Alexandre Papas - Sufi Institutions (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1 - The Near and Middle East - Handbook of Sufi Studies, 1) - BRILL (2020)
Alexandre Papas - Sufi Institutions (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1 - The Near and Middle East - Handbook of Sufi Studies, 1) - BRILL (2020)
Editor in Chief
Editors
Founding Editor
Bernd Radtke
Alexandre Papas
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 0169-9423
ISBN 978-90-04-38907-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-39260-1 (e-book)
Acknowledgments ix
List of Figures x
Abbreviations xii
Part 1
The Economy of Sufism
1 Economies of Sufism 27
Adam Sabra
Part 2
Ṣūfī Places and Dwellings
Part 3
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs
Part 4
Sufism and Worldly Powers
Part 5
The Organisation of Mysticism
Index 415
Acknowledgments
The editor of this handbook would like to thank all contributors for their
efforts and patience. I am grateful to several people who have worked with
me throughout the editorial process: Alexander Knysh, Valerie Joy Turner,
Abdurraouf Oueslati, and Nienke Brienen-Moolenaar.
Figures
12.2 Exterior of Bābā Ilyās shrine near Amasya (Black Sea Region). Photo by
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak 244
12.3 Interior of Bābā Ilyās shrine near Amasya (Black Sea Region). Photo by
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak 245
14.1 ʿAbd al-Qādir Jīlānī sitting upon a throne, Mughal, eighteenth century.
Courtesy of Victor & Albert Museum, South & South East Asia
Collection 298
14.2 Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī holding a globe, detail of miniature by Bichitr from
Minto Album, c. 1610–18, India. Courtesy of Chester Beatty Library 299
15.1 Youth and Dervish, Isfahan, second quarter of the seventeenth century.
Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum, Rogers Fund, 1911 305
15.2 Akbar and Jahangir in apotheosis (folio from the St. Petersburg Album),
attributed to Bichitr, about 1640. Private Collection 310
20.1 The silsila of the Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya belonging to the Ḥaḍramī scholar
Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh al-ʿAṭṭās (d. 1929) of Pekalongan (Central Java,
Indonesia). Photo by Ismail Fajrie Alatas 377
Abbreviations
Periodicals
AI Annales Islamologiques
AIUON Annali dell’ Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli
AKM Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes
AMEL Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures
AO Acta Orientalia
AO Hung. Acta Orientalia (Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae)
ArO Archiv Orientální
AS Asiatische Studien
ASJ Arab Studies Journal
ASP Arabic Sciences and Philosophy
ASQ Arab Studies Quarterly
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
BEA Bulletin des Études Arabes
BEFEO Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient
BEO Bulletin d’Études Orientales de l’Institut Français de Damas
BIE Bulletin de l’Institut d’Égypte
BIFAO Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire
BKI Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde
BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
BO Bibliotheca Orientalis
BrisMES British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift
CAJ Central Asiatic Journal
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
EW East and West
IBLA Revue de l’Institut des Belles Lettres Arabes, Tunis
IC Islamic Culture
IJHAS International Journal of African Historical Studies
IHQ Indian Historical Quarterly
IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies
ILS Islamic Law and Society
IOS Israel Oriental Studies
IQ The Islamic Quarterly
JA Journal Asiatique
Abbreviations xiii
Other
The very existence of the present handbook series—in addition to other re-
cent publications, such as the Journal of Sufi Studies (published from 2012) and
ongoing large collaborative projects focusing on Islamic mysticism—is an elo-
quent testimony to the extraordinary growth of Ṣūfī studies, which has tended
to become an independent discipline. This specificity is true of both eastern
and western scholarship on Islam. With departments of Ṣūfī studies (tasavvuf
anabilim dalı) in most university divinity schools (ilahiyat fakültesi), a country
such as Turkey can boast that, since the 2000s, it has been one of the world’s
leading producers of academic research on Sufism (Şimşek). This global in-
tellectual expansion has resulted in, among other outcomes that should be
explored (for example, the works of contemporary Ṣūfī intellectuals), the pub-
lication of important surveys, both individual or collective, discussing Sufism
as a whole. The present handbook does not purport to do the same, but offers a
modest contribution to the discussions opened by these seminal surveys.
Without trying to be exhaustive (many references can be found in Knysh,
Historiography, and Zarcone, Işın, and Buehler (eds.), v–xxi), I review some
of these survey works to understand how Sufism has been constructed con-
ceptually. Our aim is not to decide if this conceptual construction was legiti-
mate or not—there is no science without the construction of subjects—but
to examine how authors have established frameworks, assembled elements,
and built concepts. We do not feel the need to deconstruct the Orientalist con-
ception of Sufism. The Western discovery of Sufism was a more complicated
process than the somewhat facile scenario suggested by the distortions of
European Orientalism. Without detailing the history of this discovery (again
see Knysh, Historiography, 212–7), suffice it to identify various actors—not
just Orientalists (a term which, strictly speaking, should be reserved for phi-
lologists rather than scholars of Islam)—who explored the study of Sufism
well before the colonial period. For instance, among the first trailblazers were
two Frenchmen, the famous Huguenot merchant Jean Chardin (1643–1713)
who, during his stay in Ṣafavid Persia in 1711 provided the first informed ac-
count about soufys (Chardin, 5:152–63), and later, in 1758, the man of letters
the mystics of Islam, published in 1950, Arberry, who also translated the Qurʾān
into English, abandoned his mentor’s interest in non-Muslim influences and
presented Sufism “as if it were an isolated manifestation, viewing the move-
ment from within as an aspect of Islam, as though these other factors which
certainly determined its growth did not exist” (Arberry, 11). Arberry built his
definition of Sufism on four pillars (to use his own words), i.e., the Qurʾān as
the supreme authority for the guidance of mystics, ḥadīth (prophetic tradi-
tion) as their second source of intellectual enlightenment, the saints (awliyāʾ)
as models of pious behaviour and worldly interactions, and spiritual experi-
ences (aḥwāl and maqāmāt) specific to Ṣūfīs (Arberry, 13–4). One short chapter
(ch. 8) is devoted to Ṣūfī orders, while the last chapter deplores the decay of
spirituality that resulted from the Ṣūfī orders that rule over “credulous masses”
and the “charlatanry” of the cult of saints. Here Arberry explicitly repeats the
arguments of Muslim reformists, such as Tawfīq al-Ṭawīl, an Egyptian reformist
historian of Sufism (Arberry, 119–20).
By contrast, Arberry’s contemporary, John Spencer Trimingham (1904–87),
trained as both a social scientist and a Protestant missionary, published an en-
tire book on The Sufi orders in Islam (in 1971). After mentioning, somewhat
fleetingly, his debt to Rinn and Le Chatelier, Trimingham (who was originally
a specialist on Islam in Africa) reconsiders the historical development of the
brotherhoods according to three stages, which are chronological as well as
social in nature: the khānaqāh (lodge) stage, a golden age during which elite
circles of master and disciples lived a rigorous but informal spiritual life; the
ṭarīqa stage, when initiatory schools developed around a corpus of teachings
and a bourgeois mysticism conformed to social and legal standards; and last-
ly the ṭāʾifa (order) stage, which saw Sufism become a popular and crowded
movement that fragmented into multiple lineages and the cult of saints domi-
nated (Trimingham, preface, 102–3). Citing Muslim reformists, albeit critically,
he, too, bemoans the decline of Sufism, from the epitome of high spirituality
to vulgar mysticism, and considers this a result of the ascendancy of heredi-
tary Ṣūfī orders and the ubiquitous spread of saint veneration (Trimingham,
70–1, 246–8).
In both works, the decline thesis was less due, as is often claimed, to the
Protestant background of its promoters, who might be inclined to juxtapose
the personal experience of mystics to the institutionalisation of mysticism,
than to the replication of the views of Muslim reformism concerning Sufism
(views that were partly influenced by Western modernism and elitism). Simply
put, early Sufism or spirituality was not in question, the problem was in the
Ṣūfī orders. Whatever role Muslim reformism played in the shaping of this con-
ception, there is, now, a sharp dichotomy in Ṣūfī studies, in the two directions
4 Papas
we have pointed out. In other words, scholars of Islam agreed that there was an
irreconcilable difference between Ṣūfī doctrine and Ṣūfī orders.
Still, in its content, Trimingham’s book appears to be an exception to aca-
demic works on Islamic mysticism during that period. Indeed, the bulk of stud-
ies focus on Sufism in its trans-historical form, that is, metaphysical doctrine,
but also its spiritual techniques and poetic expressions. This was perhaps,
again, a result of the conscious or unconscious impact of Muslim reformist
ideas on Western scholarship, as if scholars shied away from social and political
history in order to discuss the “inner life of Islam” (the spiritual and intimate
experience of religion) to use Annemarie Schimmel’s (1922–2003) expression,
or even a hiérohistoire (a prophetic and esoteric history of the soul) to invoke a
term used by Henry Corbin (1903–78) who was more interested in Islamic phi-
losophy and Shīʿī gnosis than in Sufism in the strict sense. As Mark Sedgwick
showed, a movement called Traditionalism, inspired by the French esoterist
and Ṣūfī René Guénon (1886–1951), attracted some early twentieth-century
European intellectuals and, after the 1960s, spread among limited circles in the
Islamic world, Russia, and the United States (Sedgwick). Without going into
the details of this multifaceted movement, we must note its perennialist “phi-
losophy” (that is, its idea that all religions originated in a primordial religion)
and declinist vision of the modern world, which only a small elite was sup-
posedly able to understand. These elements led several eminent academics to
construct (again, this is not a value judgment) a concept of Islamic mysticism
detached from its everyday worldly expressions and from the contingences of
time, particularly those of the early modern and modern periods.
Traditionalists like Seyyed Hossein Nasr and their fellow-travellers such as
Schimmel, who was close to Nasr (Hicks, 158), produced scholarly introduc-
tions to Sufism in which readers could discover an aesthetic spiritual tradition
based on an eternal essence. In his Sufi essays (published in 1972), Nasr was
not indifferent to Islamic history and did not pretend to cover all aspects of
Sufism. Nevertheless, in the context of the “disintegration of Western cultural
values and disenchantment with the experiences of modernism,” he claimed
to expose “the real nature of a spiritual way” as opposed to the distortions
imposed by certain Orientalists, Westernized Muslims, and exoteric-minded
Muslims (Nasr, 11–3). In line with Traditionalist authors (René Guénon, Frithjof
Schuon, Martin Lings, etc.) whom he considered genuine teachers of authen-
tic Sufism, Nasr wrote his book for Western audiences and Western-educated
Muslims (Nasr, introduction). Much less ethereal in writing style and content,
Schimmel’s famous Mystical dimensions of Islam (published in 1975), starts with
a chapter entitled “What is Sufism?” After considering mysticism in general
and the history of European scholarship on Sufism in particular (drawn partly
What Is a Ṣūfī Institution ? 5
Western language (Popovic and Veinstein (eds.), Les ordres; Popovic and
Veinstein (eds.), Les voies). These works are striking for their almost exclusive
emphasis on what we call the non-doctrinal dimensions of Sufism. Probably
in response to the preponderance of religious studies (sciences religieuses) on
mysticism in the French academy, great attention was paid to Ṣūfī forms of
organisation, the social impact of Ṣūfī groups, their political activities, their
cultural achievements, and their complex historical developments. At the
disciplinary level, history and anthropology dominated over islamologie as a
religious science. The divorce between the two sub-fields, which can be sum-
marised as, respectively, taṣawwuf studies and ṭarīqa studies, seemed complete.
During this period of intensive academic production on Islamic mysticism,
a new generation of scholars (born in the 1940s and 1950s) emerged, especial-
ly in the United States. Once again, we limit ourselves to essays centred on
Sufism. Two prominent scholars who are close to the Traditionalist “school”
have published innovative handbooks.
William Chittick, a recognised authority in the study of the great Andalusian
Ṣūfī Ibn al-ʿArabī, wrote Sufism: A beginner’s guide, “to find a middle way be-
tween academic obscurity and enthusiast advocacy,” and “to show how basic
teachings appear in various guises in diverse circumstances” (Chittick, vii–viii).
Chittick reincorporates the contributions of Ṣūfīs into the general system of
Islamic thought. Besides jurists ( fuqahāʾ) and theologians (mutakallimūn), the
author methodically re-examines the main topics of Sufism (struggle against
the ego, dhikr, samāʿ, mystical experiences, love for God, the names of God,
and so forth) according to the three scriptural dimensions outlined in the well-
known ḥadīth, i.e., submission (islām), faith (īmān), and excellence (iḥsān).
Ṣūfīs were those who subordinated islām and imān to iḥsān, the highest goal.
Overall, this is a brilliant and unique reconstruction of doctrinal Sufism, in
both its diversity and unity; it also includes a sub-study on Aḥmad Samʿānī
(d. 534/1140), an important though little-known Ṣūfī from Marv (Chittick,
142–77). However, historians of Sufism might not be at ease with bold generali-
sations such as “being a Sufi certainly has nothing to do with the Sunni/Shi’ite
split, nor with the fact that all Muslims are affiliated with one or another of
the schools of jurisprudence … It has nothing to do with social class, although
some Sufi organizations may be more or less class specific. There is no neces-
sary correlation with family …” (Chittick, 23). This is certainly true in principle
but not as much in practice. Likewise, anthropologists would be reluctant to
consider figures such as Nāẓim al-Qubruṣī (1922–2014), Javād Nūrbakhsh
(1926–2008) and others as representatives of Sufism in the modern Muslim
8 Papas
world (Chittick, 38). These masters were important, but they existed in addi-
tion to many other Ṣūfī shaykhs who were unknown in the West but influential
in Turkey, Iran, and beyond.
The second handbook noted above is not American but French. Eric
Geoffroy published an Introduction au soufisme in 2003. An expert on the
Shādhiliyya Ṣūfī path, among other areas, Geoffroy carefully reconnects Sufism
to Islam, but is more interested than Chittick (in his handbook, not in gen-
eral) in the historical contexts in which Muslim mystics lived. Convinced that
“the inward-directed approach of Sufism is not incompatible with a critical
approach” (Geoffroy [trans. Gaetani], xvii), Geoffroy offers an excellent work-
ing instrument by which to understand Sufism from within and in all its facets.
Systematically mentioning the scriptural references to Ṣūfī notions, Geoffroy
first discusses key issues (Sufism and Shīʿīsm; the role of the feminine; Sufism,
quietism, and popular religion; and above all, Sufism and Islam). Then, in
chapter 3, he presents a precise historical overview of Sufism, alternating facts,
intellectual biographies of Ṣūfī masters, and developments on the main trends
in mystical Islam. Practical aspects are described at length in chapter 4, where
he again mixes scriptural and text references with anthropological observa-
tions. In these chapters, we find an exemplary effort to downplay the dichot-
omy between the two approaches to Sufism. Yet, the last sections of the book
revive the Traditionalist views: Sufism is called on to undertake the defence
of “the transcendent unity of religions” against “the pressures of exoterism”;
especially when one recalls that “objective signs of degeneration have affected
Sufism [itself] throughout the ages,” that “the appearance of initiatory paths …
certainly had some negative effects,” and that “from the fifteenth century on,
signs of ossification were clear.” These would be symptoms which “relate to
what one can call the illness of ‘brotherhoodism,’ a form of degeneration in-
herited from the institutionalization of Sufism” (Geoffroy [trans. Gaetani],
194–5). Regardless of their merits, such views cannot be taken for granted in
the social sciences because of their subjective and teleological natures.
The works of Chittick and Geoffroy remain, we think, the best syntheses on
Ṣūfī theory and practice to date. Four other important handbooks have been
published in the same period—more precisely, between 1997 and 2017—by
US-based scholars; these mark decisive steps in the historical study of Sufism.
The first was written by Carl Ernst, a well-known specialist of Islamic stud-
ies, especially Sufism in India and Pakistan. In the Shambhala guide to Sufism,
Ernst builds on his experience in the subcontinent, and carefully avoids “re-
ferring to Islam as a changeless monolithic religion” and stresses that “the
multifarious activities that we [non-Muslims as well as Muslims themselves]
subsume under the terms Sufism and Islam were not spheres of existence or
What Is a Ṣūfī Institution ? 9
separable from religious life in general” (Ernst, xv). By refusing to give a fixed
definition to these constantly contested terms, and opposed to any essential-
ism or dogmatism, Ernst conducts a dispassionate analysis of Sufism “in the
broadest descriptive sense” (Ernst, xvii). Thus, his interpretative essay is nei-
ther a doctrinal survey nor a study of historical Sufism, but an exploration of
the subtle meanings of Sufism based on diverse primary texts and through
a series of topics, namely scriptural sources, saints and sainthood, spiritual
practices, the functioning of Ṣūfī orders, Ṣūfī poetry and music, and the state
of Sufism in the contemporary world. Among the many virtues of this book,
which is addressed to a broad audience, is the fact that it paved the way for
more objective and pluralistic approaches to Sufism.
Not surprisingly, it was also a specialist of the diverse forms of Sufism in the
Indian subcontinent, and an innovative historian of the globalisations of Islam,
who wrote the handbook entitled Sufism: A global history. With his unique
background, Nile Green “devotes equal value and emphasis to each period of
its [Sufism’s] history” (Green, xi); thus, he introduces our field to the broader
area of global theory, making Sufism a horizontal phenomena, rather than
a vertical one. In more conceptual words, in the pen of the global historian,
Sufism appears as a tradition constructed through time periods and regional
contexts, rather than mysticism in the private sphere. In this new perspective,
“brotherhoods formed the conceptual and eventually the institutional chan-
nels through time and space that served to constitute Sufism as a tradition”
(Green, 9). In an original way, Green extends the scope of Ernst’s handbook, to
survey the unexpected diversity and longevity of Sufism, and put an end to at-
tempts to nationalise (Arabise or Persianise mostly) or essentialise its concep-
tion. Furthermore, he narrates the history of Sufism with an emphasis on three
interdependent types of power: discursive (Ṣūfī teachings that shape people’s
actions), miraculous (Ṣūfī saints who perform miracles to influence society),
and economic (the material strength of Ṣūfī leaders that brings a tradition into
being) (Green, 5–8).
The last two handbooks we mention were written by the same author, and
give us the rare opportunity to follow the intellectual evolution of a scholar
of Islamic studies. Alexander Knysh published Islamic mysticism: A short his-
tory in 2000 and Sufism: A new history of Islamic mysticism in 2017. Thanks to
a wide range of interests and expertise, from Sufism in Yemen to Islam in the
Caucasus, including historiography and Ṣūfī doctrine, Ibn al-ʿArabī and the
fifth-/eleventh-century scholar al-Qushayrī, Knysh is particularly qualified to
provide both overviews and clear narratives. In the first handbook, readers
followed “Sufism’s evolution from a simple world-renouncing piety to a series
of highly sophisticated doctrines that circulated within a formal and highly
10 Papas
institutional framework known as the ṭarīqa” (Knysh, Islamic mysticism, 2). Thus,
Knysh never juxtaposes spiritual aspects and temporal aspects of Sufism, and
proposes “to furnish a picture of Islamic mysticism that is firmly rooted in the
historical and socio-political contexts within which it developed” (Knysh, Islamic
mysticism, 3). This descriptive account intentionally neglects the philosophy of
history and ephemeral theoretical pretensions. In chapters 8 and 9, we find an
excellent synthetic account of Ṣūfī institutions, one that not only covers Ṣūfī or-
ders and establishments over time and space, but also understands them as a
means to cultivate (not simply perpetuate) Ṣūfī thought, ethics, and practices.
In his second handbook, Knysh offers a more complex, less positivist nar-
rative that tries to emancipate Ṣūfī studies from false debates and schematic
dichotomies—an ambition that already surfaced in his previous survey. Knysh
convincingly argues that Sufism can be approached consistently by Western as
well as Islamic epistemologies. Therefore, concepts such as “Sufism,” “asceti-
cism,” and “mysticism” appear as efficient analytical tools. Moreover, accord-
ing to the author (Knysh, Sufism, introduction) the latter two terms co-exist
in Sufism. This dual (outsider and insider) perspective, abolishes barriers be-
tween “invented” Western concepts and “authentic” Islamic notions, and thus
reopens the door (left ajar by Anawati and Gardet) for comparative analyses in
Ṣūfī studies (Knysh, Sufism, ch. 4)—a sub-field we hope to explore in a future
handbook. As for the perspective of Sufism: A new history of Islamic mysticism
(specifically its chapter 5), it is an important milestone in overcoming the di-
chotomy we first discussed. Confirming the accuracy of the term “order” (after
the Islamologist Fritz Meier (1914–2009)) to describe the ṭuruq, Knysh pres-
ents these institutions as propitious milieus for the cultivation of initiatory
teachings, and ritual activities that were transformed “to a loftier cognitive and
cosmological plane created by collective Sufi imagination.” Moreover, Sufism’s
evolution from informal circles to hierarchically-structured institutions (often
described by the Weberian concept of “routinisation”) was in fact much more
nuanced, and depended on historical and cultural contexts. Therefore, at-
tempts to explain the relationships between masters and disciples in these
institutions as only power relations “fails to do justice to the complexity of
human aspirations” (Knysh, Sufism, 142, 144, 161, 164). That is, Ṣūfī institutions
should not be reduced to simple traditional communities with no spiritual life,
and their organisation should not be perceived as just a system of power.
At the end of this historiographical review, we see the present handbook as
just a part of the scholarly heritage briefly discussed above. In order to contin-
ue the recent efforts aimed at reconciling divergent tendencies in Ṣūfī studies,
we must follow and deepen the research directions outlined by our predeces-
sors, and discuss the question of Ṣūfī institutions.
What Is a Ṣūfī Institution ? 11
To clarify our approach and answer the basic question, “what is a Ṣūfī insti-
tution?” we return to the classical (i.e. from the 1850s to the 1920s) theories
of institutions (Scott, xi). Here we are dealing with institutional theories of
sociology, not those applied in economics and political sciences. Therefore,
the concept of “institutions” not only includes the establishments but also
the community systems within societies. In parallel with the ideas developed
by American sociologists such as William Graham Summer (1840–1910) and
Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), European social theorists, chiefly Max
Weber (1864–1920) and Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), also developed variants
of analysis (Scott, ch. 1). As is well known, Durkheim defined sociology itself
as “the science of institutions, of their genesis, and of their functioning,” and
labelled an institution as “all the beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by
the collectivity,” without reducing institutionalisation to a pure determinism:
“Despite the fact that beliefs and social practices permeate us in this way from
the outside, it does not follow that we receive them passively and without
causing them to undergo modification” (Durkheim, Les règles, xxiii and n. 1).
He later refined his concept, explaining that symbolic systems, in particular
systems of knowledge and beliefs, were social institutions. For Durkheim, cate-
gories of thought and belief depend, among other factors, on the way in which
a collectivity is organised and on its religious institutions. More broadly, nearly
all the great social institutions (e.g., categories of thought, magic, moral and
legal rules) “have been born in religion … If religion has given birth to all that
is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion”
(Durkheim, Les formes, 22, 598–9). In other words, an institution is not so much
a communal organisation decided by individuals as a socially-based system of
collective representations and beliefs that remain constant over time and are
derived from religion. Likewise, the institutionalisation process is not simply a
late introduction of rules and regulations, but the slow social accomplishment
of religious ideals. Against the simplistic views on institutions, we must realize
that religious thoughts do not float outside their collective construction, and
social institutions are not just pragmatic tools that enable society to function.
In our opinion, the Durkheimian concept of social institutions is path break-
ing, not strictly holistic or functionalist, and religion-oriented, and therefore,
particularly appropriate for Islamic studies. We share with Nathan Hofer, a his-
torian of mediaeval Sufism who contributed two chapters to this volume, the
conviction that Sufism has a fundamentally social character. Ṣūfī institutions
can be defined as “the socially constructed and accepted ‘ways of doing things’
[repertoire of praxis but also technical vocabulary]” in a Ṣūfī collectivity. This
12 Papas
religious system. For example, the maintenance of Central Asian holy sites was
funded by waqf, donations, and offerings, especially during massive pilgrimag-
es, and these sites fostered the renovation of other construction and increased
the productivity of lands. Modern critics who attacked corrupt financial and
spiritual elements of this system could not put an end to mass devotions
around deceased mystics. Remarkably, Ṣūfī institutions adapted to contempo-
rary economic conditions by reinventing traditional business models, like the
Pakistani Chishtiyya qawwālī (devotional music) that turned into world music
or, in Senegal, the agrarian spirituality of the Murīdiyya that became globalised
as a migrant economy.
Nathan Hofer focuses on pious endowments (waqf, pl. awqāf ), that is, irre-
vocable trusts that enable someone to use part of his or her wealth to support a
religious or socially beneficial cause, in this case, Sufism. From the third/ninth
century until now, waqfs were beneficial to Ṣūfīs in many ways. They provided
them with spaces for learning, teaching, reading, writing, meditating, and cel-
ebrating collectively. More profoundly, endowments shaped specific patterns
of Ṣūfī social activity, which changed over time; these included innovations in
devotional life and conceptual language in mediaeval Baghdad, the systemati-
sation of Ṣūfī thought and practice, as represented by Ṣūfī literature in fifth-/
eleventh- to sixth-/twelfth-century Khurāsān, and so forth. Hussain Ahmad
Khan studies the range of donations (mainly futūḥ and nudhūr), another as-
pect of the economy of Sufism. Donations were well developed in the Middle
East, the Maghrib, and India throughout the mediaeval and early modern pe-
riods, and proved instrumental in funding Ṣūfī establishments and Ṣūfī ways
of life. However, Ṣūfī circles continuously debated the issue of the acceptance
of gifts and were acutely aware of the problematic aspects of this common
practice: whereas giving and receiving donations was not devoid of ulterior
motives that revealed the weaknesses of men (including mystics), futūḥ espe-
cially favoured pious life and elevated alms to the rank of divine openings onto
hidden truths. Mehran Afshari shows that, faced with earning a living or rely-
ing on God, Ṣūfīs found an alternative solution. They utilised the early Islamic
chivalry code ( futuwwa) to render their professional activities spiritual. From
initiation rituals and symbols to civilities and moral precepts (generosity, self-
abnegation, etc.), Ṣūfī communities in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia in-
stitutionalised spiritual values. To cultivate these principles, in the seventh/
thirteenth century Ṣūfīs created a literary genre called Kitāb al-futuwwa or
futuvvat nāma in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Conversely, later variants of
these writings infused Ṣūfī religiosity and altruism in trade and craft guilds.
The second part of this book, devoted to the “Ṣūfī places and dwellings,” ex-
plores the spatial inscriptions of mystics: where and how they lived, practiced
What Is a Ṣūfī Institution ? 15
their beliefs, received spiritual education, and found their final resting places.
We understand these sites not only as forums for Ṣūfī practice and knowl-
edge transmission but also as sites conceived by Ṣūfī collectivities as meeting
places of the immanent and the transcendent. Shrines, lodges, and outposts
thus appear to constitute a spatial institutionalisation in every sense, that is, as
geographical and architectural spaces, collective and social spaces, ritual and
imaginary spaces.
Daphna Ephrat and Paulo Pinto present a historical overview of Ṣūfī places
and dwellings. Along with the evolution of Sufism, from the late fourth/tenth
to the ninth/fifteenth century, the lodges (khānqāhs) developed into centres
of teaching and spiritual training, with their own structures of authority and
companionship in Khurāsān, Iraq, and beyond. Quite early, Ṣūfī dwellings
were funded by dynastic states, such as that of the Saljūqs who encouraged
sharīʿa-oriented Sufism. In addition, informal groups pursuing ascetic lifestyles
continued to gather in smaller hospices, for example, in Syria. The institutionali-
sation of Sufism also took place at the lodges presided over by revered masters
following the model of the Prophet and his community, rather than in state-
sponsored establishments. These were centres where disciples orbited around
their masters. The centres often contained the graves of the saintly founders,
and thus served as spaces of communal worship and pious visitations (mazār).
The premodern period (tenth/sixteenth to twelfth/eighteenth century) saw the
geographical expansion of Ṣūfī places and their religiosity. For instance, the
Ottoman capital hosted a large number of lodges of many different orders, such
as the Khalwatiyya and the Naqshbandiyya; in Mughal India, shrine complexes
(dargāhs) were hubs for the locally embedded Ṣūfī orders and for interactions
between Muslims and non-Muslims. As opposed to simplistic scenarios (decline
vs. rise, modernity vs. inertia), Ṣūfī institutions experienced five processes of
relative transformation during the modern period: reform, in so far as Ṣūfīs en-
countered Muslim reformist ideas, particularly in the lodges of Mecca; crisis and
adaptation, when lodges were tightly controlled by the state as in Syria, or even
closed, as in socialist Bosnia; revivalism, in the sense that shrines, as alternative
religious spaces, attracted masses and were also used by state authorities to pro-
mote a certain version of the nation’s “cultural heritage”; and globalisation, since
Muslim migrants and converts established new connections and encouraged
cultural transfers between Ṣūfī spaces on a transcontinental scale.
Peyvand Firouzeh takes us into the Ṣūfī lodge, a physical establishment be-
longing to a group of Ṣūfīs gathered around a master. The very fluidity of the ter-
minology related to this institution reflects its diverse regional characteristics,
heterogeneous ascetic-mystic practices, and its differentiated development.
However, in the longue durée, from the fifth/eleventh century to the present,
16 Papas
from North Africa to Southeast Asia, all lodges, beyond their material entities,
were surrounded by narratives linking Sufism to the spiritual memory of its
architecture. As political events and everyday life in the lodges show, the insti-
tution established itself as a key player in history. Terminology is also enlight-
ening in the case of ribāṭ (pl. rubuṭ), or borderland outposts, as discussed by
Nathan Hofer. Originally connoting war and pious renunciation, this paradoxi-
cal term was widespread in frontier regions before the emergence of Sufism;
it was then interpreted by Ṣūfīs as a place for spiritual struggle with one’s ego
and mystical quest. Outposts dedicated to this function emerged in Iraq, Iran,
and elsewhere in the third/ninth to fourth/tenth century, and then prolifer-
ated across the Muslim world after the sixth/twelfth century. These estab-
lishments institutionalised militant and political forms of Islamic mysticism
in the early modern Maghrib and in western and sub-Saharan Africa during
the colonial period. Related to but distinct from Ṣūfī lodges, shrines came to
be identified with Sufism par excellence from the sixth/twelfth to seventh/
thirteenth century onwards, according to Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen. Here, too,
the rich lexis reflects the variety of holy sites, from a sacred tree to a whole com-
plex, from grottoes to mausoleums with cupolas. Whether during their expan-
sion throughout the Muslim world until the eleventh/seventeenth to twelfth/
eighteenth century or in the face of criticism from Wahhābī, Deobandi, and
Jadīd reformist movements, Ṣūfī shrines are ubiquitous in the sociopolitical
history of Islam; they provide their pious visitors with the opportunity to step
out of time and approach the sacred.
The third part discusses the social roles of Ṣūfīs, that is, the different ways
in which they responded to social demands as well as to their own agendas
for changing society in accordance with Ṣūfī values. This ambiguous position
betrays the fact that Muslim mystics were torn between God and men, more
precisely between manifesting their saintly vocations and their ongoing pres-
ence in the secular world. As a “friend of God,” a father or a brother in his
community, and an authority at the heart of sociability, the spiritual master
(shaykh) himself became an institution.
The opening chapter of part 3, written by Rachida Chih, adopts a threefold
approach (textual, historical, and anthropological) to analyse the status of
the master and his relationship with his disciples. Raised to the rank of saints
(awliyāʾ), Ṣūfī masters attracted followers more because of the divine blessing
(baraka) they dispensed than because they taught mystical gnosis. Sufism was
integrated into society at large as early as the ʿAbbāsid period. This trend con-
tinued under the Mamlūks, the Ṣafavids, and the Ottomans. For all devotees,
companionship with the master presupposed the observation of a certain set
What Is a Ṣūfī Institution ? 17
of manners (ādāb) codified in writings mostly in Arabic and Persian, which of-
fered a model of society based on the prophetic ideal. This model was defined
by three concepts. First, companionship (ṣuḥba) was based on a binding pact
between the master and his disciples, one that demanded that they observe
mutual obligations. Authors such as al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) and al-Shaʿrānī
(d. 973/1565), described disciples’ submission to their master in detail; but
these descriptions can be found also, for example, among contemporary Ṣūfī
brotherhoods in Egypt. Second, within the frame of lodges and shrines, ser-
vice (khidma) to the master and to the companions extended to the site and
their visitors, and the inhabitants around these sites. The hierarchy of Ṣūfī
orders and their servants, attendants, and deputies created social functions
that mixed charity, social services, and spiritual guidance. Third, the media-
tion (shafāʿa; tawassul) performed by Ṣūfī leaders and their lodges and shrines
(through the baraka of the deceased saint) meant, first, that saint would inter-
vene with God on behalf of certain individuals, but could also include food dis-
tribution, healing sessions, and arbitration in conflicts, as, for instance, among
tribes in twelfth-/eighteenth-century Morocco or, today, in regions where
state authorities have failed or are ineffective. In the globalised contempo-
rary world where master-disciple relationships can be long distance, as in the
Qādiriyya Būdshīshiyya, the annual visits to the shaykh remain essential social
events that confirm his institutional stature and exceed the confines of his
lodge or shrine.
Contrary to their image as exclusive friends of God, Ṣūfīs devoted consider-
able attention to altruism (īthār), as Richard McGregor shows. Ṣūfī thinkers
such as ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī l-Harawī (d. 481/1089) demanded discipline of the self
in return for divine favour, practiced chivalry and benevolence, and ultimately
made selflessness a mystical experience. Hagiographers provided biographical
examples of this conception, with shaykhs like Abū Marwān ʿAbd al-Mālik b.
Ibrāhīm al-Qaysī l-Yuḥānisī (seventh/thirteenth century) feeding the poor as
part of their spiritual training, or Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Nūrī (d. 295/907) for whom
altruism was the key to proper conduct and eternal life. These activities were
institutionalised in, for instance, langars (soup kitchens) and sabīl-kuttābs
(Qurʾān schools with public fountains). In general, Muslim spiritual authori-
ties had a strong and reciprocal impact on urban sociability, as Nathalie Clayer
argues. Ṣūfī saints and orders were active in the emergence of cities and the
urban fabric. In the eighth-/fourteenth- to ninth-/fifteenth-century Balkans,
or later in twelfth-/eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Cyrenaica, several cit-
ies developed around shrines or lodges. Ṣūfīs developed sociability at the local
level (in Istanbul neighbourhoods, for example) as well as on a global scale (in
18 Papas
hubs for ḥajj, such as Jerusalem). City facilities also reshaped Ṣūfī lifestyles and
institutions with the emergence of new products, such as coffee; new technol-
ogies, such as printing; and modern administration in the form of associations.
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak studies rural environments, which are not separate, but
distinct from urban settings, and reveals a religious landscape where the con-
straints of nature fostered ascetic, but active forms of Sufism. Initially, Yasawī
Ṣūfīs proselytised in remote and rural areas, such as the Qipchaq Steppe,
whereas Naqshbandīs chose to cultivate land and bring spiritual education to
Transoxanian villages. Ṣūfī institutions were instrumental in persuading peo-
ple to settle uninhabited lands, secure roads, and educate people. In addition,
rural Anatolia proved emblematic of a politico-religious form of Sufism: local
autonomy and hostility toward the central powers were accompanied by non-
conformist tendencies.
The fourth part of our volume deals with “Sufism and worldly powers.”
We demonstrate the inextricable interrelationship of mysticism and politics,
thereby departing from the premise of their presumed separation, a view that
still holds sway in the political sciences and sociology. Ṣūfīs often dealt with
politics, but in their own unique way. Historical research on chronicles, mirrors
for princes, hagiographies, and speculative treatises suggests that Ṣūfīs were
compelled to position themselves as interlocutors of power institutions, not
simply for their own survival and promotion but, more deeply, to overcome
the principled contradiction between world renunciation and sociopolitical
involvement.
In the chapter’s introductory essay, Alexandre Papas explores five successive
yet overlapping historical contexts in which Ṣūfīs and worldly powers inter-
acted in a variety of complex ways. First, during the early mediaeval period,
ascetics (zuhhād), then Ṣūfīs proper, confronted not just “infidel” regimes, but
also Muslim rulers they considered illegitimate or corrupt. This was a casus
belli that led to a reflection on jihād later developed by al-Ghazālī. In general,
Muslim mystics maintained an ambivalent relationship with the state appara-
tus of the ʿAbbāsids and the Būyids. Second, when Ṣūfī orders emerged in the
late mediaeval period from the Maghrib to India, sultans’ patronage of Ṣūfīs
was as much pragmatic as religious (i.e., belief in the supernatural power of
holy individuals who made predictions and lent legitimacy to rulers). Third,
the Islamic millennial shift (tenth/sixteenth to eleventh/seventeenth century)
accentuated this tendency towards saintly rulership. In this regard, three cases
of Ṣūfī dynasties were emblematic: the Jazūliyya in Morocco, the Ṣafaviyya in
Iran, and the Naqshbandiyya/Khwājas in eastern Turkestan. It appears that
the theories of the “esoteric government,” which derived from the concept of
What Is a Ṣūfī Institution ? 19
and its mystical aspects as manifested in Sufism. Knut Vikør reconsiders and
relativises the concept of the Ṣūfī kingdom or state. This ultimate phase of
institutionalisation seems to emerge from an absence of alternative political
structures in three historical configurations. The aforementioned Khwājas of
Central Asia illustrate the transition from tribal to political-religious order; the
jihād movements of Dan Fodio (d. 1234/1817) and al-Ḥājj ʿUmar b. Saʿīd Tall
(d. 1280/1864) in West Africa established new states based on an Islamic reform-
ist (not Ṣūfī) agenda; and the power of the Ṣūfī leader al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1300/1883)
in Algeria, as well as the Sanūsiyya brotherhood in Libya, emerged when exist-
ing states were devastated by colonial intervention.
The last part, “The organisation of mysticism,” revises the still pervasive
“evolutionist” model derived from Trimingham by emphasizing the complex
development of Sufism and the coexistence of various trends within it, rather
than presenting it as a simple unidirectional process. We describe the insti-
tutional forms taken by Ṣūfī practices over time, collective behaviours, and
doctrinal elaborations. Organisation does not mean sclerosis of spiritual life,
or a triumph of the mundane over the supra-mundane; it does not indicate
decline or the progress of Sufism as a social fact, but more fundamentally, it
relates to the concrete responses given by Ṣūfīs to the eternal question of how
one can ensure religious stability in an unstable world by perpetuating the
key precepts of Islam while at the same time acknowledging the ephemeral
nature of things.
In the general essay authored by Mark Sedgwick, organised Sufism is pre-
sented as a ṭarīqa (path, order) system, but this is only one of the organisa-
tional forms that Sufism has taken. History shows plural, successive, and
interrelated institutionalisations. Following the example of the closely-knit
circles of masters and disciples (which remained a structural nucleus), already
widespread in the fifth/eleventh century, later Ṣūfī lodges regulated the secular
and spiritual activities of their users. Many Ṣūfī shrines (Mīhana in Khurāsān;
Ṭanṭā in Egypt) were not only sites of pilgrimage but also institutions akin to
lodges, providing religious and education services. In parallel, itinerant struc-
tured groups such as the Qalandars existed beyond the comfort of lodges, until
the nineteenth century. Ṭarīqa Sufism developed as the central Ṣūfī organisa-
tion from the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries. Many exist-
ing lodges were integrated into orders but others remained independent. As
successful orders spread, they fragmented into autonomous sub-orders that
then created sub-sub-orders. Various individuals assisted the shaykh, including
the muqaddam (deputy), khalīfa (representative), khādim (servant, guardian),
maddāḥ (reciter), etc. Membership was offered to disciples (murīds), formally
and informally to admirers (muḥibbs), but in any case, it remained fluid. The
What Is a Ṣūfī Institution ? 21
succession process was also flexible and potentially conflictual, resulting in di-
vision into groups headed by a deputy, a representative, or a son of the shaykh.
Hereditary succession was common and formed Ṣūfī families. While orders ex-
perienced life cycles (birth, maturity, replacement), other Ṣūfī organisations
appeared without replacing orders. These were instituted by the states, whose
old patronage tradition culminated, for instance, in the Majlis al-Ṣūfī (Sufi
Council) in nineteenth-century Egypt. From the 1960s onward, modern organ-
isational and administrative techniques were incorporated into ṭarīqas. The
Nurcus in Turkey deny being a ṭarīqa, but organise themselves like a traditional
ṭarīqa into educational institutions. The Threshold Society in the United States
is a non-profit organisation, but is also still a recognizably neo-Mevlevī ṭarīqa.
Returning to the beginnings of Ṣūfī organisations, Jean-Jacques Thibon
details the markers of Ṣūfī lifestyles, which began to be formalised (not stan-
dardised) in the second/eighth century. The first means of organisation in
Sufism, and one that had a deep effect on its subsequent history, included
wearing garments such as the patched cloak (muraqqaʿa), engaging in ritu-
als such as clothing disciples in the Ṣūfī robe (lubs al-khirqa), taking spiritual
paths (ṭarīqas), following the lineage of initiating masters (silsila), and living in
specific places (lodges). The fifth/eleventh to sixth/twelfth century constitute a
pivotal phase in both the institutionalisation and the sophisticated discussions
of these identity markers by Ṣūfī authors such as al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) and
al-Hujwīrī (d. between 465/1072 and 469/1077). At the core of Ṣūfī organisation
stands the principle of continuity in the form of a hereditary line (nasab) and
spiritual lineage (silsila), as analysed by Ismail Fajrie Alatas. Ṣūfīs introduced
the silsila to authenticate transmission of teachings and trace lines of initia-
tory descent, anchoring both in the prophetic past. However, some ṭarīqas
stressed prophetic descent as a prerequisite for spiritual mastership assuming
that Muḥammadan nasab favoured the inheritance of prophetic ḥasab (merit)
and baraka. Silsilas and nasabs intersected, creating tensions but, quite often,
both genealogies combined to strengthen one another (e.g., Sharifian Sufism
in Morocco), and resulted in hereditary sanctity (sayyid families in Java) and
family ṭarīqas, such as the ʿAlawiyya of Yemen. Semih Ceyhan describes the
general organisation of established Ṣūfī orders while explaining the way Ṣūfīs
themselves envisioned this development through classifications (according
to spiritual and teaching methods, litanies, etc.) and narratives, especially ha-
giographical narratives. After the passing of an eponymous master, a ṭarīqa
remained active because of the efforts of the master’s deputies (khulafāʾ). By
ramifying into sub-branches, Ṣūfī orders grew very diverse and widespread as
these deputies were dispatched to various localities. Thus, a cartography of
Ṣūfī orders can be drawn. For example, Iraq was the centre for the spread of
22 Papas
the Qādiriyya, the Rifāʿiyya, and the Suhrawardiyya, while the Mawlawiyya, the
Bektāshiyya, the Bayrāmiyya, and the Jalwatiyya developed from Anatolia. Far
from either declinist or overly enthusiastic visions sometimes ascribed to Ṣūfī
authors, many of these ṭarīqas represented the spread and institutionalisation
of spiritual paths (ṭuruq) as a territorial and an ongoing process.
To conclude this section of our book, Stéphane A. Dudoignon addresses
cyber Sufism as a new type of organisation resulting from the increase of Ṣūfī
activities on the internet from the mid-1990s onwards, and further examines
its impact on the evolution of Sufism from the mid-2000s. In the context of
mass education and professional diasporas, orders such as the Murīdiyya have
availed themselves of the internet to enhance their visibility, transcend dis-
tances between disciples and teachers (marabouts), and offer a virtual space
for collective rituals. The irruption of web 2.0 contributed to the creation of an
online Sufism, represented, for instance, by the Niʿmatullāhiyya, whose spiri-
tual authority is fragmented and sometimes reduced to a psychological role,
but is still available to diverse audiences and is a way of adapting to the rapid
pace of globalisation.
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Part 1
The Economy of Sufism
⸪
Chapter 1
Economies of Sufism
Adam Sabra
From its earliest formation, Sufism has been deeply involved in the economies
of the societies where it has been practiced. Ṣūfīs have adapted their theory
and practice to a wide variety of social, economic, and ecological environ-
ments. Ṣūfīs have founded cities or villages, converted nomads, begged for a
living, received the largesse of kings, wandered the world, lived in seclusion,
managed shrines, led artisan guilds, worked as civil servants, and migrated to
far off lands in the New World to practice commerce. If Sufism and Ṣūfīs have
been shaped by a wide range of economic systems, they have also been causal
agents, transforming the societies around them as pioneers, agricultural re-
formers, and even founders of states.
Given the immense variety of social and political environments in which
Sufism has been practiced, there is no one economy of Sufism. Nonetheless,
we can identify some patterns and major historical developments. This essay
begins with an examination of how Ṣūfīs conceptualised poverty, charity, and
wealth. For some, poverty was an important spiritual value and even a way
of life. Others believed that Ṣūfīs should live in society, practicing licit trades
and focusing on transforming their inner selves. For those who lived in pov-
erty and pledged themselves to religious devotions, the principal question was
whether to accept the patronage of wealthy and powerful persons. Beginning
in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries, patrons began to build insti-
tutions to house Ṣūfīs and to allow them to devote themselves to prayer. These
institutions were funded with the Islamic legal instrument of waqf, a term that
may be translated as endowment or trust. As waqfs became more popular and
economically important, control over them gave Muslim states, families, and
individuals considerable economic power, as well as the power to influence
religious life through patronage. For some religious households, Sufism was an
important path to building lasting power and prosperity.
In the spite of the increasingly worldly character of some Ṣūfīs, others
continued to live much more marginal or ordinary existences. They lived as
wandering beggars, or, more commonly, as peasants, herdsman, craftsmen,
shopkeepers, and merchants. Sufism began as an urban phenomenon, but
spread to rural areas, across oceans, and into the nomadic societies of the
steppes. Each society has had its own ecological niche, and Ṣūfīs found ways to
flourish in each. Ṣūfī networks have often stretched across these ecological and
social barriers, contributing to the integration of different social systems. Ṣūfīs
have been agents of commercial and agricultural diffusion and have helped
extend the authority of states into new regions.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Sufism has come under increased criti-
cism over its supposed incompatibility with modernity. This critique is insepa-
rable from the attack on the landholding classes that dominated much of the
early modern Muslim world. Among these landholders were Ṣūfī lineages that
based their wealth on control over waqfs and shrines, many of which func-
tioned like family firms and were deeply embedded in the political and social
order of local societies. As we see, attempts to reform Sufism, including the
nationalisation of endowments and shrines and even the abolition of Ṣūfī net-
works, forced Ṣūfīs to reorganise themselves to meet the challenge of regula-
tion by nation states. At the same time, however, the migration of Ṣūfīs from
rural to urban settings, the spread of Ṣūfī communities across transnational
boundaries, and the invention of new technologies created opportunities for
Ṣūfīs to sustain their networks in new ways. Rather than die out or be replaced
by Islamist movements, Ṣūfī networks and religious entrepreneurs have con-
tinued to innovate in the twenty-first-century economy.
The status of wealth has been an issue of concern to Ṣūfīs from its earliest days.
Ṣūfī sources explain the origin of their name as being from the ahl al-ṣuffa
(inhabitants of the portico), a group of Meccans who lived in the portico of
the Prophet’s mosque in Medina, after the emigration from Mecca. The aban-
donment of property and family to follow the Prophet into exile is a power-
ful origin story, though modern scholars consider it apocryphal. The story also
identifies the origins of Sufism as an ascetic movement in Islam. Later Ṣūfī
thinkers such as Abū Naṣr al-Sarrāj (d. 378/988) argued that asceticism was the
first step on the path to seek God (Sabra, Poverty and charity, 17). Gradually,
he argued, the seeker should renounce material possessions and even the ap-
petite to acquire material goods. Similar attitudes were expressed by a number
of authors of Ṣūfī manuals in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries.
The most systematic treatment is that of Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī
(450–505/1058–1111) in his extremely influential book, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn
(Reviving the religious sciences).
Al-Ghazālī was influenced by Neoplatonic psychology; he argued that the
soul is a mirror whose surface is tarnished by sin and material attachments.
Economies of Sufism 29
Another type was common in North Africa, the majdhūb Ṣūfī, who was typi-
cally a solitary, childlike individual who wandered into public places naked,
ignoring social conventions (Geoffroy, 309–33).
(law schools), khānqāhs, zāwiyas (lodges), Ṣūfī shrines, Qurʾān schools for
orphaned and poor boys, hospitals, and soup kitchens (imarets, an Ottoman
term). Waqfs could also be founded to fund family trusts, and many endow-
ments benefited both the descendants of the founder and a religious or
charitable institution. This dual role made them a useful tool for wealthy and
powerful people to protect their assets from seizure by a ruler or state after
their death.
Although not all waqfs were founded by wealthy or powerful persons, the
spread of these endowments meant that Ṣūfīs received considerable patron-
age. This development accelerated their acceptance in official religious circles,
and increasingly, from the Saljūq period onward, religious scholars also de-
fined themselves as Ṣūfīs. The state-sponsored institution for Ṣūfīs par excel-
lence was the khānqāh. The founder of the Ayyūbid dynasty, Ṣalāh al-Dīn b.
Yūsuf (d. 589/1193; known in the West as Saladin) founded the first khānqāh in
Cairo in 569/1174, after he had abolished the Fāṭimid caliphate. This institution
was known as Saʿīd al-suʿadāʾ (lit., ‘Happiest of all,’ or ‘Best of the saved’), after
the Fāṭimid eunuch whose palace it replaced; it provided lodging and a place
of seclusion within the city of Cairo (Fernandes, 21). Its leader received the
title shaykh al-shuyūkh (chief shaykh), and some 300 Ṣūfīs were provided with
residential units where they could remain in seclusion and prayer (Fernandes,
23). They received a monthly stipend, as well as daily distributions of meat
and bread. Additional food was distributed in Ramaḍān, and the Ṣūfīs also re-
ceived regular rations of soap, oil, candles, clothing, and sweets. They could
make the hajj at the khānqāh’s expense, and if they died with an estate valued
at less than twenty dīnārs, other Ṣūfī residents could divide the deceased’s es-
tate among themselves without interference from the state. They were not sup-
posed to engage in any work outside the khānqāh (Fernandes, 24).
Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn intended for his khānqāh to be a closed institution that provid-
ed a residence for foreign Ṣūfīs. This stipulation has been interpreted as part of
his method to disestablish the Fāṭimid dynasty and its official religion, Ismāʿīlī
Shīʿism (Fernandes). In the Mamlūk period, khānqāhs continued to be built,
some by sultans such as al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn (d. 741/1341), who
had one completed in 725/1324, and others by leading amīrs, such as Baybars
al-Jāshnikīr (d. 709/1310), who finished one in 707/1307 (Fernandes, 29, 69). Not
all were as well-populated as that of Salāh al-Dīn; Baybars’s foundation pro-
vided for 100 Ṣūfīs; while al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s foundation provided for forty
resident Ṣūfīs and sixty visitors (Fernandes, 69, 71). Increasingly, khānqāhs
were incorporated into larger waqf complexes, many of which included a tomb
for the founder and his descendants. Endowment deeds often stipulated that
the Ṣūfīs pray for the souls of the founder and his family (Sabra, Poverty and
Economies of Sufism 33
charity, 99). This practice instituted a prayer economy in which the living re-
ligious devotees offered prayers for their dead patron and his or her spouse
and descendants.
The creation of residential lodges for Ṣūfīs who were banned from seeking
outside employment also reinforced the parallel between the pious poor and
the less fortunate paupers of society. Like the pious poor, ordinary paupers
often offered prayers for their benefactors in exchange for the alms they re-
ceived, a phenomenon that is still common in many Muslim societies today. At
al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s khānqāh outside Cairo, leftover food was distributed to
the poor on a daily basis, and additional handouts were made to neighbours
on major holidays (Sabra, Poverty and charity, 88). The larger waqf complexes
had their own kitchens to feed the numerous beneficiaries and staff, and these
kitchens often fed neighbours and the poor. In the Ottoman Empire, freestand-
ing soup kitchens were known as imarets.
While khānqāhs evolved into religious communities aimed primarily at
foreign or travelling Ṣūfīs who were supported by sovereigns and other pow-
erful individuals, zāwiyas were more often in private hands. The term zāwiya
originally referred to a corner of a mosque that was used by a certain religious
group for its meetings; later, from the ninth/fifteenth century onwards, it com-
monly denoted Ṣūfī institutions. Zāwiyas were funded by waqfs, but the range
of their patrons was wider, and not all founders of zāwiyas came from the mili-
tary or administrative elites. Typically, control over zāwiyas was given to a spe-
cific shaykh, who could then pass it on to a chosen successor, such as his son, or
son-in-law. The endowment properties were often less extensive and valuable
than those donated to found a khānqāh (Roded, 36). In rural areas, zāwiyas
sometimes played an important role in the local economy. Unlike khānqāhs,
zāwiyas were rarely intended to be closed communities, and the shaykh’s dis-
ciples often held other forms of employment elsewhere in the town or village.
After the Ottoman conquest of the Mamlūk Empire in 922/1516–17, zāwiyas
became the predominant Ṣūfī institution, and the ruling elite ceased founding
khānqāhs in the former Mamlūk realms.
One final Mamlūk institution is worthy of note: the women’s ribāṭ. Unlike
the more general use of the term ribāṭ, this institution was founded specifi-
cally to provide a residence for divorced and widowed women, until they could
remarry. The most famous of these institutions was the Ribāṭ al-Baghdādiyya,
founded in Cairo in 684/1285 by Tidhkārbāy Khātūn, the daughter of Sultan
Baybars (Rapoport, 40). Most were built in the late seventh/thirteenth and
early eighth/fourteenth centuries in the Mamlūk realms. Women’s ribāṭs
were closed residential institutions, and the women there were expected to
devote themselves to prayer and religious instruction. Perhaps because they
34 Sabra
Ṣūfīs have been active in a wide range of societies, geographies, and ecologies.
The classic matrix for examining religious thought has often involved distin-
guishing between the country and the city (Clayer in this volume; Ocak in this
volume). Islam is often portrayed as an urban religion, and scholars tend to dis-
tinguish between the literate Islam of the urban scholarly class and the “popu-
lar” religion of the urban lower classes and rural areas. This two-tier model
of religion has come under criticism by scholars of religion for a number of
reasons. In his study of Moroccan Sufism, Vincent Cornell emphasises the in-
terplay between popular and more specialised images of Ṣūfī saints (Cornell,
xxxv–xxxvi). In doing so, he calls into question the juxtaposition of elite and
popular, urban and rural religion. In his study of antinomian Sufism, Ahmet
Karamustafa argues that the Qalandars were not an expression of popular re-
ligion or the survival of pre-Islamic practices, but rather a new form of reli-
giosity that responded to “a historically specific social and cultural context”
(Karamustafa, God’s unruly friends, 10). Like Cornell, Karamustafa denies that
there was ever a clear distinction between the Islam of the elites and the Islam
of the masses (Karamustafa, God’s unruly friends, 5). Furthermore, scholars of
Sufism now acknowledge the existence of a much wider range of social and
ecological structures into which Ṣūfīs are embedded. These include frontier
societies, steppe societies, and oceanic networks and diasporas.
Sufism appears to have originated in urban settings, and important found-
ing figures such as al-Junayd (d. 298/910) and Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī
(325–412/937–1021) were active in Baghdad and Nīshāpūr, respectively. The
patrons of Ṣūfī institutions were also urban based in most cases, and their pa-
tronage of Sufism in major cities reflected this fact. Cornell argues that Sufism
spread in mediaeval Morocco as part of the diffusion of “Sunnī international-
ism” (Cornell, 15, 106–7). Scholars who travelled to the East to perform the hajj
and study played a crucial role in the diffusion of Ṣūfī ideas in the cities of
Maghrib on their return.
In the cities of the eastern Islamic world, Sufism often overlapped with the
practice of futuwwa. Often translated as “chivalry,” futuwwa (Ar., P. javānmardī)
literally means “youthfulness.” Initially, in Khurāsān, this ideology of ethical
conduct was associated with frontier military organisations, urban associa-
tions, and Ṣūfī groups (Zakeri; Ridgeon, 29–45). It became an important part
of the ideology of trade and craft guilds in the central Islamic lands. One such
manifestation was in the akhīs of eighth-/fourteenth-century Anatolia. The
term akhī probably comes from a middle Turkish word referring to a generous
person, although the eighth-/fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (703–70
38 Sabra
of the Saljūq court (Wolper, 25–7). In this period the replacement of the Saljūq
court with a number of competing amīrs also transformed urban spaces in
towns such as Tokat, Amasya, and Sivas, as single state-sponsored institutions
gave way to multiple foundations in each town, foundations that represented
competing authorities (Wolper, 59).
In the absence of a strong, stable state, Ṣūfī leaders sometimes served as
intermediaries between local townsmen and peasants and their rulers. In the
second half of the ninth/fifteenth century, Khwāja Aḥrār (806–95/1404–90),
a Naqshbandī shaykh in Central Asia, developed a system of ḥimāyat (protec-
tion, clientage). Jürgen Paul has shown that Khwāja Aḥrār’s tenants, including
peasants, craftsmen, and merchants, looked to him for protection from, and
intervention with, the Timūrid rulers of his time (Paul, Forming a faction, 534).
The shaykh was a landholder with considerable holdings throughout Central
Asia, including some 250 plots that were endowed as waqf (Paul, Forming a
faction, 537). In addition, because of his connections with the Timūrid court in
Herat, he was able to negotiate tax reductions for himself and his clients (Paul,
Forming a faction, 540). Finally, he established a spiritual centre in Samarqand
that also served as a political and economic locus for himself and his succes-
sors (Paul, Forming a faction, 544).
Cornell has shown that Ṣūfīs functioned as missionaries in areas of rural
Morocco in the fourth/tenth century, establishing ribāṭs in the countryside to
bring Sunnī Islam to areas that were thought to harbour Khārijīs and other
“heretical” forms of Islam (Cornell, 33). Many of these new centres of learning
were established along trade routes. Importantly, Ṣūfī instruction of this type
sought to transcend tribal differences and create a more universal Islamic iden-
tity (Cornell, 55). In spite of this, Cornell notes that Sufism and its teachings
were received in rural areas differently, according to region and ethnic groups.
Holy men also served as mediators and intercessors between the rural popula-
tion and their rulers, often tribesmen from different parts of Morocco (Cornell,
58). A study of the social origins of the mediaeval Moroccan saints finds that
50.6 per cent of them were Berbers, 41 per cent were Arabs, 42 per cent (includ-
ing many Arabs) were from Fez, and 70.51 per cent were literate. This is not the
profile of a peasant religion. Furthermore, 48 per cent were middle class, 38
per cent were lower class, and 14 per cent were upper class (Cornell, 104–8).
Craftsmen, scholars, shopkeepers, and rural landowners predominated among
Moroccan saints, although labourers, peasants, and pastoralists made up a sig-
nificant proportion as well.
Admittedly, these numbers are likely to be skewed somewhat, because they
are based on written sources. Nonetheless, Ṣūfī writings, especially hagio-
graphical works, often offer unusual detail about the lives of ordinary people
40 Sabra
The veneration of saints and the visiting (ziyāra) of shrines are often seen as
characteristically Ṣūfī practices. This is only partly true. Shrines dedicated to
deceased members of the Prophet Muḥammad’s family arose early in Shīʿism,
and there is evidence that visiting the pious dead is a practice that goes back
to the early third/ninth century, when the earliest known pilgrimage guide was
written (Taylor, 5). Such guides were written with increasing frequency from
the sixth/twelfth century onwards, an indicator of the growing popularity of
visiting cemeteries. This development can be seen as part of the rise of vernac-
ular Islam in the late mediaeval period (roughly seventh/thirteenth to ninth/
fifteenth centuries); once established, shrine visitation remained an integral
part of vernacular religious practice, up to the present day (Mayeur-Jaouen in
this volume).
Vernacular religious practice can be defined as those specific to a given re-
gion or locale. Although such practices are widely defused among the popula-
tion, they may also enjoy the support of learned and political elites. For this
reason, it is problematic to identify vernacular religious practice with “popular
religion.” Shrines are particularly good examples of this phenomenon, in that
they often attract visitors from the same village, town, or city. Some shrines
are places of regional interest, or become associated with a particular political
regime or Ṣūfī network. There are saints’ shrines whose existence is unknown
outside a small village, and there are shrines, such as that of al-Ḥusayn in Cairo,
that are known throughout the Islamic world and beyond. In some cases,
shrines have served as headquarters for a particular Ṣūfī order; the shrine of
Hacı Bektaş discussed above is an example of this. Control over shrines and
the income derived from pilgrimages to them was and remains a significant
economic asset. In particular, the votive offerings (nadhr, pl. nudhūr) made
at shrines can amount to a significant sum of money. This is in addition to en-
dowments that benefit the shrine. It should be noted that this mode of piety is
not restricted to Sufism or to Sunnism. Shīʿī shrines, such as those of ʿAlī b. Abī
Ṭalib in Najaf, Imām Ḥusayn in Karbala, and ʿAlī l-Riḍā in Mashhad, witness
pilgrimages and religious devotions in some ways similar to what one finds in
Ṣūfī shrines.
Although in the mediaeval period visiting shrines provoked some criticism
from figures such as Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, it was not until
the rise of the puritanical movement led by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb
(1115–1206/1703–92) and his allies in the Suʿūdī dynasty that shrines became
highly controversial. The veneration of saints and shrines, particularly among
Ṣūfīs, is a major issue for modern Salafīs. Given the role of shrines in local and
regional religious life and in the economy of many Muslim societies, attacks on
42 Sabra
practices associated with shrines, and even on the shrines themselves, call into
question traditional religious allegiances and economic relationships.
The building of shrines and other funerary structures became increas-
ingly popular in the late mediaeval period. In Iran, this was in the wake of
the Mongol conquests, when Ṣūfīs played an important role in converting the
Mongols to Islam. The Timūrid rulers of Iran and parts of Central Asia patron-
ised many shrines in the ninth/fifteenth century (Subtelny, 196). The larger
shrines were often funded by waqf, and the Timūrids made a point of renovat-
ing shrines that had fallen into disrepair and were not the property of a specific
Ṣūfī lineage (Subtelny, 200). For example, three such shrines were those of the
Ṣūfī ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī (d. 481/1089; a Ḥanbalī who fell well within the bounds
of Sunnī orthodoxy) in Herat; that of Imām ʿAlī l-Riḍā (148–203/765–818; the
eighth Shīʿī Imām) in Mashhad; that of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661; also regarded
by Sunnīs as one of the rightly-guided caliphs and an important early Ṣūfī) in
Balkh (for a detailed study of the latter, see McChesney). Given the veneration
in which Sunnīs hold the family of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt, āl al-bayt), such
shrines likely attracted both Sunnī and Shīʿī pilgrims.
The shrine of Anṣārī first attracted patronage by Shāhrukh (r. 807–50/1405–
47) in 829–30/1425–6. Shāhrukh established the practice of weekly visits to the
shrine on Thursdays, and the shrine served as a pulpit from which to espouse
pro-Timūrid propaganda (Subtelny, 202–3). In 882/1477–8, Sultan Ḥusayn
Bāyqarā (Timūrid ruler of Transoxiana, r. 873–911/1470–1506) built a funerary
platform for the burial of several members of his family and the same location
served as a ceremonial location for political purposes. Other members of the
Timūrid elite also donated to the shrine’s endowments (Subtelny, 204). In addi-
tion, Sultan Ḥusayn exempted the shrine’s endowments from taxation, some-
thing that likely encouraged additional donations.
The case of Mashhad is even more remarkable. With support from the
Timūrids, the shrine city became one of the largest cities in Khurāsān, eclipsing
Ṭūs-Nīshāpūr (Subtelny, 205). Architectural patronage came from Shāhrukh’s
wife Gauharshād and their son Baysunghur (Subtelny, 206). The Ṣafavid dynas-
ty also patronised this shrine as a Shīʿī alternative to the pilgrimage to Mecca,
which was in the hands of Sunnī Ottomans (Subtelny, 207). The shrine had
substantial endowments in agricultural lands, and this provided the bulk of
its income.
The supposed shrine of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib in Balkh was “rediscovered” in
885/1480–1 (Subtelny, 208). This sort of politicised discovery of a shrine was
quite common. During the conquest of the city in 857/1453, Sultan Mehmed II
is supposed to have rediscovered the burial place of the Companion of the
Prophet Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī (d. 52/672) outside Constantinople, in an area
Economies of Sufism 43
now known as Eyüp. That site became the royal shrine of the Ottoman dynasty
and was visited during the accession ceremony of each new sultan (Veinstein).
After the conquest of Damascus in 922/1516, Sultan Selim I rediscovered the
tomb of Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (560–638/1165–1240). The Balkh site also
had a long history of being regarded as a sacred place. The political signifi-
cance of this rediscovery is underlined by the role of Sultan Ḥusayn Bāyqarā,
with the assistance of the prominent Naqshbandī Ṣūfī ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī
(817–98/1414–92) (Subtelny, 211). In order to preserve the special character of
this site, the Timūrids suppressed information about other discoveries that
might have led to the foundation of competing shrines. Sultan Ḥusayn had a
domed mausoleum built over the site to encourage pilgrimages to it. Within
a few decades, the shrine in Balkh was receiving one million dīnārs annually
in votive offerings by pilgrims (Subtelny, 213). Again, a regional shrine could
function as an alternative to the pilgrimage to Mecca, which in this period was
in the hands of the rival Mamlūk Empire. This policy also had the effect of re-
directing revenues and gifts that might have been sent to the Ḥijāz to regional
shrines in Khurāsān and under Timūrid control (Subtelny, 214).
The development of the shrine also promoted the status of Balkh as a city.
As part of this larger agenda, the Timūrids renovated a major canal from the
Balkh River to supply the city and its surroundings with water for irrigation. A
similar policy was followed in the area around the shrine of al-Anṣārī (Subtelny,
216). The Balkh canal was held in part as state property, and in part as private
property, which could become waqf. The result of irrigation was a substantial
increase in the agricultural productivity of the region around Balkh. Sultan
Ḥusayn also donated considerable endowments to the Balkh shrine, includ-
ing residential buildings, a bazaar, shops, and a bathhouse. He privatised and
then donated the state’s share in the canal, placing it under the administration
of the shrine (Subtelny, 219–20). He may have done so in order to increase the
productivity of the lands in question, and not merely to provide a source of
income for the shrine.
Nile Green has identified what he calls “shrine firms,” one of four types of
religious firms that operated in Bombay in the period from 1840 to 1915, the
other types being associations (anjuman), communities ( jamāʿat), and broth-
erhoods (ṭarīqa, translated in this essay as network) (Green, Bombay Islam,
15). In most cases, shrines were controlled by lineages of descendants of the
saint buried there. They were often linked to Ṣūfī networks, and had the wid-
est appeal of all of the types of religious firms that existed at that time (Green,
Bombay Islam, 17). The use of the term “firm” suggests that shrines were eco-
nomic in nature, whether these entities were controlled by lineages or founded
by rulers as independent entities. Because they were relatively secure, usually
44 Sabra
through waqfs, they were free to pursue long-term economic planning and
investment. There is an obvious parallel between the development of stable
Ṣūfī households and the growth of shrine firms. To some degree, these two cat-
egories overlapped, although the assets held by the wealthiest religious house-
holds in Ottoman Egypt probably dwarfed those held by most shrines.
The economic vitality of many shrines depended on the celebration of festi-
vals, whether saints’ birthdays (mawlid, colloquial mūlid) or death commemo-
rations (ʿurs). The former is typical in the Arabic-speaking world, while the
latter is more common in South Asia. These annual celebrations bring together
large numbers of people; in some cases, millions of people attend. The pilgrims
make votive offerings in the shrines, buy souvenirs, and spend money on lodg-
ing, food, etc.
One of the largest mawlids is the grand mawlid of al-Sayyid al-Badawī
(d. 675/1276) in Ṭantā in the middle of the Nile Delta. Every autumn, after the
planting season is over, as many as two million Egyptian peasants descend on
the town for this event (Mayeur-Jaouen, 208). Unlike tenth-/sixteenth-century
Balkh, twentieth-century Ṭanṭā did not depend on the shrine for its econom-
ic livelihood. In the early part of the century, it was an important industrial
centre, providing cotton (Mayeur-Jaouen, 211). The popularity of the mawlid
spread in part due to the development of modern transportation, particularly
railways and paved roads, in rural Egypt. By 1963, 150,000 pilgrims travelled by
train for the mawlid, while another 250,000 came by bus (Mayeur-Jaouen, 221).
The annual income to the shrine from offerings also skyrocketed. In 1975, it was
98,000 Egyptian pounds, but by 1992 it was estimated that the sum had risen to
two to three million pounds (Mayeur-Jaouen, 232–3). Even taking into account
the declining value of the Egyptian currency, this is a substantial increase. The
donation boxes are opened twice per month, with 4.5 per cent going to each
khalīfa, 13 per cent to the personnel who operate the shrine, and 10 per cent to
the state-sponsored Supreme Council of Sufi Networks (Mayeur-Jaouen, 233).
Another case of a shrine whose popularity has grown in recent decades
is that of Data Darbar, in Lahore, Pakistan. Data Ganj Bakhsh/ʿAlī Hujwīrī
(d. c. 465/1072 or 469/1077), a saint and the author of an early Ṣūfī manual
Kashf al-maḥjūb (Revealing the unseen), is buried there. His ʿurs (death an-
niversary) is commemorated annually, and is a well-attended pilgrimage in
Pakistan. Until 1960, the shrine was in the hands of the sajjāda nashīns, he-
reditary administrators of the shrine, believed to be the descendants of the
saint. This phenomenon is widespread in South Asia, and is similar to the ṣāḥib
al-sajjāda in the Ottoman context. In 1960, the shrine was nationalised by the
Pakistani government and placed under the control of the Ministry of Awqāf
of Punjab. Beginning in the colonial period, there was an increased sense that
Economies of Sufism 45
the private management of religious shrines was enabling them to be used for
personal enrichment, rather than for the pious purposes for which they were
created (Strothmann, 6). As we have seen, this division between the public
and private or material vs. spiritual does not reflect premodern Ṣūfī ideas. It
relates more to the increased ambition of the modern state, and its attempt
to regulate religious practice and reduce the political influence of traditional
religious lineages.
Strothmann notes that this shrine is atypical of South Asian shrines in three
ways: it is not affiliated with a Ṣūfī network, its architecture has changed to
reflect foreign aesthetics, and it is run by the government (Strothmann, 7). The
modernist reformers Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938) and his son Jāvīd (1924–
2015) were both very critical of the private administration of religious endow-
ments and shrines, which they saw as a way to perpetuate reactionary forms
of spiritual and political life. The establishment of state control over endow-
ments was thus a way to stop “the paralyzing influence of the Mullah and Pir
over the rural masses of Islam” and end “feudalism” ( jagirdari) (Jāvīd Iqbāl,
quoted in Strothmann, 83). The decision to nationalise the shrine was part of a
larger project of Islamic modernism, which sought to fundamentally reshape
Pakistani religion, society, and politics. Another controversial decision was
made to redesign the shrine to accommodate the increasingly large number
of visitors. Historians and conservators were unhappy with the changes, which
were completed in 1990. The complex reflects a modern, transnational design,
rather than the historical roots of the shrine, but the changes allow clean and
comfortable access to a wider range of people (Strothmann, 104).
According to Pakistan’s Waqf Ordinance of 1979, the revenues of the waqfs
taken over by the state can be used for any approved Islamic purpose, but 20 per
cent must be spent on the shrine (Strothmann, 125). The sources of income of
the shrine include votive offerings (50 per cent), rents from lands (16 per cent),
rent from shops (12 per cent), service contracts, and shoe-keeping (5 per cent)
(Strothmann, 125). As a major source of income for the Awqāf Department, the
shrine of Data Darbar receives preferential treatment in comparison to smaller
or rural shrines (Strothmann, 131). As the largest shrine firm in Pakistan, and
one that has benefited from significant state investment, there is simply more
to be gained by increasing the profitability of Data Darbar than by investing
smaller sums in minor shrines of local significance.
In terms of services, the hospital, madrasa, library, and research centre are
funded directly by the Awqāf Department, and not by the funds collected by
the shrine itself (Strothmann, 147). Organising the annual ʿurs is an important
function of the shrine and involves a lengthy process (Strothmann, 205). Food
is given away in large quantities at the shrine, and many poor people come to
46 Sabra
receive it. Poor, homeless, and runaway children (almost entirely boys) rou-
tinely turn up at the shrine to obtain food (Strothmann, 246–7). An NGO has
been set up to address the problem of unaccompanied children and is funded
by donations. In addition to the food provided by the shrine administration,
people bring langar (food to be distributed) from home or purchase it in near-
by shops and distribute it at the shrine in fulfilment of vows (Strothmann, 253).
On the night of 1–2 July 2010, two suicide bombers allegedly belonging to the
Pakistani Taliban attacked the Data Darbar shrine, killing at least fifty people,
and wounding more than 200. This was not the first attack by a Salafī organisa-
tion against a Ṣūfī shrine in Pakistan; shrine desecration by Salafīs has taken
place in recent years in many Muslim countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Mali,
and Yemen. To date, these attacks have not had the intended effect of eliminat-
ing Ṣūfī practices. This is hardly surprising, given the religious and economic
significance these shrines and their saints hold for local people. Indeed, shrines
play an important role in defining local, regional, and national identity in most
Muslim societies, in spite of the frequent criticism, that unorthodox religious
practices allegedly take place there. Although Salafism often spreads through
local networks and the influence of local preachers, its simplified version of
Islam emphasises a universal adherence to the Prophetic sunna (example, or
custom), with little tolerance for local traditions and folk customs. As we see,
this hostility, or at least condescension, towards vernacular religious beliefs
and practices is also characteristic of Islamic modernism.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Ṣūfīs, their institutions, and their practices
have come under increasing regulation by the colonial and Muslim states. As
with the Data Darbar shrine, this regulation has often been linked to a mod-
ernist discourse about “popular” or “folk” religion and its allegedly backward
customs and support for premodern social and political structures. In a few
places, such as Republican Turkey and the Soviet Union, Ṣūfī networks were
banned altogether and for many years only survived underground. In Saudi
Arabia, under the influence of Salafī ideas of religious reform, Ṣūfīs were la-
belled heretical innovators and their shrines were systematically levelled. In
recent decades, Salafī interpretations of Islam, fuelled in part by funding from
the Gulf States, have spread throughout the Muslim world and in the Muslim
diasporas. The nationalisation of religious shrines and teaching institutions,
the banning of some Ṣūfī practices, and the rise of alternative religious move-
ments and political parties have deprived Ṣūfīs of their leading role in religious
Economies of Sufism 47
al-ṣūfiyya) until 1946, but their power had long been diminished in favour of
government institutions (Luizard, 9). After the overthrow of the monarchy in
1952, the new military rulers of Egypt took an increased interest in regulating
Sufism, both to “modernise” it, and also to promote Sufism as an alternative
to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formally dissolved in 1954. In 1976, the
Egyptian government issued new regulations governing the organisation and
activities of Ṣūfī networks in Egypt, and establishing a new entity, the Supreme
Council of Sufi Networks, to regulate them (Luizard, 10). By this time, many
of the Ṣūfī shrines had fallen under the control of the Supreme Council for
Antiquities, since they were historically important buildings. This model of
governance and regulation is similar to Egyptian state policy towards secular
cultural activities; these were regulated, for example, by the Supreme Council
for Culture, which falls under the Ministry of Culture.
Modern Turkey presents an even more restrictive example of state regula-
tion of Ṣūfī activities. Following the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate and
sultanate, a major rebellion took place in southeastern Turkey (in 1925). The
leader of this revolt was Shaykh Said, a Kurdish Ṣūfī shaykh who wanted to
reinstitute the caliphate. After the defeat of this revolt, the Turkish govern-
ment banned all Ṣūfī networks (Yavuz, 52–3). The ban was not enforced uni-
formly. The Naqshbandī Ṣūfī networks were regarded with greater suspicion,
for example, than the Mevlevīs. Nonetheless, many Ṣūfī networks and lineages
lost control over their assets, especially shrines, which the Turkish Republican
government treated as potential sources of sedition. In Ṣūfī circles, opposi-
tion to the secular policies of the government continued. The Nur movement
founded by Said Nursi (1877–1960) emphasised an inward spiritual transfor-
mation, while Naqshbandī Ṣūfīs were more confrontational in relation to the
government (Yavuz, 56).
With the advent of a multi-party system and policies of economic liberalisa-
tion in the 1980s, Ṣūfī and other Islamic movements found greater opportuni-
ties to assert themselves. These political changes resulted in the creation of
what Hakan Yavuz calls an “Islamic bourgeoisie” (Yavuz, 92). The new bour-
geoisie was critical of the crony capitalism that plagued Turkey and proposed
a different form of mercantile ethics, based on Islamic teachings. Ṣūfīs played
an important role in the construction of this Islamic business class (Yavuz, 95).
One by-product of this alliance between Sufism and capital was the creation
of new forms of Islamic consumerism. These included private Islamic schools
offering superior education, hotels offering “Islamic holidays” (without alcohol
and with gender-segregated pools), etc. (Yavuz, 98).
Today, virtually all major Islamic movements in Turkey have their roots
in Sufism, especially the Naqshbandī Khālidī movement that swept the late
Economies of Sufism 49
well. Since they practice strict gender segregation, they train female hocas to
instruct all-female groups. Women trained in the Diyanet, by contrast, cannot
be appointed as lower-level imams, although they can become public school
religion teachers or preachers (Hart, 215).
The Gülen movement is another Turkish religious group to emerge in the
post-WWII era and define itself as a community (cemaat) instead of a Ṣūfī net-
work (tarikat). Like the Süleymancıs, the followers of Fethullah Gülen are part
of a transnational religious movement that emphasises the role of individual
religious reform and education. The Gülen movement has its origins in the
Nursi movement, a modernist Ṣūfī current that promoted the study of modern
science while maintaining a critical attitude towards the secularising project
of Republican Turkey. Gülen, known to his followers as hocaefendi (revered
teacher), rallied many of the followers of Said Nursi after his death in 1960. In
addition to Gülen’s writings, which have an international market, the move-
ment had a newspaper Zaman, a TV station, a bank, and many businesses; yet
the principle economic asset of the Gülen movement was its education system.
This included a highly successful system of private schools in Turkey, as well
as schools abroad, including charter schools in the United States (Hendrick,
136–43, 217–31). Economic activities are so central to this movement that a full
discussion of them is beyond the scope of this essay; suffice it to say, the Gülen
movement provides yet another example of the voluntary affinity between
Ṣūfī networks as an organisational form and type of religiosity and neoliberal
economics. The success of the Gülen movement in exploiting the opportuni-
ties provided by the neoliberal turn in Turkey’s economic policy, and in culti-
vating a form of pious capitalism, demonstrates the adaptability of Ṣūfī ethics
and organisations.
Perhaps the best-studied modern Ṣūfī network with regard to economics
is the Murīdiyya, originally of Senegambia (and following independence in
1960, of Senegal and Gambia), and its various diaspora populations in Europe
and North America, especially New York City. This network has played an im-
portant role in agriculture, especially in the cultivation of peanuts, but also
expanded into urban areas, due to the migration of its followers from rural
areas to cities. As Senegalese have migrated abroad, the Murīdiyya have be-
come established in the diaspora communities and the network in Senegal has
benefitted from the circulation of people, commodities, and remittances from
the diaspora and to the home country.
The Murīdiyya were founded by Aḥmadu Bàmba Mbàkke (1850–1927)
in Senegambia, shortly before the beginning of French colonial rule in 1883
(Glover, 83). The son of a shaykh of the Qādiriyya network, Aḥmadu Bàmba
was heir to a long tradition of Ṣūfī political activism in Senegambia and West
Economies of Sufism 51
Africa in general. The French colonisers regarded the Ṣūfī networks with some
trepidation, since Ṣūfī shaykhs had led the resistance to French colonisation
in many parts of North and West Africa. Alarmed by the spread of Aḥmadu
Bàmba’s influence, the French exiled him to Gabon and then Mauritania, and
only allowed him to return to Senegal permanently in 1907. The Murīdiyya in-
terpret Aḥmadu Bàmba’s exile as evidence of his resistance to colonial rule,
but his followers consistently avoided confronting the French, and eventually
the French came to see the Murīdiyya as cooperative with French rule.
Virtually all Murīds are Wolof, and studies of the spread of the Murīdiyya
emphasise the importance of the collapse of the Wolof polities as a causal
factor in the development of the group (Cruise O’Brien, 59–60). Initially, the
order was entirely rural. The construction of railways connected these rural
areas to the cities and to foreign markets, creating an incentive to bring new
land into cultivation, especially for peanut farming. The French administration
gave shaykhs title to large tracts of land to which the Murīd ṭalibés (disciples,
students) emigrated in order to cultivate their estates (Cruise O’Brien, 65–6).
These estates are called daras, from the Arabic word for house (dār) (Cruise
O’Brien, 163). Families send their sons to work on the daras, where they did
the arduous work of reclaiming marginal lands for cultivation. Unlike other
Ṣūfī networks in the region, the Murīds established some daras in which there
was little to no education. Cruise O’Brien argues that these daras were based
on the Wolof tradition of collective work groups (Cruise O’Brien, 165). The
ṭalibés either volunteered to submit to the shaykh and work on his dara, or
were brought by their parents and left in the shaykh’s care. In most cases, the
boys came from impoverished families. The dara provided a minimal degree
of economic security, membership in a community, and, for those who served
for several years, the possibility that the shaykh would provide for the ṭalibé’s
marriage (Cruise O’Brien, 173). When the ṭalibé left the dara, he was a respect-
ed figure in his home village and might even receive a plot of land from his
shaykh. In short, service in the dara, while arduous, provided a means of social
mobility for poor, landless, and orphaned boys. In addition to the labour that
the shaykhs received from their disciples, they also built patronage networks.
After independence, these patronage networks made the wealthiest shaykhs
into powerful political brokers who could recruit their disciples to vote in elec-
tions (Coulon).
Peanuts remain central to the Senegalese economy, but as the economy
developed and people increasingly migrated from rural areas to cities, the
Murīdiyya evolved into urban religious societies, known as dahiras, from the
Arabic word for a study circle (dāʾira) (Cruise O’Brien, 251). These societies or-
ganise religious rituals and collect donations to be sent to the shaykhs (Cruise
52 Sabra
O’Brien, 253). They also provide mutual aid for their members, such as assist-
ing with medical care, marriage, or funerals (Cruise O’Brien, 255). The growth
of the network also contributed to urbanisation in Senegal. The shrine town
of Touba, where the founder is buried, is now the second largest city in the
country, after Dakar. Each year, millions of Murīds participate in the Grand
Magal, or pilgrimage, to the Great Mosque of Touba. This event is supported by
donations from Murīds, including those in the diaspora communities abroad.
Senegalese migrants have settled in a number of cities overseas, but per-
haps the most vibrant Murīd community abroad is Little Senegal, in New York
City (Kane, The homeland is the arena, 62). When they arrived in the United
States, most of these immigrants were unskilled, undocumented, and had
little knowledge of English, and so they worked as street vendors (Kane, The
homeland is the arena, 63). Connections to the Murīdiyya have helped them to
establish themselves and obtain vending licenses (Kane, The homeland is the
arena, 65). Murīds established their own mosque, Masjid Touba. In the 1980s,
Senegalese in New York were able to obtain citizenship and branch out into
a variety of businesses, including money transfers, to allow immigrants and
visiting businessmen to transfer money home. Gradually, Little Senegal grew
into an ethnic enclave in the city. More than 75 per cent of the Senegalese im-
migrants are men, most of whom support families at home in Senegal (Kane,
The homeland is the arena, 78). In addition to street vendors, many of these
men drive gypsy cabs, especially in Harlem (Kane, The homeland is the arena,
80). Women often work as hair braiders, which can be a remunerative profes-
sion (Kane, The homeland is the arena, 81).
Murīds began to organise dāʾiras in New York in the 1980s. Every three
months, the donations collected were remitted to Touba (Kane, The homeland
is the arena, 94). In the 1990s, the Murid Islamic Community of America was
founded, providing an umbrella organisation for smaller associations through-
out the United States. Many of the dāʾiras reproduce village social ties from
Senegal (Kane, The homeland is the arena, 95). In addition, there are now wom-
en’s dāʾiras and NGO s. One such NGO funded a number of charitable activities
in Touba, including the building of an 8 million-dollar hospital. The movement
of funds also takes place in the opposite direction. When Masjid Touba was
built in the 1990s, a prominent Murīd leader donated $55,000 towards the
purchase of the building, which was to be acquired without recourse to an
interest-bearing loan (Kane, The homeland is the arena, 96–7). With a reputa-
tion as hard workers and law-abiding citizens, Murīd communities have de-
veloped good relations with municipal leaders in New York and Atlanta. Every
summer, the Murīd community of New York celebrates Murīd month, funded
by contributions by community members (Kane, The homeland is the arena,
Economies of Sufism 53
151). The month is marked by an annual march, public prayers, and lectures
(Kane, The homeland is the arena, 154–5). These events serve to reinforce com-
munity ties and demonstrate the integration of the Murīdiyya into New York
City society. Shaykhs visiting from Senegal play an important role by reinforc-
ing the transnational ties that bind all Murīds into a single community. The
Murīdiyya are a remarkable example of Sufism’s adaptability to the changing
economic and social conditions of modernity. From their origins as agricul-
tural pioneers in the peanut industry, to the creation of new spiritual commu-
nities for migrants in urban areas, to their transformation into a transnational
religious movement, the Murīdiyya epitomise the challenges and possibilities
of capitalist development for modern Ṣūfīs.
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Chapter 2
endowed spaces; they studied with a teacher who drew income from an en-
dowment; or they had access to manuscript copies donated as an “eternal en-
dowment” (waqf muʾabbad) to a local library (Sublet). From the third/ninth
century to the present, endowments have subsidised the development and
transmission of Sufism across the Muslim world. The waqf provided Ṣūfīs with
spaces to congregate, it housed them, fed them, funded their travel to and
lodging in Mecca, paid their salaries, bought their political loyalty, supported
their mawlid (Prophet’s birth) celebrations, enriched their families, bolstered
their social capital, incentivised their settlement in frontier zones, financed
construction of their tombs, and underwrote their saintly afterlives. A full ac-
counting of Sufism as a historical phenomenon requires significant attention
to the material conditions that shaped the many Ṣūfī “sociabilities” that in turn
shaped Islamic civilisation (Gaborieau). Reconstructing those conditions will
necessarily entail the study of endowments founded by and for Ṣūfīs.
The first in-depth scholarship devoted to Ṣūfī endowments appeared in
the early 1980s as part of the so-called second stage, or wave, of waqf studies
(Hoexter, Waqf studies). These early studies of Ṣūfī endowments focused on
the wealth of economic and social data contained in the extant waqfiyyas for
Ṣūfī lodges or shrines. Much of this data is unavailable in other sources and
have significantly improved our understanding of the political contexts and
institutional frameworks through which Sufism flourished, particularly after
the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries (e.g., Mahendrarajah, The
shrine; Mahendrarajah, The Gawhar; Schwarz). The history of a particular Ṣūfī
endowment is best understood in terms of both the founding stipulations of the
waqfiyya and the subsequent management of the waqf properties and revenue.
Political and social contexts change; later jurists interpret earlier rulings differ-
ently; and supervisors may interpret the founder’s stipulations as the situation
demands. The legal maxim shurūṭ al-wāqif ka-naṣṣ al-shāriʿ (i.e., “the stipula-
tions of the founder are like the decrees of the Lawgiver”) was oft-violated. One
must pay attention to the wealth of contextual and historical detail from other
sources in order to reconstruct the history of the property or organisation in
the long term, not the history of the document in the short term (Deguilhem,
The waqf; Shatzmiller; Singer, 303–4). Unlike the first wave of waqf studies
and its stereotype of mismanaged and inefficient waqfs, studies of the long-
term management of waqf have shown that they were typically run efficient-
ly and carefully, and generated a long and rich documentary trail (Hoexter,
Endowments; McChesney, Waqf ). The shrine of Muḥammad Bashārā in Mazār-i
Sharīf, for example, is five hundred years old and the documentary record left
in its administrative wake is extraordinarily large (Gross). By extracting waqf
Endowments for Ṣūfīs and Their Institutions 61
studies from the confines of legal history, scholars from the second wave have
had a much larger impact on Islamic studies, including Ṣūfī studies. The extent
to which the second wave have penetrated the larger milieu is clear from the
publication of special issues devoted to the waqf in prestigious journals: The
Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient (1995) and Islamic Law and
Society (1997); the publication of a collection of methodological and historical
studies of waqf across the Islamic world (Deguilhem, Le Waqf ); and Mariam
Hoexter’s state-of-the-field survey published in 1998 (Hoexter, Waqf studies).
The larger scope and visibility of this scholarship has precipitated what one
historian has described as a third wave of waqf studies that is characterised by
its multi-disciplinary engagement with other fields (Moumtaz, Theme issue).
These scholars have brought waqfs into conversations about the public sphere
(Hoexter, The waqf), citizenship (Isin), the nation state (May, God’s land;
Moumtaz, Is the family), neoliberal governance (Atia), and the cultural roots
of capitalism and European economic power (Choudhury; Kuran, The provi-
sion; Kuran, Institutional roots; Kuran, The long divergence; Shatzmiller). One
indication of the importance of this work is the prominence of Islamic stud-
ies in a recently established academic journal devoted to multi-disciplinary,
comparative studies of endowments (Chitwood et al.). This work has much to
offer historians of Sufism (e.g., Erie), though it engages with Ṣūfī studies only
tangentially. This state of affairs is at least partially due to the fact that there
is so much scholarship now that it is simply impractical to engage with all of
it (McChesney, Waqf, 3–4). Recent bibliographic surveys show that, in the last
forty years, scholars of endowments have produced a mountain of Himalayan
proportions (Durmuş and Kaya; Islahi; Rashid).
Furthermore, Ṣūfī studies and waqf studies are animated by separate dis-
courses that, while overlapping to some degree, developed from different sets
of questions, sources, conceptualisations, approaches, and biases. In terms of
Ṣūfī endowments in particular, the result has been a proliferation of studies
devoted to specific Ṣūfī spaces (e.g. Blair, Ilkhanid; Fernandes, The founda-
tion; Hallenberg; Mahendrarajah, The shrine; Mahendrarajah, The Gawhar;
Schwarz); or to Ṣūfī life in specific places (Bölükbaşi; Chabbi; Ephrat and
Mahamid; Faroqhi; Fernandes, Three Sufi; Fernandes, The evolution; Homerin;
Lifchez; Little; Roded); or to surveys of endowments that include Ṣūfīs and Ṣūfī
life among other illustrations (ʿAfīfī; Amīn; Deguilhem, Le Waqf; Deguilhem
and Hénia; Ghazaleh, Held in trust; Hennigan; Lambton; Lev, Charity; Peters
et al.). But there has been no synthetic history of Ṣūfī endowments in general.
One way to narrate a more comprehensive history of Ṣūfī endowments is to
focus on specific patterns of Ṣūfī social activity, the role that endowments play
62 Hofer
in shaping or facilitating those patterns, and how both Ṣūfī activity and endow-
ments change over time. In these terms, the history of Sufism can be heuristi-
cally divided into a number of unique morphological patterns. Each pattern
is characterised by the dynamic relationship between the changing political
and material conditions created by endowments and changing patterns of Ṣūfī
social activity. Changes to one element of the social ecosystem produced no-
ticeable adaptations in the others. Innovations in the use of the waqf after the
seventh/thirteenth century meant that it could fund an increasing variety of
architectural projects, public services, and forms of patronage. One tangible
result of this patronage was the consolidation and dissemination of distinctly
Ṣūfī modes of authority that in turn shaped Timūrid, Ṣafavid, and Mughal no-
tions of royal authority (Moin; Rahimi; Rizvi). Likewise, Mamlūk and Ottoman
rulers developed creative ways to fund their patronage of Ṣūfīs. These methods
included the waqf irṣādī, in which lands from the public treasury were alien-
ated as endowments (Cuno; Haji Abdullah, 55; Hernandez; Johansen), and
the cash waqf (Çizakça, Cash; Mandaville). Competition for these resources
contributed to the anti-Ṣūfī Ḳāḍīzādelī movement and changed the social and
political landscape of Ottoman Istanbul and the provinces (Baer; Sariyannis;
Ulumiddin; Green). In these ways, existing patterns of Ṣūfī activity persisted
in new material conditions and new patterns developed. At the centre of this
developmental process were the transmission of accumulated knowledge and
the reproduction of social relations across time and space. From the vantage
point of endowments, then, the history of Sufism is not a strict chronology of
sequential events, but rather a diachronic morphology of accumulating social
patterns across Muslim society.
The first patterns of Ṣūfī activity emerged in third-/ninth-century Iraq and
are characterised by innovations in devotional practice, conceptual language,
and notions of prophetic authority. Baghdad in particular had a thriving intel-
lectual and devotional culture that was a central factor in the development of
Ṣūfī thought and practice. The city was home to a number of pious movements
that had sprung up in the wake of the Islamic conquests. These included the
murābiṭūn—pious warriors who defended the frontier by day and practiced
their devotions at night; the zuhhād—wandering renunciants who rejected the
trappings of social life in favour of a praxis of ostentatious self-mortification;
and the ahl al-ḥadīth—traditionists who collected and transmitted traditions
about the Prophet Muḥammad in order to model their piety on his exempla-
ry ideal (Melchert). The Ṣūfīs drew on the language of the latter in particular
(Thibon, Transmission). Furthermore, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn’s (r. 198–
218/813–33) efforts to consolidate the power and authority of the caliphate
Endowments for Ṣūfīs and Their Institutions 63
(Karamustafa, 127), there is no doubt that Ṣūfī activity was facilitated by the in-
troduction of endowments to fund madrasas and khānqāhs during this period
(Malamud). There were already a number of endowed centres of learning in
Baghdad in the early fourth/tenth century (Makdisi, Muslim institutions). And
the first madrasas and khānqāhs associated with Ṣūfīs appeared in Nīshāpūr
shortly thereafter. Both al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) and al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072)
were known to have taught Sufism at endowed spaces in Nīshāpūr: al-Sulamī
at his duwayra (Thibon, L’oeuvre, 238–44) and al-Qushayrī at his madrasa
(Malamud, 430–1). In general, endowments during this era furnished the
capital—social, cultural, and economic—that these early Ṣūfīs required to
fund the early stages of what Alexandre Papas has called the “Sufi patronage of
patrimony and memory” (Papas, Toward a new history, 88).
A third pattern of Ṣūfī activity can be seen as the earlier patterns of inno-
vation and systematisation continued to develop in the context of the Saljūq
and post-Saljūq military patronage states. This pattern is characterised by
two major innovations to the political economy of the region. First was the
Saljūq’s patronage of scholars and Ṣūfīs to promote a particular ideological
program of political legitimisation (Safi). The second was the waqf policy in
Syria of Nūr al-Dīn Zangī (d. 569/1174) which Stefan Heidemann describes as
“the systematic use of a legal instrument of private law for general public du-
ties and purposes, which fell—in the broad sense—under the responsibility
of the state” (Heidemann, 155). The combination of these two innovations—
state patronage of Sufism and waqf-financed public services—allowed the
Zangid and Ayyūbid sultans to undertake a massive campaign of public piety
(Talmon-Heller). From this point on, nearly all Muslim rulers began to fund
public services and patronise scholars using awqāf instead of the public trea-
sury (Lev, The ethics, 612; Sabra, 69–71). At the same time, economic opportu-
nities for Ṣūfīs in the East were becoming increasingly scarce. Economic crises
brought a sizable number of Khurāsānī scholars to Baghdad, Damascus, and
eventually Cairo beginning in the mid fifth/eleventh century (Gilbert). Many
of these scholars were Ṣūfīs who brought the Khurāsānī model of the khānqāh
to Baghdad, where they founded similar lodges known there as ribāṭ and
which subsequently spread as far as Morocco (Chabbi). The Ṣūfīs who passed
through these ribāṭs were some of the most influential scholars of ḥadīth of
their time and enjoyed increasing levels of patronage by the ruling class (Van
Renterghem). These rulers established Ṣūfī organisations and patronised Ṣūfī
individuals by setting up endowments to pay for the construction of lodges,
hospices, tombs, or other spaces for Ṣūfīs to gather. In addition to providing
stipends for Ṣūfīs and salaries for a “head Sufi” (shaykh al-shuyūkh), revenues
Endowments for Ṣūfīs and Their Institutions 65
from these endowments paid the wages of the construction workers, the waqf
supervisors, the cooks, custodial workers, singers, bath attendants, and main-
tenance crews. This model was widely replicated and created the conditions
in which Sufism exploded in popularity across the Muslim world. Between
the seventh/thirteenth and tenth/sixteenth century, for example, the number
of Ṣūfī lodges in Damascus doubled, from 38 to 76 (Miura, 13). The Mamlūks
founded and endowed hundreds of Ṣūfī lodges, large and small (Fernandes,
The evolution; Homerin; Little); as did rulers in the Mongol Īlkhānate (Blair,
Ilkhanid; De Nicola, Patrons; De Nicola, The ladies; Lambton; Mahendrarajah,
The Ṣūfī); in Marīnid Morocco (Cornell; Sanseverino); in Timūrid and post-
Mongol Central Asia (Arbabzadah; May, The relationship; McChesney, Earning
a living; Subtelny); in Mughal India (Ernst); and so on.
In addition to their patronage of living Ṣūfīs, Muslim ruling elites also began
to patronise the dead. Rulers would often alienate properties for the con-
struction and upkeep of shrines at the graves of Ṣūfīs that had become regu-
lar objects of pilgrimage (Khan in this volume). The shrine-complex differed
from region to region in its form, but the function was generally to produce a
built environment in which visitors could find family, belongings, and other
miscellanea belonging to the shaykh; the tomb of the shaykh; a mosque; and
some space for accommodating short- and long-term visitors. By the eighth/
fourteenth century, these types of buildings had become so numerous across
the entirety of the Muslim world that one could travel from the Maghrib to
South Asia without paying for lodging (Blair, Sufi saints).
Ruling elites who created large endowments on behalf of Ṣūfīs and saints
not only benefited from the social and cultural capital generated by their pa-
tronage, but also gained the means to raise economic capital for large projects
in need of financing. Despite the large sums required to found such an enter-
prise, the revenues of a waqf often exceeded the stipulated disbursements. In
one example from eighth-/fourteenth-century Egypt, two-thirds of the revenue
from one individual’s large waqf holdings were unassigned (Taher and Garcin).
And the last two Mamlūk sultans held massive waqfs in which 90 per cent of
the revenues were unassigned (Petry, Fractionalized estates; Petry, A Geniza).
The unassigned revenue functioned as a kind of slush fund that provided eco-
nomic security in turbulent years or funded construction and agricultural ef-
forts. After conquering Baghdad, for example, Hülegü reinstated the official
waqf supervisor and rebuilt Baghdad with the resulting revenue (Gilli-Elewy,
170). The Timūrid sultans used complex forms of the waqf mushtarak to endow
lodges and shrines that served as vehicles for wealth preservation and imperial
agricultural reforms (Dale; Mahendrarajah, The Gawhar; Subtelny, 192–234).
66 Hofer
At the same time, Ṣūfīs with means founded and endowed lodges and shrines
of their own on an equally large scale.
In the broader context of state and local patronage of Ṣūfī lodges and shrines,
yet another pattern of Ṣūfī activity emerged as the disciples of well-known
shaykhs and pīrs reproduced and transmitted the unique method (ṭarīqa) of
their masters. The post-mortem institutionalisation of a Ṣūfī masters’ method,
reputation, and sanctity was one of the critical components of the develop-
ment of Ṣūfī orders (Sedgwick in this volume; Ceyhan in this volume). This
process depended, to large extent, on access to the material resources neces-
sary to build, maintain, and accommodate visitors at the shrine or lodge of a
Ṣūfī master. Revenue from endowments, either established by a wealthy pa-
tron or a Ṣūfī with means, provided the resources to maintain the social mi-
lieu in which Ṣūfīs practiced and propagated the master’s ṭarīqa (Papas, No
Sufism). Endowed lodges and shrines were of central importance in the early
appearance of a number of orders, including the Suhrawardiyya (Ohlander),
Shādhiliyya (Hofer), Mevleviyye (Holbrook), Kubrawiyya (DeWeese), Naqsh-
bandiyya (Paul), Mujaddidiyya (Dale and Payind), and Chishtiyya (Ernst and
Lawrence)—to name only a few.
Once established, endowed Ṣūfī lodges, particularly those associated with
a specific order, often developed increasingly complex functions and became
critical to the regional economy. Similarly, the creation of shrine complexes
drove economic growth as benefactors expanded the precincts of the shrine it-
self and added new structures for lodging, food, and other activities. New con-
struction and upkeep often depended on the strategic leveraging of existing
endowment revenue for the acquisition of new properties to be alienated as
waqf. Ṣūfī lodges and shrines could drive urbanisation as much as urban spac-
es transformed Ṣūfī life and practice (Hallenberg; Karataş, The city; Karataş,
The Ottomanization; Mañas; McChesney, Waqf; Rodriguez-Manas; Wolper;
Yürekli; Clayer in this volume). Indeed, a distinct pattern of Ṣūfī activity that
has been described as “colonizing Sufis” (Green, 133) is characterised by the
use of endowments to bring organised Sufism to new regions. Here one finds
imperial expansion carried out by offering Ṣūfīs land grants, endowments, or
other enticements to colonise or tame new regions of the world. In the early
stages of their expansion, the Ottoman armies granted newly annexed ter-
ritories to Ṣūfī dervishes in exchange for their military, political, or colonial
assistance (Kafadar). When sultan Meḥmed II conquered Constantinople in
857/1453, he declared himself wāqif over the entire city, and then parcelled out
land to subordinates to supervise as waqf irṣādī in order to rebuild the city
and attract scholars to the new capital (Atçıl, 61). Ṣūfī dervishes utilised land
Endowments for Ṣūfīs and Their Institutions 67
grants and endowments to establish lodges that often developed into vital so-
cial and economic centres, functioning as “vectors of colonization” that were
critical to the Islamisation of the Balkans (Yıldırım), Bulgaria (Koltaş), north-
ern Greece (Lowry), and Bosnia (Aščerić-Todd). One finds a similar pattern
with the Delhi Sultanate (Eaton, The Sufis; Huda); and the Mughal expansion
into Bengal (Eaton, The rise; Kozlowski). There are also cases in which Ṣūfīs
used endowments to settle new areas of their own initiative. The Islamisation
of the Maldives began in earnest when a local Ṣūfī returned from study in
Ḥaḍrawmawt and established a khānaqāh in Vadu in 980–1/1573 (Peacock,
65). Likewise, waqfs were central to the establishment of Ṣūfī networks in the
Western Indian Ocean region during the nineteenth century (Bang). For sub-
Saharan Africa the picture is different. Given a vastly dissimilar economy of
resources in the Islamic regions stretching from West Africa to the Nile Valley,
the use of waqf was rare (Hunwick). Rather, in exchange for “spiritual services
rendered or to come,” rulers granted Ṣūfīs and their families regional adminis-
trative privileges, land grants, or tax exemptions. These financial mechanisms
were instrumental in the Islamisation of the region and the establishment
of overlapping Ṣūfī networks (O’Fahey). Similarly, in the nineteenth century
the Sanūsī order established a network of lodges spanning the trans-Saharan
trade route by developing land the local Bedouin had granted them. These
lodges were nominally waqf properties, but only in the sense that the Ottoman
authorities granted them that status because they were unable to tax them
(Vikør, Sufism and social welfare). These lodges were all based on organisa-
tional principles articulated by al-Sanūsī (d. 1276/1859) himself, whose direc-
tions concerning the founding of zāwiyas were very precise (Vikør, Sufi and
scholar, 189).
Finally, there is a pattern of Ṣūfī activity unique to the European colonisa-
tion of Muslim areas and post-colonial nation states. This pattern is character-
ised by Ṣūfī interactions with colonisers mediated through endowed lodges,
colonial attempts to centralise control of endowments in order to extract their
revenue, and the post-colonial nationalisation of endowments and interfer-
ence with the operation of Ṣūfī orders. There was no single Ṣūfī response to
colonialism or single valence to the character of Ṣūfī interactions with colo-
nial authorities (Vikør, Sufism and colonialism; Voll; Papas in this volume).
Some Ṣūfīs allied themselves with colonial authorities, such as the Tījāniyya in
Algeria. Other Ṣūfīs fought against colonial rule, using their networks of lodges
supported by endowments to organise the resistance (Medici; Vikør, Sufi and
scholar). In any case, we must take care not to assume that the Ṣūfī affiliation
of the leaders or members of an anti-colonial movement necessarily indicates
68 Hofer
the Ṣūfī character of the resistance movement itself (Knysh, 294–300). There
is more uniformity of activity with the European and Ottoman authorities’
centralisation of control over the awqāf in their territories. Europeans gen-
erally found the waqf baffling—an economic institution neither public nor
private—and colonial authorities attempted to take control of them or nullify
them in a variety of ways (Çizakça, A history; Medici; Powers). For Ottoman
administrators, a combination of external and internal pressures to modernise
the Ottoman economy led to a concerted policy of centralisation. In 1826 the
sultan Maḥmūd II (r. 1223–55/1808–39) began a multi-year project to reorga-
nise endowments under the supervision of the ministry for waqf affairs. This
policy had disastrous consequences for endowments, as larger portions of the
revenue were needed to pay the bureaucrats’ salaries, many of whom then
embezzled even more money from the waqf revenue (Argun, 240–3; Barnes;
Çizakça, A history, 75). As a result, most scholars—including Ṣūfīs—saw their
income and political power decline dramatically (Singer). The gutting of the
waqf revenue alongside the growth of European-inspired municipalities with
their tax-driven provision of social services, ultimately led to the obsolescence
of the waqf system in Ottoman territory (Kuran, The provision). While many
endowments survived colonialism and the dissolution of premodern Islamic
states, they typically did so only under the auspices of centralised bureaucra-
cies. For example, in the 1930s, the Turkish Republic pursued the same Ottoman
centralisation policies and ultimately nationalised the awqāf (Zencirci).
There are similar continuities between the colonial and the post-colonial
management of awqāf elsewhere. Most nation states centralised control of the
endowments within their borders; the unique character of each state produced
different results in terms of politicising endowments (Kogelmann, Islamische
fromme Stiftungen; Kogelmann, Die Entwicklung). Acting as representatives of
a reformist political Islam, a number of post-colonial states instituted restric-
tive “policies of bureaucratizing Sufi lifeworlds” in order to marginalise Ṣūfī
leaders or banish them from the public sphere (Malik, 588). These policies
included one or more of the following tactics: eliminating existing waqf ahlī
and preventing the establishment of new ones; effectively nationalising the
awqāf by placing existing waqf khayrī under the regulatory purview of the
state, typically in a ministry of endowments; confiscating waqf properties in
order to redistribute them to the private sector; and restricting waqf supervi-
sors’ use of traditional legal instruments to keep the awqāf solvent (Sait and
Lim, 161–4). Both the Egyptian and the Syrian governments made concerted
efforts to maintain tight control of Ṣūfī endowments and Ṣūfī orders (Luizard;
Pinto). In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s ḥamlat al-ʿawda ilā l-īmān (or al-ḥamla
Endowments for Ṣūfīs and Their Institutions 69
al-īmāniyya; faith campaign) included courting Ṣūfī leaders and funding re-
pairs and new construction of Ṣūfī shrines; the campaign was led by vice-
president, ʿIzzat Ibrāhīm al-Dūrī, who belonged to branches of the Qādirī and
Naqshbandī orders. The politics of sectarianism stoked by the American oc-
cupation resulted in the creation of three regulatory bodies for endowments:
Sunnī, Shīʿī, and other. The creation of the Dīwān al-Waqf al-Sunnī, which is
dominated by the Salafī movement, has had a profound effect on Sufism in
Iraq. In Baghdad, for instance, the Salafī leadership of the Dīwān has attempt-
ed (mostly unsuccessfully) to eliminate Ṣūfīs and Ṣūfī practices from the shrine
of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (Al-Gailani). In recent years, politicians in Morocco
and Algeria have publicly embraced what they see as a non-political form of
Islam; in 2002 a prominent Ṣūfī was named to head the Moroccan ministry
of endowments (Muedini). Pakistan legislated centralised control of endow-
ments and the management of national shrines in 1959, both to modernise
the national imagination and to reduce the influence of local saints and their
families. Subsequent Pakistani governments have marshalled different ver-
sions of the saintly patrimony to shore up various nationalist projects and
have used shrines as platforms for state ideology (Ewing; Philippon, A sub-
lime; Philippon, An ambiguous; Zaman, 194–225). The Malaysian government
banned the neo-Ṣūfī movement Al Arqam in 1994 after members successfully
used awqāf to fund their own social services outside the government structures
(Nagata). In many cases, however, Ṣūfī endowments persist and continue to
function as sites of social mobilisation and the production of counter-publics
(Malik, 591). In Bosnia, a newly created directorate of waqfs has been charged
with managing the endowments that survived Tito’s policy of nationalisa-
tion and the destruction by Serbian forces between 1992 and 1995 (Trakic).
In addition to protecting the endowments for Ṣūfī tekkes, the constitution of
Islamska Zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine (the Islamic Community of Bosnia
and Herzegovina) contains provisions for the Ṣūfī orders in Bosnian society
(Karčić).
Finally, there are several aspects of Ṣūfī endowments that remain unex-
plored. One such area is the patronage of relics rather than saints for econom-
ic and political ends, or what McChesney has described as “reliquary Sufism”
(McChesney, Reliquary). A study of Ṣūfī endowments in East Africa remains to
be undertaken, although there is some work on endowments in the region in
general (Athuman; Carmichael; Carmichael and Cooper; Oberauer, Fantastic
charities; O’Fahey and Vikør; Sheriff). Another question is the role of endow-
ments outside the traditional boundaries of the Muslim world. There are, for
example, awqāf in North America. The most well-known is the North American
70 Hofer
Islamic Trust (NAIT), founded in 1973, the revenue of which are used to finance
mosque construction around the country and to fund the Islamic Society of
North America (ISNA). As the waqf experiences a revival in many parts of the
Muslim world, particularly in Southeast Asia (Budiman and Kusuma; Ibrahim,
Amir, and Masron; Islam; Khan; Mohammad et al.; Nour), Ṣūfīs in Europe and
North America may follow this trend and found endowments for their own
activities. And while past scholarship has shown little interest in addressing
this question, the recent growth of research on Sufism in Europe and North
America, particularly in its social and political aspects, suggests that this
state of affairs will soon change (Dressler, Geaves, and Klinkhammer; Piraino;
Raudvere; Sedgwick; Sharify-Funk, Dickson, and Xavier).
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Endowments for Ṣūfīs and Their Institutions 79
With the emergence of the phenomenon of Sufism, first in the Middle East and
Persia, primary sources from as early as the fifth/eleventh century onwards,
among which we find al-Qushayrī’s (d. 465/1072) Risāla (treatise) and Khwāja
ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī’s (d. 481/1089) Ṭabaqāt al-Ṣūfiyya (Classes of the Ṣūfīs), began
discussing various types of donations, such as futūḥ (sing. fatḥ) and nudhūr
(sing. nadhr), that sultans, kings, nobility, and others (merchants and shop-
keepers are frequently mentioned) gave to Ṣūfī shaykhs and later, to their insti-
tutions. Futūḥ is derived from an Arabic root, fataḥa, that means “to open”; it
is largely understood as alms or charity, and can take the form of money or food,
clothing, or housing. In the mystical writings of the well-known theoretician of
Sufism, Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), futūḥ also connotes “revelations” or “spiri-
tual openings,” hence the title of his opus magnum, the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya
(Meccan openings). Often, Persian Ṣūfī sources translate futūḥ as “God-given
charity” or unsolicited gifts (Auer; Islam, 90–5). We may speculate that both
dimensions of futūḥ, i.e., alms and revelations, are intended in expressions
describing the lifestyle of Muslim mystics. Living “on donations” (ʿalā l-futūḥ)
means relying on God’s opening “the gates of livelihood” (abwāb al-rizq) to the
Ṣūfī; this is the most elevated kind of futūḥ, because it comes from the hidden
treasures of God’s creation (min al-kawn) (Goldziher, 48–50).
Nudhūr (nadhr, votive gifts) refers to the personal vows to dedicate or sac-
rifice something (e.g., money or animals) for an individual Ṣūfī or a Ṣūfī insti-
tution, after the fulfilment of his/her desire (Pedersen). Sometimes niyāz and
ṣadaqa are also used like nadhr. Nadhr is given after a conditional pledge has
been fulfilled, such as the wish for male progeny, or a pardon, or a successful
conquest of territory.
Over time, a wide range of debates emerged in Ṣūfī circles about accepting
donations. Those who favoured their acceptance, especially futūḥ, argued that
it helps Ṣūfīs dedicate their lives to worshipping God and also saves them from
seeking work, and enables them to avoid subjecting themselves to a worldly
authority. For South Asian Chishtī Ṣūfīs, acceptance of futūḥ was a reflection
of tawakkul (absolute trust in God). Ṣūfīs did not ask for donations nor did
they refuse them and in most cases, quickly distributed the donations to their
followers among the lower social classes, such as craftsmen, cultivators, and
labourers. In principle, they opposed accepting donations from kings and the
nobility. This position was more of an ideal, one that could not be followed
given the circumstances. For instance, the seventh-/thirteenth-century Chishtī
Ṣūfī, Farīd al-Dīn Ganj-i Shakar (d. 664/1265), who lived in Pakpattan (in the
Punjab), refused donations, but, in cases of acute poverty, permitted his fol-
lowers to beg (“use the begging bowl”), a practice that was not as common
among Ṣūfīs as it was among dervishes (Papas). The shaykh Niẓām al-Dīn
Awliyāʾ (d. 725/1325) of Delhi advised Burhān al-Dīn Gharīb (d. 738/1337) of
the Deccan, to have “worthy people” as disciples and adopt a policy of “not re-
jecting, not asking, not saving” alms. He declared: “If anyone brings you some-
thing, do not reject it, but do not ask for anything, and if they bring a little of
something good, do not reject it (politely) in order to have it increased, nor
should you specify everything (else that you need) in accepting it” (Ernst and
Lawrence, 21). We find equivalent attitudes (that is, the refusal or acceptance
of donations, but only out of necessity) in other contexts, for instance, among
the Shādhilīs of Ifrīqiyya in the seventh/thirteenth century (Amri, 155).
Donations were not always unsolicited; sometimes they were demanded,
either implicitly or explicitly, and were made an essential part of rituals. In
sixth-/twelfth- to seventh-/thirteenth-century Morocco, a boat could not weigh
or cast anchor without giving alms (a part of their merchandise, such as oil,
figs, etc.) to the hermitage of Abū ʿAlī l-Ḥasan al-Qazzāz in Badis (Bādisī, 96–
9). More generally, one could evaluate the popularity of mediaeval Maghribi
saints by measuring (with a yardstick) the amount of futūḥ they collected
(Alouani, 137, 166, 183). In early modern times, two Indian Naqshbandī Ṣūfīs,
Shāh Palangpūsh (d. 1110/1699) and Shāh Musāfir (d. 1126/1715) in the city of
Awrangabad, used to demand nadhr to remove the misfortunes of their fol-
lowers. In the hagiography entitled Malfūẓāt-i Naqshbandiyya, Shāh Maḥmūd
(d. 1175/1762), the successor of Shāh Musāfir, stressed the spiritual and social
importance of giving nadhr. To him, those who neglected nadhr would go
insane or simply die (quoted in Green, 16–7). However, abandoning employ-
ment left Ṣūfīs completely dependent on donations, and this, too, could be
problematic. For instance, a Chishtī Ṣūfī in Delhi, Shāh Kalīm Allāh Jahānabādī
(d. 1142/1729), had to rent out his property to generate additional income, since
donations were not enough to support his khānaqāh and for him to recover
from illness (Ernst and Lawrence, 5). Whatever their pecuniary value, in fact,
donations from common people were often quite modest, and many pilgrims
Donations to Ṣūfīs and Ṣūfī Institutions 83
throughout the modern period brought nudhūr, as in the case of such dona-
tions to shrines in Cairo (De Jong, 31).
It is important to remember that, in the economy of Sufism, the issue of
income was not necessarily thought to reflect people’s generosity; that is, from
a Ṣūfī viewpoint, one’s income was ultimately God’s will. So, rather than ask-
ing for or expecting alms, many Ṣūfīs preferred to have an occupation. For ex-
ample, we find Ṣūfīs with professions such as bannāʾ (mason), saqaṭī (pedlar),
ḥaddād (blacksmith), ḥallāj (cotton carder), qawārīrī (glassmaker or seller),
warrāq (bookseller or copyist), and nassāj (weaver) (Schimmel, 84; Afshari in
this volume). Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband (d. 791/1389), the eponymous master of
Naqshbandiyya Ṣūfī silsila, was an embroiderer or engraver; similarly, Bahāʾ
al-Dīn ʿAmīlī (d. 1030/1621) was an architect in the Ṣafavid Empire and was
involved in the construction of the Masjid-i-Shāh (mosque) in Isfahan. This
was in line with doctrinal positions (of certain Ṣūfīs) against inactivity. Among
other authors, the prominent Baghdad-based Muslim jurist and theologian Ibn
al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200) defended those who believed in working for a living and
rejecting alms, as opposed to those who were slothful:
We have seen a horde of more recent Sufis lounging around in the ribāṭ
so as to avoid working for a living, occupied by eating and drinking, song
and dance; they seek the things of the world from any tyrant, not hesitat-
ing to accept the gift of even the tax-collector! Most of their ribāṭs have
been built by despots who have endowed them with illegal properties …
The Sufis’ concern revolves around the kitchen, food, and ice water …
while they spend most of their time in amusing conversation and visiting
the nobility …
cited in Homerin, 64
that by providing Ṣūfīs with material and financial support, they could invoke
baraka to win wars, protect themselves and their kingdoms against enemies,
and resolve their personal issues. For instance, in 708–9/1309–10, the sultan
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khaljī (r. 695–715/1296–1316) asked Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ to use his
baraka for the conquest of a fort in the Kakatiya kingdom of Telingana; like-
wise sultan Muḥammad Tughluq (r. 725–52/1325–51) requested the blessing of
a Suhrawardī Ṣūfī, Shaykh Rukn al-Dīn (d. 735/1335) of Multān, to crush a re-
volt. In return, the sultan pledged the waqf income from one hundred villages
to the Ṣūfī after the victory (Rizvi, 1:160, 213).
