Editor’s Preface

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The study of religion has largely worked its way through the positivist and functionalist paradigms that treated mystical claims as objects to be explained away rather than as modalities of knowing in their own right. The recent move across various academic departments — e.g., religious studies, history, anthropology — to engage with and center categories like the supernatural, esotericism, the occult, the weird, and magic as serious topics of inquiry is a welcome development, with parallels in the growing interest among psychologists and other scientists in researching altered mental states and parapsychological phenomena.¹ Scholars such as Jeffrey J. Kripal, Wouter Hanegraaff, Marshall Sahlins, and Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm have persuasively argued that the epistemic parameters established by what we might call “Enlightenment rationality” — which deploys categories like “superstition” and “(dis)enchantment” to adjudicate between knowledge and flights of fancy — are not only contingent, but historically and culturally parochial. ²

It is in this spirit that Nūr: Journal of Sufi Thought and Praxis, an initiative of the Al-Karkari Institute for Sufi Studies, was launched. One of the aims of the journal is to offer another outlet to challenge these same epistemic barricades by providing a forum to study those modalities of knowledge/knowing that define the Islamic philosophical and mystical traditions that broadly fall under the category of Sufism. The academic study of Islam has made tremendous leaps in uncovering the rich intellectual output of this tradition, exposing the limitations of those interpretations of Sufi thought that reduce it to political gestures and paraphernalia, symbolic social capital, and claims to authority — i.e., ideology, sociology, and psychology. But the decolonial move remains incomplete until the academic study of Islam and religion, at the very least, considers the prospects of Sufi epistemologies themselves. Thus, this journal seeks to recover notions such as kashf/mukāshafa (unveiling or disclosure), dhawq (immediate experience), ilhām (inspiration), and ḥads (intuition) as credible and legitimate avenues of knowledge-making — or at least ones that cannot be dismissed a priori. Nūr strives to move beyond Sufism as a mere object of study to a mode of scholarship that looks upwards to the cosmos and inwards to the self. Like most intellectual initiatives, this journal is an experiment in the possibilities and promise that come with carving out new pathways of knowing. The essays in this inaugural volume exemplify the kind of bridges this journal hopes to construct and the methods it is receptive to.

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REFERENCES.

1 Cardeña, Etzel. “A Call for an Open, Informed Study of All Aspects of Consciousness.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (January 27, 2014): 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00017.

2 E.g., Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (University of Chicago Press, 2022); Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism in Western Culture: Counter- Normativity and Rejected Knowledge (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025); Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022); Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).