalent “postsecular condition” (Braidotti 2008, 10). First, the radicalization of many religions within the context of perpetual war and global neo-conservative politics. Second, and in contrast, life-affirming postsecular feminist theories challenge secularist (white) feminism to argue that religious/spiritual piety can convey/support ethical subjects in exercising forms of agency beyond a simplified binary of subordination and resistance (2008, 10; Mahmood 2005). It is in this second, life-affirming mobilization of the term that I situate my argument for postsecular Sufi practice and subjectivity in this book.
The creative borrowing and integration of practices from other traditions are well-known in the continuum of Sufi lifeworlds, as a form of “Sufi-philosophical amalgam” (Ahmed 2016, 31). However, the eclectic assemblage of diverse traditions in contemporary postsecular settings engenders new forms of aesthetic, therapeutic, and adult learning tools. In many Muslim-majority societies, the syncretic nature of Sufi practice often renders it vulnerable to the label of being non-Islamic (2016, 31). In postsecular Berlin, the juxtaposition of Sufi discourses, historically tied to Islamic lifeworlds, with the Judeo-Christian tradition and Buddhist teachings is prone to the typical labeling of “New Age Sufism”—as if eclectic Sufism is nothing but a mish-mash of multiple techniques without inherent logic (Selim 2020a). Having spent countless hours and more than half a decade with the Inayati Sufis in Germany, I argue that the logic of unlikely juxtapositions that Sufi networks make is situated within the historical tradition of eclectic Sufism, on the one hand, and its postsecular politics of “blurred boundaries” on the other.
Anthropologists are skeptical of rigid domaining practices (Lambek 2013). The intertwining of the religious and medical spheres is oft captured by the idiom of healing (Parkin 2007, 2014). Anthropology of Sufism and healing in Berlin and connected sites cut across the lines of conventional separation and domaining. The Sufi networks in Berlin are registered as religious associations, but they also operate as informal social networks of healing. In practice, they move from the religious (Haqqani-Naqshbandis) to the therapeutic field of alternative healing (Inayatis, Tümata-Berlin, nomadic Sufis), to the performance arts (Tümata-Berlin and nomadic Sufis) and yet inhabit the religious/spiritual landscape of Berlin at the same time.
Breathing Hearts focuses on the postsecular as a heuristic field where the religious and the secular co-exist,54 where the medical and the religious/spiritual, and performing arts meet. In these conflating real (and virtual) fields, the unseen neighbors mark their existence, and the ethnographer makes their “hidden presence” (Jonker 2006, 71) in Germany known.
What does it mean to “breathe well” as a Sufi in a place where public expressions of religion are constrained, and Islam is increasingly marginalized? How is Sufi healing practiced and experienced in Berlin? This chapter raised these questions to place Sufi healing practices in the context of anti-Muslim racism in Germany. The global/local history of Sufism has addressed the debates around its ontologies. Situating this work in the anthropology of Sufi practice, I hope to have laid the foundation to argue how Sufi practices challenge taken-for-granted ontologies of medicine, religion, and aesthetic performance with a postsecular imagination of healing.
Chapter 1, “The Unseen Neighbors and a Dual Apprentice: Silsila, or Drawing the Lines of Transmitting Breath,” describes the ethnographic entry into selective Sufi spaces in Berlin and offers early impressions of these unseen neighbors. The contemporary “intention” (or invocation) of Sufis reconfigures the line of transmitting breath in the presence of Sufi teachers and students. In Sufi parlance, such lines (or chains) of transmission are known as silsila, transgressing time, place, and personal biographies, connecting Sufism in the here and now to the Elsewhere and somewhere else. The chapter also reflects on how affective pedagogy and dual apprenticeship (in Sufism and anthropology) as a method provide agile conditions for doing ethnography, helping ethnographers learn how to learn.
