Abstract
By investigating a contemporary Sufi community centred around the person and teachings of
a little written about Sufi master, Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri, this study offers insight into the lived
reality of Islamic spiritual life in a Western context. Using an ethnographic approach, the
relationship between master and pupil is centred to reveal how spiritual authority and
transmission in a transnational Sufi movement facilitates the commitment to integrating
metaphysical and esoteric horizons into quotidian life and how the habitus of a transnational,
transethnic, gender-sensitive community of practise assists the process of self-transformation.
The ‘Shadhiliyyah-Haydariyyah’ Sufi movement, or ‘community of practise’ as I have
characterized it, has grown out of Iraqi born Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri’s vocation to teach and
share Islam through the Sufi tradition. Starting around 1980, originally in the USA, it soon
spread to other parts of the world (Britain, Pakistan, Scandinavia, and South Africa) as a natural
consequence of the transnational movements of its founder, his unique approach and appeal,
and the way disciples have been drawn to learn from him. This study therefore focuses on two
main areas: firstly, it seeks to locate Haeri in his own context and against a backdrop of the
Sufi tradition using biography. Secondly, in seeking to answer questions centred around the
nature of shaykh-murīd relationship, through a grounded theory inspired approach, using openended,
semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the movement’s multiple
sites, I focus on the quest that brings the student together with the teacher, the encounter with
the Shaykh and the topography of that interaction transnationally and diachronically as it
emerged from the data, reflecting the tensions between tradition and modernity, authority and
autonomy, alluding to Sufi epistemologies on the ontology of being and universalist spiritual
traditions. Finally, I explore what light this embodiment of that dynamic sheds on the real-time
process of spiritual awakening in relation to current limits of decolonial horizons.
As such this study contributes to understanding contemporary spirituality rooted in
Islam, the nature of transmission and self-transformation among a self-identified community
of Sufi practitioners who privilege essence over form yet remain rooted in Islamic praxis.