---
domain: architecture
tags: [harmonism, civilizational-diagnosis, islam, muslim-world, sufism, modernity, dharma, wahhabism, salafism, severance]
content_layer: bridge
doctrinal_status: clear
breadth: substantial
depth: developed
craft: clean
published: "2026-05-17"
---

# The Hollowing of the Muslim Soul

*Civilizational diagnosis. See also: [[The Sufi Cartography of the Soul]], [[The Five Cartographies of the Soul]], [[Religion and Harmonism]], [[The Hollowing of the West]], [[The Spiritual Crisis]].*

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A civilization can lose its body and keep its soul; it can also keep its body and lose its soul. The Muslim world today has lost neither completely — but the asymmetry between what it inherits and what it currently transmits is severe across many of its territories, and the severance has a specific shape that the broader diagnosis of religious modernity has not fully named at the level of operational consequence for the Muslim seeker.

The inheritance is enormous. The Qurʾanic revelation, the Prophetic *sunna*, the *fiqh* tradition, the philosophical inheritance from al-Kindī through al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, Ibn Rushd, al-Ṭūsī, and Mullā Ṣadrā, the *kalām* of al-Ashʿarī, al-Māturīdī, and the later schools, the spiritual science of *taṣawwuf* — al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī, Rūmī, al-Shādhilī, al-Sirhindī, Shah Walī Allāh, Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh, Aḥmad al-Tijānī — and the unbroken chains of transmission (*silsila*) reaching back to the Prophet through fourteen centuries: this constitutes one of the deepest civilizational inheritances any tradition has been given. The masters span the entire *umma*. Al-Ghazālī was Persian, Ibn Sīnā was Persian, Rūmī was Persian writing in Persian and Arabic, Ibn ʿArabī was Andalusi-Arab, al-Sirhindī was Indian, Niasse was Senegalese-Mauritanian, Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband was Central Asian Tajik, al-Bukhārī was Central Asian, al-Tirmidhī was Central Asian, Aḥmad al-Tijānī was Algerian. Arabic is the sacred-language vehicle of revelation and *fiqh*; the practitioners and masters who carry the tradition span every region the *umma* has reached. [[The Sufi Cartography of the Soul]] articulates the cartography itself — the seven stations of the *nafs*, the *latāʾif*, the methods of *dhikr* and *murāqaba*, the horizon of *fanāʾ* and *baqāʾ*, the *insān kāmil*. The cartography is real, native to the Muslim inheritance, and one of the most thoroughly mapped interior anatomies in the human record.

What the Muslim today encounters when they encounter Islam is, in many institutional settings, something else. They encounter, depending on where they are, a religion of juridical observance shorn of contemplative depth, or a religion of identity-and-grievance shorn of practice, or a religion of state-managed bureaucratic conformity, or a religion of secular cultural-residue without operative metaphysics, or a religion under active state-secularist suppression, or a religion of literalist reformism that declares its own contemplative inheritance heretical. The cartography is not what most Muslims encounter as Islam. What most encounter is its outer shell — the form without the path the form was built to vehicle. This is the hollowing.

The diagnosis applies at differential intensity across the Muslim civilizational landscape. It is most acute in the Arabic-civilizational orbit (Maghreb to Gulf), where the Wahhabi-Salafi rupture originated and the post-Ottoman political fracture cut deepest. It was inflicted with comparable severity but differently shaped in the post-Atatürk Turkic track, where state secularism severed institutional Sufism by direct legal ban for over half a century. It was imposed at scale across the Soviet-secularized regions of Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Volga-Ural, and the formerly socialist Balkans, where seventy years of communist anti-religious policy produced its own version of the severance. It operates in different registers in South Asian Sunni Islam, where a tripartite contest between Barelvi traditionalism, Deobandi reformism, and Salafi-Wahhabi penetration shapes the contemporary religious landscape. It is differently configured in Indonesian-Malay Islam, where the Nahdlatul Ulama tradition has resisted the Wahhabi pull more successfully than most. It runs along its own track in Sub-Saharan African Islam, where the Tijānī mass tradition of West Africa, the Qādirī tradition of East Africa, and other lineages have preserved the cartography at scale. It is differently positioned in Iranian Shia Islam, where the *ʿirfān* tradition within the post-1979 Islamic Republic carries paradoxes the Sunni regions do not face. The condition is one phenomenon at the *umma*-wide level. The mechanisms and intensities vary by region.

The Muslim seeking the depth of their inheritance — Amazigh-speaking Moroccan in the Boutchichiyya, Urdu-speaking Pakistani Chishti aspirant, Kurdish Naqshbandi-Khalidi practitioner, Hui Chinese descendant of the Naqshbandi-Khufiyya line, Bosnian Mevlevi initiate, Senegalese Tijānī under Niasse, Hadhrami in the Bā ʿAlawī, Wolof in the Mouride tradition, Bengali Barelvi, Maghrebi diasporic in Paris encountering the Tijānī *zawiya* — faces the same structural question with regional variations: where does the depth live, why is it institutionally embattled, and how does one find or rebuild access to it.

Five compounding vectors of severance shape the contemporary condition: Wahhabi-Salafi reformist rupture, post-Ottoman and post-imperial political fracture, colonial-modernist overlay, communist secularization, and late-modern reconfiguration through 1979 and after. They operate at differential intensity across the major Muslim civilizational tracks. They make the Muslim case structurally distinct from the Western. And they shape the recovery path the *umma*'s own surviving resources permit — the lineages still living across multiple regions, the substrate preserved where institutional and political conditions allowed, the articulation through which the cartography can be re-encountered when the institutional vessels are out of reach.

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## I. The Inheritance

To diagnose the hollowing requires first naming what was filled. Muslim civilization, at its operating peak between roughly the eighth and seventeenth centuries, transmitted four interlocking forms of knowledge that together constituted one of the most comprehensive civilizational architectures ever assembled.

The first was the *exoteric*: the Qurʾan as recited revelation, the Prophetic *sunna* as embodied exemplar, *fiqh* as the juridical structure of communal life, *kalām* as the dialectical defense of the creed against philosophical challenge. This dimension is the one that survives most visibly in contemporary mainstream Muslim life. It is real, it is necessary, and it is not the whole.

