Tasawwuf
is a branch of Islamic knowledge which focuses on the spiritual development of
the Muslim.
Allah 
sent His final messenger, Prophet
Muhammad 
, as a source of knowledge for
the entire ummah. He was the fountain of Quran,
Hadith, tafsir, rhetoric, fiqh, and so on. After the Prophet, the scholars of
this ummah carried and propagated each of these branches of knowledge. Because
no one person can attain the perfection of the Prophet , who single handedly assumed
all of these roles, various branches of the Islamic sciences developed. For
example, Imam Abu Hanifah preserved the science of fiqh and after him thousands
of scholars continued in his footsteps. Hence these scholars preserved the fiqh
of the Prophet . Similarly Imam Bukhari and
the other famous scholars of Hadith, preserved the words of the Prophet. The
scholars of tajweed preserved the recitation of the Prophet . And, the scholars of Arabic
grammar preserved the language of the Prophet .
Along these lines, the Prophet was the model of spirituality for the
world. His God-consciousness, deep spirituality, acts of worship, and love for
Allah were preserved and propagated by an
Islamic science called Tasawwuf. The aim of the scholars of this science was
purification of the heart, and development of consciousness of Allah through submission to the
shariah and sunnah.
Studying the life of the Prophet , the scholars who propagated
the science of tasawwuf understood that a requisite for approaching Allah was abandonment of the common pursuits
of the world. They often wore wool because of its simplicity and low cost. In
Arabic the word for wool is suf and
thus, those who wore it became known as the Sufis. Another possible derivation
of the word comes from the root wordsafa,
which means "to clean." Because the scholars of tasawwuf focused on
cleansing the heart, they later became known as the Sufis.
http://www.tasawwuf.org/basics/what_tasawwuf.htm
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