Sufismo e spiritualità islamica

The topic of spirituality in Islam is one to which Western readers, and not only those who are experts in Islamic matters, are particularly sensitive, maybe because it reveals a side in which they can more easily find similarities and affinities with their own religious heritage or, at least, with their way of conceiving religious experience. Actually, it is an extremely varied and complex field in which very different experiences have converged and continue to converge. The very term Sufism, the most commonly used when referring to Islamic spirituality, raises a series of unavoidable issues, the only certainty being their problematic nature: the origins and essence of the phenomenon it designates, the complexity of the language by which various authors have attempted to describe its contents, the comparison with a religiosity based on strict adherence to tradition, and so on.
For this reason, too, we have chosen not to approach the topic by tracing the history of Sufism or Islamic spirituality in general – assuming that this is even possible – nor by reviewing its leading figures, who could then be compared on the basis of their teachings. Instead, we have chosen to focus on some of the above-mentioned issues in an attempt to highlight the multiple aspects and mutual implications which, in their complementarity or mutual exclusion, contribute to defining the nature and modalities of the spiritual experience.