What is the difference between salafi and sufi

Therefore, as the shaykh explained to me in a later conversation, the amount of money would be gradually paid, while the boy would earn some money and learn some working skills for his future.

Sufi texts and manuals circulate among various religious audiences, both Sufis and non-Sufis, carrying Sufi concepts and symbols into individualized contexts of religious reflexivity. There is a renewed interest in Sufi literature as a form of intellectual spirituality among members of the middle and upper strata of Syrian society. There are also many books that present Sufi forms of religiosity to a larger popular audience.

This text is sold in bookstores and street-stalls in a cheap reprint of an Ottoman edition and is composed by collections of prayers , mystical formulas, and litanies, which are systematically organized in order to facilitate their daily recitation according to weekly calendar of personal devotions. This text rationalizes a vast Sufi devotional material into doctrinal and ritual units that are distributed across the temporal units of everyday life, providing the reader with intellectual tools and religious framework necessary for solitary performance of simple mystical exercises.

Many participants in the activities of the Sufi communities become permanent members and adopt their affiliation to Sufism as a defining element of their identities as Muslims. The various traditions that constitute Sufism are constructed in a highly contextual way, with each shaykh selecting and combining elements from the doctrines and rituals that were historically systematized as the various Sufi orders. The experiential character of Sufi identities also creates a broad gamut of variation in the outcome of the process of internal conversion, as each member of the community is not only differently positioned in the web of power relations that organizes it, but also differently equipped in terms of the concepts, values and body techniques that constitute its religious tradition.

The personal engagement in Sufi religiosity can be expressed through the adoption of general public signs of Muslim piety, such as veiling, the use of beard or mosque attendance, or can be marked with elements specific to Sufi religiosity. He was 22 years old and was doing his military service in Aleppo, where he was born and where his family lived.

According to him, he was having serious conflicts with his father and was having many other problems in his personal and professional life. While he was not religious at that time, as he was a militant of the Marxist-inspired PKK Kurdistan Workers Party , he followed the advice of a friend and went to talk to this shaykh. After that, Sherwan ended his relations with the two friends and, according to him, his personal problems were gradually solved. He also said that he became a better person and a better Muslim after he discovered Sufism and that he convinced his parents and some of his friends to become followers of his shaykh.

However, when I asked if this meant that he regularly performed the general religious duties, such as mosque attendance, he answered that :.

The shaykh also offered him a set of moral and practical principles, which allowed him to both discipline and evaluate his social relations. This is a very important skill in the Syrian society, where individual trajectories are shaped and supported by the capacity of establishing and mobilizing reliable personal relations. He must be restrained in his gestures, never raising his voice or expressing uncontrolled emotional states.

He also engaged in a gradual reshaping of all his social relations according to the moral principles preached by his shaykh. Mustafa also articulated several disciplinary mechanisms of religious and non-religious character in the performative configuration of his moral and social self.

More surprisingly, he also saw the practice of sports, such as handball, and his successful performance in his studies and work activities as expressions of moral commitment, inscribing his middle-class culture of nurturing the self and the body into the disciplinary practices of Sufi asceticism.

This process can create challenges to shared assumptions about the common good. Thus, social practices that are culturally legitimate can be abandoned or changed as a result of the systematic enactment of embodied correctness by Sufi agents in the public sphere. When asked the reason, one of them said,. Thank God we all live well. We have good people who buy from our shops because they know they can trust us.

Therefore, the practical enactment of embodied correctness creates the possibility of the emergence of stable circles of shared anticipation and trust even in a public arena as volatile as the marketplace. This emergence of new circuits of solidarity, moral authority, and social distinction can bring about the re-signification of social practices and the redistribution of prestige, power and authority in the public sphere. Sufi public discourses on both religion and society contribute to the constitution of a sphere of public debate, offering channels for expression of disputes over forms of the common good in Syrian society.

The Sufi-framed moral performances create circles of communication, trust, and shared expectations, which demarcate multiple arenas of solidarity and participation in the public sphere. The relations of trust and solidarity produced in these arenas allow for social circulation of Sufi doctrines and conceptions of authority, providing its participants with shared conceptual tools for the understanding and evaluation of the common good.

Apart from doctrinal reasons for rejecting Sufism such as those mentioned above, Salafis also have political objections to Sufis. Although these attempts have not always been successful, [12] this practice must have solidified the view among Jihadi-Salafis that Sufi sheikhs and their followers are stooges of Arab regimes.

Ironically, the politically quietist Salafis who make up the largest share of Salafism as a whole sometimes have opposite political reasons for disliking Sufis. While the destruction of Sufi shrines in countries such as Libya and Mali was likely always done by Jihadi-Salafis — not quietists — the doctrinal arguments used against Sufis are shared by both branches of Salafism. Not only do Salafis have political reasons to be against Sufism as well, attacks against Sufi shrines most often take place in contexts where conflict and violence are quite present anyway, suggesting this may also have something to do with political power and influence in societies in flux.

Both were accessed 10 March Hasan b. Emirate or Caliphate? Internal debates about transnational political movements, competing claims over religious authenticity, scholarly authority and group priorities converged to fragment the organizations and disillusioned many members. A number of interesting developments occurred accordingly. This had serious implications. A handful of its ex-members went on to found the controversial Quilliam Foundation and have made careers out of adopting government security narratives and are criticized for their opaque relationships with right-wing American networks.

At their peak, these groups in their different ways, helped young people learn their religion and participate in collective faith-based activism. However, since the beginning of the s, most faded and others rebranded. A younger generation of religiously inclined British Muslims became more interested in experimenting with their religious identities and explored creative cultural synthesis.

Today, most Islamic activists prefer to express their Islamic values on advocacy platforms and in online network hubs rather than formal, hierarchical socio-political movements. Despite all of the above, Sufi Salafi and Islamist perspectives in Britain persist because of the ongoing competition for religious authority and recruits in many Muslim-majority societies and the globalized repercussions. They are different from the past, however, in that they are eclectic, heavily use social media and focus on political campaigns more than theology or ideology.

How Global Britain is helping to win the struggle against Islamist terror. Foreign Commonwealth Office. Middle East Eye. On Being. Countering-Islamophobia Kit. University of Leeds.