Sufi poetry — the mystical strand of the Arabic and Persian traditions — supplied much of the imagery (the wine, the beloved, the cup-bearer, the journey) that secular Arabic poetry would later borrow. The major Arabic-language Sufi poets are al-Hallaj (executed in Baghdad in 922 for his alleged claim "I am the Truth"), Rabi'a al-‘Adawiyya, ‘Umar ibn al-Farid, Ibn ‘Arabi, and the obscurer al-Niffari.
Adonis's critical work has done as much as anyone's to bring the Sufi tradition back into the modernist mainstream; his The Static and the Dynamic rereads al-Niffari and al-Hallaj as the secret heroes of an Arabic literary modernity that the official tradition tried to erase.
