Sufism as a Normative (or Therapeutic) Humanism

It is helpful to approach tasawwuf (Muslim pietism) as a kind of pre-modern psychology that has both normative and descriptive elements. Psyche-ology is, after all, the science of the soul. The "scientific" aspect of psychology is intended to be purely descriptive (a worthy, if unattainable, ideal). But psychology has never been "purely" descriptive; it has always included a therapeutic aspect, and therapy implies normativity.

One of the main assumptions that underlies tasawwuf is that human beings are works-in-progress. They possess conflicting urges and understandings of themselves and others. They require training in order to become fully or appropriately human beings (this is the normative/therapeutic aspect). Tasawwuf is not only Muslim pietism but also humanistic psychology.

Such an assumption does not fit well with the culture that predominates in the United States. That culture, built upon an assumption of inherent individual rights, proceeds from the proposition that the individual human being enters the world fully developed. All that is necessary for the world to work safely, fairly, and efficiently, is to remove impediments to the free exercise of those inherent rights. It is an interesting vision, but one that invites conflict as each individual struggles to assert his or her "inherent rights," frequently at the expense of those of another. Egotism all too often prevails over the common good.

A thousand years ago, the shaykhs of tasawwuf worked out the details of a different kind of culture: one that seeks to balance individual effort (self-culture) and group dynamics (learning to negotiate the exigencies posed by living in, and committing oneself to, a community).

In the 1950's, Norman O. Brown started his intellectual odyssey with Freud and eventually found his way (in the early 1980's) to explorations of tasawwuf. He was handicapped in those explorations by the relative paucity of material available to him in languages that he could read. Nevertheless, in his brief but intense period of Islamic Studies, he offered new directions to thinking about tasawwuf as a variety of humanism.