Supporting Ṣūfīs and their institutions materially was politically significant
for sultans and kings, in terms of commanding legitimacy and gathering faith-
ful subjects. Most mediaeval sultans obtained a khilāfat-nāma (i.e., a letter
from the caliph in Baghdad recognising their rule) that bound them to support
religious communities. Through a policy of patronage and non-intervention in
Ṣūfīs’ affairs the sultans legitimised their rule (Safi, 126). In India, appointing
a Ṣūfī to a ceremonial position, such as shaykh al-islām (an advisor to the sul-
tan on religious matters), made him eligible for a stipend, donations ( futūḥ),
and land grants. Muḥammad Tughluq appointed Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Bukhārī
(d. 785/1384) of Ucch Sharīf (in the Punjab), as shaykh al-islām; he was also
granted a khānaqāh in Sistan (at Sehwan) that was financially supported by the
income of nearby villages (Rizvi, 1:279). Such material strength aided in pros-
elytising activities, e.g., those of Suhrawardī Ṣūfīs in India, and new converts
were considered faithful subjects of the state (Aquil (ed.)). Ṣūfīs patronised
by kings largely became mediators between the local populace and the state.
In many cases, Ṣūfīs avoided visiting the royal courts, but when they did so, it
became an occasion for large grants and gifts. For instance, Rukn al-Dīn visited
the court of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khaljī in Delhi twice and each time the sultan gave him
200,000 tankas (a significant amount at the time) on his arrival and 500,000
tankas when the shaykh returned to Multān. It is said that the shaykh imme-
diately distributed these donations among the people of Delhi (Rizvi, 1:211).
Muslim rulers who assumed the title of bādshāh (monarch or king, from the
Persian pādishāh) and did not request a khilāfat-nāma from the caliph were
still politically compelled to support the Ṣūfīs. These kings were, as in the case
of the Mughals in India, ethnically, culturally, and religiously different, and re-
quired intermediaries who commanded respect among the people. If making
donations to individual Ṣūfīs and their institutions had political undertones,
the Ṣūfīs’ acceptance or rejection of such donations did as well. By accepting
donations, they accepted the legitimacy of the donor. For instance, a contrario,
Shāh Musāfir refused to accept nadhr by a Central Asian soldier because the
latter was aiding the enemies of Shāh Musāfir’s patron (Green, 16).
Donations to Ṣūfīs and Ṣūfī Institutions 85
With the institutionalisation of Sufism in the Middle East, Iran, and in Central
and South Asia, the belief in baraka and donations to Ṣūfī institutions such as
shrines and khānaqāhs also became institutionalised in a sense. Khānaqāhs
were often huge complexes with staff such as healers, builders, labourers, gro-
cers, water-carriers, butchers, gardeners, and cooks. Kings and nobles donated
large sums in exchange for prayers from the Ṣūfīs in this world and in the here-
after. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (r. 564–89/1169–93) established one of the earliest known
khānaqāhs in Cairo, named al-Salāḥiyya or Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ, to house itinerant
Ṣūfīs; he also gave huge endowments and futūḥ in the hope that the khānaqāh
would continue to flourish after him (Hofer, 35). The khānaqāh sheltered ap-
proximately 300 Ṣūfīs, most of whom were non-Egyptians. In some instances,
khānaqāh appeared to be more resourceful than the local administration. For
instance, in seventh-/thirteenth- and eighth-/fourteenth-century India, en-
dowments and futūḥ granted by the sultans, nobility, and traders made the
khānaqāh of the Suhrawardiyya so affluent that local governors borrowed grain
from them during periods of drought. A hagiographical story in Iran relates
that the invocations of the shaykh Amīn al-Dīn Balyānī (d. 745/1345) gave Faqīh
Rūḥ al-Dīn Rāmgardī a donation of 200,000 dinars so that he could repay his
debt to the governors of Shiraz (Aigle, Le soufisme, 243). Yet, in most mediaeval
khānaqāhs, Ṣūfīs distributed futūḥ among needy people immediately upon re-
ceiving them. Ṣūfī traditions did not lay down strict rules for how futūḥ were to
be used, so donations collected for one purpose could be used for another. For
instance, on his deathbed, Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ asked that his servant (who
was reluctant to do so) distribute all his grain to the public kitchen (Islam, 113).
Mediaeval rulers gave huge futūḥ to Ṣūfī shrines for two reasons: first, they
believed that those close to God did not die, but were remained alive in their
graves; second, it was in the interest of the kings to support deceased Ṣūfīs
instead of living ones, because there was less possibility of conflict with those
already dead. Muslim rulers in Central and South Asia and Iran continued to
give donations and to rebuild, repair, and maintain the shrines of Ṣūfīs who
had died centuries earlier. Donations from kings and the nobility were one of
the ways of controlling Ṣūfīs and their institutions. When the successors of
Burhān al-Dīn Gharīb’s shrine were unable to cover their expenses, they sought
donations from the sultans of the Deccan.
In the mediaeval Muslim world, particularly in Iran and the Ottoman
Empire, artisan guilds headed by a Ṣūfī shaykh or those that were part of a
Ṣūfī ṭarīqa enjoyed the patronage of kings, artisans, and traders for many rea-
sons (Afshari in this volume): First, they garnered support for the king or for
the opposition to the king; second, they increased the productivity of the ar-
tisan guild by relating craft practices to divine help; third, they intensified the
86 Khan
process of conversion. For instance, artisan guilds and traders donated futūḥ
in large numbers to a Khurāsānī dervish named Ḥasan Jurī (d. 743/1342) and
his militant followers to initiate a resistance movement, popularly known
as the Sarbidarān movement, against the oppression of local landlords. The
movement was successful in establishing an independent state at Sabzevar
between 738/1337 and 783/1381 (Aigle, Sarbedārs). The Ottomans appointed a
shaykh of the Rifāʿiyya Ṣūfī order, Sayyid Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Kamāl
al-Dīn b. ʿAjlān (d. 1025/1616), based in Damascus, as the shaykh mashāyikh
al-ḥiraf (head of guilds). Similarly, in 1098/1687, the Ṣūfī master of the
Khalwatiyya silsila was appointed head of the artisan guild in Tripoli, Lebanon
(Wilkins, 255). The main objective of such appointments and the financial sup-
port of these Ṣūfīs was to reduce the chances of revolt and increase the produc-
tivity of the guilds. Shāh ʿAbbās I (r. 995–1038/1587–1629) of the Ṣafavid Empire
financially supported various Ṣūfī factions, such as Niʿmatīs/Niʿmatullāhīs,
Ḥaydarīs, and Lutīs in artisan guilds dominant in the bazaars of Iran, which
were hubs of political and social life. The main objective of this financial sup-
port was to create a division among the artisan guilds and thereby reduce the
chances of revolt (Keyvani, 249–50).
Bibliography
The celebrated Bishr b. Ḥārith al-Ḥāfī (d. 227/841 or 842), remembered for
renouncing the study of ḥadīth and for walking barefoot, is one example of
an early Ṣūfī who renounced earning a living through trade or labour. Before
taking to a life of asceticism, Bishr earned a living by making yarn from cot-
ton (al-Sarrāj, 195). However, despite examples in which early Ṣūfīs renounced
work, this was not the general trend and Ṣūfīs tended to accept that earning a
living and having a profession was something practiced by the prophets of God.
Adam, for instance, was said to be a farmer (Mustamlī Bukhārī, 3:1103); Seth
was a weaver of burlap; David was an armourer; Solomon wove baskets from
palm leaves, which he then sold for two loaves of barley bread each; and both
Moses and Abraham were shepherds (Mustamlī Bukhārī, 3:1104). Nevertheless,
Ṣūfīs did not tend to believe it was obligatory to earn a living, merely that it was
permissible. In short, they did not believe they needed to have a profession,
although they could if they chose to (Mustamlī Bukhārī, 3:1105). Most Ṣūfīs un-
derstood tawakkul to mean that relying on God to provide for one’s daily suste-
nance and needs was better than earning a living, and said that only those who
had fallen from the spiritual station of tawakkul had to seek a living and earn a
livelihood (al-Sarrāj, 195–6; Mustamlī Bukhārī, 3:1107).
Conversely, in the second/eighth century there were some Ṣūfīs who em-
phasised the importance of earning a living, as they believed this was the
practice of the Prophet of Islam. For example, it was reported that ʿAbdallāh
b. al-Mubārak (d. 181/797), an early scholar and ascetic, said that there is no
good in anyone who has not humbled himself through work, while he also ad-
vised his followers that they should not let their profession or earning a living
cause them to forget to rely on God in all their affairs (al-Sarrāj, 196). Similarly,
Ibrāhīm b. Adham (d. 161/777–8), a prominent early Ṣūfī said, “Earning a
permissible livelihood to provide for one’s family is a religious obligation”
(al-Sarrāj, 196). He himself worked as a gardener and shared his earnings with
his companions (al-Sarrāj, 178). However, later, most Ṣūfī shaykhs relied on beg-
ging or wealthy individuals to sponsor their lodges and provide food for them
to eat (Ibn al-Jawzī, 229), as we read repeatedly, for example, in the biography
of Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr (d. 440/1049) (Ibn Munawwar, 1:118, 148–9, 152–3).
Abū Ḥafs Ḥaddād (d. 264/878), who was a blacksmith, gave what little money
he made each day to the dervishes and spent his nights going door-to-door
begging for alms, living on the bread he obtained in this manner (al-Sarrāj, 197;
Mustamlī Bukhārī, 3:212). It is related that Abū Ḥafs said, “I gave up earning a
number of times before returning to it again, until one day I resolved to give it
up and then never again returned to it” (al-Sarrāj, 196; Hujwīrī, 190). However,
we should hesitate before accepting this report, as Abū Ḥafs was a Malāmatī
and the Malāmatiyya as a rule believed in continuing to earn a living and work
in a profession. The leader of the Malāmatiyya, Ḥamdūn Qaṣṣār, had a disciple
by the name of ʿAbdallāh Ḥajjām, who practiced cupping (ḥijāma) as a profes-
sion. ʿAbdallāh asked his master whether he should discontinue his profession,
to which Ḥamdūn replied, “On the contrary, you should strive harder in your
profession. I prefer that you become known as ʿAbdallāh the ḥajjām (the prac-
titioner of cupping) rather than ʿAbdallāh the zāhid (ascetic) or ʿārif (mystic)”
(al-Sulamī, 94).
The Malāmatiyya movement originated in the third/ninth century, from be-
liefs and practices associated with the ideals of chivalry or futuwwa (Afshari
(ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 67, 68, 74–5, 81). Individuals known to belong to
this group of Ṣūfīs are mentioned in classical books on Sufism as those who
Sufism, Futuwwa, and Professional Guilds 91
subscribed to the ideals of futuwwa; they are given descriptions and titles
such as ʿayyār, javānmard, ṣuʿlūk (all words that imply a chivalrous disposi-
tion). Examples of such persons include Aḥmad Khiḍruwiyya (d. 246/860),
Shāh Shujāʿ Kirmānī (d. c. 300/913), and Abū l-Ḥasan Pūshangī (d. 348/959).
These Ṣūfīs introduced the ideals of futuwwa into Sufism—their efforts are
evident in the moral precepts discussed in Ṣūfī works on futuwwa, such as the
Risāla Qushayriyya by Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) and the Kitāb al-
futuwwa of Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021). Discussions such as
theirs gave rise to the Malāmatiyya, a Ṣūfī movement closely linked to the prac-
tice of futuwwa; in fact the Kitāb al-futuwwa is similar in content to al-Sulamī’s
work on the movement, the Risālat al-Malāmatiyya. However, this is not to say
that these figures gave rise, directly, to futuwwa as a practice or moral code and
it is important to distinguish between ideals and principles, on the one hand,
and a fully-developed code, on the other (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 68).
Centuries later, after the decline of the Malāmatiyya of Khurāsān, the
Khwājagān or early Naqshbandiyya, more than other Ṣūfī orders, emphasised
the importance of earning a living, and their followers tended to have a trade
(Zarrīnkūb, 207–8).
2 Futuwwa
Even though many of the craftsmen who became Ṣūfīs left their trades be-
hind, craftsmen and merchants who did not become Ṣūfīs nevertheless fol-
lowed a code that (like Sufism) emphasised the struggle against one’s lower
desires and the importance of undertaking spiritual wayfaring. The moral pre-
cepts that were of particular importance to these craftsmen and merchants
included helping others, generosity, clemency, self-abnegation, altruism, hos-
pitality, keeping one’s word and fulfilling contracts, keeping the secrets of
others, showing kindness, and forgiving the mistakes of others (Afshari (ed.),
Futuvvat nāma-hā, 58–66). This code was called futuwwa in Arabic (from fatā,
meaning “youth”) and javānmardī in Persian, both of which are similar to the
English term “chivalry.” While futuwwa is a phenomenon that arises out of
the Islamic tradition, chivalric codes can be traced to Sāsānid Iran, suggest-
ing that pre-Islamic Persian sources influenced the practice (Zakeri, Sāsānid
soldiers, 84–94).
Originally, futuwwa reflected the moral code of a class of warriors known
as ʿayyār (a designation that was later adopted by merchants and craftsmen).
We do not know exactly when merchants and craftsmen began following the
same code as the ʿayyār, but the Qābūs nāma indicates that it was well before
92 Afshari
the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (r. 575–622/1179–1225) combined fu-
tuwwa with Sufism and asceticism. Written by the Ziyārid prince Kaykāwūs
b. Iskandar ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī in 475/1082, the Qābūs nāma is a Persian text on
futuwwa that discusses not just the code of honour for ʿayyārs and soldiers,
but also that of craftsmen and merchants (Kaykāwūs, 242, 249). Kaykāwūs also
speaks about the futuwwa of the Ṣūfīs, further illustrating that only some Ṣūfīs
followed the moral precepts of the futuwwa code and that Sufism had little to
do with its rituals and ceremonies (Kaykāwūs, 249–57).
In the early centuries of Islam, the ʿayyār were predominantly active in the
cities of Iraq which, prior to the Arab conquests, was part of the Sāsānid em-
pire. They were ordinary people, rather than nobility, but daring and martial
in character, and frequently involved in political affairs. Some would disrupt
the peace and security of cities and steal from homes and shops (Ibn al-Athīr,
9:126, 248). But the unruliness of the ʿayyār paid off in 197/813 when Ṭāhir Dhū
l-Yamīnayn (d. 207/822), the Persian commander of al-Maʾmūn’s (d. 218/833)
forces, attacked Baghdad with the intention of removing al-Amīn (d. 198/813)
from the caliphate and installing al-Maʾmūn in his place. The city’s ʿayyārs
fought Ṭāhir’s soldiers and brought about a memorable defeat (Ibn al-Athīr,
6:189–90). Later, in the seventh/thirteenth century, the ʿAbbāsid caliph,
al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh, who was sympathetic to the code of futuwwa, officially
declared himself head of the ʿayyārs, in the hope that it would prevent them
from causing disorder and committing criminal acts in the cities (Ibn al-Athīr,
11:286–7; Taeschner, 55–72; Zakeri, From futuwwa, 30–4; Cahen, 235–42). It
was during this period that Ibn al-Miʿmār (d. 642/1244) wrote (in Arabic) his
Kitāb al-futuwwa, one of the oldest works on the topic, and thereby affirmed
the adherence of al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh and his followers to the code of chivalry.
This work shows that futuwwa in Baghdad at this time had, to varying degrees,
become mixed with asceticism and Sufism, and the number of fighters and
ruffians in its ranks had diminished. Ibn al-Miʿmār enumerates the condi-
tions a person must meet to be accepted into the code of futuwwa: (1) he must
be male; (2) he must be adult; (3) he must be of sound mind; (4) he must be
a pious Muslim; (5) he must not have any blemish or disability in his body;
(6) he must have muruwwa (lit., “manliness,” from the Arabic word marʾ, mean-
ing “man”), which is more or less synonymous with futuwwa but which seems
to have been used by Ibn al-Miʿmār specifically to refer to the traits of fairness,
munificence, and generosity (Ibn al-Miʿmār, 160–78).
Members of futuwwa fraternities organised themselves into a hierarchy of
ranks and grades. The first among these ranks is the jadd (grandfather), of
whom all of the members are disciples. Second is the kabīr (elder), a lower
rank than the jadd, his disciples are those individuals that he initiated into
Sufism, Futuwwa, and Professional Guilds 93
futuwwa. Other names for this rank include shaykh (elder), pidar (father),
and pīr (elder). Third in rank is the zaʿīm (chief), whose job it is to give ad-
vice and moral exhortation to the disciples. Fourth is the wakīl (deputy) who
serves as the representative of the kabīr and shaykh and who succeeds them.
Fifth is the naqīb (leader), appointed by the kabīr or pidar, whose responsibil-
ity it was to look after the affairs of the junior members and meet their needs
(Ibn al-Miʿmār, 75–7, 192, 206).
The members of the futuwwa were organised into independent groups
based on their association with some of the leading elders of the organisation.
Each group was called a “house” (bayt) or “party” (ḥizb). Typically, a “house”
was larger than a “party” and a single house might contain several parties (Ibn
al-Miʿmār, 75).
New members of a futuwwa order were initiated through a number of ritu-
als, including tying the girdle, donning the trousers of the futuwwa, and drink-
ing salty water or salty milk from a bowl. The practices of futuwwa spread
throughout Muslim lands, but were especially prevalent in regions such as
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia. The initiation practices of these diverse
groups in various regions appear to have differed from one another over time
but, according to Ibn al-Miʿmār, in the seventh/thirteenth century, it appears
that an aspirant would take an existing member as a mentor and then be ad-
mitted to the futuwwa society after performing whatever rituals of initiation
were required.
During the initiation, the special girding (called a shadd, or “binding”) worn
by members of the futuwwa was placed on the floor in the middle of the gath-
ering. The naqīb would then emerge from the members gathered, and ask both
the kabīr and the aspirant’s mentor (known as a ṣāḥib or ustād) for permission
to begin the ceremony. He would recite a sermon (khuṭba) in Arabic, prais-
ing God and the Prophet, then invoke blessings on the ruler or caliph of the
time, and recite some verses of the Qurʾān or sayings of the Prophet on the
merits of futuwwa. Then he would command the aspirant to stand up. When
the aspirant stood, the naqīb would ask the gathering if anyone had anything
to say or any objection to the aspirant. If no one objected, the naqīb would
respectfully announce the name of the aspirant and say that he wishes such-
and-such a person (namely, his mentor) to accept him as a friend (rafīq) (It
is noteworthy that whereas Ṣūfīs used the term murīd to denote a disciple,
among the futuwwa orders it was common to use the term rafīq). At this point,
all the members of the gathering would stand up and the kabīr would say to
the mentor, “This gathering also wishes you to accept this aspirant as a friend.”
The mentor would say: “I accept.” The naqīb then would then wrap the girding
around the waist of the aspirant, now called a “son” ( farzand) and present him
94 Afshari
with the trousers of futuwwa. The kabīr would get up and firmly tie the knot of
the girding, before giving the aspirant a bowl of salty water (or salty milk) to
drink (this part of the ritual is known as the shurb, or “drinking”). All of those
gathered would pass the bowl and take a drink from it, until it reached the
hand of the mentor. He would drink and say, “Peace be with you, youths!” Then
the naqīb would answer on behalf of those assembled. The mentor would say,
“I have accepted, for the sake of God, in following the Prophet, this person
as an aspirant through this ritual of drinking.” Then the naqīb himself would
take the bowl of salty water and drink from it before bringing the ceremony to
a close (Ibn al-Miʿmār, 192–3, 236–9). By the late seventh/thirteenth century
and early eighth/fourteenth century, Najm al-Dīn Zarkūb (d. 712/1312) wrote
that the mentor himself, rather than the naqīb, would present the trousers of
futuwwa and wrap the girding around the waist of the aspirant. This was done
because the disciple had entered the society of futuwwa and become the stu-
dent of his mentor (Zarkūb, 195).
A statement of the Iranian preacher and polymath Ḥusayn Wāʿiẓ Kāshifī
(d. 910/1504–5) illustrates the way in which the initiatory practices of futuwwa
varied over time and place. Writing almost three centuries after Ibn al-Miʿmār,
Kāshifī says, “A rank called ‘the father of God’s covenant’ (pidar-i ʿahd Allāh)
delivers moral admonition to the disciple during the initiation ceremony and
teaches him several utterances. Then there is a rank called ‘the master of the
girding’ (ustād-i shadd) who wraps the girding around his waist and presents
him with the bowl of salty water to drink” (Kāshifī Sabzawārī, 131–8).
Rank and file members of the futuwwa orders were given the title of “broth-
er” (akh) and would address one another as “my brother” (akhī) (Ibn Baṭṭūṭa,
1:292). However, this practice was not exclusive to the futuwwa orders; Ṣūfīs
also addressed one another in these terms (ʿAbbādī, 78). In the eighth/four-
teenth century, the traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 770/1368–9 or 779/1377) met crafts-
men in Anatolia who followed the futuwwa code and were known as “brothers.”
He said that whatever they earned through their trade during the day, they
would deliver to the elder or head of the guild in the mid-afternoon. With this
money, food and fruit were purchased for the guild lodge. According to Ibn
Baṭṭūṭa, the craft guildsmen of Anatolia would wear a robe and walk around
in a specific style of shoes. They also carried a dagger on their belt. On their
heads, they wore white felt hats with a tassel hanging from the tip. When they
were in the lodge, they would remove their hats. He also describes, in great
detail, the hospitality of the youth, as this reflects one of the fundamental
precepts of the futuwwa code (Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 1:292–3). Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s descrip-
tions can be compared to those of Aflākī in Manāqib al-ʿārifīn (The virtues of
Sufism, Futuwwa, and Professional Guilds 95
Unlike the Ṣūfīs who did not practice a trade, having a profession and earn-
ing a living were important (even sacred, perhaps) for the people of futuwwa
because they worked with the goal of helping others. This was an important
precept of futuwwa religiosity (Gölpınarlı, 119). A considerable number of
futuvvat nāmas in Persian and some in Arabic and Turkish were guild-based in
character, meaning that they were written in order to introduce new members
of a particular trade guild to the doctrines, etiquette, and ceremonies of the
guild. Naturally, these teachings were mixed with those of the futuwwa chiv-
alry code more generally. This sub-genre of futuvvat nāmas is characterised,
to a greater or lesser extent, by an emphasis on serving others. For example,
in the Futuvvat nāma-yi ṭabbākhān (that is, the futuvvat nāma for the cooks),
God is related as having said to Abraham, “Strive to bring the hot cooked food
to the lips and mouths of my servants!” (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 170).
The Futuvvat nāma-yi salmāniyān (for the bathhouse workers) repeatedly en-
joins its readers to show respect to customers when shaving their heads and to
serve them for the sake of God (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 185–6). In the
98 Afshari
same vein, the Futuvvat nāma-yi nanvāyān (for the bakers) says that if a baker
mistreats people, the pīr of the guild should reprimand him for his behaviour
(Afshari (ed.), Chahārdah risāla, 162).
In these guild futuvvat nāmas, each professional guild traces its trade back
to one of the prophets. In this way, the progenitor of most crafts is none other
than Adam, the first man. For example, the guild of butchers claims Adam as
the first butcher (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 148), the guild of cobblers
claims him as the first cobbler (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 156), and the
guild of bakers claims him as the first baker (Afshari (ed.), Chahārdah risāla,
156). Adam is said to have learnt all of these trades from the Angel Gabriel.
Conversely, the guild of cooks traced their lineage back to Abraham (Afshari
(ed.), Chahārdah risāla, 169–70), the tailors to Idrīs (Afshari (ed.), Sī futuvvat
nāma, 83), and the weavers to Job (Afshari (ed.), Sī futuvvat nāma, 189). Virtually
all of these futuvvat nāmas include a myth and legend that tell the story of
how one of these prophets originated the craft in question. These myths and
legends also tell how each of the tools of a particular trade came into being.
The futuvvat nāmas were usually short treatises consisting of several questions
and answers, intended to teach the followers of the guild and its initiates to
remember God when doing their work and to recite prayers and invocations as
they laboured. These works also taught them to show deference to their teach-
ers and the guild elders, to remember the good deeds of those forebears and
teachers of the guild who had passed away, and to always observe the code
of chivalry ( javānmardī) with their customers. In the course of training, as
alongside the names of the prophets, the names of the famous masters of each
guild were also mentioned. Many of these were the names of real historical
figures, such as a figure by the name of Sulṭān Walad, who was a master of
the guild of skinners (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 152). Other figures are
ambiguous, possibly mythical, such as Shaykh Ẓahīr, one of the masters of the
guild of cobblers (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 162), Ustād Nawrūz Rūmī,
a master of the guild of chefs (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 173), and Ustād
ʿAbdallāh Aqtash and Aḥmad Rūmī, masters of the guild of dyers (Afshari,
Sī futuvvat nāma, 112), and Ustād Suhayl Sharwānī, a master of the guild of
weavers (Afshari (ed.), Sī futuvvat nāma, 189). Finally, there are those names
that are clearly of a mythical character, such as Javānmard Qaṣṣāb of the guild
of butchers and skinners (Afshari (ed.), Chahārdah risāla, 184).
After appearing in the guild futuvvat nāmas that were mainly composed in
the tenth/sixteenth to twelfth/eighteenth centuries when the Ṣafavids ruled
Iran, and even in the two centuries that followed, these lists of masters’ names
that blended historical and legendary personalities found their way into short-
er treatises introducing only the masters of several guilds (usually seventeen
Sufism, Futuwwa, and Professional Guilds 99
guilds). These treatises on guilds were usually composed in Iran by the Ṣūfīs of
the Khāksār order, who were heavily influenced by futuwwa (Gramlich, 1:78–
80; Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 347–58) and who attached great impor-
tance to the guild of bathhouse workers (Salmānīs). In the past, when initiates
joined the Khāksār order, they would spend some time working in this profes-
sion (Afshari (ed.), Futuvvat nāma-hā, 180–1). The ʿAjam dervishes, a branch of
the Khaksār, also attended the “sokhanvarī” ceremony, that is, a poem recita-
tion in coffee houses, during which they commemorated seventeen guilds and
included themselves as one of them (Afshari, Tāza bi tāza, 111–25).
The guild treatises identify the first master of each guild, in other words, who
first practiced their craft. Works similar to these Persian guild treatises, written
in Arabic and slightly later, also survive in manuscript form (al-Shaykhalī, 184).
Other manuscripts of treatises in this vein also exist in Turkish (Gölpınarlı,
121–2). However, it should be noted that these treatises in Persian, Arabic,
and Turkish are not uniform in terms of which guilds they introduce, nor the
names of their masters; these details vary from one treatise to another. It seems
that they reflect the earlier beliefs of the people of futuwwa that only certain
trades were permitted to follow the code of chivalry, and that fraternities were
not open to all. As we have seen, these beliefs varied from one time and place
to another; in some cases, a trade that was forbidden from joining the futuwwa
in one treatise is considered a member of the fraternity in another.
The members of guilds continued to follow the futuwwa code in many
Islamic lands until the early twentieth century. Recalling his childhood in
Bukhara, the Tajik writer Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAynī (d. 1954) says that the guilds of
Bukhara at that time had organisations and institutions like those of the
futuwwa. Each of these guilds followed a particular master, just as depicted
by the Khāksārs centuries earlier. For example, ʿAynī relates, the guild of cob-
blers followed Bābā Pārahdūz Bukhārī (ʿAynī, 467–73), who appears to have
been a legendary figure akin to the aforementioned Javānmard Qassāb. And
just as the grave of the latter is popularly believed to be in southern Tehran, the
grave of Bābā Pārahdūz is commonly thought to be in Bukhara. Furthermore,
according to ʿAynī, the members of the guilds of his youth even had a hier-
archy: bābā (father), āqsaqāl (elder), ustād (teacher), and ṣāḥibkār (master)
(ʿAynī, 467–73). The guild of early twentieth-century Bukhara had handwritten
treatises handed down from their masters containing invocations that their
members should recite as they laboured and worked, exactly like the futuvvat
nāmas of the various guilds in Iran. Interestingly, in Uzbekistan today, we can
still find knowledge transmitted from one generation of artisans to another
(blacksmiths for example), with professional textbooks (risāla) to teach the
craftsman the spiritual values attached to his work (Dağyeli, 111–56, 261–76).
100 Afshari
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Sufism, Futuwwa, and Professional Guilds 101
⸪
Chapter 5
1 Introduction
whereas many others underwent significant changes in terms of the orbit and
pattern of their geographical expansion, and in their formats and designations.
Numerous magnificent shrines (both old and recent) have acquired a sanctity
of their own, and maintained their importance as prime centres of Muslim
religious and communal life.
2.1 Beginnings
The genesis of specifically Ṣūfī structures is not well known. When dealing with
their origins, the usual starting point is the second-/eighth-century duwayra
(the diminutive of dār, “house”) or ribāṭ—the first one we know of is a fortified
cloister on the island of ʿAbbādān (modern Ābādān) on the Persian Gulf. This
ribāṭ became a chief training ground for Iraqi ascetics. Originally a military
outpost against sea raiders, it was later manned mostly by pious volunteers
who, alongside their military service, engaged in acts of worship and super-
erogatory piety (Knysh, 17). During the second/eighth century, early Muslims
who renounced the world combined worship with holy war and settled in forti-
fied strongholds (ribāṭs) along the Arab-Byzantine frontier. Ibrāhīm b. Adham
(d. c. 161/777) is cited as a typical example of a celebrated ascetic-cum-warrior
(Chabbi, Ribāṭ). Yet, it is difficult to verify any historical connection between
the ribāṭs of the frontier areas and later institutions with this name that were
regularly and consistently connected with activities of Ṣūfī masters and their
disciples (Chabbi, La fonction, 102; Hofer [Ṣūfī Outposts] in this volume).
Such institutions became prominent in the eastern lands of the Muslim
world toward the end of the fourth/tenth century. Ṣūfīs in Khurāsān adopted
the institution known as khānqāh (originally linked to the Karrāmiyya ascetic
and missionary movement), and adapted it for their own purposes (Bosworth,
8). These can be considered the first Ṣūfī organisations. The word khānqāh, a
compound of the Persian khān/eh (usually meaning “house”) and the locative
suffix –gāh, conventionally denoted a dwelling occupied by Ṣūfīs; it was used
for meetings, as residences, for study, and for communal prayer under the su-
pervision of a Ṣūfī master (Chabbi, K̲ h̲ānḳāh; Böwering and Melvin-Koushki).
Sources from this age depict such dwellings as centres of teaching and
spiritual training presided over by Ṣūfī masters, and self-sufficient hospices for
residents and travelling Ṣūfīs. Rules of ethical behaviour and companionship
were set to regulate the collective activities of denizens of the khānqāh—most
famously, the code of the celebrated Ṣūfī, Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr (d. 440/1049)
(Chabbi, K̲ h̲ānḳāh, 1025–6; Meier, 306–10; Graham, 83–135; Omer, 11–4). The
Ṣūfī Places and Dwellings 107
code he laid down for inhabitants of his khānqāh consists of ten injunctions;
these are quoted in a biography written by Muḥammad b. Munawwar enti-
tled Asrār al-tawḥīd fī maqāmāt al-shaykh Abū Saʿīd (Ibn Munawwar, 316–7 in
O’Kane, 493–5). The first set of injunctions focuses on the constant recollec-
tion of God. All inhabitants must maintain ritual purity and have clean cloth-
ing, supplicate God for forgiveness after the dawn prayer, recite the Qurʾān at
daybreak, not talk to anyone until the sun rises, recite litanies between the
last two ritual prayers, and perform supererogatory night prayers. Such injunc-
tions, designed to regulate a social organisation, demanded that residents re-
ceive the poor and weak to ease their burdens, always eat in the company of
others, and not leave without mutual consent.
Historians of early Sufism in Khurāsān of the late fourth/tenth and fifth/
eleventh centuries have shown that, from this point forward, the connec-
tion between the khānqāhs and followers of Ṣūfī masters became a perma-
nent feature of the Muslim religious landscape. This important development
marked the evolution of Sufism into an established pietistic tradition with its
own structures of authority and companionship. While integrating themselves
into the madrasas and the established schools of law and law colleges, Ṣūfīs
in Khurāsān, such as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān
al-Hujwīrī (d. c. 465/1072), Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), and Abū
Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), defined the basic beliefs and practices of the
distinctive Ṣūfī traditions, and reiterated that each group needed an authorita-
tive master to guide his disciples through the stages and stations of the Path,
and closely monitor their behaviour (Malamud).
Rajasthan) around Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī (d. 633/1236); it was one of the earliest
Ṣūfī orders and the most widespread in the territories ruled by the sultanate
and in the Indian subcontinent as a whole. Chishtī’s disciples set up numer-
ous khānqāhs throughout India; these served as residences for disciples and
sometimes as inns where free meals were served to visitors. In general, Chishtī
shaykhs remained aloof from the ruling elite. However, beginning in the eighth/
fourteenth century, the centralised administration of the order grew weaker
and less independent, and over time they were compelled to forge ties with the
rulers, a practice that came to be generally accepted. This acceptance resulted
in a significant change in the resources available to the khānqāhs (Nizami, 51–
71; Gaborieau; Ernst and Lawrence).
The late sixth/twelfth century marked the beginning of an alliance be-
tween Ṣūfī khānqāhs and the political rulers of Egypt and Syria. The process of
founding khānqāhs in Egypt began under the Ayyūbids, following the restora-
tion of Sunnī Islam as the official religion of the state (after over two hundred
years of Fāṭimid Shīʿī rule). Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin, d. 589/1193) founded his first
khānqāh—a hospice known as Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ or Ṣalāḥiyya—in 569/1173, in
order to house Ṣūfī newcomers to Cairo. He built it in the heart of the city and
endowed it with a charitable trust (waqf ) to ensure that the khānqāh would
continue to provide a home for Ṣūfīs long after he had passed away. Ṣūfīs living
in the khānqāh received daily rations of food and sweets, small stipends, and
time away from the khānqāh to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. At the top of
the khānqāh’s organisation, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn created a salaried position, known as
shaykh al-shuyūkh (lit., “the master of masters”) whose job was to mentor the
Ṣūfīs in the khānqāh and act as a liaison between the ruling class and local Ṣūfī
communities in the Ayyūbid sultanate (Hofer, 35).
Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn also founded the first khānqāh in Jerusalem. In 585/1189, about
two years after the liberation of Jerusalem from the crusaders, he turned the
Patriarch’s residence near the Church of the Resurrection into a khānqāh. He
named it ‘Ṣalāḥiyya’ in his own honour, and endowed it liberally for groups
of Ṣūfī followers—whether indigenous or, more probably, foreign—and cre-
ated the office of director of the khānqāh and trustee of its pious endowment
(Ephrat, Spiritual wayfarers, 113). The regulations regarding the use of the en-
dowment made clear that the founder designed it to safeguard mainstream
Sufism and to promote his image as its supporter:
in al-Aqṣā Mosque, where they should recite the holy book as much as
possible, then pray for the donor and the Muslims and read aloud in the
presence of their shaykh the words of the leading Ṣūfī shaykhs, may God
make them beneficial.
al-ʿAsalī, 94
and the citadel. The religious and political centrality of this area can hardly
be underestimated. Although no deeds of endowment or remnants survived,
we can surmise that, regardless of the density of this prestigious area, their
buildings were sufficiently spacious to house groups of Ṣūfīs. These build-
ings thus projected an aura of religious prestige and highlighted the piety of
their founders and their role as patrons and supporters of Ṣūfīs (Ephrat and
Mahamid, 189–92).
Ṣūfī Places and Dwellings 111
The affinity between the nature and location of the Ṣūfī institutions was ap-
parent in Aleppo as well. During the early phase of their development, under
the reign of the Zangid Nūr al-Dīn (541–69/1147–74), almost all khānqāhs in
Aleppo were situated at the foothill of the citadel and the palace, in order
to be close to their protector and patron (Elisséeff, 3:367). Apparently, later,
under the Ayyūbids and the early Mamlūks, khānqāhs were clustered in the
area beneath the citadel, which had gained increasing importance as Aleppo
was transformed from a military garrison into a fortified palatial city. Other
khānqāhs were situated in the northern and prosperous northwestern quar-
ters of the walled city, not far from the Great Mosque. Among them was the
Khānqāh al-Farāfra, the only one in Aleppo to have survived. The building
Figure 5.3
Khānqāh al-Farāfra
in Aleppo, muqarnas
hood
Yasser Tabbaa
Archive, courtesy
of Aga Khan
Documentation
Center, MIT
Libraries
(AKDC@MIT)
112 Ephrat and Pinto
Figure 5.4 Khānqāh al-Farāfra in Aleppo, detail of upper part of courtyard with citadel in
background
Yasser Tabbaa Archive, courtesy of Aga Khan Documentation
Center, MIT Libraries (AKDC@MIT)
There are many zāwiyas in Egypt …, and the amīrs compete with others
to build them. Each has a shaykh and doorkeeper, and their affairs are ad-
mirably organised. They have many special customs, one of which relates
to food. The servant of the zāwiya comes in the morning to the fuqarāʾ
[mendicants] and each one indicates what he desires, and when they as-
semble for meals, each man is given bread and soup in a separate dish, no
one sharing with another. They eat twice a day, and are given winter and
summer clothes and a monthly allowance of twenty to thirty dirham [a
silver coin]. Every Thursday night they receive sugar cakes, soap to wash
their clothes, the entrance fee of a bath, and oil for their lamps. These
men are celibate; the married individuals among them belong to a sepa-
rate category. They must attend the five daily prayers, spend the night
in the zāwiya, and assemble in a special room (qubba) in the zāwiya.
Each sits on his special prayer rug…. Copies of the Qurʾān are distributed
among them, and they recite the verses together after the morning and
afternoon prayers…. On Fridays, the servant gathers all of the prayer rugs
and takes them to the mosque. The mendicants leave together with their
shaykh and go to the mosque, where everyone prays on his rug. After the
prayer, they read the Qurʾān silently, and return to the zāwiya with their
shaykh.
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 37–8
In Anatolia, dervish lodges, mostly known as tekkes (tekiyye or tekye, from the
Arabic takiyya, “a place or thing on which one leans; or where one rests”) first
appeared after the establishment of Saljūq Sultanate of Rūm in the late fifth/
eleventh century. But it was only following the disintegration of the sultanate
into principalities in the mid-seventh/thirteenth century that dervish lodges
began to proliferate in the region. In the important trading cities of central
Ṣūfī Places and Dwellings 115
the zāwiya organisation, as a prominent Ṣūfī centre with a wide range of func-
tions, was commonly linked to the consolidation and spread of the ṭarīqas in
the region, most visibly the Shādhiliyya. Under the patronage of the Ḥafṣids
(627–982/1229–1574) in Ifrīqiyya and the Marīnids (614–869/1217–1465) in
Morocco, new Shādhilī lodges were built and funded for popular leaders of the
order. Paradoxically, with time, Shādhilī lodges became seats of opposition to
the central power. However, in general they served as centres of social stability,
by securing the allegiance of local tribes or villages to one or another Shādhilī
leader. Zāwiyas became more common and more elaborate under the patron-
age of the Saʿdian sharīfs (descendants of the Prophet) (916–1069/1510–1659),
who often allied themselves with local religious fraternities. One of the largest
and finest zāwiyas in Morocco was established in Marrakesh for the renowned
Shādhilī shaykh Muḥammad al-Jazūlī (d. 869/1465), whose followers were in-
fluential in bringing the Saʿdian dynasty to power (Cornell, 235).
It was at the lodges presided over by revered spiritual masters—the zāwiyas,
the ribāṭs, and the tekkes—rather than in state-sponsored and organised estab-
lishments that the institutionalisation of Ṣūfī practices of establishing author-
ity and constituting a following, and the eventual formation of ṭarīqa-based
Sufism, took place. There the master guided his disciples in his distinctive
spiritual path, supervised their conduct, set up hierarchies among his disciples
and followers, and formed a community of devout followers. In their lodges,
Ṣūfīs attempted to pattern their micro-communities on the sacred community
of the Prophet and his Companions (ṣaḥāba); they compared themselves to
the “people of the porch” (ahl al-ṣuffa) who slept on his roofed porch (portico)
in Medina.
In the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries, a genre of literature known
as ādāb al-murīdīn (“rules of conduct for seekers of the path”), which had its
origins in the writings of the great mystics of the Islamic East, laid down the
conceptual foundations for the organisation, regularisation, and routinisa-
tion of lodge communities. One of the earliest and most widely read works of
Ṣūfī rules for novices was written by Abū l-Najīb al-Suhrawardī (d. 563/1168)
(Milson; Netton). This literature matured in the writings of his nephew and
disciple ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), the presumed founder of the
Suhrawardiyya order. ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, who had been trained in the
ribāṭ-based community established by his uncle in Baghdad, was probably
the first master to present a systematic description of the regulations of life
in the Ṣūfī lodge in his manual, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (The benefits of intimate
knowledge). The system, which was replicated thereafter, detailed the hierar-
chy within the institution; the rights, obligations, and roles of its various mem-
bers; the activities they engaged in; and the manner and customs by which
Ṣūfī Places and Dwellings 117
they interacted with one another (Ohlander, 194–247). Al-Suhrawardī laid out
a body of regulations governing the ritual for departing from and entering the
ribāṭ; this action represented a highly ritualised break between its sacralised
space and the profane space of the outer world, a transition whose gravity he
highlighted. The acts associated with these rituals symbolised the mendicant’s
commitment to embark on a practical and spiritual journey under the supervi-
sion of the spiritual guide and master of the lodge (al-Suhrawardī, 1:304–5, in
Ohlander, 231–2). For al-Suhrawardī, the ribāṭ is first and foremost a space for
the greater jihād against the lower self (mujāhadat al-nafs), the seat of self-
ish lusts and passions, though it is also a space for the lesser jihād against the
infidels. In waging the greater jihād through acts of supererogatory piety and
self-exertion, al-Suhrawardī finds one of the most powerful arguments for the
necessity of such a space vis-à-vis the Ṣūfī path (al-Suhrawardī, 1:265–6, in
Ohlander 194–5).
Taylor). While the living friends of God represent the various stages of mystical
progress and closeness to God, the dead saints, in their graves, combine the
merits of transcendent humans with the merits of those still alive. Thus, the
graves of the saints (walī, pl. awliyāʾ) were a double-fold repository of divine
grace through immanence. The walī reached a degree of sanctity through tran-
scendence, and his grave, by virtue of his presence there, is a concentration of
the sacred inherent in the cosmos. Pilgrimage guides pinpointed the specific
locations of blessings (baraka) where pilgrims might come to seek the active
assistance and intercession of the saints or simply benefit from close proximity
to the divine grace that emanates from their graves.
The process by which certain Ṣūfī masters came to be venerated as popu-
lar saints is clearly apparent in shrine communities (Karamustafa, 143). Such
communities became prominent in the sixth/twelfth century, particularly in
small provincial towns, as illustrated by the case of Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr
(d. 440/1049) in Mīhna, Khurāsān. According to sacred biographies composed
by two of his descendants, “the cult practice at the shrine” included
of novices; she also reported that a thousand devout women followers visited
the ribāṭ in a single year (al-Tādilī, 316 in Ephrat, Quest, 82–3).
During the sixth/twelfth century, the popularity of Ṣūfī sainthood made
major inroads into small towns and rural areas. It also spread in urban centres,
reaching the peak of its expansion among urban dwellers in the late mediaeval
period, as clearly manifested in Mamlūk Cairo. The link between Sufism and
the Cairene populace was generally a venerated shaykh, who resided in the
Ṣūfī lodge surrounded by his followers. Two circles radiated from the shaykh.
The first, and probably narrower circle, consisted of young people and others
who came to the lodge to receive the shaykh’s spiritual guidance and be initi-
ated into his spiritual path. At least some of those who were attracted to the
shaykh’s circle lived in his lodge and severed their family ties, as in the case
of the zāwiya of Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Kāzarūnī (d. 776/1374), whose lodge
was on Rawḍa Island. The second, wider circle, visited the lodge, and later the
tomb, to receive the shaykh’s blessings (baraka) in times of trouble, to listen to
popular preachers, and to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid). In addi-
tion to the Prophet’s mawlid, others gathered in mawlids to honour the various
Ṣūfī saints (Shoshan, 11–2). An example is the ceremonies that took place at
Inbāba (west of Cairo) at the tomb of Ismāʿīl al-Inbābī. In the ninth/fifteenth
century, on the night of the twelfth of each month, the Cairenes commemo-
rated him. Sources report that large numbers of people used to travel by boat
to al-Inbābī’s tomb; they pitched tents in the hundreds, set up fairs, and en-
deavoured to enjoy themselves “to the utmost” (Ibn Iyās, 2:37, in Shoshan, 17).
The development of lodge-tomb complexes that provided settings for pub-
lic activities and popular worship likely played a significant role in sustaining
and perpetuating the veneration of saints, both living and dead. This general
trend is corroborated by the first such gatherings in Anatolia. As we have seen,
these buildings were designed to serve both the residents and the generality of
believers. Apart from prayer halls and enclosed courtyards, rooms for travel-
lers, and sometimes a chamber for ritual meals, almost all the dervish lodges
contained domed chambers for the tombs of saints. Often the saint’s tomb was
the nucleus of a tekke and the most important part of the complex endowment
(waqf ) that provided steady funds for its upkeep and salaries for the officials
responsible for the administration of the waqf. Because of its tangible connec-
tion to a holy figure, the lodge attracted visits from wandering dervishes, mer-
chants, and pilgrims. At the same time, by sheltering travellers and pilgrims,
the fame of the lodge, as both hostel and pilgrimage site, expanded. Large win-
dows allowed access to the tomb. These windows usually faced a main thor-
oughfare and had marble revetments with inscriptions and ornamentation
that drew attention to the windows and the tombs of the saints. On market
120 Ephrat and Pinto
days, the exterior of these buildings became an extension of the interior space,
where food and other charity were offered. Such structural flexibility may be
one of the reasons many of these mediaeval Anatolian buildings continued to
be adapted and used well into the modern period (Wolper, 32–4).
His [Sayyid Ghāzī’s] tomb and sacred site lies between the territories of
Othman and Charaman, and although there is frequent discord between
them and one of them invades the lands of the other, neither has yet
once dared to approach his tomb. For they know from experience that his
great revenge came upon those who have dared to do so. And among all
of them is the common opinion that no one who implores him for help,
especially in matters of war and negotiation of battle, is ever denied his
wish. This is proven by the multitude of offerings of all kinds, animals as
well as cash, which the king, the princes and all the common people an-
nually give to the tomb. He has indeed the greatest fame and estimation,
not only among the Turks, but in all nations and their sect (Islam).
de Ungaria, 286–8, in Yürekli, Architecture, 5
Ṣūfī Places and Dwellings 125
The monumental complex that emerged around the burial site of Sayyid
Ghāzī still stands today. In the course of its renovation, his tomb was com-
pletely rebuilt on a colossal scale, the old buildings around it were restored,
and lead-plated tombs were added to them. New buildings included enormous
kitchens and common spaces that were large enough to cater to a great num-
ber of pilgrims, in addition to the dervishes who lived on the premises. From a
hill, the complex, with its remarkable palatial appearance, still dominates the
surrounding plateau (Yürekli, Architecture, 87–102). The fertile land and barns
beneath the tekke belonged to the Bektāshī order; these supplied grain, yogurt,
and vegetables for the kitchen. Moreover, pilgrims brought gifts of sheep and
horses, goats, and cattle. As a result, the dervishes were rich enough to pay sala-
ries and purchase cooking oil, honey, and other luxuries on the open market
(Goodwin, 64).
The shrine of Ḥājjī Bektāsh, the founder of the Bektāshiyya, was built in
Kırşehir in the early seventh/thirteenth century and from the late ninth/fif-
teenth century onward was also largely remodelled. Its transformation was even
more radical than that of the shrine of Sayyid Ghāzī: the only part that certain-
ly predates the late ninth/fifteenth century is the core of today’s so-called ‘hall
of the forty’ (qırqlar meydanı). A series of new buildings were added, creating
a monumental complex arranged around a linear succession of courtyards.
Once again, the complex has a palatial aspect. The courtyards are flanked by
individual buildings, including a kitchen and bakery, assembly rooms, offices,
living quarters, stables, and storage facilities (Yürekli, Architecture, 101–25).
The third shrine arrangement was at Konya, the centre of the Mevlevī order
of dervishes. Once Rūmī was declared orthodox by the chief muftī, this site was
elevated in stature. Though it was originally established in the seventh/thir-
teenth century, the shrine attained extraordinary stature and monumentality
in the tenth/sixteenth century, when, with the ongoing patronage of Ottoman
sultans, starting with Süleymān (r. 926–74/1520–66), it was remodelled. The
sultan commissioned a domed mosque next to the shrine of Rūmī, and initiat-
ed the construction of a domed hall adjacent to the tomb, and a monumental
Friday mosque just outside the shrine complex (Goodwin, 65).
With imperial endorsement, the major Anatolian shrines became principal
centres of interregional networks of various social groups that grew to include
the followers of over one hundred tekkes and saints’ tombs. In many cases, the
tombs of these saintly figures became part of large complexes that included fa-
cilities for dervishes; kitchens and bakeries to supply food to initiates, pilgrims,
festival attendees, travellers, and the poor; and systems to pipe water to pools
and fountains, as well as to residential and educational buildings. The centre
126 Ephrat and Pinto
was usually a hall (meydan or semahane) for prayer and devotional activities
(Yürekli, Architecture, 135–54).
seventeenth and the first half of the twelfth/eighteenth century. They came to
exercise considerable influence on the nomadic and sedentary population of
the oases, and later became rulers themselves. From their central lodge in the
oases of the Tarim Basin, the Khwājas’/Khojas’ groups extended their reach as
far as the Chinese frontier (Weismann, Naqshbandiyya, 81–2; Papas, Soufisme
et politique, 51–86, 139–56).
In the late twelfth/eighteenth century, Ṣūfī lodges and saints’ tombs and
shrines dotted the landscapes of the Islamic world. Leaders of the regional and
transregional orders that dominated these sites reached out to the common
people, thus contributing to the dissemination of a more meaningful religious
experience among the lower strata of Muslim societies, and spreading Islam
from the urban to the rural population. These seats of Ṣūfī saintly authority
provided a space for expanding circles of followers, played a vital role in the
expansion of Islam beyond the dominion of the state and, eventually, contrib-
uted to the mobilisation of popular support in the face of growing challenges
posed to Muslim societies and their ruling empires and monarchies in the fol-
lowing century.
Risale-i nur külliyatı (Collection of the epistles of light) between 1926 and 1949.
It was not printed until 1956, due to government censorship, though it circu-
lated clandestinely in handwritten or mechanically reproduced copies. In this
book, which is a commentary on the Qurʾān, Said Nursi presented Islam as an
ethical and spiritual framework for religious subjects fully integrated in mod-
ern society. His writings gave rise to the Nur/Nurcu (light) movement, which
consisted of devotional communities organised around schools devoted to the
study of the Qurʾān and Said Nursi’s texts and to the performance of spiritual
exercises derived from Sufism, such as meditation on God’s names. Despite
its clear Ṣūfī influence, the Nurcu movement is not a Ṣūfī order and its adepts
do not consider the Nur movement to be a Ṣūfī tradition, rather it is more a
Ṣūfī-inspired adaptation of Islamic spirituality that arose in response to the
secular character of the Turkish Republic (Yavuz).
The case of Said Nursi shows one way in which Sufism faced the challenges
of the twentieth century, with the end of the empires after World War I and
the emergence of nation-states and communist regimes in places with impor-
tant Muslim populations such as the Soviet Union, and later the Balkans and
China. The nationalist and communist ideologies that guided the construc-
tion of these states were geared to the establishment of sovereign and modern
societies in which religious life was suppressed by official atheism, tamed by
secularism, or rationalised according to the moral and social/economic needs
of the nation.
In Turkey, Ṣūfī lodges were closed and Ṣūfī forms of religiosity were forbid-
den in 1925. In Egypt, the al-Majlis al-Āʿlā lil-Ṭuruq al-Ṣūfiyya (Supreme council
of Sufi orders) was created in 1903 with a view to controlling Ṣūfī activities
in the country (Luizard, Le soufisme). The modernistic views that guided the
organisation of the Wazīrat al-Awqāf (Ministry of religious endowments) in
Syria between 1949 and 1961 (Deguilhem, 125–35), considered Sufism a kind of
“folk” religiosity that should disappear with the modernisation of society and,
therefore, Ṣūfī orders were excluded from regulations and funding by the state.
Even in countries where Sufism was inscribed in the idea of “cultural authen-
ticity” (as in Morocco), controls over Ṣūfī institutions and their activities were
put into place.
In socialist countries with Muslim populations, Ṣūfī places suffered from
various policies. In Yugoslavia, during the interwar period they were partially
transformed into museums or schools on the orders of the ministry of awqāf,
then in 1952, all the tekkes of Bosnia-Herzegovina were closed, following a de-
cision by the Ulema-Madžlis (an assembly of Muslims scholars linked to the
state). Despite a certain easing of these policies in the late 1960s, tekkes were
again shut down in 1972. Yet, in Kosovo and Macedonia, the same Ulema-Madžlis
136 Ephrat and Pinto
left them open (Clayer and Popovic). The situation was different in Soviet
Central Asia. After years of harsh persecution, Ṣūfī communities survived and
in the 1940s and 1950s even found niches to thrive next to state enterprises.
Previously abandoned mosques and shrines were used again by Ṣūfī īshāns
(authorities), especially Naqshbandīs and Qādirīs. Khrushchev’s (d. 1971) anti-
religion campaign, supported by the state Muslim authorities, strongly limited
these activities. For example, by 1959, thirty shrines in Uzbekistan, sixty-two
in Tajikistan, and four in Turkmenistan were closed (Tasar, ch. 1 and 4). The
equivalent alliance between a socialist state and reformist Muslim authorities
occurred in Xinjiang, where important Ṣūfī shrines were turned into museums,
and lodges and inns were shut down (Papas, Les tombeaux). In China more
generally, some waqfiyya land owned by Ṣūfī orders of the Hui minority was
confiscated during the Land Reform programme in the early 1950s and many
Ṣūfī buildings were closed after the implementation of the Religious System
Reform in 1958. The Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 and its trail of
destruction worsened the situation (Dillon, ch. 11).
Therefore, it is fair to say that after the 1980s there was a revival of Sufism
throughout the Muslim world, one that involved not only an increase in the
number of disciples and communities but also a greater visibility of Ṣūfī places
and dwellings. This expansion benefitted reformed forms of Sufism as well
as traditional Ṣūfī institutions centred on the charismatic authority of shaykhs
expressed through notions of baraka (grace, divine power, blessing) and
karāmāt (miraculous deeds); the cult of shrines also thrived in this period.
Even the leader of a modernistic Islamic movement, such as Fethullah Gülen,
who created the Hizmet (‘Service’) from the Nurcu movement in the 1960s, was
keen to claim Ṣūfī concepts as central to his understanding of Islam (Gülen,
1–53). This does not mean that the challenges and competition from other
understandings of Islam or secular ideologies were not present, but simply
that Sufism was again a visible player in the religious and cultural field of
Muslim societies.
The increased visibility of Sufism came not only from its place in the pub-
lic, especially urban landscape, but also from a process of commodification of
Sufism as a “cultural heritage” or “Islamic spirituality” and its consumption in
local and global arenas. Since the 1950s, several Mawlawī/Mevlevī tekkes were
allowed to work as cultural associations where the ritual of the whirling der-
vishes was presented to tourists; public performances enabled these tekkes to
recreate their religious life in a framework of cultural heritage. Similarly, the
poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273), the inspirer of the order (ṭarīqa), was
globally consumed as a form of “universal spirituality.”
The twentieth century also saw the globalisation of Sufism as religious be-
liefs and practices beyond Muslim-majority societies. This happened through
Muslim immigration to Europe and the Americas, as well as the conversion of
non-Muslims to Ṣūfī codifications of Islam. Already in the 1920s, North African
migrants had Ṣūfī gatherings in coffee shops in the outskirts of Paris (Hamès,
442), and in the 1950s and 1960s, Indian and Pakistani migrants also brought
their Ṣūfī affiliations to Great Britain. Some of these orders (ṭuruq) developed
in large transnational organisations that connected discrete communities with
different social and cultural universes across a vast territory religiously delim-
ited by the devotion to a saint or shaykh. This was the case of the Ṣūfī com-
munities organised around the devotion to Zindapir (d. 1999), a pīr (shaykh/
saint) who lived at his dergāh (Ṣūfī lodge) in Ghamkol Sharif; his communities
were scattered across a broad expanse from Pakistan to the United Kingdom.
This vast and discontinuous territory demarcated by the presence of Zindapir’s
devotees was connected to the centre through practices of mimesis and re-
membrance of the saint and his lodge in each community (Werbner, 157–8).
138 Ephrat and Pinto
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144 Ephrat and Pinto
Ṣūfī Shrines
Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen
1 Definition
What is a Ṣūfī shrine? The answer is certainly not easy; especially since the
expression “Ṣūfī shrine” has no equivalent in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish. If we
try to translate it, we find a rich lexicon relating to the cult of the dead and
Muslim saints, not necessarily Ṣūfīs. The terms qabr, türbe, mazār, maqām,
dargāh, designate mausoleums and tombs of the ʿAlids (descendants of ʿAlī b.
Abī Ṭālib), of the Companions of the Prophet, and—especially in the Muslim
world before the recent urbanisation—“natural sanctuaries,” such as trees,
springs, rocks, or caves, often associated with the presence of a certain “friend
of God,” or saint (Kriss and Kriss-Heinrich). It was only in the sixth/twelfth to
seventh/thirteenth century, after Sufism was institutionalised, i.e., organised
into brotherhoods or communities to become a dominant form of Islam (at
least until the end of the nineteenth century), that Muslim shrines came to be
identified with Sufism par excellence (Ephrat and Pinto in this volume).
A Ṣūfī shrine is usually centred around the tomb of a Ṣūfī shaykh, or saint. In
Arabic, it is called qabr (meaning “grave,” i.e., the place where a body is buried).
Its synonym, turba (Ar.) or türbe (Tk.), is derived from the Arabic for “dust.”
These words can designate a simple stele or a masonry or wooden construction
(ṣundūq, tābūt in Arabic) that marks the location of the tomb. If it attracts wor-
shippers and visitors, the community often builds a sanctuary that then be-
comes a focal point and the beginning of a cemetery (Râghib; Grabar). Certain
family or tribal necropolises sometimes become Ṣūfī shrines, especially when
the family or the ancestor buried therein is identified with a Ṣūfī brotherhood
or a Ṣūfī shaykh.
Two commonly used terms for Ṣūfī shrines are maqām (a place where a
saint resides) and mazār (a place of pious visitation, or ziyāra). A tree with
branches to which people tie rags, a cave where people light candles can be-
come a mazār associated with the cult of a Ṣūfī shaykh. This association is
usually confirmed by a legend (widespread among the saint’s followers) and
eventually, the construction of a sanctuary. One can metonymically designate
such a sanctuary by the name of a walī (saint) buried in it, as is often the case
in the Middle East and the Maghrib, or a nabī (prophet) in Palestine (Canaan).
Again, metonymically, such a site can be designated by the Arabic qubba (the
dome that crowns the sanctuary) or the Persian dargāh (threshold or palace).