The second was the *intellectual*: a philosophical tradition running from the Greek and Indo-Iranian inheritances through al-Kindī, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, Ibn Rushd, al-Ṭūsī, Mullā Ṣadrā — a tradition whose high-period work would become foundational for European scholasticism through Latin translation. This dimension was largely suppressed in the post-Ghazālian Sunni Arab world, survived more vigorously in the Persian-Shia tradition through the Isfahan school and the *ḥikma* lineage continuing into the present, and exists today in Sunni regions primarily as object of historical scholarship rather than as living inquiry.

The third was the *contemplative*: *taṣawwuf*, the science of interior purification, organized through the *ṭuruq* (orders) and transmitted through the *silsila*. [[The Sufi Cartography of the Soul]] articulates this at depth: the seven stations of the *nafs*, the *latāʾif* of the subtle anatomy, the operative methods of *dhikr*, *murāqaba*, *muḥāsaba*, and the terminal horizon of *fanāʾ* and *baqāʾ*. This is the dimension that has been most actively severed in the modern era and whose absence most defines the present hollowing across most Muslim regions.

The fourth was the *integrative*: the institutional architecture that held the three previous dimensions together — the *madrasa* system that transmitted classical learning, the *zāwiya* and *tekke* that housed contemplative practice, the *waqf* (religious endowment) system that provided material support across centuries, the relationship between rulers and *ʿulamāʾ* that maintained the tension between political power and religious authority. This integrative architecture was the connective tissue. Without it, the three knowledge forms become disconnected fragments. Most of this architecture was destroyed, nationalized, or radically reconfigured during the long twentieth century — by Wahhabi state-violence in the Hijaz, by Atatürk's secularist legislation in Turkey, by Arab nationalist *waqf* dissolution, by Soviet anti-religious campaigns in Central Asia and the Caucasus, by socialist atheism in the Balkans, by Cultural Revolution destruction in Hui Muslim China, by colonial-modernist administrative reorganization across the dependent territories. What remains is partial, instrumentalized, and in many places hostile to its own deepest content.

The contemporary Muslim today inherits the *exoteric* form intact in most regions, the *intellectual* form as historical museum (Iranian Shia exception), the *contemplative* form fragmented and embattled at differential intensity by region, and the *integrative* architecture largely dissolved. What was a civilizational whole is now, across most of the *umma*, a hollowed shell with surviving fragments of depth visible to those who know where to look.

## II. The Wahhabi-Salafi Rupture

The first and deepest cut in the modern severance was inflicted by the movement that emerged from central Arabia in the eighteenth century around Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792). [[The Sufi Cartography of the Soul]] treats the structural mechanism in detail; the diagnostic point here concerns the rupture's character and its global reach.

Wahhabism was not a theological disagreement framed in scholarly language. It was a programmatic assault on the contemplative tradition, conducted with state power, executed through violence, and exported globally through petro-state finance. When Wahhabi forces, allied with the House of Saud, conquered the Hijaz between 1803 and 1925, they did not debate the Sufi orders — they destroyed them. The shrines of saints were razed across the peninsula. The cemetery of al-Baqīʿ in Medina, containing the graves of the Prophet's family and the earliest companions, was leveled in 1925, with Saudi forces returning to complete the destruction in 1926. The Jannat al-Muʿallā cemetery in Mecca, where the Prophet's mother was buried, was similarly destroyed. The *ṭuruq* operating in the Hijaz were closed, their masters expelled or killed, their *awrād* (litanies) banned, their methods declared *bidʿa* and *shirk* — innovation and idolatry, the gravest charges Islamic theology can level.

This was the inaugural pattern. The contemplative was framed as un-Islamic and erased through institutional violence. The framing was theological; the mechanism was force. By the late twentieth century, the export of this framing through Saudi-funded *madrasas*, publications, preachers, mosques, and student-scholarships across the Muslim world had reconfigured the global Islamic conversation. A movement that had been a marginal eighteenth-century desert reformism became, through the leverage of post-1973 oil revenue, the dominant institutional voice claiming to speak for "authentic" Islam from Morocco to Indonesia. The reach was effectively global. South Asian *madāris* on the Saudi model, Indonesian Salafi networks contesting the NU establishment, West African Salafi-jihadist movements challenging the Tijānī mass tradition, Bosnian Salafi influence after the 1992–95 war, post-Soviet Caucasian Wahhabism funded through Gulf NGOs, Filipino Mindanao Salafi movements — each represents the export of the original Arabian rupture into a different civilizational track, with differential effects on the local contemplative inheritance.

A generation raised within the Salafi frame in any of these regions inherits a religion in which the contemplative cartography is not merely absent but actively suspect. Veneration of saints is *shirk*. The *ṭuruq* are *bidʿa*. Claims of spiritual transmission outside the literal text are presumed fraudulent. The interior science the masters mapped over a millennium is rendered, in this frame, either heretical or impossible. The cartography continues to exist; the institutional framing within which much of contemporary Muslim youth encounters Islam denies that the cartography even is what it claims to be. This is more than severance. It is severance accompanied by the assertion that nothing was severed — that what was destroyed was never genuine in the first place. The Wahhabi-Salafi vector is the spine of the global hollowing because it operates at the level of religious-institutional legitimacy, declaring what counts as Islam and what does not, and what counts as Islam in this frame excludes the cartography by definition.

## III. The Post-Ottoman Fracture and the Atatürk Severance

In 1924, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the Ottoman caliphate. This was not a Turkish event. It was the dissolution of the political form that had embodied the *umma*'s integrative unity for thirteen centuries. The Ottoman caliphate was not always strong, was sometimes nominal, was sometimes contested — but it existed. In 1924, it ceased to exist, and what replaced it was nothing.

For the Arab-speaking Muslim world, the replacement was the system of European-imposed mandates and post-mandate states established at Sykes-Picot (1916), San Remo (1920), and the subsequent Mandate decisions. The Arab world was divided into territories — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine, Egypt nominally independent under British supervision, the Hijaz consolidated under Saudi rule — whose borders had been drawn by European powers serving European interests. None of these states corresponded to any pre-existing political form. Their populations had to construct national identities from scratch within colonial parameters. The Arab nationalist project across the twentieth century — Baathism in Syria and Iraq, Nasserism in Egypt, the FLN in Algeria, Bourguiba's Neo-Destour in Tunisia — sought to construct a secular Arab modernity in which religious authority would be subordinated to the nation-state. The *waqf* system, which had provided endowed material support for *zāwiyat*, *madāris*, and Sufi *ṭuruq* for a millennium, was nationalized or dismantled across most of the Arab world during the twentieth century. In Egypt, the Nasser regime nationalized the *awqāf* in the 1950s. In Tunisia, Bourguiba dissolved them in the 1950s and 1960s. In Algeria after independence, similar measures followed. The financial substrate that had sustained contemplative practice across centuries was dissolved within a single generation.