Chapter 2, “‘Why Do I Suffer and What Should I Do?’: The Desire Lines of Sufi Breathing-Becoming,” details selective narratives of several Sufi women articulating postsecular imaginations of healing in their life transitions: from Turkish secularism to Sufi Islam, from German state-enforced atheism to Inayati Sufism, and from a Christian upbringing to nomadic Sufi practice. These articulations are multidirectional desire lines through which Sufi interlocutors found tentative answers to their existential quests. Through Sufi breath, sound, and movement, the recovery from the problems of living, and the pursuit of a nomadic longing. The desire lines of their existential quests remain irreducible to consumerism or predatory (cultural) appropriation.
Chapter 3, “Techniques of Transformation: Subtle-Material Bodies in Dhikr and Other (Breathing) Practices,” elaborates on the techniques of Sufi body prayers and healing practices centered around breath, sound, and movement. The everyday secular, materialist bodies are transfigured into subtle/material bodies, even if momentarily, through the techniques of whirling, breathing, and energizing. The possibilities for imagining and inhabiting the human body expand through the practice of Sufi techniques of and discourses about the transformation of a self-centered ego (nafs), activating the subtle centers (lataif) and the metaphysical (breathing) heart (qalb) in the novice’s journey through the anticipated stages/stations (maqamat), guided by an authorized teacher.
Chapter 4, “‘There Must Be Something Else’: The In-between World of Healing Secular and Religious Suffering,” articulates the existential quests of key interlocutors and the postmigrant longing of the ethnographer as postsecular subjects to heal secular and religious suffering. Postsecular Sufi subjects in Berlin inhabit an in-between world (Zwischenwelt), a confluent configuration of the religious with the therapeutic and aesthetic fields to “breathe well” in seeking “something else.” Healing secular and religious suffering does not necessarily mean an epistemic jump to the obliteration of social suffering. Sufi healing practices do not mark the end of social suffering but equip a Sufi breather-wayfarer with the existential resources to bear such modes of everyday suffering.
Chapter 5, “Participation in the Real: The Healing Power of Breath, Words, and Things,” illustrates Sufi practices as participatory performances of healing: be it a weekly healing meditation, a healing ritual (Heilritual), a healing companionship in conversation (sohbet), a music-and-movement therapy session, or resonating with the healing sounds of the ninety-nine names of the Real. The healing dimension cannot be separated from the rest of Sufi practice. The healing power of Sufi practices arises from the material and subtle worlds of ritual breaths, words, sounds, and enlightened things. These participatory performances of healing reflect the agile ontologies of Sufism navigating the otherwise bounded fields of religion, medicine, and performing arts, as barzakhs or things-in-between.
Chapter 6, “‘The Right-Wing Attacks Our Mosques and Our Muslim Brothers Do Not Consider Us to Be Real Muslims’: The (Anti-)Politics of Breathing Hearts,” argues that the popular non-political image of Sufism is illusory. The clash of ontologies in media debates and anti-political politics is exemplified in Sufi engagements with social responsibility. Reflections on media debates and conversations with Sufi interlocutors demonstrate the divisive ontological politics of contemporary Sufism. Focusing on the importance of affective pedagogy and calm reflection in Sufi practice and public anthropology, a collaborative event illustrates how ethnographic documentation evolved into a field of engagement in the context of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 and growing anti-Muslim racism. The chapter argues how life-affirming action is made possible by expanding the affective politics beyond secularism, engaging both Sufism and anthropology.
“Conclusion: Lessons from the Breathing, Wayfaring Hearts” summarizes the key arguments of this book. I discuss the limitations of this work and map a few unchartered terrains to consider future lines of empirical and theoretical inquiry. The book concludes with an epilogue.
1. In this book, “woman” and “man” stand for “cis woman” and “cis man” respectively. I did not ask for specific information regarding the gender identity and sexual orientation of my interlocutors, other than what they explicitly shared with me. Racialized identities are framed as “white,” “of Color,” and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) unless the interlocutors identify themselves otherwise.
