An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü (Nominated Fellow, 2026)
Environmental Narratives: Sufi Storytelling Traditions as a Living Cultural Heritage in British Childhoods
What messages do the stories you know about the environment convey?
For many children growing up in Sufi families, storytelling forms an important part of everyday life, offering ways of understanding the environment as inseparable from the self.
Sufism (taṣawwuf) is a spiritual and mystical dimension of Islam. It encompasses a rich diversity of spiritual paths and orders (ṭuruq), whose practices commonly include the remembrance of Allah (dhikr), contemplative reflection (tafakkur), and artistic, poetic, and musical traditions as expressions of devotion. These traditions have generated a rich literary and oral heritage that continues to inform ethical understandings of humanity's relationship with the natural world.
This project explores Sufi storytelling traditions as a form of living cultural heritage within contemporary Britain. It documents both the environmental stories shared between parents and children in everyday family life and the new environmental stories and creative responses produced by children themselves. The Sufi understanding of the environment, grounded in the principle of tawḥīd (the Oneness of Being), provides a distinctive perspective within contemporary Western societies, where nature is often approached primarily through human-centred frameworks.
Britain offers a particularly significant context for this research, where Muslims constitute a religious minority and Sufi communities represent a further minority within that population. At a time when children's encounters with stories are increasingly mediated by digital technologies and AI-generated content, documenting these intergenerational oral traditions contributes to safeguarding an important form of intangible cultural heritage. The project preserves both inherited narratives and children's own creative stories, exhibiting them through two complementary public resources: the Digital Museum of Sufi Stories and Art by Children, which showcases children's creative artworks and story-making, and the Family Archive of Sufi Narratives, which preserves recorded oral stories shared by parents and young people.
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e