Ahmed AboHamad

Sufism is often represented in policy discourse as a spiritual tradition that promotes peace through its focus on practices of inward self-transformation and struggle against the self. This paper critically examines that representation by reconstructing the assumptions that underlie the political instrumentalization of Sufism as a peace-promoting resource. I argue, first, that such representation is dubious insofar as it tacitly relies on a view of Sufism as motivating civic disengagement and political quietism. Furthermore, while some Sufi traditions do exhibit quietist tendencies, the historical and contemporary diversity of Sufi political engagement shows that focus on inward self-transformation does not always lead to political disengagement or nonviolence. Second, I argue that the ascetic self-discipline and forms of emotional detachment cultivated by “inward-looking philosophies” such as Sufism, Buddhism, and Stoicism can also be enabling psychological conditions for the exercise of violence. The analysis thus challenges the assumption that turning inward reliably aligns one with nonviolent ends, and calls for greater caution toward the ways inward-looking philosophies might shape political and moral sensibilities.

Explanations in the natural historical sciences often take the form of stories. This paper examines two accounts of the sources of narrative’s explanatory power: Beatty’s suggestion that narrative explanation is closely connected to historical contingency, and that narratives explain by contrasting what happened with what might have happened; and Ereshefsky and Turner’s view that narratives explain by organizing events around a central subject with a distinctive direction of historical development. In both accounts, it turns out that non-epistemic values typically play a role in the construction of narrative, and hence contribute to narrative’s explanatory force. Two case studies from historical science – the plate tectonic story of the Avalonian terrane, and the story of the evolution of trichromatic vision in (some) mammals – help to motivate and illustrate this argument.