Sufis and Saints' Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)

Islam is often described by Orientalists as particularly abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott A. Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power.