The research area of Islamic Mysticism and Spirituality at Al-Mahdi Institute convened an international conference titled “Ways of Knowing in Sufism: Epistemology, Authority, and Contemporary Implications” on 1–2 June 2026 at its Birmingham campus. Shortlisted presenters will develop their papers into full studies for an edited volume to be published in partnership with Brill Academic Publishers.
This two-day conference brought together philosophers, theologians, historians of religion, and scholars of Islamic intellectual history to examine the epistemology of Sufism: the claim, running through unveiling, inspiration, presential knowledge, and dream-vision, that experiential and divinely-disclosed modes of cognition stand alongside, and at times in conflict with, rational and textual modes of apprehension.
Concept and Aims
The conference took as its starting point the long-contested status of mystical experience as a source of religious knowledge. Jurists and theologians have historically questioned whether unveiling or spiritual tasting could ground legal rulings or theological claims, on the grounds that such experience is unfalsifiable; other scholars have defended its validity within carefully specified limits, often situating experiential certainty at the summit of a hierarchy of knowledge. The conference set this historical debate alongside its contemporary stakes. The renewed theological interest in religious experience as a response to secular critique, the difficulty of distinguishing mystical states from psychological crisis, and the exploitation of claims to privileged knowledge by charismatic leaders to secure unaccountable authority. In his welcome remarks, Dr Zoheir Esmail framed the conference around this same tension — between Sufi epistemology’s claim to a superior framework of religious understanding and the question of what, if anything, disciplines that claim.
Day One — Monday, 1 June 2026: Foundations, Sources and Authority
Panel One: Epistemological Foundations and Debates
Davlat Dadikhuda (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and visiting fellow at Al-Mahdi Institute opened the conference with “Why Knowledge Is Only Ḥuṣūlī,” a Peripatetic critique, developed through the contemporary work of Ayman ʿAbd al-Khāliq al-Maṣrī, of the Illuminationist and Sufi elevation of presential (ḥuḏūrī) knowledge over discursive (ḥuṣūlī) cognition. Having set out the major divisions of presential awareness — self-knowledge, inner experiential awareness, and purported unveiling — Dadikhuda turned to the Avicennan account of representational knowledge as a revelatory state governed by the objective standards of conception (taṣawwur) and assent (taṣdīq), and on this basis rejected ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭbāʾī’s claim, in Nihāyat al-ḥikma, that representational knowledge ultimately reduces to the presential. The reduction, he argued, involves a category error: presential and mystical awareness retain real motivational and psychological significance, but not, except qualifiedly, epistemic merit.
Mohammad Sajjad Qadeer (independent researcher, Qom) followed with “Taqwā as an Epistemic Filter in Sufi Ways of Knowing: Murāqaba and the Regulation of Unveiling.” Reading Qurʾanic formulations of taqwā as conferring knowledge (2:282; 65:2), Qadeer argued that taqwā functions not merely as ethical virtue but as the mechanism that regulates the reliability of experiential knowledge claims, with murāqaba — sustained conscious self-monitoring — as its operational mode. On this account unveiling is neither dismissed nor absolutized: it requires calibration against revelation and against an intellect illuminated by revelation, particularly where the claimant does not embody prophetic perfection. The paper closed by situating this regulatory architecture within a recurring tension in Islamic intellectual history between textual mastery and genuine understanding.
Panel Two: Scriptural Sources
Hashem Morvarid (Trinity University) presented “Religious and Mystical Experience in Shia Ḥadīth: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Epistemology,” arguing that the experiential materials embedded in early Shia ḥadīth and supplicatory literature remain underexplored as primary data for theorising religious experience, despite the field’s tendency to read Islamic mysticism through later Sufi and philosophical sources. Distinguishing three literary modes — third-person depiction, as in Sermon 222 of Nahj al-Balāgha; first-person testimony, as in the Ḥadīth of Ḥāritha; and the normative aspiration voiced in supplications such as al-Munājāt al-Shaʿbāniyya — Morvarid undertook a phenomenological analysis of these reports’ intentionality, affective structure, and enabling preconditions, before addressing their epistemological implications: proposed marks of veridical experience, recognised defeaters such as pride or satanic suggestion, and the extent to which such experience is publicly assessable.
