Sufism, as a devotional and mystical current within the Islamic tradition, has been subject to the strains of modernization experienced across the Muslim world. Rapidly expanding urban populations, the diffusion of non-religious general education and the natural sciences, the erosion of family and village social hierarchies, the supplanting of royal with popular sovereignty, increased mobility and access to information – all have brought to Muslim communities stresses comparable to those experienced by Western societies in the course of their industrialization. But in much of the Muslim world, where economic modernization has come relatively late and in the face of competition with non-Muslim societies that made their head-start partly at the expense of Muslim colonies, confrontation with modernity has been especially traumatic. The material prosperity of the Western early developers has been attractive to later-developing Muslim societies, but the social transformations associated with technological and economic change have not always been welcomed. Nor have the politics of post-colonial international relations between Western and Muslim-majority societies been reassuring, especially since the end of the Cold War and the post-September 11 ‘War on Terror’. The sense of heightened threat that many Muslims experienced at the end of the nineteenth century when colonial powers began introducing socially corrosive modern capitalism into their colonies has been reignited (Malik, 2004). To the extent that religion has guided and become intertwined with local cultural practices of peasant communities and pre-modern states, Muslims (like Jews, Christians, Hindus and others) have had to question to what extent their religious traditions could, and should, accommodate modernity. If they should accommodate modernity, then in what areas and in what ways? Legal safeguards for religious pluralism, increments of democratic participation in government, and support for human rights and gender equality have to varying degrees accompanied the development of modern nation-states in the North Atlantic region.