Sufism is the mystical dimension of Islam — the tradition of direct personal experience of divine reality, pursued through the annihilation of the ego (fana) in the love of God. Its greatest poet, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, is the best-selling poet in the English-speaking world today. Its practices — dhikr (remembrance), sama (listening to music as spiritual practice), the whirling of the Mevlevi dervishes — combine rigorous inner discipline with extraordinary aesthetic beauty. Sufism produced the finest mystical poetry in any language and some of the deepest analyses of the spiritual path ever written.
The Sufi path (tariqa) is transmitted through lineages of masters and students stretching back, in each order, to the Prophet Muhammad through a chain of teachers (silsila). The student (murid) pledges allegiance to the master (shaykh or pir) and undertakes a progressive training in inner disciplines: purification of the self (nafs), development of the heart (qalb), and ultimately the annihilation of the ego in divine presence (fana) and subsistence in God (baqa).
The great Sufi orders — the Mevlevi (whirling dervishes), Qadiri, Naqshbandi, Chishti, Shadhili — each have their own practices, emphases, and aesthetic traditions. The Chishti order of South Asia is particularly associated with music as spiritual practice; the Naqshbandi with silent dhikr (remembrance) and sober sobriety; the Mevlevi with the sema ceremony and Rumi's poetry.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–1273) is the greatest mystical poet in the Islamic tradition and one of the most widely read poets in the world today. His Masnavi — six books of spiritual verse totalling 25,000 couplets — has been called the Persian Quran. His shorter poems, collected in the Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi (dedicated to his spiritual friend and catalyst Shams of Tabriz), are perhaps the most direct expressions of mystical love in any literature.
Rumi's central image is the reed flute separated from the reed bed — the soul separated from its divine origin, crying out with the pain of longing that is also the music of spiritual life. His poetry is not about mysticism; it is the experience of mysticism rendered into language.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. — Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Masnavi