For Turkey itself, the post-Ottoman trajectory was more violent and more total. Atatürk's 1925 Law No. 677 banned all Sufi orders, closed every *tekke* and *zāwiya* across the Turkish republic, prohibited the use of Sufi titles (*ṣūfī*, *darvīsh*, *çelebi*), banned the wearing of distinctive religious dress, and made membership in any *ṭarīqa* a criminal offense. The Mevlevi order — the order of Rūmī, with its center at Konya, transmitting one of the most refined contemplative traditions in any civilization — was outlawed. The Bektashi tradition, deeply integrated with the Janissary corps and Anatolian popular religion for five centuries, was outlawed. The Naqshbandiyya, the Khalwatiyya, the Qādiriyya, every active *ṭarīqa* in the Turkish lands was forced underground. The Hagia Sophia was museumified in 1934. The *ʿulamāʾ* establishment was dissolved and replaced by a state Religious Affairs Directorate (*Diyanet*) under direct cabinet authority. Arabic script was replaced with Latin in 1928, severing the next generations from direct access to the classical religious-philosophical-Sufi inheritance.

The contemplative tradition in Turkey did not die. It went underground for fifty-five years. Naqshbandi networks transmitted in private homes, in coded language, through family lines that maintained the *silsila* without public *ṭarīqa* form. The Mevlevi tradition was preserved by individual *postnishin* shaykhs and a handful of practitioners across decades when public *samāʿ* (the whirling ceremony) was illegal. From 1980 forward — under the post-coup political-economic restructuring and increasingly under Özal and Erdoğan's governments — the prohibitions were progressively relaxed and Sufi institutions returned to public life. But the recovered tradition was not identical to what had been suppressed. Fifty-five years of underground operation, partial transmission, and selective survival had produced a different shape. The contemporary Turkish Sufi landscape includes the surviving classical lineages, the Erdoğan-era political-Islamist religious revival (which is not synonymous with the Sufi inheritance and in some respects has its own tensions with classical *ṭarīqa* practice), and various contemporary figures whose claims to the *silsila* span the genuine to the dubious. Turkey's case demonstrates that a contemplative tradition can survive direct legal suppression for half a century, but the survival is bought at a cost the tradition will continue to pay for generations.

## IV. The Colonial-Modernist Overlay

Compounding the post-Ottoman and post-imperial fractures was the colonial-modernist overlay imposed across Muslim-majority territories from the late nineteenth century forward. The British in India (consolidated from 1857), Egypt (from 1882), Iraq (from 1920), and across the Gulf and Malaya. The French in Algeria (from 1830), Tunisia (from 1881), Morocco (from 1912), and Syria-Lebanon (from 1920). The Dutch in the East Indies (from the seventeenth century, intensifying in the nineteenth). The Italians in Libya (from 1911) and briefly in Somalia. The Russians, then Soviets, in Central Asia and the Caucasus from the eighteenth century onward, with the Soviet phase representing a categorically different mechanism treated separately below. Each colonial regime brought its own institutional and intellectual architecture, but each produced a comparable result: the formation of a local elite educated in European frames and operating within institutional structures designed to integrate the colonized population into European-then-American economic and security systems.

This elite became the engine of post-independence state-building. Atatürk's republican modernization in Turkey, Bourguiba's domestication of Tunisian Islam, Nasser's instrumentalization of al-Azhar, the Pahlavi dynasty's modernization in Iran, Sukarno's secular nationalism in Indonesia, Jinnah's lawyer-modernist Pakistan, the FLN technocracy in Algeria — these were the products of European-modernist education applying European-modernist categories to the reorganization of formerly Ottoman or formerly colonized Muslim societies. Their religious policy ranged from Atatürk's frontal assault to Bourguiba's controlled secularization to Nasser's instrumentalization to Sukarno's Pancasila pluralism to the Pahlavi promotion of pre-Islamic Persian identity. The common feature was that religious authority, including contemplative religious authority, was made to serve the modernizing nation-state's project, not the other way around.

Within this configuration, the religious-reformist projects that emerged from each region occupy specific structural positions. In Egypt and the Arab Mashriq, the *Salafiyya* current of Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) and Rashīd Riḍā (1865–1935) sought a synthesis of Islamic learning with Western rationalism, defending Islam against Orientalist critique while modernizing its juridical and intellectual practice; the trajectory across the twentieth century was not synthesis but progressive convergence with the harder Salafism emerging from the Arabian peninsula. In British India, Sayyid Ahmad Khan founded Aligarh Muslim University in 1875 on rationalist-modernist lines, while the Dār al-ʿUlūm Deoband (founded 1866) pursued classical-traditionalist preservation with Salafi-leaning theological positions, and the Barelvi movement (Aḥmad Riḍā Khān Barelvī, late nineteenth century) defended the contemplative-veneration tradition against the Deobandi-Salafi current. In the Dutch East Indies, the *Muhammadiyah* (1912) emerged as modernist-reformist and the *Nahdlatul Ulama* (1926) as traditional-Sufi-resistant — the most institutionally successful traditional defense of contemplative tradition in any modern Muslim region, owing partly to colonial-Dutch policy that stayed largely uninvolved with internal Muslim institutional life. In Persia, Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941) imposed an aggressive secular modernization including the forced unveiling of women in 1936 and the suppression of Sufi orders, but the *ʿirfān* tradition within Shia *ḥawza* networks (especially in Najaf and Qom) maintained its institutional integrity through the period because of its embedding in Shia clerical training rather than in independent *ṭarīqa* structures.

The result across the colonial-modernist landscape was a religious topology in which the Muslim seeking depth was offered a constrained menu: state-bureaucratic Islam compromised by its instrumentalization, Salafi-reformist Islam excluding the contemplative tradition by ideological commitment, modernist-rationalist Islam concerned more with apologetics than with depth, and the increasingly attenuated *ṭarīqa* tradition operating under pressure from the others. The specific configurations varied — Indonesian NU more preserved than Egyptian Sufism, South Asian Barelvi more populist than Maghrebi tariqa-aristocracy, Turkish recovered Sufism politically charged in ways the West African Tijānī mass is not — but the structural pattern obtained across the colonial-modernist territories with depth-loss as the common consequence.

