ABSTRACT
What’s American about American Sufi movements? On initial consideration, this question seems most likely to be posed from a European comparativist perspective. After all, someone from the Muslim world, say Egypt or South Asia, would be likely to think of the West as an undifferentiated whole. At the same time, Sufi movements that are essentially ‘transplants’ of orders active in Muslim countries and retain the same clientele and language among immigrants in the United States or Europe might not be thought of as significantly ‘Western’ at all. However, other Sufi movements that have made substantial adjustments to a new context and attract larger numbers of Europeans or North Americans are more likely to be seen as generically ‘Western’. Once one starts to consider these Western Sufi movements more closely, a category of specifically ‘American’ Sufi movements emerges as both informative and inadequate. It is informative in the sense that movements with significant activities based in the United States do adapt styles and practices resonant with American ways of doing things. It is inadequate with respect to the impossibility of drawing a line between the United States and Europe and imagining no crossfertilisation and circulation of leaders, members and publications of particular groups, even more so in an age of electronic communication and Internet linkages. Therefore, in viewing the situation of contemporary American Sufi movements, we need to consider both
transnational theory and activity and those factors which exhibit local, regional and particular contextual influences.
