Quick Answer
The book that will show you how much of the Sufism on English shelves has had the Islam taken out of it. Schimmel read every relevant language, spent a career in the primary sources, and argues throughout that Sufism is the interior dimension of a specific religion rather than a universal spirituality that happens to use Arabic words. It is dense to the point of exhausting, it is the standard survey fifty years on, and there is nothing else with this reach.
Key Takeaways
- Sufism is Islam, not an escape from it, and the whole book is that argument.
- The linguistic range is the achievement. Nobody since has covered this many traditions from the sources.
- The poetry is treated as integral, which most surveys fail to do.
- It is genuinely exhausting: dense, allusive, and not designed to be read straight through.
- Read it against the popular market to see exactly what has been removed there.
🕑 14 min read
What This Book Is
Mystical Dimensions of Islam was published in 1975 and remains the standard scholarly survey of Sufism in English.
It covers the origins and early ascetics, the emergence of the classical vocabulary, the great figures of the ninth and tenth centuries, the systematisation of the tradition, the rise of the organised brotherhoods, the theosophical developments after Ibn Arabi, the poetry in several languages, and the later history in Persia, Turkey and the Indian subcontinent.
It is roughly five hundred pages, densely footnoted, and it moves fast. Schimmel assumes you will keep up.
On reading it: this is a reference work that happens to be readable, not a narrative. Most people should use the chapter structure to read the sections they need rather than attempting it front to back, which defeats a great many first-time readers.
Who Annemarie Schimmel Was
Born in Erfurt in 1922, Schimmel completed a doctorate in Islamic studies at nineteen and a second doctorate in the history of religions later. She held a chair in Turkey in the 1950s, then taught at Harvard from 1967 for twenty-five years.
Her linguistic range was the foundation of everything. She worked in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi, alongside the European scholarly languages, which meant she could read the primary literature of every region she covered rather than relying on translations and secondary accounts.
That is why this book has no successor. A comparable survey would require a scholar with the same range, and the profession no longer produces them.
She was also a public figure, honoured widely in Muslim countries, and she attracted controversy in Germany late in her life over remarks about the Rushdie affair. Readers should know the dispute exists; it does not bear on the scholarship in this book.
The Argument About Origins
The book's central contention is a historical one and it was contested when she made it.
Earlier Western scholarship had frequently explained Sufism as something imported: Christian monasticism, Neoplatonism, Indian influence, Persian survivals. The implication, sometimes explicit, was that Islam was too legalistic and too austere to have produced a mystical tradition of its own, so the mysticism must have come from outside.
Schimmel's position is that this is wrong and that the sources do not support it. The vocabulary is Quranic. The practices develop from Quranic recitation, from the ritual prayer, from the remembrance of the divine names. The model of the spiritual life is built on the Prophet's night journey and on his practice.
Contact with other traditions occurred and shaped later developments. The root is internal.
This matters beyond the historical question, because it determines whether Sufism can be detached from Islam and repackaged. Schimmel's answer, sustained over five hundred pages of evidence, is that it cannot.
The Ascetic Beginning
The earliest phase she describes is not the one most readers expect.
The first figures are ascetics: renunciants, fearful of judgement, weeping over their sins, sleeping little, eating less, and distinguished by a severity that has nothing of the wine-and-roses imagery associated with later Sufi poetry.
The word Sufi itself, on the most widely accepted etymology she reports, derives from the coarse wool such figures wore.
Their motivating emotion is fear, and their concern is the accounting to come. Schimmel is right to insist on this, because the popular presentation of Sufism as ecstatic love from the beginning is simply not what the early sources contain.
The Turn to Love
The shift from fear to love is the tradition's decisive early development and Schimmel locates it precisely.
Rabia al-Adawiyya, an eighth-century woman of Basra, is the figure associated with it. The story attached to her, of walking with fire to burn paradise and water to quench hell so that God might be worshipped for God's own sake rather than out of hope or fear, is almost certainly later legend and it states the position exactly.
From there the vocabulary of love enters and eventually dominates. The relationship is reconceived from that of a fearful servant to that of a lover, and the entire later poetic tradition follows from this move.