Zoheir Esmail (Al-Mahdi Institute) closed the panel with “‘Whoever Has Seen Me in Their Dream Has Certainly Seen Me’: Visions of the Prophet as a Path to Certainty.” Taking as its point of departure the widely transmitted ḥadīth equating dream-vision of the Prophet with veridical sight of him — sound in the Sunnī corpus, but transmitted in the Shīʿī corpus only as a solitary (khabar al-wāḥid) and therefore weak report, notwithstanding the persistence of such dream-narratives in wider Shīʿī literature — the paper examined the reception of this tradition cluster and what it discloses about the place of dreams within mystical epistemology. The central difficulty, as posed in the paper, is that a tradition of direct corporeal access to the Prophet sits uneasily within an historical-rational method built to validate sunna through chains of transmission rather than through vision.
Panel Three: Institutional Control and Discursive Construction
Liana Saif (University of Amsterdam) presented “Sufism as ‘Mysticism’: A Global Religious History Approach.” Tracing the genealogy of the now-reflexive equation of Sufism with “Islam’s mysticism” through twentieth-century Orientalist, Traditionalist, and Perennialist discourse — Massignon, Guénon, Corbin — and through the Muslim intellectual agents who worked within and against that discourse, Saif argued, drawing on Talal Asad and Richard King, that “mysticism” names not an indigenous Islamic category but a dense field of entanglement between Orientalist comparativism, Muslim projects of modernity, and Western esoteric appropriation. Al-bāṭiniyya, she proposed, offers the more historically grounded frame for understanding how Sufi and Shīʿī traditions have in fact articulated modes of divine knowledge, authority, and mediation.
Day Two — Tuesday, 2 June 2026: Systematizations, Frameworks and Practice
Panel Four: The Akbarian Tradition — Systematizing Kashf
Lahouari Ramzi Taleb (American University of Sharjah) opened the second day with “Between Intelligibility and Sensation: Divine Self-Disclosure in Ibn ʿAjība’s Mystical Epistemology,” examining how Aḥmad Ibn ʿAjība’s Taqyīdān fī waḥdat al-wujūd accounts for the standing of sense-data within a metaphysics that subordinates rational and sensorial cognition to mystical gnosis. For Ibn ʿAjība, Taleb argued, the apparent duality of the intelligible and the sensory is not an objective feature of reality but a cognitive veil (ḥijāb) dissolved within the gnostic’s contemplative awareness of the Oneness pervading the Self-disclosures (tajāllīyāt) of the Divine Essence.
Mehmet Akif Aydın (Freie Universität Berlin) followed with “The Classification of Kashf as a Source of Knowledge in Dāwūd al-Qayşarī’s Thought,” a focused study of the seventh introduction to Qayşarī’s Sharḥ Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam — a text Aydın noted has received little dedicated attention despite Qayşarī’s pivotal role in systematising Akbarian metaphysics within early Ottoman scholarly culture. Qayşarī’s distinction between kashf maʿnawī and kashf ṣūwarī, the latter subdivided into five sensory modalities each anchored in prophetic tradition, was read as an attempt to articulate unveiling not as a purely inward event but as a structured epistemological process with identifiable phenomenological registers.
Omneya Ayad (Institute for Sufi Studies, Üsküdar University) closed the panel with “From Letter to Spirit: The Role of Spiritual Unveiling in Sufi Exegesis,” centred on an unpublished treatise by Rūzbihān al-Baqlī, al-Anwār fī kitāb kashf al-asrār — most probably, Ayad noted, the only independent Sufi treatise devoted solely to establishing the authenticity of kashf. Having traced the case for unveiling as the essential ground of Sufi exegesis against its ẓāhirī critics, the paper turned to the interpretive rule by which Sufi exegetes have historically constrained that ground: where an unveiling contradicts the literal sense of a verse, the literal sense prevails.