## V. The Communist Severance

A categorically different mechanism operated across the Muslim populations under twentieth-century communist regimes. From 1917 in the formerly Russian-imperial territories and 1945–67 in the Balkans, Muslim communities experienced sustained state-secularist anti-religious campaigns whose scale and duration exceeded any other vector in the modern history of Islam.

In the Soviet Union, the period from 1925 through 1941 saw the systematic dismantling of Muslim institutional life across Central Asia (Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Turkmen, Kyrgyz Soviet republics), the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia), the Volga-Ural region (Tatar and Bashkir lands), and Crimea. The *Hujum* campaign (1927–1941) targeted Muslim women's veiling through coordinated state mobilization. Mosques were closed at scale — by some estimates, of approximately 26,000 mosques operating in 1917, fewer than 1,000 remained legally functioning by 1941. The *madrasa* system was effectively destroyed. *Waqf* properties were nationalized. The Stalin purges of 1936–1939 executed Muslim scholars, Sufi shaykhs, and traditional jurists in the thousands. The Bukharan and Samarkand traditions of classical Islamic learning, which had been continuous transmission centers for over a millennium, were broken. The Naqshbandi tradition in Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan went underground; the so-called "underground Naqshbandiyya" (*Naqshbandiyya-i Khufiyya* in some accounts) maintained operational transmission through coded teaching, family-line transmission, and informal *zikr* circles in private homes for decades.

After the Second World War the Soviet regime relaxed its most violent anti-religious posture but maintained tight institutional control. A small number of state-approved mosques and one *madrasa* (Mir-i Arab in Bukhara) operated under direct supervision. The Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Central Asia, headquartered in Tashkent, served as the institutional channel through which acceptable Islam was permitted to function. Outside this framework, religious practice was either underground or illegal. The Muslim populations of the Soviet Union experienced seventy years of this configuration. By 1991, the institutional damage was profound — generations had grown up without classical religious education, the *silsila* transmissions had become attenuated, and the surviving traditions operated on reduced foundations.

Post-Soviet recovery has been uneven and largely state-controlled. Karimov's Uzbekistan banned non-state Islam outright; tens of thousands of Muslims were imprisoned for unauthorized religious practice. Tajikistan after its civil war (1992–1997) imposed similar restrictions. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan permitted somewhat broader practice but under tight state oversight. The Caucasus saw distinct trajectories: post-Soviet Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov has promoted a state-aligned version of the Qādirī tradition (descended from Kunta-Hajji Kishiev's nineteenth-century lineage) while suppressing Salafi and unaffiliated Islamic practice. Dagestan has the densest concentration of post-Soviet Sufi recovery in the Russian Federation, with Naqshbandi-Shadhili lineages under Said Afandi al-Chirkawi (assassinated 2012) and his successors maintaining transmission while contesting Salafi-jihadist insurgency. The Volga-Ural Tatar tradition, including the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi line through such figures as Zaynullah Rasuli (d. 1917), survives on a reduced base.

A parallel pattern operated across the formerly socialist Balkans. Hoxha's Albania declared itself the world's first atheist state in 1967 and outlawed all religion. The 1,608 mosques, *tekkes*, and churches operating in 1967 were closed. The Bektashi headquarters, Albania's distinctive contribution to the global Sufi heritage and the Bektashi center for the world, was shuttered; the Bektashi tradition survived primarily in diaspora. Bosnian Muslims under Yugoslav socialism experienced a less violent but still constrained religious life; their tradition recovered institutional presence after 1991, though the 1992–95 war produced its own distortions including the entry of Saudi-funded Salafi networks during and after the war. Kosovar and Macedonian Muslim communities faced comparable conditions. Across the Balkans, the Sufi tradition (Naqshbandi, Khalwatī, Bektashi especially) survived but on reduced foundations.

The Chinese case represents a structurally analogous severance vector with distinct regional features. The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) destroyed Hui Chinese-Muslim heritage at scale: mosques shuttered or repurposed, *imāms* forced into manual labor, classical texts destroyed, the Naqshbandi-Khufiyya and Naqshbandi-Jahriyya traditions of the Northwest Hui regions severely damaged. Recovery from 1978 forward proceeded with state oversight but allowed reconstruction. The contemporary Xinjiang situation (intensifying from 2014–2017) represents a different configuration — direct state assault on Uyghur religious practice through mass internment, *madrasa* closures, mosque demolitions, and forced cultural assimilation — with consequences for the Uyghur Naqshbandi-Khufiyya tradition that may rival the Soviet 1930s in eventual scale.

The communist severance differs from the Wahhabi-Salafi rupture in mechanism — secular-atheist state violence rather than religious-reformist institutional pressure — but produces a comparable result. The contemplative cartography is severed from accessible institutional life; surviving lineages operate underground or at the margins; recovery requires reconstruction from reduced foundations. The post-communist generation in Central Asia, the Balkans, and Hui China inherits a religious tradition whose contemplative depth requires deliberate seeking against institutional headwinds different from but structurally analogous to those facing the Sunni Arab Salafi-frame inheritor.

## VI. The Late Modern Reconfiguration

Four hinge events of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries each compounded the severance globally, producing the configuration the contemporary Muslim worldwide inherits.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution introduced revolutionary Shia Islamism as a major regional force and triggered Saudi Arabia's response: an acceleration of global Wahhabi export to counter Iranian influence, financed by post-1973 oil revenue. The next four decades saw Saudi-funded *madrasas*, mosques, publications, and preachers spread across the Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia, embedding Salafi assumptions into institutional Islam at scale never before possible. The Sufi orders, caught between Sunni-Salafi and Shia-revolutionary poles neither of which had cartographic depth as central commitment, lost institutional space across the entire Sunni world. The competition between Tehran and Riyadh for the *umma*'s allegiance was not a contest between two contemplative traditions; it was a contest between two political-revolutionary frameworks each of which marginalized the cartographic dimension in different ways.

