On Inayati Female Visions in Austria: Female Leadership in the Western Sufi Tradition

Ināyati female teachers in Vienna follow a spiritual path that crosses borders and in so doing they embrace an agenda of pluralism, feminism, and the unity of mystical experience, as providing an insight into life-orientational attitudes in which the contents rather than the form is accorded most importance. Reflecting a multiplicity, which is inherent in many Sufi teachings, this also shows a more nuanced and dynamic picture of their teachings and healing rituals, and the degree to which it remains rooted in Islam’s spiritual heritage. Underscoring the discursively elusive dynamics of experiential knowing (reflecting the characteristic privileging of knowing-by-the-heart over knowing-by-the-mind), they are involved in the pioneering exegesis of women who reinterpret the manifold layers of meaning embedded in the qurʾānic text—that is in both its exoteric and its esoteric dimensions as confirmed by their own mystical experiences—with a particular gender sensitivity to language and implication. In this way their work aims to reflect the qurʾānic injunction, “The believers, male and female, are protectors of one another (awliyāʾ)” (Q 9:71), which means they are each other’s mutual ‘friends’ and ‘allies’ (cf. Q 5:51; 8:72; 45:19). At one and the same time, it envisions a humanistic outlook in which both women and men have the same spiritual, moral and social standing and authority, and in which they also share the same spiritual, moral and social obligations.