Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam

This project seeks to explain the emergence, flourishing and lasting appeal of non-conformist movements in Islamic intellectual history, investigating how Islamic antinomian movements both consolidated Islam in a vast region from the Balkans to Bengal, while offering methods of self-reflection that allowed for critical thinking within Islamic streams of thought.

By examining how generations of Islamic mystics and intellectuals in the Persianate world challenged, redefined or rejected Islamic canonical law in their poetic, artistic, philosophical and political writings and teachings, this project generates significant new insights on transgression in Islam.Non-conformist mystics combined the ascetic principles of early Islam with shocking deviance, transgressing the holiest Islamic laws such as prayer, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca, and praising other religions such as Christianity.

By rejecting the outward piety of the clerics, celebrating wine, gambling and homo-erotic love, they provoked the orthodox, craving rejection and criticism, which they used as a shield to protect their piety.

Using transgression as a theoretical frame, this project demonstrates how non-conformist mystics relativized the status of the Islamic jurists at the centre in Islamic life, while validating what for the jurists was peripheral.

Examining non-conformism as part of Islam since the tenth century breaks new grounds in the field of Islamic Studies, and in the wider fields of Religious Studies, Literary Studies and History.

This is the first study dealing in a broad way with questions about the relationships between centre and periphery, normal and deviant, profane and divine, and low culture versus high religion in Islamic culture.

As such it also offers significant contributions to transgression studies from Islamic Studies perspectives, demonstrating why antinomian themes, motifs and metaphors have taken a central position in Islam, especially in art and through poetry.