The Role of Islamic Sufism and Mysticism in Interfaith Dialogue: From Waḥdat al-Wujūd to Peaceful Coexistence

Abstract

This article examines the historical and doctrinal contribution of Islamic Sufism (taṣawwuf) to the theory and practice of interfaith dialogue, focusing on the metaphysical doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd ("the Oneness of Being") articulated by Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-ʿArabi and disseminated across the Muslim world through poets such as Jalal al-Din Rumi. Drawing directly on primary Sufi texts — Ibn al-ʿArabi's Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, and al-Tadbīrāt al-Ilāhiyya; al-Ghazali's Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn; and the Maktūbāt of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi — alongside the major secondary scholarship on these traditions, the article argues that Sufi metaphysics, by situating the diversity of religious forms within a single transcendent Reality, has functioned historically not merely as a private mystical philosophy but as a practical framework for religious coexistence, most visibly in the composite religious culture of South Asia under the Chishti order and the Mughal court of Akbar and Dara Shukoh. Locating this heritage within the comparative study of mysticism and within contemporary interfaith initiatives, the article also takes seriously the doctrine's long history of internal Islamic contestation, from Ibn Taymiyya's critique to Ahmad Sirhindi's own Naqshbandi reformation, waḥdat al-shuhūd. It concludes that waḥdat al-wujūd offers Muslim societies, and South Asian Islam in particular, an indigenous, textually grounded, and theologically serious resource for religious pluralism that need not be derived from secular models of tolerance, provided its historical complexity and internal contestation are honestly acknowledged rather than elided.