Mysticism and the City: Temporality, Spatiality, Culture, and Society

By Miriam Hanses

Mysticism and Sufism are often portrayed as historical and spiritual traditions detached from present-day realities. The MECAM Traveling Academy “Mysticism and the City: Temporality, Spatiality, Culture, and Society”, held in Gabès, Tunisia, challenged this perspective by addressing present-day dynamics. The question of how mystical traditions continue to shape urban life in the Maghreb and beyond today, particularly in contexts marked by crisis, marginalization, and heritage politics, was at the heart of the Academy.

From 31 March to 2 April, the University of Gabès (Higher Institute of Languages) hosted the Academy, which brought together researchers, writers, journalists, and artists from Tunisia, Germany, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and elsewhere. Convened by Cyrine Kortas (University of Gabès) and organized by Diana Abbani (MECAM/Forum Transregionale Studien), the Academy enabled participants to reflect on mystical traditions in urban life across different contexts. It also broadened mainstream perspectives on mysticism by including local voices and lived experiences, as demonstrated by its setting in Gabès, a small city in southeastern Tunisia, outside the usual international academic centers.

Sufism as a social practice

Throughout the Academy, discussions explored how mystical traditions shape urban life in the Maghreb and beyond, acting as spiritual, cultural, and political forces that produce belonging, creativity, and solidarity, but also contestation, exclusion, and power struggles. Several contributions approached Sufism as a social practice. They showed how it moves between marginalization and state use, between ritual and public performance, and between history and contemporary urban life. For instance, one intervention examined how Sufi groups in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were marginalized as backward by the post-independence states, and more recently, instrumentalized as representatives of an “indigenous” Islam in discourses of counter-radicalization and pro-regime mobilization.

Approaching Sufism as a social practice also grounded the discussions in lived experience and everyday practices. This became particularly tangible to me in discussions around Sufi dance and its its therapeutic functions, describing how practitioners may enter a trance state and temporarily overcome physical pain. The example of Sufi dance furthermore illustrates how practices once confined to ritual spaces now move into public settings through their performances, where they can both create visibility and generate tension.

The Academy’s engagement with diverse formats, continued through Alia Mossallam’s listening session on colonial sound archives. She introduced the Lautarchiv, a Berlin collection of 1918 prisoner-of-war recordings made by German linguists for research and colonial classification, and critically reinterpreted them through alternative listening practices that seek to uncover their suppressed meanings.

In a unique approach, she invited participants to listen to recordings in Arabic, while also presenting recordings from prisoners originating from the Maghreb, including Gabès. In doing so, she linked the Academy in Gabès to Berlin’s colonial sound archive and highlighted Germany’s often overlooked involvement in colonial knowledge production.

She further explained how some prisoners were afraid to speak into the recording device, believing it to be a form of dark magic capable of stealing their voices. Interestingly, the session concluded that this colonial practice did in fact steal the voices of the prisoners by extracting them. This session raised broader questions about how we engage with colonial archives, namely through critical and imaginative forms while also listening in solidarity with those we hear.

Heritage-making and symbolism

Heritage-making in relation to mysticism emerged as a recurring thread in the Academy, particularly in the presentation of Spirituality, an exhibition in Sousse that reactivated historic zaouïas through contemporary art and Sufi-inspired practices. While many discussions focused on the Maghreb, another perspective on Sufism and its contemporary heritage emerged through a presentation on the “love pilgrimage” to Konya, understood as a heritagized tradition that has become a global spiritual practice with participants from various backgrounds. Taken together, these examples reveal how mysticism is contained and actively reconfigured through cultural, artistic, and global practices.

The role of symbolism in mysticism also appeared throughout the discussions. The heart, for example, was analyzed as a spiritual site of divine inscription in premodern traditions, and was used by Morisco writers to frame exile through transformative writing. The focus then shifted to the modern city through an analysis of two novels by Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, where fragmentation produces secular forms of transcendence. In both cases, symbolism offered a lens through which the city could be reimagined as a site of meaning, memory, and transformation.

The exploration of symbolism continued with the artist, Zeineb Mchirgui, who presented a series of visual artwork portraying the shrines of revered saints in Maghrebi art as places of peace and remembrance. Forat al-Hatab followed with a storytelling session drawing on fieldwork from the Kerkennah Islands and Gabès, sharing local legends and fishing traditions, and environmental knowledge that reflect the relationship between sea, land, and community. This session shifted the discussion from analysis to lived experience, showing how mysticism is narrated, transmitted, and felt through stories and creative practices.

Mysticism in translation and the Tunisian context

The Academy’s transregional character was also reflected in its multilingual discussions and exchanges. In an Arabic session, the idea of mysticism in translation was discussed through the work of the Belgian scholar Jean Michot and his engagement with Ibn Taymiyya in debates on Sufism and Islamic thought. The session also examined how crisis and postcolonial rupture shape the city and its marginalized figures in the Tunisian context. Mysticism was thus constantly reinterpreted across languages, contexts, and intellectual traditions.

The final session, designed as a conversation between the two journalists Vanessa Barisch and Mariem Mtiraoui, highlighted Tunisia’s Stambeli tradition, a practice under the threat of vanishing, with only a few masters still performing today. They discussed its role in contemporary society and how artistic practices might help preserve its heritage. While raising broader questions about preservation, transmission, and the role of art in sustaining practices that are at risk of disappearing, this discussion turned the Academy’s attention back to Tunisia and civil society’s inclusion in artistic practices. To me, this was especially reflected in the lively participation of the public in the conversation.

Cities and mystical traditions across contexts

Whether in Gabès, Sousse, Konya, or broader Maghrebi and European contexts, MECAM’s Traveling Academy demonstrated the significance of mysticism beyond the Maghreb and narrow spiritual frameworks. Bringing together different formats and participants with diverse backgrounds, it presented mysticism as a force in urban life, producing community, culture, and heritage.

I found it refreshing to see how decentralizing the Academy to Gabès, a city less visible in international academic discussions, allowed the Academy to consider mysticism from another angle, an approach that has been highly appreciated by the participants as well. In this setting, the Academy could engage with alternative traditions and perspectives, which was further enriched by the Academy’s excursion to Gabès’ unique oasis landscape, grounding many of the discussions in the social and environmental realities of the region itself.

Across the discussions, participants identified mysticism as deeply embedded in everyday urban life, taking on different roles beyond the spiritual, such as social, cultural and political dimensions. Its evolving character placed the questions of heritage and memory at the center, while also focusing on symbols and alternative ways of understanding the urban sphere and its histories. Rather than presenting mysticism as fixed spiritual domain, reserved to only a certain segment of society, the Academy represented it as a flexible and contested field, impacting how cities are lived, remembered, and transformed, while opening new ways of thinking about urban life and collective memory.

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About the Author

Miriam Hanses is a student assistant at the Forum Transregionale Studien within the MECAM project. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where her thesis focuses on representations of masculinity in contemporary Tunisian Arabic literature.

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Citation: Miriam Hanses, Mysticism and the City: Temporality, Spatiality, Culture, and Society, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 09.06.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/66023

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