Contraction and Expansion of “Religious Tolerance” Discourse in Islamic Sufism (up to the Eighth Century)

The discursive fluctuations of the idea of “religious tolerance” in different periods of Sufism show the direct and indirect influence of the social and political conditions of these periods on the contraction and expansion of this approach in Sufi works. This article, via deploying the framework of Foucault's theory and considering the mutual relationship between power strategies and ideologies governing the society, assumes the idea of ​​religious tolerance among Muslim Sufis as having a discursive nature related to the political will of the rulers, and studies that in the context of socio-political transformations of the historical eras. The studies show that the religious tolerance discourse in the Sufi works, until the end of the sixth century, has faced ideological challenges despite its expansion in the Buyid and Seljuk eras, due to the religious nature of the governments (the control of the political institution by the religious institution) and the stable hegemony of the jurisprudence discourse. However, in the seventh century, the rise of secular Mongol rulers and their policy of religious tolerance, on the one hand, and the removal of the religious-law enforcement from the arena of political power, on the other hand, set the ground for the expansion of the discourse of religious tolerance in a favorable way for Sufism. The purpose of this article is to examine the discourse of “religious tolerance” in Islamic Sufism with regard to the political and social developments of the historical periods up to the eighth century. The study has been conducted using a descriptive-analytical method.