102 Spirituality Studies 1 Introduction The relevance of this study lies in its proposal of an alternative to both the reduction of spirituality to a purely private inner experience and its institutionalization in the form of rigid normative religious systems. Sufi spirituality is analyzed as a processual form of life in which the spiritual path is inseparable from ethical practice, social relations, and responsibility in the world. This perspective makes it possible to understand spirituality not as an exceptional state or a symbolic resource of identity, but as sustained work on one’s mode of being in everyday life. In the context of contemporary crises of meaning, fragmentation of subjectivity, and the search for authentic forms of religious experience, the proposed model of lived spirituality demonstrates how traditional mystical practices can remain ethically effective, open to transformation, and at the same time deeply rooted in historical tradition. In contemporary studies of Sufism, spirituality is most often conceptualized through the category of mystical experience. This approach has deep roots in the phenomenology of religion and the psychology of mysticism of the twentieth century, where Sufi practices were interpreted primarily as sources of intense inner experiences, ecstatic states, or distinctive modes of consciousness. While this perspective significantly contributed to interreligious dialogue and to the recognition of Sufism as a legitimate religious-philosophical tradition, it simultaneously led to a reduction of Sufi spirituality to moments of peak experience detached from broader ontological, ethical, and practical contexts. Within such experience-centered approaches, Sufism is frequently presented as a system of techniques aimed at achieving “union with God”, whereas the internal logic of the Sufi path its duration, repetitiveness, openness, and deep embeddedness in everyday religious life remains peripheral to scholarly analysis. As a result, spirituality is treated as an outcome rather than understood as a lifelong process of subject formation. By contrast, within the Sufi tradition itself, spirituality is rarely conceived as a singular experience or a final stage of attainment. The central concept of ṭarīqa denotes a path not in the sense of linear progression from lower to higher states, but as a continuous movement between “external normativity” (Ar. sharīʿa) and “inner truth” (Ar. ḥaqīqa), between discipline and love, effort and gift. Key concepts such as fanāʾ and baqāʾ do not function as ultimate goals in Sufi texts; rather, they signify moments of profound transformation that recur in different forms and at different levels of the spiritual path (Schimmel 1975, 143). This tension between academic representations of mystical experience and the internal processual logic of Sufism calls for a new analytical framework. In this context, a metamodern perspective offers the possibility of rethinking Sufi spirituality without reverting either to modern essentialism or to postmodern relativization. Unlike earlier epistemological regimes, metamodernism does not seek a final synthesis or a universal definition; instead, it operates through a logic of oscillation between faith and reflection, tradition and critique, transcendence and immanence. Applying a metamodern perspective to the analysis of Sufism makes it possible to shift the focus from the question “What does the mystic experience?” to the question “How is a spiritual subject formed in the course of the path?” Such a shift does not deny the significance of mystical experience; rather, it situates it as one moment within a broader processual dynamic, rather than as its center or culmination. In this sense, spirituality appears not as the accumulation of exceptional states, but as a transformation of modes of being, thinking, and acting within the horizon of divine reality. The aim of this study is to conceptualize Sufi spirituality as a process of subject transformation through a metamodern methodological lens. Accordingly, the research questions are not directed toward the description of isolated mystical experiences, but toward the analysis of the structures, mechanisms, and dynamics of this transformative process. In particular, the study examines how spiritual practice, ethical discipline, and mystical experience interact in the formation of subjectivity, and how this interaction sustains the unfinished and repetitive character of the Sufi path. The selection of sources follows from this methodological framework. The analysis draws on classical Sufi texts (al-Qushayrī, al-Ghazālī, Ibn ʿArabī, Rūmī), which allow for a reconstruction of the internal logic of the Sufi path from within the tradition, alongside contemporary theoretical approaches in process philosophy and spirituality studies that provide analytical tools for interpreting these texts beyond experience-centered reductions. This corpus enables a combination of historical-contextual analysis with conceptual reconstruction.
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