2. Since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, the number of attacks on mosques in Germany has increased (Becker 2017).
3. Abu Bakr was born in a German Protestant family. He spent years exploring Berlin’s “spiritual scene” before joining the Haqqani-Naqshbandi network. As a white man, he was not perceived as “Muslim” in Germany, unless he carried Islamic objects or wore a prayer cap.
4. In 2015, the arrival of refugee newcomers, primarily from Muslim-majority Syria and the Middle East, but also from Central Europe and Africa, reached a peak (BAMF 2015). While the so-called refugee crisis was created by the rigid, discriminating German laws and administration, which were unable to provide support for the refugee newcomers, the right-wing and conservative forces renewed their attacks on Muslims by accusing them for their failure to integrate into “German culture” and blamed refugee Muslims for the repeated ISIS-inspired attacks in Western Europe (2015–2017).
5. On 19 February 2020, in Hanau, a small town near Frankfurt, a white German right-wing extremist (Tobias R.) attacked two shisha bars and killed nine people of Color (Ferhat Unvar, Hamza Kurtović, Said Nesar Hashemi, Vili Viorel Păn, Mercedes Kierpacz, Kaloyan Velkov, Fatih Saraçoğu, Sedat Gürbüz, and Gökhan Gültekin). Tobias R. had been posting his racist conspiracy theories with threats of attacks against “nonwhites” and singled out Islam to be a threat to Germany. Yet the German intelligence service did not consider him to be a potential danger for postmigrant communities of Color (DPA 2022; Bax 2021; Baș, 2020; Initiative 19. Februar Hanau 2020). The terror attack in Hanau is a turning point in the discussion of anti-Muslim racism in Germany. The white-majority German public discourse had systematically denied or relativized anti-Muslim racism in foregrounding radical Islamism as the only form of Islam (Keskinkilic 2019). After the Hanau terror attack, for the first time, the (former) German Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly denounced the “poison” of racism and hatred against racialized Muslims in Germany (Connolly and Oltermann 2020). On the first anniversary of the Hanau attack, Berlin established an expert commission against anti-Muslim racism for the first time in Germany (Betschka 2021; Breitensträter 2021).
6. “Inayati” is a working frame to refer to all Sufi networks inspired by the Universal Sufism of Hazrat Inayat Khan.
7. Türk Müziğni Araştırma ve Tanıtma Grub, (Turkish)/Traditional Turkish Music Research and Promotion Society, was established in 1976 in Istanbul, Turkey. Tümata-Berlin refers to the network active in Berlin since 2000.
8. Khidr, the Sufi teacher mentioned in the Preface, considered himself a nomadic Sufi, although he had received lessons from three different Sufi teachers belonging to Naqshbandi, Nimatullahi, and Chishti networks (chapter 1).
9. See Amir-Moazami (2022).
10. The term postmigrant/postmigrantisch is a politicized self-definition inspired by generations of artists, activists, and scholars who consider themselves to be integral to Germany, and hence no longer “foreigners” or “migrants” in a society fundamentally shaped and transformed by migration (Foroutan 2016; Langhoff 2011).
11. I heard the term “Döner murders” (Dönermorde) within a few days after my arrival (May 2012). Between 2000 and 2007, an underground neo-Nazi group Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU), killed Turkish, Kurdish, and Greek “migrants” and a policewoman. The German police and the secret service initially argued that the murders were linked to organized criminals (with “migrant background”). The NSU link became clear after two NSU members died and the third surrendered to the police in 2011. In November 2012, citizen protests took place across Germany criticizing the secret service and the police for institutionalized racism (DPA 2012).
