Although poets like Adunis and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati used Sufism as part of their poetics in the 1950s, the interest in al-Niffari, Ibn Arabi, and al-Hallaj remained limited to images and lexicon. Both poets rarely explore the Sufi experience whereby the ego-self gets obliterated in the encompassing love of the Divine. Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim focuses on the Sufi as the enraptured lover, whose new being is regained through annihilation in the Divine Beatitude. Interrogating modern poetry on the base of the failure of poetics to capture a disembodied lexicon free from the material burden, Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim argues that Sufism can function as a liberating force in modern poetics. In his book-length study of al-Bayati, he interrogates the modern neglect of the metaphysical as a secular positioning that alienates poetics and stifles its potential for expansion in the transcendent. To sustain his advocacy of an intimate knowledge of the Sufi experience, Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim wrote Mutasawwifat Baghdad (Sufis of Baghdad) to demonstrate to writers not only the power of Sufi lexica, but also how a seemingly finite space engages a Sufi who nevertheless soars high in the infinite. In this presentation, I argue that Aziz al-Sayyid Jasim’s writing on Sufism brings an invigorating element in Iraqi intellectual thought that was dominated for long by secular politics.