Misguiding generalization

Submitted by Concerned Buddhist (Lithuania), Sep 15, 2007 at 19:45

It would be much more correct to say that there some Muslims(first of all Salafis) who do not consider Sufis to be Muslims, and secondly there are Sufi Muslims(and some conservative Muslims who are not Sufis) who do not consider Salafis to be Muslims.

Secondly there are very different kinds of Sufis who range from Panentheist Sufis of Ibn Arabi school to such who are in reality fundamentalist Muslims and only formaly belong to a Sufi tariqa, maybe in honor of family tradition. And there is lots of shades in-between. A litmus test for Sufis maybe could be the question - what do you think about Ibn Arabi? Do you consider him to be genuine Muslim and genuine Sufi? If the answer is yes, then the person is truly genuine Sufi( a Salafi would never endorse Ibn Arabi even for taqiyya sake; just hearing Ibn Arabi's name drives them mad and crazy); if not then he is suspect, although it can happen that a person in question simply has fear openly declare his support for Ibn Arabi; it can well be that the person in question endorses the Sufism of Sirhindi or Ghazali - those far more in line with shariatic Islam, but not Ibn Arabi; or he can be only token Sufi, i.e. a formal member of a Sufi Tariqa(Ibn Taimiyya and Mulla Omar were also "Sufis" of such kind).

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