Schimmel is careful about what it does and does not mean. The love language is not a softening of the discipline; the ascetic practice continues. What changes is its motive.
Stations and States
The technical framework, which she sets out clearly and which readers of Sufi material need.
The path is described as a sequence of stations: repentance, abstinence, renunciation, poverty, patience, trust, contentment. These are attained by sustained effort and, once attained, are held.
Alongside them are states: conditions that arrive unbidden and depart, not produced by the practitioner. Contraction and expansion, intimacy and awe, longing and ecstasy.
The distinction is doing real work. Stations are your responsibility; states are not, and a practitioner who mistakes a state for an attainment, or who chases states, has misunderstood the structure.
Schimmel notes that the classical authorities disagree about the order and number of stations, and she resists tidying this, which is characteristic and correct.
One further theme runs through the book and deserves separating out, because it explains a good deal about how Sufism was practised rather than described.
Schimmel devotes sustained attention to dhikr, the remembrance of God through repetition of the divine names or of short formulae, and argues that it is the central Sufi practice rather than one among many. Everything else, the poetry, the theory of stations, the orders themselves, is arranged around it.
She distinguishes the forms carefully. There is silent remembrance, performed inwardly and associated particularly with the Naqshbandi order, which regarded audible practice as inferior. There is vocal remembrance, performed aloud, sometimes in a group, sometimes with breathing patterns and bodily movement, which other orders regarded as more effective precisely because it engages the whole person.
The theory behind it is simple and demanding. Repetition of a name is held to work on the practitioner over years, not by producing states but by gradually displacing what ordinarily occupies attention. The aim is that the remembrance continue without effort, running underneath ordinary activity, until the practitioner is no longer performing it.
Schimmel notes that the orders guarded their specific formulae and their instructions, that a practitioner received them from a teacher rather than selecting them, and that this transmission is what a lineage actually consisted of. That detail is routinely omitted in popular presentations, which reproduce the phrases and drop the requirement.
Al-Hallaj
The figure she treats at greatest length and the one around whom the book's central tension turns.
Al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922, after long imprisonment, in circumstances that were as much political as theological. He is remembered above all for an utterance rendered in English as I am the Truth, the Truth being one of the divine names.
The claim, taken at face value, is blasphemous in Islam, where the absolute distinction between creator and creature is the foundation of everything.
The Sufi defence, which Schimmel presents fully, is that al-Hallaj was not claiming divinity but reporting a condition in which the self had been so annihilated that nothing remained to speak but the divine, and that what was heard as a claim was the absence of anyone left to make one.
Later Sufis divided. Some regarded him as a martyr and the supreme example. Others held that the fault was not in the experience but in the disclosure, that such states are real and must not be spoken of publicly, and that his execution was a consequence of indiscretion rather than of error.
Schimmel traces his enormous afterlife in the poetry, where he becomes the emblem of the lover destroyed by love.
The tension al-Hallaj embodies is not peculiar to Islam and it recurs wherever a tradition holds both that God is absolutely other and that union is possible. Christianity had the same problem with its own mystics and handled it with the same mixture of veneration and prosecution. What is worth noticing is the sophistication of the Sufi resolution: not that the experience was false, and not that the doctrine was wrong, but that the two operate at different levels and that the error was in speaking across them. Whether that is a genuine solution or a way of avoiding the question is a matter on which the tradition itself never fully agreed.
The Reconciliation
The chapter on how the tension was resolved institutionally is among the most useful in the book.
After al-Hallaj, Sufism faced a real problem. Its practices produced states that could be expressed in language indistinguishable from heresy, and the legal scholars were not wrong to be concerned.
The resolution came largely through al-Ghazali in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a jurist and theologian of unimpeachable standing who underwent his own crisis, left his professorship, and returned to argue that the mystical path was not merely permissible but necessary for a religion that had become formal and dry.
Because of who he was, the argument landed. Sufism was largely accepted as the interior dimension of a religion whose exterior remained the law, and the formula that emerged, that the outward and the inward require each other, became standard.