12. In German, the common expression was Der Weg des Herzens (The Way of the Heart) or Der Herzensweg der Sufis (The Heart-Way of the Sufis) (Al Habib 2009). The Way of the Heart (Scorer 2010) is the title of a documentary film that features Hazrat Inayat Khan. The Sufi networks in Berlin often used the label “way of the heart” for Sufism. The term is not specific to Sufism. It has been applied to other traditions, for example, the practices of early Christianity and its contemporary versions (Nouwen [1981] 2009). Seyyed Hossain Nasr discussed the Sufi prayer or invocation (dhikr) as a “prayer of the heart” (2004, 41). See James Cutsinger (2004) for the comparative theologies and prayers of the heart across diverse traditions.
13. The hermeneutics of affective pedagogy (what is there to learn along desire lines?) attempts to move beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion (what is there to criticize?) and grounded in a critical understanding of faith (what is there to believe in?) (Ricoeur 1970, 35). The term “hermeneutics of suspicion” is derived from Hans-Georg Gadamer (1984, 313) drawing from Paul Ricoeur’s framing of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the “masters of suspicion” (1970, 35). I discuss the hermeneutics of pedagogy in taking issue with the above-mentioned hermeneutics, adapted from Peter Sotirou’s (1993, 365) articulation of “hermeneutic pedagogy” (chapter 1). I have borrowed the term “affective pedagogy” from Anna Hickey-Moody’s (2013, 92) discussion of aesthetic and affective forces produced by artwork. This framing is helpful because the affecting force and pedagogic acts of the teachers and their reception by the learners were crucial in my research settings (Selim 2020a).
14. An intentional community is “consciously formed with a specific purpose in mind” (S. Brown 2002, 3). With a shared vision of life, such communities grow out of religious/spiritual, political, economic, and artistic initiatives.
15. Jörg Stolz (2006) and Enzo Pace (2006) engaged with the Weberian concept of salvation goods (Heilsgut) to discuss the religious markets both in terms of exchange and gift economy.
16. Personal communication with Saboura Naqshband on 6 February 2023. The framing of super-diversity rethinks migration in shifting from an “ethnic lens” to intersecting categories of differences. Super-diversity points to the dynamic interplay of shifting demographics and “multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated, and legally stratified immigrants” (Vertovec 2007, 1024).
17. See Dilger and Schnepf (2020); Dilger, Peterson, and Werkstatt Ethnologie (2018); Grübel and Rademacher (2003); Jütte (1996).
18. “If we are concerned with the coming into being [ontology] of possibilities, what is that if not historical?” (Hacking 2002, 583). Following Ian Hacking (2002), I use the term historical ontology as the temporalized coming into being of possibilities. See Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) for details about the more recent ontological turn in anthropology.
19. Tholuck’s dissertation (1821) is the first comprehensive academic text on the phenomenon of Sufism in a major European language (Schimmel [1985] 1995, 24). Bernhard probably referred to this when he implied that “Sufism” was invented in Berlin.
20. See Sharify-Funk et al. (2018); Dickson and Sharify-Funk (2017); Ahmed (2008); Heck (2007a); Ernst (1997); Schimmel ([1985] 1995); and Lings (1975).
21. Taṣawwuf is the “phenomenon of mysticism within Islam” (Massington et al. 2012). Hence, a “mystic” in the Islamic tradition is to be called ṣūfi or mutaṣawwif (2012). However, there is no common consensus regarding the etymology.
22. Paul Heck questioned the framing of Sufism as Islamic mysticism: “[I]s it mysticism? What is its relation to Islam?” (2007a, 148), but in response, he simply replaced “mysticism” with the word “spirituality,” defining Sufism as “the spirituality of Islam” (2007a, 148).
23. Sharīʿa (lit. the point of entry to a water-hole or the area around it) refers to the rules and regulations that govern the lives of Muslims in terms of Islamic jurisprudence (Bearman et al. 2012a). Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and the Hanbali are four major schools in Sunni Islam that offer interpretations and influence the execution of the Islamic law based on Qur’an and sunnah (Prophetic tradition) intersecting with the secular law of the nation-states (J. Brown 2014).
