Gnostic Christianity vs Sufism

Hey everybody:

Thinking about it, I wonder why the mystical branch of Islam is considered less extremist while Gnostic Christianity seemed so much more extreme, and also so much more extinct. What was it about Sufism that let it stay alive, and why did other Christians persecute gnostic cults to such an extent? What features of Christianity/Islam make them more/less tolerant of heterodox views? Were Muslims just more accepting of syncretic beliefs and unorthodox views? Was it because the Muslim empire overthrew and governed over other religious traditions, whereas Christianity only sprung up after Rome had done its conquering?
 
The first reason is the institutional unicity of Christianism during its history, while Islam was far more diverse.

Long story short, the european realms maintained a theological unicity (with the obvious Latin/Greek rupture) while being quite divided, the Church being considered as a constituing body with its own head.
Christian rulers ended by either supporting the church, or considering it as a subordinated body.

Heresies were then as well threats against maintreasm Christianism than secular power.

In Arabo-Islamic civilisation, religion is far more integrated into politics and institution, molding them more than being molded by. It led Arabo-Islamic rulers being considered either as head of religion (caliphes, and powerful emirs) or at least having a legitimity about favouring some particular school or a personal mix without this being considered as properly heretical (It's a bit more complex, a Shia school could being considered as heretical, while a Shia inspired won't).

Furthermore, as you don't have a clearly unified, institutionalized religion as its own body (being tied to political power), it's harder to define a precise school or current as heretical, and it ends to be considered as heterodoxial or peripherical.
 

karikon

Banned
Islam lacks the centralized clerical hierarchy of the catholic church and orthodox church.This made widespread persecution of religious unorthodoxy harder for Muslims clerics at the time period.
 
The best example of the distinction is the difference between the position of Pope and Caliph.

The Papacy was an office that evolved over time into becoming the per-emininent position in the Latin West from the humble position of one of the five patriarchies as Bishop of Rome. The Papacy wielded some limited temporal power over Constantine's Grant (most famous act of forgery EVER) but for the most part Popes and their subordinates were largely concerned with ecclesiastical matters first. The split between Church hierarchy and lands from feudal ones is another reflection of the nature of the institution's development. Even when you're talking Orthodox Christendom a similar pattern emerged starting with the Patriarch of Constantinople who was, while a secularly-appointed figure, ultimately was a purely spiritual/ecclesiastical office at the top of a Roman-inspired hierarchical system of bishops and archbishops.

The Caliph, by contrast, was the Deputy to the Prophet chosen by the community to lead and up until mid-way through the Abbasid Caiphate they genuinely did. Caliphs weren't just spiritual authorities; they administered cities, commanded armies, and organized one of the largest land empires in human history. As a result they had a LOT more things on their mind than doctrinal purity and as a consequence there was more room for local and regional variance. Case in point: in the Catholic West there were divergent schools of thought that DID sprout up. Those that agreed with Church doctrine (for the most part, see Francis of Assisi) were brought into the fold while those who clashed with it were crushed as heretics. Islam, by contrast, ended up developing at least five different Sunni schools of jurisprudence in this time, the Shi'a were largely tolerated in part because they didn't seek to overthrow or replace the Caliphs with one of their own, and beyond that the Caliphate in these formative years simply had much bigger fish to fry like the intermittent wars along the Byzantine frontier.
 
Islam lacks the centralized clerical hierarchy of the catholic church and orthodox church.This made widespread persecution of religious unorthodoxy harder for Muslims clerics at the time period.
It also helped contribute to Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11.
 
Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam, but it really did not challenge any of the doctrines of the established religion. One can be a Sunni Muslim and still engage in Sufic practices. Other kinds of Islamic mysticism did - like radical Ismailism of the Assassins - and they were treated harshly by the established Muslim orthdoxy just like any of the various other offshoots like the Druze or Alawites who have come out of the Islamic culture, yet are considered to be outside of Islam.

