From Rumi''s whirling dervishes in Turkey over 700 years ago, to circles of silent mystics in the West today, this book reveals the history and practices of Sufism, the ancient but still active system of Islamic mysticism which has long been the spiritual current in Islam that counterbalances fundamentalism. Eric Geoffroy is an authority on Sufism, and he shows us this increasingly popular contemplative dimension of Islam, which is little understood in the West.