What's the difference between mysticism and sufism?

Mysticism


Definition:

  • (n.) Obscurity of doctrine.
  • (n.) The doctrine of the Mystics, who professed a pure, sublime, and wholly disinterested devotion, and maintained that they had direct intercourse with the divine Spirit, and aquired a knowledge of God and of spiritual things unattainable by the natural intellect, and such as can not be analyzed or explained.
  • (n.) The doctrine that the ultimate elements or principles of knowledge or belief are gained by an act or process akin to feeling or faith.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They operate on a mystical and symbolic plane, which is foreign to the practice of "Western" medicine.
  • (2) According to Deborah Mattinson, his pollster, Brown " loved slogans and believed them to be imbued with a mystical power capable of persuading the most intransigent voter", and therefore went a bundle on them – not least " A future fair for all ", the surreal dud with which Labour went to the country in 2010, following 2005's equally idiotic " forward not back ".
  • (3) On involvement with the guru and a new 'family,' the experienced increased well-being and periods of bliss, and their acceptance of mystic Hindu beliefs was solidified.
  • (4) Contact was made with a ‘mystical-religious’ group that used the gas to accelerate arriving at their transcendental-meditative state of choice.” It increased in popularity with the rise of festival culture – it’s been a mainstay of Glastonbury’s stone circle and squat parties in Bristol and south London for at least a decade – but the equipment needed to dispense it remained relatively expensive.
  • (5) Animal Rescue is based on a screenplay by the novelist Dennis Lehane , author of Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River and Shutter Island, all of which have been made into films by Hollywood.
  • (6) None of the students attributed AIDS to mystical forces, while some associated it with affluence.
  • (7) As part of their studies, orphans at the centre will be taught a curriculum based on Spirituality for Kids, linked to the Kabbalah school of mysticism, of which Madonna is a follower.
  • (8) Christians believed, and believe, that the body is not only physical, but also spiritual and mystical, and many believed it was an allegory of church, state and family.
  • (9) In the interim, Phil cut the solo albums Star Spangled Springer (1973), Phil's Diner (1974) and Mystic Line (1975), and appeared on Roy Wood's album Mustard and on Zevon's debut album in 1976.
  • (10) All subjects were most likely to cite mystical causes for their disability and to believe that mystical sources would most help them to improve.
  • (11) If there’s a mystic, a European setting and an antique time-period, you should already know – if only from bitter experience of his recent oeuvre – that you’re in eighth-rate Allen territory.
  • (12) Bush's fantastical lyrics, influenced by children's literature, esoteric mystical knowledge, daydreams and the lore and legends of old Albion, seemed irrelevant, and deficient in street-cred at a time of tower-block social realism and agit-prop.
  • (13) A questionnaire was developed to assess adult recall for a range of transpersonal experiences throughout childhood and adolescence (mystical experience, out-of-body experience, lucid dreams, archetypal dreams, ESP), as well as nightmares and night terrors as indicators of more conflicted, negative states.
  • (14) Such mystical guidance always remained important to him.
  • (15) As for individuals, intent on shielding themselves from paying tax, intent on giving nothing back, I fail to see the mystical benefit of their physical presence in the UK.
  • (16) Going beyond, an attempt is made, and this, solely from the anthropological standpoint, to apply these data to the religious and mystical act of Eucharistic Manducation.
  • (17) The film reflects the conciliatory, almost mystical mood of a man who emerged from prison as a mediator, philosopher and president-in-waiting.
  • (18) The study of spatial marks implies looking for the fundamental marks of the human being as well as the existence of a mystical space that has to be differenciated from a pathological space.
  • (19) Stanford University might have been the cradle for a hundred Silicon Valley startups and the hothouse for some of its greatest technical innovations, but the Singularity University is an institution that has been made in the valley's own image: highly networked, fuelled by a cocktail of philanthro-capitalism and endowed with an almost mystical sense of its own destiny.
  • (20) I’ll call them the Mystic East, the Dead Centre, and the Wild West.