The 1979–1989 Soviet-Afghan War provided the operational vehicle for the militarization of the Salafi current. The Saudi-American-Pakistani partnership that funded, armed, and ideologically shaped the *mujāhidīn* produced a generation of fighters trained in a Salafi-jihadist register, with Pakistani Deobandi *madāris* providing much of the ideological infrastructure. The earlier synthesis of warrior tradition with contemplative authority — Imam Shamil of Dagestan in the nineteenth century operating from a Naqshbandi-Khalidi base, ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī's anti-French resistance grounded in Akbarian metaphysics, the Mahdi of Sudan within a Sufi-reformist frame, the Ottoman *Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya*'s defense of Anatolia, the Chechen Sufi resistance of Kunta-Hajji and his successors — was structurally absent from the new global jihadism, in which the Salafi rejection of Sufism was constitutive. Combat tradition that had once been one register of contemplative civilizational defense became something else: an ideologically literalist movement whose theology of action was structurally unable to articulate the cartography it had cut itself off from. Post-Afghan-war exports — al-Qaeda, the Algerian Civil War 1990s, the spread of Salafi-jihadism through Bosnia, the Caucasus, Yemen, and eventually ISIS — represent the diffusion of this configuration.

The Arab Spring of 2010–2012 and its failure marked the political exhaustion of the available Arab-civilizational political vocabularies. The brief flowering of hope in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain dissolved into civil war, military coup, or counter-revolutionary restoration. The contemplative question — what would a renewed Muslim civilizational order serve, and on what spiritual ground — was not asked at the level of mass political consciousness, because the categories available were liberal-democratic, Islamist (in Brotherhood-electoral or Salafi-militant variants), or military-secularist. None of these categories operates from a register at which the cartography of the soul is the ground of political form. The Arab Spring's failure was not principally the failure of liberalism or of Islamism. It was the failure of any available political vocabulary to articulate what a Muslim civilization renewed at depth would actually be.

ISIS (2014–2019) and its global recruitment constituted the terminal expression of the late-modern Salafi-jihadist trajectory. A movement declaring a caliphate, executing Sufis publicly, destroying the shrines of Yūnus and other Prophets in Mosul, demolishing the al-Qubba al-Khaḍrāʾ in Aleppo, dynamiting the temple of Bel and the Arch of Triumph at Palmyra, exporting terrorism globally and recruiting fighters from every Muslim-majority country and from Western diasporas. ISIS was destroyed militarily, but the conditions that produced it were not reversed. Salafi-jihadism remains the most globally recognizable form of Islam to most Western observers — which produced the post-9/11 securitization that further constrained Muslim religious life everywhere. Every Muslim-majority country and most Western states with Muslim populations now operate within a counter-terror security architecture in which religious institutions are surveilled, religious authority is co-opted into "moderate Islam" frameworks compliant with state and Western security interests, and the Sufi orders — which the security state often nominally favors as moderate alternatives to Salafism — find themselves instrumentalized by the very state apparatus that originally suppressed them. Instrumentalization is not preservation. A *ṭarīqa* whose existence is permitted because it serves the security state's narrative is not a *ṭarīqa* operating in the integrative architecture the contemplative tradition requires. It is something else, wearing the form.

The Chinese state's intensifying repression of Uyghur Muslims from 2017 forward — mass internment, forced cultural assimilation, mosque demolitions, restrictions on religious practice extending to the Hui regions and to other Muslim minorities — represents the contemporary frontier of the state-secularist severance pattern, operating now under Xi Jinping's hardened Sinicization policy.

## VII. The Differential Picture

The compounding vectors do not affect every Muslim region equally. Mapping the differential intensity is essential for the practitioner: the lineages still living, the substrates still preserved, the conditions for recovery vary by region, and the operational specifics of the recovery path differ accordingly.

**Most severely hollowed at the institutional level**: Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (institutional Salafi-Wahhabi dominance, Sufi tradition operating only under tight constraints when permitted at all), post-Asad Syria (the Damascus and Aleppo Sufi networks devastated by the war), Iraq's Sunni regions (decades of war and Salafi-jihadist destruction), Soviet-era Central Asia (institutional Islam shattered for seventy years, recovery state-controlled), post-2014 Xinjiang (active repression of Hui and Uyghur Muslim institutional life), Hoxha-era Albania before 1991 (total atheist-state suppression, partial recovery since).

**Severe but with significant survival**: Egypt (state-bureaucratic Islam plus Salafi pressure, but al-Azhar's post-2013 defense of the Sufi tradition and the surviving Sayyid al-Badawī, Naqshbandī-Khalwatī, and Shādhilī-Yashruṭī networks remain institutionally active), the Maghreb outside Morocco (Algeria's Sufi tradition under FLN pressure but partially recovering, Tunisia's tradition damaged by Bourguiba), much of post-Atatürk Turkey before the 1980 recovery, Wahhabi-penetrated regions of South Asia, Bosnia after the 1992–95 war.

**Substantial preservation**: Morocco (the most preserved Sufi-Maliki substrate in the Arab world, with the Boutchichiyya, Tijāniyya, Shādhiliyya, Darqāwiyya, and other orders institutionally living), Mauritania (the *Maḥāḍir* of the Trārza and Adrar regions transmitting both classical jurisprudence and Sufi cartographic practice), Indonesia within the NU institutional structure (the world's largest Sunni traditional organization, ~95 million affiliates, preserving classical Shafi'i fiqh integrated with Sufi tradition through the *pesantren* network), Pakistan within the Barelvi mass (the largest Sunni populist tradition defending contemplative-veneration practice), West African Tijānī through the Niasse line (tens of millions of practitioners across Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, and the West African diaspora), Senegalese Mouride (Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba's distinctive tradition, deeply embedded in Senegalese national identity), the Bā ʿAlawī networks centered on Tarim in Yemen and globally distributed.

**Distinct track preserved**: Iranian Shia *ʿirfān* within the post-1979 Islamic Republic. The configuration is paradoxical. The Islamic Republic is a state-theocratic regime whose foreign policy is regional-revolutionary and whose internal political life is contested. But its institutional preservation of the classical *ḥikma* tradition (Mullā Ṣadrā's *al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya*, the Isfahan school, contemporary figures like Hasan Hasan Zadeh Amoli, the late Allameh Tabatabaei whose *Tafsīr al-Mīzān* and *ʿirfān* writings remain foundational, Ayatollah Khomeini's own *ʿirfān* training under Mirza Mohammad Ali Shahabadi) is, in raw scholarly-institutional terms, more robust than the corresponding philosophical-mystical preservation in most Sunni regions. The state's Shia identity has produced a configuration in which the philosophical-mystical inheritance is institutionally protected (in the *ḥawza* training in Qom and Mashhad, the *taʾwīl* tradition of the *ahl al-bayt*, the contemporary publishing of classical *ʿirfān* texts) while the political consequences of the regime's other policies remain contested. For the practitioner concerned with the cartography itself, the Iranian Shia track has preserved more than most Sunni regions, even as its political configuration produces distortions of its own.

