If early Arab lyric invades contemporary Franco-Arabic poetic composition, by the poet's conscious choice or unbeknownst to him, the Sufi lyric tradition short-circuits the poet's distinction as artisanal mediator, as privileged but passive medium. The language of Arabic lyric was cleaved by Islam, and had to mediate a pre-existing poetic register with a newly emergent religious tongue. The sacred context instigated by the texts of prophetic, spiritual revelation introduced a dynamic sense of linguistic awareness. Arabic lyric henceforth spoke in a bifid tongue. Poets invented virtuosic displays of lyric mastery within Arabic's internal, dual translingualism, which developed in Islam's different light. The poem of Islam ripped poetry, bursting at the seams, out of old lyric. The cut of early Arabic lyric's imposing cloth no longer fit the new array of poetic measures.

Early Islamic mysticism

The old qaṣīda lyric, the odists who mastered the form, and the subsequent chain of transmitters of the texts fomented Arabic's archetypal literary genres, modes of address, and poetic idiom. With the beginning of the Islamic era in the seventh century, following the Qurʾānic revelations, the literary idiom of the old poems would become instrumental in subsequent exegetical interpretation of scripture. Both jāhilī and Islamic poetics were intertwined from an early moment in the seventh century, and so they remained through the intertwined histories of Islam and Arabic lyric, up until the nahḍa in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century modernism. The syncretic nature of lyric cultures in Arabia could also be observed in the development of the spiritual branches of Islam, which would produce the highly sophisticated mannerist, rhetorical poetic style known as badī’, and the densely coded poetic compositions inscribed within Sufism, the mystical strain of the Islamic faith.

Over the past two centuries, the history of Western scholarship on Sufism has caused much confusion in terms of occidental receptions and understandings of the term: