About AskSufi.

AskSufi is an initiative of Shaykh Humayun Hanif Mujaddidi. Its purpose is to answer the questions that gather around Sufism, and to set the reality of the path apart from the misconceptions that have grown around it.

Every answer here is responded to by the Shaykh, or reviewed under his supervision, drawn from his teaching in the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi tradition.

Why this exists.

Much of what is said about Sufism today is remote from the discipline the early Muslims knew. Orientalist writers shaped a “Modern Sufism” of their own, and others added ideas foreign to Islam, until a great deal of confusion had settled over tasawwuf.

Two errors sit at the centre of it. Some treat Islam as outward practice alone and set the inner life aside; others imagine that the outward law holds no weight and keep only a private spirituality.

The tradition holds both together. Tasawwuf is the inner dimension of Islam, the purification of the heart (tazkiya) that the Prophet ﷺ was sent to teach alongside the Book and the wisdom.

How questions are answered.

Seekers bring real questions about the inner path: a practice, a state of the heart, a difficulty in the way. The answers are given by the Shaykh, or reviewed under his supervision, and grounded in the Qur’an and the Sunnah.

Where a teaching is drawn from his recorded sessions, it is transcribed, translated, and read by a reviewer before it appears here. The Urdu is kept beside the English, because the original carries what a translation cannot always hold.

The path it stands in.

Shaykh Humayun Hanif teaches in the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi order, with authorisation in the Chishtiyya, Qadiriyya, Suhrawardiyya, and Shadhiliyya paths as well. Weekly gatherings of dhikr and lectures on tasawwuf are held at Khanqah-e-Shamsia in Karachi.

Read more about the Shaykh and the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi path.