Prayer, Deconstruction, and Boundless Play
Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya's Avant-Garde Sufism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3974639 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cyril V Uy (0009-0005-4652-2693, James Madison University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 290-320 |
| Publication date | 2024-02-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2710 • E-ISSN: 1545-6935 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/728125 |
| OpenAlex | W4394948901 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 7 |
This article focuses on the performative textual strategies of Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya (d. 1252), a Mongol-era Sufi whose arcane treatises both bewildered and inspired future generations of occultists, mystics, and messiahs. Framing Ḥamūya’s work as avant-garde Sufism or Sufi free jazz, the article demonstrates how the shaykh self-consciously deconstructed medieval Sufi genre conventions to engage readers in an active process of meaning making. The training manuals penned by Ḥamūya’s teachers and colleagues bound abstract metaphysical frameworks to the embodied and affective dimensions of Sufi praxis, teaching readers to negotiate multiple levels of reality through careful scrutiny of their own subjective experiences. With a deft use of structural allusion and ritual cues, Ḥamūya placed his own idiosyncratic formulations in conversation with these manuals while simultaneously deconstructing the very conventions through which they became meaningful. In so doing, the shaykh forced advanced Sufi readers to continually remap constellations of theory, practice, and experience without a stable hermeneutical center, thus leaving his work radically open to play and interpretation. While his colleagues claimed spiritual authority by subsuming a diversity of embodied practices and metaphysical frames within a single authorial vision, Ḥamūya parochialized their universalizing pretensions by recruiting readers to imagine and expand the endless possibilities of reality for him
Art · Art history · Avant garde · Deconstruction (building) · Islam · Prayer · Sufism · Theology · Engineering · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy · Religious studies
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |