Armando Montoya Jordán’s Review of Orfali, Khalil, and Rustom (eds.), Mysticism and Ethics in Islam (Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies, 2024)

Is the science of ethics entirely separate from mysticism, or might mysticism be the foundation of ethics? Or, conversely, might mysticism be the fruit of a higher ethics? these and other such questions come to the fore in a variety of ways in this important volume, a commendable attempt to produce a historical and conceptual survey of the intersections between mysticism and ethics in Islam.

The book addresses the parameters of ethics within the Muslim tradition through the analyses of a variety of authors who wrote in languages as diverse as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Russian, and Chinese. Many of them, we learn, were not necessarily bound to the postulates of Greek philosophy, even though the latter did exert a tremendous influence on the
development of ethics in Islam by defining some of the key problems in the discipline.