Panel Five: Philosophical Frameworks and Practical Implications, Part One
Aiyub Palmer (University of Kentucky) presented “‘The Heart We Mean Is Not the Pinecone Shaped Organ of the Body’: Negotiating the Soul between an Avicennian Spirit/Body Anthropology and the Sufi Barzakh.” Palmer traced the theological precondition for the heart-centred epistemology of Sufism to Ashʿarism’s gradual departure, completed in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, from a metaphysics of bodies and accidents — a shift precipitated by Avicenna’s notion of the soul as distinct from yet connected to the body, itself in productive tension with an earlier Sufi anthropology in al-Tustarī and al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī. The resulting synthesis, normalised through al-Ghazālī, opened the possibility of the intricate moral psychology of the heart on which later Sufi epistemology depends.
Mohammadmahdi Morvarid (Concordia University) followed with “The Diversity of Religious Experience: A Ṣadrāean Perspective with Contemporary Reflections,” reading the gradations of Qurʾanic encounter with the divine — from assent to guidance (28:53), through angelically mediated revelation (2:97), to direct address (7:143) — through Mullā Ṣadrā’s doctrines of graded existence (tashkīk al-wujūd) and substantial motion (al-ḥaraka al-jawhūryya). On this reading the diversity of religious experience reflects real metaphysical distinction rather than merely interpretive variation, supplying a realist alternative to contemporary philosophy of religion’s tendency to reduce such diversity to sociocultural factors.
Panel Six: Philosophical Frameworks and Practical Implications, Part Two
Arif Abdulhussain (Al-Mahdi Institute) presented “The Wish to Be Known: An Existential Reading of Soul and Knowledge in Akbarian and Ṣadrian Thought.” Reading the Prophetic dictum that one who knows his soul knows his Lord through both Qayşarī’s systematisation of Ibn ʿArabī’s waḥdat al-wujūd and Ṣadrā’s existential dynamism, Abdulhussain argued that self-knowledge names not a cognitive achievement but an ontological event: the emergence of the Divine through the realising subject, in fulfilment of the ḥadīth qudsī of the Hidden Treasure. The soul’s interior dividedness, on this account, marks the commencement of divine self-knowing through a locus of genuine otherness, rather than merely a site of moral struggle.
Syed AmirHossein Asghari (Indiana University Bloomington) presented “Fiṭra and Presential Consciousness: Qurʾanic Ways of Knowing Beyond Physicalism,” developing an account of fiṭra as a mode of presential, non-conceptual consciousness distinct from acquired (ḥuṣūlī) cognition. Reading Qurʾanic foundations (30:30; 41:53; 5:105) alongside later discussions of ʿilm al-ḥuḏūrī in Ṣadrā and Ṫabāṭbāʾī, Asghari proposed fiṭra as a disciplined method — purification and remembrance turning consciousness back upon itself — through which divine wisdom (ḥikma) is received, and placed this account in dialogue with non-reductive approaches to consciousness in contemporary philosophy of mind.
Mishaal Javed and Miguel Farias (Coventry University) closed the conference’s final panel with “From Remembrance to Insight: Ḥuḏūr al-Qalb and Baṣīrah in Ṣalāt and Dhikr,” a qualitative study of forty-one practitioners of ṣalāt, dhikr, and mindfulness. Reading participants’ accounts of ḥuḏūr al-qalb against al-Ghazālī’s classical formulations and against neuroimaging comparisons of dhikr and mindfulness meditation, the paper argued that heart-presence functions as an epistemic practice in its own right: a cultivated khushūʿ, mediated by intention, in which insight becomes recognisable through its fruits — bringing classical accounts of yaqīn and baṣīrah into direct conversation with the psychology of religion.
Reflections and Future Directions
Closing remarks were delivered by Dr Zoheir Esmail. Across six panels and twelve papers, the conference traced a single epistemological question through successive frameworks: the philosophical contest between presential and discursive knowledge, the scriptural warrant for experiential states in the Qurʾān and Shīʿī ḥadīth, the historical processes by which “Sufism” itself came to be named and bounded, the Akbarian systematisation of kashf, and the practical and psychological implications of these frameworks for contemporary believers. Across the philosophical, historical, and empirical papers alike, a common concern recurred: that experiential knowledge, whatever its claims to certainty, requires some principle of regulation — whether taqwā, scriptural conformity, institutional licensing, or the discipline of murāqaba — if it is to be distinguished from delusion or exploited authority. The shortlisted papers will be developed into full studies for the forthcoming Brill volume.
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