The most common term in mediaeval texts is mashhad. In the writings of the
fourth-/tenth-century geographer al-Muqaddasī, mashhad can be a place com-
memorating the passage of a saint, or a place built following a divinely inspired
vision (al-Muqaddasî). It may also be, as the root sh-h-d suggests, the martyrion
(a place built in memory of a martyr), for example, a Shīʿī Imām, as in the
city of Mashhad around the shrine of Imām Riḍā (d. 203/818). In Sunnī lands,
mashhad refers to the mausoleum of a hero of the Arab-Islamic conquests, or
one of the members of the House of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt) (Williams).
2 Early History
St. George and the Prophet Elijah (Hasluck; Albera and Couroucli). The second
factor is the importance of the cult of the ʿAlids in Shīʿīsm; this was matched
by Sunnīs’ reverence for the Prophet’s Companions. These parallel cults oc-
curred in the context of clashes between the two communities (Mulder). The
third factor was the spirit of jihād and, more generally, the spirit of the frontier.
In fourth-/tenth-century Khurāsān, in Nīshāpūr, the khānaqāhs were home to
ascetics practicing peregrination and popular preaching. In North Africa, the
ribāṭs (fortified enclosures around tombs of martyrs of the jihād) sacralised a
defensive fort against the attacks of the Franks or the Berber tribes. In Ifrīqiyya,
the oldest ribāṭ was founded in Monastir in 180/796, followed by that of Sousse
in 206/821. In Morocco, as early as the third/ninth century, ribāṭs affirmed the
presence of Islam against the Barghawāṭa (a Berber tribe) of the Atlantic plains.
The Ragrāga (another Moroccan tribe) distinguished themselves in the jihād
in the Atlantic region and became the legendary propagators of Islam in the
Maghrib; they were said to have been converted to Islam by the Prophet him-
self (Ferhat). Under the influence of the mystical movement, which appeared
around the fifth/eleventh century, and developed during the al-Muwāḥḥidūn
(Almohad period) (sixth/twelfth century) and especially during the Marīnid
period (614–869/1217–1465), the ribāṭs became places of Ṣūfī pilgrimages
(Hofer [Ṣūfī Outposts] in this volume). We find this frontier spirit in Nubia,
where forty-nine anonymous tombs in Aswan date to the first half of the fifth/
eleventh century, and were later attributed to Ṣūfī shaykhs of the seventh-/thir-
teenth century. Ṣūfī orders thus annexed older sanctuaries even as they created
new ones. The fourth and final factor in the development of shrines is the role
of the mediaeval dynasties, which in Iran and Central Asia built mausoleums
funded by pious foundations: after the disappearance of these dynasties, some
of these tombs were occupied by Ṣūfī shaykhs and their cults (Kervran).
The first tombs of Muslim mystics appeared in the third/ninth century, along
with other mausoleums. While the inscription on the stele of Dhū l-Nūn
al-Miṣrī’s (d. 246/861) grave is perhaps apocryphal (Massignon), the tomb of
al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (d. 298/910), which is in present-day Uzbekistan, is prob-
ably the authentic grave of this famous mystic. It honours the author who first
developed a theory of holiness (walāya) in Islam. The veneration of the liv-
ing shaykh extended to the deceased saint: he was not considered dead, rather
he continued to guide and instruct his disciples from the grave. Therefore,
for Ṣūfīs, the visit to a sanctuary is not a form of worship of the dead, but an
148 Mayeur-Jaouen
initiatory practice and a spiritual relationship with a master who is still pres-
ent. This transmission mode, called uwaysī, takes place when a Ṣūfī visits
the tomb of the master and visions, nocturnal or diurnal, occur. The prolific
and influential Ṣūfī author al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) already recommended vis-
iting the tombs of saints, although Ṣūfī sanctuaries, strictly speaking, were
rare before the development of Ṣūfī orders in the sixth/twelfth and seventh/
thirteenth centuries.
After 544–5/1150, we witness the rise of large monumental complexes in the
East that combined tombs and pious institutions. At the same time, pilgrimages
to the tombs of local and trans-regional saints multiplied. Written works reflect
both phenomena. Between the sixth/twelfth and the beginning of the elev-
enth/seventeenth century, the historian Yūsuf Rāghib identified some twenty
guidebooks devoted to Qarāfa, Cairo’s great cemetery (Rāġib). More general-
ly (beyond Egypt), the guidebook of the pious visits (kitāb al-ziyāra) by Abū
l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Abī Bakr al-Harawī, a Shīʿī pilgrim who died in Aleppo in 611/1215,
promoted the sanctuaries and visits to them in order to revive a sense of unity
in Islam at a time when the ʿAbbāsid caliphate was disintegrating (al-Harawī;
Meri, A lonely wayfarer’s guide). It was also in the sixth/twelfth century that,
under Fāṭimid domination and due to Ṣūfī influence, the celebration of the
Prophet’s birthday was sponsored in an official sense (Kaptein). This model in-
spired the celebration of annual festivals at the tombs of Ṣūfī saints, such as
the Egyptian mawālid (mulids) and the Maghribi mawāsim (moussems), which
often followed the solar calendar of the seasons observed by farmers and cattle
breeders. Patron saint festivals around shrines often combined Ṣūfī rituals and
trade fairs (Mayeur-Jaouen, The mulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi; Reysoo).
With the resurgence of Sunnī Islam under the Ayyūbids, the Mamlūks,
and the Ottomans, the role of Ṣūfī orders asserted itself. After the death of an
eponymous saint, a saint’s main disciples established around his sanctuary a
brotherhood whose branches remained linked by pilgrimages to the mauso-
leum of the holy founder. The cult of Ṣūfī shaykhs often entailed worship in
multiple locations. For example, the followers of the Qādiriyya order (Ceyhan
in this volume), who followed and revered ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilānī (d. 561/1166)
in a huge mausoleum in Baghdad, also founded a number of sanctuaries in
honour of the founder, from Morocco to Indonesia.
Several Mongol dynasties converted to Islam and the waves of migration
that resulted from various invaders led Ṣūfīs to resettle in areas from Iran and
Central Asia to Anatolia and India, which became a seat of Persianate cul-
ture. The first sanctuaries of the Chishtiyya, a brotherhood founded by Muʿīn
al-Dīn Chishtī (d. 633/1236) who came to Ajmer in 602/1206, appeared in the
seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries (Ernst and Lawrence).
Ṣūfī Shrines 149
It was the worship at the shrine of Ajmer, rather than the saint himself, that led
to many conversions of Hindus to Islam. When the wish of Hindu pilgrims at
the tomb of Chishtī (to heal an only son or have male offspring) was granted,
some converted to Islam (Siddiqui). Under the Mughal Empire, from 926/1526
onward, the alliance between saints and princes, whose gifts to the mauso-
leum of Ajmer funded offices including candlestick lighters, the musician as-
signed to the tomb, the annual pilgrimage, and maintenance of the buildings
(Tirmizi), culminated. Once on the throne in 963/1556, Akbar walked to Ajmer
in 971/1564 and renewed this pilgrimage almost every year. In India during
this time, the annual patron saints’ festivals, known as ʿurs (lit. “wedding”),
became common.
In the Maghrib, the time of so-called “maraboutism” began. The Andalusian
Abū Madyan al-Shuʿayb (d. 589/1193 or 594/1198), revered in Tlemcen under
the name of Sidi Boumediene, was the first great Ṣūfī saint of the Maghrib
(Andezian). In the seventh/thirteenth century, the Shādhiliyya order spread,
followed by the Jazūliyya (Ceyhan in this volume), and in the ninth/fifteenth
and tenth/sixteenth centuries, saints multiplied to such an extent that they
“now embodied a group, a region or a city of which he [the saint] became the
standard bearer” (Ferhat, 22). Large zāwiyas or complexes henceforth repre-
sented political and spiritual power. A zāwiya served many purposes simul-
taneously; it was a mosque, a mausoleum, a place of education, the seat of a
Ṣūfī brotherhood, a centre of economic and political power, and a refuge from
the violence of Bedouins and tribes (Firouzeh in this volume). Holiness, which
had become hereditary, was formed around the great sanctuaries and murābiṭ/
marabout lineages (Amri).
In the Arab Orient (bilād al-Shām) during the seventh/thirteenth to ninth/
fifteenth century, the Frankish and Mongol perils, and the spirit of the
Sunnī resurgence increased the need for the veneration of Ṣūfī awliyāʾ. The
ʿAbbāsid caliph’s move to Cairo after the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in
656/1258 consecrated Egypt’s new status as an institutional religious centre.
In the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries, with the support of
the Mamlūk state that dominated Syria and Egypt, there appeared a “second
wave” of Ṣūfī orders (Geoffroy). Sultan Qāytbāy (r. 872–901/1468–96), the pious
Muslim prince par excellence, built many Ṣūfī shrines.
Rituals at such shrines took on features that are remarkably similar through-
out the Muslim world, namely, circumambulation of the saint’s tomb, like the
Meccan ṭawāf around the Kaʿba, with visitors reciting the fātiḥa (first sūra
of the Qurʾān), lighting candles, burning incense, offering flowers, silver, and
gold. During ceremonies at the shrine, they performed dhikr (a ritualised rep-
etition of God’s names) and samāʿ (the so-called “spiritual concert”). Annual
150 Mayeur-Jaouen
The most radical condemnation of the cult of Muslim saints was launched in
the twelfth/eighteenth century by the aforementioned Muḥammad b. ʿAbd
Ṣūfī Shrines 151
al-Wahhāb. Supported by the Saʿūd family, Wahhābīs treated the cult of saints
as paganism and Sufism as idolatry. Between 1157/1744 and 1233/1818, in the
Najd region of the Arabian Peninsula, where the Wahhābī movement originat-
ed, many shrines were destroyed and sacred trees were cut (Peskes). A century
later, in 1924, the Saudi emirate conquered the holy cities of the Ḥijāz and in
1932 established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The mausoleums of the cem-
etery of Baqīʿ in the city of Medina were razed to the ground. Only the shrine
of the Prophet, which remains a site of pious visitations, escaped destruction.
The struggle between the advocates of the sacredness of local territories—
embodied by Ṣūfī sanctuaries—and those who promote the idea of a mono-
lithic Islam based on a single version of the Wahhābī-inspired creed remains
as acute today as it was in the past.
In the early nineteenth century, several Ṣūfī orders rejected not Sufism it-
self, but, the practices of the cult of saints: circumambulations, animal sac-
rifices, candles, and so on. In India, Aḥmad Barelwī (d. 1246/1831) permitted
the ceremony of reading the Qurʾān and distributing food at the tombs of
saints, but refused to allow it to take place on specific dates. The process of
Westernisation and modernisation of Muslim societies contributed to the
growth of anti-Sufism criticism. In India, Deobandi members of the Chishtiyya
scholars (ʿulamāʾ) believed in the intercession of saints, but disliked the ritu-
als performed at their sanctuaries (Metcalf). In the late nineteenth century
and early twentieth century in Central Asia and among Russian Muslims
the so-called “Jadidism” (from the Arabic jadīd, “new”) linked in part to the
Naqshbandiyya, emerged. Its representatives stigmatised “Ishānism,” that is,
the very existence of a Ṣūfī “clergy” (the īshāns being the hereditary guardians
of tombs) by presenting their activities as a major cause of the decline of Islam.
The saints were not involved, nor was Sufism as mysticism per se, or as a means
of transmitting and preserving Islamic knowledge. Actually, the Tatar Muslim
reformists wanted to fight the cult of saints, seen as archaic and pagan surviv-
als, according to a vision of Islam that was inspired by the evolutionary way
Europe was then reading the history of religions (Dudoignon, Is’haqov, and
Möhämmätshin (eds.)). The secularised rationalism of the Muslim reformists
owed much to European scientism: it rejected the “superstitions,” the miracles
of the saints, the lack of hygiene of pilgrimages, and the lack of decency associ-
ated with the festive atmosphere of popular ziyāras. Another common theme
was the economic waste involved in hoarding food and other goods around
Ṣūfī shrines in very poor countries.
After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and in the colonial context of
the age, this hostility to Ṣūfī shrines grew even harsher. It was directly related
to the growing urbanisation and secularisation of Muslim societies, especially
152 Mayeur-Jaouen
the rise of new urban and educated social classes. The Muslim Brotherhood,
founded in 1928 in Egypt, was a typical representative of this anti-Ṣūfī rheto-
ric. In Algeria, the ʿUlamāʾ Association (Jamʿiyyat al-ʿUlamāʾ al-Muslimīn) of
Ben Badis/Bin Bādīs, founded in 1931, recognised in its statutes the existence
of saints, which it defined as sincere believers who fear God. Yet, any worship
of the saints was rejected as heretical and as a vestige of paganism, and the
Algerian ʿulamāʾ attacked rural sanctuaries, sometimes violently (Andezian).
In the twentieth century, throughout the Muslim world Islamists of various
types showed their hostility to Ṣūfī shrines, adding to the already strong influ-
ence of Wahhābīs/Saudis who rejected Sufism as a whole.
In spite of the ascendancy of the reformist anti-Ṣūfī discourse, for a long
time it had little effect on events and the life of Ṣūfī shrines and sanctuaries.
They were probably much more affected by the consequences of the grow-
ing urbanisation, industrialisation, and modernisation throughout the second
half of the twentieth century (Clayer in this volume). The Muslim world be-
came predominantly urban in the 1970s, and this led to the decline or even
the disappearance of “natural” sanctuaries in many regions. In the countryside
as in the city, sacred springs and trees disappeared. Stories of the miraculous
saving of holy sites and saints’ from the pickaxe and later bulldozers tell us
more about the inexorable process of their demolition than of their preserva-
tion (Kriss and Kriss-Heinrich; Canaan). Although modern twentieth-century
neighbourhoods in Arab cities continue to build sanctuaries for new saints,
the vast majority of Ṣūfī shrines are confined to ancient quarters or cemeter-
ies. Similarly, despite the fact that roads and railways facilitate pilgrimage and
air travel enables visits by transnational pilgrimages and members of Ṣūfī or-
ders, the majority of sanctuary visits take place within national boundaries
(Werbner).
The nationalist ideology and political independence of Muslim states have
resulted in the construction of large sanctuaries, despite the fact that the dom-
inant discourse of Muslim elites condemns their visitation. The considerable
incomes generated by the sanctuaries attracted the attention of state authori-
ties, anxious to keep popular Ṣūfī teachers under control and still promote
a modern economy. Atatürk’s republican Turkey, in a clear rupture with the
Ottoman past, suppressed Ṣūfī institutions with the law of December 13, 1925.
The Ṣūfī shrines came under the control of the ministry of waqfs and when,
after a long time in hiding, Ṣūfī orders resurfaced, they were deprived of their
earlier material foundations (Zarcone). In the Central Asian republics of the
USSR, Soviet authorities waged a pitiless struggle against mosques, mausole-
ums, and khānaqāhs. In Bourguiba’s Tunisia, some of the zāwiyas were closed
or repurposed (Boissevain).
Ṣūfī Shrines 153
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Chapter 7
Ṣūfī Lodges
Peyvand Firouzeh
1 Introduction
While the prehistory and early phases of the evolution of the Ṣūfī lodge are
shrouded in uncertainty, its history as an organised physical institution with
rights of ownership is usually dated to the fifth/eleventh century. It is not clear
when the terms in question were first applied to Ṣūfī establishments, but we do
160 Firouzeh
Figure 7.1 View of the open-air burial and entrance portal from the courtyard of Turbat-i
Shaykh Aḥmad Jām
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
Ṣūfī Lodges 161
A common thread among Ṣūfī lodges across Islamicate societies is the central
role of Ṣūfī bodies (living or dead) to the Ṣūfī lodge. Ṣūfī lodges were shaped
around the presence, or memory of the presence, of the Ṣūfī in that locale. This
includes his/her past or present space of retreat, the historic stopping place
of a renowned figure, or permanent burial (Green, Making space, 4–5; for an
example of a Ṣafavid dynastic shrine that grew from a modest zāwiya, see Rizvi,
24–56). The correlation between the sacredness of the space and the body is
evident in rituals related to a Ṣūfī’s burial place. For instance, in South Asia,
materials that came into contact with the grave of a Ṣūfī were treated as relics.
The flower petals, the surrounding earth, or the water used to wash the graves
could all be ingested to circulate the baraka (blessing) of the Ṣūfī (Flood, 472).
Narratives—oral, hagiographic, and epigraphic—played an indispensable
role in making a Ṣūfī lodge a sacred place, and connecting the body of the Ṣūfī
with the site and its audience (on the correlation between the development
of sacred sites and the writing of hagiographies, see Yürekli; Green, Making
space, 18). The Ṣūfī’s trajectory before and after their sojourn at the site pro-
vided key aspects (such as genealogies, chains of initiation, education, and
travels) of these narratives. On the one hand, the building commemorating
the body or former presence of a Ṣūfī was physically embedded in a locale, and
its connection to the place was strengthened by texts. On the other hand, the
162 Firouzeh
same narratives situated a Ṣūfī lodge as a node on the map of the wider Islamic
world and beyond. It was connected to people, places, and times near and far.
In this sense, Ṣūfī lodges were both local and global.
Ṣūfī lodges were thus grounded in an interplay of mobility and stasis. The
architecture, as a permanent structure, encouraged mobility among pilgrims,
rulers, travellers, merchants, and scholars by being part of regional and tran-
sregional networks of sacred sites. In addition to commemorating the sanctity
of Ṣūfīs’ teachings and miracles, the architecture and the narratives surround-
ing it also provided a place for the permanent commemoration of the Ṣūfīs’
mobility, a reminder of their origins and past travels.
Zāwiyas, khānaqāhs, and tekkes ranged from modest single buildings to grand
composite complexes consisting of several private or communal, residential
or non-residential spaces. A prototypical, large Ṣūfī complex could include a
ritual hall (called jamāʿat-khāna, dhikr-khāna, tawḥīd-khāna, or samāʿ-khāna,
sometimes also used as a mosque), a mausoleum for the founding Ṣūfī or other
important figures of the ṭarīqa, lodging for the Ṣūfī shaykh and his dependents,
cells for disciples and travellers, a mosque, library, bathhouse, hospital, gar-
dens, water reservoir, fountain, granaries, and a soup kitchen to feed residents,
travellers, and the poor.
Although not an indispensable element of the Ṣūfī lodge, the burial place
of the ṭarīqa founder was a common feature of both single buildings and larg-
er complexes. The tomb, in many cases one of the oldest parts of the com-
plex, sanctified the site and secured a larger following for the ṭarīqa through
pilgrimage.
With respect to the architecture of the burial areas, Ṣūfī establishments can
be divided into two groups: those that housed the cenotaph in a designated
covered space, such as a domed chamber (for example, the mausoleum of Shāh
Niʿmatullāh Walī, d. 834/1430–1, in Māhān), and those with open, uncovered
tombs. In the latter case, the gravestone, together with a tree or shrubs, would
oftentimes be placed on a raised platform (sometimes called takht, lit., ‘bed’ or
‘throne’), protected by a grilled enclosure (sometimes called ḥaẓīra, but this
term also concurrently refers to a domed structure, as O’Kane shows: O’Kane,
Tāybād, 96). While in many cases open-air burial places served to expand ex-
isting funerary structures, in other cases, they were the primary structures in
the complex, around which later expansions took place. Examples of the for-
mer are numerous and include the enclosure at the site of the mausoleum of
Ṣūfī Lodges 163
Shāh Khalīlullāh (d. before 858/1454), son of the Iranian Ṣūfī Shāh Niʿmatullāh
Walī in Bidar (fig. 7.2), and the raised platforms at Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband’s
(d. 791/1389) shrine complex in Bukhara (fig. 7.3). Some examples of the latter
in the greater Khurāsān region include the shrine at Gāzurgāh, the shrine of
Shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām in Turbat-i Jām (fig. 7.1), and that of Shaykh Zayn al-Dīn
Abū Bakr Tāybādī (d. 791/1389) in Tāybād (fig. 7.4) (Yazdani, 141–45; Golombek,
Chronology, 41–43; O’Kane, Tāybād, 96). While in some contexts the open-air
burial sites have been interpreted in terms of the prohibition of covering holy
graves, the existence of a direct, universal correlation between them is debated
(see, for example, O’Kane, Tāybād, 96).
A Ṣūfī ṭarīqa required that a primary space serve as a communal place for
gatherings, teaching sessions, and rituals. To this end, especially during the
early phases of the history of the ṭarīqa and the formation of their architec-
ture, any space could be adapted for this purpose. For instance, gatherings and
retreats could be held in private residences or mosques.
When organised teaching and lodging for large groups of followers and trav-
ellers became key functions of the ṭarīqas, the architecture of Ṣūfī lodges were
similar to structures like madrasas and caravanserais. These complexes con-
sisted of lodging cells arranged around an open courtyard, and incorporated
Figure 7.2 View of tomb enclosures added on the site of Shāh Khalīlullāh’s mausoleum
in Bidar; both as an independent structure, and attached to the main ninth-/
fifteenth-century mausoleum (right)
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
164 Firouzeh
Figure 7.3 View of the raised platforms at the shrine complex of Bahāʾ al-Dīn
Naqshband at Bukhara
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
Figure 7.4 View of open-air grave in front of the entrance īvān at the mausoleum
of Zayn al-Dīn Abū Bakr Tāybādī
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
Ṣūfī Lodges 165
other elements for teaching, burials, and rituals, including, perhaps, a mosque
within or near the courtyard. Beyond these morphological similarities, the in-
stitutionalisation of Ṣūfī lodges was connected to the evolution of the madra-
sa under the state patronage of the Saljūqs and their elites, such as the vizier
Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 485/1092), and the Ayyūbids and Zangids in Syria, Palestine,
and Egypt. Under the patronage of the Ilkhanids, Timūrids, and Turkmens (for
instance Uzun Ḥasan Āq Qoyūnlū, r. 857–82/1453–78), and the Mamlūks of
Egypt, the madrasas and Ṣūfī lodges could be paired together in one complex.
An Ilkhanid example in Sivas included the lodge of the Ṣūfī Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī
(d. 688/1289) (Wolper, 11–12). Some Timūrid examples include the complexes
of Muḥammad Sulṭān (d. 806/1403) and Ulugh Beg b. Shāhrukh (d. 853/1449)
in Samarqand, those of Shāhrukh (r. 807–50/1405–47), Amīr Kukeltāsh
(d. 844/1440), Sulṭān Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (r. 873–911/1469–1506), Amīr Jalāl al-Dīn
Fīrūzshāh (d. 848/1444–5), and the Ikhlāṣiyya complex of Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī
(d. 906/1501) in Herat, as well as the shrine complex of Khvāja ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī
(d. 481/1089) at Gāzurgāh, outside Herat (see Golombek and Wilber, I, nos. 29,
30, 56, 71–2, pp. 48, 260–4, 307–10, 448, supplementary catalogue nos. 60, 70,
77, 90–1, pp. 314–5, 449–50; O’Kane, Timurid architecture, no. 54, pp. 23, 339–43;
Allen, A catalogue, no. 427, p. 102; Subtelny, 44–7). Such hybrid complexes did
not necessarily belong to a specific Ṣūfī ṭarīqa, and were often patronised by
the state that controlled the affairs of the Ṣūfī lodge, for example, through the
appointment of the head of the complex.
During the Timūrid period there was also a shift away from the courtyard
model, in terms of the spatial arrangement of the Ṣūfī lodge. Large complex-
es were designed as one grand building under a single roof, for instance, the
monumental khānaqāh of Khwāja Aḥmad Yasawī (d. 562/1166) in Turkestan
(southern Kazakhstan) was built under the patronage of the dynasty’s founder,
Tīmūr (r. 771–807/1370–1405) (see Yusupova, 236–8). At the centre of this new
organisational model, also seen under the Shaybanids and the Tuqay-Timūrids,
there was often an assembly hall covered by a colossal dome with cells on dif-
ferent levels (Yusupova, 233); this lent a more monumental scale to the archi-
tecture of Ṣūfī lodges.
The composite nature of the complexes was the result of a variety of private
and communal functions, from solitary retreats to large ritual assemblies, as
well as the holiness of the sites themselves, which attracted the sort of elite
and urban chain patronage that could sustain several phases of development.
The primary structures of the sites, whether for ritual or funerary purposes,
or bound by other associations to a holy figure, were restored and expanded,
sometimes resulting in a completely different structure from the first phase of
the building. We can see these transformative processes in a few extant shrine
166 Firouzeh
Figure 7.5 Elevated view of the astāna of Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī in Māhān
developed around the ninth-/fifteenth-century dome chamber
from the tenth/sixteenth through twentieth centuries
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
complexes, such as those of Shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām in Turbat-i Jām (fig. 7.1),
Shaykh Ṣafī [l-Dīn Ardabīlī] (d. 735/1334) in Ardabil, Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī
in Māhān (fig. 7.5), and Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (d. 672/1273) in Konya
(fig. 7.6). Such continuity makes the architecture something of a palimpsest,
marked by many layers of physical construction, and served to document and
shape architectural genealogies, urban dynamics, and sociopolitical history.
Ṣūfī Lodges 167
Figure 7.6 View of the Ṣūfī cells, tomb, and mosque at the tekke of Jalāl al-Dīn
Muḥammad Rūmī, and the Selīmīye mosque (right) in Konya
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
The income of Ṣūfī lodges came from the alms tax (zakāt), donations from
urban or elite patrons, and awqāf (s. waqf, pious endowment), and in some
cases from begging (suʾāl). The endowments provided revenue from the pro-
duce of agricultural lands in places near or far, markets, water rights, and
other sources.
From as early as the Saljūq period, organised communities of Ṣūfī ṭarīqas
entered into diverse and complex relationships with ruling authorities, using
their sanctifying power to bless a ruler’s reign in exchange for just treatment
of their communities, and for financial support in the form of landed property,
real estate, and ceremonial gifts (see Safi; Peacock; Sabra in this volume). In re-
turn, rulers strengthened their legitimacy by presenting themselves as uphold-
ers of the sharīʿa and patrons of organised religion, or by affiliating themselves
to the supernatural forces associated with Ṣūfī masters (Manz, 192). The sway
they held with the public and their claims to intimacy with the divine meant
that Ṣūfīs had the cultural and political power to lend credibility to conquerors,
168 Firouzeh
would-be rulers, and sultans with ambitions to expand their dominion (some
well-documented examples of such patronage include the shrines of the
Ṣafaviyya and Bektāshiyya orders. See Rizvi; Wolper; Yürekli).
The bestowal of kingship on the ruler usually took place through a real or
imaginary encounter with a Ṣūfī, which sometimes occurred at a Ṣūfī lodge.
During these encounters, the Ṣūfī usually predicted what areas the ruler would
conquer and offered blessings for his reign (Digby, 75). Such politicisation of
Ṣūfī communities went hand in hand with financial support for Ṣūfī lodges.
Rulers went on pilgrimages to Ṣūfī lodges; these visits usually included the
ritual circumambulation of the tomb and donations to the shrine. Mughal rul-
ers, for instance, regularly visited the shrine of the Chishti Ṣūfī, Niẓām al-Dīn
Awliyāʾ (d. 725/1325) in Delhi (fig. 7.7) while on pilgrimage tours from their
capitals (Koch, 18–24; on Mughal patronage of shrines, see Green, Auspicious
foundations, 71, 80).
The decision of whether to support a Ṣūfī lodge, or accept the court’s support
for a Ṣūfī lodge, hinged on the dynamics of the personal and political relation-
ships formed between the community and court. While these decisions varied,
Ṣūfī lodges often acted as permanent material repositories of the temporary
alliances formed between Ṣūfīs and rulers (see Wolper, 19). On the whole, the
growth (in numbers and size) of Ṣūfī lodges, and their transformation from
humble structures to grand-scale monuments that increasingly dominated the
landscapes and townscapes of Islamicate societies testifies to the general con-
tinuity of patronage (for a discussion the role of Ṣūfī lodges in the transforma-
tion of urban landscapes in Anatolia, see Wolper).
Ṣūfī lodges played a significant financial role in the transformation of rural
areas by drawing pilgrims and attracting patronage from the local and transre-
gional elite. As Ṣūfī lodges expanded in urban settings they became important
nodes in the cityscape, alongside the palace and mosques. The relationship
between the palace and Ṣūfī lodge varied: sometimes the two stood in close
proximity, but tensions could also result in the expulsion of the Ṣūfī lodge from
the city proper. In India, Awrangabad, Firozabad, Fatehpur Sikri (fig. 7.8), and
Ajmer offer examples of proximity between the palace and Ṣūfī lodge (Green,
Making space, 23–5). By contrast, the Chishti Ṣūfī Gīsū Darāz (d. 825/1422)
had to relocate outside the city walls of Bahmanid Gulbarga. Similar relation-
ships existed between several royal funerary sites and Ṣūfī shrines: Humāyūn’s
tomb and the shrine complex of Niẓām al-Dīn Awlīyāʾ in Delhi, the tombs of
Awrangzeb and his son Aʿẓam Shāh within the shrine of Zayn al-Dīn Shīrāzī
(d. 771/1369) at Khuldabad, and the Bahmanid royal necropolises in the prox-
imity of the shrines of Gīsū Darāz in Gulbarga and Shāh Khalīlullāh, son of
Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī in Bidar (Green, Making space, 23–5; Asher).
Ṣūfī Lodges 169
Figure 7.7 View of the tomb of Nizām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ (centre) and the mosque (on the
left) at his shrine complex in Delhi
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
Figure 7.8 View of Salīm Chishtī’s tomb within the great mosque of Fatehpur Sikri
(located in the southern part of the palace complex)
Photo by Peyvand Firouzeh
170 Firouzeh
The core human relationship at the Ṣūfī lodge was that between the Ṣūfī mas-
ter (pīr or shaykh) and the disciple or student (murīd). Members of the ṭarīqa
are referred to as ikhwān (‘brothers’), and akhawāt (‘sisters’). Regular rituals
of dhikr (Ar. ‘remembrance,’ recitation, or repetition of God’s name and other
sacred phrases), as well as samāʿ (Ar. ‘listening,’ also known as ḥaḍras, musical
sessions that could include singing, playing instruments, dancing, recitation
of poetry and prayers), ṣuḥbat (‘companionship,’ that is, instruction sessions),
and ʿurs (‘spiritual wedding,’ festival held on the death anniversary of Ṣūfīs)
brought the members together in ritual halls or in public areas (Papas, 9;
Frishkopf, 118–20).
Sources such as hagiographies, travelogues, and waqf documents shed light
on day-to-day life at the khānaqāh, which regularly acted as a charitable insti-
tution. Apart from members of the ṭarīqa, life at the Ṣūfī lodge also involved
travellers, pilgrims, and the poor who benefitted from food and lodging at the
site (see Gramlich, Das Sendschreiben, 104, 394, 400, 477). The ṭarīqa’s care for
the poor, strangers, and animals is evident from waqf documents that men-
tion funds allocated for food and clothing, sums for the burial of travellers who
died in the city, and food for birds. Ṣūfī lodges also served as commercial hubs
frequented by merchants, as in the case of the khānaqāh of Shāh Niʿmatullāh
Walī at Taft, or as sanctuaries offering refuge in times of war. As the use of Ṣūfī
lodges as public spaces grew, there was an increasing need to regulate codes of
behaviour; we see this in the works of Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr and Abū Ḥāmid
Muḥammad Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) (see, for instance, Pūrjavādī, 87–91). In addi-
tion to the institutions’ sources of income, waqf documents also tell us about
the professions connected to Ṣūfī lodges, such as the khādim (attendant) who
acted as a financial officer, and the mutawallī (keeper, guardian).
Life at Ṣūfī lodges has long been conditioned by the shifting dynamics be-
tween the lodges and the state, a dynamic that sometimes involved the state’s
desire to control the power of Ṣūfī lodges by policing and regulating its activi-
ties. Many Ṣūfī lodges around the world continue to perform ritual and chari-
table functions to this day. However, some modern states have subjected Ṣūfī
lodges to rigid regulations that sometimes resulted in the abolition of rituals,
the transformation of lodges into museums, and their partial or complete de-
molition. Examples include the suppression of operations at the tekke of Jalāl
al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī in Konya and its reopening as the Mevlana Museum,
and the banning of functions at the Niʿmatullāhī khānaqāhs in Iran.
Ṣūfī Lodges 171
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Chapter 8
Ṣūfīs have generally used the term ribāṭ (pl. rubuṭ) to denote rural lodges or
outposts that housed itinerant Ṣūfīs, provided centres of instruction for novic-
es, or facilitated outreach to surrounding communities. Many ribāṭs combined
these functions. Beyond this general statement, however, it is not possible to
formulate a singular description or definition of the Ṣūfī ribāṭ that captures
its wide variations in form and function across time and space. This difficul-
ty is complicated further by the fact that the term itself predates Ṣūfī usage
and continued to develop in multiple ways in both Ṣūfī and non-Ṣūfī contexts
across the Islamic world (Picard and Borrut). In Arabic usage more broadly,
ribāṭ (from the root r-b-ṭ, ‘to tie’) may connote several abstract and concrete
nouns, all of which developed from the basic meaning of garrisoning horses
in preparation for battle (for a more detailed linguistic overview, see Chabbi
and Rabbat as well as Böwering and Melvin-Koushki). In the Qurʾān, the noun
and verb (rābaṭa) appear only once (Q 8:60 and Q 3:200, respectively), both in
the context of a divine command for the believers to prepare for battle against
their adversaries. This Qurʾānic mandate imbues an otherwise mundane activ-
ity with a strong sense of piety and divine favour. Not surprisingly, then, by the
post-conquest period, the idealised practice of ribāṭ as defensive warfare had
become enmeshed with the developing ideology of jihād and a life of militant
piety along the frontier (see, for example, al-Farāhīdī [d. 170/786] on Q 3:200
[al-Farāhīdī, 2:90–1]). The literary, lexicographical, and archeological evidence
suggests that by the end of the second/eighth century the term encompassed
not only militant piety in defense of Islam, but the physical outposts where
that defense took place as well, and in some cases travellers’ hospices (De la
Vaissière). Functionally and architecturally, many of the early ribāṭs developed
organically from Byzantine and Persian precedents along the northern Syrian
and Central Asian frontiers of the Islamic/ʿAbbāsid empire (Jallūl, 15–40).
The fundamental question concerning the history of the Ṣūfī ribāṭ is why
and by what discursive and practical means did Ṣūfīs take up this particular
term, and only in particular times and places, to designate structures for the
performance and propagation of Sufism? Ṣūfīs generally adopted the term
in those areas where its use was already widespread: frontier regions, coastal
areas, and along caravan routes. By the time Sufism appeared in Iraq in the
third/ninth century, many of these ribāṭs had already begun to serve as re-
treats for ascetics and devotees seeking divine favour in militant piety. By the
early third/ninth century at the latest, then, Muslims had begun to link the
figure of the frontier warrior (murābiṭ/mujāhid) with Late Antique ideals of
monasticism and renunciation (al-zuhd fī l-dunyā). The earliest example of
such linkage is the famous ḥadīth that the students of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Mubārak
(d. 181/797) transmitted widely: “The monasticism of my community is jihād”
(Ibn al-Mubārak, 67–8, nos. 15 and 16). Thus, we find many ribāṭs in this period
functioning as spaces for the performance of militant piety and renunciation.
It is worth noting here, however, that these early murābiṭūn took their name
from the practice of ribāṭ and not necessarily from the structures of the same
name. That is to say, while murābiṭūn often lived in ribāṭs, they also lived in
buildings known by other terms as well (e.g., qaṣr or ḥiṣn); it was the devo-
tion to militant piety, not the architectural setting, from which their name
derived (Picard and Borrut, 40). As for the aforementioned ribāṭs themselves,
they were undoubtedly associated with renunciants before Ṣūfīs adopted the
term. The fourth-/tenth-century ribāṭ at Guardamar on the southeast coast of
al-Andalūs is instructive of this period. The structure combines elements of the
frontier outpost with pious communal life: it includes individual devotional
cells (marked with mihrābs) as well as guest quarters for travellers (Ruiz 2004);
but there is no evidence to suggest a link with Sufism (see Green, 56–7). This
is not surprising, since it was during this same time period that early Ṣūfī au-
thors were just beginning to construct a coherent tradition for themselves in
Baghdad (Karamustafa, 1–37; Knysh, Islamic mysticism, 43–67; Green, 24–44).
The early doctrinal and biographical treatments of Sufism claim many of
the earlier pious frontier warriors as their own, as a means of legitimising their
nascent movement. While many of these figures were not actually Ṣūfīs, or
were only tangentially connected to the movement, a number of early Ṣūfīs
did travel to frontier outposts for devotional purposes. The uncle and teacher
of the famous al-Junayd (d. 298/910), Sarī l-Saqaṭī (d. 253/867), for example,
reportedly spent time on the frontier in Tarsus and at the ribāṭ in ʿAbbādān
(al-Iṣfahānī, 10:116–7 and 10:110–1, respectively). Simultaneously, these early
sources often describe the Ṣūfīs as mujāhids who battle the nafs (ego self) and
the material world, and as murābiṭs who join a community of like-minded in-
dividuals in order to patrol and surveil their spiritual states and progress along
the Ṣūfī path (Böwering, Règles, 139). In this vein, the etymologies of ʿUmar
al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234) regarding the Ṣūfī ribāṭ are quite clever: the ribāṭ is
where individuals tie themselves in obedience to God and where one defends
the pious against misfortune (al-Suhrawardī, 99–100; Grämlich, 107). These
etymologies are clearly a later gloss on a much longer process of conceptual
176 Hofer
development, the origins of which are obscure. That is, while the aforemen-
tioned practical and discursive processes by which Ṣūfīs incorporated and
associated themselves with the ribāṭ are more or less clear, it is much more
difficult to determine when and where the first explicitly Ṣūfī ribāṭ emerged.
There is scant evidence that Ṣūfīs lived together communally, in ribāṭs or oth-
erwise, prior to the early fourth/tenth century. Early Ṣūfī sources depict some
Ṣūfīs travelling together in small bands, and describe the mujāwirūn (tempo-
rary residents) of Mecca as pious collectivities with their own unique adab,
or rules of comportment (al-Sarrāj, 190 and 169, respectively; see also Ende on
the mujāwir). The Ṣūfīs of Baghdad often gathered together at the Shūnīziyya
Mosque in Baghdad (al-Qushayrī, 542 and 566; Knysh, al-Qushayrī’s epistle, 377
and 397). And while some individual Ṣūfīs did live on the premises, temporar-
ily or otherwise (e.g., al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh, 6:423–4 and 7:609), they did not live
communally (there was a Ṣūfī khānqāh on the site in later years [al-Ḥamawī,
3:374]). The famous ribāṭ at ʿAbbādān, an island in the Persian Gulf near Basra,
was originally a military garrison (see Elwell-Sutton; Knysh, ʿAbbādān). Once
the site was no longer militarily useful it became a devotional retreat asso-
ciated with the Sālimiyya of Basra. Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 283/896), credited with
the founding of the Sālimiyya, was a regular visitor to the ribāṭ (al-Tustarī, 106;
Keeler and Keeler, 29). But explicit evidence for its association with Ṣūfīs exists
only in the sixth/twelfth century (this from the testimony of an anonymous
copyist who passed through in 533/1138–9; Ibn Ḥawqal, 53). Similarly, there
is some sketchy evidence of a Ṣūfī hospice in the Palestinian city of Ramla
from the fourth/tenth century (Hofer, Sufism, 45), but the record is difficult to
interpret (e.g., Meier, Abū Saʿīd, 302–4). As an important coastal city, Ramla
contained multiple ribāṭs (al-Maqdisī, 164) and it is likely that one of these
developed into a Ṣūfī hospice. Later sources describe the Ramla hospice as a
khānqāh, while the earlier sources describe it as a duwayra (e.g., al-Sulamī’s lost
Taʾrīkh al-ṣūfīya, cited by Ibn ʿAsākir, 54:304–5). This last term tracks well with
the fact that al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) himself was also said to have a duwayra
in Nīshāpūr at roughly the same time (Thibon, 24). Another possible candi-
date for the first explicitly Ṣūfī ribāṭ, also known as a khānqāh in subsequent
years, is that belonging to Ibn Khafīf (d. 371/982) of Shīrāz (Sobieroj, Ibn Ḫafīf,
176–7). One of Ibn Khafīf’s students, Abū Isḥāq al-Kāzarūnī (d. 426/1033),
supposedly founded more than 60 ribāṭs in Central Asia; these were a com-
bination of Ṣūfī hospices and traveller’s lodges (Meier, Die Vita; Sobieroj,
Mittelsleute). Itinerant Ṣūfīs continued to use some of these outposts in the
eastern frontier regions as late as at the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/
eighteenth centuries (Papas, 173–4, 180). So, while we may not know precisely
when and where Ṣūfīs first lived communally in ribāṭs, it was almost certainly
Ṣūfī Outposts ( ribāṭs ) 177
in the East (most likely Khurāsān, where garrisons, outposts, and caravanserais
proliferated) and no earlier than the fourth/tenth century. Finally, we should
not discount the relevance of the Karrāmiyya, a devotional movement of the
peasant and working classes of Khurāsān who followed the teachings of Ibn
Karrām (d. 255/869) and often lived together in khānqāhs (Bosworth) (on the
khānqāhs, see Firouzeh in this volume).
Perhaps the most important development in the evolution of the Ṣūfī out-
post was the institutionalisation of rules specific to a particular shaykh and
the organisation of communal life that followed. The earliest indisputable
evidence for organised Ṣūfī life appears in the fifth/eleventh century with the
ten rules of Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr (d. 440/1049). These rules were clearly
designed to foster harmonious communal living in pious devotion (Ebn-e
Monavvar, 493–4; Meier, Abū Saʿīd, 310–1; the purportedly earlier “eight rules”
of al-Junayd are actually from the seventh/thirteenth century [Radtke]). While
Ibn Abī l-Khayr’s hospice was known as a khānqāh and not a ribāṭ, the inno-
vation of rule-based Sufism he pioneered was absolutely critical for the sub-
sequent development of Ṣūfī lodges and outposts. For it was émigrés from
Khurāsān who established the first urban ribāṭs in Baghdad to house visitors
from the East, especially Ṣūfīs (Chabbi, La fonction). It was in the ribāṭs of
Baghdad that Abū l-Najīb al-Suhrawardī (d. 563/1168) and his nephew, Abū
Ḥafṣ al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), developed their “ribāṭ-based Sufism,” which
was far more organised, both socially and conceptually, than the earlier rule-
based Sufism (Ohlander). The ribāṭ-based Sufism of Baghdad had a profound
impact, in turn, on organised Sufism in Syria and Egypt (Hofer, The popularisa-
tion, 40–1). The rapid growth of ribāṭ-based Sufism across the Muslim world
after the early sixth/twelfth century owes a great deal to wealthy or ruling-class
patrons who built and endowed madrasas, khānqāhs, and ribāṭs on a grand
scale, providing room and board for Ṣūfīs of all kinds. These projects bolstered
the credentials of their patrons and, more importantly, opened up Ṣūfī spac-
es to increasingly large numbers of people, including in many cases women
(al-Ālūsī, 59–67; Karamustafa, 125–6). Fuelled by the wealth of elite donors,
ribāṭ-based Sufism spread rapidly across the Muslim world, appearing in both
urban and rural areas, from the Maghrib to South Asia, and attracting ever
larger segments of the population. It was the mass popularisation of increas-
ingly organised forms of Sufism that precipitated the emergence and develop-
ment of Ṣūfī brotherhoods after the seventh/thirteenth century (Popovic and
Veinstein (eds.)). But a fatwa by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) on the per-
missibility of subsidised Sufism offers an early indication of the anxiety that
many scholars, even those with Ṣūfī propensities, felt regarding this elite pa-
tronage (Pūrjavādī, 96–100). These anxieties only increased during the period
178 Hofer
181–249). The usage of ribāṭ in this context is primarily due to two factors. First,
it was a refugee from the al-Muwāḥid (Almohad) revolt in the Maghrib—
ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Qināʾī (d. 592/1196)—who first brought Sufism to Upper
Egypt. Al-Qināʾī settled in the village of Qena, where he founded his own
ribāṭ that he used to develop a large network of disciples. These disciples in
turn founded ribāṭs up and down the Nile, where they propagated a uniquely
Maghribī-Egyptian fusion of Sufism beginning in the early seventh/thirteenth
century. Second, the Ṣūfīs of Upper Egypt saw themselves as moral regulators
of the region, commanding the good and forbidding the wrong in the face of
a weak state presence and large Christian and Shīʿī population (El-Leithy).
The Maghribī-style ribāṭ was the ideal vehicle for this project of political and
moral regulation.
The Ṣūfī traditions of the Maghrib were also critically important to the
development of Sufism in West and sub-Saharan Africa (Vikør, Sufi brother-
hoods, 442). Sufism first appeared in the Kingdom of Timbuktu as early as the
ninth/fifteenth century, although there is little evidence of Ṣūfī brotherhoods
in the region prior to the nineteenth century (Seesemann; Triaud; Vikør, Sufi
brotherhoods). Nevertheless, while Sufism appeared relatively late, by the
nineteenth century it had become massively popular and the Ṣūfī brother-
hoods constituted some of the most effective vehicles of anti-colonial resis-
tance throughout the region, albeit in a variety of forms (Vikør, Sufism and
colonialism). Not surprisingly, the type of ribāṭ that developed in Maghribī
Sufism also played an important role in the propagation and popularisation of
Sufism across sub-Saharan Africa. However, although most of the Ṣūfī lodges
and outposts across this region functioned like the Maghribī-style ribāṭ, they
did not usually adopt that name. Rather, with a few notable exceptions, these
lodges and outposts were known as zāwiyas or by words drawn from local
languages. A typical example of the development of the Maghribī-style ribāṭ
in West Africa is that of the Murīdiyya of Senegal. Over the latter part of the
nineteenth century Amadu Bamba (d. 1927) and his followers founded a large
number of hospices known in Wolof as daara tarbiyya [Ar. Dār al-tarbiya];
these functioned as centres of instruction, employment, and political activ-
ism, spreading Islam and Sufism into rural areas (Babou, 105–8). The use of the
term ribāṭ was widespread in the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), where it was
used for fortified settlements or outposts that grew and developed into impor-
tant social and economic centres (Philips). Sufism was integral to the success
of the Sokoto jihād and these ribāṭs were critical to the growth and stability
of the caliphate (Salau). In the Sahara, Ṣūfī lodges were consistently known
as zāwiyas but functioned much like the Maghribī ribāṭ. They were scattered
180 Hofer
across trade routes and served as critical information hubs and centres of so-
cial outreach (Clancy-Smith, 102).
A final, contemporary example of the reach of the Maghribī-style ribāṭ is
the European branch of the Darqawiyya brotherhood led by the British-born
Ṣūfī Abdelqadir (né Ian Dallas). Abdelqadir converted to Islam in Morocco
and joined the Darqawiyya brotherhood in the late 1960s before establishing a
branch of the Darqawiyya in London. In a 1978 booklet, Jihad: A ground plan,
he laid out his vision for the establishment of an Islamic society by means
of the “Ribat model.” This model involved the training—both spiritually and
militarily—of murābiṭūn in his ribāṭ from where, once they were prepared,
they could engage in warfare against non-believers. While never actually pur-
suing the military portion of the project, he did found Ṣūfī ribāṭs of this type in
Norwich, Grenada, and Johannesburg (Sedgwick, 236–46; Hermansen, 483–9).
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Part 3
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs
⸪
Chapter 9
1 Introduction
More often than not, becoming a Ṣūfī means connecting with a living master
(shaykh, pīr, bābā, dede), establishing a direct and intimate relationship with
him, following the initiatory path (ṭarīqa) he teaches, and emulating him. It
also means establishing relationships with the other disciples of that mas-
ter: the ideal model is that of the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions
(ṣaḥāba). The disciples emphasise not so much their affiliation with a particu-
lar initiatory path, but the quasi-filial ties to their master, and this filiation in-
fluences all aspects of their lives, spiritually and socially.
It is difficult to estimate how many disciples a master might have because
they form a nebula of groups that maintain more or less close ties to him. The
influence of a master radiates in concentric circles over a space that represents
his sacred territory: it could be a quarter or neighbourhood, a village, an entire
region; in short, it might be anywhere in the world where his disciples are. Such
a territory therefore fluctuates and is unstable, and it evolves in accordance
with the shaykh’s reputation during his lifetime and after his death. The circles
correspond to the degree of proximity that the disciples maintain with him:
the innermost circle is made up of his closest disciples, who sometimes bear
the title of lieutenant (khalīfa, naqīb, muqaddam) because they represent him
in his absence; a second circle is made up of those who have chosen to serve
the master and live permanently with him; this affords them a special status.
The other followers comprise the largest circle and represent the civitas (inde-
pendent community) as a whole; they visit the shaykh in weekly meetings or, if
they live far from him, at festivals celebrating the birth of the Prophet (mawlid)
or of the founders of the master’s sacred lineage. This large majority has not
necessarily been initiated into the path, but seeks the shaykh’s spiritual influ-
ence (baraka), his protection and intercession on earth and in the afterlife.
Whatever their degree of attachment and proximity to the master, all his
disciples and followers must respect rules of behaviour (ādāb) in relation
to his person. These can be summarised as absolute submission and obedience
to his authority in return for his grace and divine blessings, of which he is con-
sidered to be the source:
Do not think that spiritual openness is the result of your devotion, be-
cause it is only through your shaykh’s baraka that you will get to know
God. If you oppose your shaykh internally (bāṭinan) or openly (ẓāhiran),
you are opposing God and his Messenger. Your shaykh will not be able to
help you progress if you do not demonstrate your truthfulness to him.
al-Ṭāhir, 175
Between those who feel invested and manifest themselves to their con-
temporaries, those who recognise such signs—or on the contrary deny
those men such qualities—, and then those who project onto them their
ideal of human perfection, their need for assistance and relief in mate-
rial and moral adversity, and the assurance or at least the promise of
salvation.
Amri, Walī et awliyāʾ, 30
190 Chih
he summarised its early formulations and revealed the importance that the
figure of the master had acquired in his time, and his function in the life of
the emerging Ṣūfī communities. In his writings, al-Sulamī demonstrates this
evolution of mysticism, in which the education of the soul no longer depends
on asceticism as in the first centuries of Islam, but rather on social life elevated
to the status of a spiritual discipline (Thibon, L’œuvre d’Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
al-Sulamī). His works, Kitāb ādāb al-ṣuḥba (Treatise on the etiquette of com-
panionship) and Jawāmiʿ ādāb al-ṣūfiyya (Compendium of Ṣūfī etiquette) state
that the progress of the aspirant on the spiritual path results from his attitude
toward his master, and that attitude is determined by adab and is not the re-
sult of any spiritual discipline. However, there is an evolution toward a greater
authority of the masters, which is linked to their clearly defined status as suc-
cessors of the Prophet. While al-Sulamī refers to customs alien to Arab culture,
he also refers extensively to the ḥadīth in order to illustrate various rules; adab
is linked to the Prophet, who, having been educated by God, represents the
supreme model. Al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), al-Sulāmī’s disciple in Nishāpūr
and the author of the Risāla, produced a highly effective synthesis of all the
preceding literature; in it, he addressed both masters and disciples, a fact that
explains the manual’s great success to this day.
Two centuries later, at the end of the sixth/twelfth century, the codes that
articulated social relations in Sufism were fixed definitively and did not change
again: Sufism had achieved its social integration. Khānqāhs and zāwiyas spread
in the urbanised quarters of inner cities or, when no space was available, they
were built in still empty areas on the outskirts of cities, and very soon thereaf-
ter new quarters grew around them (Clayer in this volume). In rural environ-
ments, saints and their descendants became central to the identities of villages
and tribal communities (Ocak in this volume). The well-known manual by
ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (The benefits of intimate
knowledge) represents what historians call an age of transition (Ohlander,
Sufism), during which the great mystical paths (the rise of the ṭarīqa) emerged,
along with a more strongly established institutionalisation of Sufism (Knysh,
Islamic mysticism). During this period, when the ʿAbbāsid caliphate was weak,
on the eve of the Mongol invasion and their capture of Baghdad in 656/1258,
Ṣūfīs of the central and eastern regions of the caliphate established their iden-
tity and their role in society, and were strengthened by an increasing number
of followers, and by the patronage of political elites.
During his long reign, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (r. 575–
622/1180–1225) attempted to fight against the disintegration of the caliphate
and supported al-Suhrawardī’s project to open his ribāṭ in Baghdad to the
whole population, that is, to those who were not affiliated but sought the Ṣūfī’s
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 193
blessing (tabarruk). The master assigned everyone in the ribāṭ a status and
a role according to their degree of participation in the activities of the com-
munity and established the rights and obligations of each role. Al-Suhrawardī
granted the non-affiliated people many dispensations (rukhṣa, pl. rukhaṣ), in-
cluding not submitting to the strict spiritual discipline. In this, he followed
the line established by his uncle Abū l-Najīb (d. 563/1168) in Ādāb al-murīdīn
(Book of aspirants’ manners); thus, he was able to integrate into his commu-
nity whole segments of the urban population that lived outside the walls of the
ribāṭ and extend his influence to society at large (Ohlander, Sufism, 243). These
“possessors of dispensations” (arbāb al-rukhṣa), however, were subject to a
minimum of moral instruction (adab), as described in his famous manual. The
rapid and widespread success of the ʿAwārif, especially in India and Central
Asia, is linked to its style and form: it is a practical guide with a clear message
for novices, who first familiarised themselves with all the external aspects of
Sufism, then embarked on the path of spiritual progress. It contains a set of
rules of exterior manners (ādāb al-ẓāhira) that are closely linked to the seeker’s
inner development. These rules cover travel, eating habits, behaviour at the
table and generally in public, and attire. The shaykh’s recommendations in-
volve the disciple’s private and family life, a tendency also found in subsequent
Persian manuals, such as the treatise by Yaḥyā Bākharzī (d. 736/1335–6), Awrād
al-aḥbāb wa-fuṣuṣ al-ādāb (Litanies of the beloved and bezels of good man-
ners) which gives advice relative to the Ṣūfī environment. Shaykh Bākharzī,
who headed a khānqāh in Bukhara, taught his disciples values that were meant
to include their ordinary family and social circles: among other things, ad-
vice on how to treat women and educate children (Feuillebois-Pierunek, ʿIzz
al-Dīn Kāshānī).
The fall of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate reinforced the authority of the Ṣūfīs, as
evidenced by the increase in numbers of hagiographies describing a world
order in which the true masters are the saints who form an invisible govern-
ment with a council (dīwān) and its own hierarchy, above which is the pole
or supreme recourse (quṭb, ghawth) (Papas in this volume). In addition to po-
litical upheavals, socioeconomic factors, such as the economic crisis and the
profound changes impacting the countries around the Mediterranean in the
eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries (for example, the Black Death,
Bedouin acts of pillage, ruralisation) drove people to seek the comfort and pro-
tection of the shaykhs, who, in turn, complained that they no longer had true
disciples. In the context of these crises, the zāwiyas experienced a great resur-
gence; some of them were transformed into large complexes that served as a
means of integrating the rural population into the urban social fabric. The es-
tablishment of zāwiyas around the city of Kairouan, for example, was directly
194 Chih
the teachings of the Moroccan Ṣūfī Aḥmad Ibn Idrīs (d. 1253/1837). These or-
ders were founded by Ṣūfī figures with the status of ‘renewers’ (mujaddid) or
‘seal of the saints’ (khatm al-awliyāʾ), directly initiated by the Prophet. Within
those orders a certain exclusivism set in, along with the adoption of specific
ritual practices that served as marks of identity and community membership.
For example, the recitation of a special prayer upon the Prophet in the branch-
es of the Tijāniyya in West Africa, or the introduction of the forty-day retreat in
the Khālidiyya (Triaud and Robinson; Abu-Manneh).
The first quarter of the twentieth century, however, represents a turn-
ing point. The Saudi dynasty in Arabia, driven by the Wahhābī ideology and
hostile to Ṣūfīs, seized power. Along with the development of fundamentalist
religious movements and the rise of nationalisms, they terminated the pre-
dominant position that the Ṣūfīs had held for centuries in the mental universe
of the Muslims. In the 1960s, sociologists even predicted the protracted and
inexorable decline of the social role of Ṣūfīs. While we cannot deny the nega-
tive impacts on Ṣūfī practices that stemmed from the Salafisation and growing
secularisation in contemporary Muslim societies, field studies conducted over
the past twenty years from Morocco to Indonesia, including Egypt, Turkey, and
Pakistan, but also Europe, show that the model of social life that Ṣūfīs prac-
ticed is resilient and even experienced a new vitality in the last quarter of the
twentieth century of, as it adapted to modernity.
This historical perspective shows a parallel evolution between the growing
role of Ṣūfīs in society, which resulted from historical circumstances and pa-
tronage from political elites, and the role they created for themselves as spiri-
tual guides through their writings, a role that was recognised by their followers.
The model of the ideal community developed by the Ṣūfīs in the khānqāhs
and the zāwiyas, with their rules of behaviour stemming from the Sunna and
customs (notably, courtly culture), gradually extended to the rest of society,
and integrated all believers, even as the Ṣūfī institutions met the increasingly
concrete social demands for protection, assistance, and mediation, and main-
tained their initial vocation as a place for spiritual retreat and the initiation
of novices.
In Sufism, the relationship between a master and his future disciple (murīd)
is generally sealed by a pact during a ceremony, one of the first descriptions
of which can be found in the Risāla by al-Qushayrī. When making the pact
196 Chih
(akhdh al-ʿahd), the novice takes an oath of allegiance (bayʿa) to the shaykh,
demonstrating his submission. The term bayʿa, which denotes the act of shak-
ing hands (muṣāfaḥa) with a crossing of fingers (mushābaka) peculiar to cer-
tain initiation rites, also carries the idea of an agreement between a seller
and a buyer. Thus, in the Qurʾān the term ʿahd can mean both “testamentary
designation” or “contract.” Indeed, the pact requires reciprocity: the act of
submission on the part of the disciple and the duty to transmit knowledge
on the part of the master. It establishes between the two a relationship of
companionship (ṣuḥba), modelled on the relationship between the Prophet
and his Companions (Gril, Le modèle prophétique). As a social relationship,
this attachment to the shaykh is subject to certain rules of behaviour and du-
ties; henceforth, books on Sufism speak of the “rights of the master” (ḥaqq
al-murshid) and the “rights of the disciple” (ḥaqq al-murīd) as reciprocal “du-
ties” (shurūṭ wa-ādāb). These rules must be respected by the body of believers,
even those who attach themselves to the master but have not made the pact
with him, but only hope to benefit from his blessings (tabarruk).
The strict etiquette observed in the presence of the master reinforces the
sacred character of his person (ḥurmat al-shaykh), whose word should be,
for his disciple, “like a call from God and his Messenger.” This formulation by
al-Suhrawardī was taken even further by an Egyptian Ṣūfī in the eighteenth
century, for whom “the presence of the shaykh is the presence of God Himself”
(ḥaḍrat al-shaykh ḥaḍrat Allāh) (al-Samanūdī, 107). Surrounding the shaykh
are interdicts that the disciple must respect, inwardly and outwardly, to adhere
to the pact, which is a pact made with God. Whoever breaks the code of sub-
mission must be banished, because to disobey the master is to disobey God;
his attitude equates with ingratitude, which is similar to kufr (impiety), and he
must be excluded as he endangers the community.
For Ṣūfīs, the attitude of the disciples toward the master is based on the
Qurʾān and the Sunna, just as the figure of the master draws its model from
the Prophet, of whom he is heir on earth. The chapter on the rules of conduct
of the novice toward his master in al-Suhrawardī’s ʿAwārif al-maʿārif is a com-
mentary on Q 49:1–5:
O you who believe, do not raise your voice above that of the Prophet and
do not address him in a loud voice as you do among yourselves, for fear
that your works will be invalidated, without your realising it … Certainly
those who call you from outside your private apartments, most of them
do not understand.
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 197
Thus, on the basis of these verses, many rules were established that relate to
respecting the privacy and personal space of the master.
The disciple must present himself before his shaykh in a state of ritual pu-
rity (muṭahharan), wearing his most beautiful clothes, and in a state of repen-
tance. According to al-Qushayrī, Abū ʿAlī l-Daqqāq (d. 405/1015) stated that he
never attended a session with his master al-Naṣrabādhī (d. 367/977–8) with-
out first performing the major ablution (al-Qushayrī, Risāla, bāb al-ṣuḥba).
Al-Qushayrī himself adopted this behaviour, in addition to the practice of fast-
ing. The disciple should not knock at his master’s door but make his presence
known by invoking God out loud, and wait for the latter to allow him to enter
or leave. In the presence of his shaykh, the disciple should not sit until invited
to do so and, once sitting, should remain silent, head down, and speak only if
asked to by the shaykh. If the disciple is authorised to speak, he should do so
without raising his voice; he must not take leave until authorised and, when
exiting, should never turn his back on his shaykh, rather he should leave the
room stepping backwards. He should not walk in front of his shaykh (except at
night), nor sit at his table unless invited; he should not tread upon his prayer
mat, sleep in his bed, wear his clothes or his shoes, and he should not use his
prayer beads. He must not spy on his shaykh, nor try to find out how long he
sleeps or what he eats, or what relations he maintains with women (al-Ṭāhir,
121–7; Chih, Le soufisme, 231–2). These rules are modelled on those that the
believers were asked to obey with respect to the Prophet according to the
Qurʾān 53:33:
O, you who believe, do not enter into the Prophet’s apartments unless
you have been given permission, without looking at his plate. But if you
are called, enter, and once you have eaten, disperse and refrain from
speaking with familiarity; that would annoy the Prophet, who would be
ashamed to tell you, but God is not ashamed of the truth.
Gril, Le modèle prophétique, 348
The disciple must abandon all personal will and place himself in the hands of
the shaykh to become like a “cadaver in the hands of the washer of the dead”
(a phrase attributed to the Iraqi master Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 283/896)). With re-
gard to his spiritual training, and in all aspects of his private life (travel, mar-
riage, and work), he should not undertake anything without first consulting
his master, as only he knows what is appropriate for the disciple. Finally, he
should not conceal any of his thoughts or actions from his shaykh. In al-Anwār
198 Chih
Just as the infant drinks milk at the breast of its mother or wet-nurse, re-
ceiving from them the sustenance without which he would perish, so too
the infant of the spirit drinks milk of the path and Truth from the nipple
of the mother of prophethood, or the mother of sainthood (walāya), re-
ceiving from both the prophet or the shaykh who stands in place of the
Prophet, the sustenance without which he would perish.
Algar, 223–4
The Egyptian Ṣūfī al-Shaʿrānī, following the death of his master al-Shinnāwī,
was spiritually weaned, as he himself described it, under the guidance of
al-Khawwāṣ (Geoffroy, 192). The attitude of the shaykh toward his disciple is
also the subject of a chapter in the Ṣūfī manuals; it must reflect both the quali-
ties of the father and mother: that is, authority and firmness, but also affection,
benevolence, accessibility, and tenderness. Furthermore, the shaykh should
adopt behaviour that inspires the disciple to respect him and his authority, and
emulate him; he should be a model, not only in the spiritual realm but also in
social behaviour, as was the case with the Prophet and his Companions (Knysh
(trans.), al-Qushayri’s epistle).
Sufism repurposes family ties by transposing them to another plane and
directing them to a different goal. Malamud’s anthropological reading of the
Ṣūfī manuals from the classical period and Hammoudi’s analysis of modern
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 199
in age and experience; he granted them his teachings so that they, in turn, could
train aspirants. Al-Suhrawardī gave them the title of khādim (pl. khuddām) and
described them as superintendents with multiple roles: to solicit and collect
donations for the ribāṭ, receive complaints from the residents, feed the trav-
ellers, and serve the population in general (al-Suhrawardī, ch. 11; Ohlander,
Sufism). In the Egyptian Khalwatiyya, founded by Muḥammad al-Ḥifnī in the
eighteenth century, these roles were played by the naqīb al-nuqabāʾ (chief at-
tendant), also called naqīb al-ḥaḍra or naqīb al-jamāʿa because he was, among
other duties, responsible for the smooth running of the dhikr sessions (ḥaḍra).
The naqīb al-nuqabāʾ was described as the repository of the shaykh’s secret, the
door through which he may be accessed (maḥall sirr al-shaykh wa-bābuhu),
his representative in his absence; he brought the novices close to the master to
perform the pact and replaced the shaykh during dhikr sessions. He must pos-
sess a certain maturity and experience, show good character (ḥusn al-khuluq),
a conciliatory nature, and perfect honesty. He must set an example for others
by showing great spiritual energy (himma). He must enquire about his broth-
ers if they are absent, and the brothers must respect and carry out his orders,
even if they are older than he is. He often acts as a supervisor and attendant,
according to al-Suhrawardī. He must be learned, knowledgeable about the
path and its rules, and ensure that the disciples respect those rules, especial-
ly those related to behaviour toward the master and those connected to the
dhikr. He must be able to relate to everyone and speak to them gently, without
raising his voice or joking with them, or staring at them. If the disciple needs
some information regarding the customs of the zāwiya, he should not address
the shaykh directly, rather he should enquire through the naqīb; however, with
regard to a vision, a dream, or an inspiration, he must wait until the master
has retired privately and speak only to him, after receiving his authorisation
(al-Samanūdī; al-Dardīr).
At present, in the Qādiriyya Būdshīshiyya order in Morocco, as in the
Naqshbandī branch of Shaykh Zindapir in Pakistan, the khulafāʾ are treated
with great respect by the master, whom they provide with comprehensive ser-
vices: they belong to literate urban circles and are, through their writings and
in practice, those who spread his teachings; they take care of a local zāwiya
(which can be a private home) where dhikr sessions are organised on a weekly
basis; finally, they are in charge of the enormous organisation of the mawlid
(celebration of the Prophet’s birthday), or ʿurs, death anniversary, in Pakistan,
which draws thousands of visitors from the entire country and from abroad
each year (Chih, Sufism; Werbner).
In addition to the naqīb al-jamāʿa, the Khalwatī manuals of the eighteenth
century also mention a group of nuqabāʾ responsible for domestic tasks; they
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 201
help and assist the shaykh (muʿāwinū l-shaykh). Given the selflessness of their
tasks, they are compared to the Prophet’s Anṣār, the original Companions who
protected and shared their homes with him and his Companions (al-Samanūdī,
151). Four nuqabāʾ suffice for the zāwiya to work and the role of each is subject
to precise rules, mainly related to food and table manners. The practice of eat-
ing together has inspired a great number of texts on ādāb, undoubtedly due
to its strong social dimension. The rules of the Khalwatiyya were copied di-
rectly from mediaeval treatises, particularly from al-Ghazālī and al-Suhrawardī
(Feuillebois-Pierunek, La maîtrise du corps). At the bottom of the hierar-
chy, but spiritually the highest, is the person in charge of the sandals (naqīb
al-niʿāl): he is responsible for the cleaning, maintenance, and arrangement of
the sandals according to the individual’s rank (rutba), which he must attend
to, without mistaking their owners. He must fulfil his task for God with humil-
ity. Above him is the brother responsible for the transport and distribution of
water (sāqī l-māʾ): he is charged with the cleaning of the jugs and goblets, and
subject to a strict hygienic lifestyle, he must keep his hands and clothes clean,
should not blow his nose or spit; and while distributing water, he should not
deny it to anyone, even to those who do not belong to the community of broth-
ers. When distributing water, he must always begin with whomever is sitting to
the right of the master and end with whomever sits to his left. He must know
the etiquette of drinking (ādāb al-shurb), so that he can teach it to others; for
example, one needs to drink while sitting, to grasp the jug with the right hand,
and take only three mouthfuls, breathing after each one, and remember to re-
cite the basmala (“In the name of God”) and the ḥamdala (“Praise to God”)
with each mouthful. Finally, the person in charge of the water is responsible
for washing the clothes of the disciples; he must do this without resentment,
without balking at the task.
The person responsible for the table must be skilful, energetic, clean, virtu-
ous, a good cook, and a model of scruples and asceticism (wariʿan wa-zāhidan).
When serving meals, he must recite Sūrat al-Fātiḥa, inwardly request divine
permission for that meal and its blessing following an established formula. He
then sets the table according to a prearranged scheme (he is assisted by the
water carrier, as the two tasks are closely related), all the while reciting Sūrat
al-Ikhlāṣ (Q 112), which chases demons away. During the meal, he must remain
standing, ready to serve the brothers, while inwardly reciting Sūra Quraysh
(Q 106) against the abdominal problems that food may cause. At the end of
the meal he gathers the leftovers to share them with the person in charge of
the water. When clearing the table, he praises God for the meal and hopes that
it will bring strength, health, light, and purity to those who have partaken in
it. He must always ensure that some food remains for a potential visitor and,
202 Chih
after serving him, he should never let him eat alone, but should sit with him.
He must not touch the dishes before serving them, except to taste them, and
he must not show favouritism, as that would compromise his commitment to
the path and warrant his dismissal.
If someone were to make a donation to the zāwiya, he must not keep any of
it for himself but bring it to the master, to dispose of as he wishes. He must, of
course, know good table manners in order to teach them to the novices. There
are many table manners, for example, one must sit on one’s knees or stretch
out only the right leg, take small bites and chew them at length, not blow his
nose or spit during the meal, and turn his face away if he feels the need to
cough or sneeze, and not place on the plate anything that might have been in
his mouth, not lean over or stretch at the table, not stick meat or cheese in the
bread, or tear off pieces of bread with his teeth, but instead break it off with
his hands, limit himself to the necessary amount of food (neither too much
nor not enough), not begin eating before being authorised to do so, not throw
anything to the ground (such as watermelon rinds, which should be placed
before oneself), eat with only three fingers, and finally, begin and end the meal
by taking a bit of salt, if there is any available (this custom was thought to ward
off illnesses).
Since their foundation, Ṣūfī establishments welcomed a very diverse popu-
lation: “One of the best examples of this is the khānqāh of Abū Saʿīd b. Abī
l-Khayr (d. 440/1049) where ‘ordinary people, poor folk and labourers, urban
and rural … [and] even the most ostracized outcasts of society, such as a
wretched young drunkard in one instance’ received hospitality” (Graham, 122).
At every stage of their expansion, these establishments, built in urban environ-
ments or on the outskirts of towns, served as places where the rural population
could be integrated. In addition to the initiatory knowledge, the population
was instilled with a minimum of customs and the good manners of the liter-
ate and urbanised men, a milieu from which arose the Ṣūfīs who created these
rules of behaviour and set them in writing with an increasingly wider audience
in mind.
In return for the service rendered to the shaykh, the disciples had access
to his friendship and trust. According to a ḥadīth qudsī (sacred tradition) nar-
rated by al-Bukhārī, “My servant does not approach Me for something more
dear to me than the obligations that I have imposed upon him” (al-Bukhārī,
Ṣaḥīḥ, book 76, 509). God brings close to him those He loves, and so the shaykh
draws his disciples close or drives them away. According to accounts collected,
for the disciples, the love and trust of the master are a source of empowerment,
a driving force; in turn, those who are entrusted with important tasks gain a
certain aura, or respect, within the group. In a contemporary zāwiya, such as
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 203
that of Muḥammad al-Ṭayyib in Qurna, Upper Egypt, one can see young people
working at different tasks; often they are students and, once married and set-
tled into their professional life, they leave their places to other young students.
Sometimes, one may split his time between his studies and serving the master
in his zāwiya (called a sāḥa in Upper Egypt):
The intimate relationship created between the master and his disciple ren-
ders the latter completely open and transparent in the eyes of the master,
who can then assign him responsibilities. It is easy to imagine the tensions,
rivalry, and envy that this pursuit of the shaykh’s trust can generate among
the disciples, but also the consternation that the loss of this trust can cause
(Werbner, 136–40).
Certain disciples remain khādim of the shaykh their entire lives and for-
sake founding a family or pursuing a career. The anthropologist Abdallah
Hammoudi refers to this as social atypism, citing the example of a nineteenth-
century Moroccan Ṣūfī: “But at the age when other young men married women,
probably in order to be served by them, he did the opposite and began serving a
master. This decision constitutes an inversion of the ‘normal’ course of life and
can definitely be regarded as a ‘transgression’” (Hammoudi, 94). These servants
are closest, on a day-to-day basis, to the saint and perform tasks that give them
more access to his private life: bringing him water, preparing his meals, getting
his clothes, making his bed. This proximity to so many aspects of the master
confers on this servant a special status among the disciples; some even seek
the servant’s blessing (baraka) or ask him to make a talisman (ḥijāb), because
he has become a master at the art of “spiritual healing” (ʿilāj rūḥānī), that is,
healing through the baraka of saints. In the Moroccan Qādiriyya Būdshīshiyya
Ṣūfī order, a certain Sīdī Bābā served as a caretaker of the mosque and the mau-
soleum of the master’s ancestors, and lived permanently in the zāwiya, where
he received visits from women who, with a photo or a bottle of water, request-
ed cures for cases in which traditional medicine had failed, often the cause
is then attributed to spirits ( jinn) or to the evil eye (Dominguez Diaz, 187).
Although his master Sidī Ḥamza (d. 2017) did not grant talismans, he did pres-
ent himself as a doctor of the soul (ṭabīb al-nafs), an expression that appeared
204 Chih
ʿAbdallāh al-Sharīf (d. 1088/1678): “In a single night our shaykh fed fourteen
thousand visitors and before he died had left behind five hundred authentic
initiates (ʿārifūn), friends (awliyāʾ) and witnesses of God, capable of leading
[others] to Him” (Elboudrari, Quand les saints, 498). Thus, the image of the
saint that redistributes the donations given to him, without keeping any of
it for himself, is a hagiographic topos that reveals a mechanism for establish-
ing clientelist relations and for the social appropriation of a territory. Finally,
through the mediation that he performs in conflicts, the shaykh is a guarantor
of peace and social stability.
The master first performs mediation in his community of disciples and their
families. Given that the disciples are all pursuing intimacy as well as the in-
tellectual, spiritual, and physical proximity to the shaykh, they are subject to
competition and tension, as well as envy and resentment. The hagiographies
of the masters echo this and mention these feelings as a way to highlight the
education of their disciples. The hagiography of the Iranian Ṣūfī Abū Saʿīd b.
Abī l-Khayr states: “When a dispute occurred between two dervishes, it was our
Shaikh’s practice to remain silent until they had emptied their hearts. When
he knew that their interiors were cleansed, then he would say a few words and
effect a reconciliation and make peace between them” (Karamustafa, Reading,
242). In the Akhlāq matbūliyya by the Egyptian Ṣūfī al-Shaʿrānī, we discover
that the masters of the Aḥmadiyya ṭarīqa staged a weekly ritual, inspired by
ʿAbbāsid rituals, to end disagreements between the disciples: the shaykh
influence of their zāwiya, that is, in the Gharb, the Rif, and the Oriental region.
At the same time, in Iran and Central Asia, a similar tension appeared between
Naqshbandī saints and nomads in the system of patronage and protection es-
tablished by Khwāja Aḥrār (Paul, Forming a faction). In the border regions of
the Punjab and Sindh, Ṣūfīs established sanctuaries and served as mediators
and conciliators for transhumant nomads, farmers, and herdsmen who fought
over land and grazing rights; these Ṣūfīs and their descendants retained this
role until the early twentieth century (Kozlowski). In Tripolitania, Libya, the
Algerian Ṣūfī Muḥammad al-Sanūsī (d. 1276/1859) settled and founded zāwiyas
near the border between various tribal clans; then he and his khalīfas estab-
lished themselves as mediators and arbitrators (Evans-Pritchard).
The saint’s khidma means the exercise of his walāya/wilāya over his sacred
territory; he represents the ideal patron, as defined by Peter Brown in relation
to the Christian holy men of Late Antiquity: “He is a man who uses his ‘power’
to smooth over the thorny issues of village life … He would arrange the cancel-
ling of debts, he would settle disputes among the villagers on the spot, and so
save them the long trek to the local town to conduct their litigation” (P. Brown,
85). According to J. S. Trimingham, the Ṣūfī shaykhs were able to mediate in the
conflicts of traditional, tribal, and clan societies; but that role was said to have
disappeared with the establishment of a modern state, the breakdown of tradi-
tional social structures, and the creation of a bureaucracy that took charge, in
the cities and in the countryside, of functions of justice traditionally entrusted
to the Ṣūfī shaykhs. The anthropological fieldwork carried out in the 1990s in
Upper Egypt shows that the shaykhs continued to arbitrate and offer hospi-
tality in this region, especially when the state failed to resolve conflicts that
brought into play the honour and reputation of the parties, namely vendettas.
Arbitration by the shaykhs is called ṣulḥ (“conciliation,” “accommodation”); the
solution to a conflict should also lead to a peace agreement between the par-
ties to ensure that the conflict does not resurface. Aḥmad Raḍwān (d. 1967),
a Ṣūfī from the region of Luxor, thus defined the sāḥas: “The sāḥas are every-
where in Upper Egypt because they serve as places of worship, for welcoming
visitors, for the arbitration of conflicts and conciliation” (Chih, Le soufisme, 2).
These sāhas have open-air courtyards with covered or shaded areas to protect
from the sun; in these courtyards the shaykh, sitting on wooden benches or
mastabas (masonry benches), surrounded by notables and usually on a Friday
after the prayer and dhikr, received those who sought some material assistance,
advice or arbitration from him. As the shaykh was a recognised and respected
moral and religious authority, one of God’s elect, submitting to his arbitration
made it possible to avoid the shame (ʿār) that befell those who did not engage
in blood feuds with regard to matters of honour.
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 207
Figure 9.1 Servants at the zāwiya of Shaykh Raḍwān during the saint’s mawlid (Upper
Egypt)
Photo by Rachida Chih
Figure 9.2 Servants at the soup kitchen of the zāwiya of Shaykh Raḍwān during the
saint’s mawlid (Upper Egypt)
Photo by Rachida Chih
208 Chih
Moroccan immigration and European converts); this explains why most fol-
lowers live far from their master. The date of the great annual meeting of the
members of the ṭarīqa in the zāwiya of Madagh overlaps with the celebration
of the birth of the Prophet (al-mawlid al-nabawī); it is a unique opportunity to
see the master and, for some, to meet him for the first time. This ziyāra, which
brings together several thousand people, is thus the subject of real organisa-
tion; buses are chartered for the occasion and it requires prior registration with
the muqaddam (the representative of the shaykh in a town or village), who
encourages the brothers to undertake the trip. In the opinion of many disci-
ples, this is a long journey with many participants—the zāwiya is located in a
remote region difficult to access; thus, it is an experience that brings them to-
gether. In the zāwiya, brothers and sisters show their respect and mutual con-
sideration: whatever their rank and social status, everyone is addressed with
the respectful title of lallā (“my lady”) or sīdī (“my master”), wears the djellaba
(long loose-fitting robe), eats the same food, and sleeps under the same roof:
the brotherhood is a structure of integration that transcends social divides
without eliminating them. The weekly sessions of dhikr in the local zāwiyas,
where mystical poems, verses of the Qurʾān, and prayers are recited and chant-
ed, sometimes to the rhythm of physical movements, carry a strong emotional
charge and are powerful elements that establish close ties among the disciples;
regular attendance at these sessions is strongly encouraged by the masters.
In Turkey, the closing of the tekkes after the prohibition of the Ṣūfī brother-
hoods by the new Turkish Republic in 1925 had a huge impact on the forms of
Ṣūfī communities, which had to be adapted and transformed to survive in a
new and hostile political context (Clayer in this volume). The concept of kh-
idma changed “into a new kind of community service corresponding with their
functioning as a benevolent association registered as a foundation (waqf ).
Sohbet also assumes new forms, even becoming a kind of ‘mediated sociabil-
ity’ when congregants listen to the shaykh via satellite then read his address
in the order’s monthly magazine” (Silverstein). At present, when joining a Ṣūfī
group the newcomer must be able to rely on the mutual aid and solidarity that
has always existed among the brothers in the path. For example, in order to
divert a young Egyptian from fundamentalist religious groups and persuade
him to join the Ṣūfīs, a Rifāʿī group put forward the argument that he would be
able to find Ṣūfī brothers in all the towns of Egypt and they would all offer him
hospitality (Hoffman, 152). The Ṣūfī path thus perpetuates its traditional role
of welcoming and offering hospitality, of moral and material support, but now,
through a network of regional and sometimes global establishments.
The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 211
5 Conclusion
Sufism is a quest for inner development and a model of social life: its norms
dictate all aspects of spiritual and worldly life, which are inseparable; slightest
infringement of a norm governing an exterior act can negatively influence the
interior development. The shaykh represents the incarnation of the Prophet’s
model of spiritual perfection that he communicates to his disciples and all be-
lievers. The relationship with the master is voluntary and though it contains
the notion of a contract (ʿahd), it is not legally sealed: it derives its power from
the sacred strength of a shared belief, that the master’s baraka spreads to his
followers. Sufism contributed to the Islamisation of vast regions of the Muslim
world, through its capacity to integrate itself into the fabric of local societ-
ies where the Ṣūfī/saint constitutes a foundation to identify with, one based
on relations of loyalty, service, and protection. The search for the saint’s pro-
tection stems from his recognised role as mediator between God and men. In
exchange for the protective friendship of the Ṣūfī/walī, men pledge allegiance
to him and serve him. The connection to the master is considered sacred, and
breaking the pact is seen as equivalent to perjury.
The rules governing social relations in Sufism have changed little since their
earliest conception in the Middle Ages, despite the strong criticism they pro-
voked because they focus mainly on “blind” obedience to a master and this
is construed by critics as associationism (shirk) that leads to unbelief (kufr),
the greatest sin in Islam. The Ṣūfī path rests firmly on the relationship to the
master: he is its pivot, the axis around which concentric circles of disciples
and followers revolve. This very strong relationship is at once paternal and
maternal and, according to the disciples themselves, it is first and foremost a
relationship of love (maḥabba) that unites spiritual brothers in a community.
This explains why the death of the shaykh leaves a great void that is difficult
to fill. However, the relationship is not unidirectional. The shaykh must also
respond to the expectations, hopes, and human as well as spiritual needs of his
followers. In a sense, it is a collective creation that satisfies a social and histori-
cal demand for a supernatural spiritual power that manifests itself in mental
attitudes and way of life (Dupront, Du sacré).
Finally, it must be emphasised that the formative period of Sufism, with its
doctrines and practices and its institutionalisation in the orders also brought
about the expansion of other concurrent forms of spiritual life that adopted
social behaviours often judged to be outside social and religious norms. As
a reaction to institutionalised Sufism, groups such as itinerant dervishes,
212 Chih
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The Social Role of Ṣūfīs 217
Ṣūfī Altruism
Richard McGregor
The idea of selflessness, the willing forfeiture of one’s interests for another,
seems to have pervaded cultural and religious systems throughout history. We
might rightfully start to explore this idea by distinguishing between actions
and motivations that serve others, and those that serve ourselves. Any discus-
sion of the concept of altruism, however, quickly encounters a conundrum.
Why, for example, should a Muslim pay zakāt, the obligatory tax for the poor?
Why should anyone give charity in any form? Why be patient and forgiving
with friends? And why do we love our children? It seems that whatever form of
altruism we examine, the boundary between serving others and ourselves, is in
fact murky. On closer inspection, we might question who exactly benefits from
charitable giving. Beyond improving the situation of the poor, the benefactors
profit at several levels: they have a clear conscience in the face of economic in-
equality, they may live in a socially peaceful, less hostile public space, and earn
heavenly credit against their sins, and improve their own afterlife. Selflessness
toward family and friends might occasion a similar quandary about altruism:
the happiness and success of friends enriches our lives, and the sacrifices we
make for children are long-term investments in a thriving family, which re-
flects well on us.
But we can muddy the waters around altruism further, by questioning if
any act can be truly selfless. Acts of selflessness are taken quite seriously in
several branches of Islamic knowledge. The practice of Islamic law, with its
institutions of pious endowments (waqf, pl. awqāf ) and its charitable giving
(zakāt and ṣadaqa), recognises and regulates altruism. Yet, it is in the field of
Sufism that the complexities of altruism are most carefully explored. Here the
term īthār, with its sense of privileging or preferring the other, is key. As we
see, Ṣūfī thinkers followed various strands of the idea, which together form a
multi-layered understanding of altruism. The first of these strands centres on
the obligations imposed by religious law, obligations that demand the disci-
pline of the self in return for divine favor and ultimate reward in the afterlife.
The second strand embraces altruism as the religio-cultural virtue of chival-
ry, benevolence, and humility. Building on this chivalry, the third dimension
moves beyond any sense of transactional reward for virtue, and transforms
to the second stage, one seeks reconciliation with estranged companions, and
honours (without prejudice) those who have caused offense or outrage. At the
third level, one seeks no reward for one’s generosity, forgives one’s enemies,
and seeks neither apology nor retribution from those who have caused offence
(al-Harawī, 84). Al-Harawī’s definition of Ṣūfī chivalry resonates well with the
definition of altruism, which maintains that one can be selfless in relation to
others and move toward an ethics in which the tensions and friction are re-
moved from such calculations. Much of this selfless ethics was mirrored in the
Persian concept of jawānmardī, which was also incorporated variously into the
Ṣūfī tradition (Ridgeon, Morals and mysticism, 5–6; Ridgeon, Reading Sufi his-
tory, 384–5).
Like the pre-Islamic image of the selfless hero, the Muslim figure of the Ṣūfī
shaykh, often at significant personal risk, defended the poor and the exploited.
Several examples can be enumerated. In the Egyptian context, Muḥammad
al-Ḥifnāwī (d. 1181/1768) embraced his role as a defender of the masses; this
became a central component of his profile as a saintly figure (Clancy-Smith,
152). Interceding to protect victims of oppression might also require defend-
ing individuals higher up the social ladder. In 1201/1786, the Ottoman repre-
sentative in Egypt, Ḥasan Pasha, took to openly extorting money and women
from prominent Cairene families. The only successful resistance was mounted
by a group of Ṣūfī shaykhs. Abū l-Anwār (d. 1228/1813) (Winter, 142), head of
the Wafāʾiyya Ṣūfī order, Aḥmad al-ʿArūsī (d. 1208/1794) (Winter, 119–24), and
Aḥmad al-Dardīr (d. 1201/1786), then head of the Khalwatiyya order in Egypt,
banded together to march to the citadel and deliver a letter of protest to the
ruler (al-Jabartī, 2:196).
Many a Ṣūfī shaykh was known for charity toward the hungry. The seventh/
thirteenth-century Maghribī saint, Abū Marwān al-Yuḥānisī, was famous for
his generosity during the yearly celebrations of the Prophet’s birthday (mawlid
al-nabī), during which he typically fed the needy multitudes for eight con-
secutive days (al-Qashtālī, 105–7). In the same region, the Ṣūfī hagiographer
Ibn Qunfudh (d. 810/1407) claimed that, for many Ṣūfīs, feeding the poor was
essential to their spiritual discipline and training (Ibn Qunfudh, 23; Berque
makes much the same point in regard to the Ṣūfī zāwiya [lodge] generally, see
Berque, 127). In Cairo, the yearly saint day commemorating Aḥmad al-Dardīr
has long been an occasion during which his zāwiya distributes significant alms
to the poor, in the form of money and food (Waugh, 66). In Iran and India, the
langar played much the same public charitable role (Papas, 23–4).
Such altruism not only benefits the needy, but is an organizing principle
for the Ṣūfī’s relationship to those in power with worldly possessions. In the
Indian context, a twelfth-/eighteenth-century hagiography presents Bābā
Ṣūfī Altruism 221
Palangpūsh’s retort to the criticism that he spends too much time with the
wealthy of this world:
The shaykh likens his charity to the acquisitiveness of a predator who leaves
scraps for the animals below him in the food chain. In the same period, an-
other Ṣūfī teacher explains that tradition calls on the shaykh to act simply as
a conduit between the wealthy and the poor. This is reflected in the term faqīr
(lit., ‘impoverished’), a common term for Ṣūfīs in the Persian-speaking world.
Bābā Musāfir, who was known for visiting the sick and helping widows in dis-
tress, declared, “A faqír should not own anything. If God … sends something
from nowhere, he should spend it immediately. If anything remains, it is the
custom of a faqír not to keep it with him … This has been the way of faqírs of
former times” (Digby, 106).
Social assistance is also formalised through the institution of the waqf, or
perpetual endowment. Here, wealth established permanent service institu-
tions, typically for the poor, and in formalised Ṣūfī communities (Sabra in this
volume). Waqfs can be found throughout the Islamic world, but given its size
and wealth, Cairo was particularly well-endowed. Ribāṭs or Ṣūfī hostels were
established in the Mamlūk period to house Ṣūfī communities, or to provide
wider social services. One example, from the middle of the ninth/fifteenth cen-
tury, was the Ribāṭ Zawjat Ināl, intended specifically to house destitute widows.
Zaynab, the wife of Sultan Ināl (r. 857–65/1453–61) established the ribāṭ near
the Ṣūfī zāwiya of the Sādāt al-Wafāʾiyya, and appointed Ḥusnāʾ (d. 888/1483)
the daughter of one of the order’s founding figures ʿAlī Wafāʾ (d. 807/1405) as
its first director (McGregor, 58).
A much larger waqf had been established a century earlier by Sultan Baybars
al-Jāshnakīr (d. 710/1310). This consisted of an assemblage of institutions that
included a khānqāh, a ribāṭ, and a qubba funerary complex. The khānqāh pro-
vided housing for one hundred Ṣūfīs, who attended daily prayers and devotion-
al exercises in return for a monthly stipend. The ribāṭ served as a hospice for
222 McGregor
one hundred Muslims, chosen from among the poor of the city, thirty of whom
resided there; all received a monthly stipend, and a daily ration of bread and
meat. Additional funds were earmarked for manumitting slaves, providing bail
for poor Muslims in jail, providing shrouds for those who died destitute, and
buying medicine for the poor (Fernandez, 24–7; Firouzeh in this volume). In
this configuration, charity was inseparable from the practice and institution-
alisation of Sufism. The charitable function of a waqf supported other types
of religious activities. In the eleventh/seventeenth century, Shāhīn Aḥmad en-
dowed a sabīl-kuttāb (public fountain and Qurʾān school) that included money
in perpetuity to cover school fees, along with food and clothing, for students
who were orphaned (Badr and Crecelius, 83). Another foundation provided
for the needs of blind students studying at al-Azhar, and for local Muslim poor
(Crecelius, 135).
Alongside the waqf and related charitable institutions, Ṣūfī theorists have
explored altruism for its role in spiritual training. These reflections took place
beyond the transactional relationship of divine reward and punishment; they
focus instead on the transformative possibilities of selflessness. A prominent
theme was that of begging, which was generally seen as beneficial for the
Ṣūfī novice. Not all Ṣūfī shaykhs agreed, however, for example, Abū l-Ḥasan
al-Shādhilī (d. c. 656/1258) forbade his followers from begging for alms. This
position set a tone for his order, which expanded across the Islamic world and
asserted its independence in part through its financial autonomy. Al-Shādhilī
is reported to have worn fine clothes to signal his independence from worldly
political powers (Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh, 98). Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr (d. 440/1049), an
early Persian Ṣūfī master, defended his wealth, saying that God put some Ṣūfīs
at the station of contemplation (which includes wealth), and others at the sta-
tion of mortification (al-Hujwīrī, 346).
Another prominent teacher claimed that, for some Ṣūfīs, service to their
shaykh and the community is more beneficial to their spiritual training than
any of the supererogatory devotions Ṣūfīs were famous for (Chih in this vol-
ume). This was the context in which Abū l-Najīb al-Suhrawardī (d. 563/1168)
said, “Service (khidma) is a rank second only to that of shaykhood” (Ohlander,
Sufism, 207). Al-Suhrawardī’s position on begging, however, recognised the
multiple levels at which khidma operated. He allowed it for his followers on
two conditions: when it benefited fellow Ṣūfīs, and when the Ṣūfī him/herself
was in need. He supported this with the rationale that begging restrained the
pride of one’s ego (al-Suhrawardī, 71). Since disciplining the ego is a central
concern in mystical training, the humiliation concomitant with begging could
be a useful tool in a Ṣūfī’s training. The Khurāsānī Ṣūfī master Abū Naṣr al-Sarrāj
(d. 378/988) relates a number of stories in which adepts were enjoined to beg,
Ṣūfī Altruism 223
in order to decrease their pride and arrogance (al-Sarrāj, 191–2). The influential
Ṣūfī author al-Hujwīrī, popularly known as Dātā Ganj Bakhsh (d. c. 467/1074),
relates stories from early Ṣūfī history on the usefulness of begging as an exer-
cise in self-effacement. Begging should be done for the sake of discipline, not
for profit; thus, aspirants curb their egos by learning that they are nothing in
the eyes of others (al-Hujwīrī, 360).
The third dimension of altruism continues with this focus on inner benefits.
More precisely, the ultimate import of īthār is that it bridges the divide between
the seeker and the divine. Al-Harawī lists the three levels of preference that
culminate in a transcending of the self. At the first level, īthār is manifested as
preferring others, respecting their rights, and aspiring to noble acts, generally.
This is followed by a level at which the seeker prefers God’s satisfaction above
all others, even if that entails burdens of poverty or his own anguish. At the
last stage, ‘preference’ as we normally understand it, is abandoned, since it pre-
serves the distance of the subject-object relationship. Rather than struggling
to discern God’s preference, and exerting oneself in its pursuit, the boundaries
break down, and the Ṣūfī leaves behind that very struggle (al-Harawī, 44–5).
Al-Hujwīrī identifies the school of Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Nūrī (d. 295/907), as-
sociated with al-Junayd’s school of ‘sober’ Sufism, as one that is centrally con-
cerned with the concepts of companionship and altruism. For al-Nūrī, the
Ṣūfī path was a place shared by a community (although some teachers would
disagree with him) and thus retirement (ʿuzla) is an inferior and even baleful
practice. In an echo of the Neoplatonists’ struggles against the lower self, with
its worldly desires and appetites, for al-Nūrī, Ṣūfī altruism is the key to proper
conduct, and thus the key to eternal life. But beyond the rewards of paradise,
which are predicated on distance between the individual and God, a higher
altruism leads to union with the divine, and a collapsing of that distance
(al-Hujwīrī, 189–93).
To illustrate the depths of Ṣūfī preference, the story is told of a convert to the
Ṣūfī path, Aḥmad Ḥammadī. Inspired but discomfited by the Qurʾānic verse,
“They prefer them to themselves, although they are indigent” (Q 59:9), Aḥmad
had set off into the desert with his camels, intent on staying as long as needed
to attain to some insight. He tells of a hungry lion that killed one of his camels,
but rather than eating it, the lion withdrew to a nearby high ground and roared.
Foxes, jackals, wolves, and others gathered to eat, but the noble lion kept his
distance until they had eaten their fill. Then he approached the remains with
the intention of satiating his hunger, but seeing a lame fox on the horizon, the
lion withdrew again until the unfortunate fox had eaten. After eating what was
left of the kill, the lion turned to Aḥmad and said, “Even a lowly dog can prefer
others over itself in the matter of food; but a great person sacrifices even in
224 McGregor
matters of spirit, and life itself” (al-Hujwīrī, 193). The lion’s lesson for Aḥmad
clearly points beyond any calculation or reward for one’s altruism, and toward
one’s spiritual orientation on the mystical path.
Al-Nūrī himself embodied this insight in his own saintly acts. One day the
caliph was set to execute three Ṣūfīs for heresy and al-Nūrī stepped forward to
offer himself to the executioner, saying,
In a subsequent exchange with the chief judge, al-Nūrī won mercy for the
Ṣūfīs by describing their intimate connections with God. After he exonerated
them, the caliph asked them what they would like from him, to which they
responded, “The only boon we ask of thee is that thou shouldst forget us, and
neither make us thy favorites nor banish us from thy court, for thy favour and
displeasure are alike to us” (al-Hujwīrī, 191). Thus, al-Nūrī’s path of īthār not
only signals indifference to the material things of this world, but also that such
selfless indifference gives meaning to proximity with God—the goal of all Ṣūfīs
in both this life and the next.
The Maghribī Ṣūfī saint, Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Sabtī (d. 601/1205) represents
another model of sanctity connected to altruism. Inspired by the Prophet’s
Sunna, and Qurʾānic passages, including “They prefer them to themselves,
although they are indigent” (Q 59:9), he concludes that īthār is an essential
part of the Prophet’s legacy. Al-Sabtī resolved to put it into practice, in his life
and teachings; he vowed to only ever accept one-seventh of any gift ever given
to him, and to leave the rest to his fellow Ṣūfīs and the poor. He notes that
after decades of practicing this altruism, his spiritual capacities were greatly
increased. Whatever the saint’s thoughts resolved upon, inevitably came to
pass. Whenever he called on God, the divine voice would immediately attend
to him, announcing labbayka—here I am, at your service! (al-Tādilī, 460).
The tri-fold structure of altruism that has emerged from this survey close-
ly mirrors the observations that we can make of the Ṣūfī treatment of other
key concepts. For example, we can see in the concept of tawakkul (complete
trust in God) much the same dynamic—of a movement from a preliminary
Ṣūfī Altruism 225
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Chapter 11
Ṣūfīs and their institutions have played a role in urbanisation processes in two
ways: sometimes, directly or indirectly, they were at the origin of city founda-
tions and urban developments; at other times, they were active in the integra-
tion of individuals and groups in the urban fabric, and participated in urban
affairs, including in the life of contemporary megacities, in a wide variety
of ways.
Contrary to the idea that Sufism should be limited to world-renouncing
mysticism or folk Islam, naturally rooted in isolated and rural settings rather
than in urban spaces, the relationship between Ṣūfīs and cities has long been
and remains very close. As Ahmet Karamustafa has shown, Sufism as an interi-
orised mode of piety appeared in the educated urban milieus of Baghdad, the
ʿAbbāsid capital, in the second half of the third/ninth century and spread into
a variety of urban places, thanks to the activities of the disciples of Baghdadi
masters, first in Lower Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia (Karamustafa). There, the
educated urban groups eventually merged with the followers of other inward-
looking mystical movements that operated in urban spheres, especially those
of the Malāmatiyya (lit., the “path of blame”) that had spread among traders
and craftsmen and was linked to futuwwa groups (chivalry associations of
young urbanites) (Afshari in this volume).
With the formation of local communities, including charismatic masters
(shaykhs) and their disciples, Sufism in cities acquired a high level of social
visibility. From the fourth/tenth century onward, the process of Sufism’s inte-
gration into city life was strengthened by the establishment of lodges that bore
various names, including ribāṭ, khānaqāh, dargāh, zāwiya, or tekke) (Ephrat
and Pinto in this volume; Firouzeh in this volume). Since the Ṣūfī concept of
sainthood gave urban Ṣūfī leaders, dead or alive, a charisma based on their
proximity with God (walāya), they became foci of attraction for people beyond
the circle of initiated disciples or the urban middle and upper classes. From
the fifth/eleventh century on, partly through the cult of saints and partly the
development of antinomian mystical currents, Sufism spread, largely outside
cities and towns, to villages, steppes, oases, and deserts (Ocak in this volume).
That is, Sufism was not exclusively an urban phenomenon. However, with the
spread of Islam and because or, maybe, despite the transformations of societ-
ies, Ṣūfīs remained, in many cases, key actors of urbanisation processes and the
development of urban sociabilities.
foundation of a Ṣūfī lodge (the Ghāzīler tekke) by dervishes who came with
the Ottoman troops during the conquest and settled there in the 830s/1430s.
Later, in 866–7/1462, the local Ottoman governor, ʿIsā Beg, often considered
the city founder, made a donation for the construction of another Ṣūfī lodge
and additional buildings, including a mosque, which gave to Sarajevo a real
urban character. In the early tenth/sixteenth century, another local governor,
Ghāzī Khusrev Beg, also endowed the town with a complex of buildings com-
prising a khānaqāh for the Khalwatī/Halvetī dervishes. Many toponyms in the
city remind us that several Sarajevo neighbourhoods grew around Ṣūfī lodges
or shrines.
Similar processes took place elsewhere in the Muslim world, where Ṣūfī
shrines, in particular, formed the core of new cities. Eric Ross, who cites the ex-
amples of Mawlay Idriss Zerhoun and Ouazzane in Morocco, and Khuldabad
in the Deccan (in the Indian subcontinent), uses the concept of “shrine-town”
(Ross, Sufi, 3). In Shīʿī areas, certain Ṣūfī shrines had equally symbiotic rela-
tions with urban settlements. Such was the case of Ardabil (in northern Iran),
where the tomb and the zāwiya of Shaykh Ṣafī l-Dīn Ardabīlī (d. 735/1334), situ-
ated in the bazaar area, grew and changed along with the city (Rizvi).
The example of sub-Saharan Africa, where Jean-Louis Triaud observed
three types of encounter between Islam and cities—urban Islamic enclaves,
cities around Islamic courts, and saintly cities—is particularly striking in that
it shows that, even in (partially) nomadic societies, Ṣūfīs also contributed to
urbanisation. In these regions, from the second half of the twelfth/eighteenth
century, that is, during the second wave of the Islamisation of sub-Saharan
Africa, Ṣūfīs who had already been active among nomadic tribes were influ-
ential in the foundation of many cities, for religious, but also for economic
and political reasons (Triaud; Hamès). Leaders of the Sanūsiyya Ṣūfī order
in Cyrenaica considered the construction of zāwiyas (Ṣūfī lodges) not only a
means to sanctify the space and to foster religious activities, but also to ad-
vance education, trade, crafts, and politics. Their centre was the new city of
al-Jaghbūb (in present-day Libya). The Tijānī Ṣūfīs were responsible for the de-
velopment of various cities (Tivouane and Kaolack in Senegal, Nioro in Mali,
Kano in Nigeria), whereas other Ṣūfī shaykhs in Mauritania built zāwiyas that
became the nuclei of sedentarisation and urbanisation. The Murīds, who built
the holy city of Touba (in Senegal), represent an extreme example: Shaykh
Aḥmadu Bàmba Mbàkke (1853–1927) founded the city in 1887, but it developed
mainly during the twentieth century. Touba remained a city entirely managed
by the disciples of this charismatic leader, and its urban design is the product
of the application of Ṣūfī principles and concepts symbolised by the “Touba,”
that is the “tree of paradise,” according to certain prophetic ḥadīths (Ross, Sufi).
230 Clayer
On the one hand, Ṣūfīs were very active in the religious and social life of cities.
On the other hand, the evolution of urban settings also altered patterns of Ṣūfī
organisations and practices.
Paradoxically perhaps, Ṣūfī lodges within cities have been places of retreat
and isolation from the outer world. In some cases, special rooms or cells built
inside lodges were devoted to seclusion (khalwa). This was particularly (but
not exclusively) true in establishments belonging to Ottoman Halvetī groups,
which placed seclusion at the heart of their practices, because spiritual lead-
ers and some elected members engaged in individual khalwas as part of their
regular spiritual exercises, and other members occasionally did so as well
(Curry). Nevertheless, most of the religious practices held in Ṣūfī lodges or in
other spaces (private places, mosques, madrasas) were collective and implied
a religious sociability, during religious festivals and pilgrimages, as well as
in everyday life, including pious and meditative visits to saints’ tombs, prac-
tices of devotion to shaykhs, prayers, and communal rituals such as the dhikr
(remembrance of God through a repetition of formulas and divine names).
Generally, this sociability of several circles of initiated and non-initiated peo-
ple around the spiritual master (and sometimes his family) was hierarchical,
codified, and often gendered (Clayer, Life; Le Gall). As places of initiation of
the disciples by the spiritual master, Ṣūfī establishments and other Ṣūfī spatial
arrangements were also sites for education and transmission not only of Ṣūfī
creeds, ethics, and principles, but also of Islamic knowledge, as well as the pro-
fane sciences and arts (literature, poetry, calligraphy, and so on). For instance,
the transmission of the Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī (the well-known mystical poem
Sufism, Urbanisation, and Sociability in Cities 231
written by Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, d. 672/1273) was central to the diffusion of the
Naqshbandī Ṣūfī path in tenth-/sixteenth-century Istanbul, and took place to-
gether with the transmission of the teachings of Ibn al-ʿArabī (the well-known
Andalusian Ṣūfī, d. 638/1240) and the rigorous observance of the sharīʿa (Le
Gall). Therefore, rich libraries can be found in such places (for example, at
Timbuktu, on which see Ross, A historical), even though oral transmission
(through formulas, tales, poetry, and religious hymns) remained central in the
diffusion of beliefs for most followers.
Similarly, Sufism could be connected with the urban economy in a num-
ber of ways. In premodern Anatolia and the Balkans, and probably also in the
Arab lands, urban crafts and trade guilds were influenced, for a long period,
by futuwwa and Ṣūfī principles inherited from the tradition of the Akhī guilds
(Kara; Aščerić-Todd). Urban craftsmen and traders shared with them a broth-
erhood organisation, as well as a religious ethics and esoteric principles. Ṣūfī
lodges were often located in bazaars or their vicinity, attesting to their intimate
links to economic activities. Through the system of pious foundations (waqf,
pl. awqāf ) and donations made by powerful patrons or more modest followers,
dervish establishments were founded, maintained, and embellished, and their
religious staff rewarded from the revenue of shops, mills, agricultural lands,
etc. Thus, Ṣūfī institutions became small enterprises managed by an adminis-
trator (mütevellī in Turkish), often a descendant of the founder.
From a social point of view, many Ṣūfī lodges also functioned as inns, offer-
ing hospitality to travellers, and to villagers coming from the countryside to the
city for administrative or economic purposes. They served as homes for social
assistance: food and material support were given to various groups of the urban
population, well beyond the circles of initiated members. As in rural areas, the
charisma of shaykhs made them not only spiritual guides, but also advisers in
social matters and arbitrators in conflicts. People came to ask the shaykhs for
advice concerning their families, their personal lives, and their professional
activities. Places of contacts and sociability, the dervish lodges may also have
been places of disputes. On the one hand, conflicts regularly happened over
the shaykh’s succession (Zarcone, Shaykh) or competition occurred between
spiritual leaders; on the other hand, Ṣūfīs were involved in sociopolitical
factions for the territorial control of cities or their neighbourhoods, as in me-
dieval Iran (Rahimi).
Ṣūfī lodges and other spatial arrangements, such as gates and pathways,
were the nucleus of sociability in and beyond the neighbourhoods where they
were located. The study of the tekke of Imrahor founded in the Yedikule quar-
ter in Istanbul at the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century shows that, in
the course of the nineteenth century, among the dervishes who were initiated
232 Clayer
by the shaykh, some lived inside the lodge itself while others were artisans and
religious servants living around and in nearby neighbourhoods. Other initiated
dervishes were employed in the sultan’s palace. A few fellow disciples had a
common name indicating their provincial origin (Clayer and Vatin). If the local
dimension is often predominant, the fact remains that some lodges were still
connected to social networks that went far beyond the city itself, ensuring the
function of shelters for ethno-regional mobile networks. In this case, the urban
Ṣūfī establishments became nodes of mobility between different places in the
Muslim world and its holy places. Ṣūfīs opened tekkes in Istanbul, Konya, Bursa,
Antakya (Antioch), Aleppo, Damascus, and Jerusalem to welcome Indian
and Central Asian pilgrims on a hajj (for the “Hindi” and “Özbek” tekkes, see
Zarcone, Histoire; Zarcone, Sufi; Can; Choudhury). In the Middle East and in
the city of Cairo in particular, the Ṣūfī lodges of the Mevlevīs and the Bektāşīs
likewise served as hubs for Turkish-speaking sociability, while other establish-
ments attracted people from the Maghrib. In addition to these long distance
networks, urban Ṣūfī lodges were also part of shorter distance networks that
allowed for the integration of villagers or inhabitants of small towns into larger
urban centres and facilitated the life of neo-urbanites when urbanisation pro-
cesses were at work. Perhaps more in the cities than elsewhere, Ṣūfī places of
worship were often used as meeting places for various religious groups, despite
the great differences in practices, beliefs, and imaginary. This frequently oc-
curred in Anatolia and is still quite visible in India. However, in times of crisis,
such places also became sites of tensions, disputes, and conflicts among con-
fessional communities and sectarian groups (Werbner, Globalising).
The process of integrating Ṣūfīs and their institutions into urban societies was
changing. In so far as they were influenced by local as well as global transfor-
mations, Ṣūfīs themselves underwent changes by becoming involved in new
forms of urban sociability or tensions. Here it is not possible to analyse every
local or regional change. Among global processes in the premodern epoch, we
should mention the spread of the consumption of coffee that was imported
from the Arabic Peninsula in the tenth/sixteenth century. Dervish circles,
which began to use the virtues of coffee to stay awake during night vigils, pro-
moted the new beverage. The drinking of coffee became ritualised. In some
lodges, spaces were dedicated to its preparation and consumption, and reli-
gious duties were associated with it. In the Ottoman capital, it is significant
that Ṣūfīs using coffee were attacked by ʿulamāʾ who considered the practice
Sufism, Urbanisation, and Sociability in Cities 233
To sum up, Sufism is still extremely active in urban settings throughout the
world, and surely capable of adapting itself to ever-changing local sociopoliti-
cal and global contexts and contributing to these changes.
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Chapter 12
1 Introduction
Islamic mysticism, with its institutionalised form, the ṭarīqas (orders), has
become one of the most well-studied topics in the historiography of Islam.
It is noteworthy that the majority of the literature that has appeared until now
tends to focus on urban mystic thought, the great Ṣūfīs who generated it, and
the ṭarīqas that began to emerge from the sixth/twelfth century onward. We
have far fewer studies about Sufism in rural settings. However, since roughly
the 1980s, the eastern and western Islamic world have seen an increase in in-
terest in Sufism in the rural environment, and the number of anthropological
studies of rural Sufism has grown considerably, as evidenced by this chapter.
We should point out that historians of this field of mysticism are not as fortu-
nate as scholars of urban Sufism, as they face a lack of firsthand sources.
Before commencing with our topic, we must define “rural environment” and
“rural Sufism.” It generally refers to what takes place outside cities, even if it
has social and economic ties with them, albeit limited; thus, “rural environ-
ment” means, first, nomadic and tribal, and second, countryside. Sociological
and anthropological studies have long provided many examples showing that
the culture of these two settings relies mostly on oral tradition and greatly
emphasises mythology. Hence, it should be underscored that “rural Sufism”
is intended to designate Sufism and Ṣūfīs among nomadic tribes and villages
and villagers, which represent the two types of lifestyle in the rural context. In
these surroundings, the essential character of Sufism undoubtedly suits the
abovementioned social, economic, and cultural basis and naturally generates
notions and practices according to it. Consequently, this topic relates to the
practical rituals that take place in the rural environment and the mythological
beliefs taken up in miracle stories, rather than the more theoretical or doc-
trinal written texts of urban Sufism. This distinction should certainly not be
exaggerated and it is important not to be too rigid in our analysis (Peacock
and Yıldız (eds.), Introduction; Gril). Still, we focus on the specificities of rural
contexts, as opposed to what is characterised by cities (Clayer in this volume);
moreover, we must keep in mind that, in the mediaeval and early modern pe-
riods, the institutions of knowledge (schools, colleges, libraries, and so forth)
were concentrated in cities and the level of illiteracy was extremely high in
the countryside.
The primary problem in rural Sufism is one of sources. Aside from the limit-
ed written sources that are rarely produced in this setting, the oral nature of the
topic clearly makes it difficult to effectively comprehend Ṣūfī Weltanschauung,
belief, and culture. As stressed above, the reason for this is the environment—
in rural settings, oral culture predominates over written culture. Despite the
plentiful, varied sources on urban Sufism in the Islamic world today (as op-
posed to the Middle Ages), attaining these resources presents certain difficul-
ties. Since it would be challenging to trace the overall history of rural Sufism in
mediaeval and modern Islam, in this chapter I emphasise the Turkish world,
with occasional mention of other areas. Lastly, I cover mainly the mediaeval
and early modern periods, and occasionally modern times, because contem-
porary rural Sufism has become less differentiated (although it did not van-
ish, as the development of the Maijbhandarī ṭarīqa in Bangladesh shows, see
Harder, chs. 1–2) for a number of reasons: the disappearance of nomadism,
rural exodus, the absorption of villages into cities, and the modernisation of
agriculture (e.g., in Egypt, see Chih).
and anxiety generated by the first clashes between Muslim conquerors and
local peoples in Syria and Egypt. The Ṣūfīs’ lenient, receptive approach played
a significant role in the emergence of this new way of life. Though some Ṣūfīs
were educated in large cities such as Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Kufa,
Basra, Nīshāpūr, Shiraz, and Isfahan, others were not necessarily in metropo-
lises and shared their encounters and thought with the nomadic tribes and
villagers among whom they lived in the remote deserts and steppes. Some of
these educated Ṣūfīs spread Islam through mysticism to, for instance, Turkish
villages and nomadic tribes of Transoxiana. Aḥmad Yasawī (d. 562/1166) is one
of the few whose names and backgrounds are known today.
It can be said that the Turks became acquainted with Islam and Sufism simul-
taneously. It is also known that the Qarakhānids (382–609/992–1212), who
formed a confederated state with Turkish nomadic tribes in fourth-/tenth-
century Transoxiana, were Muslims; Iranian Ṣūfīs had introduced them to
Islam. Aḥmad Yasawī and his ṭarīqa, the Yasawiyya, are an early example of rural
Sufism in that period (Köprülü, Ahmed Yasavi; Eraslan; DeWeese, Foreword).
After receiving training in the Islamic sciences at the foremost centres of the
Islamic world, Yasawī embraced mysticism by affiliating himself with Khwāja
Yūsuf Hamadānī (d. 535/1140), one of the most important Ṣūfīs of the era, and
with Arslān-bāb (Bābā), a shaykh apparently from Yasawī’s place of origin, the
southern Kazakh steppe. His teaching, later synthetised in the Dīwān-i ḥikmat
(Collection of wise sayings) that expresses a philosophy of Ṣūfī life, spread ex-
tensively among the nomadic Turkish tribes (Yasawî; Köprülü, Early mystics,
127–40; DeWeese, Ahmad Yasavi). This influence persisted, and after roughly
a century, Yasawī’s legacy was transferred to the Naqshbandiyya (Yaman). In
what is now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the culture generated by Yasawī con-
tinued throughout early modern times (DeWeese, The Yasavî presence).
Aḥmad Yasawī and others like him, who had received an excellent Islamic
education and abandoned a comfortable urban existence to live in the steppes
of Central Asia among nomadic Turkish tribes and villagers, must have sought
to convert the inhabitants of these regions to Islam. Surrounded by many dis-
ciples, Yasawī continued his mission up to his death, at the tekke on the site
of the large khānaqāh (head lodge), which was rebuilt in 791/1389 by Tīmūr
(r. 771–807/1370–1405) in the city of Turkestan (old Yasī), in modern-day
Kazakhstan. Yasawī was especially successful in spreading Islam in Khwārazm
and the Qipchāq territories, through the widespread propaganda activities of
242 Ocak
the Yasawiyya ṭarīqa he founded, and through his successors, such as Ḥakīm
Ātā, also known as Sulaymān Bāqirghānī (d. 582/1186–7), whom he had taught
(DeWeese, The Yasavî presence).
It has been suggested that in the 610s/1210s, at the beginning of the
Mongol incursion into Central Asia, some Yasawī dervishes migrated to India
and some nomadic Turkish tribes journeyed to Anatolia via Iran (Köprülü,
Anadolu’da). This theory has come under criticism recently. It has been pro-
posed that the Yasawīs did not come to Anatolia; this new theory is based
on the lack of primary evidence and the silsila (the chain of descent of the
order’s shaykhs) of the ṭarīqa (Karamustafa). However, we know that tenth-/
sixteenth- and eleventh-/seventeenth-century Ottoman sources, particularly,
indicate the existence of Yasawīs (even a small number) in rural areas of cen-
tral Anatolia (Muṣṭafā ʿAlī, 5:58–61; Evliya Çelebi, 2:134–5, 3:237). With regard to
the Islamisation of the territory of the Golden Horde, legends hold that Bābā
Tükles (considered of Yasawī descent) converted Özbek Khān (r. 712–42/1313–
41) during the eighth/fourteenth century, and through him, Mongol nomads
(DeWeese, Islamization).
Among the most important examples of Sufism are the Naqshbandīs, who
evolved and expanded from the Yasawīs’ village social base in Central Asia,
in modern-day Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (former Transoxania) especially.
The Naqshbandiyya most often emerged among rural villagers, especially land-
owning farmers. The Khwājagān shaykhs in the Naqshbandī line of descent in
Transoxania from the eighth/fourteenth century on took over the teachings
of the Naqshbandiyya order (Algar), and their activities encompassed the re-
gion’s villages and their environs. The lodges and mausoleums of these shaykhs
still exist in Bukhara and its surrounding towns. One of these tombs from the
ninth/fifteenth century, that of Khwāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār (d. 895/1490), dem-
onstrates how far the Naqshbandiyya had spread in rural Central Asia, par-
ticularly among farmers in villages (Gross). Agricultural production was the
basis of the economic activity of Khwāja Aḥrār’s disciples, and agricultural
lands comprised the majority of their property holdings. In addition to his
Ṣūfī activities, Khwāja Aḥrār provided assurances to the people vis-à-vis the
state by developing a system in which landowners of small- and medium-size
holdings voluntarily ceded their lands, through waqfs (pious foundations), to
him or the order, and in this way, the villagers came into his circle of disciples
(Paul). Perceived as a protective mechanism, the order prevented arbitrary
Ṣūfīs in Rural Environments 243
As noted, the perception of Islam among the nomadic tribes differed from the
understanding of Sufism that derived from the more formal, theoretical Ṣūfī
thought that developed in the written culture of urban Ṣūfī institutions. This
variance was fostered by the difficult natural conditions that shaped the lives
244 Ocak
Figure 12.1 Shrine of Dede Garkın in Dedeköy near Mardin (eastern Anatolia)
Photo by Ahmet Yaşar Ocak
Figure 12.2 Exterior of Bābā Ilyās shrine near Amasya (Black Sea Region)
Photo by Ahmet Yaşar Ocak
Ṣūfīs in Rural Environments 245
Figure 12.3 Interior of Bābā Ilyās shrine near Amasya (Black Sea Region)
Photo by Ahmet Yaşar Ocak
of the nomads and their oral cultures and narrative writings tended to focus on
myths. Few Ṣūfīs affiliated with nomadic tribes produced mystical theories like
their urban counterparts, but they (i.e., those affiliated with nomadic tribes)
created a situation suited to the structures of Ṣūfī culture in which disciples
transmitted thought from the successors (khalīfas) of the great Ṣūfīs. In these
circumstances, tales of the shaykhs were a more effective means of transmis-
sion than sophisticated speculative doctrines. Close examination shows that
these oral traditions and narrative texts describe relations between the no-
mads’ societal structures and their view of the world and themselves. They are,
on the one hand, mystical stories and, on the other, “oral texts” that perform a
sociological function in nomadic society.
