Sufi dhikr

What it is

Dhikr means remembrance. It is the central practice of Sufism — taṣawwuf, the inward dimension of Islam — and consists of the repeated invocation of God, through the divine names or short formulas.

The most common: lā ilāha illā'llāh, there is no god but God; the name Allāh alone; and Hū, the pronoun He.

Forms vary:

• Dhikr khafī — silent, interior, held in the heart
• Dhikr jalī — vocal, aloud
• Solitary practice, assigned by a shaykh as part of a rule of life
• Ḥaḍra — the collective gathering, in which a circle recites together, often with regulated breathing and movement, sometimes for hours

Where it came from

Sufism developed within Islam from the earliest centuries as an ascetic and interior current. Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya (d. 801), a former slave in Basra, articulated a love of God sought for its own sake rather than for reward or from fear of hell — one of the tradition's founding voices, and a woman.

Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) made Sufism intellectually respectable to orthodoxy in his Revival of the Religious Sciences, arguing that inner practice was not a deviation from Islamic law but its fulfilment. That reconciliation shaped everything after.

The orders — ṭuruq — formed from the twelfth century, each with a lineage traced back to the Prophet and a characteristic practice:

• Qādiriyya, among the oldest and most widespread
• Naqshbandiyya, distinguished by silent dhikr and by the principle of "solitude in the crowd" — interior practice sustained in ordinary life rather than in retreat
• Chishtiyya, in South Asia, using samāʿ, spiritual listening, with music and poetry
• Mevleviyya, the followers of Rūmī, whose turning ceremony — the semā — was formalised after his death by his son and successors

The theological vocabulary is precise. Fanāʾ is annihilation, the passing away of the self in God; baqāʾ is subsistence, the return to functioning existence with the self no longer at the centre.

How it is practised

Under a shaykh, within an order, alongside — not instead of — the obligatory Islamic practices. The shaykh assigns a wird, a personal litany, with specified formulas and counts, often using a tasbīḥ of thirty-three or ninety-nine beads. Group ḥaḍra combines recitation with coordinated breathing and movement, sometimes reaching considerable intensity.

A point of substance rather than etiquette: in the classical understanding, dhikr is not a technique that can be separated from Islam. The names are God's names, the practice is a religious obligation intensified, and the traditional orders regard the sharīʿa as the necessary container. Detached practices marketed as "Sufi meditation" without that framework are regarded by most traditional Sufis as something else wearing the name — a dispute that goes back to the Western universalist Sufism of Inayat Khan and continues.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the tradition is deep, textually rich, and continuous, and that Rūmī — the most widely read poet in the English-speaking world by some counts — is a Sufi writing about God, however frequently he is republished with the Islam edited out.

We can say the practice does what repetition practices do, and that the parallels with the Jesus Prayer and with mantra practice are striking. Repeated invocation, breath, posture, prolonged duration, and a devotional frame recur across traditions that had limited contact.

And we should say something that matters more than any of that. Sufis are persecuted.

Sufi practice — shrine visitation, music, the veneration of saints, the ḥaḍra itself — has been attacked as unorthodox innovation by Salafi and Wahhabi currents and by militant groups. Shrines have been destroyed in Mali, Libya, Pakistan and elsewhere. Worshippers have been killed in large numbers: the attack on the al-Rawda mosque in Sinai in November 2017, targeting a Sufi congregation, killed more than three hundred people and is among the deadliest terrorist attacks in Egypt's history.

Western writing about Sufism tends toward the decorative — whirling, poetry, love. The living tradition is in many places under sustained violent threat, and a site describing it should say so rather than treating it as an aesthetic.

We cannot say what is reached in fanāʾ, and the tradition is careful about the claim. The statements of some ecstatics — al-Ḥallāj's "I am the Truth", for which he was executed in 922 — have been read within Sufism as utterances made in a state where the speaker was not present to speak, rather than as doctrinal assertions. The distinction has mattered enough that people have died over it.

Further reading

• Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975) — the standard scholarly survey.
• Al-Ghazālī, The Alchemy of Happiness — his own accessible summary.
• Rūmī in a scholarly translation, such as Jawid Mojaddedi's, rather than a popular rendering.