Abstract
This paper introduces the exchange of letters in early Sufism, analyses the significance of these exchanges, and examines these documents not for their general literary qualities or for theoretical discussion of appropriate conduct but, rather, for actual data relating to personal and interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the crucial need for creating a corpus ofSufi letters and pieces of correspondence. The discussion is divided into methodological and conceptual-historical perspectives. The methodological perspective includes a survey of sources, the question of transmission, letter fragment usage by later authors, and a reconstruction attempt of the actual circumstances of these documents. The conceptual-historical perspective analyses content, rhetoric, argumentation forms, and self-representation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 391-413 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies |
| Volume | 83 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:1 The first draft of this paper was written during my stay at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies as Imam Tirmizi Visiting Fellow (2019). I wish to express my deep gratitude to the Centre’s Director Dr Farhan Nizami and the Deputy Registrar, Dr Richard Yousif Weyers, for their support in ensuring all allocated office facilities and full access to the libraries and archives in Oxford. The final version of the paper was completed thanks to a research grant from the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 514/19).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press.
Keywords
- Corpus of Sufi letters
- Fragments of letters
- Ikhwaniyyat
- Maali
- Mukatabat
- Rasail
- Rasail al-Junayd
- Uberreste
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Cultural Studies
- History