Dede Garkın, the aforementioned Wafāʾī shaykh in Anatolia and leader of
the Turkmen Garkın clan, was a significant, influential figure in northern Iraq
and southeast Anatolia, particularly among the Turkmen and Kurdish tribes
(Ocak, Ortaçağ, 44–5). In contrast, among the Turkish and Mongol tribes that
lived largely in Qipchāq lands north of the Black Sea and in the Balkans, reli-
gious authority was vested in the Yasawīs, Ḥaydarīs, and Qalandars. Although
these groups found support among the nomads and the villagers, the difficult
life Ṣūfī groups led as a result probably played a role in their loose adherence
246 Ocak
to Sunnī principles. The Turkmen tribes that settled in Anatolia were governed
by individuals who acted as chiefs and religious leaders; they used winter and
summer pastures granted to them by the Anatolian Saljūqs in accordance with
traditional principles of shared property (Cahen, 572–5). Though they also paid
a specific annual tax (Turan), they often avoided it, either by refusing to pay
the tax collectors or by rebelling. The Bābāʾī revolt (to which we return) was
apparently triggered by an attempt to collect taxes (Elvan Çelebi, 146). In addi-
tion to Turkmen, but fewer in number, there were a number of tribes: Qarluqs,
Khalajs, Qanghlıs, and Qipchāqs. These nomads spread throughout eastern,
southeast, and central Anatolia, bringing with them their traditional tribal
organisation, customs, and traditions. To prevent likely revolts, the Anatolian
Saljūqs divided the tribes into small groups and settled them in different areas.
Over time, the nomads adopted a sedentary life and began to work in agricul-
ture and establish villages. These “tribal villages” were usually named after the
heads of the tribes, who were Ṣūfīs and can be called “tribal saints.”
peasants relied on Ṣūfī brotherhoods that offered charity health care and re-
ligious education, albeit limited, in elementary Qurʾānic schools. The fami-
lies of shaykhs benefited from a new system, co-opted by the Ottomans, that
allowed them to acquire the most lucrative agricultural lands (Walker). Facing
the rising influence of Wahhābī groups, as in east Africa at the beginning of the
twentieth century, Ṣūfī orders were particularly active in educating and pros-
elytising the semi-illiterate rural population. We may mention the Qādiriyya of
Somalia, whose scholars propagated a cosmological view along with orthoprax
models of behaviour in brief, simple, and straightforward printed works used
by itinerant “bush preachers” (Reese, ch. 6). Today, we still find a form of village
Sufism in various countries where Qurʾānic schools run by Ṣūfīs predominate
over state institutions. Such is the case in rural Senegal, where daaras founded
by Tijānīs attract more pupils than “French schools” (Smith, 60–84).
Because of its distance from centres of religious authority and political power,
rural Sufism also had a “non-conformist” dimension, perhaps more than Sufism
in urban contexts. In general, in historical studies “non-conformism” is under-
stood to mean that which does not fit acceptable, commonly recognized soci-
etal rules, and it is used to describe the attitudes of those groups frequently in
conflict with the political authority. It is especially applicable to Sufism, since
some rural Ṣūfīs rebelled against pressure from the ruling power for a variety
of reasons (particularly tax burdens).
Depending on location, uprisings of non-conformist Ṣūfī shaykhs in rural
areas were referred to as qiyām (revolt) or ʿiṣyān (rebellion); these were almost
always fuelled by mahdist, i.e., messianic (from the Arabic mahdī, “the rightly
guided one”), ideologies. Facing opposition to tax impositions, disruption of
law and order, episodes of pillaging, and loss of control, the political authori-
ties preferred to suppress these disturbances with military force, and massacres
sometimes occurred. Political authorities faced with such uprisings generally
proclaimed that those involved were heretics and then cowed them into sub-
mission by force of arms or by burdening them with hefty taxes. Though the
authorities sought to exert greater control, this was not easy to achieve, given
that nomads were accustomed to an autonomous lifestyle and often revolted
against the constraints of the governing power.
In Anatolia, nearly a dozen revolts occurred in the Saljūq and Ottoman peri-
ods alone. These revolts were usually inspired by mahdist ideologies and their
leaders were mostly tribal chiefs with religious charisma who were viewed as
Ṣūfīs in Rural Environments 249
mahdīs. As emphasised, rural Sufism not only involves differences of belief but
also issues related to economic and social conflicts with political powers and
settled areas. During the Middle Ages, the most striking mahdist movement
in Turkish history (in terms of “non-conformist” Sufism), the effects of which
extended to later centuries, was the so-called “revolt of the Bābāʾīs” (Ocak, La
Révolte). Moreover, in 819/1416, an eminent scholar of Muslim jurisprudence in
the Balkans, shaykh Badr al-Dīn/Bedreddīn (d. 819/1416), led a movement with
mahdist overtones that attracted Muslim and Christian villagers. This Balkan
uprising ended in failure, and the shaykh was executed (Balivet). Unsure of
the fate of their lands and seeking to maintain their livelihoods, the villag-
ers had regarded shaykh Badr al-Dīn as a mahdī and a saviour. His disciples
also included former Balkan landowners whose properties had been seized
by the Ottomans.
A somewhat similar situation took place in the ninth-/fifteenth-century
Maghrib, where the autonomy of rural Ṣūfī communities (ṭāʾifa) brought them
into conflict with Marīnid powers (Geoffroy, 209–10).
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Ṣūfīs in Rural Environments 251
⸪
Chapter 13
In spite of the repeated warnings by Ṣūfīs about the dangers of political power
and those who wield it, a continual relationship has existed between spiritual
authorities and worldly powers; in fact, Sufism has been so useful to rulers that
the institutionalisation of Islamic mysticism may appear to be the creation of
rulers and states, and Sufism itself has eventually acquired its own hierarchi-
cal organisations and structures of power. Paradoxically, the political commit-
ment of certain individuals or groups did not hinder them from preaching an
ideal of world renunciation. This continuous oscillation between quietism and
activism, religious authority and political power, transcendence and imma-
nence should not be understood to indicate that Sufism was an instrument of
worldly powers or spirituality was diluted by exclusively temporal concerns.
In terms of their political and doctrinal aspects, Ṣūfīs have long discussed the
very meaning of the power that God has given to some of them.
This chapter explores five successive yet overlapping topics that have gener-
ated scholarly debates.
(1) The early and high mediaeval period (from the second/eighth to the
sixth/twelfth century) saw the expansion of Islam westward as well as east-
ward. Ascetics (zāhid, pl. zuhhād), then Ṣūfīs, confronted “infidel” regimes but
also Muslim rulers they saw as illegitimate. This casus belli, which led to a re-
flection on war ( jihād, ghazawāt) as a pious act, was later discussed by the
theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) who became a major reference
in Ṣūfī political thought. Yet, Muslim mystics maintained an ambivalent rela-
tionship of distance and proximity with the state apparatus of the ʿAbbāsids
and the Būyids.
(2) The second section covers the period from the seventh/thirteenth to the
ninth/fifteenth century. The emergence of Ṣūfī orders was closely observed,
even fostered, by royal courts in the Maghrib, the Mashriq, Anatolia, Iran,
Central Asia, and India. The sultans’ patronage of Ṣūfīs was as much pragmat-
ic as religious, given the widespread belief in the supernatural power of holy
men (walī, pl. awliyāʾ) who made predictions ( firāsa) and provided support
(madad) for rulers. A subgenre of the Ṣūfī ‘mirror for princes’ literature devel-
oped in letters and treatises, especially in Persian.
(3) The Islamic millennial shift, during the tenth/sixteenth and the eleventh/
seventeenth centuries, accentuated this tendency towards saintly rulership.
In this regard, three Ṣūfī dynasties are emblematic: the Jazūliyya in Morocco,
the early Ṣafaviyya in Iran, and the Naqshbandiyya in eastern Turkestan.
The theories of an “esoteric government” (dawla bāṭiniyya, dīwān al-awliyāʾ)
derived from the concept of the sanctity (walāya) of governorship (wilāya),
and is based on the thought of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (d. 298/910) and Ibn al-
ʿArabī (d. 638/1240s), as found in later elaborations.
(4) In the chapter’s fourth section, covering the twelfth/eighteenth and
thirteenth/nineteenth centuries, we discuss the Ṣūfī view of the rise of colonial
powers across the Muslim world. Whereas some saintly leaders sought accom-
modation with the new authorities, notably in Africa, others, such as Sayyid
Aḥmad Barelwī (d. 1246/1831), Imām Shāmil (d. 1288/1871), and ʿAbd al-Qādir
al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1300/1883), led armed resistance movements and called for jihād.
In the historical context and the institutional history of Islamic mysticism,
Muslim states like Egypt introduced modern administrative practices into Ṣūfī
orders (ṭuruq).
(5) In the last section, we propose to call what emerged from the twentieth
century onwards a “baraka bureaucracy.” This refers to Ṣūfī officials, if not ap-
paratchiks, for example in Soviet Uzbekistan and in Syria, or Ṣūfī associations
( jamāʿas) pursuing political agendas, as in Indonesia, Turkey, and western
Europe. Lastly, we can observe the explicit backing, even the creation, of politi-
cal parties by Ṣūfī lineages in Senegal, the Sudan, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Pakistan,
a practice that can be interpreted as an attempt to give a spiritual dimension
to nationalist ideologies.
The distrust of scholars towards political power manifested itself very early
in Islamic intellectual history. In addition to the ḥadīth stating, “God hates
nothing more than a Qurʾān reader who visits a ruler (amīr)” (Wensinck, I,
397b7), many statements often repeated by mystics warn that “the worst rul-
ers are those most remote from the scholars, and the worst scholars are those
closest to the rulers” (Rosenthal, 330). According to Baghdad masters such as
the celebrated al-Junayd (d. 298/910), political life contradicted the spiritual
quest, and involvement in politics constituted opposition to the divine de-
cree (Junayd). The Khurāsān Ṣūfī milieu, in the person of the influential Ṣūfī
theorist al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), gave birth to the legend of Ibrāhīm b. Adham
(d. c. 161/777–8) who is said to have abdicated his throne in Balkh to lead an
Sufism and Worldly Powers 257
ascetic life (Jones). Despite advice, ideals, and legends designed to discourage
mystics from worldly powers, mutual necessity between the two persisted. A
high official at the ʿAbbāsid court in Sāmarrāʾ (in present-day Iraq), al-Shiblī
(d. 334/946) is a vivid example of a Muslim who abandoned his post to become
a Ṣūfī under the supervision of al-Junayd, but neverthless, remained close to
court circles in Baghdad until the end of his life (Sobieroj). More profoundly,
the tragic course of events and the weight of the corrupt and injust world,
forced ascetics and gnostics to take part in temporal affairs.
The first and greatest challenge was the preservation of Islam itself, the
spread of which took dramatic turns in the frontier lands (thughūr) between
dār al-Islām (“the abode of Islam”) and dār al-ḥarb (“the abode of war”).
Interestingly, the “real” Ibn Adham probably engaged in military operations
on the border with Byzantium in greater Syria, whereas his student Shaqīq
al-Balkhī (d. 194/810) led a jihād against Turks in Central Asia (Mojaddedi;
Ephrat and Pinto in this volume). The life and the writings of ʿAbdallāh b.
al-Mubārak (d. 181/797) reveal that he was an ascetic who shunned worldliness,
yet did not shun the world itself. Later sources depict him as a scholar teaching
ḥadīth, and a warrior who travelled from Iran to the Arab-Byzantine frontier
to fight for the sake of God. In his foundational treatise, the Kitāb al-jihād, he
presents holy war as not simply a legal concept, but as a spiritual discipline,
dependent on pure intentions and equivalent to intensive worship and piety
(Salem, 76–104). The struggle for Islam continued until the fifth/eleventh
century: the Ṣūfī moralist, proselyte and benefactor Kāzarūnī (d. 426/1033)
used to dispatch fighters (ghāzī, pl. ghāziyān) to Asia Minor to wage war on
the Christians of Byzantium, while he himself combatted Zoroastrians in Fārs
and negotiated the tensions between religious communities with the Būyid
vizier in Shiraz (Meier, Persian text ch. 17 and 23). What we might label the
“ascetic jihād” of early mediaeval times defies the common assumption among
scholars that Ṣūfīs distinguished between the “lesser” (aṣghar) jihād and the
“greater” (akbar) jihād, and emphasised the latter over the former; this was not
the case until the spiritualising theories of al-Ghazālī and Ibn al-ʿArabī; and
despite their legacy, in subsequent centuries, these theories were exceptions
rather than the rule (Cook, Jihad, ch. 2; see below on the Ṣūfī jihād in moder-
nity; Cook in this volume).
The Islamic states, rather than the “infidels,” were equally problematic for
pious Muslim individuals. In Ifrīqiyya (modern Tunisia) under the Shīʿī dynas-
ty of the Fāṭimids, the provocative saint Abū Isḥāq al-Jabanyānī (d. 369/979)
challenged the political authorities with his insults and miracles. According
to one hagiographical tradition, the patron saint of Tunis, Muḥriz b. Khalaf
(d. 413/1022), defended Sunnī orthodoxy against official Shīʿīsm and encouraged
258 Papas
the condemnation and execution of the Shīʿīs of Tunis under the Ḥammādids
(r. 405/1015 to 515 or 518–47/1121 or 1124–52), a dynasty that severed its relations
with the Fāṭimids (Idris; Pellat). There was no question of holy war; instead,
Ṣūfīs supported a part of the population’s resistance against what they per-
ceived to be illegitimate or oppressive powers.
This political stance often found its moral justification in the Qurʾānic pre-
cept of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” (al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-
nahy ʿan al-munkar) (from Q 3:104 and other verses). The precept was known
as ḥisba (censorship, lit. “accountability”), according to al-Ghazālī, in his Iḥyāʾ
ʿulūm al-dīn (Revival of the religious sciences) in Arabic and his Kīmiyā-yi
saʿādat (Elixir of happiness) in Persian. It was previously invoked by ascetic
fighters to validate extending their self-discipline to the environment around
them; it was also used by the Arab-Iranian Ṣūfī Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 283/896),
who conceptualised a religious leader assigned by God to, among other things,
forbid wrong and command right. Concerning the wrongdoing of rulers and
the duty to rebel, al-Ghazālī defended the right to exhort, to oppose verbally,
and to sacrifice one’s life for the cause; and if necessary, the recourse to force
was admissible without the rulers’ permission. Here again, the idea of doing
something for God’s sake without personal or worldly motives was decisive
(Cook, Commanding, 427–68).
Though not specifically a Ṣūfī viewpoint, these subtly radical ideas cata-
lysed a series of factors in the Muslim West, and these factors converged to give
Sufism an unprecedented political significance. Considered a blameworthy in-
novation (bidʿa) by many Mālikī jurists in the Maghrib, the Iḥyāʾ was prohib-
ited in Fez and Marrakesh in the sixth/twelfth century and publicly burnt in
509/1103 on the order of the qāḍī of Cordoba, Ibn Ḥamdīn (d. 508/1114). Yet
this book continued to be read and deeply effected its Ṣūfī readers; al-Murābiṭ
authorities increased their pressure. Al-Ghazālī’s revival project was accom-
panied by messianic expectations among Ṣūfīs, and this concerned the local
rulers. Thus, the renowned Andalusian master Abū Madyan (d. 589/1193 or
594/1198), who read and spread the doctrines of the Iḥyāʾ, avoided conflicts
with political authorities but was denounced to the sultan as a threat to the
dynasty (dawla) because he was seen by the populace as a potential messiah
(mahdī) and, moreover, his disciples were widespread (García-Arenal, 105–
14). The Ṣūfī idea of a saintly elite with access to God contributed to Mahdist
hopes and convinced followers that among this elite a guide would emerge for
the community of the faithful. Although what some scholars called the Ṣūfī
“school of Almeria” did not exist as such, its personalities corresponded with
one another by letter, and this was sufficient to arouse suspicion among juridi-
cal and political authorities. In 536/1141, the al-Murābiṭ sultan in the Maghrib
Sufism and Worldly Powers 259
by the Turkmen shaykhs Bābā Ilyās Khurāsānī (d. 638/1240) and Bābā Isḥāq
(d. 638/1240) challenged Saljūq rule in Anatolia. Although little is known about
the Bābāʾī doctrine, it was clearly imbued with Ṣūfī antinomianism and strongly
tinted by messianism. As for the political dimension, most experts consider the
insurrections to be a result of sociopolitical conflicts between semi-nomadic
groups and sedentary populations supported by the Saljūqs, while others em-
phasise local causes related to taxes and a regional feud with the Chalcedonian
Armenians (Ocak, Babaîler; Beldiceanu-Steinherr; Ocak in this volume).
Whereas the narratives of intercessory meetings between the Saljūq sultans
and fourth-/tenth- and fifth-/eleventh-century Qalandars (Kalenders) such
as Bābā Ṭāhir ʿUryān (d. 401/1010) (lit., “the naked”) and Darwīsh Āhū-pūsh
(lit., “the one covered by a gazelle skin”) are legendary (Ocak, Marjinal Sûfîlik,
18–22; Baldick), later, better attested cases show that the relationships between
Anatolian Ṣūfīs and power institutions tended to fluctuate between mutual
suspicion and common interests.
In terms of the literature produced by court authors in the Muslim East,
it depicts holy individuals as legitimising the reign of temporal rulers.
Hagiographers, for example, of the Khurāsānī saint Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr
(d. 440/1049), extrapolated the effectiveness of his power from the authority
he exercised over the political and military elite. To these authors, true sover-
eignty was in the hands of the saint, not those of the sultan. This explains why
the biographer of the Persian Ṣūfī Aḥmad-i Jām (d. 536/1141) described him as
the spiritual patron of the Saljūq sultan Sanjar b. Malikshāh (d. 552/1157). More
concretely, signs of contacts between Ṣūfīs and political figures are visible in
another kind of document that is crucial later: letters exchanged between the
Saljūq vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 485/1092), who asks for advice and from two
Ṣūfīs, ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī l-Harawī (d. 481/1089) and Abū l-Ḥasan Bustī (d. ?).
This confirms the rapprochement between rulers and ascetics, though at this
point, it cannot yet be considered a relation of patronage and reciprocal ser-
vices (Karamustafa, 144–55, 176). An imaginary of Ṣūfī sainthood as similar to
governorship began to emerge, though these speculations only found their full
expression and institutional application in the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/
fourteenth centuries onwards.
Often explained by the Mongol invasions of the 610s/1220s onwards and the
resultant necessity of re-establishing social structures and restoring religious
authority, the rise of Ṣūfī orders in the Muslim East was also the result of a
Sufism and Worldly Powers 261
episode of the conversion to Islam of Berke Khān (r. 655–65/1257–67) (the future
ruler of the Golden Horde) at the hands of Sayf al-Dīn Bākharzī (d. 659/1261), a
disciple of Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 618/1221). Another role was that of educator
and spiritual mentor, as in the case of Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband (d. 791/1389),
the eponymous founder of the Naqshbandiyya Ṣūfī order who taught his spiri-
tual path to the prince of Herat Malik Ḥusayn (r. 732–71/1332–70). We also find
Ṣūfīs with more straightforward political roles, mainly as mediators resolving
political conflicts (e.g., when nomad armies attacked the Bukhara citadel and
Ṣūfīs mediated to avoid a massacre), and as kingmakers. For example, Ṣūfī mas-
ters allegedly asserted the legitimacy of Tīmūr (Tamerlane; r. 771–807/1370–
1405), predicted his domination, and participated in his enthronement (Paul,
Scheiche und Herrscher).
From the early modern period onwards, the political advent of the
Naqshbandiyya was an important element that had long-lasting consequenc-
es. The attitude of the early masters, known as Khwājagān, was initially qui-
etist and apolitical. The shaykhs issued statements such as “Do not sit with
rulers and sons of rulers,” recommended that their followers stay away from
the public sphere in general, cultivate patience (ṣabr), and apply a principle of
“solitude within society” (khalvat dar anjuman); that is, be socially active, but
remain inwardly focused on God. Towards the middle of the ninth/fifteenth
century, the Naqshbandī attitude changed radically when ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār
(d. 895/1490) led a Ṣūfī order that came to dominate Central Asian Islam; he
stated, “a good khwāja must benefit Muslims and must also mingle with amīrs
and sulṭāns….” Aḥrār acted accordingly (Paul, Solitude within society; Gross).
Among the elements that changed were the land tenure system, which al-
lowed religious figures to accumulate endowment properties; the weakening
of central authority in the Timūrid political structure; and the Islamic belief
system that attributed power and authority to Ṣūfī saints. Though hagiogra-
phers may have exaggerated Aḥrār’s political influence (for example, in ʿAlī
b. Ḥusayn al-Wāʿiẓ al-Kāshifī’s (d. c. 939/1532) influential work, Rashaḥāt ʿayn
al-ḥayāt (Tricklings from the fountain of life)), endowment (waqf ) deeds
and letters between the shaykh (or his trusted disciples) and sultans such as
Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (r. 873–911/1469–1506) document Aḥrār’s authoritarian role as
advisor to decision-makers at the court and as a mediator in disputes between
princes. He acted to ensure peace and unity and uphold the sharīʿa and a strict
Sunnism (Chekhovich; Gross and Urunbaev, 14–17, 24–36). With Aḥrār, the
“solitude within society” principle found a political significance; he shaped the
doctrinal framework to ensure that political involvement became not only licit
but spiritually rewarding (Algar, 145).
Sufism and Worldly Powers 263
The spread of the Naqshbandiyya, notably the Aḥrārīs, in India is among the
major, albeit late elements that may explain the confluence between Ṣūfīs and
sultans. In contrast to the idealised principle, according to which Indian Ṣūfīs
(particularly the Chishtiyya order) kept aloof from politics, we find a cross-study
of chronicles, hagiographies, conversations, and letters (all written in Persian),
that show to what extent saintly authority and courtly power ultimately
merged into a politico-religious interdependence. In contrast to exhortations
such as, “If you desire to attain the position of great saints, do not pay atten-
tion to princes” by the Chishtī master Farīd al-Dīn Ganj-i Shakar (d. 664/1265),
numerous narratives from the Delhi Sultanate made use of a different rhetoric,
which brought saints and sultans closer together (Auer, Intersections between
Sufis and power). In the chronicle Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī (Generations of [sultan]
Nāṣir) by Minhāj-i Sirāj Jūzjānī (d. after 659/1260) as well as in the hagiography
Fawāʾid al-fuʾād (Benefits of the heart) by Ḥasan Dihlavī (d. 737/1336) we find
tales about the predictions ( firāsa) of Ṣūfī shaykhs and descriptions of them
blessing rulers who then became sultans. Court chroniclers sought to establish
a sultan’s destiny as decided by God, while Ṣūfī authors sought to show that the
saint’s clairvoyance confirmed his role as maker of destiny and vehicle of God’s
will. Other historians and Ṣūfī biographers deliberately confused the two fig-
ures: on the one hand, Ṣūfī masters were called sultans, surrounded by a court
of disciples who received robes (khirqa) during a quasi-royal ceremony; on
the other, sultans were depicted as shaykhs who possessed the qualities of the
friends of God (awṣāf-i awliyāʾ); they were blessed and had miraculous powers.
Beyond the symbolic nature of a literary culture, this rhetoric reveals ways of
thinking and common conceptions and beliefs that resulted in actual practices
and institutional realities.
It is said that the sultan Shams al-Dīn Īltutmish (r. 607–33/1211–36) was re-
quired by his official historians to maintain his relations with Ṣūfī masters. He
seems to have been particularly pious and devout, not simply in his own reli-
gious practice but also in developing Delhi as an Islamic city. In the collective
memory of Indian Sufism, the sultan appears as a great patron of mysticism,
strongly supported by Chishtī shaykhs and influenced by Ṣūfīs in his policy of
accommodation with Hindus. Not all shaykhs promoted concord with Hindus:
the Chishtī Ṣābirī master ʿAbd al-Quddūs Gangohī (d. 944/1537) wrote let-
ters to the Mughal emperor Bābur (r. 932–6/1526–30), asking him to exclude
the “infidels” from high offices and deny them financial assistance from the
government (Alam, Languages, 84–8, 160–1). Concerning the Afghan Lodī dy-
nasty, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī’s (d. 1052/1642) hagiographical com-
pendium mentions a plethora of examples. Shaykh Muḥammad Mallāwah’s
264 Papas
(d. 900/1495) prayer made the harvest so abundant that the sultan Sikandar
Lodī (r. 894–923/1489–1517) thanked God for the saint’s presence; Malik Zayn
al-Dīn (d. 926/1520) was a noble (vakīl) at the court of a governor Khān Jahān
(cousin of Sikandar), and Zayn’s brother Shaykh Vazīr al-Dīn (d. 932/1526) fell
on the battlefield; some Ṣūfīs were consulted before combat to give their pre-
dictions while others were given diplomatic missions (ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlavī,
345–6, 414–5, 453–5, 585).
Regarding the mediaeval Deccan, historians have suggested that the ha-
giographical narratives—written much later—minimised the violence of the
Islamisation process in which Ṣūfīs participated. We have the onomastics like
shahīd (martyr) and asad al-awliyāʾ (lion of the saints), which reveal the pres-
ence of holy warriors alongside the military, and in at least two cases, promi-
nent Ṣūfī combatants, i.e., Ṣūfī Sarmast (d. 680/1281?) (a disciple of Niẓām
al-Dīn Awliyāʾ) fought Hindus in Maharashtra, and Pīr Maʿbar Kʾhandāʾit
(d. ?) joined a military expedition to South India against the Tamil in 710/1311.
However, other scholars argue that surnames were merely symbolic epithets
and, more importantly, the few sources available depict the Chishtīs’ social
role and mystical philosophy according to which most of them were religious
leaders not engaged in military activities; the “warrior Ṣūfī” was a later legend-
ary construction used to legitimise the Muslim conquest of the Deccan (Eaton,
19–44; Ernst, 99–105). This did not mean that Ṣūfīs were apolitical. The case
of the Khuldābād (in Maharashtra) Chishtīs epitomises the complex relations
of independence and interdependence, of proximity and distance that mys-
tics maintained with the powers-that-be (Ernst, 191–215). Integrated into the
patronage system, Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ (d. 725/1325), his deputy (khalīfa) in
the Deccan Burhān al-Dīn Gharīb (d. 738/1337), and the latter’s successor Zayn
al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 771/1369), did not accept (in theory) the donations, but ad-
mitted them in practice under specific legal conditions. Administrators and
notables used to visit the shaykhs to take their opinions, to listen to sermons,
or to be initiated. After his initiation into the Chishtiyya, Qutlugh Khān, the
Tughluq governor of Daulatabad from 736/1335 to 745/1344, was reputed to be
a king outwardly but a Ṣūfī inwardly. The fact that his successor did not follow
the same path and Zayn al-Dīn saw him as an oppressor is a reminder that
the links between Ṣūfīs and rulers were tense and fragile. In addition to the
“Maussian gift” obligations (a theory of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss
on the threefold obligation to give, receive, and return, an obligation that then
creates social interdependence), Ṣūfī prayers for the emperor, the bestowal of
relics, and attendance at the enthronement, shaykhs tried to avoid personal
involvement with the court, though they encouraged their disciples to obtain
government posts.
Sufism and Worldly Powers 265
Bālī Efendī (d. 960/1553) spied for the imperial authorities on the Ṣafavids and
on the “heretics”; and his successor Nūr al-Dīn Zāde (d. 979/1571) insisted that
advising state officials was more urgent than initiating the masses. This elit-
ist political position could not but be intertwined with loyalty conflicts and
regional enmities, leading rival shaykhs to very different fates and rendering
occult sciences (predictions, dreams, revelations, talismans, etc.) politically
sensitive (Clayer, Mystiques, 69–112; Karataş).
Sufism in the Middle East drew the attention of the state authorities long
before the Ottoman conquest. In 569/1173, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn or Saladin (r. 564–
89/1169–93) endowed the first Ṣūfī lodge in Cairo, named Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ (lit.,
“happiest of the happy”), and introduced the office of the “chief master” (shaykh
al-shuyūkh), on the model of the one established in Damascus under Nūr al-Dīn
Zangī (r. 541–69/1147–74). This marked the beginning of the Ayyūbids active in-
terest in Sufism. Prosopography confirms that, until 709/1309, this institution
remained in the hands of non-Egyptians who were more elite politicians than
mystics, and were well connected with the Ayyūbid and the early Mamlūk rul-
ing class. At the heart of this state-sponsored system, master shaykhs such as
ʿImād al-Dīn ʿUmar (d. 636/1239) or Taqī l-Dīn al-ʿAllāmī (d. 695/1295) acted
as viziers and diplomats, in addition to serving at the lodge, i.e. teaching law,
leading rituals, and overseeing everyday activities. Above all, the purpose of
the lodge was to spread the ideology of the state, in this case juridical Sufism
based on Sunnī Shāfiʿī Ashʿarī doctrine (Hofer, ch. 1; Gottschalk).
Other Ṣūfīs in Egypt, especially the Shādhiliyya order under the guid-
ance of Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Mursī (d. 686/1287) and Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī
(d. 709/1309), remained aloof from the state. More informal movements in
Upper Egypt were even hostile to Mamlūk rule (Hofer, 128–36, 179–85). From
the perspective of religious history, whatever the balance of pragmatism and
personal interest that determined the attitudes of Ṣūfīs and sultans, a common
belief linked these figures throughout the late mediaeval period. According to
Qurʾān 25:12 (among many other verses), omnipotence belongs to God alone;
the delegation of sovereignty (mulk) to men is metaphorical, and sovereigns
(malik, pl. mulūk) come after the prophets, caliphs, and saints in the hierar-
chy of power. As a result, the position of Ṣūfīs vis-a-vis the state was fragile,
but the legitimacy of rulers was equally uncertain. Under the Mamlūks and
the Ottomans, in Syria and Egypt, the amīrs and sulṭāns believed (iʿtiqād) in
the sainthood of Ṣūfī shaykhs, through whom they saw the possibility of su-
pernatural assistance (madad), and the shaykhs, in turn, urged the rulers to
publicly seek spiritual advice, religious legitimacy, and occult intervention
(Geoffroy, 101–108).
Sufism and Worldly Powers 267
Conversely, although many Ṣūfīs were closely affiliated with rulers, various
prominent masters of the time expressed serious doubts. For instance, the il-
literate ʿAlī l-Khawwāṣ (d. 939/1532) maintained that Ṣūfīs should not actively
engage with temporal rulers to advance their own interests. Yet, seeking in-
tercession for someone else was considered laudable. Notably, the polymath
al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), in his Mā rawā-hu al-asāṭīn fī ʿadam al-majīʾ ilā l-salāṭīn
(What has been transmitted by the authorities about not going to the sultans),
rejected contact with men of power on the grounds that, according to numer-
ous ḥadīths, scholars may be affected by proximity to worldly rulers who have
committed political misdeeds (Mauder). This debate among Ṣūfīs not only
challenged the legitimacy of this or that ruler, but it also challenged secular
rulership itself, such that Ṣūfī advice literature seemed to presage politico-
religious upheavals.
The ancient genre of Islamic ‘mirrors for princes’ attracted Ṣūfī authors quite
early. Aside from a chapter of the Kīmiyā entitled “On governing and exercis-
ing authority,” the theologian al-Ghazālī is believed to have produced a major
reference work, the Naṣīḥat al-mulūk (Advice for kings, esp. part 1), on the
practices of statecraft and the spiritual ideals required for a ruler conceived
of as “viceregent of God” (khalīfat Allāh). Composed in Persian, it was trans-
lated into Arabic and Turkish, and was circulated widely. The Mirṣād al-ʿibād
min al-mabdaʾ ilā l-maʿād (The path of God’s bondsmen from origin to return,
esp. part 5, ch. 1–3) by the Kubrawī master Dāya Rāzī (d. 654/1256) was also
written in Persian then translated into Arabic and even Chinese. This work
offered kings, ministers, and deputies guidance on the spiritual path. Another
Kubrawī, Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī (d. 786/1385) from Iran wrote the Dhakhīrat
al-mulūk (The treasure for kings) in which he discussed the principles of gov-
ernance for Muslim rulers and state officials on the model of the Prophet and
the first caliphs (Bagley; Razi, 395–444; Riyāḍ). These popular works, which
were copied and spread in the Mamlūk, Saljūq, Ottoman, and Mughal courts,
remained in the conceptual frame of the Ṣūfī-sultan patronage system; they
also revealed the mystics’ growing interest in political involvement.
Beyond this, Central Asian Ṣūfīs of the Timūrid and post-Timūrid peri-
ods openly called for rulers to support Ṣūfī orders and “convert” to Sufism. If
Kāshifī’s (d. 910/1504–05) Akhlāq-i muḥsinī (The Muhsinian ethics) does not
bear Ṣūfī characteristics, the esoteric mirror for princes by the Herat polymath
268 Papas
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), entitled Salāmān va Absāl urged the Āq
Qoyūnlū ruler to recognise that “authentic kingship” consists of becoming a
Ṣūfī ruler, that is, the “shadow of God” (ẓill Allāh) who repents (tawba) and
disciplines his ego (nafs). Another prolific Naqshbandī writer, Aḥmad Kāsānī,
known as Makhdūm-i Aʿẓam (d. 949/1542), explicitly argued that Ṣūfīs should
seek elite patronage to defend, beyond his own order, Sunnī Islam as a whole,
and that the patron-monarch should be a mystic animated by spiritual energy
(himmat) and devoted to the Almighty. Ultimately, the ruler is confronted with
the aporia of power in powerlessness and sovereignty in servitude. Kāsānī’s
reference to the four conditions of defending the Ṣūfī path—i.e. a unified com-
munity (ikhwān), a place (makān) to gather, a stable time period (zamān), and
the ruler’s (khān’s) religiosity—perhaps inspired Khazīnī, a tenth-/sixteenth-
century Yasawī shaykh who moved from Transoxiana to Istanbul and produced
(in Turkic and Arabic) the Manbaʿ al-abḥār fī riyāḍ al-abrār (The source of
waters in the gardens of the righteous), in which he mentions the same four
conditions (Lingwood; Papas, Cheikhs et sultans; Hazînî, 343–57).
With the exception of Makhdūm-i Aʿẓam’s descendants, as we see, it is
difficult to assess the impact of these treatises on the political behaviour of
that time. Other Ṣūfī authors wrote advice literature addressed to their fellow
Muslims in general rather than the rulers in particular, without any interest
in political commitment. In his al-Naṣīḥa al-kāfiya (The sufficient advice) and
elsewhere, basing himself on the Prophet’s traditions, the Mālikī jurist and
Shādhilī Ṣūfī from Fez, Aḥmad Zarrūq (d. 899/1494), urged the elite to obey
legitimate authorities and denied Ṣūfīs the role of kingmakers and the right to
oppose the sultan or justify actions against him (Kugle, 162).
The Jazūliyya lineage in Morocco was a main and concrete target of Zarrūq’s
denunciation. During the Marīnid period (614–869/1217/1465), Islamic mys-
ticism was institutionalised, organised fraternities were created, and the
Sharifian model of authority (an ideology derived from early Shīʿism, in which
the politico-religious authority rested on descent from the Prophet) was in-
troduced. Muḥammad al-Jazūlī (d. 869/1465) founded a Ṣūfī order that sought
to establish a saintly power structure in both word and deed. In a context of
moral crisis and social upheaval in Morocco, al-Jazūlī organised his Ṣūfī order
according to rigorous rules. His disciples applied a fourteen-step program
known as “rules of repentance” (shurūṭ al-tawba); this was followed by train-
ing to acquire ten attributes of self-discipline. Ṣūfīs were encouraged to visit
religious leaders to prepare Ṣūfī networks for political mobilisation. The quasi-
prophetic knowledge of the master made his disciples’ obedience absolute.
Al-Jazūlī cast himself as spiritual leader with social and political responsibili-
ties to whom authority (wilāya) was granted by his closeness to God (walāya).
Sufism and Worldly Powers 269
In the face of the disintegrating Marīnid state, which was threatened by rising
Portuguese power, the shaykh who called for holy war appeared to many as a
last recourse. Al-Jazūlī died before accomplishing his grande oeuvre but the
Jazūliyya realised it, at least in part (Cornell, ch. 6).
The ideology of the Jazūliyya order synthetised two concepts of saintly au-
thority: the above-mentioned Sharifian model and the imitatio Muḥammadi,
which consisted of following the Prophet’s example and governing Muslims ac-
cording to his directives. In a radical sense, the “Muḥammadan way” (al-ṭarīqa
al-Muḥammadiyya) the Jazūlī ʿAbdallāh al-Ghazwānī (d. 935/1528) presented
and the “sovereignty of saintly authority” (siyādat al-imāma) he theorised was
based on an eclectic collection of writings provided to the Ṣūfī saint of the
time with the prophets’ authority. The aim was to make him the vicegerent of
God on earth and the leader of people, a leader whose charisma resembled
that of the Shīʿī imam, though the order was based on mediaeval Ṣūfī theories
of sainthood. The Jazūlī doctrine concretised itself in social reality with the
involvement of its advocates in dynastic politics. Al-Ghazwānī recruited dis-
ciples among several tribes who were opposed to the Watṭṭāsid ruler who had
seized Fez from the Idrīsids. He then acquired the material support of local
tribal leaders and promoted himself as the paramount shaykh of Moroccan
Sufism and the true sultan of the masses. The shaykh definitively broke with
the Watṭṭāsids and the Idrīsids and joined the lesser-known Saʿdian sharīfs in
southern Morocco. As a jihād state struggling for the liberation of the Islamic
Maghrib from the yoke of foreign rule, the Saʿdian power reflected the ideology
of the Jazūliyya and indeed, in 961/1554, they succeeded in establishing a mon-
archy by divine right and in unifying Morocco; this was done by excluding its
Jazūlī intercessors from the circles of power, and finally persecuting the main
shaykhs (Cornell, ch. 7–8).
The nascent Ṣafavid state in Iran represents a second case of saintly ruler-
ship. The Ṣafaviyya Ṣūfī order, named after Ṣafī [l-Dīn Ardabīlī] (d. 735/1334),
a member of an old and influential family from Ardabil near the Caspian Sea,
grew into a religio-political movement under the successive leadership of
Ṣadr al-Dīn (d. 794/1391), Khwāja ʿAlī (d. 832/1429), Junayd (d. 864/1460) and
Ḥaydar (d. 893/1488). The Ṣūfī order was marked by missionary zeal and their
bellicose character; as early as 851/1447, they obtained the military support of
Qizilbāsh (lit., “red heads”) Turkmen tribes whose chiefs pledged allegiance to
the Ṣafavid shāh (“king”) as disciples of a spiritual master. Although it is diffi-
cult to reconstruct with precision, historians have shown that the creed of the
first Ṣafavids was drawn from various sources, among them, the Turkish poetry
collection of Shāh Ismāʿīl (d. 930/1524). To the usual Ṣūfī conception of mas-
ters as saints (awliyāʾ) performing miracles were added less common elements,
270 Papas
In 1911, after leading a revolt against the Ottoman forces, Ibn Idrīs’ grandson
Muḥammad b. ʿAlī l-Idrīsī (d. 1923) founded a short-lived state known as al-
dawla al-Idrīsiyya (the Idrīsid state) in ʿAsīr province. The political formation,
which did not survive the Wahhābī conquest in 1923, was not a Ṣūfī state, in
that it did not emerge from a Ṣūfī organisation with a hierarchy and institu-
tions, as was the case of the Sanūsiyya, another lineage inspired by Muḥammad
al-Idrīsī’s father. This major brotherhood was established by the disciple closest
to Aḥmad b. Idrīs, the Algerian-born Muḥammad b. ʿAlī l-Sanūsī (d. 1276/1859),
who set up a military-political organisation that opposed European forces
in Cyrenaica (present-day eastern Libya) and then evolved into an embry-
onic state. Colonial and early twentieth-century historiography stressed the
political and revivalist nature of the Sanūsiyya. Against this teleological the-
sis, scholars have shown that, although it was, originally, clearly apolitical,
the Sanūsiyya Ṣūfī order took political action for specific local reasons. Holy
war and political power did not serve a religious purpose, they were a prod-
uct of specific historical events. Replete with speculations in line with Aḥmad
b. Idrīs’ teaching, al-Sanūsī’s writings never mentioned jihād; in practice, he
implemented a regional network of missionary lodges (zāwiyas). In 1298/1881,
his successor Muḥammad al-Mahdī (d. 1902) undertook a long march (called a
hijra) and introduced the brotherhood in the Sahara and the Sudan. Attacks by
the French and Italians in 1911 forced the new shaykh Aḥmad al-Sharīf (d. 1933)
to declare jihād and to create an independent Sanūsī government (ḥukūma
sanūsiyya) in Cyrenaica. Aḥmad al-Sharīf was quickly defeated by the Italians,
abdicated, and took refuge in Turkey. The Sanūsiyya resurfaced in the 1950s
with the British recognition of Muḥammad Idrīs (d. 1969) as king of Libya. By
then, the Ṣūfī ṭarīqa had completed its process of tribal segmentation and sec-
ularisation (O’Fahey, ch. 5–6; Bang, ch. 5; Triaud, 1: introduction).
Comparisons have been made between the Sanūsiyya and the Naqshban
diyya Khālidiyya in Kurdistan, largely because both movements proclaimed
jihāds and created organisational frameworks to counteract the centrifugal
tendencies of tribes. However, this framework seems to have been less crucial
than the role of the Ṣūfī shaykh as landlord and holy man, as in the case of
the Kurdish Khālidī Shaykh Saʿīd (d. 1925) who led an insurrection against the
Kemalist regime, in an effort to establish an independent state where Islamic
principles would be respected (Bruinessen, Agha, ch. 5). Even more striking
is the somewhat similar genesis of these two movements. During the early
nineteenth century, the Naqshbandiyya Khālidiyya spread rapidly in Kurdis-
tan under the influence of the Kurdish eponymous leader Mawlānā Khālid
(d. 1242/1827), whose missionary zeal and hostility toward European domina-
tion assured the popularity and legitimacy of his Ṣūfī branch. Then, driven by
276 Papas
India and Transoxiana, the perfect (tāmma) imamate of the first caliphs, under
his leadership (as a messiah or mahdī); thus, he intended to transcend the tem-
poral rulers, without replacing them (Gaborieau, ch. 9–10).
As a faithful member of the Naqshbandiyya Khālidiyya, Imām Shāmil
(originally Shamwīl) was compelled to respond to the Russian advance on his
homeland and their subsequent imposition of colonial laws in place of Islamic
law and values. Imām Shāmil took over the political engagement from his
Khālidī predecessors. Before him, in 1246/1830, his friend Ghāzī Muḥammad
(d. 1248/1832) had proclaimed holy war against the colonial empire; he was
declared imam then killed. Shāmil survived and, after the assassination of the
second imam Ḥamza(t) Bek (d. 1250/1834), was recognised as the third imam
of Daghestan. His military victories enabled him to unify the Caucasian moun-
tain tribes under one banner. From an institutional perspective, Shāmil was at
the top of a well-organised theocratic state administered by a council (dīwān)
and regional deputies (nāʾibs). The sharīʿa was scrupulously applied by the
learned class, which consisted of muftīs and judges. The army, which played
a central role, included a corps of 400–500 “warrior disciples” (nāʾib murīds).
In 1276/1859 Shāmil was captured and placed under house arrest in Kaluga
(southwest of Moscow) then in Kiev; in 1285/1869, he went on pilgrimage, and
died and was buried in Medina. Imām Shāmil was more a practitioner of Sufism
than a thinker; within his circle of followers, he acted as and was perceived as a
spiritual leader who performed the Naqshbandī rituals, though his Ṣūfī model
of community never materialised in a large scale in north Caucasian society
(Gammer, ch. 5–8, 21–24; Knysh, S̲h̲āmil).
Around the same time (during a long ḥajj between 1241/1826 and 1243/1828)
ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī, the offspring of a Sharifian family of notables be-
longing to the Qādiriyya order, was initiated into the Khālidiyya by Mawlānā
Khālid. He then intended to retire to the solitude of his lodge in Oued al-
Hammam (Wādī l-Ḥammām in northwestern Algeria). But in 1246/1830, he
was stirred into action by the French conquest of Algeria, which had dire ef-
fects on local legal and religious values. Thus, he took action and endeavoured
to unite Algerian chiefdoms to struggle against the French. After negotiating
a provisional status, ʿAbd al-Qādir established an embryonic theocracy with
Tagdempt as capital, where legislative and moral codes were defined by the
sharīʿa. The main currency was named Muḥammadiyya, khalīfas administered
the regions, and Ṣūfī lodges were used to promote devout public behaviour.
He was defeated in 1264/1847, imprisoned, then forced into exile: the man
who had been called, in 1248/1832, sultan and amīr al-muʾminīn (“commander
of the faithful”), ended his life in Damascus as a spiritual master surrounded
by disciples from various countries; he declined all French offers to assume
278 Papas
a political role in Syria. His body was buried next to the grave of his spiritual
“ancestor” Ibn al-ʿArabī, whose thought fuelled ʿAbd al-Qādir’s monumental
book entitled Kitāb al-mawāqif (The book of stations). In the 372 chapters
articulating three essential pivots, i.e. God ad intra and ad extra, the created
world of the human servant, and the intermediate sphere between God and
his servant there is no discussion of later history or politics (Bouyerdene, 19,
44, 73–76, 133; D̲ j̲azâʾirî, 1:3–20).
The commonality between Imām Shāmil and ʿAbd al-Qādir and a Ṣūfī lead-
er like Sayyid Aḥmad Barelwī is based on the fact that they all waged jihāds
against colonial forces, and were supported by combatants whom sources de-
scribe as disciples (murīds). Whereas Shāmil and ʿAbd al-Qādir adopted the
titles imām or amīr al-muʾminīn, only Aḥmad Barelwī claimed the title mahdī;
and all three practiced Sufism through introspection, a strict adherence to the
divine law, or direct communication with the Prophet. More generally, schol-
arly debate about these “jihād states” concentrated on the issue of Islamic
mysticism as a primary motivating force. In contrast to a paradigm known as
maraboutisme (in French) or miuridizm (in Russian), which appeared at the
same time as the events they described, the primary sources that emerged
from the colonial administration and the Ṣūfī actors themselves suggest a dif-
ferent scenario (Gaborieau, 177–9, 275–8; Knysh, Sufism). The militancy of the
Ṣūfīs at that time were the acts of individual community leaders, who act after
some hesitation and soul-searching, as they were caught up in the turmoil of
historical events that were often marked by doomsday predictions and mes-
sianic expectations.
Less spectacular but no less influential in the long run, in the course of the
nineteenth century, modernity (in the sense of public administration) en-
tered Ṣūfī orders. The Egyptian ṭuruq, which were institutionalised from the
top-down by the Ottoman state, then under the khedival (khıdīvī, “viceregal”)
government, is a well-studied example. In 1812, a firman issued by Egypt’s
pasha Muḥammad ʿAlī (r. 1220–64/1805–48) created a central authority for
Ṣūfī groups, and assigned as its first head Muḥammad al-Bakrī (d. 1271/1855), a
shaykh of an old ashrāf family who claimed descent from the first caliph Abū
Bakr. With the active support of government agencies, al-Bakrī’s administra-
tive power increased. The hereditary charge passed to ʿAlī l-Bakrī (d. 1297/1880)
who reinforced the hierarchical rules in the ṭuruq administration, and integrat-
ed the heads of lodges (mashāyikh al-takāyā) and heads of shrines (mashāyikh
al-aḍriḥa) into that administration. In 1298/1881 under pressure from the khe-
dive al-Tawfīq (d. 1309/1892), reforms of rituals and interference in the shaykhs’
management provoked a crisis of authority. In 1312/1895 a council of the minis-
try of the interior promulgated a series of regulations; these were completed in
Sufism and Worldly Powers 279
1905 as the “Internal Rules for the Sufi orders” (al-lāʾiḥa al-dākhiliyya lil-ṭuruq
al-ṣūfiyya), and were designed to institute a rudimentary bureaucratic system
(De Jong, 39, 95, 124, 187–8). During the twentieth century, whatever the share
of political instrumentalisation or even corruption of the ṭuruq administra-
tion, the adoption of modern administrative practices brought Ṣūfī institu-
tions closer into the state machinery, not only through interpersonal contacts
between Ṣūfī administrators and state bureaucrats, but also in the use of paper-
work, procedures, legal statuses, decision processes, official titles, and so forth.
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), seized power, Syria had hosted important
Ṣūfī orders. Of course, its religious policy differed fundamentally from that
of the Bolsheviks. The state sponsored the Naqshbandiyya Kuftāriyya order,
headed by and named after the grand mufti of Syria, Aḥmad Kuftārū (d. 2004).
His role was to counter the Ikhwān al-Muslimūn (the Muslim Brotherhood,
a politico-religious movement founded in Egypt by Ḥasan al-Bannāʾ, d. 1949)
and promote an “official [version of] Islam” (al-islām al-rasmī), though in fact
many Ṣūfī masters and their disciples joined the anti-Baʿth opposition and
maintained close ties with the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the
1970s, Kuftārū and other leaders were supported by Ḥāfiẓ al-Asad’s (d. 2000) re-
gime, by virtue of which they controlled the religious establishment, fostered a
quietist, spiritual, and educational form of Sufism. The Syrian religious leader-
ship toyed with the idea of eliminating some Ṣūfī terminology, an idea that was
introduced into Syria by the Indian Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ, a reformist “Council of
Religious Scholars” founded in 1891. Thus, the Kuftāriyya developed as a trans-
national Ṣūfī movement. Its key institution, the Abū al-Nūr Islamic Center in
Damascus included schools, universities, prayer halls, offices, a library, meet-
ing rooms, and so on, with branches in other Syrian cities, Lebanon, the United
States, and Europe (Böttcher; Weismann, Sufi Fundamentalism).
The bureaucratisation of Ṣūfī institutions also occurred under anti-
communist regimes, such as that in Indonesia under the New Order instituted
by Suharto (d. 2008), which lasted from 1967 to 1998. Sharīʿa-oriented Sufism
replaced syncretistic mysticism, first in rural areas where Ṣūfī leaders became
political figures, then among urban classes as traditional Ṣūfī communities
(tarekat) were gradually supplemented by formal associations. Influenced by
Ṣūfī doctrines and practices, but also by European spiritualities (Theosophy,
Freemasonry), some esoteric (kebatinan) movements adopted a structure
resembling that of associations with administrators who assisted spiritual
teachers. In the 1950s and early 1960s they were allied with the left. In addi-
tion to them, leaders of local tarekats participated in associations, mainly
the Nahdlatul Ulama (Awakening of Scholars) and the Persatuan Tarbiyah
Islamiyah (Union for Islamic Education) which became political parties.
One of these leaders, Haji Jalaluddin, created his own association, the Partai
Politik Tarekat Islam, which became an institution of Ṣūfī bureaucrats who
lacked major shaykhs. Later, in the 1970s, Musta’in Romly (d. 1984), the leader
of the Qadiriyya wa-Naqshbandiyya, established a Jam’iyyah Ahlith Thoriqah
Mu’tabaroh (Association of the Members of Respectable Orders) to represent
“orthodox” Sufism; they were recognised by the central government. Engaged
in electoral politics, he campaigned on behalf of the government party, the
Golkar, while officials of the Nahdlatul Ulama issued fatwās (legal opinions)
Sufism and Worldly Powers 281
to vote for the rival party block, the United Development Party, which was
composed of Muslim parties. Musta’in lost control over the tarekat network
and his opponents inaugurated a second association, the Jam’iyyah Ahlith
Thoriqah Mu’tabaroh al-Nahdliyyah, which was closer to the Nahdlatul Ulama
(Bruinessen, Saints). On the one hand, conflicts around the Jam’iyyah show the
increasingly political role of Ṣūfī orders, but on the other hand, they reveal the
varied understandings of this role: in 1984, the Nahdlatul Ulama decided not
to participate directly in politics and shaykhs of other groups acted more as
spiritual mentors than as political entrepreneurs.
In the Turkish Republic, Islam entered politics institutionally in 1974 when
Necmettin Erbakan (d. 2011), the leader of the Milli Selamet Partisi (National
Salvation Party) and a follower of the Nakşibendi (Naqshbandī) shaykh
Mehmed Zahid Kotku (d. 1980), was elected as a legislator in the national gov-
ernment. During legislative elections, Erbakan’s party members obtained im-
portant ministerial offices. For example, in 1977, the Nakşibendi Korkut Özal
(d. 2016) was appointed minister of the interior. His elder brother Turgut Özal
(d. 1993), a disciple of Kotku and of his successor Esat Coşan (d. 2001), created
the Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party), became prime minister in 1983, then
president in 1989. Özal’s government promoted Islamic ethics and values, and
legitimised charitable donations so that religious communities (cemaat) like
Ṣūfī orders (which had been forbidden by Mustafa Kemal in 1925) could de-
velop as official foundations. Ṣūfī brotherhoods, with their hierarchy of char-
ismatic powers, formed a matrix for political Islam in Turkey: the Refah Partisi
(Welfare Party) cofounded by Erbakan was administered in the manner of a
cemaat whose supreme chief, surnamed “master” (hoca), maintained quasi-
mystical relationships with his subordinates by granting blessings; more broad-
ly, many Islamic movements were modeled on Ṣūfī communities. They had
three levels, i.e. an internal discipline based on loyalty and hierarchy, Ṣūfī lead-
ers with religious charisma, and a model of Muslim civil society. This did not
prevent divisions and conflicts. Several shaykhs disavowed Erbakan because of
his autocratic practices. From the 1990s onwards, Ṣūfī cemaats that favoured
indirect lobbying over direct political action, set up influential networks and
well-organised institutions to provide Qurʾān courses, social services, residen-
tial schools (yurts), nurseries, and clinics, and made use of various medias
(Zarcone, La Turquie moderne, 188–226). In sum, along with the bureaucratisa-
tion of spirituality, the spiritualisation of bureaucracy also occurred.
In the post-communist Balkans, especially in Albania, Bektāshī institu-
tions were re-established, thanks to an association called the Komuniteti
Bektashian Kryegjyshata Botërore Bektashiane (Bektashi Community–World
Bektashi Chief Grandfather Centre), headquartered in Tirana. In the wake
282 Papas
of three congresses held in 1993, 2000, and 2005, and successive drafts of de-
tailed statutes, the organisation defined itself with a clear hierarchy of mem-
bers ranging from aspirants to high clerics (babas/prindës, dedes/gjyshs, and a
dedebaba/kryegjysh). It also had a spiritual, administrative, and economic
management run by various councils, headed by the dedebaba Reshat Bardhi
(d. 2011). The Bektashi Community had international ambitions, in that it
claimed authority over lodges (tekkes) situated in Macedonia, Kosovo, Greece,
and the United States (in Taylor, Michigan, opened in 1954). In reality, this
authority was rather pan-Albanian. Despite the high centralisation of the
community, struggles for power and authority took place at the top as well as
the bottom. Baba Selim Kaliçani (d. 2001) opposed Baba Reshat Bardhi and
in 2002 under the authority of a baba close to Baba Selim, a competing re-
gional organisation was officially registered in Skrapar district. The registration
was cancelled by a court decision, but the fact remains that Bektashi institu-
tions were and still are largely autonomous at the local level. Divergences
also arose between Ṣūfī bureaucrats and local believers regarding the defini-
tion of Bektashism itself: Ṣūfī leaders stressed the commonality of Sufism and
Sunnism, whereas local opponents highlighted the differences between these
two interpretations of Islam (Clayer, The Bektashi).
The Turkish and the Albanian cases illustrate that baraka bureaucracy
was not exclusively a product of twentieth-century states seeking to control
spiritually-oriented groups; it also concerned Ṣūfī groups themselves, at least
their elites, who sought to adopt the modern techniques to maintain their sta-
tus and power. The phenomenon of baraka bureaucracy even produced quasi-
autonomous political entities and parliamentary religious parties.
Contemporary Senegal serves as an emblematic example. In the heteroge-
neous world of Ṣūfī brotherhoods in the Republic of Senegal, two major orders
stand out, the Murīdiyya and the Tijāniyya, each of which claims several mil-
lion followers worldwide. Founded by Aḥmadu Bàmba Mbàkke (d. 1927), the
Murīdiyya order accepted an exchange for services (échange de services) with
the French colonial system, an arrangement that continued after the indepen-
dence of Senegal in 1960. In short, in return for producing groundnuts (a major
cash crop at the time) on an industrial scale and supporting the colonial ad-
ministration, the French authorities (and later the Senegalese state) granted
the Murīds a certain degree of autonomy in the capital city of Touba. Affected
by the economic crisis in the 1970s, this modus vivendi between the state and
the Murīds faltered, causing shifts in the “voting instruction” (ndiggël) given
by the Khalifa Général to his disciples. The political power of the holy men
blessed with baraka and the administrative autonomy of the rural commu-
nity in Touba did not mean that the Murīds exercised political domination
Sufism and Worldly Powers 283
or that all the Murīds agreed on the exercise of political power. If the 2000
election of Abdoulaye Wade, surnamed le Président Mouride, marked a re-
turn to the exchange for services system, some Murīds still aspired to remain
neutral and distance themselves from the state. This dissonance may mark a
return to Aḥmadu Bàmba’s emphasis on spiritual training and self-discipline
(tarbiya) as the genuine purpose of Ṣūfīs’ worldly action (Loimeier; Babou, 5,
62–66, 81–84).
Among the Tijāniyya of Senegal, the Niasse family also faced and survived
colonial rule. In 1931, outside of Kaolack the Medina community founded by
Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975) became a transnational path known as the Jamāʿat
al-Fayḍa (Community of the divine flood). Furthermore, Niasse established the
Jamʿiyyat Anṣār al-Dīn (Association of the helpers of the religion) to further
the cause of Muslims by organising local sections led by steering committees.
A leader of international stature, in 1957, Niasse (together with Cheikh Tidjane
Sy [b. 1925], a member of the Sy family network), cofounded the short-lived
Parti de la Solidarité Sénégalaise. Tidjane Sy, with his son Muṣṭafā (b. 1952),
founded a separate Tijānī branch with a highly territorialised administration,
the Dāʾirat al-Mustarshidīn wa-l-Mustarshidāt (Circle of the seekers of guid-
ance); from the 1990s onwards, it played a prominent, albeit shifting, role in
encouraging voting. In 2000, Muṣṭafā Sy ran for president under the banner of
the Parti de l’Unité et du Rassemblement, but withdrew his candidacy a few
days later. Beyond partisan strategies described by political scientists, intellec-
tual historians have pointed out that an organisation like Niasse’s was designed
to reform the socioreligious identity of common believers through the secret
transmission of spiritual training (tarbiya) and mystical experience ( fayḍa)
(Seeseman, The Divine Flood, ch. 2–3, epilogue; Samson, ch. 2).
Outside a democratic, or electoral, setting, the Tijāniyya faced the
Islamist regime in the Sudan after the coup d’état of 1989, as did two popu-
lar Ṣūfī orders, the Khatmiyya (founded by Muḥammad ʿUthmān al-Mīrghānī,
d. 1269/1853) and the Mahdiyya or Anṣār (founded by Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh,
d. 1302/1885), and their respective political parties, the Democratic Unionist
Party and the Umma Party. Under the influence of the Islamist leader Ḥasan
al-Turābī (d. 2016), the government of ʿUmar al-Bashīr tried to involve the
Ṣūfī orders in state politics by creating, in 1995, the Majlis al-Qawmī lil-Dhikr
wa-l-Dhākirīn (National assembly of remembrance and those who remember).
Headed by a shaykh affiliated with the Qādiriyya, the institution raised funds
for projects run by Ṣūfī orders, facilitated visits of masters and pilgrims from
abroad, and promoted public relations. In relation to the government, Ṣūfī au-
thorities were torn between two positions, cooperation or silent disagreement.
In the Tijāniyya, the Nigeria-born Ibrāhīm Ṣāliḥ (b. 1939) walked hand in hand
284 Papas
with the government of Khartoum, even during the bloody jihād against south-
ern Sudan, whereas other shaykhs rejected the politicised understanding of
Islam, citing al-Tijānī’s statement “politics is a Kaʿba around which all evil cir-
cumambulates” (al-siyāsa kaʿba yaṭūfu bihā jamīʿ al-shurūr). Ṭarīqa members
in contemporary Sudan were thus once again faced by the classical challenge
of choosing between Ṣūfī spirituality and worldly power (Seeseman, Between
Sufism and Islamism; Maruyama).
The bureaucratisation of Ṣūfī institutions did not preclude Ṣūfī members
from reconsidering the significance of the mission that God assigned to them,
especially when confronted with competing modern ideologies. While they
responded to contemporary Islamism, Ṣūfīs also redefined nationalism in
their own terms by imparting a spiritual dimension, a supplément d’âme one
might say, to the political body shaped by nation-building processes. Thus, in
Pakistan, the religious policies of Ayyub Khan (Ayyūb Khān, 1958–69), Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto (Dhū l-Fiqār ʿAlī Bhutto, 1971–7), and Zia ul-Haq (Ḍiyāʾ al-Ḥaqq,
1977–88) were no different in this respect. The three governments were unani-
mous in their caution about the mobilisation power of Ṣūfī shrines and living
saints (pīrs); they attempted to instrumentalise them by availing themselves
of baraka and making the sacred nature of the saints a state ideology of sorts.
In a tangible sense, the governments took control of the physical institutions
of Ṣūfīs—i.e., shrines, lodges, and related properties—to undercut the po-
litical power of the hereditary pīr families, and to demonstrate that the state
could fulfil the same caretaking and ritual functions. As a result, Ṣūfī saints
and shrines became a prominent component of Pakistan’s state machinery.
Paradoxically, Ṣūfī leaders themselves were involved in the construction and
the ideological support of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The Chishtī-Ṣābirī
shaykhs Muhammad Zauqi (Muḥammad Dhawqī, d. 1951), Shahidullah Faridi
(Shahīd Allāh Farīdī, d. 1978), and Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani (Wāḥid Bakhsh
Siyāl Rabbānī, d. 1995) were ardent nationalists. They sacralised Pakistan in
the name of the purported ḥadīth, “Love of the homeland is a part of faith”
(ḥubb al-waṭan min al-īmān), and defined their Ṣūfī lineage as a sacred com-
munity antecedent of the nation-state. Zauqi, who joined the Muslim League,
had close contacts with nationalists and exchanged letters with Ali Jinnah (ʿAlī
Jinnāḥ, d. 1948), and was later eulogised as the esoteric founder of Pakistan
(Ewing; Rozehnal, ch. 3). This was perhaps reminiscent of the concept of
dawla bāṭiniyya.
A more obvious and recent echo of the concept can be found in the dis-
course of the members of the Kasnazāniyya order in Iraqi Kurdistan; in 2005
they referred to a “spiritual state” (dawla rūḥiyya), a hypothetical state that
would be governed by the Kasnazānī shaykhs. This branch of the Qādiriyya,
Sufism and Worldly Powers 285
established by the Kurd ʿAbd al-Karīm Shāhī Kasnazān (d. 1316/1899) in Sulay-
maniyya, created the political party Tajammuʿ al-Waḥda al-Waṭaniyya al-ʿIrāqī
(Coalition of the Iraqi National Unity) in 2003, right after the fall of Ṣaddām
Ḥusayn’s (d. 2006) regime and the subsequent opening of multi-party system.
Composed of Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab disciples, of Sunnī as well as Shīʿī
extraction, the Ṣūfī order and its party sought to transcend ethnic and con-
fessional boundaries to promote the as yet unachieved unity of Iraq. Highly
bureaucratic, the Kasnazāniyya is supervised by a presidency (riyāsat) based
in the central lodge of Sulaymaniyya, with offices and commissions across the
country; these regularly report their activities in written communiqués and
correspond with each other by telephone and internet. In the 2014 legislative
elections, the party won two seats in parliament. In addition to their strictly
economic and political agenda, Kasnazānīs present themselves as representa-
tives of modern Sufism, antithetical to both Islamism and religious communi-
tarianism (Salihi, part 3 and 5).
In the 2000s, Islamism, in the form of the Islamic Salvation Front (dissolved
in 1992) or jihadist groups, prompted the Algerian government of Abdelaziz
Bouteflika (ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Bū Taflīqa, b. 1937) to rehabilitate Ṣūfī institutions
and to promote them as an antidote against manifestations of political Islam.
Lodges (zāwiyas) and attached religious classrooms were encouraged to take
an active role in society, among the youth in particular; the ministry of reli-
gious affairs allowed Ṣūfīs to distribute publications to mosques and schools;
monuments were erected or restored with government funding (Muedini,
57–66). Research centres with the support of the ministry of culture—but
also self-funded zāwiyas—organised large events that combined cultural, aca-
demic, and religious presentations and presented Islamic mysticism as quiet-
ist, apolitical, and peaceful. Despite this state instrumentalisation of Sufism,
some cultural or intellectual actors, academic scholars of Islamic studies, and
Ṣūfī practitioners tried to use Ṣūfī institutions to voice critical opinions. They
pointed out that, throughout its history, Ṣūfīs have vacillated in regard to the
issue of being involved in politics, and wavered between an irrepressible “will
to power” and its very negation.
This brief survey of the political history of Islamic mysticism shows that
worldly powers were often attracted by Ṣūfīs, and that Ṣūfīs, in a reciprocal
sense, were close to power institutions, and they themselves sometimes pro-
duced institutions of power. In the early mediaeval period, Muslim mystics
and states found a common terrain of, alternatively, exchange and tensions in
jihāds, messianic expectations, and social justice. Simultaneously, Ṣūfī think-
ers laid the foundations for a concerted and systematic reflection on power.
From the seventh/thirteenth century onward, Ṣūfīs and sultans benefited from
286 Papas
a reciprocal system of patronage, which secured material support for the Ṣūfīs
and religious legitimacy for sultans. Beyond the interests of Ṣūfī leaders and
sultans, the majority, as well as the elite (whether political or religious elite),
expressed their belief in the possibility of political sovereignty for saints. It
is significant that, during the early modern era, saintly Ṣūfī lineages have es-
tablished theocratic regimes that appear to be the political “translation” of
mediaeval and post-mediaeval theories that describe the saints’ hidden gov-
ernment of the world. While the domination of many Muslim countries by
European colonial states seems to have put an end to such attempts, Ṣūfī lead-
ers responded to the new historical situation. Inspired by the prophetic expe-
rience of migration and sometimes claiming direct communication with the
Prophet, Muslim mystics retreated before waging jihād on the colonisers, and
occasionally founded full-fledged Islamic states, which were usually devoid
of distinctly Ṣūfī trappings. Finally, the bureaucratisation of institutions that
characterised twentieth-century societies has also affected Sufism in both its
organisational modes and its construction of authority and charisma. Ṣūfī
political parties have reflected this new reality, while seeking to maintain the
spiritual ideals of premodern Sufism.
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Sufism and Worldly Powers 291
doctrines of royalty that were strictly tied to theological and metaphysical con-
cepts (Brisch; Gonda). In the Semitic and ancient Middle Eastern context, the
metaphor of royalty was frequently applied to God, particularly by Judaism
and later by Islam. Several interesting studies address this doctrine of royalty in
Judaism, as it is inscribed in the context of the ancient Middle East (Brettler).
Christianity used biblical formulas, and developed its own distinctive
interpretation of the metaphor of royalty through the well-known notion
of Christ, as the King, in the New Testament, where he is referred to in the
following forms: as “King of Israel or King of the Jews,” “King of the World,”
“King of the Universe,” “King of kings” (Beskow). In Byzantine iconography,
from the sixth to the seventh century, we again find Christ as the Pantocrator,
“Sovereign of the Universe,” just as it appears in the mediaeval images of the
“Majestas Domini,” where Christ is seated on a celestial throne. In various des-
ignations the Holy Virgin is often named “Queen,” and from the thirteenth cen-
tury, one of the Gothic iconographies of the Virgin represents her coronation
as Regina Coeli.
Medieval Islamic thought inherited many of these historical, cultural, and
theological perspectives. In Islam, one of the names of God is Mālik, “King,”
and Mālik al-mulk, “King of the kingdom.” Whereas Judaism unites the image
of the prophets with that of kings, as shown by the examples of David and
Solomon, the same is not true with regard to the Islamic tradition, which did
not embrace the exaltation of temporal power, rather it specifically rejected
the kings from ancient Arabia, the Byzantine basileus, and the Iranian shāh.
A ḥadīth of the Prophet Muḥammad affirms: “On the day of resurrection, the
name that God will dislike the most is the one held by a man who gave him-
self the title King of Kings (malik al-amlāk)” (al-Bukhārī, 4:129). While the
Sassanids may have influenced the Islamic empire in terms of state protocol,
its very elaborate doctrine of royalty was not applied unaltered to the new
Middle Eastern political reality. It must, however, be highlighted that certain
ʿAbbāsid sovereigns, such as al-Maʾmūn (r. 198–218/813–33), were influenced
by Sassanid culture, in an obvious political and symbolic continuity with the
ancient Persian empire (Frye, 4–56; Khaleghi-Motlagh). Finally, the doctrine
of royalty in the pre-Islamic Middle East exerted a strong influence on Islamic
medieval thought, particularly in the Persian environment. Sufism integrated
it in a metaphorical way, building part of its doctrinal system and hierarchical
structure on it, as we can see from an analysis of its technical terminology.
Yet, even before its appearance in Ṣūfī literature, in a passage of the Rasāʾil
Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity), presumably written in Basra
during the second half of the fourth/tenth century, the notion of royalty had
a metaphorical meaning; the Rasāʾil uses technical mystic terminology in a
294 Patrizi
And there are those that consider it obligatory for the sages, when they
desire to open the door to wisdom for the scholars and unveil the se-
crets for the disciples, that they first exert themselves, perfect their souls
through education to purify them, [and] purify their morals, because
wisdom, like a bride, needs a solitary encounter, and it is one of the trea-
sures of the hereafter. Then, if the sage does not put into practice what
is obligatory for him, in terms of wisdom, regarding the asceticism of the
sages before the secrets of wisdom are revealed to them, in this he is like
the chamberlain of the king that allows foolish people to come before
the king without respect for the rules of hierarchy, and that therefore de-
serves punishment.
Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:13
Note that Junayd (d. 298/910) is the representative, par excellence, of the
school of Baghdad, whereas Abū Ḥafṣ al-Ḥaddād al-Nīshāpūrī (d. c. 270/883)
is originally from Khurāsān. This may suggest that the school of Khurāsān was
more influenced by the Sassanid heritage than was the school of Baghdad.
Sufism of the mediaeval period consciously used the analogy between tem-
poral power and spiritual power. In the Kitāb adab al-mulūk fī bayān ḥaqāʾiq
al-taṣawwuf (“The book of the rule of the kings concerning the explanations of
the realities of Sufism”), an anonymous text that dates to the fourth/tenth cen-
tury, we find the metaphor of royalty applied to Sufism and named al-mulūkiyya
al-ṣūfiyya (the royalty of Ṣūfīs). The most significant passages follow here.
I called it “the rule of the kings,” because the Sufis renounced all second-
ary earthly causes, and have become kings … Why, then, should not the
definition of “kings” rightly be applied to them, since for them only God
is important and, in this life, [they] are content with little? … They have
become the kings of this world and the hereafter. They educate them-
selves according to the Sunna and, internally, they put effort into service.
They preserve the superior realities of divine sacredness, and thus have
become kings of both worlds, kings of the two dwellings, kings of para-
dise. It has been reported by Abū Hurayra that the Prophet said: “The
kings of paradise are men with messy hair, covered in dust and dressed
in rags, to whom no one pays attention, and if they were to merely swear
by God, their oath would be realised.” Such are the characteristics of the
Sufis and of royalty, attested by every single one of their movements. Part
of the reality of the royalty of Sufis is the fact of their dislike of the world,
in accordance with God…. Royalty is realised in them because they do
not move, except for His sake…. They are the real kings, and how could
the name of royalty not be applied to them since God gave men the name
of “kings” for what He has given them in terms of the beauty of this world
and its graces? God said: “He made you kings after having given you what
had never been given to anyone in the worlds” [Q 5:20]…. It is reported
that Ibrāhīm b. Adham said one day: “Miserable are the sovereigns of
this earth! If they had known what we are they would have killed us.”
Certain sages have affirmed: “Renounce this world, and you will be a king.
Renounce the hereafter and you will be crowned king.” The condition of
royalty on earth, is to renounce it, and you will be prince and master of
everything you renounce. It has been reported in a tradition that God
said to the garden of Eden: “Rejoice for the dwellings of the kings,” which
is intended to mean the houses of the ascetics and the prodigies of the
296 Patrizi
soul. I described the reality of the states of royalty according to the spe-
cific realities of the kings of the people of spiritual courtesy (adab): they
are the Sufis, those who educate themselves according to the Sunna with
the goal of performing real service to God.
Kitāb adab al-mulūk, 7–8
He [God] arranged the Muslims according to ranks. The masses are like
subjects of the king. The hadith collectors are like the treasurers of the
king. The people of the Qur’an are like the guardians of the registries and
valuables [of the king]. The jurists are the king’s trustees, because the
jurist [adjudicates] for God. The scholars of the roots (‘ulama’ al-usul) are
like the chiefs and commanders of the armies. The awliya’ are like pillars
of the [palace’s] gate, while the lords of hearts (arbab al-qulub) and the
people of the purity (ashab al-safa’) are like the elect of the king and his
companions.
Knysh, 72
One of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works, entitled Kitāb al-tadbirāt al-ilāhiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-
mamlaka al-insāniyya (The book of divine management in the reformation
of the human kingdom), focuses on the metaphor of political power and de-
scribes the spiritual microcosm of man, in which the spirit (rūḥ) is the king
(malik) who rules the “city of the body” (madīnat al-jism) (Ibn al-ʿArabī).
At the foundation of the institution of the Sunnī caliphate we find, ide-
ally, the uninterrupted transmission of the khilāfa, the legacy of Prophet
Muḥammad to his successors. In the same way, the foundation of Sufism in the
transmission of initiation resides in prophetic transmission, and the initiatory
pact between master and disciples is an esoteric transposition of the temporal
pact in Islam. The lieutenant of a spiritual Ṣūfī lineage in fact often takes the
name khalīfa; this started from as early as the sixth/twelfth century. The termi-
nology of the initiatic pact closely follows the terminology of the caliphal pact;
the pact taken with the khalīfa is referred to as ʿahd, bayʿa, mubāyaʿa (De Jong,
K̲ h̲alīfa (iii)).
In Sufism, another fundamental term of temporal power, sulṭān, is used
to identify those with remarkable spiritual mastery (Kramers). We can point
out some representative figures who, among others, have been qualified with
this title: Ibrāhīm b. Adham, who was called sulṭān al-ʿārifīn (“sultan of the
gnostics”) has already been mentioned; Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī (d. 261/874 or
264/877–8) was also nicknamed sulṭān al-ʿārifīn; the Shāfiʿī jurist and Ṣūfī ʿIzz
al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Sulamī (d. 660/1262) was called sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ
(“sultan of the scholars”); Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī’s (d. 672/1273) father, Bahāʾ
al-Dīn Walad (d. 628/1231), was also called sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ; his grandson was
known as Sulṭān Walad (d. 712/1312); Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235), a poet and Ṣūfī,
was called sulṭān al-ʿāshiqīn (“sultan of the lovers”); Ibn al-ʿArabī was sulṭān al-
ʿārifīn; Muḥammad al-Ḥanafī (d. 847/1443), an Egyptian Ṣūfī, was commonly
called sulṭān Ḥanafī (Sabra, 219, 231).
In Persian, the analogous term khwāja was used to designate the sovereigns
of ancient Persia, particularly in the Shāh-nama of Firdawsī (d. 411/1020). This
term is used equally among Ṣūfīs in the Persian- and Turkish-speaking regions
to designate important masters, from Khwāja ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī (d. 481/1089),
to the chain of Naqshbandiyya masters that are known by the denomination
khwājagān. According to legend, this denomination comes from one of the
first masters of this Naqshbandī chain, ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduwānī (d. 617/1220),
who appeared to Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband (d. 791/1391) in a vision in which he
was seated on a large throne behind a green curtain, surrounded by khwājagān
(Molé, 38–9).
The terminological parallel extends to the hierarchical structure of Sufism
and to ceremonial power. In fact, the spiritual hierarchy in Sufism is influ-
enced by the categories of temporal power: the dīwān al-awliyāʾ, the “council
298 Patrizi
of the saints,” is clearly derived from the government institution of the dīwān
(Chodkiewicz, 113–15). Above the Ṣūfī hierarchy lies the quṭb, the “pole,” who
is endowed with the same attributes of a temporal monarch, but in a spiri-
tual sense, according, for example, to Ibn al-ʿArabī and his school (De Jong,
al-Ḳuṭb (2)).
With regard to investiture ceremonies, al-Shaʿrānī says that the khirqa
(the initiatory mantle transmitted from master to disciple) was analogous
to the robe of honour (al-khalʿa) given by kings to those in his entourage
(al-Shaʿrānī, 1:21).
figure 14.1
ʿAbd al-Qādir Jīlānī
sitting upon a throne,
Mughal, eighteenth
century
Courtesy of
Victor & Albert
Museum, South &
South East Asia
Collection
Ṣūfī Terminology of Power 299
figure 14.2
Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī holding a globe, detail
of miniature by Bichitr from Minto Album,
c. 1610–18, India
Courtesy of Chester Beatty Library
The second modality in which the metaphor of royalty is integrated into Sufism
is the incorporation of the practice of the ancient royal banquets, in particular
the Iranian bazm (Melikian-Chirvani, 95–119). In this case, the usage is no lon-
ger just literary, but also ritual, the banquet is part of a sacred representation.
During the ʿAbbāsid period, the court of Baghdad integrated the practice of the
Iranian bazm, but referred to as a majlis (Shaked, 75–91; Khaleghi-Motlagh).
Ṣūfīs, then, because of their familiarity with the terminology and etiquette of
power, integrated the ʿAbbāsid majlis by transposing its principal characteris-
tics into symbolic practices. At the centre, the master takes on the role of king,
while the master’s entourage, that must conform to the rules (ādāb), is analo-
gous to the king’s court. Finally, both music and chants were used in the court
majlis and in the Ṣūfī majlis. In the latter, the cupbearer (sāqī), who brings the
wine that leads to intoxication, is metaphorical; it appears in song lyrics and in
Persian and Arabic Ṣūfī poetry.
The majlis takes place in the khānqāh, the headquarters of Ṣūfī life in the
Persian environment. According to the testimony of the Andalusian traveller
300 Patrizi
Ibn Jubayr (d. 614/1217), who traveled in the Middle East in the late sixth/
twelfth century, the ribāṭs or khawāniq of Damascus were like palaces whose
members, the Ṣūfīs, are kings whom God has raised above mundane things, to
render them free from material attachments, so that they could dedicate them-
selves to the service of God and the samāʿ (Trimingham, 9–10).
Another Persian term, dargāh (threshold or palace), was especially wide-
spread in the Indian environment; it denotes the seat of a fraternity and the
shrine of a great saint (Ephrat and Pinto in this volume). In this case the origi-
nal meaning is also linked to the court of the caliphs in Baghdad and Samarra,
and was directly inspired the court’s organisation (P., bār, bādrgāh, dargāh,
darbār; to refer to “meeting place,” lit., “where one sits,” i.e., or the “seat of
power”). The former was imbued with a pre-Islamic influence (Bosworth).
Judging by the sources, this integration of court etiquette into Sufism can be
attributed to Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr (d. 440/1049), who certainly played a key
role in the process of institutionalising the collective forms of Ṣūfī sociability
(Graham). The first stage of Abū Saʿīd’s life was characterised by a strong ascet-
icism that led to a series of spiritual openings. After this, his attitude changed
radically: he founded a khānqāh and established collective assemblies (majālis)
with all the characteristics of court assemblies. Dressed in silk like a king, he
is described resting on cushions. The disciples sometimes knelt down in front
of him. According to sources, it was Abū Saʿīd who introduced the practice of
chanting poetry and the use of musical instruments into the majālis, and al-
lowed for the presence of young men in the meetings, similar to the image of
the cupbearer in the Iranian bazm, and the Greco-Roman symposium (Ritter).
4 Conclusions
The use of the terminology of power in Sufism appears to be more than a sim-
ple rhetorical artifice that reflected an aspect of the confrontation between
temporal and spiritual institutions in Islamic societies. Likewise, this use of
political terms cannot be read solely as an attempt by Ṣūfī authorities to share
temporal power, a fortiori to replace it. In fact, in Islamic mysticism, the pro-
cess of integrating this technical terminology began very early and went hand
in hand with the integration of the technical notion of adab, a notion that
was also influenced by the etiquette practiced at the Persian Sassanid court.
The proof that it relates not only to a rhetorical device or a simple element
of historical conjecture can be found in the complex system of Sufism that is
at once doctrinal and ritual, of which this terminology represents just a small
part. Finally, this system seems to have efficiently adapted itself to the elitist
Ṣūfī Terminology of Power 301
and hierarchical structure of Sufism that had developed by the end of the me-
diaeval period.
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Chapter 15
were among Niẓām al-Mulk’s trusted counselors (Yavari, The future of Iran’s
past, 118–25). In these Ṣūfī luminaries the vizier found powerful allies commit-
ted to curbing confessional strife.
The ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Nāṣir al-Dīn Allāh (r. 575–622/1180–1225), another po-
litical ruler who, like Niẓām al-Mulk, hoped to capitalise on the authority wield-
ed by religious leaders (Ohlander, 19), and cultivated a close relationship with
the Ṣūfī master Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234). In 577/1181,
al-Nāṣir installed al-Suhrawardī as director of the Ribāt al-Maʾmūniyya in
Baghdad. Nine years later, the caliph sent al-Suhrawardī on a diplomatic mis-
sion to the court of the Shāh-i Armanid ruler Begtimur (r. 581–9/1185–93), to
secure his support against the last Saljūq sultan, Tughril III (r. 571–90/1176–94),
although al-Nāṣir had previously relied on Shāfiʿī jurists for such diplomatic
initiatives (Ohlander, 90–2). Another diplomatic initiative, this time to the
Ayyūbid (564/1169 to end of ninth/fifteenth century) court in Damascus began
in 604/1207–8 (Ohlander, 94–6). Mediaeval historians report with great fanfare
al-Suhrawardī’s reception at the court—further testimony to the growing in-
fluence of Ṣūfī masters by the early seventh/thirteenth century. In 614/1217–8,
al-Suhrawardī received his most critical charge, to repel the advance of ʿAlāʾ
al-Dīn Muḥammad Khwārazm Shāh (r. 596–617/1200–20) on Baghdad and
to save the caliph’s throne. Al-Suhrawardī met with the Khwārazm Shāh in
Hamadān, and pleaded with him to refrain from harming a descendant of the
Prophet. ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad refused to heed the Ṣūfī master’s exhorta-
tions. He received his just deserts, however, when a heavy snowfall confounded
his army, and a few months later, he was left to defend his throne from the
invading Mongols (Ohlander, 98–104). Al-Suhrawardī also played an important
role in al-Nāṣir’s short-lived attempt to rejuvenate the caliphate as an umbrella
institution alone capable of accommodating the competing interests of jurists
( fuqahāʾ), Ṣūfīs, and brotherhoods ( fityān), as well as Ḥanbalīs, Shīʿīs, and
Ashʿarīs (Ohlander, 291–303).
In these early examples, the relationship between Ṣūfīs and politicians took
place as a one to one encounter in which the king or vizier met the Ṣūfī, or
the ascetic or the ascetic Ṣūfī. Unlike the advice to the king from his vizier in
Niẓām al-Mulk’s Siyar al-mulūk, this performance is designed to exhibit power
on both the temporal and spiritual planes. Hence, the stage directions vary as
well. The mystic often refuses to come to the court, compelling the prince to
journey to the Ṣūfī’s threadbare abode; as depicted in countless illustrations in
mediaeval manuscripts. Unlike other advisors, such as viziers or amīrs (mili-
tary leaders), and apart from a few notable exceptions, Ṣūfīs, reluctant advi-
sors, enjoyed a long life and died in their own beds, and even had shrines built
in their honour.
Ṣūfīs as Court Advisors 305
figure 15.1 Youth and Dervish, Isfahan, second quarter of the seventeenth century
Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum, Rogers Fund, 1911
Significantly, the advice comes in the form of isolated anecdotes rather than
chapters and books. The tone of advice is also different and not as deferen-
tial as that of bureaucrats offering counsel. Rūmī’s father Bahāʾ al-Dīn Walad
(d. 628/1231), dubbed sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ (king of the scholars/clerics) by later
hagiographers, frequented the company of the Saljūq sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn
Kayqubād (r. 616–34/1220–37). On one occasion, he is quoted as saying to the
king: “You are a sultan and I am a sultan; your reign will last for as long as your
eyes remain open, mine will begin when I shut them forever” (Sipahsālār, 14).
Bahāʾ al-Dīn Walad’s son Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273) characterised thus
the edifying relationship between Ṣūfīs and rulers:
Such is the custom of kings: you might have heard this before, if you
recall.
The paladins stand on their left hand, because the heart is on the left side.
On the right hand are the chancellors and the secretaries, for the art of
writing and bookkeeping belongs to this hand.
They make the Sufis face them, for they are a mirror of the soul, and bet-
ter than a mirror,
306 Yavari
Still, the scale and impact of these early encounters were modest. Both the
texture and the tenor of Ṣūfī involvement in political life changed dramati-
cally in the altered landscape of the Islamic world in the post-Mongol period,
in Egypt, Iran, Asia Minor, Central Asia, and India (Potter, 77–82; Gross, The
Naqshbandīya, 14–7). This transformation is the focus of the remainder of this
chapter. It explores Ṣūfī engagement with rulers and courtiers to better under-
stand the scope and evolution of Islamic thought in the early modern period.
Accordingly, the emphasis is on the writings of prominent Ṣūfīs in royal service
rather than enumerating individual Ṣūfīs who served in such capacities. How
did Ṣūfīs themselves describe and legitimate political influence? For spiritual
figures who claimed—almost by definition—to eschew mundane affairs in
favour of nobler gratifications, Ṣūfī masters placed a heavy premium on prox-
imity to power. This conundrum is nicely captured in a collected biography
of Naqshbandī shaykhs by the Egyptian Ṣūfī master and poet Yāsīn b. Ibrāhīm
al-Sanhūtī (d. 1935). The Ṣūfī worldview, he holds, is one that rests on shunning
worldliness, but at the same time, it is instructed to uphold justice, to ensure
that governors act in accordance to the law of God, and to promote public
welfare (Sanhūtī, 130).
Ṣūfī writings of the post-Mongol period engaged with a wider audience and
amplified a universal message. The increasingly assertive authorial voice in
Ṣūfī hagiographies, ethical and theological treatises, poetry, mirrors for princ-
es, and collected biographies, is difficult to miss. Ṣūfī masters laid out their
views and provided guidance on religious issues, good rule, and the adab (eti-
quette) of engagement with foes and foreign potentates. Among the Ṣūfīs who
played an overtly political role and left behind a substantive body of writing
in the later Mongol period is ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla al-Simnānī (d. 736/1336), theolo-
gian, jurist, poet, and Ṣūfī master who wielded great power at the court of the
Īlkhānid Arghūn (r. 683–90/1284–91). His aristocratic family enjoyed eminence
at the court; his father was appointed governor of Iraq, one uncle was made
vizier and another served as chief judge (Martini, 5–9). Al-Simnānī’s career at
Arghūn’s court began early in his life. He served the sultan devotedly, and they
struck up a great friendship. In 683/1284, however, al-Simnānī experienced a
Ṣūfīs as Court Advisors 307
I will not befriend an emir unless I think that his love for me will in-
crease the more I rebuke him, the more severe I am with him, and the
more I point out his faults. If he is not like that, I send him away with
a kind phrase, for there is no value in a mendicant befriending an emir
except to admonish him and so that he may profit in this world and in
the Hereafter. In the absence of admonition, there enters deceit, and one
loses this world and the Hereafter.
al-Shaʿrānī, 58–9
The Ṣūfī shaykh must renounce the world wholeheartedly before he befriends
an amīr, so that he may know that his amīr and his amīr’s rival are equally
deserving of respect (al-Shaʿrānī, 71). In al-Shaʿrānī’s telling, it is the Ṣūfī who
decides whether or not a king is worthy of his advice.
Ṣūfī communities proselytised a new template of civil religion that gal-
vanised local populations, and relying on that popular support, engaged in
a traffic in authority with political elites. The new civil religion of the Ṣūfīs
also dislodged Arabic as the sole language of theology (in the eastern Islamic
lands), and upended the centuries-old template of maintaining distance from
rulers and politicians as a sine qua non of piety and exemplarity in the Islamic
mould. None among the silsilas achieved closer collaborations with governing
authorities than the Naqshbandiyya. Developed in the ninth/fifteenth century
with claims to significantly older historical roots, the Naqshbandī silsila spread
across a vast swath of Islamic lands, with a significant presence in Egypt, Iran,
Central Asia, and India.
The Naqshbandī savant Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Kāshifī’s (d. 939/1532) account of
an encounter between two rival Tumūrid princes, Abū Saʿīd (r. 855–73/1451–
69) in Samarqand and Abū l-Qāsim Bābur (r. 851–61/1447–57), who ruled in
Khurāsān, is telling in this regard. Faced with an imminent attack from Bābur’s
Ṣūfīs as Court Advisors 309
forces, Abū Saʿīd asked the influential Naqshbandī master, ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār
(d. 895/1490) for advice. The military commanders in his service had ruled out
resistance as futile, and advised the sultan to seek refuge in Turkestan. Aḥrār
disagreed, and said: “I have assumed the task of defeating Bābur. Rest assured:
I will fulfill my task.” The commanders protested, but the Ṣūfī shaykh prevailed,
because, we are told, the sultan was steadfast in his conviction. The command-
ers of Bābur’s army were also well aware that Abū Saʿīd’s forces would not
survive in battle against them. They were certain that his commanders would
arrange his escape from Samarqand, and planned their attack on that basis. As
Bābur’s army descended on the city, Abū Saʿīd’s soldiers were dispersed in vari-
ous neighbourhoods. The people of Samarqand put up a fierce resistance, and
as instructed, proceeded to cut off the nose and ears of each captured soldier.
Bābur’s army was in despair. And then, a cholera epidemic befell their horses
and the trenchant smell of decaying corpses exacerbated their misery. Bābur
sent an emissary to Aḥrār to sue for peace (Kāshifī, II: 522–4).
But the story does not end there. As the vanquished Bābur lay on his side
outside the city walls, he is said to have cried out: “It may be true that we did
not conquer Samarqand, but we did learn the truth about Khwāja Aḥrār, who is
not an ʿārif, for if he were, he would not have destroyed us so.” Aḥrār’s retort in
defence of his spiritual credentials elevated the status of Ṣūfī saints to that of
prophets: “Like prophets, ʿārifs are judged by the cause not the consequence of
their action. For if it weren’t so, justifying the destruction wrought by the likes
of Noah and Hūd who destroyed their own people by water and wind would be
a problem” (Kāshifī, II: 525–6.) To buttress his claim, Aḥrār cites Q 8:11, which
addresses the believers and claims that it was not they who killed the unbeliev-
ers, but God himself.
In this episode, Aḥrār emerges as the true ruler of Samarqand, the people of
the city his true army, and their truth confirmed by divine intervention. Rather
than advice to the sultan, the true meaning of this and numerous similar an-
ecdotes strewn across Ṣūfī writings of the period is that members of a Ṣūfī
silsila are sovereign actors beholden to and supported by the one true Lord.
Accordingly, rather than ethical conduct, the Ṣūfī shaykh advises the ruler on
matters of strategy and tactics in warfare.
Exercising the king to instill in him the virtues required for good rule
is only a secondary and derivative objective in the mirror for princes of the
Naqshbandī master, Aḥmad Kāsānī Dahbidī, better known as Makhdūm-i
Aʿẓam’s (d. 949/1542) Risāla-yi tanbīh al-salāṭīn, addressed to the Shaybānid
sultan ʿUbaydallāh b. Maḥmūd (r. 940–6/1534–9). Ensuring the primacy of
the Ṣūfī path (ṭarīqa), promoting and patronising Ṣūfī confraternities, and
protecting them from all enemies are the main exhortations delivered in
this treatise. Makhdūm-i Aʿẓam calls for the conversion of the sultan, such
310 Yavari
that the sultan becomes a disciple of the Ṣūfī and the Ṣūfī rules the sultan
(Papas, 25).
Parity between king and Ṣūfī master is a perennial motif in early modern
Ṣūfī writings. Bahāʾ al-Dīn Walad was known as sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ, as noted. The
early Ṣūfī master Junayd (d. 298/910), al-Shaʿrānī tells his readers, “used to say
to those who came to him seeking the path, ‘Have you served kings?’ If they
said ‘No,’ he would say: ‘Go serve them, then come back. The least demanding
Ṣūfīs as Court Advisors 311
conduct with us is beyond the conduct you are obliged to follow with kings’”
(al-Shaʿrānī, 72–3). In fact, regal terminology abounds in Ṣūfī circles. One
prominent example is the term walī, used for Ṣūfī saints, which echoes the
wilāya, or authority of caliphs and princes (Patrizi, 199; Patrizi in this volume),
or references to the divine as the true sovereign (Patrizi, 200–11). In addition
to metaphors, Ṣūfī rituals mimic those found in the royal banquet, bazm (a
courtly practice) that travelled from pre-Islamic Iran to the ʿAbbāsid capital
(Patrizi, 205–11). Naqshbandī masters, to take another example, routinely ap-
pointed four men among their followers as a khalīfa (successor, anglicised as
caliph) charged with propagating their teachings (Kāshifī, I:14). The template
of non-hereditary leadership clearly emulates the ideals of governance that
prevailed in the early days of Islam, when the Prophet Muḥammad was suc-
ceeded by his closest disciples, the four rightly-guided caliphs mentioned ear-
lier. In the annals of mediaeval Islamic historiography, the ideal paradigm of
pious succession was considered to have ended in 41/661 when the Umayyads
instituted hereditary succession.
Similarly commonplace in the premodern sources is the centrality of su-
pernatural powers associated with Ṣūfī shaykhs to their efficacy as court ad-
visors. Effectively, the mediatory role often assumed by Ṣūfī masters rested
on their ability to deliver the favour of fortune to their patrons. ʿUbaydallāh
Aḥrār’s invocation of pestilence on an opposing army is one such example,
as is Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr’s oracular prediction, both mentioned above. In
fact, saintly miracles were considered on a par with the evidentiary miracles
attributed to prophets. Through his rectitude and his gift of revelation, the Ṣūfī
acquires power over the ruler, al-Shaʿrānī writes (al-Shaʿrānī, 74–5; Geoffroy,
304–8; Papas, 18). Unless the Ṣūfī master can avail victory, defeat enemies, or
heal the sultan’s friends, he will not be of any use to the ruler.
Approbation for engaging with politics and with princes, although clearly
manifest in Naqshbandī history and dogma, was by no means restricted to that
community. The politically-minded al-Shaʿrānī, for example, was strictly anti-
confessional; he never revealed his own affiliation, and enjoyed close relations
with both major Ṣūfī communities active in Egypt at the time, the Shādhilī
and Aḥmadī networks. Likewise in seventh-/thirteenth-century Anatolia,
where the Kubrawī Bahāʾ al-Dīn Walad (Lewis, 114–8) lorded over the kings,
and in ninth-/fifteenth-century Egypt, the Shādhilī Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad
al-Ḥanafī (d. 847/1443) held sway (Sabra, 218–26). Feted and generously re-
warded by Mamlūk sultans (648–922/1250–1517), Shams al-Dīn al-Ḥanafī
amassed great wealth in exchange for lending his good name and providing
prudent counsel to the kings. In one instance, when al-Nāṣir Faraj b. Barqūq
(r. 801–15/1399–1412, with a gap in 808/1405) was about to punish an adminis-
trator for an ill-conceived policy, al-Ḥanafī intervened to remind the sultan of
312 Yavari
his own role in formulating that measure. When the irritated king asked the
Ṣūfī shaykh whose kingdom it was, al-Ḥanafī is to have retorted: “The kingdom
does not belong to me or to you, it belongs to God …” (Sabra, 219)—a procla-
mation that could well have come from a Naqshbandī shaykh, as we have seen.
And in tenth-/sixteenth-century Iran, it was a Ṣafavī perfect master (murshid-i
kāmil) who inaugurated a new dynasty and ruled as Ismāʿīl I (r. 907–30/1501–
24), pīr (master) and prince united in one.
The new language of civil religion presented by Ṣūfī silsilas transformed the
political and religious landscape of the Islamic world in the tenth/sixteenth
and eleventh/seventeenth centuries, and had far-reaching consequences (for
example, in Central Asia, see DeWeese, 39–40). The increasing appeal of on-
tological monism among Islamic philosophers in the eleventh/seventeenth
century, for one example, “seems largely to have been linked to the spread in
the Arab East of Ṣūfī orders such as the Khalwatiyya from Anatolia and the
Shaṭṭāriyya and Naqshbandiyya from India” (El-Rouayheb, 235–6). On the po-
litical register, most states in the early modern Islamic world—the Āq Qoyūnlū
(eighth/fourteenth century until 907–8/1501–3), Ottoman (eighth/fourteenth
century–1922), Ṣafavid (907–1135/1501–1722), and perhaps even the Mughal
(932–1161/1526–1748, and as a much reduced polity until 1274/1857)—relied
heavily on the input of Ṣūfī masters.
Although Ṣūfī prospects diminished significantly in the modern period, their
influence at various Islamic courts persisted until the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. The influential Ṣūfī Mīrzā Ḥājjī Āqāsī (d. 1265/1849), prime minister at the
court of Muḥammad Shāh Qājār (r. 1250–64/1834–48), is largely blamed for the
king’s failed attempts at modernising the army and effective rule (Amanat, 221–
2, 230–2). As opposition to absolutist rule and colonial encroachment gained
steam in the late nineteenth century, influential Ṣūfī shaykhs persisted in their
monarchical stance. Ṣūfī mirrorists such as Muḥammad Ḥusayn Naṣr Allāh
Damāwandī (fl. 1260s/1840s), Ṣafāʾ al-Salṭanah ʿAlī Khān Naʾīnī (fl. 1301/1883),
and Dhū l-Riyāsatayn Qāḍī Muḥammad b. Jaʿfar Saryazdī (d. 1312/1894), active
at the court of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh Qājār (r. 1264–1313/1848–96), were vociferous
supporters of the king against the rising tide of activist clerics (Zargarīnizhād,
I: 64–7, 108–10, 123–7; II: 35–80; III: 388–99; IV: 241–67), a trend that continued
well into the twentieth century (Keddie, 211–30; Bos, 73–142).
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Ṣūfīs as Court Advisors 313
Sufism is the mystical strain of Islam which has its roots in both early Islamic
asceticism as well as the common Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ascetic-
mystical tradition. Jihād (“struggle, exertion”) is God-sanctioned warfare, while
ghazw (“raid”) is a term that, albeit used in Islamic literature, tends to be less
specifically religious in scope. Statements about jihād appear in the Qurʾān;
however, the primary development of the doctrine occurred during the first
Islamic centuries, most probably as a result of fighting during the conquests.
In general, jihād is said to have three distinct manifestations: jihād of the soul,
jihād of the tongue, and jihād of the sword.
The first, jihād of the soul, involves struggling against the soul’s lower
impulses, as in the Qurʾān the soul is said to be a locus of evil (Q 12:53) and
is presented in the sources as the starting point for true jihād. One who has
not overcome the soul’s temptations cannot participate in other forms of war-
fare, because that person’s motives will not be pure. The best-known ḥadīth
(tradition ascribed to the Prophet Muḥammad) associated with the jihād
of the soul is:
the wrong” (Q 3:104, 110). In practice, this type of jihād has been utilised by
preachers and reformers to mobilise movements to fight.
The third type of jihād, of the sword, is often augmented by the phrase “in
the path of God.” As a theory, it developed considerably during the first cen-
turies of Islam, and to some degree in the Qurʾān. By the period of ʿAbdallāh
b. al-Mubārak (d. 181/797), who authored the earliest surviving book on jihād,
the mythology associated with the term was complete, and included addition-
al references, such as specific rewards for martyrs who die in battle, spiritual
rewards for fighters, and admonitions concerning the protected status of fight-
ers’ families.
There are considerable connections between proto-Ṣūfīs during the first
centuries of Islam and warfare; these are exemplified by the figure of ʿAbdallāh
b. al-Mubārak, who wrote on jihād as well as asceticism, and was seen as a
figure of towering courage for his willingness to confront the ʿAbbāsid caliph
Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 170–93/786–809) (an example of the jihād of the tongue).
A number of other proto-Ṣūfī figures, such as Fuḍayl b. ʿIyāḍ (d. 187/803) and
Ibrāhīm b. Adham (d. c. 161/777–8) also participated in all three types of jihād.
Most of these proto-Ṣūfīs fought in the border regions of northern Syria against
the Byzantines, or occasionally in the East. After this initial period (second/
eighth to third/ninth century) of Ṣūfī fighting there is not much evidence of
Ṣūfīs participating in warfare until the period of the crusades, which coincided
with the development of the great Ṣūfī brotherhoods. Many of the Ṣūfī brother-
hoods were closely linked with the practice of futuwwa (chivalry) or javānmardī
(Zakeri). Futuwwa brotherhoods involved physical preparedness (among other
things) and were mostly located in the Muslim heartlands of Iraq and Iran dur-
ing the period leading up to and including the crusades. During this period,
some of those in border regions (Sistan, Caucasus, and Central Asia) continued
earlier ascetic practices of fighting unbelievers.
Some of the Ṣūfī brotherhoods participated in the jihād against the crusad-
ers, most notably at the decisive Battle of Haṭṭin (583/1187), in which the cru-
saders were defeated. The historian Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1372–3) states that these
Ṣūfīs were given the task of killing the Templar and Hospitaller knights after
the battle (Ibn Kathīr, xii, 321–2). The sources frequently speak of “volunteers”
(mutṭawiʿūn)—for example, at the siege of Acre in 690/1291—that helped the
regular troops by carrying wood for mangonels, or bringing supplies. While it
cannot be said conclusively that these were Ṣūfīs, the volunteers were usually
drawn from the audiences of popular preachers of this period.
Ṣūfī orders were also prominent in the nascent Ottoman Empire, where
they were known to have close connections with the Janissaries (elite Ottoman
Sufism, the Army, and Holy War 317
troops) (Birge, 74–5). Although a number of these Ṣūfī orders and so-called
“coloniser dervishes” were later deemed to be heretical, as they had possible
connections to the Shīʿa and even to ghulāt (extremist Shīʿī groups), their
importance—along with the more orthodox Muslims—for the conquests dur-
ing the period from the eighth/fourteenth to the tenth/sixteenth century can-
not be denied (Barkan; Clayer, part II). At a more symbolic level, Anatolian
and Iranian Ṣūfī groups under Shīʿī influence, especially the Bektāshīs and the
Khāksārs, borrowed objects from martial culture, such as ʿAlī’s sword (known
as dhū l-fiqar) and axe (tabar/tabarzīn) (Baḥraynī Ārānī; Raei; Zarcone).
The closest connections between Sufism and jihād were forged in Central
Asia and in India with the rise of the Naqshbandiyya brotherhood during
the tenth/sixteenth century and later. The Naqshbandiyya, which stressed
its adherence to mainstream Sunnī Islam—especially in the context of the
multi-faceted range of Indian Islam—proved to be an important ally for the
Mughal dynasty in its conquest of central India (Buehler, 8–9). The Malfūẓāt-i
Naqshbandiyya is an important document that attests to the ability of Ṣūfī
groups to work with imperial objectives, at least from the period of Awrangzeb
(d. 1119/1707). In spite of the mainstream affinities of the Naqshbandiyya, it
portrays a series of wars attended by holy figures who waged jihād, promoted
a popular Islam including healings and miracles, served the spiritual needs of
the troops, and gave legitimacy to the fighting. One figure stands out, Bābā
Palangpūsh (d. 1110/1699; lit., “leopard skin”); he is said to have had a vision
of the Prophet Muḥammad’s uncle Ḥamza (the paradigmatic Muslim mar-
tyr, killed in the Battle of Uḥud, 3/625), who gave him a sword, and told him:
“Take this sword … and go to the army of Mīr Shihāb al-Dīn in the land of
the Deccan” (Digby, 69–70). Many other incidents describe the Naqshbandīs
fighting in India. After the fall of the Mughal Empire, for the most part, the
Naqshbandiyya in India no longer involved themselves with jihād. Yet, we
know cases of Ṣūfī servicemen in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Awadh
(northwestern Uttar Pradesh) who served as soldiers in the cold season and as
pious mystics in the hot season (Papas, 127, 131, 135).
The Naqshbandiyya also heavily influenced the resistance of Turkic Muslims
to Chinese rule during the nineteenth century (Kim, ch. 2). An example of this
tendency can be seen in the Dungan revolt among the Hui (ethnic Chinese
Muslims) in 1279–94/1862–77, when a number of Naqshbandī teachers from
Central Asia who had been travelling among the Hui for at least a century,
brought about a revival not unlike that experienced by Indian Muslims. The
Dungan revolt also had an anti-colonial character, though strictly speaking, the
Hui were not colonised by the Chinese (Chu).
318 Cook
Many important manifestations of Sufism and jihād took place in Africa, es-
pecially in western Africa (see Vikør in this volume), which has a long Islamic
history, although in many regions of Africa Islam has been closely linked to
syncretistic practices. This linkage was especially true for the regions of what
is presently northern Nigeria and southern Niger, where, from the thirteenth/
eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the nomadic cattle-grazing Fulani peo-
ple scattered across the Sahel and intermixed with the much more populous
Hausas, who were settled farmers and traders. The Fulanis, led by the char-
ismatic preacher Shehu ʿUthmān Dan Fodio (d. 1234/1817), a member of the
Qādiriyya order, began a reformist jihād against the syncretistic Hausa in
1219/1804. This jihād was supposed to eradicate the non-Islamic beliefs and
systems that the Hausa monarchs tolerated and even encouraged, and to es-
tablish in its place a purely Islamic state. Ultimately, by 1227/1812, the fight-
ing foundered when the Fulani attacked the older Muslim polity of Borno
(northeastern Nigeria and western Chad), which did not feel that it was a le-
gitimate target for a jihād. Probably the most famous of all Dan Fodio’s visions
is one in which ʿAbd al-Qādir Jīlānī (d. 561/1166), the eponym of the Qādiriyya
brotherhood, appeared to him in a dream accompanied by the Prophet and
many other early Muslims, and gave him the ‘sword of truth’ by which to
fight and defeat the unbelievers (Hiskett, 66). Dan Fodio methodically dem-
onstrated precisely the spiritual preparations that should take place prior to
a jihād, namely, preaching and summoning to repentance and undertaking a
hijra, during the course of which all the believers gather to fight the unbeliev-
ers (Dan Fodio).
For northern Nigeria, and to some extent Islamic West Africa as a whole, the
numerous writings of Dan Fodio and his close family members have continued
to be normative until the present time. Thus, while some other Ṣūfī traditions,
such as the Indian and Turkish orders, have de-emphasized the use of mili-
tant jihād, the West African tradition has not. It should be further stressed that
while Dan Fodio’s jihād is frequently referred to as the “Fulani” jihād, because
it ended by empowering a series of Fulani emirates (which exist to the present
day), it also included a large number of Hausa who joined for religious reasons;
currently northern Muslims in Nigeria would see the jihād as a spiritual, not
ethnic, endeavor.
Most anti-colonial resistance movements in Islamic Africa during the nine-
teenth century were led by Ṣūfīs. This trend began with the Algerian figure
ʿAbd al-Qādir (also Abdelkader, d. 1300/1883), whose works include spiritual
writings as well as a number of practical discussions on jihād. In general,
French colonial authorities throughout West and North Africa associated Ṣūfī
brotherhoods, rightly and in many cases wrongly, with militancy. This trend is
Sufism, the Army, and Holy War 319
most obvious with the figure of ʿUmar Tall (d. 1280/1864), who was the most
consistent and successful opponent of the French in the area of Senegal and
Mauritania, and was a Tijānī. Like Dan Fodio, who was clearly his exemplar, he
preluded his jihād with a hijra, and ensured that he had completed his preach-
ing and invitations to his opponents to convert to Islam prior to initiating
violence. A later successor to Tall, but more closely associated with southern
Morocco and Mauritania, is the figure of Māʾ al-ʿAynayn (d. 1910), who was a
member of the Qādiriyya. Just as Dan Fodio and Tall before him, he undertook
lengthy preparations prior to initiating his jihād against the French in 1904.
Although he was eventually defeated, his movement, unlike the other two, had
a number of proto-nationalist affinities (Martin, ch. 5). There are a number of
other examples of Ṣūfī warrior brotherhoods, such as the Sanūsiyya throughout
North Africa, and individual fighters from the early resistance to colonialism.
However, it should be noted that some important figures, such as the
Senegalese Aḥmadu Bàmba Mbàkke (d. 1927), founder of the Murīdiyya broth-
erhood, employed the language of jihād without its militancy. Merely utilising
the term brought about the hostility of the French authorities, and as a result
Bàmba spent much of his life in exile. The Murīds restricted the teachings of
Tall (above), and developed new interpretations of jihād, which included phys-
ical labor (Glover, 54).
Ṣūfī brotherhoods were also prominent in anti-colonial movements in East
Africa, but such brotherhoods were not quite as widespread there as they were
(and are) in West Africa. In Somalia, the figure of Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh Ḥasan
(d. 1920), known to his British opponents as the “mad mullah,” was the best
known of these. Ḥasan was not merely a Ṣūfī, but also channeled early forms
of Somali nationalism in his numerous poems, transmitted orally.
Militant forms of Sufism were weaker in the Arabic-speaking heartlands
during the Ottoman and early colonial periods, largely because, by the middle
of the eleventh/seventeenth century the Ottomans had severed the connec-
tions between the Ṣūfī brotherhoods and the Janissaries, and did not encour-
age fighting qualities among Ṣūfīs. Nonetheless, in both Egypt and greater
Syria, opposition to colonial rule was frequently marshalled by Ṣūfī broth-
erhoods, especially the Rifāʿīs. Interestingly, the Mevleviyye represent a late
military involvement of an Ottoman Ṣūfī order. During World War I, the sultan
established a regiment of Mevlevī holy combatants (mücāhidīn) who bore Ṣūfī
symbols and played music to support the troops in Syria in 1915 (Köstüklü).
In the Caucasus Mountains, for several decades the anti-Russian jihād of
Imām Shāmil or Shamwīl (d. 1288/1871) owed a great deal to the spread of
the Naqshbandiyya-Khālidiyya brotherhood throughout this region (Zelkina,
200–4). However, the exact nature of Shāmil’s affiliation with and personal
320 Cook
status in the local branch of this brotherhood remain a matter of dispute (Knysh,
Sufism as an explanatory paradigm).
At the present time, Sufism is not closely identified with fighting; however,
there are a number of recent conflicts in which Ṣūfīs have fought. These in-
clude both Afghanistan and Pakistan, where a number of Ṣūfī fighting groups
were prominent, for the most part in the war against the USSR (1978–89). In
post-2003 Iraq as well, the Jaysh Rijāl al-Ṭarīqa al-Naqshbandiyya (Men of the
Army of the Naqshbandiyya) was quite prominent among other groups, mostly
Salafī jihādīs, fighting against the United States’ forces (see their website: www
.alnakshabandia.net/army/). Ṣūfī organizations, however, have consistently
shunned the use of suicide bombings in their tactics.
For the most part, at the present time, Salafī jihādī trends in Islam iden-
tify Sufism as an enemy, and in conflicts in which Salafīs fight against a non-
Muslim enemy, such as Afghanistan or Chechnya, and the majority of the
local population is close to Sufism, one of the stated goals of such fighting is
to shift the local belief system away from Sufism. For this reason, today Sufism
is usually seen as a comparatively non-violent spiritual alternative to Salafism
(Knysh, Sufism, ch. 6). More recently, as a result of the backlash against the
Salafī jihādī use of indiscriminate violence, certain Ṣūfī groups, such as those
in Nigeria (in relation to Boko Haram), have been actively trying to redefine
even militant jihād away from the Salafī jihādī discourse, which claims that
anyone who does not support an Islamic state is an unbeliever and a legitimate
target for violence.
In summary, the militancy of certain strains of Sufism, especially those
located in South and Central Asia, the Caucasus, and in Africa, is well docu-
mented. Although Sufism overall has tended to be irenic, we cannot justifiably
state that Sufism precludes militancy or violence, or that the tradition of the
“greater jihād” against the soul necessarily restricts or precludes violence. It is
apparent, however, that the vast majority of more recent Ṣūfī jihāds have either
been associated with the Naqshbandīs or with African Ṣūfīs (mainly Qādirīs
or Tijānīs).
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Sufism, the Army, and Holy War 321
1 Transition to Statehood
Such cases can probably be grouped into certain types of Ṣūfī state-building.
One type consists of states that arose in mediaeval or late mediaeval times on
the fringes of the Muslim world, as nomadic or tribal forces began to morph
into early statehood. Here we can identify two cases from Central Asia.
was exiled by the Chaghatayid ruler who patronised a rival khwāja clan. With
the support of Buddhist Mongols, Āfāq took control of the oasis of Kashgar
in the Tarim Basin in 1090/1679. There, he established himself as khān, ruler of
the city and region, although formally still under his Mongol patron. He legiti-
mised his position by marrying into a local noble line, claiming to be a descen-
dant of the Prophet, and presenting himself as a shaykh of the Naqshbandiyya.
At that time, mutual relationships between Naqshbandī Khwājas and the
ruling khāns, the holders of spiritual and political power, had been the norm
in Central Asia. Khwāja Āfāq broke this mould by combining his religious posi-
tion with temporal leadership (Papas, part 3). Here, too, money and material
resources were a crucial element in the growth of his power. By controlling
the income generated by pious endowments (waqfs), he could amass great
wealth. Some historians note that Khwāja Āfāq’s economic policies also broke
with those of his predecessors who based their rule on the redistribution of
resources to the tribes (Togan, Differences in ideology and practice, 28–30).
Āfāq’s policy, by contrast, was based on the accumulation of wealth and ignor-
ing the redistributive model.
This led to the development of a state structure that could become stron-
ger than one reliant on patron-client relationships. It is reasonable to link this
development to the support he could draw on due to his religious legitimacy
both as defender of the sharīʿa and as the chief shaykh of the Naqshbandiyya
ṭarīqa in the region. His successors ruled Kashgar, using the titles of pādishāh,
khān, and töre (tribal leader; Togan, Islam in a changing society, 140), until the
Chinese conquered it in the 1750s.
while his son and successor, Aḥmad (d. 1315/1897), adopted the title of amīr
al-muʾminīn (Ọlọruntimehin, 178).
Therefore, to a certain extent, ʿUmar Tall’s state can be called a “Ṣūfī sultan-
ate.” But it was also marked by political ambition: while he maintained close
relations with Sokoto far to the east, when he wanted to expand his area north-
wards he fought the neighbouring Masina state, which was itself a Fulānī state
influenced by the same Sokoto jihād.
3 Anti-Colonial Resistance
It was thus clear that it was his family’s Ṣūfī status among the tribes that
prompted ʿAbd al-Qādir to lead the struggle. He began establishing political
structures, while the French took several years to muster sufficient forces to
move inland and instead negotiated treaties with ʿAbd al-Qādir that de facto
recognised his authority over the interior. ʿAbd al-Qādir settled in the town of
Mostaganem, which was his capital. He was partly influenced by the reformist
endeavours of Muḥammad ʿAlī in Egypt and attempted to create, for example,
a modernised army. For the most part, we must consider his state as a tradi-
tional one. When the French finally moved against him, he quickly abandoned
the towns he controlled and resorted to guerrilla warfare.
We can see little or no influence of Sufism in his state or in his ideology. ʿAbd
al-Qādir remained a devout Ṣūfī, and returned to this existence when he was fi-
nally defeated in 1847 and exiled to Syria. He seems to have kept his Sufism and
state-building activities quite separate. The most noteworthy case in which the
two activities overlapped may have been when he took time off from fighting
the French to attack the rival Tijānī centre at ʿAyn Māḍī. Unlike their Tijānī
brother al-Ḥājj ʿUmar in West Africa, the Tijānīs of Algeria were completely
apolitical and did not take a position for or against the resistance movement.
Thus, ʿAbd al-Qādir’s quarrel with them was, primarily, because they might un-
dercut his Qādirī Ṣūfī position, rather than because of political and military
aspirations. Yet, while ʿAbd al-Qādir was both a Ṣūfī and a head of state, it is
probably not correct to call his political structure a “Ṣūfī sultanate.”
a republic, but the less populated Cyrenaica only accepted unity if their can-
didate, Idrīs, became head of state. Thus, the head of the Sanūsī Ṣūfī order
became king of Libya, and remained so until deposed by al-Qadhdhāfī in 1969.
In this history, there is no doubt that the Sanūsī order, while originally
non-political and non-militant, played a key organisational role in the jihād
against the Italians. The Acroma emirate was imposed from outside, and in
the later war the Italians effectively crushed the Sanūsiyya as a brotherhood.
When Idrīs returned as king in 1951, the Sanūsiyya was just a tribal aristoc-
racy of Cyrenaican nobility who effectively ran the state with the royal fam-
ily. Although Idrīs himself was keenly interested in his religious roots, perhaps
more so than in running the kingdom, Libya can hardly be considered a
“Ṣūfī kingdom.”
In all these cases, Ṣūfī leaders became heads of state. But the Ṣūfī influence
on the actual state structures they built were negligible or completely absent.
The shaykhs-sultans were known by various titles: imām (Shāmil), khān (Āfāq),
shāh, emir, or mālik (Ṣafavids, Sanūsiyya), etc. But formally, most referred to
themselves primarily with the classical title amīr al-muʾminīn, a title generally
associated with, but not synonymous with, the office of the caliph. By the time
these states arose, this title no longer had universal implications, but desig-
nated a ruler who implemented the sharīʿa in his territory. While some of these
leaders also may have used Ṣūfī or religious titles, such as khalīfa of the ṭarīqa
(al-Ḥājj ʿUmar) or khwāja (Āfāq), this likely denoted an authority distinct from
that of political leader.
A similar situation existed in relation to the administrative apparatus com-
posed of traditional offices, such as wazīr, qāḍī, and muftī. However, here we
can distinguish between the cases in which the previous Ṣūfī initiates turned
militants ran the new state, and those in which the traditional notables admin-
istered the state. In the former group, we find al-Ḥājj ʿUmar’s ṭalibés, Shāmil’s
murīds (with the caveat mentioned above) and the Ṣafavid Qizilbāsh. In the
latter cases of Ibn Fodiye and ʿAbd al-Qādir the Ṣūfī initiates seemed to have
little or no influence. The Sanūsīs represent an intermediary position; that is,
the non-initiate Bedouins did the fighting, but they were led by the local Sanūsī
shaykhs, who were generally drawn from outside the tribal unit. In cases where
there was such a link, militancy and political leadership transformed those in-
volved into an established state aristocracy, regardless of whether or not they
maintained a religious identity.