Gnostic Christianity was not a mystical branch of Orthodox Christianity. It was an entirely different religion teaching completely different dogmas that simply used Christian imagery. Jesus was a Jew whose ministry was grounded in Judaism. The Gnostics were Gentiles who believed in non-Jewish beliefs like Aeons, emanations, and a Demiurge. In other words, it was an attempt by non-Christians to hijack the Christian religion. That naturally provoked a harsh response by the Christian establishment. There was plenty of Christian mysticism deemed acceptable by the Church, and they've been the basis of a variety of monastic or lay orders or vocations.
 
Islam lacks the centralized clerical hierarchy of the catholic church and orthodox church.This made widespread persecution of religious unorthodoxy harder for Muslims clerics at the time period.

This is true, but Islam still has a accepted way to interpret Islamic jurisprudence and theology based on the Quran, hadith, sunnas, and fatwas. Even though several schools of Islamic jurisprudence exist, if someone started preaching a strange new version of Islam, the imams are going to start complaining to the Caliphs and sultans fairly quickly.

The Kharajites, Qadaris, certain Shi'ite sects, certain Sufi orders, and other "innovators" were definitely shut down, oppressed, or exiled. So were all of the heretics that rejected the Islam of the Rashiduns after the Prophet Mohammed died during the Ridda Wars. Islam has its own history of religious conflicts just as Christianity does.
 
To begin with, Sufism is emphatically NOT a branch of Islam. It would be tantamount to say that, for example, "theology" is a branch of Christianity.
Sufism is a form of Islamic religious feeling that, as far as I know, appears in most branches (there is Hanafi Sufism, Shafi'i Sufism, Twelver Shi'i Sufism, you name it). Sufism is almost as diverse as Islam itself.
In this sense, Sufism is not really a good comparandum to Christian Gnosis insofar it is more about a particular set of approaches to the Divine than a specific doctrine, or group of doctrines.
That said, it is true that a lot of Sufi teachings (to the limited point they can be brought to someting resembling a coherent whole) show a degree of similarity with some aspects of Gnosis, and in some cases are quite close to gnostic ideas (this includes the very plausible possibility that some strains of Sufism had a direct influence from Christian Gnosticism).
In this, I agree with LSCatilina that the different position of faith and political power in Islam made it much harder to define, let alone suppress, unorthodox views (not that it didn't happen, but it was hardly ever instutionalised) relative to the highly hierarchical and centralized system of most Christian churches.
 
Last edited:
This is true, but Islam still has a accepted way to interpret Islamic jurisprudence and theology based on the Quran, hadith, sunnas, and fatwas. Even though several schools of Islamic jurisprudence exist, if someone started preaching a strange new version of Islam, the imams are going to start complaining to the Caliphs and sultans fairly quickly.

The Kharajites, Qadaris, certain Shi'ite sects, certain Sufi orders, and other "innovators" were definitely shut down, oppressed, or exiled. So were all of the heretics that rejected the Islam of the Rashiduns after the Prophet Mohammed died during the Ridda Wars. Islam has its own history of religious conflicts just as Christianity does.

But not all Caliphs or Sultans were going to listen to such complants. The Fatimids, for example, really tended not to. This could lead to backlashes, and you are right that Islam has a story of internal religious conflicts - a pretty long and convoluted one indeed.
 
Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam, but it really did not challenge any of the doctrines of the established religion. One can be a Sunni Muslim and still engage in Sufic practices. Other kinds of Islamic mysticism did - like radical Ismailism of the Assassins - and they were treated harshly by the established Muslim orthdoxy just like any of the various other offshoots like the Druze or Alawites who have come out of the Islamic culture, yet are considered to be outside of Islam.

Gnostic Christianity was not a mystical branch of Orthodox Christianity. It was an entirely different religion teaching completely different dogmas that simply used Christian imagery. Jesus was a Jew whose ministry was grounded in Judaism. The Gnostics were Gentiles who believed in non-Jewish beliefs like Aeons, emanations, and a Demiurge. In other words, it was an attempt by non-Christians to hijack the Christian religion. That naturally provoked a harsh response by the Christian establishment. There was plenty of Christian mysticism deemed acceptable by the Church, and they've been the basis of a variety of monastic or lay orders or vocations.

