The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich online at www

history of philosophy dot net.

Today's episode will be an interview about philosophical sufism with Mohammed Rustam, who is Associate Professor of Islamic

Studies at Carleton University.

Hi, Mohammed.

Hello, Peter.

Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

So I guess the obvious first question here is what do we mean when we talk about philosophical

sufism?

Obviously it must have some relationship to philosophy on the one hand and Sufism on the other hand, but I suppose maybe it's a more specific idea than Sufism in general,

it's some specifically philosophical kind of Sufism? Is that the idea?

Yes, well, the term philosophical Sufism is somewhat problematic because they can take in

Sufies or Muslim mystics who are well-training philosophy,

the formal discipline of philosophy, and as well as philosophical theology in the later

period. And it can also relate to authors who had a pension

for philosophical modes of expression, but who were not really philosophers in any way at all.

So with that in mind we can kind of say that philosophical Sufism broadly refers to the theoretical or doctrinal attempt on the part of Sufies to articulate some of these more central topics in Islamic thought

pertaining to things like cosmology, ontology, theology, so on and so forth, but within the framework

of what we can call their spiritual vision.

This means that at minimum we encounter in philosophical Sufism a more concrete kind of

articulation of any given abstract philosophical or theological problem or position.

...