Politicizing Sufi Ontologies: Ubaidullah Sindhi and Ali Shariati's Articulations of Wahdat ul-Wajud and Tawhid

• In Event: 30612 - Culture I: On the Infrastructures and Politics of Belief

Abstract

How might troubling the analytical separations between the human, the
natural, and the divine allow us to re-imagine the possibility for political liberation
amidst contemporary capitalist catastrophe, ecological destruction, and secular
crises of meaning? Through the writings of twentieth century intellectuals
Ubaidullah Sindhi and Ali Shariati, this paper will offer a few insights to this
provocation. Writing in early twentieth century India, Sindhi explored the political
implications of wahdat ul-wajud, a perspective within Islamic metaphysics that
understands differentiated worldly objects as manifestations of a single, unified
consciousness. Sindhi argued that wahdat ul-wajud not only challenged the
self-other dichotomy undergirding Hindu-Muslim communal violence, but also acted
as a theological basis for the formation of a religiously integrated postcolonial India.
In Iran several decades later, Shariati deployed a related ontological concept in his
critique of capitalism. He saw tawhid not only as a declaration of Islam’s belief in a
monotheistic God, but as a description of the blurred metaphysical separations
between self and other, human and nature, and Creator and creation. Shariati’s
tawhid was not only an ontological description but also a political assertion of
history’s movement towards the destruction of capitalism. In and through
understanding how they used these concepts in their particular contexts, both
scholars demonstrated how seemingly abstracted, ontological accounts of the
relationship between the self, the other, the natural, and the divine within Sufi
metaphysics could be creatively articulated for concrete political projects. I argue
that these political articulations of Islamic ontologies may offer creative theoretical
repertoires for contemporary movements ushering vernacular spiritual idiom into
the realm of liberatory political struggle.

Author

• Sarah Merchant, University of California-Berkeley