Sufism for Non-Sufis?

Few forms of classical Islam are more controversial among modern Muslims than the spiritual discipline known as Sufism. Yet in the face of the modern Muslim tendency to limit Islam's deployment to the emphatically political few expressions of the religion could be more central to its spiritual vitality in the modern world. In his translation and analysis of Ibn 'Ata' Allah al-Sakandari's Taj al-'Arus Sherman A. Jackson demonstrates that violent lax or rigid readings of the texts of Islam are just as much a result of the state of spiritual health awareness and fortitude of those who read and deploy them as they are of the substance of the Qur'an Sunna and the teachings of Islam's sages.