Healing as Embodied and Entangled Practice

Contemporary Sufi-inspired healing practices in German-speaking contexts draw on concepts and practices whose meanings are reshaped as they enter contemporary healing discourses. Drawing on historical and conceptual scholarship on Sufi traditions and on previously published qualitative findings from a doctoral study of contemplative and healing practices in Germany, the analysis focuses on four practitioners with biographical or institutional connections to the Inayati tradition. It examines how concepts such as the heart (qalb), the self (nafs), purification (taṣfiya), and divine proximity are reinterpreted within contemporary understandings of healing. Healing is approached both as an emic category and as an analytical lens through which bodily experience, spiritual meaning, and therapeutic interpretation can be examined together. The analysis shows that Sufi-derived concepts are reconfigured in contemporary healing contexts through their connections with therapeutic understandings of health and well-being. These processes illustrate how religious resources can become part of contemporary healing discourses while retaining their specific historical and conceptual backgrounds.