Riffing on/as Reality: Towards Jazz as a Framework for Medieval Sufism

This paper develops jazz as a theoretical framework for the study of medieval Sufism. Recent work by Paul Berliner, Ingrid Monson, Fumi Okiji, and Dan DiPiero frame jazz improvisation as a way of being that unfolds fluidly across embodied, social, affective, and theoretical dimensions of diverse musical contexts. The paper will bring these insights to bear on the work of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), a renowned Sufi shaykh whose writing left an indelible impact on almost all dimensions of Sufi thought and practice. By reading Ibn ʿArabī's Sufi training manuals, litanies, hagiographies, and philosophical treatises in dialogue with jazz, the paper will explore methods for textured analyses of the interwoven textual, embodied, and social performances of medieval Sufis. Put simply—if read training manuals as exercise books and philosophical treatises as scores and transcriptions, how might we imagine (and analyze) the dynamic improvisations of lived Sufi knowledge?