Sufism and Advaita Vedānta — Waḥdat al-Wujūd and Brahman: One Reality, Two Philosophies

Both traditions arrive at non-dualism: there is ultimately only one reality, and what appears as multiplicity is the single reality in different modes or appearances. Both develop sophisticated accounts of why this one reality appears as many. Both describe the mystic path as a progressive removal of the veils that separate apparent individuals from their source.

Dara Shikoh's Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn (The Confluence of Two Oceans, 1655) is the most explicit historical statement of the convergence: he argued that the Upaniṣads and the works of the Sufi masters were describing the same ultimate reality in different vocabularies.

Sufism (Ibn Arabī's Waḥdat al-wujūd): there is only one being (al-wujūd), and every existent thing is a self-disclosure (tajallī) of that one being. God and creation are not two separate things — creation is God's self-manifestation. The mystic's fanāʾ (annihilation) is the disappearance of the apparent separate self in recognition of this unity.

Advaita Vedānta: Brahman alone is real. The world is not God's self-manifestation but an appearance (vivartavāda — apparent transformation, not real transformation) through māyā / avidyā. The individual self (jīva) is not a manifestation of Brahman but is Brahman, mistakenly identified as limited.

The deepest difference: Ibn Arabī's tajallī implies that the world is genuinely God's self-expression — the divine delights in its own infinite self-disclosure through the variety of creation. This is closer to what Hinduism calls saguṇa Brahman (Brahman with qualities).

Śaṅkara's vivartavāda denies that Brahman truly transforms into the world — the appearance of the world is superimposition (adhyāsa), not real transformation. This preserves the absolute simplicity of nirguṇa Brahman.

Sirhindī's later Waḥdat al-shuhūd (unity of witness) narrowed the claim: unity is a feature of the mystic's experience, not of reality itself. This qualified the Waḥdat al-wujūd in a direction closer to Viśiṣṭādvaita (Rāmānuja's qualified non-dualism) than to Advaita.

Sufism: the individual (the ʿayn — the specific locus of divine self-disclosure) is ultimately a name/attribute of God. Fanāʾ is the disappearance of the apparent separate self; baqāʾ is the subsistence in God — the mystic continues to exist but now as God's self-expression, not as a separate entity.

Advaita: the individual self is Brahman with a superimposed limitation. At liberation (mokṣa), the limitation is seen through — the individual self recognises itself as Brahman.

Sufism: fanāʾ / baqāʾ — annihilation and subsistence in God. The mystic's individual identity dissolves into God but is restored in a transformed mode — now consciously as God's expression.

Advaita: mokṣa — the recognition that individual consciousness was always Brahman. Nothing new is added; the false identification is removed. Jīvanmukti — liberated while living.

Dara Shikoh was probably right about the experiential convergence and probably wrong about the metaphysical identity. The practical descriptions of liberation are strikingly similar. But Waḥdat al-wujūd retains a relational structure (God as the one being manifesting in multiple self-disclosures) that Advaita's strict non-dualism denies. The difference matters for theology (Sufism remains theistic in structure; Advaita is impersonalist) even if not for mystical experience.