Schimmel is clear that the accommodation was never complete and that suspicion persisted, erupting periodically, and continues in some quarters today.
The Orders
From the twelfth century the organised brotherhoods appear, and her treatment of them corrects a common misconception.
Each order traces a chain of transmission back through its founder to the Prophet. Each has its own practices, its own forms of remembrance, its own rules of discipleship. The Qadiriyya, the Naqshbandiyya, the Chishtiyya, the Mevlevi and many others spread across the Islamic world and beyond.
The misconception is that institutionalisation represents decline: that the real Sufism was the individual ecstatics and the orders are what happens when bureaucracy arrives.
Schimmel does not accept this. The orders are how Sufism actually reached people, how the practices were transmitted intact across generations, how the tradition survived, and how it functioned socially: as networks of shrines, teaching, charity, and in many regions as the primary vehicle of Islamisation.
The Poetry
A major strength, and unusual in a scholarly survey.
Schimmel was a translator and read the poetry in the original in several languages, and she treats it as a primary theological source rather than as illustration.
She works through the conventional imagery and what it means: the wine that is not wine, the beloved who may be human or divine or deliberately ambiguous, the moth and the flame, the reed cut from the reed bed and crying for its origin, the nightingale and the rose.
Her point is that this is a technical vocabulary rather than decoration. A reader who does not know the conventions will misread Rumi or Hafiz systematically, and the ambiguity between sacred and profane is frequently deliberate rather than a puzzle to be solved.
She covers the Arabic tradition, the Persian masters, the Turkish poets, and the Indian and Sindhi material she knew better than almost any Western scholar.
Women in the Tradition
She gives this more attention than her contemporaries did, and it deserves noting.
Rabia is the famous case, and Schimmel documents others: women teachers, women in the orders, women whose sayings are recorded in the biographical collections, and the substantial female presence at shrines and in devotional life.
She also does not overstate it. The tradition's institutions were male-dominated, most orders restricted women's participation, and the biographical literature preserves men far more thoroughly.
The balance is right: the presence was real, it was constrained, and both facts belong in the account.
What She Underplays
Three fair criticisms.
Politics and economics. The orders held land, controlled shrines with substantial revenues, allied with rulers, and in some periods governed. Schimmel's interest is spiritual and intellectual, and the material history of the institutions gets far less attention than it warrants. Later scholarship has filled this in considerably.
The sympathy. She writes as an admirer. Where the tradition contains material a modern reader would find difficult, or where Sufi practice was in genuine conflict with Islamic law rather than harmoniously complementary, the tone smooths rather than sharpens.
Density. The book attempts to cover fourteen centuries and half a dozen literatures, and the result is compression that becomes punishing. Names arrive in sequences, each with a date and a distinguishing doctrine, and a reader without prior orientation drowns.
Against the Popular Market
The most useful thing this book does for a general reader is act as a control.
A great deal of what is sold as Sufism in English has had specific things removed: the Arabic, the Quran, the ritual prayer, the law, the requirement of a teacher within a lineage, and the fact that every figure quoted was a practising Muslim for whom the religion was not incidental.
What remains is a universal spirituality of love and tolerance, congenial and largely invented, with poetry detached from its context and rendered into English by people who did not read the original.
Schimmel does not polemicise about this. She simply documents what the tradition contained, in detail, across centuries, and the contrast makes the point without her having to.
Readers who came to Sufism through the popular market and want to know what they have been given a version of will find the answer here.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you read Rumi or Hafiz and want the tradition they were writing inside, which changes the poems considerably.
Read it if you want a reference work on Sufi vocabulary, figures and history that you will return to rather than finish.
Read it alongside al-Ghazali for the reconciliation argued from inside, and alongside Ibn Arabi for the theosophical development she treats more briefly than it deserves.
Do not read it as a first book on Islam, do not attempt it cover to cover on a first pass, and do not expect a practice manual. It is a scholar's survey and it is the best one there is.
The distinction between stations and states is worth taking out of this book and applying anywhere. Stations are what you build and keep: the habits, the restraint, the capacity that stays with you whether or not you feel anything. States are what arrives and goes, and they are not yours to arrange. Almost everyone chasing a spiritual life is chasing states, judging their progress by whether anything felt significant this week, and treating a dry period as failure. The tradition's answer is that the dry period is where the stations are built, that the states are given rather than earned, and that a person who requires the experience in order to continue the practice has the relationship exactly backwards.
Fifty years on, still the survey nobody has replaced.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's density and of what it underplays is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Mystical Dimensions of Islam?
Annemarie Schimmel's 1975 survey of Sufism, covering its origins, its historical development, its major figures, its technical vocabulary, its orders and its literature across Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Indian traditions. It remains the standard scholarly introduction in English.
Who was Annemarie Schimmel?
A German scholar of Islamic studies, 1922 to 2003, who took her doctorate at nineteen, taught at Harvard for a quarter of a century, and read Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi among other languages relevant to her field.
What is her central argument?
That Sufism is an interior dimension of Islam rather than something imported into it or an escape from it. She insists throughout that the Quran and the practice of the Prophet are the source, against older Western accounts that traced Sufism to foreign influences.
Does the book require background in Islam?
Some. She uses Arabic and Persian terms freely, assumes basic familiarity with Islamic history, and moves quickly between periods and regions. A reader with no background will manage but will get considerably more with an introduction to Islam read first.
What is the path of stations and states?
The Sufi model of spiritual development, in which stations are stages attained by effort and retained, while states are conditions given rather than achieved and which pass. Schimmel sets out the classical sequences and the disagreements between authorities about them.
Who was al-Hallaj?
A tenth-century mystic executed in Baghdad, remembered for the utterance usually rendered as I am the Truth. Schimmel treats him at length as the decisive figure in whom the tension between mystical experience and public orthodoxy became fatal.
Does she cover the poetry?
Extensively, and it is one of the book's strengths. She was a translator of Persian and Urdu poetry and treats the literary tradition as integral rather than decorative, including Rumi, Attar, Hafiz, Ibn al-Farid and the later Indian and Turkish poets.
How does she handle the orders?
She traces the development of the organised brotherhoods from the twelfth century onward, their lineages and their spread, and treats them as central to how Sufism actually functioned rather than as a decline from an earlier individual purity.
What are the criticisms of the book?
That it is dense to the point of overwhelming, that its sympathy sometimes softens the tensions between Sufi practice and Islamic law, that it says little about the political and economic role of the orders, and that scholarship has moved on in fifty years.
Is it still current?
As a survey it remains unmatched in scope and is still assigned. A great deal of specialist work has appeared since, particularly on the social history of the orders and on Sufism in specific regions, and readers going deeper should follow it.
How does it compare with popular Sufi books?
Sharply. Most popular presentations detach Sufism from Islam, from Arabic and from the law, and present it as a universal spirituality. Schimmel demonstrates in detail that this is not what the tradition was, and the contrast is instructive.
Who should read it?
Anyone who wants to know what Sufism historically is rather than what it has been marketed as, and anyone reading Rumi or Hafiz who wants the tradition those poets were writing inside.
The context is not an obstacle to the beauty
There is a worry, when you learn that a tradition you admire is more specific and more demanding than the version you met, that the specificity will spoil it. The opposite happens. Rumi read as a universal poet of love is pleasant and slightly weightless. Rumi read as a Muslim jurist and teacher, working inside a law and a language and a lineage, writing about a God whose absolute otherness he never questions, is a considerably stranger and more powerful figure. Schimmel gives you the second one, at some cost in effort, and the poems are better for it.
Sources & References
- Schimmel, Annemarie (1975). Mystical Dimensions of Islam. University of North Carolina Press.
- Schimmel, A. And Muhammad Is His Messenger and her translations of Persian and Urdu poetry.
- Massignon, Louis. Scholarship on al-Hallaj, on which Schimmel draws.
- Al-Ghazali. The Revival of the Religious Sciences, on the reconciliation of law and path.
- Later social-historical scholarship on the Sufi orders and their institutions.
- Critical literature on the reception of Sufi poetry in English translation.