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Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism influence on Sufism.

The greatest heresy of Islam was also its greatest gift to humanity: Sufism. The Sufis—those poets of love, those saints of ecstasy, those thinkers of unity—were not faithful jurists of the Qur’an. They were, in spirit and philosophy, crypto-Vedantins and crypto-Buddhists smuggled into Islam. Their metaphysics sounded more like Śaṅkara than like Muhammad, their compassion more like the Buddha than like the sharīʿa. And that is why the jurists persecuted them.

For Islam, in its orthodox and Salafi form, is a legal machine. It thrives on obedience, rules, commands. The Qur’an and ḥadīth are codified into fiqh, a labyrinth of laws binding every corner of life. But Sufism whispered a subversive truth: the law is only a veil, multiplicity an illusion, the self a mirage. Ibn al-ʿArabī called it waḥdat al-wujūd, “the unity of being.” Śaṅkara called it tat tvam asi, “thou art that.” Nāgārjuna called it śūnyatā, the emptiness of self that opens into universal compassion. Rūmī, whirling in ecstasy, sounded less like a Muslim jurist than a Mahāyāna bodhisattva.

This resemblance was not coincidence. Islam, as it expanded into Persia, Central Asia, and India, came face to face with Vedānta and Mahāyāna Buddhism. Al-Bīrūnī described Hindu philosophy with admiration. Prince Dārā Shikōh translated the Upaniṣads into Persian and proclaimed that Sufism and Vedānta were “two oceans mingling.” Sufi saints declared that the divine love was not bounded by creed—an echo of the bodhisattva’s vow to save all beings. Al-Ḥallāj’s Ana al-Ḥaqq was indistinguishable from the Vedāntic declaration of identity with the Absolute. The most daring Sufis were not repeating Qur’anic monotheism; they were reinventing Advaita and Buddhism in Islamic garb.

This was intolerable to the guardians of the law. If the self can dissolve into the Real, then what becomes of legal authority? If compassion is higher than command, why obey the clerics? So the jurists executed them. Mansur al-Ḥallāj was crucified and burned in Baghdad in 922. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī was executed in 1131 for preaching too boldly of divine unity. Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī, philosopher of light, was strangled in Aleppo in 1191 at Saladin’s order. Prince Dārā Shikōh, who dared to compare Islam’s mysticism with the Upaniṣads, was executed by his orthodox brother Aurangzeb in 1659. Again and again, Sufis were branded heretics and killed, because they smelled too much of India and Tibet, too much of Advaita and Mahāyāna.

The persecution of individuals was matched by the persecution of movements. In the eighteenth century, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb declared war on Sufi orders. Shrines were demolished, saints denounced as idols, poetry and music outlawed. Saudi Arabia bulldozed the sacred graves of saints and banned dhikr. The Taliban bombed shrines. ISIS assassinated Sufi sheikhs and massacred worshippers. In 2017, 300 Muslims were slaughtered in a Sufi-associated mosque in Sinai. Wherever Salafism rose, Sufism was hounded, because the Salafis understood instinctively that the dervish who whirls in ecstasy is a greater threat to their empire of law than the atheist.

And yet, outside the Islamic world, it is Sufism that survives. Rūmī is the best-selling poet in America, not because he sounds like a Qur’anic jurist, but because he sounds like Śaṅkara and Nāgārjuna. His reed flute, his lover and beloved, his drop merging into the ocean—these are not Semitic images of a tribal god, they are Indo-Buddhist metaphors of dissolution into the One. The West has embraced what Islam repressed, because it recognizes in Sufism a universal human truth: that love is higher than law, unity greater than obedience.The lesson is as plain as it is incendiary. Sufism was not the heart of Islam—it was its heresy. It was Advaita Vedānta smuggled under Arabic names, Mahāyāna compassion disguised as Islamic devotion. It was the antidote to Salafi legalism, which is why Salafis have always tried to kill it. The true heirs of Rūmī and Ibn al-ʿArabī are not the clerics of Riyadh but the seekers of universal truth everywhere. The greatest heretics of Islam—its crypto-Vedantins, its crypto-Buddhists—are also its only saints worth remembering.
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