spiritual descent of the Sufi masters... in an unbroken chain back to the Prophet himself.21 While Burckhardt chides orientalists for being anxious to bring everything down to the historical level... and attributing the origins of Sufism to Persian, Hindu, Neoplatonic, or Christian sources,22 the alternative he proposes is, as previously shown, simply inadequate from an objective and academic perspective. In comparison to Nasr and Burckhardt, some Islamic scholars, such as Fazlur Rahman, take a more discriminate approach, admitting that popular Sufi preachers exerted a powerful influence on the masses by enlarging Quranic stories with the aid of materials borrowed from all kinds of sources, Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, and even Bhuddist and Zoroastrian.23 Rahman even goes so far as to state that a number of [foreign] ideas were introduced into Sufism and thence into popular Islam.24 However, rather than rejecting Sufism as essentially un-Islamic, he argues that Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111) was the great reformer of Sufism, purifying it of un-Islamic elements and putting it at the service of orthodox religion.25 Rahman recognizes that Ibn al-Arabis (d.1240) later and influential formulation of Sufi epistemology was absolutely unorthodox in its monism and pantheism, but seems to attempt to negate this by giving an immense list of Sufi and other Muslim thinkers who rejected portions of, or all of Ibn al-Arabis epistemology.26 27 Rahman concludes his chapter on Sufi doctrine with the declaration that, [the synthesis of Sufism and orthodoxy] provides us with a shining example of the fundamentally catholic genius of Islam - a panorama of continued tensions and challenges and of equally persistent efforts to resolve these tensions and meet these challenges in a process of modification, adaptation and absorption.28 While Rahmans literary skills are clearly evident, his critical appraisal of Sufism essentially ends at al-Ghazali, subsequently r...
