Sufism

Sufism
The thickest veils between man and Allah are the wisdom of the wise, the worship of the religious, and the piety of the pious."
Bayazid Bistami James Fadiman & Robert Frager Essential Sufism (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1997), p. 111 ...

Sufism
Islamic mysticism that began to develop in the 7th century, the first century of Islam.

Sufism, which is a branch of Islam, teaches the personal and mystical worship, and union with Allah or God. It was formulated in opposition to the formal, legalistic Islamic theology of the ninth century AD.

Sufism remained for a long time incomprehensible to European thought. From the point of view of Christian theology and Christian morality the mixing up of sensuousness and religious ecstacy is incomprehensible, ...

To Suhrawardi, Sufism also owed the introduction of the 'alam al-mithal, the "world of imagination" (Rahman 1964).

45-83: Andrew Rawlinson: A History of Western Sufism
Renaissance: A Monthly Islamic Journal
Wikipedia: The Islamic Calendar
Islamic Awareness
Ibn al-'Arabi - the Sufi mystic: A History of pantheism/scientific pantheism by Paul Harrison ...

Sufism represents the ascetic system of Islamic mysticism that stresses contemplation as a vehicle to ecstatic union with the Divine. Roger Bacon (1214-1292) was a Franciscan monk (5).

But I would be remiss if I did not include in this survey two other potential sources of the journey literature: Sufism and the Grail legends.

Theosophy is this direct knowledge of God; the search after this is the Mysticism, or Esotericism, common to all religions, thrown by Theosophy into a scientific form, as in Hinduism, Buddhism, Roman Catholic Christianity, and Sufism.

Orthodox forms of mysticism include the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, the Spiritual Guide of Miguel De Molinos (Christian), the classical (Judaism), Sufism (Islam), , Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, etc.

See also: World, Spirit, Spiritual, Ritual, Christ