Book Talk: Dervishes of the North
Event
Rumi, the Muslim poet and mystic, has become a popular spiritual icon in the contemporary era and though his poetry and personae has resulted in some critiques of our consumption and appropriation of Islam, this talk will consider how Sufi communities in Canada with deep commitments to Rumi are defining their relationship to Rumi and Sufism through ritual practices. Using some examples of Sufi communities in Canada that engage with Rumi ritually and also in performative venues (sometimes as a commodity) I consider how these dynamics around Rumi’s consumption and popularization unfold and what they say about how we can think about contemporary Sufism today, especially as it is unfolding within both the context of Muslim communities and also beyond it.
RSVP
Speaker
M. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religion and Diaspora at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. She works on contemporary global Sufism with regional interests in Canada, the United States, and Sri Lanka and takes an ethnographic approach to her scholarship. She is the author of several publications on the topic of contemporary Sufism, including her most recent book the Dervishes of the North: Rumi, Whirling, and the Making of Sufism in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2023). She also is one of the co-hosts of the popular podcast channel New Books in Islamic Studies.