Paper Short Abstract:

How do Sufis un/do the breathing heart facing secular suffering in the context of anti-Muslim racism? How does anthropology mis/understand with its "controlled equivocation"? Sufi heart-centered contemplation and surrendering to breath may not be about ending suffering but living with uncertainties.

Paper Abstract:

"A Sufi is someone who breathes well,""The medicine of the heart is the remembrance of Allah,""The heart is the higher intelligence and intuition"- I frequently heard these key phrases from my Sufi interlocutors. How do Sufis un/do the breathing heart to navigate secular suffering in Germany, a postsecular society fraught with anti-Muslim racism? How do Sufi Islamic practices of heart-centered contemplation and surrendering to the breath feature in such navigation? How does anthropology mis/understands them with its "controlled equivocation"? My paper contemplates these questions informed by more than a decade of Sufi practice and long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2013-2015, 2020-2021) among three Sufi networks and nomadic Sufis in Berlin and connected sites. As a dual apprentice of anthropology and the Sufi tradition, I have followed the metaphor and practice of the breathing heart to explore the promises and limits of Sufi un/doing in the company of anthropological theory and practice (Selim 2024). Juxtaposing conversations with contemporary Sufis with classical Sufi discourses, this paper shows how Sufi seekers un/do the breathing heart not only through contemplation and surrendering but also by engaging in body prayers while the anthropologist mis/understands them with her (un)intentionally "controlled equivocations" (Viveiros de Castro 2004). These "controlled equivocations" implicate not only Sufi discourses but also anthropological discourses as and the productivity and limits of the latter's mis/understandings. The discursive, embodied, and more-than-biomedical knowledge derived from Sufi heart- and breath-centered practices provide ontologies and epistemologies of healing that may not be about ending suffering but living with contemporary uncertainties.