Politicizing Sufi Ontologies: Ubaidullah Sindhi and Ali Shariati's 20th Century Articulations of Wahdat ul-Wajud and Tawhid

This paper documents how non-dualist ontologies within Islamic mysticism were mobilized by twentieth century political critics of capitalism and empire in the Muslim world. The project centers the mystical doctrine of wahdat ul-wajud, the Unity of Being, which troubles the metaphysical separations between the human, natural, and cosmic and sees all creation as separate appearances of a divine unity. I explore how this cosmology of oneness was politicized in the writings of Indian theologian Ubaidullah Sindhi (d. 1944) and Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati (d. 1977). By offering English translations of Sindhi’s Urdu work, I put his political re-imagining of wahdat ul-wajud in pre-Partition India in conversation with Shariati’s translated writings on tawhid (the declaration of God’s Oneness) in pre-revolutionary Iran. I argue that both authors use the doctrine of metaphysical unity as a basis to render the political domination of the other ontologically incoherent.