About

Beyond Rumi: Sufi Art and Practice is part of the multiyear initiative The Arts of Devotion at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, generously funded by the Lilly Endowment. It focuses on eight sites, from Morocco to Indonesia that flourished after the thirteenth century and uses various multimedia resources to highlight the sensory dimensions of Sufism and its wide-ranging forms of artistic expression. The intent is to provide students, teachers, and interested individuals with a different and accessible introduction to the complexity of Sufi Islam. 

We would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of our advisory board: Maria M. Dakake, George Mason University; Katherine Pratt Ewing, Columbia University; Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles; Ahmet T. Karamustafa, University of Maryland, College Park; Abdul-Rehman Malik, Yale Divinity School; Oludamini Ogunnaike, University of Virginia; M. Shobhana Xavier, Queen’s University; and Robert Rozehnal, Lehigh University. We are also grateful to Night Kitchen and the staff of the National Museum of Asian Art, especially Austin Bailey and Jennifer Berry, for all their advice and assistance in realizing the site. The project greatly benefited from conversations with Esin Çelebi Bayru and Haji Syed Salman Chishti and from the research conducted by Jasraj Khatra, Xenia Makovsky, Janet O’Brien, and Hallie Swanson. 

We also gratefully acknowledge the support and generosity of the following individuals: Ata Anzali, Serpil Bağcı, Naci Bakırcı, Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Bideew Bou Bess, Hadiye Cangökçe, Matthew Cohen, Abdulaziz Zekaria Kamus, Bernard O’Kane, Sara Kuehn, Sarah Piram, Jaap Otte, Ki Purjadi, Kenneth Robbins, Eric Ross, Abdullahi Sherif, and Ahmed Zekaria. Our thanks also to the following institutions and organizations for their collaboration: the British Museum, Cornell University Library, Kalan Müzik, Kutubía Institute, Leiden University Libraries, Library of Congress, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Al-Madina Institute, Mevlana Museum, Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Nasser Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, Rijksmuseum,  Sherif Harar City Museum,  Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, and Tropen Museum in Rotterdam.