Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Syed Maududi's attitude towards Sufism was critical but respectful. Our attitude towards Sufism determines the answer to the complex question of our identity in matters personal and political – our view of religious/secular other. Syed Moududi’s views helped determine views of millions towards Sufism and call for attention and clarification.     Syed Moududi’s attitude towards Sufism was critical but respectful. Certain ambivalence in his attitude shows he was not quite clear on key claims of Sufism or didn’t reflect in depth on them.     Let us first note how Syed Moududi concedes, in principle, traditional understanding of Tasawwuf as spirit or interior dimension of Islam. He writes in Towards Understanding Islam that Fiqh and Tasawwuf complement each other and noted that, “What concerns itself with the spirit of conduct is known as Tasawwuf ” and “the true Islamic Tasawwuf is the measure of our spirit of our obedience and sincerity, while Fiqh g overns our carrying out comma

Modern secular humanistic, postmodern relativist and fundamentalist religious camps all agree in privileging a certain ideological ferment that downplays/marginalizes the epistemic, ontological and axiological claims of certain or all premodern/wisdom/archaic traditions/religions or negate Absolute/Reality/Transcendence centrism of traditions and find reasons to debunk vast majority of people with their adherence to their religions, myths, philosophies, folklore and have globalizing ambitions at the cost of local, archaic, “wild”, colonized others. Against all of them are little known, little read, much reviled, mostly misunderstood traditionalist thinkers who uphold the primacy of Tradition, see its ramifications everywhere, assert that only Absolute is absolute, God has never been without witness in any culture and there are as many paths to Truth as are souls even though. It transcends in its essence every approximation of knowers/gnostics and has infinite faces and facets implying