Sufism


Definition:

  • (n.) A refined mysticism among certain classes of Mohammedans, particularly in Persia, who hold to a kind of pantheism and practice extreme asceticism in their lives.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) My Wahabi guide, Sayeed, tried to tell me that hardly anyone followed Sufism any more.
  • (2) She was spiritual as well, exploring the limits and pitfalls that came with being human, especially after she became an adherent of Sufism.
  • (3) In Turkey too, Sufism is frowned upon - although in the city of Konya, there are celebrations on the anniversary of Rumi's death every year.
  • (4) Like much of Sufism, the performance of the whirling dervishes works on many levels and is charged with symbolism.
  • (5) Thus sufism would be an adaptation from Chinese Shamanism.
  • (6) Tempting though it is to dismiss Parveen's claims that she can see Sufi saints among the audience, Sufism has a tradition of female mystics, notably the eighth century's Rabia al-Basri, who ran through the streets of Basra in Iraq with a blazing torch in one hand and a container of water in the other.
  • (7) Sufism, on the other hand, is a tradition devoted to the development of the higher intuitive capacity needed to deal with this issue.
  • (8) She continues to lend her name to local campaigns, however, for better reading in schools, for the preservation of the trees in Hampstead Heath, and, revealingly, to pursue a faith in Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam which she studied for years under the tutelage of Idries Shah.
  • (9) Its origins are in seventh-century aesthetics and followers of Sufism aim to achieve direct union with God.
  • (10) Many European writers have been fascinated by Sufism - Richard Burton, the translator of the Kama Sutra, was initiated as a dervish, and Doris Lessing and Ted Hughes shared his interest ('the Sufis are the most sensible collection of people on the planet', Hughes once said).
  • (11) One, two, sufi... 204 The number of countries in which Sufism is practised 1.3 The number, in billions, of Muslims worldwide 20 The percentage of Muslims who class themselves as Sufis 10 The number of Sufi adherents, in millions, in Turkey 10 Number of Sufi adherents, in thousands, in Germany 195 Number of practising Sufis in New Zealand 125 Number of albums recorded by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan · Ramadam Nights, featuring the al-Kindi Ensemble, is at the Barbican, London EC1 from 4 November.
  • (12) It was the latest such attack on devotees of Sufism, a mystical and generally moderate form of Islam despised by radical fundamentalists.
  • (13) It's the kind of sentiment echoed by most students of Sufism, such as Coleman Barks, whose translations of Rumi propelled the 13th century mystic into, bizarrely, becoming the bestselling poet in America in the Nineties (Madonna was a fan).
  • (14) They were selling manuscripts by Arab scholars on everything from astronomy and arithmetic to Islamic law, as well as mystical texts on Sufism, the otherworldly, saintly style of faith that the al-Qaida-affiliated Ansar Dine finds so offensive.
  • (15) Nusrat's family (originally from Afghanistan, a traditional centre of Sufism) have an unbroken tradition of singing qawwali for 600 years, yet you felt, somehow, as if you were plugging into something utterly modern.
  • (16) But Isis believes Yazidism, one of the world’s oldest religions, fusing elements of Zoroastrianism, Sufism, early Islam and Christianity, is godless.
  • (17) Everything that doesn’t conform to the most strict Wahhabi standards of acceptability, anything that is beloved by people that Isis doesn’t like, anything that represents non-Isis interpretations of Islam such as Shiism or Sufism, and anything from before the time of Muhammad.” Sanhareb Barsom, an official with the Syriac Union party across the border in Syria’s Hassakeh province, where the Assyrian community has also come under assault by Isis, told the Guardian: “These are not Assyrian artefacts, these are artefacts for all of humanity.” Isis kidnapped more than 200 Assyrians in a sweep through villages south of the Khabur river last month, where members of the community had settled after the Simele massacre in the 1930s by the then-kingdom of Iraq.

Words possibly related to "sufism"