The Children’s Digital Museum of Sufi Stories and Art

About the Digital Museum

This Children’s Digital Museum of Sufi Stories and Art showcases contemporary Sufism-inspired artworks created by children and young people based in the UK. These pieces emerged from Story Design Workshops held as part of a broader social science research project conducted by Dr Hamide Elif Üzümcü at the University of Edinburgh.

Sufism (taṣawwuf) is the spiritual and mystical dimension of Islam, concerned with drawing closer to Allah through the purification of the heart. 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 workshops were conducted individually with young participants aged 12–15 who were raised by parents following a Sufi tradition. Each workshop began with warm-up storytelling activities, followed by an introduction to the Sufi concept of the imaginal, understood as a reflection of both one’s individual and social contexts, as well as what lies beyond any simple opposition between them.

The young participants were then invited to respond to the following question by crafting their own story:

What is your imaginal of your engagement with a Sufi environmental approach?

They had approximately 35 minutes to create their stories. Below, you will find their artistic responses, anonymised to comply with research ethics protocols.

All artworks by the children are archived in DataShare, the University of Edinburgh’s Research Data Repository. Each dataset includes the story, the storyteller’s reflective notes, themes, citation, and copyright & licence statement.

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