ABSTRACT

The public row that occurred in later 2010 over the proposed building of the Park51 Community Center, an institution envisioned by its planners as a cosmopolitan space serving both the Muslim and wider community in New York City’s bustling lower Manhattan area, has once again placed the phenomenon of Sufi sm into the spotlight. As more shrewd observers have noted, one of its primary organizers-the Muslim-American religious leader and long-suffering interfaith advocate Feisal Abdul Rauf-has deep and enduring ties to Sufi movements.1 Among the most prominent of these is the Jerrahi branch of the Halveti Sufi order, which was founded by a late eleventh/seventeenth-century Ottoman Sufi leader. In turn, the roots of the Halveti order itself can be traced back well into medieval times.2