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The first academic overview of Sufism in the United States, Hermansen’s pioneering article includes an often-cited typology of American Sufi movements, classifying them in terms of their relationship to Islam (“hybrids”), universalism (“perennials”), or their grounding within a particular immigrant community (“transplants”).
From Rumi poetry and Sufi dancing or whirling, to expressions of Africanicity and the forging of transnational bonds to remote locations in Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, Varieties of American Sufism immerses the reader in diverse expressions of contemporary Sufi religiosity in the United States. It spans more than a century of political, ...
Introduction. (pp. ix-xlvi) Marcia Hermansen. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18255039.4. This volume brings together detailed ethnographic and historical work on diverse Sufi orders operating in the United States.
To understand contemporary expressions of Sufism in North America, it is necessary to examine the contested role of Sufism within the global Islamic tradition.
Although many U.S. mosques continue to follow a conservative version of Islam, a generation of native and converted Muslims is turning to Sufism. The growth of Sufism has been gradual and hushed, in part because one of the precepts of Sufism is to remain private.
The past fifteen years have seen the emergence of this order as one of the most widespread and politically active Sufi organizations in America. In this paper I ask: Why and how is it that the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order effectively functions as a public religion in America?
Today's North American Sufism can appear either explicitly Islamic or seemingly devoid of Islamic religiosity. Dickson provides indispensable background on Sufism's relation to Islamic orthodoxy and to Western esoteric traditions, and its historical development in North America.