24. See Nanda and Talib (1992) for a discussion on the teacher-student (Piri-Murid) relationship in Sufi discourse.
25. In colonial Bengal, the Sufi conceptual vocabulary not only informed the everyday Muslim but was also ingrained in the syncretistic self-expressions of the Bāul (Openshaw 2018).
26. “The West” refers to the imaginary of a vast geographical region with enormous internal differences in history and the contemporary, but includes mostly Judeo-Christian and secularized Western Europe and North America with their allies and wealthy nation-states (e.g., Australia) that are implicated as major forces deploying colonialism and advanced capitalism, (neo-) imperialism, and orientalism on the rest of the world (Said [1978] 1995; Nader 2015). The imagined “East” (the Orient) (mostly Islamic in Said’s work) is invoked in academic and popular orientalist discourses as the other of the imagined “West” (the Occident) where Islam and Sufism are minority traditions.
27. This fact is evident from the nineteenth-century texts by the British orientalists, William Jones (1807), J. Malcolm (1815), J. W. Graham (1819), and E. H. Palmer (1867) (Khalil and Sheikh 2014; Ernst 2003).
28. See Khalil and Sheikh (2014, 2016), Sijbrand (2013), Knysh (2005), and Küçük (2008).
29. See Sharify-Funk et al. (2018), Milani (2018), Ridgeon (2015a), Chittick (2015), Taji-Farouki (2009), Ernst (2003).
30. For a selection of these works, see Xavier (2023), Sharify-Funk et al. (2018), Sedgwick (2017), Geaves (2015), Weismann (2015), Khalil and Sheikh (2014), Geaves, Dressler, and Klinkhammer (2009), Raudvere and Sternberg (2009), Klinkhammer (2009a, 2009b), Rawlinson (2009), Küçük (2008), Malik and Hinnells (2006), Westerlund (2004), Hermansen (2000, 2004), and Werbner (2003).
31. Drawing on the controversy around the Danish caricature in Egypt and his observations in the Netherlands, Samuli Schielke (2010) argued that the populist sections of the “Muslim” Egyptians and “secular” Dutch people reacted similarly, mobilizing populist sentiments, and something other than Islamic tradition was at play in those instances.
32. Cultural appropriation is a term rarely discussed in German anthropology (for notable exceptions, see H. Hahn 2011, 2012). But the term is popular among antiracist intellectuals and activist circles in Berlin as a powerful critique of the widespread predatory “white culture” in Germany that takes or adopts traditional practices from marginalized social groups or societies without any reflection or acknowledgment (Sow 2011). Integral to cultural appropriation is this asymmetry of power relations between societies or social groups within a society (Arya 2021). In my work, cultural appropriation implies the phenomenon of majority/dominant white actors taking or adopting Sufi practices from the marginalized Islamic tradition and racialized Muslim societies and communities, without adequately reflecting on historical contexts and sociopolitical implications of the power asymmetries involved (Chapters 2, 4, and 6).
33. This is a frequently cited poem from the collection of Goethe’s poetic imagination of the “East” or “Orient” (Gundert, Schimmel, and Schubring 1952, 5). Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) was frequently cited in Sufi-Berlin. Andrea (Inayati Sufi-Ruhaniat) considered him to be a Sufi Muslim, a widespread misconception (Mommsen 2001, 2014). Esra Özyürek (2015, 25) showed how white German “converts” to Islam reimagine the “lost ideals of the German Enlightenment” embodied in the figure of Goethe being Muslim.
34. The first German translation of the Farsi-speaking Sufi poet Sa’dī’s Gulistān (Rose garden) in 1654 had a significant impact on the German understanding of the Islamic world, impressing the classical writers of the German Enlightenment, such as Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and Goethe (Schimmel 2010). See also Klinkhammer (2009a, 2009b) and Schleßmann (2003), who detailed the history of German interest in Sufism.
