Sufism Shat’h versus Surrealism Literature and Art

Abstract

Resemblance of Surrealism and Sufism is very exciting. Surrealism, the influential avant-garde movement and offspring of 20th century Modernism, strives for truth by plumbing depths of psychic plane and going beyond concrete reality. Sufism, the Islamic mystical discipline, as well, involves a spiritual pilgrimage toward the Absolute Unity above and beyond all created real objects. Confrontation with supra-reality leads to similar paradoxical symptoms in both Surrealism and Sufism expressions. Pertinently, disclosures of Surrealists manifest in their art and literature; and present article tends to compare their substratum, principles and methods with those of Sufi’s ecstatic and theopathetic exclamations or shat’h. The comparison digs for deeper sources from which both Surrealism and Sufism flow, as they are believed to overlap hitherto.