Forms: 7 Suffi, 7, 9 Sofee, 8 Souffee, 8–9 Sofi, 9 Soof(f)ee, Soofi, Soophee, 9 Sufi. [a. Ar. çūfī lit. ‘man of wool,’ f. çūf wool (see Margoliouth, Early Devel. Mohamm., 1914, 141). Cf. F. sofi, soufi. It has often been erron. associated with SOPHY1, q.v.] One of a sect of Mohammedan ascetic mystics who in later times embraced pantheistic views.
1653. Greaves, Seraglio, 178. Those Turks which … would be accounted Sofees [marg. Puritans] do commonly read, as they walk along the streets.
1796. Morse, Amer. Geog., II. 571. Some of them called Souffees, who are a kind of quietists.
1815. Elphinstone, Acc. Caubul (1842), I. Introd. 83. The mystical doctrines of the Sofees.
1872. Lowell, Dante, Prose Wks. 1890, IV. 149. A Soofi who has passed the fourth step of initiation.
1875. Encycl. Brit., II. 677/2. The Persian Sufis specially distinguished themselves by their practice of abstinence and solitary meditation.
attrib. 1815. Elphinstone, Acc. Caubul (1842), I. 273. The beauty of the Soofee system.
1886. Conder, Syrian Stone-Lore, ix. (1896), 342, note. The ‘path,’ the final ‘unity’ with God, the disbelief in all creeds, [etc.] … which form the great Sufi doctrines, are purely Buddhist.
