10.21.07
Fall, 2007 - The Midway Point
Now entering Week 10 of the semester and I am busily researching my paper for History of Islam due at the end of the semester. I was really excited and happy to spend most of my day reading one of the many books from my bibliography. It has been a very long time since that’s happened, usually I feel like I’m just slogging through.
My topic is Sufism and my approach will be a descriptive narrative using mostly secondary sources. I want to write about the origins of Sufism and its impact upon Islam itself. The book I am currently reading is J. Spencer Trimingham’s The Sufi Orders in Islam which turns out to be a book about the origins of the many different orders of Sufism. It wasn’t what I was expecting but it’s a good read anyway.
I choose this topic because mysticism always fascinates me and I remember copies of Idries Shah’s books about Nasrudin in the house when I was a teenager. I had no idea what they were all about and wanted to explore that. I am not reading any of Shah’s books for this paper but I am beginning to understand that Nasrudin is the clown found in all mystic traditions.