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Sufism and Islam: what is the difference?

The short answer: Sufism is not another religion than Islam; it is its inner dimension. Asking ‘what is the difference between Sufism and Islam’ comes down to asking what difference there is between practising a religion and deepening that practice spiritually. The long answer calls for a little precision, because the word ‘Sufism’ today covers very different realities.

The bark, the flesh and the kernel

Islam is traditionally understood in three degrees, set out in the hadith of the archangel Gabriel: islam (submission, the practices: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage), iman (faith, the content of belief) and ihsan (excellence: ‘worship God as though you saw Him, for if you do not see Him, He sees you’). Sufism is the path that takes ihsan for its object: it is the ‘science of the purification of the soul’ (’ilm al-tazkiyat al-nafs), drawn from the same sources as the rest of the religion.

It is also expressed by the metaphor of the fruit: the religious Law (shari’a) is the bark, faith is the flesh, the contemplation of the divine presence is the kernel. A kernel without bark rots; a bark without kernel bears no fruit. The full relationship between these three planes is developed in our articles Sufism and Islam and Sufism at the heart of Islam.

What changes for the practitioner

To be a Muslim is already to live a spirituality: prayer accomplished with presence, fasting lived inwardly, are spiritual acts by nature. The Sufi is not another kind of believer, but a Muslim who undertakes an additional, methodical work upon the soul, under the direction of a guide. That work takes forms the ordinary Muslim does not necessarily know: the initiatic dhikr transmitted by authorisation, invocations prescribed in measured doses according to the disciple’s state, the inner vigilance (muhasaba) over the movements of the ego.

In the other direction, nothing specifically Sufi exempts one from what is common to all Muslims. A shaykh of the path puts it soberly: ‘the Law (shari’a) is the gate of the path (tariqa)’. The distinction, then, is not between two religions, but between religion lived and religion deepened.

The case of ‘neo-Sufism’

The confusion comes from a recent phenomenon: spiritual offerings that take up the Sufi vocabulary while claiming emancipation from the Islamic form, sometimes with paid workshops and the promise of immediate experience. This ‘neo-Sufism’ seduces because it promises gnosis without the discipline.

For the tradition, it is a contradiction in terms: a path severed from the Qur’anic Revelation and the prophetic model produces nothing more than emotions, not a transformation. That would mean passing the revealed tradition through the prism of personal subjectivity, rather than adapting one’s being to the teaching. Substance and form protect each other: the religious form protects the wayfarer from the wanderings of mere feeling, and the substance protects the form from literalist sclerosis.

In practice, for a Westerner

This question of the difference often conceals another: ‘is it for me?’ Two things can be said simply. First, tasting Sufism (its poetry, its music, its open sessions) requires nothing; the Qadiriya Boutchichiya path welcomes every visitor at its dhikr sessions. Second, entering an initiatic path binds one to the religion from which it proceeds: the question ‘can one be a Sufi without being a Muslim?’ has its own dedicated page.

Further reading