This is a fairly good summary. I disagree that the Ismailis were a form of Islamic mysticism (they were perhaps closer to a revolutionary movement) and there were Gnostics who really believed they were being good Christians (too bad their bishops usually disagreed), but in general this is close to the mark.
 
The best example of the distinction is the difference between the position of Pope and Caliph.

The Papacy was an office that evolved over time into becoming the per-emininent position in the Latin West from the humble position of one of the five patriarchies as Bishop of Rome. The Papacy wielded some limited temporal power over Constantine's Grant (most famous act of forgery EVER) but for the most part Popes and their subordinates were largely concerned with ecclesiastical matters first. The split between Church hierarchy and lands from feudal ones is another reflection of the nature of the institution's development. Even when you're talking Orthodox Christendom a similar pattern emerged starting with the Patriarch of Constantinople who was, while a secularly-appointed figure, ultimately was a purely spiritual/ecclesiastical office at the top of a Roman-inspired hierarchical system of bishops and archbishops.

The Caliph, by contrast, was the Deputy to the Prophet chosen by the community to lead and up until mid-way through the Abbasid Caiphate they genuinely did. Caliphs weren't just spiritual authorities; they administered cities, commanded armies, and organized one of the largest land empires in human history. As a result they had a LOT more things on their mind than doctrinal purity and as a consequence there was more room for local and regional variance. Case in point: in the Catholic West there were divergent schools of thought that DID sprout up. Those that agreed with Church doctrine (for the most part, see Francis of Assisi) were brought into the fold while those who clashed with it were crushed as heretics. Islam, by contrast, ended up developing at least five different Sunni schools of jurisprudence in this time, the Shi'a were largely tolerated in part because they didn't seek to overthrow or replace the Caliphs with one of their own, and beyond that the Caliphate in these formative years simply had much bigger fish to fry like the intermittent wars along the Byzantine frontier.

There's also the fact that very often, doctrinal differences coalesced precisely on the point of who was supposed to be the Caliph. The Caliphate itself can be partly seen as a product of doctrinal conflict, among other things.
 
The Kharajites, Qadaris, certain Shi'ite sects, certain Sufi orders, and other "innovators" were definitely shut down, oppressed, or exiled.

Which was largely on a case by case basis and less due to theological conflicts and more due to political ones. The Kharajites effectively declared war on all other Muslims who disagreed with them from the outset (not unlike the modern Wahhabis), Shi'a sects experienced varying degrees of persecution depending on the period with less under the Abbasids, more under the Ummayads, and more under the Ottomans again depending on how much of a challenge to the established hierarchy they were with the case of the Ottomans being the presence of Safavid, Shi'a Iran as an immediate rival reaching out to Shi'a populations in the Empire. The Mu'tazila school, for example, was tolerated and flourished during the Abbasids with a fairly radical message that was also quite accommodating to the existing establishment.

The Isma'ili sects were another situation as they were often more revolutionary in nature and intent compared to most Sufi or Shi'a populations and offshoots like the Druze had broken away from Islam of their own volition. Christendom, by contrast, was absolutely brutal in dealing with heresy crushing the Lollards, the Waldensians, the Cathars, the Hussites, and a bunch of others less because they were calling for an overthrow of the existing order and more for pointing out serious problems in how the Church was doing business in that day and age. The Lollards, Hussites, and Waldensians were ultimately going for major reforms in the Church that would have still left the ecclesiastical hierarchy in place in some way or another and didn't start out violent which stands in stark contrast to the Isma'ili and Kharajites who weren't shy about starting fights from the get-go as befit their more temporally-rooted concerns.

Blackfox5 said:
So were all of the heretics that rejected the Islam of the Rashiduns after the Prophet Mohammed died during the Ridda Wars. Islam has its own history of religious conflicts just as Christianity does.

Which was less rooted in religion and more rooted in politics, again. Many of the tribes that broke away during the Ridda Wars did so on the grounds they were sworn to Muhammad himself, not to his deputy and successor. What was done during the Ridda Wars doesn't rise much above the norm for pre-Muslim Arabian tribal warfare and doesn't come close to ringing the same bell the Albigensian Crusade did ie, "Kill them all and let God sort it out."
 
Top