35. See Sedgwick (2017) for a detailed history of such contacts in terms of pre-modern intercultural transfers and the subsequent establishment of “Western Sufism” between 1910 and 1933, tracking its subsequent development till 1968.
36. Bektaşiyye/Bektāshiyya is a Sufi network established by Balım Sultan in fifteenth-century (Turkish) Anatolia and named after the thirteenth-century figure Hacı Bektaş Veli (d. 1270) emerging from several antinomian trends (Zarcone 2004). See Robert Langer (2011) for a discussion of the Bektashi and Alevism in Turkish and German contexts. In addition to Mevlana Rumi’s work, Tümata-Berlin regularly performed songs drawn from the Bektashi repertoire. For example, Yūnus Emre, a fourteenth-century figure whose poems in old Anatolian Turkish are immensely popular in Turkey (Ambros 2012).
37. Petra Schildbach, the German representative of the Sufi-Movement (Sufi-Bewegung), expressed a strong reservation against the term “Inayati,” preferring the framing, “Inayat-Khan-inspired” (conversation with the author, 7 March 2018). Since the term Inayati in this book is a working label and does not refer to the Inayati Order (Inayatiyya) only, I stay with the term, but to accommodate her reservations, I frame the organization she represents, the Sufi-Movement, as “Inayat-Khan-inspired” instead of Inayati-Movement.
38. During my fieldwork, I have also briefly engaged with other smaller groups: the Institute of Sufi Research, Flaming Heart Meditation, the Rumi Project, and Whirling Berlin (renamed Sufi Laboratorium).
39. Such an assumption often arises from the notion that decoupling Sufism from the “ritual formalism of normative Islam” inevitably domesticates Sufism to fit the “ethos of . . . individualism, liberalism, and neoliberal privatization” (Lipton 2011, 427–28).
40. Scholars have also classified Sufism in Western Europe into diasporic, conversion, and New-Age Sufism, based on generational changes in Sufi communities and translocations of Sufi orders (Lassen 2009a, 148).
41. Tayfun Atay’s (2012) ethnography in a Haqqani-Naqshbandi community in London draws from the community’s perspectives on (secular) modernity, millenarian themes, and political views on Turkey, Iran, and Saudia Arabia. Sufism in European countries and North America have also been explored in terms of “emulation and embodiment,” enacting the “connections between this world and Elsewhere” among the Naqshbandis in Denmark (Rytter 2016, 229). Ron Geaves (2009) described the strategies of continuity and local transformations of the Naqshbandi in Britain regarding the relationship between the Sufi shrines and educational seminaries, while Simon Stjernholm (2009, 2015) focused on translocal practices of the network in Britain and Cyprus.
42. The Haqqani-Naqshbandi network members have published several texts and translated primary texts into German. See Sheikh Eşref Efendi (2004, 2011) and Sheikh Nāẓim (2004). The Haqqani-Naqshbandi was the only Sufi network depicted in a recent documentary about Berlin’s spiritual landscape, Spirit Berlin (Hildebrandt 2014).
43. Tümata members have published texts and became involved in audiovisual productions. For example, see Güvenç (2014), Güvenç and Güvenç (2009), Bachmaier-Ekşi (2004, 2007), and Bergmann (2006).
44. For studies of Inayati Universal Sufism in the United States, see Sharify-Funk et al. (2018); Dickson (2015), and Hermansen (2000, 2004); in the United Kingdom, see Geaves and Gabriel (2014), R. Jackson (2014), and Geaves (2012); and in Australia, see Genn (2007, 2008).
45. Inayati network members have translated numerous English texts into German and a few audiovisual productions. See Douglas-Klotz ([1990] 2007), W. Meyer et al. (2011), and Iradah (1996) for illustrative examples.
