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Philosophizing Tasawwuf: The Postmodern Cult of Sufism

Abstract

The paper is a critical study of some relatively recent Western approaches to tasawwuf. These so-called post-structuralist approaches, the deconstructionist being chief among them, seem to extend the earlier orientalist attempts, as that of Henry Corbin, Reynolds Nicholson or Pervez Morevidge, of philosophizing tasawwuf, thus turning it into one among various other ‗isms‘ conveniently available to the Western critical understanding. Reviewing Ian Almond‘s Deconstruction and Sufism and The New Orientalists, the paper argues that in their preoccupation with tracing apparent affinities between the deconstructive/ post-structuralist and the Sufi positions on the socalled ‗metaphysics of presence‘, what such studies often overlook is the epistemological difference between these two discourses. It remains a matter of some detailed discussion, which the paper does propose to attempt, to see that these recent critical approaches in the West, despite their avowed project of announcing the demise of philosophy, still somehow remain essentially complicit with the tradition of thought they look to dismantle.

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