Performance Philosophy and Spirituality: The Way of Tasawwuf

This chapter explores performance philosophy in the context of Sufism. The essay focuses on tasawwuf as lived philosophy and embodied Sufi thought – drawing from the lived experiences of the authors in music (Ellison) and whirling (McClure), respectively. Issues of practice and transculturalism are raised in relation to the spiritual purpose of tasawwuf, which is foundational to the perception and realisation of Sufi philosophies. As performance philosophers who seek to move beyond not only body–mind dualities but all manner of binaries, and who seek to articulate knowledges perceived and expressed in domains other than linear thought, the essay proposes that there is much we can take from the integrative, reciprocal principles of Sufism in our approach. The chapter seeks to highlight the modes of knowing by experience and doing which are central to Sufism, and therefore the foundation or centre of later religious thought and philosophy. As knowing through doing remains central to advances in Performance Philosophy, the authors seek to foreground the idea that knowing by doing may contain the sacred within it and that by the inclusion of the sacred within the precepts of Performance Philosophy, wider dimensions of critique are enabled which allow ‘South and East’ knowledges of the more subtle aspects of ontology a place within the Western critical canon.