The differential picture matters because it reframes the recovery question. The question is not "is Islam hollowed?" but "where is the cartography accessible to me, given my regional and civilizational location?" The Maghrebi practitioner has different proximate access points than the South Asian Barelvi inheritor than the Indonesian NU member than the Bosnian recovering Naqshbandi than the Iranian *ʿirfān* student. The structural diagnosis is one; the operational paths are differentiated.

## VIII. The Asymmetry with Western Severance

[[The Hollowing of the West]] traces the analogous condition in Western civilization — the institutions standing, the substance evacuated. The asymmetry between the Western and Muslim hollowings must be marked precisely, because conflating them produces analytical error and forecloses the recovery paths each civilization actually requires.

Western severance has been largely passive. Nominalism's late-medieval severing of universals from reality, the Reformation's rejection of contemplative monasticism, the Enlightenment's reduction of religion to private opinion, the secular drift of late modernity — each was a slow philosophical and institutional movement, often without dramatic violence, in which the contemplative was marginalized and forgotten rather than actively destroyed. The Hesychast tradition continued unbroken on Mount Athos. The Carmelite tradition continued through Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and their successors into the present. The Cistercian, the Trappist, the Quaker contemplative, the Anglican mystic — all survived. A Western seeker today has paths. The paths require initiative to find, but they exist, they are stably institutional, and they are not under active assault from the religious establishment of the seeker's own civilization.

Muslim severance has been largely active. Wahhabi-Salafi destruction of shrines and *ṭuruq* over two centuries, Atatürk's direct legal ban on all Sufi orders for fifty-five years, Soviet anti-religious campaigns across Central Asia and the Caucasus for seventy years, Hoxha's total atheist-state suppression in Albania, Cultural Revolution destruction in Hui China and ongoing Xinjiang repression, the post-1979 reconfiguration that pinched the surviving Sunni lineages between revolutionary Shiism and exported Wahhabism, the post-9/11 securitization that surveilled and instrumentalized whatever remained — this is a more concentrated, more recent, and more thorough rupture than anything the Western contemplative tradition faced. The closest Western analogues are the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII (1536–1541), the French Revolution's anti-clerical violence (1789–1794), and the Soviet anti-religious campaigns themselves where they affected Russian Orthodox tradition. Each was severe; none was sustained for two centuries of continuous structural pressure layered through five distinct vectors as the Muslim contemplative tradition has faced.

A second asymmetry compounds the first. Western civilization, despite its hollowing, retains structural openness to inquiry. A seeker who locates the Hesychast tradition or the Carmelite tradition or the Cistercian can study and practice without facing institutional sanction from any religious or political authority. Muslim civilization in many of its territories does not retain comparable openness. To articulate the Sufi cartography in much of the contemporary Muslim world is to take a position within an active religious-political conflict — to defend it against Salafi critique, to position oneself relative to state-bureaucratic religious authority, to navigate security-apparatus assumptions about who one is and what one might be doing, to choose between contested *ṭarīqa* lineages whose mutual delegitimation has been intensified by the late-modern reconfiguration. The fish has no clean water. Even the surviving lineages must operate inside an environment whose institutional categories presume their illegitimacy in many places.

A third asymmetry concerns the relation between exoteric form and contemplative depth. Christendom, broadly, has lost much of its exoteric form alongside its contemplative depth — church attendance has collapsed across Europe, the institutional Church's authority has dissolved, the sacramental rhythms that ordered ordinary Christian life have weakened. The Muslim exoteric form remains intact across most regions. Mosque attendance is high, Ramadan observance is widespread, the *fiqh* tradition is institutionally robust, the Qurʾanic recitation is at every wedding and funeral. But the cartography is largely absent from this vibrant exoteric life across most Sunni regions. The form continues without the path the form was built to vehicle. The Western form has hollowed visibly; the Muslim form is hollow invisibly across much of the *umma*, beneath an exoteric surface that masks the absence.

This third asymmetry produces a specific psychological condition for the contemporary Muslim. The form continues to claim them while the form's contemporary articulation in many institutional settings excludes the depth their tradition once held. They are not free of Islam in the way the post-Christian Westerner is free of Christianity. They are bound to a form whose institutional voices in many contemporary settings disagree with the cartography their tradition transmitted. The Western post-Christian can leave Christianity and seek elsewhere. The Muslim seeking the cartography is in the structurally more difficult position of needing to recover what is theirs from inside a religious establishment that, in many settings, denies that what they seek is genuine Islam at all.

## IX. The Living Substrate

The cartography is not gone. The recovery path begins from acknowledging where it survives — and it survives in specific places, with specific lineages, accessible to those who seek with seriousness. The geographic distribution is wider than the diagnosis of severance might suggest.

**Morocco** preserves the most intact Sufi-Maliki substrate in the Arab world. The integrative architecture that the rest of the Arab world largely lost was, in Morocco, partially preserved by three structural features: the relative autonomy of Moroccan religious life from Saudi-Salafi institutional pressure (Morocco maintains its own religious authority through the institution of *Amīr al-Muʾminīn*, Commander of the Faithful, held by the King), the embedding of Sufi orders in Moroccan national identity at every level, and the survival of *zāwiya* networks across the country. The Boutchichiyya under Sidi Hamza al-Qādirī al-Boutchichi (d. 2017), centered at Madagh in the Beni Snassen Berber region, produced a generation of contemporary Moroccan intellectuals trained in both classical Islamic learning and Sufi practice. The Tijāniyya is institutionally enormous across the Maghreb. The Shādhilī, the Darqāwī, the Nāṣirī, the Wazzāniyya — all continue.

**Mauritania** preserves the *Maḥāḍir*, the traditional learning circles of the Trārza and Adrar regions, which transmit both classical jurisprudence and Sufi cartographic practice at high level. Mauritanian scholarship produces classically trained *ʿulamāʾ* whose authority is recognized across the Sunni world, and whose training preserves the integration of *fiqh*, *taṣawwuf*, and classical Arabic letters that has been broken elsewhere.

