Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: what is islam the importance of being islamic by — January 28, 2026 | Ali Shukri Amin

I think you're overestimating the prominance of tariqas/zawiyyahs in much of the world and definitely overestimating the penetration of Rumi/Hafez. Rumi & Hafez have had very little discernible impact in Arabic (I say this as a fan of Rumi). Even the great Farid al-Din al-Attar who wrote in Arabic & has perhaps the greatest epic poem of Islamicate civilization has very little impact.

I do concede their outsize influence among Persian & Turkic Hanafi Sufis & Shi'a. That being said, there have always been Hanafis who held serious reservations about them.

When we look at madrasah curriculums currently & historically, we don't tend to see Rumi or Hafez as staple texts for spiritual instruction or even as supplemental texts. They're moreso devotional works for aesthetic enjoyment & personal/communal enlightenment - which demonstrates that they were not considered to be scholarly or pieces of what constitutes orthodoxy.

I don't think it's useful to define Islam from the popular religious practices of masses.

In the Islamic Maghrib, Sufi tariqas had already decomposed by the time Mohammad Mawlud was writing about Tasawuff. Ahmad Zarruq also has a litany of criticisms for the decaying institution of organized Sufism. I don't think it's fair to attribute this to Salafism. There was a deep ossification of these institutions that made the ground ripe for Salafi repudiation.

The Salafi Egyptian repudiation of Egyptian Sufism has little in common with the Peninsular Salafism's repudiation of Peninsular Sufism. Which has less in common with the Maghribi Salafi repudiation or the Malay Archipelago.

That being said Rumi was controversial even early on and Hafez even moreso. Rumi acknowledges & tries to pre-empt some of the criticisms that will be lodged against some of his verses but I don't see that in my lay reading of Hafez.