46. Gritt Klinkhammer studied the histories of specific Sufi networks in-depth, especially the Mevlevis (2009c) in Brandenburg and Tariqa Burhaniya (2005) in Berlin and Haus Schnede of Salzhausen. In addition to Schleßmann (2003), Klinkhammer (2009a) has provided brief histories of Inayati, Haqqani-Naqshbandi, and Tümata networks in Germany.
47. For notable exceptions, see Langer (2015), Klinkhammer and Tolksdorf (2015), and Klinkhammer (2015, 2009b).
48. Fieldnote 28 October 2012.
49. Djalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (ca. 1207–1273) was born in Balkh, present-day Afghanistan, and died in Konya, present-day Turkey, where the Mawlawaiyya/Mevleviyya dervish order was later founded by his son (Ritter and Bausani 2012). The order was named after the title he was given, Mawlānā/Mevlânâ (our Master). The word Rūmī referred to him as an inhabitant of Rûm (Roman Anatolia). This historical Sufi figure is frequently cited as “Mevlana Rumi” in Sufi-Berlin and connected sites. Rumi was declared a best-selling poet in the United States in 1997 but remains popular worldwide. A contemporary biographer calls this global popularity “Rumi-Mania” (Lewis [2000] 2014, 1).
50. Farīd Al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār (ca. 1119–1239) was a Farsi-speaking poet who wrote Manṭiḳ al-ṭayr (Maḳāmāt al-ṭuyūr), known in popular translations as The Conference of the Birds or Conversations of the Birds (German. Vogelgespräche) (Schimmel 1999). It is a parable of the recurring Sufi themes, such as fanā or annihilation of the self-centered self (Ritter 2012). Attar is quite popular among the Haqqani-Naqshbandis. Feride Gençaslan, a leading figure in the network in Berlin read Attar’s stories during the 14th Berlin International Literature Festival (10 September 2014).
51. Berlin’s postsecular identity is enacted in the recent tradition of celebrating the Long Night of Religions (Lange Nacht der Religionen) where Haqqani-Naqshbandi Sufi-Center Berlin and Inayat-Khan-inspired Sufi-Movement took part. The Long Night of Religions emerged along with other initiatives such as the Berlin Dialogue of Religions and Berlin Forum of Religions, urban projects supported by the city council since 2011 (Kreutziger-Herr et al. 2015, 13).
52. See Josef Bengston’s (2015) genealogy of postsecular thought in the history and philosophy of Western modernity. For a discussion of global secularism and the revival of religions, see Rectenwald, Almeida, and Levine (2015).
53. Germany is known for its secularization as well as its postsecular religious landscape, as a “Republic of Faith” (Glaubensrepublik) (Drobinsky and Keller 2011). The Protestant (Lutheran) Church enjoys a long history of state privileges since its interests are intertwined with that of the nation-state of Germany (Jonker 2000, 312). Jonker described the fractured landscape of German secularization to track a crucial moment of its establishment. In 1919, the church provision policy in the German (Weimar Republic) constitution made a distinction for the first time between the tasks of the nation-state and those entitled to the church (2000, 313). The status of the German “corporation of public law” (Körperschaftsstatus) privileges the Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox Churches and the Jewish communities by granting them the rights to raise taxes, receive financial endowments, provide “pastoral care” in public institutions, obtain state-supported social welfare, and provide religious instructions in state schools (2000, 313). Islamic institutions, however, are barred from these rights by most regional governments in Germany (2000, 313; Özyürek 2015, 8). Berlin Islamic Federation, after two decades of legal challenges, was granted the right to provide religious instructions in public schools upon parental demands (Yükleyen 2012, 161). Klaus Obermayer has described the fractured secularization of Germany as an “independence [of the nation-state, but] with Christian overtones” (1977, 10) (Jonker 2000, 312).
54. Everyday Islamic (or other religious) practices are embedded in and co-constituted by “secular modes of living,” however selectively (Liebelt and Werbner 2018, 4).