**West Africa** holds the Tijānī line through Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900–1975), extending from Senegal-Mauritania across Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, and the West African diaspora with millions of practitioners. The Niasse-Tijānī tradition is one of the largest contemporary Sufi networks anywhere in the world. The Mouride tradition of Senegal, founded by Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba (1853–1927) during French colonial repression, transmits a distinctive Sufi-economic-civilizational integration deeply embedded in Senegalese national life. The mass scale of West African Sufi practice — easily tens of millions of active practitioners — represents the largest single Sunni Sufi-mass-tradition globally and operates with less Salafi penetration than most other regions.

**Egypt** has, despite intense Salafi pressure since the mid-twentieth century, retained an institutionally active Sufi tradition. The annual *mawlid* of Sayyid al-Badawī in Tanta draws millions. The Naqshbandiyya-Khalwatiyya and Shādhiliyya-Yashruṭiyya lineages persist. After 2013, al-Azhar under the leadership of Shaykh Aḥmad al-Ṭayyib has explicitly defended the Sufi tradition against Salafi attack, though this defense operates within state-bureaucratic parameters.

**Yemen** preserves, in the Bā ʿAlawī *ṭarīqa* of the Ḥaḍramawt, traced to the Prophet through Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, one of the most globally distributed Sufi transmissions in any language. The Bā ʿAlawī shaykhs operate from the city of Tarim (called "the city of light") across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Gulf, East Africa, and increasingly the Western diaspora. Habib ʿUmar bin Ḥafīẓ's Dār al-Muṣṭafā institute in Tarim has, since its founding in 1993, transmitted the cartographic tradition to thousands of students from across the *umma* in Arabic at high classical level, with operational integration of *fiqh*, *taṣawwuf*, and prophetic ethics. Habib ʿUmar's network reaches every continent.

**Turkey**, after fifty-five years of legal suppression, has reconstructed public Sufi presence since 1980. The Mevlevi tradition operates publicly again at Konya and through diaspora networks. The Naqshbandiyya in its various branches (Khalidiyya, Mujaddidiyya, Iskenderpaşa) operates widely, though with the political-Islamist coloring contemporary Turkey carries. The Cerrahi-Halveti tradition preserves a refined classical lineage. The Turkish recovery is real but cannot be confused with what was suppressed; the contemporary form bears the marks of its underground period and its political-religious context.

**South Asia** carries enormous contemplative inheritance. The Chishti tradition, with its central shrine at Ajmer (the *dargāh* of Khwāja Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī, d. 1236), continues across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; the Chishti-Sabiri-Nizami networks transmit through living teachers including those associated with the Nizamuddin *dargāh* in Delhi. The Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya through Shah Walī Allāh's lineage in Delhi continues through several streams. The Qādiriyya through descendants of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī's family lines. The Barelvi tradition (institutionally led by figures associated with Bareilly Sharif and across the Pakistani Sunni *barelvi* networks) preserves the contemplative-veneration tradition at populist mass scale. South Asian Sufi tradition is contested by Deobandi reformism and Salafi-Wahhabi penetration but remains institutionally enormous.

**Indonesia** and Malaysia, through the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) institutional structure in Indonesia (~95 million affiliated, the largest Sunni traditional organization globally) and analogous traditional networks in Malaysia, preserves a Shafi'i fiqh integrated with Sufi tradition through the *pesantren* (Islamic boarding school) network. The NU is institutionally robust, doctrinally articulate (its *Aswaja* — *Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah* — articulation is a sophisticated traditional defense against both Salafi reformism and secular modernism), and culturally embedded across the Indonesian archipelago. The Indonesian case is the most institutionally healthy traditional Sunni preservation in any major Muslim region. The various *ṭarīqa* networks operating within and alongside NU — Naqshbandi, Qādirī, Shādhilī, Tijānī, Khalwati — have public practice.

**The Caucasus and post-Soviet regions** show partial recovery. Dagestan has the densest Sufi institutional life in the Russian Federation, with Naqshbandi-Shadhili lineages and substantial *zikr* practice. Chechnya operates a state-aligned Qādirī-Kunta-Hajji tradition. Central Asian recovery is more constrained by state controls but underground transmissions continue, with diaspora networks (especially in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, and the West) sustaining what state restrictions limit.

**The Balkans** — Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia — have rebuilt institutional Sufi presence since 1991. The Naqshbandi tradition has post-war presence in Bosnia. The Bektashi has reconstructed its global headquarters in Tirana. The Khalwati and Mevlevi traditions operate at smaller scale. The Balkan revival is real though smaller in scale than the historical pre-suppression configuration.

**East Africa** preserves the Qādiriyya in Somalia (despite the al-Shabaab insurgency's anti-Sufi violence), the Sudanese Sufi orders (Khatmiyya, Sammāniyya, Burhāniyya — operating despite political turbulence), and the Swahili-coast traditions in Kenya, Tanzania, and the Comoros. The Comorian and Madagascan Bā ʿAlawī networks connect to the Yemeni transmission line.

**Hui China** retains the Naqshbandi-Khufiyya and Naqshbandi-Jahriyya traditions in the Northwest (Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai), diminished by the Cultural Revolution but with ongoing state-managed institutional presence. The Uyghur traditions of Xinjiang are under acute repression at present.

**The Iranian Shia track** preserves *ʿirfān* through the *ḥawza* training in Qom and Mashhad, the Allameh Tabatabaei lineage, the contemporary work of figures like Hasan Hasan Zadeh Amoli, and the publishing infrastructure for classical *ʿirfān* texts. The institutional preservation is paradoxical (operating within a regime whose other policies are contested) but real.

**The diaspora** presents a paradox across all these traditions. Many contemporary Muslim cartographic transmissions have found greater institutional space in the Western diaspora than in their countries of origin. Habib ʿUmar's Bā ʿAlawī networks, the Boutchichiyya, the Tijāniyya, the Chishti, the Naqshbandi in its various branches, the NU diaspora, the Bektashi and Mevlevi in their European and American branches — all operate with a freedom in the Western diaspora that they often lack at home. A Muslim born in the diaspora may have easier institutional access to the cartographic tradition of their inheritance than one born in much of the contemporary Muslim heartland.

## X. The Way of Recovery

What does a Muslim seeking the depth of their tradition do, today, inside the condition diagnosed above?

