“Sufism isn’t a sect, and it’s not even a subgroup within Sunnism,” Shadi Hamid, a Middle East and Islam expert at the Brookings Institution, told me. Sufism is “a spiritual tendency within Islam that prioritizes the inward aspects of religion and one’s personal relationship with God,” Hamid said. “This is why defining who’s a Sufi is hard, since many Sufis wouldn’t self-identify as such.” [...]
ISIS follows a fundamentalist, highly intolerant interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism. As Vox’s Jennifer Williams explains, “Wahhabism grew out of the teachings of an 18th-century reformer named Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who argued for ‘purifying’ Islam by getting rid of the ‘innovations’ that had snuck in over the centuries as Islam spread to new lands and mixed with indigenous beliefs and practices.” [...]
Groups like ISIS consider Sufis among those “apostates.” That’s because they think Sufis are polytheists because they venerate mystics and erect shrines to saints. ISIS — and other Wahhabi followers — consider the association of God with others an unpardonable sin. [...]
But ISIS writ large isn’t just going after Sufis in Egypt. It continues to attack Sufis around the world, especially in Pakistan. Most infamously, ISIS bombed a Pakistani mosque in February that killed at least 70 people and injured more than 250. Four months before, ISIS murdered 52 people at a Sufi shrine. And in April 2011, suicide bombers killed 41 Sufis during a three-day festival.
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