Author

• Zahrā Ansāri

Abstract

One of the most frequent topics in discourse on Sufism is presumed to be stories about Kerāmāts of Sufis. The first step for reading these stories is presenting a classification based on theme and frequency of stories. Persian texts on Sufism do not seem to include any comprehensive and scientific category of Kerāmāts (Sufis Extraordinary Actions). Instead, these texts are found to introduce some limited types of Kerāmāts. The findings of this study reveal that stories about Kerāmāts of mystics in discourse on Sufism, written up to the 7th century AH, can be categorized into 21 groups and 15 subgroups. While the most frequent theme in these stories was found to be “knowledge of unseen”, the least common appeared to be “corpse walking on air”.

Keywords

• Islamic Mysticism
• Persian Texts on Sufism
• Extraordinary Actions of Sufi Masters
• Categorization of Kerāmāt