ABSTRACT
The present research contributes to a yet-incipient scholarly trend that has emerged in the last decade, 1 one that aims to comprehensively scrutinize Sufism as a living tradition, and in order to do so prioritizes the study of religious practices over that of texts (e.g. Geaves, 2000; Raudvere, 2002; Werbner 2005). Fieldwork-based research has revealed the current vitality enjoyed by Sufism and its capacity to keep adapting to the changing social conditions of the modern world. Until recently, most of the existing studies on Sufism relied mainly on textual analysis as a form of data collection, arguably producing a distorted image in which Islamic mysticism becomes a remnant of the past and an almost extinct tradition (Geaves et al., 2009).