First, name the inheritance. The cartography is yours. Not someone else's, not the East's, not the West's borrowed wisdom — yours, by inheritance, transmitted through fourteen centuries of unbroken chains across the *umma*. The Sufi tradition is the Muslim articulation of the same interior territory the Indian, Chinese, Andean, Greek, and Christian traditions also map. To return to it is not departure from Islam. It is return to the depth Islam was structured to vehicle. The Salafi claim that *taṣawwuf* is foreign to authentic Islam is historically false. Al-Ghazālī's *Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn* — the most influential single work in the Sunni tradition after the Qurʾan — is a contemplative-cartographic text written by the most authoritative scholar of his age. The cartography is not foreign to Islam. The framing that says it is foreign is what is foreign — a three-century-old reformist movement projecting its claims backward across a millennium of contrary evidence.

Second, find the lineage where it lives. The orders are not fictional. The Boutchichiyya, the Bā ʿAlawiyya, the Shādhiliyya, the Tijāniyya, the Naqshbandiyya in its various branches, the Chishtiyya, the Mevleviyya, the Qādiriyya, the Khalwatiyya, the Bektashiyya, the Mouridiyya — all transmit. The mass scale of practitioner participation across regions runs into the tens of millions. Distance, language, family politics, and security concerns may make access difficult but rarely impossible for someone who genuinely seeks. The internet age has made identification of authentic teachers easier than at any time since the lineages were globally distributed. The criterion for authenticity is the *silsila* — a verifiable chain of transmission to the Prophet through teachers each of whom was authorized by their own teacher. A teacher with no *silsila* is a theorist; a teacher with a fabricated or interrupted *silsila* is a fraud; a teacher within a verifiable chain is, at minimum, in a position to transmit what has been transmitted to them. Beyond authenticity, the criterion for fit is the same one any serious tradition asks: does the practice as transmitted produce the transformation the cartography names? The *muḥāsaba* discipline answers that question over time.

Third, where the lineage is out of reach, the articulation lives. Harmonism articulates the territory the Sufi cartography mapped, in a sovereign register, while keeping the tradition's vocabulary available as the deeper home. This is not a substitute for the lineage. It is a way to encounter the cartography at the level of articulation — to understand what is being mapped, what the stations are, what the methods produce, what the horizon names — when the institutional vessel is out of reach. The [[Wheel of Harmony]] is not a replacement for the *ṭarīqa*. It is one register at which the same architecture becomes intelligible. A practitioner who finds Harmonism first, recognizes their own tradition's depth through it, and is moved from there toward a *ṭarīqa* they would otherwise not have sought is using Harmonism for what it can do. A practitioner who has access to a *ṭarīqa* and reads Harmonism alongside it is finding cross-cartographic confirmation of what their lineage transmits. Both uses honor what the articulation is.

Fourth — and this is the largest matter — do not accept that the empty institutional Islam of state-bureaucratic conformity, Salafi literalism, modernist apologetics, or surveilled and instrumentalized "moderate Islam" is what Islam is. It is what specific historical forces have produced from Islam in the last three centuries through five distinct vectors. Al-Ghazālī did not believe what the contemporary Saudi-funded preacher believes. Ibn ʿArabī did not believe it. Rūmī did not believe it. al-Shādhilī did not believe it. al-Sirhindī did not believe it. Niasse did not believe it. Naqshband did not believe it. Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Bukhārī did not believe it. The depth was here before the rupture; the depth is here now where the lineages survive across multiple regions; the depth is yours by inheritance and cannot be revoked by any institutional voice claiming the authority to do so. The recovery begins with the recognition that the contemporary mainstream framings — Salafi, state-bureaucratic, modernist, securitized — are not the tradition speaking. They are specific historical configurations speaking, claiming to be the tradition. The actual tradition is older, deeper, geographically more widely preserved than any of these framings admit, and continuous with its surviving lineages.

## XI. Convergence

[[The Hollowing of the West]] and the present diagnosis are siblings. They are not the same condition. Western severance was passive, slow, and produced a civilization that lost its center while retaining structural openness; recovery requires reorientation toward what was forgotten. Muslim severance, across its multiple vectors, was active, recent, and produced a civilization whose forms still claim the inheritance while in many institutional settings excluding its depth; recovery requires distinction between the inheritance and what has captured the inheritance, and reattachment to the surviving lineages or to the articulation that preserves what they preserved.

What both hollowings share is the architecture of recovery. The [[The Way of Harmony|Way of Harmony]] is universal. The [[Wheel of Harmony]] names what an individual life is structured for, the [[Architecture of Harmony]] names what a civilization is structured for, and the contemplative cartographies — the Sufi among them — name how the human being is interiorly mapped. These are converging articulations of one reality. The recovery, in any civilization, is reorientation toward [[Glossary of Terms#Logos|Logos]], alignment with [[Glossary of Terms#Dharma|Dharma]] at all scales, and the patient work of finding or rebuilding the lineages and articulations through which the work is transmissible.

For the Muslim practitioner this means: the Qurʾanic [[Fitrah and the Wheel of Harmony|*fiṭra*]] — the constitutional uprightness toward Tawḥīd — is your ground. The Sufi cartography is your map. The surviving *ṭuruq* across multiple regions are your living transmission. Where these are inaccessible, the articulation is here. The work is the same work the *muṭmaʾinna* soul has always done, in every civilization that has preserved knowledge of how to do it. The hollowing is not irreversible. The lineages that produced al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī, Rūmī, al-Sirhindī, and Niasse are the same lineages still producing transmissions today in Madagh, in Tarim, in the Tijānī *zawāyā* across West Africa, in the Chishti *dargāhs* of South Asia, in the NU *pesantren* of Java, in the post-Atatürk recovered *ṭarīqas* of Turkey, in the underground and rebuilt networks of the post-Soviet regions, in the Bā ʿAlawī branches across the world, in the diasporic *zawāyā* in every Western capital with a substantial Muslim population. What is required is the willingness to recognize them, find them, and enter the work the cartography names — the slow, patient, civilizationally and individually demanding work of moving the *nafs* from *ammāra* through *lawwāma* toward *muṭmaʾinna*, and beyond.

The hollowing is the diagnosis. The recovery is the work. The cartography is yours.

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*See also: [[The Sufi Cartography of the Soul]], [[The Five Cartographies of the Soul]], [[Tawhid and the Architecture of the One]], [[Fitrah and the Wheel of Harmony]], [[Religion and Harmonism]], [[The Hollowing of the West]], [[The Western Fracture]], [[The Spiritual Crisis]], [[Architecture of Harmony]], [[The Way of Harmony]], [[Iran and Harmonism]], [[Turkey and Harmonism]], [[Indonesia and Harmonism]].*

*[[Recommended materials|Recommended reading →]]*
