Beyond Deconstruction: Rewriting Self, Being, and Meaning Through Sufi Ontology in Bulleh Shah's Kafi-A Digital Humanities and Computational Textual Perspective

Abstract

Recent scholarship has increasingly drawn parallels between Sufi mystical tradition and post-structuralist philosophy to underpin their peripheral similarities and cross-cultural ties. However, these comparative studies have oversimplified their fundamental ontological and epistemological distinctions, leading to a westernized systematic dissection of Sufi spirituality. This paper argues that Sufi metaphysics and cosmology provides a distinctive yet densely rich understanding of self, divine and meaning though its philosophical investigation share similar anti-rationalist and anti-essentialist approach with Western deconstruction. Through close reading of Sufi kafi’s of Bulleh Shah informed by Ibn Arabi’s philosophical doctrine of Wahdat-ul-Wujud, this paper argues that paradoxical nature of Khudi and Khuda in Sufi text is not reflective of linguistic or cosmic indeterminacy but in-depth realization of divine infinity and experiential knowledge of the Real. By contesting the generic and structural interpretation of Sufi texts, this paper contributes to the development of a counter-argument to cross-cultural studies that posit overtly conceptual unities between Eastern Sufi thought and Western post-structuralist philosophy. The findings of this paper reveal that metaphysical complexity and spiritual density in Bulleh Shah's poetry ultimately shapes its understanding of existence and meaning, acting as a contrary to the linguistic différance which strictly bound itself with the interpretive understanding of reality. This paper further extends its analysis into the digital humanities domain by examining how computational text analysis tools and natural language processing methods, when applied to Bulleh Shah’s kafi’s, may expose the limits of algorithmic meaning-making when confronted with spiritually dense, experiential poetic discourse that resists reduction to lexical or semantic pattern.