330 Vikør
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Part 5
The Organisation of Mysticism
⸪
Chapter 18
organised mysticism of ṭarīqa Sufism is now often regarded as the norm for
Islamic mysticism. This, too, is incorrect, as the ṭarīqa is only one of the organ-
isational forms that Sufism has taken. There was Sufism before the ṭarīqa, and
there is Sufism beyond the ṭarīqa today.
This chapter is structured historically, following the organisation of Sufism
from its beginnings through the ribāṭ and the brotherhood to the ṭarīqa, and
then on to modern developments. The organisation of Ṣūfīs by rulers and
states is considered after the ṭarīqa, but before modern developments.
At its beginnings, Sufism was individual rather than organised, though there
was still a transfer of ideas and practices from individual to individual, which
is in some ways a form of organisation. The very first Muslims who were later
identified as Ṣūfīs did not use the term “Ṣūfī” themselves; the earliest use of this
term was in and around Baghdad, at the heart of the great ʿAbbāsid caliphate,
in the third/ninth century (Karamustafa, Sufism, 6). These third-/ninth-century
Ṣūfīs did not understand Sufism as something they had invented, however, but
as something that had been practiced by earlier ascetics and mystics.
Though little is known of these earliest Muslim ascetics and mystics, they
and their activities do not seem to have been organised in any particular fash-
ion. Nothing is said about the institutional or even personal relations of the
earliest (often semi-mythical) proto-Ṣūfīs whose lives are reported in the clas-
sic Risāla of Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072). These proto-Ṣūfīs appear
as saintly ascetics whose practice was supported only by God and their own
piety (Qushayrī, 18–43).
Starting with Abū l-Qāsim al-Junayd (d. 298/910), one of the first Muslim
mystics to identify himself as a Ṣūfī, it became standard to mention who a
great Ṣūfī studied with. At first, the Ṣūfī who was most often mentioned in
this way was al-Junayd himself (Qushayrī, 43–65). The central organisational
mechanism of Sufism—the relationship between teacher and student—dates
to the beginnings of Sufism, then.
A teacher-student relationship is found in many human activities that in-
volve the transmission of knowledge or techniques, and is also characteris-
tic of the early ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars). However, one aspect of the Ṣūfī
teacher-student relationship that differs from the organisation of the exoteric
sciences of the ʿulamāʾ was the institution of the ʿaqd (contract). According to
al-Qushayrī’s Risāla, at the beginning of the training of a Ṣūfī murīd, an ʿaqd
was formed between the murīd and God, and as a result of this contract, the
The Organisation of Mysticism 337
murīd owed total obedience to his murshid, known generally as a shaykh (Ar.,
elder or teacher) or pīr (P., also elder or teacher). “One condition for success
is that there should be no opposition to the master [shaykh] in his student’s
[murīd’s] heart” (Qushayrī, 406). Later, a contract between the murīd and the
shaykh replaced that between the murīd and God; this contract was known as
an ʿahd (covenant) or bayʿa (allegiance). Organisationally, then, the teacher-
student relationship in Sufism is distinguished from the teacher-student rela-
tionship in other Islamic contexts by the bayʿa from murīd to shaykh (Thibon
in this volume).
By the third/ninth century, the giving of bayʿa had become ritualised, often
taking the form of the shaykh bestowing an article of clothing, normally a kh-
irqa (cloak), on the murīd (Michon). “Taking the khirqa” thus became a syn-
onym for giving bayʿa. This practice was sometimes justified by reference to a
ḥadīth (report) of the Prophet giving a khamīṣa (shirt) to one of his followers,
though many Ṣūfīs accepted that this was in fact a weak justification (Ohlander,
210). The actual purpose of the khirqa is unknown, though it has a parallel in
the custom of a ruler bestowing a khilaʿ (robe of honour) as a mark of favour, a
custom said to have been followed by Pharaoh, who bestowed a robe on Joseph
(Genesis 41: 42). This custom survived in the Middle East and Central Asia until
the Ottomans replaced it with the modern practice of bestowing stars, ribbons,
and medals. The khirqa served as a visible mark of identity, like a Christian
monastic habit, and likewise it varied in colour and design. Some Ṣūfīs wore
muraqqaʿa (patched) khirqas as a mark of their asceticism.
Since the adoption of global models of Western men’s clothing in the Muslim
world from the late nineteenth century onwards, the khirqa has largely disap-
peared, although it is still worn by Mevlevi Ṣūfīs during their samāʿ (whirling
ceremony) and by some shaykhs in Iran and Central Asia. The practice of bayʿa,
in contrast, continues. It is now generally marked by the murshid assigning a
wird (litany) to the murīd.
The very earliest Ṣūfīs were organised informally into groups as well as into
teacher-student pairs. The Ṣūfīs who associated with al-Junayd, for example,
met regularly in the Shūnīziyya Mosque in Baghdad (Karamustafa, Sufism, 20).
Again, this form of organisation resembles that of the early ʿulamāʾ, and the
term ḥalqa (circle) was used to refer to their gatherings/lessons. Two formal
institutions, the lodge and the brotherhood, then replaced the informal groups
of Ṣūfīs.
338 Sedgwick
ribāṭs in such major cities as Damascus, Damietta, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Some
qalandars became part-time itinerants, and lived part of the year in ribāṭs
(Karamustafa, Antinomian Sufis).
Although other forms of organisation eventually superseded the itiner-
ant brotherhood, the qalandars remained popular in Central Asia during the
eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries, and survived there
until the early twentieth century (Papas, Mystiques et vagabonds). E. W. Lane
wrote about Persian dervishes in Cairo in the 1830s, and noted that they were
still distinguished by their kashkūl and tāj (Lane, 248–9). The qalandar model
also survives until today in the form of the Bektāşīs. During the tenth/sixteenth
century the Ottoman government was threatened by Kızılbāş (lit., “red heads”),
Turkic tribesmen who were inclined towards Shīʿism, and the Ottomans’ rivals,
the Ṣafavids. The Bektāşīs were already linked with the elite Ottoman military
forces (the Janissaries, many of whom were Bektāşīs), and were therefore pro-
moted by Ottoman rulers as an alternative to the Kızılbāş. The Kızılbāş survived
until today, as the Alevīs (Dressler), while the Bektāşīs absorbed the remains
of the qalandars, including some of their unusual theological positions and
ceremonies. These positions distinguish them from mainstream Sunnī Sufism.
The Bektāşīs developed a unique organisational structure, on the one hand
linked to the Janissaries and on the other hand divided into celibate and non-
celibate branches. The celibate branch was led by a dede (grandfather) as
shaykh, who presided over a hierarchy of ranks and a large number of tekkes.
The non-celibate branch was led by a çelebi (gentleman) (Zarcone).
When the early nineteenth-century Ottoman government was challenged
by the Janissaries and suppressed them (in 1826) it also suppressed the Bektāşīs,
and confiscated their property. Despite this, the Bektāşīs survived until the end
of the Ottoman Empire (Zarcone), and they are still found in Albania, where
the 1826 suppression was never very effective. During the 1920s and 1930s,
Albanian Bektāşīs became an officially recognised religious community along-
side Sunnī Islam and Christianity; they retain this status until today (Clayer).
one variety of which played a major role in the life of mediaeval Europe by
combining religious devotions, charitable activities, mutual self-help, and
what Christopher Black has called “general desires for corporative identity and
solidarity outside the kin group” (Black, 8).
The futuwwa differed from the itinerant brotherhoods in that they were
urban and settled, and they differed from both the itinerant brotherhoods and
ribāṭ Ṣūfīs in that they did not live together, though they often ate together.
Entry into the futuwwa brotherhood was marked not by receiving a khirqa but
by receiving a shadd (girdle belt), a symbol that was also used by trade guilds
(and by Christian monks). Membership in the futuwwa was further indicated
by wearing sirwāl (trousers) (Algar and Raymond). The shadd was generally
granted when a ṭālib (postulant) had completed a trial period and could be-
come a murīd, then a rafīq (companion) (Taeschner, 140).
The objectives of the futuwwa were periodically described in what was
known as a futuwwat-nāme (a treatise on futuwwa). These included advice on
the religious and spiritual training and development of young men, and have
been compared to European manuals of chivalry. These manuals link the futu-
wwa brotherhoods to Sufism. ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), an important
Ṣūfī (on whom see below) who wrote two futuwwat-nāmes, argued that the
futuwwa was a subsidiary form of Sufism (Ohlander, 284–5, 289–90). He seems
to have had some success in incorporating the futuwwa into Sufism, although
futuwwa brotherhoods still maintained a distinct, separate identity. In gener-
al, little is known of their internal organisation or functioning, but we have
some information about the akhīs in eighth-/fourteenth-century Anatolia. By
then, the akhīs were an association of urban craftsmen who pooled the profits
of their trades, ate together every evening, and then performed dhikr or read
Qurʾān, rather as ribāṭ Ṣūfīs did. They welcomed and handsomely entertained
travellers, including Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 770/1368–9 or 779/1377), and even acted as
governors in towns where the rising Ottoman power had not yet established
itself (Arnakis). Thus, they combined religious, economic, and political func-
tions, rather as rural murābiṭs and shaykhs at tombs did.
The futuwwa were repressed in Iran by the Ṣafavids after the tenth/sixteenth
century (Ridgeon), as the akhīs were repressed by the Ottomans around the
same time, after an initial policy of patronising them was abandoned (Ocak).
The term futuwwat-nāme persisted, however, to describe the literature of some
trade guilds, which survived (often with Ṣūfī connections) until the economic
restructuring of the nineteenth century (Ridgeon; Afshari in this volume). A
form of futuwwat-nāme known as the risāla was in use in Central Asia until the
early twentieth century (Dagyeli). The term futuwwa likewise survives, and is
now used to describe local gangsters (Irwin, 162–3).
344 Sedgwick
3 Ṭarīqa Sufism
the ṭarīqas provided, that the organisational form of the ṭarīqa met this de-
mand, and that this process encountered no significant or effective opposi-
tion. Erik Ohlander sees two complementary developments: the “routinization
of Sufism as a distinct mode of religiosity, identity, and social affiliation” and
“an institutionalizing vision of organization, accoutrement, and praxis which
was self-regulating, self-propagating, and most importantly, reproducible”
(Ohlander, 187).
The ṭarīqa differed not only from the ribāṭ and the brotherhood but also
from the Catholic monastic order. Firstly, membership of a monastic order is
full-time, with vows of chastity and poverty preventing participation in ordi-
nary life. Secondly, a monastic order is integrated into the authority structures
of the Catholic Church, structures that have no real equivalent in Islam. The
Catholic “third order” is somewhat closer to the ṭarīqa, as its members (called
“tertiaries”) live “in the world,” but a third order is attached to a “first order”
(a male monastic order) or a “second order” (a female monastic order). The
closest the Catholic Church comes to the ṭarīqa is, perhaps, Opus Dei, a largely
autonomous movement established in Spain in 1928, most of whose members
live in the world. Opus Dei is so unusual that the papacy has repeatedly had to
invent new organisational categories to accommodate it (Walsh).
“belongs” to more than one great order; this, of course, is only possible when
the larger order exercises no actual control.
All are equally called ṭarīqas: the larger order (Shādhiliyya), the sub-
order (Jazūliyya Shādhiliyya), the sub-sub-order (ʿĪsāwiyya), and the quasi-
independent local branch of the sub-sub-order (ʿĪsāwiyya of Taroudant). The
name of a sub-order often indicates the larger order from which it derives, as
in the case of the Jazūliyya Shādhiliyya or the Khālidiyya Naqshbandiyya. It
should be noted that since adjectives follow the noun in Arabic, these two
ṭarīqas are known in Arabic as the Shādhiliyya Jazūliyya and the Naqshbandi-
yya Khālidiyya. Abbreviated nomenclature (“Jazūliyya” and “Khālidiyya”) is
also used.
Most of the larger orders no longer have a living leader, though the guard-
ians of the tomb of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī in Baghdad are still treated with great
respect by Qādirīs everywhere. The leaders of some ṭarīqas in cities such as
Cairo retain limited authority over the shaykhs of local sub-orders, notably
when the successor to a shaykh needs to be appointed. From the Mamlūk pe-
riod to the nineteenth century, for example, some Qādirī sub-orders in Egypt
recognised a central mashyakha (skaykhdom) in Cairo, though some other
Qādirī sub-orders did not. In contrast, another Egyptian ṭarīqa, the Rifāʿiyya,
had no central authority (De Jong, 16–8). The most centralised of all the ṭarīqas
was the Mevleviyye, all branches of which, across the Middle East, accepted
the authority of the çelebi in Konya (Trimingham, 179).
scholar to teach a particular text (Vajda). An ijāza, then, is also a sort of certificate.
Sometimes, honorary ijāzas are given, in Sufism as in classic Islamic scholar-
ship. Not all who receive an ijāza from a shaykh, then, function as actual muqa-
ddams. The celebrated Egyptian Ṣūfī ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shāʿrānī (d. 973/1565)
was known for having twenty-six ijāzas (Chih and Mayeur-Jaouen, 39).
In addition to muqaddams, a ṭarīqa may have a number of other officials
who perform various duties, especially during a ḥaḍra (dhikr ceremony).
The most important of these is the reciter, for whom various terms are used
depending on the place, including munshid and maddāḥ. In nineteenth-
century Algeria, most ṭarīqas also appointed standard-bearers and a saqqāʾ
(water-carrier) who was responsible not only for water but also for refresh-
ments and cooking (Rinn, 87). The muqaddam, though, is the most important
ṭarīqa official.
who has given bayʿa, and a more loosely attached follower, often called a
muḥibb (admirer); one sub-order of the Shādhiliyya distinguishes four such
grades (Trimingham, 188–9). In practice, however, some who attend the cer-
emonies and rituals of a ṭarīqa may not have given bayʿa or received any alter-
native rank, and not all those who have given bayʿa attend events regularly, and
some may move to another town or country where there is no local branch,
or may simply drift away from a ṭarīqa. In addition, because of the practice of
honorary bayʿa, one person may have given bayʿa to several shaykhs, only one
of whom serves as his murshid. Given this, ṭarīqa membership is fluid, and it is
difficult to say exactly how many “followers” a particular shaykh actually has.
Shaykhs have almost invariably been male, as have their followers in the
ṭarīqa. Although there are reports of ribāṭs for women in the sixth/twelfth cen-
tury, these may have been refuges for the destitute rather than communities
of Ṣūfīs (Karamustafa, Sufism, 126). Some nineteenth-century Algerian ṭarīqas
admitted women and even had female muqaddams (Rinn, 88–9), but this was
unusual in other parts of the Muslim world. There is no theological reason for
the gendering of Sufism, but gender practices in Sufism generally follow local
norms. This means that as gender practices have changed during the twentieth
century in some parts of the Muslim world, such that women play a greater
part in public life, women have also begun to play greater roles in some ṭarīqas,
both as followers and in some cases also in leadership positions (Sedgwick,
Saints, 209).
While nearly all shaykhs have been male, there has been variety in their oc-
cupations and backgrounds. Some have been members of the ʿulamāʾ, some
have been merchants, and some have been poor and illiterate. This has or-
ganisational consequences. When a shaykh is a merchant, the organisation
of Sufism and the organisation of trade may be entwined, so that a shaykh’s
business trips facilitate the spread of his ṭarīqa, and the ṭarīqa may also assist
the business. When a shaykh is a member of the ʿulamāʾ, activities may also be-
come entwined. Such a shaykh has the exoteric knowledge of the ʿulamāʾ and
the esoteric knowledge of the Ṣūfīs, and may combine these in his teaching.
Ṣūfī organisational structures may also become entwined with other struc-
tures. In some parts of Upper Egypt, for example, roles in ṭarīqas mirror roles
in agriculture. Major landowners do not themselves participate in ṭarīqas,
but often contribute to them financially. Prosperous farmers are the local
shaykhs (or technically muqaddams, as they publicly honour national leaders
in Cairo). Murīds are mostly agricultural labourers. It has been suggested that
this both mirrors and reinforces existing economically-based power structures
(Hopkins, 145, 150).
350 Sedgwick
4 Succession
5 Finances
The activities of Ṣūfī ribāṭs, tombs and ṭarīqas are generally financed by contri-
butions from shaykhs’ followers and admirers, or by a waqf, with the important
352 Sedgwick
proviso that while in the past ṭarīqas controlled their own waqf, in the modern
period waqf properties are often controlled by the state, considerably reducing
the independence of the ṭarīqas affected (Sabra in this volume).
Contributions from followers and admirers may be in kind, in cash, or in
labour. Those made in kind or labour take a variety of forms, from making tea
before a ḥaḍra and cleaning up after it to working in shaykh’s fields, a practice
which was common in northern Sudan (Karrar, 148). Contributions may also
be irregular and entirely voluntary, regular and customary, or take the form of
fees for particular services.
Waqf, customary contributions, and fees are more important for well-
established ṭarīqas and tombs. Waqf funds derive from gifts and legacies,
sometimes from rulers and sometimes from wealthy followers. Customary
contributions are often made on an annual basis, for example at a mawlid or
at an ʿīd (festival) (De Jong, 160). These customary contributions are, in effect,
membership fees. Sometimes, however, in the view of colonial officials, the
contributions collected by rural shaykhs and murābiṭs were considered exces-
sive in relation to the resources of the rural farmers who made them (Rinn,
95–6). It is difficult to determine whether such views reflected reality or the
antipathy the colonial officials held towards Sufism.
Fees were and are given in return for a variety of religious services, ranging
from the provision of names for the newborn (Crapanzano, 338) to burial plots
for the dead. Fees were also given for the performance of ḥaḍras at marriage
celebrations (De Jong, 101) or, in rural Morocco, to cure the ill or someone pos-
sessed by jinn (Crapanzano, 338–43). Fees were never a significant source of
income for new and growing ṭarīqas.
Waqf income and various kinds of contributions are applied to the activities
of the ṭarīqa, including the purchase and maintenance of premises, to charita-
ble ends (sometimes in the form of free food or cash), and to the maintenance
of shaykhs and their families. Some shaykhs refuse any income from ṭarīqa
sources, especially if they have some other source of income, for example, if
they are members of the ʿulamāʾ, and can live from teaching salaries. By con-
trast, some shaykhs live comfortably or even become rich. This is not normally
seen as problematic.
Given their size and potential for action, Ṣūfī organisations have long been a
concern for rulers and states. It is therefore not surprising that there have been
repeated attempts to organise and control Sufism.
The Organisation of Mysticism 353
One way in which rulers and states commonly exercise influence over reli-
gious institutions is through patronage, since the recipients of patronage are
more likely to respect the interests and wishes of their patrons. Patronage of
celebrated religious institutions also helps legitimise rulers and states in the
eyes of the general population (Papas in this volume). Throughout the history
of Islam, rulers have shown public respect to leading Ṣūfī shaykhs, and often
also given them money and property. Sometimes gifts from rulers serve other
purposes. The Ottoman practice of granting waqfs in newly conquered areas
to favoured Ṣūfīs, for example, helped consolidate their control of such areas
(Green, 133).
In Baghdad in the fifth/eleventh century, during a turbulent period when
dynastic rivalries aligned with confessional disputes, a formal office of shaykh
al-shuyūkh (shaykh of the shaykhs or chief shaykh) was introduced. A ribāṭ was
endowed for the shaykh al-shuyūkh, whose task it was to promote Sunnī the-
ology and loyalty to the Sunnī regime. The Sunnī ruler in Damascus followed
suit, and as did the ruler in Cairo, where a ribāṭ was endowed for a shaykh
al-shuyūkh in the sixth/twelfth century. The Baghdad and Cairo offices were
sometimes hereditary, and as their holders became increasingly engaged
in politics, it seems likely that several appointed deputies to carry out their
Ṣūfī duties, at least in Cairo. Despite their titles, they seem to have exercised
little real control over other Ṣūfīs, who often complained about their moral
and scholarly shortcomings. After the seventh/thirteenth century, the of-
fice seems to have been abandoned (Hofer, Origins and development). The
last shaykh al-shuyūkh of Baghdad was executed by the Mongols in 656/1258
(Ohlander, 111).
The ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Nāṣir, ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī’s patron, also attempted to
control the fityān of Baghdad, first by joining them and then by declaring him-
self their head (Ohlander, 271). This established a connection between futuw-
wa and royal authority that continued in Cairo after the Mongol destruction of
Baghdad, when the refugee ʿAbbāsid prince who became caliph al-Mustanṣir II
(r. 659–60/1261) dressed sultan Baybars I (d. 676/1277) in the sirwāl of futuwwa
(Taeschner, 143). A similar practice developed in the Ottoman Empire, where,
from 824/1421, new sultans were dressed in a sword belt, as a form of shadd, by
a Ṣūfī shaykh (Algar and Raymond).
Rather than appointing a single shaykh al-shuyūkh to supervise all the
ṭarīqas, the Mamlūk sultans in Cairo attempted to exercise control over in-
dividual ṭarīqas. For example, they appointed a member of a leading ʿulamāʾ
family, one Muḥammad ʿAshūr, to lead the Burhāmiyya, and then made this
office hereditary. Throughout the Mamlūk and Ottoman periods, the ʿAshūr
family seems to have maintained its authority over Burhāmīs in Cairo, and so
354 Sedgwick
presumably also (indirectly) the authority over them of the state from which
its own authority derived, though it probably never exercised much control
outside Cairo (De Jong, 17–8).
In the early modern era, the construction of stronger and more centralised
states on models inspired by nineteenth-century European practices included
the expansion of state power over all religious institutions, including Sufism.
In Egypt, the reforming military ruler Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha (r. 1805–48) ap-
pointed a supervisor over all the Ṣūfī ṭarīqas, giving him the power to resolve
succession disputes, to approve the payment of government stipends out of
the waqf that the state had taken control of, and to allocate individual ṭarīqas
particular areas in which they had exclusive right to operate by virtue of qadam
(seniority). The Egyptian state thus established some control over older, more
institutionalised ṭarīqas, especially those with tombs, or with a claim on sti-
pends in lieu of waqf. This system seems to have little impact on the less insti-
tutionalised, growing ṭarīqas, however, and perhaps for this reason, Khedive
Ismāʿīl (r. 1863–79) attempted to ban private ḥaḍras, so that only recognised
ṭarīqas could operate (De Jong, 20–44).
Again, these provisions did not have their desired effect, and in 1895 a khe-
dival decree established a Majlis al-Ṣūfī (Sufi Council) with jurisdiction over
Sufism and the same powers in this area as a court of law (De Jong, 132). The
Majlis passed regulations that specified, in remarkable detail, how a ṭarīqa was
to operate and even what might and might not be done during a ḥaḍra, try-
ing especially to eliminate doctrines and practices that the reformist religious
establishment of the time found objectionable. Its regulations, however, were
controversial, and never enforced (De Jong, 167, 172). It is not clear what in-
fluence these attempts had in terms of establishing bureaucratic control. The
Majlis al-Ṣūfī is now al-Majlis al-Aʿlā lil-Ṭuruq al-Ṣūfīya (the Supreme Council
for Sufi Ṭarīqas), and in theory, all Egyptian ṭarīqas must be registered and su-
pervised by it. In practice, many of Egypt’s ṭarīqas are not registered, and many
Ṣūfīs simply ignore the Majlis (Hoffman, 15). However, only registered ṭarīqas
can conduct large-scale rituals and processions in public.
Similar models were adopted elsewhere. In 1866, the Ottomans established
a Meclis-i Meşāyiḥ (Council of Shaykhs), linked to the Şeyhülislām, the office
at the pinnacle of the Ottoman religious hierarchy (Zarcone).
Colonial states also attempted to control Ṣūfī organisations, but ironically,
these attempts often had more in common with premodern models than with
the centralised state models followed by Muḥammad ʿAlī and his successors.
The British in India and the French in Algeria were both, in principle, op-
posed to Sufism, which they saw as a threat to their power and as inherently
The Organisation of Mysticism 355
8 Conclusion
The brotherhood, of which there were two forms, was the other early organ-
isational form Sufism used. Itinerant mendicant brotherhoods of the qalandar
type became widespread. Shams-i Tabrīz (d. c. 645/1247) was evidently a Ṣūfī
of this type, while Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī directed a lodge. Little is known of the
internal organisation of the itinerant brotherhood, or of how rulers attempted
to control them. Many were later absorbed into the ṭarīqa system, just as the
urban ribāṭ was, but even in the nineteenth century, there were still itinerant
mendicant Ṣūfīs; the Bektāşīs, now found especially in Albania, originated
from this form of organisation.
Brotherhoods were also associated with futuwwa, which were neither
mendicant nor itinerant. They took a number of forms, sometimes military,
sometimes as associations of craftsmen. These resembled the confraternities
of mediaeval Europe except that, once again, they were free from ecclesiasti-
cal supervision and control. Muslim rulers often tried to control them or ally
with them. In some ways, these brotherhoods were the forerunners of ṭarīqa
Sufism, as they allowed ordinary Muslims to combine aspects of Sufism with
their normal lives. Engagement in the ribāṭ of the qalandar-type brotherhood,
by contrast, was a full-time affair. The futuwwa brotherhoods were repressed,
but some of their rituals survived in imperial ceremonial.
As an organisational form, the ṭarīqa was immensely successful; it spread
throughout the Muslim world, incorporating and often replacing earlier forms
of Ṣūfī organisations, and bringing Sufism to ordinary Muslims everywhere. If
the ribāṭ resembles the Christian monastery and the futuwwa brotherhood re-
sembles the mediaeval Catholic confraternity, the ṭarīqa has no obvious coun-
terpart in European history. If any parallel other than Opus Dei is appropriate,
it is the anachronistic one of the franchise.
The extent to which ṭarīqa Sufism was the same as the mysticism of the
ribāṭ varied from ṭarīqa to ṭarīqa. Most followers of well-established, mature
ṭarīqas focused on the wird and the dhikr, not on aḥwāl (mystical states) and
maqāmāt (mystical stations). Ṭarīqas led by notable shaykhs, however, focused
on the mystical or esoteric development of its followers.
Rulers attempted to control urban ṭarīqas, sometimes by appointing their
shaykhs. In the modern period, rulers tried to institutionalise control over
them, notably through the Egyptian Ṣūfī Majlis. In other countries, notably
Turkey, modern states tried to eliminate the ṭarīqas altogether. These attempts
have met with only limited success, as the ṭarīqa is a robust organisational
form, especially when it is not dependent on state-controlled waqf. Even so,
the ṭarīqas no longer occupy the prominent place they once did in Muslim so-
cieties, if only because many new organisations, from universities to newspa-
pers, have ended the joint monopoly that Ṣūfīs and ʿulamāʾ held over public life
The Organisation of Mysticism 359
for many centuries. Some ṭarīqas have modified their organisations somewhat,
either by incorporating modern practices or by grafting modern organisations
onto the ṭarīqa. Despite this, the organisational form of the ṭarīqa continues
to reign supreme.
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The Organisation of Mysticism 361
The first Ṣūfīs adopted a particular way of life characterised by certain ele-
ments that distinguished them from other Muslims: wearing garments such
as a patched frock (muraqqaʿa), rituals in which disciples wear the Ṣūfī cloak
(lubs al-khirqa); seeking to access the divine by a path (ṭarīqa); utilising chains
of initiation (silsila); and living in specific places (khānaqāh, ribāṭ, zāwiya).
The first Ṣūfīs were divided over these various elements, a fact that is reflected
in the Ṣūfī literature of the early centuries.
1 Origins
The ascetics of the second/eighth century wore simple clothing, often made of
wool; on this issue, it is difficult not to recognise the influence of the Christian
monks. Thus, the Damascene Abū Sulaymān al-Dārānī (d. c. 215/830), who is
said to have worn a coarse white tunic, regarded the wearing of wool as a sign
of renunciation (al-Sīrjānī, § 232–3). The white woollen garment was arguably
the most common one, and is often presented as the origin of the term ṣūfī,
namely, those who wear a garment made of wool (ṣūf ), although this deri-
vation is debated by Ṣūfīs themselves (for example, al-Kalābādhī, 21–6; and
Anon., Adab al-muluk, 24–6).
At a later stage, toward the middle of the second/eighth century, there appeared
garments onto which pieces of fabric or used clothing were sewn. The terms
muraqqaʿa (a garment made of pieces of fabric sewn together), mulawwanāt
(multicoloured or variegated garments) (al-Sulamī, Bayān, 366) and khirqa
(Meier, Abū Saʿīd, 356–60) (a piece of fabric, mystical cloak, patched frock) are
synonymous, although the technical meaning of the khirqa appeared after the
fourth/tenth century. Despite some nuances, these terms all refer to this piece
of clothing, which was worn because of the material conditions of the earliest
Ṣūfīs; eventually it became a distinctive garment of the Ṣūfīs, “[the] symbol
of material and spiritual poverty of someone [travelling on] the path to God”
(Gril, De la khirqa, 58). The scriptural justification for wearing a muraqqaʿa was
related to the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, who wore a loincloth patched with
twelve pieces of fabric (and possibly another garment, a jubba, comprising
thirteen pieces), according to al-Kharkūshī (Tahdhīb al-asrār, 228–9) when he
stood on the pulpit in the mosque of Medina. There is also a story that por-
trays ʿĀʾisha mending a garment (raqqaʿa) with pieces of fabric (riqāʿa), and
the Prophet encouraging her to continue to do so. Although it is difficult to
verify historically, these reports at least show that these two figures represent-
ed models of frugality for the first generations of Muslims (al-Sīrjānī, § 231–2).
According to certain traditions, the Prophet himself mended his clothing (or
commended the use of clothing patched with pieces of fabric (riqāʿ), accord-
ing to Ibn Ḥanbal, 6:106, 6:242 and 3:244) and encouraged his companions to
wear woollen garments (al-Kharkūshī, 228; al-Maqdisī, 222–6). However, as
ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234) acknowledged in his ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (The
benefits of spiritual knowledge), the ritual of transmitting the khirqa was not
practised in that way by the Prophet (Gril, De la khirqa, 59). Later, the follow-
ing verse of the Qurʾān was invoked as a scriptural foundation: “However, the
364 Thibon
garment of piety is worth even more” (7:26) (see, for example, al-Kharkūshī,
229 and Ibn al-ʿArabī cited in Addas, 19).
For Ibrāhīm b. Adham (d. 161/777–8), a prominent Ṣūfī figure originally from
Khurāsān, wearing a patched garment was ostentatious if done by choice, and,
if done out of necessity, it amounted to a complaint about one’s material situ-
ation (al-Sīrjānī, § 235). The Damascene Aḥmad b. Abī l-Ḥawārī (d. 230/845 or
244/860) claimed to have worn it in his youth and to have earned his father’s
disapproval, because the latter thought him incapable of living up to the strin-
gent demands that wearing such a garment implied (al-Sīrjānī, § 233). Ḥātim
al-Aṣamm (d. 237/851–2) was originally from Balkh; he and his disciples wore
used garments, perhaps even rags, and he maintained that wearing the cloak
(ʿabāʾ) was one of the signs of renunciation. His spiritual method was based on
four types of death, the fourth one being the so-called “green death” that con-
sisted of donning a garment made of rags (riqāʿ) sewn one on top of the other
(Thibon, Les générations, 94, n. 2 and 97, n. 20; on this matter: Chodkiewicz, Les
quatre morts, 35–57). This garment, known from the prophetic era, was a sort
of coat of white or striped wool, sometimes made of camel hair and without
sleeves; it became a distinguishing symbol for Iraqi Ṣūfīs. Another Khurāsānī,
Abū Turāb al-Nakhshabī (d. 245/859), saw it as a form of disguised mendican-
cy, a warning to those who came to khānaqāhs as mendicants, not as genuine
ascetics (al-Sīrjānī, § 237). In Basra, during the first half of the third/ninth cen-
tury, the muraqqaʿa was criticised by al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857 in Baghdad) as
a subterfuge, used in order to be recognised as a renunciant and solicit alms
(al-Sarrāj, 248). Abū Ḥātim al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 260s/874–84), a transition figure be-
tween early Sufism and classical Baghdadi Sufism (Melchert, Basran origins,
234–40), cautioned the Ṣūfīs who wore it (al-Sīrjānī, § 235). Thus, adopting a
specific garment became the subject of debates and disputes for a good part
of the third/ninth century, although al-Junayd accepted it under certain condi-
tions (i.e., the master had to order the disciple to don it: al-Sīrjānī, § 228). In
addressing his entourage, al-Shiblī (d. 334/946) turned to poetry to convey the
message that clothing does not make one a Ṣūfī (Böwering and Orfali (eds.),
Sufi treatises, 105, § 514). Abū l-Ḥusayn al-Nūrī (d. 295/907), another Baghdadi,
was the most severely critical of the deviations that had occurred in the past
decades; he proclaimed: “The pieces of fabric were a veil covering pearls; they
have now become piles of rubbish over corpses” (al-Sīrjānī, § 237).
The wearing of the murāqqaʿa does not have a single, uniform meaning
throughout the Middle Eastern area. In Khurāsān, it was associated with those
who practise the code of chivalrous virtue ( futuwwa) and thus belonged to
a trade guild or an urban movement seeking social justice, then it became
a form of spirituality integrated by the Ṣūfīs (al-Qushayrī, “bāb al-futuwwa,”
The First Communities 365
472–9; al-Sulamī, Kitāb al-futuwwa; on futuwwa and its links with Sufism, see Tor,
229–49). Yet not all of those who practised the futuwwa code wore this gar-
ment, at least in public; for example, Abū Ḥafṣ al-Ḥaddād, one of its most fa-
mous representatives (Deladrière, 77; al-Sulamī, Risālat, 108; al-Sarrāj, 194), did
not wear the garment in public. Likewise, in Nīshāpūr, those in the Malāma
movement, which was characterised by the blaming of the soul/self and the
search for anonymity, rejected the slightest mark of distinction, including in
their clothing. They believed that any kind of public exposure of one’s spiri-
tual state was tantamount to ostentation (Deladrière, 66, 85; al-Sulamī, Risālat,
103, 113). By contrast, in the same geographical area, the Karrāmiyya, who were
somewhat eccentric preachers in search of social visibility, wore barely tanned
animal skins (Massignon, 260).
During the fourth/tenth century, treatises were devoted to the wearing of
specific garments, one treatise of which is the Kitāb lubs al-muraqqaʿāt by Ibn
Khafīf (d. 371/982) (Sobieroj, Ibn Ḫafīf, 311, n. 26, cited by Karamustafa, 86),
but these are no longer extant. More often than not, this subject and its ac-
companying discussions are found dispersed throughout the first manuals of
Sufism. One of the first is the work of al-Kalābādhī (d. 380/990), who primarily
mentions wearing a woollen garment (al-Kalābādhī, 22–5: where he discusses
the origin of the term ṣūfī; on Abū Ḥātim accompanied by 320 disciples, all
wearing woollen clothes on their way to the pilgrimage, see Abū Nuʿaym, 8:80).
Al-Sarrāj (d. 378/988) does not discuss this matter at length; in his Lumaʿ, he
says that clothing matters little as long as it corresponds to the spiritual mo-
ment (waqt) and is not based on a calculated choice or meant to be a sign of
affectation (al-Sarrāj, 188). Al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) does not devote any space
to this matter in his Risāla, but he does address it in another text. There, he
says that it is preferable for the disciple to have the khirqa handed to him by
the master, so that it is not a result of his personal choice (see ʿUyūn al-ajwiba
fī funūn al-asʾila, in Sobieroj, Die Responsensammlung, 37, question 57). In the
same place, he explains the reasons for wearing a specific blue garment—
he says it is the colour of mourning, and white is preferable (Sobieroj, Die
Responsensammlung, 36, question 56). Al-Kharkūshī (d. 407/1016) devotes a
section to clothing in general and shows an interest in references to the pro-
phetic era; however, he does not speak of any specific garment, and the term
muraqqaʿāt appears only once (al-Kharkūshī, 228–35; 234 for the muraqqaʿāt).
Throughout his works, al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) has interspersed several refer-
ences or reflections on this matter, but he does not address it in a specific chap-
ter or treatise. He states that wearing the khirqa is part of the adab of the Ṣūfīs
(al-Sulamī, Jawāmiʿ, 40, § 100), but in his eyes, it is only justified by complete
indigence. Influenced by the malāmatī orientation, al-Sulamī did not favour
366 Thibon
example, al-Hujwīrī indicated that a trial period of three years should precede
wearing a cloak; in this case it was an initiatory rite and not a rite of reception
for a disciple who had already confirmed his initial commitment (Addas, 9–17).
According to Chodkiewicz’s description, Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) considered
it “an additional function,” in which the master transferred his spiritual states
to this disciple to lead him to perfection (Chodkiewicz, Note, 50). It somehow
complements other modalities such as the bayʿa (the pledge) of the initiato-
ry pact and the talqīn al-dhikr (the transmission of an invocation formula),
two modalities of initiatory incorporation whose scriptural foundations are
more solid than those of the lubs al-khirqa and yet seldom highlighted in the
sources of the first four centuries (Chodkiewicz, Note, 42–9; see al-Qushayrī,
737 [“bāb al-waṣiyya li-l-murīdīn”], where talqīn al-dhikr is mentioned; on the
subsequent ritual, see Papas). It should be noted that Ibn al-ʿArabī was initially
hostile to the lubs al-khirqa, as the western Muslims did not know this practice
during his time. He changed his mind once he arrived in the East (Addas, 13–5).
Finally, Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), in his ʿAwārif
al-maʿārif, distinguished two types of khirqa, the first representing a complete
commitment to the master and a connection of spiritual aspiration (khirqat
al-irāda); the other connection of blessing (khirqat al-tabarruk) refers to one
who seeks to benefit from the master’s baraka, without undertaking commit-
ments assigned by the master (al-Suhrawardī, ch. 12, 99; on the khirqa in the
Persian sources, see Ohlander).
Wearing a khirqa handed down by a master enables the disciple to benefit from
the transfer of baraka the khirqa symbolises; in return, the disciple places him-
self under the master’s authority in order to make progress on the path. Yet
what is this authority based on? The first manuals of Sufism or the works of
Ṣūfī ṭabaqāt (successive generations) documented the relations of masters to
disciples in order to establish the transmission of their teachings. Their au-
thors, such as al-Sulamī or al-Qushayrī, were also traditionists (muḥaddithūn)
(on the links between Sufism and the ḥadīth sciences, see Karamustafa, 87–91;
Knysh Islamic mysticism, 125–30). The process of collecting the words of the
masters and the teachings they documented involved employing methods
that were similar, in every respect, to those of the traditionists; most notably,
they mention the chain of transmitters. In fact, these isnāds had an additional
value: they not only guaranteed the authenticity of the words transmitted, as
with ḥadīth, but they also embodied a presence and conveyed the baraka of
368 Thibon
the initial speakers and the various successive transmitters. Al-Sulamī was one
of the first Ṣūfī authors to formulate the characteristics of this spiritual isnād
(Thibon, L’œuvre, 432–5). This new use of the isnād modified the perception of
the chain of transmission of the muḥaddith, at least for Ṣūfīs. What was just an
instrument of validation of the authenticity of the prophetic words became,
for Ṣūfīs, the vehicle of the Prophet’s presence through successive generations,
almost a sort of relic (Thibon, Transmission, 75–6). The isnād guaranteed the
reliability and authenticity of the words of the Ṣūfīs of the first generations,
but with the establishment of another kind of transmission, the isnād lost its
importance. The new chain of transmission that was established validated the
baraka of a Ṣūfī master and the totality of his teachings and was called the
“path” (ṭarīq, ṭarīqa).
Among the books of Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya (Generations of the Ṣūfīs), al-Sulamī
was likely one of the first to note the different types of relationships that ex-
isted among the teachers he identified (Thibon Les générations, 18–27). At the
time, the relationships between masters and disciples were often manifold
and seemingly unlimited by constraints connected with conventional norms
(ādāb) or particular behaviour between masters and disciples. In this work, as
in others, the term ṣaḥiba plays an essential role in describing such relation-
ships. In addition, during the two centuries in which the figures identified in
the Ṭabaqāt lived, the content of this term evolved. For example, was there a
transition from simple companionship that might be qualified as scholarly, to
a master-disciple relationship? (Ibn ʿAbbād dated the transition from shaykh
al-taʿlīm to shaykh al-tarbiya as being from the fifth/eleventh century; on this,
see Meier, Khurāsān, 189–219 and Meier, Qušayrī’s Tartib, 93–8). Sometimes a
lineage is sketched out, as when al-Sulamī said of Shaqīq al-Balkhī: “He was
the master of Ḥātim al-Aṣamm, a disciple of Ibrāhīm b. Adham, and from him
he took the spiritual path (akhadha ʿan-hu al-ṭarīqa)” (Thibon, Les générations,
74). The expression akhadha ʿan-hu al-ṭarīqa, which became normative in later
Sufism, only appears twice in the text and in each case links only two figures.
Furthermore, the term ṭarīqa or ṭarīq is ambiguous. At that point, in the fourth/
tenth century, the term did not yet designate a specific lineage, but a method of
inner transformation experienced by a specific master in order to reach God.
Al-Sulamī thus explains that Ibrāhīm al-Khawwāṣ followed the path of trusting
in God (salaka ṭarīq al-tawakkul).
Jaʿfar al-Khuldī (d. 348/959) was one of the first to identify an initiatory chain
(silsila) that is cited by Ibn Nadīm, and proceeds from Junayd to Anas b. Mālik,
and includes Sarī l-Saqaṭī < Maʿrūf al-Karkhī < Farqad al-Sabakhī < al-Ḥasan
al-Baṣrī (Thibon, al-Khuldī, Jaʿfar; see also Trimingham, appendix A, 261–3
for the first silsilas). Al-Qushayrī cites his own master, Abū ʿAlī l-Daqqāq, who
stated: “I took this path (ṭarīq) from al-Naṣrābādhī, who took it from al-Shiblī,
The First Communities 369
who took it from Junayd, who took it from Sarī (l-Saqaṭī), who took it from
Maʿrūf al-Karkhī, who took it from Dāwūd al-Ṭāʾī, who had met the succes-
sors (tābiʿūn)” (al-Qushayrī, “bāb al-ṣuḥba,” 578–9; a path passing via al-Sulamī
and al-Naṣrābādhī and going back to the first six imāms is given for Abū Saʿid
b. Abī l-Khayr according to Monawwar, 49; Ibn Salāḥ al-Shahrazūrī, who was
connected to the path of Qushayrī [khirqa qushayriyya] presents a chain that
mentions Ḥabīb al-ʿAjamī, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, and ʿAlī after al-Ṭāʾī; see Chiabotti,
44–5). It should be noted that these first chains do not reach beyond the suc-
cessors. It is only later that a link connects al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib;
this link is common in the majority of brotherhoods, but is the subject of con-
troversy and debate (see the critique formulated by Massignon, 128–34, whose
views, because he addressed this question as a pioneer, lack nuance, as pointed
out by Gril, De la khirqa, 60). For pedagogical reasons, al-Hujwīrī identified
twelve branches into which Sufism is divided, two of which were excluded
for their heterodoxy. Each branch was designated by the name of the figure
considered to be their founder. The branches he highlighted are not the Ṣūfī
lineages that appeared later, rather they are methods of education specific to
each of the masters and the associated practices that their disciples transmit-
ted (al-Ḥujwīrī, 176–260; trans. Mortazavi, 214–301). Ibn al-ʿArabī was one of
the first Ṣūfīs to have dedicated a treatise to the initiatory affiliation that he
acquired when he received a khirqa (Gril, De la khirqa, 60). With the develop-
ment of the ṭuruq (pl. of ṭarīqa, initiatory paths or brotherhoods) this isnād
was then transformed and took on the name of silsila, a kind of genealogical
tree showing the filiation from the current master, more often than not going
back to the Prophet, through all the spiritual figures that transmitted a particu-
lar path (see Alatas in this volume). It was not until the sixth/twelfth century
that the first brotherhoods appeared; these continued to develop and have
branched out until the present day. ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166), founder
of the Qādiriyya brotherhood, marked that turning point (Knysh, Islamic mys-
ticism, 179–95). Yet he was not the only one. Al-Ṣuhrawārdī benefited from the
subsidies of caliph al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (r. 575–622/1180–1225) who held him in
high esteem and built for him a ribāṭ called al-Marzūbaniyya. In this way the
caliph enhanced his social and spiritual standing in the eyes of his subjects
(Knysh, Islamic mysticism, 195–207; Hartmann) and Sufism became a powerful
social and political force (Ceyhan in this volume).
In order to deliver their teachings to their disciples, Ṣūfī masters needed places
in which to meet (Ephrat and Pinto, Firouzeh, Hofer [Ṣūfī Outposts], all in this
370 Thibon
5 Conclusion
The emergence of Sufism around the second half of the third/ninth century
was followed in the next century by a phase of exploration of the various forms
of spirituality, and its doctrines and practices were documented in written
form. The fifth/eleventh to sixth/twelfth century constitute a pivotal phase,
when the first institutionalisation took place, preceding the emergence of the
brotherhoods. Around the figure of the spiritual master (shaykh), who acquired
an indisputable authority and became indispensable for those in search of a
spiritual ideal, practices, and codes that went beyond spiritual exercises and
devotion were instituted (Van Renterghem, 1:108). A Ṣūfī identity was formed
based on markers such as clothing, rituals, and places that made it possible to
quickly recognise an individual as being a Ṣūfī. From then on, Sufism became
The First Communities 371
a social component in cities, one that potentially represented the political and
social aspirations of the populace or, alternatively, was used as an instrument
in the hands of power.
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Chapter 20
Nasab and silsila are terms that denote kinds of genealogical relations, both
of which are regarded by Ṣūfīs as authoritative channels for the transmission
of spiritual knowledge across generations; thus, they serve as a foundation of
Ṣūfī institutions and organisations. Nasab (Ar. pl. ansāb) refers to pedigree or
bloodline and designates the lineal descent of a particular individual or tribe
from an eponymous ancestor. Silsila (Ar. pl. salāsil), literally means “chain,” and
is commonly used in Sufism and Ṣūfī orders, or ṭarīqa (Ar. pl. ṭuruq), to denote
a continuous string of Ṣūfī initiation and transmission of spiritual knowledge.
Silsila connects a Ṣūfī disciple to his/her master (shaykh or pīr), all the way
to the founder of the ṭarīqa, and ultimately back to the Prophet Muḥammad.
Both nasab and silsila are often presented graphically, in the form of a
shajara, or genealogical tree, that maps an individual lineally to his predeces-
sors, and—in certain cases—also laterally in relation to other individuals who
share the same line of descent.
In charting a genealogical connection to the Prophet or a Ṣūfī master, a sil-
sila works like a nasab, although theoretically speaking, the silsila is accessible
and attainable to any Muslim, while the nasab is exclusive. That is, one must be
born into a nasab, but one can attach oneself to a Ṣūfī master over a protracted
period and be initiated into the ṭarīqa and thereby enter into a silsila. This
functional similarity may make a silsila a kind of rival of a nasab, particularly
when both are understood as channels of spiritual blessings (baraka) and mys-
tical powers constitutive of spiritual leadership, and thus define the logic of
leadership succession in a Ṣūfī ṭarīqa. Nevertheless, nasab and silsila may also
work together in augmenting the spiritual authority of Ṣūfī masters, forming
family ṭarīqas, and establishing a hereditary succession of ṭarīqa leadership.
1 Nasab
term ibn (son of) or, in the case of a woman, bint (daughter of). For example,
D1 ibn C ibn B ibn A, or D2 bint C ibn B ibn A. While interest in kinship and
genealogies among the Arabs predated Islam, nasab narratives were put into
writing around the first/seventh century (Rosenthal). During the reign of the
caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 13–23/634–44), nasab was inscribed to register
tribal affiliations for military and tax purposes. By the third/ninth century, ge-
nealogical writings had become an integral part of Arab literary and historio-
graphical traditions (Duri). During the same period, if not earlier, nasab was
drawn in an arboreal form (mushajjar), thereby projecting a shajara (family
tree), that graphically shows not only lineal descent from an ancestor but also
lateral relations between descendants.
The importance of nasab for the Arabs is due, among other reasons, to the
prevalent ideology of aṣl (root) that posits nobility of origin as conferring moral
qualities and distinction, such as excellence ( faḍīla), honor (sharaf), sincerity
and honesty (ṣidq), and generosity (karam), all of which can be encapsulated
by the term ḥasab (inherited merit) (Abu Lughod, 45; Marlow). The Qurʾān ex-
pounds egalitarian values and decouples ḥasab from nasab, and even stresses
the primacy of ḥasab over nasab to highlight the attainability of moral excel-
lence notwithstanding one’s pedigree. In practice, however, nasab remained a
foundational evaluative category among Muslims who employed it to explain
the noble qualities of an individual.
Moreover, nasab has continued to play a central role in Islamic social or-
ganisations. The Quraysh, those who came from the same tribe as the Prophet
Muḥammad, were given certain privileges—ranging from tax exemptions to
entitlement to certain allowances—in the Medinan era, the ʿUmayyad, and
the ʿAbbāsid empires, as well as in subsequent Islamic polities. The sayyids
(Ar. pl. sāda), meaning those whose nasab can be traced back to the Prophet
Muḥammad through his daughter, Fāṭima, in particular, have persisted in em-
phasising the centrality of prophetic genealogy as a prerequisite to the leader-
ship of the Muslim community. This very issue, of course, lies at the centre
of the Sunnī-Shīʿī division. Later, as I discuss below, some Ṣūfī ṭarīqas stress
prophetic descent as a prerequisite for spiritual leadership of the order with
the assumption that prophetic nasab facilitates the inheritance of prophetic
ḥasab and blessings (baraka).
2 Silsila
a Ṣūfī master to the Prophet Muḥammad. Ṣūfī ideas and practices were initial-
ly developed in informal communities that revolved around particular “moral
athletes” and spiritual mentors in first-/seventh- and second-/eighth-century
Mesopotamia, Syria, and Khurāsān (Knysh, 1). Recent scholarship notes that
early Ṣūfīs in Baghdad were part of the Qurʾānic, ḥadīth, and even legal schol-
arly circles. From such learned circles, these Ṣūfī masters borrowed discursive
tools and symbolic forms, including the ijāza (diploma, certificate of autho-
rization) and silsila (Green, 50) to structure their own knowledge practice.
A silsila is modelled on the isnād, that is, a chain of the transmission of the
Prophet’s words and deeds, used by ḥadīth scholars to verify the soundness
and authenticity of a ḥadīth text (matn). Replicating the isnād, Ṣūfī masters
introduced silsila to authenticate transmission of spiritual teachings and trace
the line of initiatic descent, anchoring both to the prophetic past.
Gradually, Ṣūfīs adopted available institutional frameworks such as ribāṭs
(residences for Muslim warriors along the frontiers) (Fisher; Hofer [Ṣūfī
Outposts] in this volume) and futuwwa (fraternities based on chivalry), that
is, exclusive and esoteric societies of craftsmen and professionals in mediaeval
Persian towns (Meier, 217; Afshari in this volume); they developed their own
Ṣūfī institutions, like lodges and monasteries (khānaqāh). Initiates of these
organisations wore the distinctive robe of their spiritual mentor as a form of
identification, signaling their belonging to a silsila of knowledge and practice
inherited from a Ṣūfī master (Geoffroy, 44–67). These organisations marked the
emergence of Ṣūfī orders or ṭarīqas. Each ṭarīqa is known for its own silsila that
traces the spiritual genealogy of a current head of the order to its eponymous
founder and ultimately back to the Prophet. As a graphic form that asserts the
ṭarīqa’s connection to the Prophet, a silsila works to legitimise the order as a
proper mechanism for the transmission of prophetic teachings. In the context
of a fully-organised ṭarīqa, a silsila took on another function beyond simply au-
thenticating knowledge transmission, that of charting and defining the order’s
leadership succession.
The silsila has been a potent discursive tool and symbolic concept that held
together adherents of a Ṣūfī ṭarīqa over the generations and geographical gaps
that divided them from the eponymous founder of the order. While the silsila
did not necessarily point to concrete bonds of connectivity, it nevertheless pro-
vided adherents of a ṭarīqa with a conceptual connection that allowed them
to imagine themselves as belonging to an inherited religious tradition that ul-
timately goes back to the Prophet. As such, a silsila “offered a way for initiates
to conceive themselves as being meaningfully connected to the teachings and
power of a Prophet who had lived centuries ago” (Green, 87). Equally important
Ṣūfī Lineages and Families 377
figure 20.1 The silsila of the Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya belonging to the Ḥaḍramī scholar Aḥmad b.
ʿAbdallāh al-ʿAṭṭās (d. 1929) of Pekalongan (Central Java, Indonesia)
Photo by Ismail Fajrie Alatas
378 Alatas
of the Prophet’s descendants were considered saints, “it was from among them
that most Muslim saints emerged” (Mayeur-Jaouen and Papas, 8). Indeed, as
early as the fifth/eleventh century, hagiographical sources presented sayyid
families as the privileged sites for the transmission of sanctity. Scholarly and
saintly sayyid families, like the ʿAydarūs family of the Ḥaḍramawt and India,
and the Wafāʾ family of Egypt, were perceived as the institutional loci and
training grounds in and through which sanctity is passed on from father or
uncles to sons or nephews (Peskes; McGregor). As late as the twentieth cen-
tury, scions of saintly sayyid families in Java were still actively disseminating
teachings that sayyids were born with congenital knowledge and spiritual po-
tentialities that could be developed into sanctity through proper familial train-
ing and supervision from childhood (Alatas, They are the heirs, 146–7).
We can also observe the merging of nasab and silsila in so-called family
ṭarīqas, orders in which the nasab of the spiritual leader also functions as a
silsila, and the transmission of spiritual knowledge and leadership is passed
down within the family. In such a ṭarīqa, spiritual leadership is passed down
hereditarily. Scholars have suggested that most large Ṣūfī communities ini-
tially began as lineage-based institutions (Trimingham, 14–6). Some have suc-
ceeded in becoming more open, while others have remained as family orders.
A notable example of the first trend is the Qādiriyya ṭarīqa, attributed to the
Baghdad-based scholar and public moralist ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1166).
In the eighth/fourteenth century, ʿAbd al-Qādir’s sons played active roles in
propagating the ṭarīqa. Gradually, the ṭarīqa spread through “the personal ini-
tiative of Ṣūfī shaykhs in different lands who enhanced their religious standing
by acting as representatives of the prestigious Qādiriyya without renouncing
their independence as spiritual guides of their local communities” (Abun-Nasr,
96). While ʿAbd al-Qādir’s family remained one of the leading scholarly Sunnī
families of Baghdad, the ṭarīqa itself gradually devolved and became decentral-
ised. The Ṣūfī shaykhs in various Muslim lands who belonged to the Qādiriyya
silsila had much latitude in determining the mystical teachings and practices,
all of which were validated through the spiritual authority of ʿAbd al-Qādir.
This dynamic, in turn, allowed the Qādiriyya to spread more widely than any
other ṭarīqa. By the ninth/fifteenth century, the Qādiriyya had branches in the
Middle East, the Maghrib, Iberia, the Indian subcontinent, the horn of Africa,
and Mali, and by the tenth/sixteenth, it had reached China and present-day
Indonesia. The landscape of the Qādiriyya can thus be characterised as a loose
network made up by individual silsilas, some more visible than others, which
operated independently, even as they claimed a common background and ep-
onym. The case of the Qādiriyya shows that the decoupling of silsila and nasab
may lead to the dramatic expansion of the ṭarīqa.
380 Alatas
An example of the second trend is the Ṭarīqat Sādat Banī ʿAlawī, commonly
known as the ʿAlawiyya ṭarīqa (Alatas, ʿAlāwiyya). This order emerged in the
seventh/thirteenth century among the Bā ʿAlawī sayyids of the Ḥaḍramawt, in
southern Yemen and is attributed to Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Bā ʿAlawī (d. 653/1255),
also known as al-faqīḥ al-muqaddam (the paramount jurist). This ṭarīqa com-
bined two silsilas: that of the Prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt) handed down
through the nasab, and that of the renowned Ṣūfī master of the Maghrib, Abū
Madyan Shuʿayb (d. 589/1193 or 594/1198). Like other South Arabian Ṣūfī or-
ders, the ʿAlawiyya ṭarīqa never became a fully institutionalized order. In the
absence of developed infrastructures, nasab played a crucial role in securing
transmission of knowledge and succession of leadership. As a result, most
Bā ʿAlawī scholars did not formally initiate their Bā ʿAlawī children into the
ʿAlawiyya ṭarīqa, as it was assumed that they are born into the ṭarīqa, just as
they are born into the lineage. Thus, if a Bā ʿAlawī sayyid adopts another silsila,
it may be seen as a betrayal of his nasab. While the ʿAlawiyya ṭarīqa never man-
aged to become widespread like the Qādiriyya, it has, nevertheless, taken root
in regions across the Indian Ocean, largely through the diasporic mobility of
the Bā ʿAlawī sayyids (Ho).
passed down to his son Muḥammad al-Mahdī (d. 1320/1902), and subsequently
to al-Mahdī’s brother’s son, Aḥmad al-Sharīf (d. 1352/1933). Al-Sharīf led sev-
eral armed struggles against the French, the Italians, and the British before
he was finally exiled from Libya in 1918. Upon his departure, al-Mahdī’s son,
Muḥammad Idrīs (d. 1403/1983) became the leader of the order. In 1951, after
the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on Libyan inde-
pendence, Idrīs ascended the throne of the newly founded United Kingdom
of Libya and remained as both a monarch and the supreme leader of the
Sanūsiyya ṭarīqa until 1969, when he was deposed in the coup d’état led by
Colonel Muʿammar al-Qadhdhāfī.
Scholars have suggested that Ṣūfī ṭarīqas that developed “centralized sys-
tems of spiritual leadership were the ones that exercised a regulatory religious
influence in rural tribal communities” (Abun-Nasr, 186). Both the Ṣafavid and
the Sanūsī cases certainly attest to this observation. In both cases, the con-
vergence of nasab and silsila worked to form spiritual dynasties. The supreme
leadership of the order was passed down hereditarily, even though others,
outside the hereditary line, may become disciples and deputies. Loyalty to the
spiritual teachings passed down through a silsila become coterminous with
loyalty to the house of the leader. This very dynamic equipped the ṭarīqa with
the potential to become a political dynasty.
5 Conclusion
Central to the teachings of most, if not all, Ṣūfī ṭarīqas is the belief that true
spiritual knowledge ought to be communicated and imparted directly from
the Ṣūfī masters, going back to the Prophet himself in an unbroken chain of
authoritative and trustworthy transmitters. The importance of an unbroken
chain of knowledge transmission means that there must be some discursive
mechanism and attestation that would allow for its authentication, delinea-
tion, and presentation. Traditionally, genealogical forms, whether nasab or
silsila, have performed this role. Theoretically, nasab and silsila point to two
different genealogical relations that may indeed compete with each other.
Nevertheless, it is more often the case that they are combined and used to-
gether to configure novel forms of spiritual authority; establish saintly families,
family ṭarīqas, and spiritual/political dynasties; ensure a steady transmission
of spiritual knowledge; and help smooth the transfer of the material resources
of a Ṣūfī institution. These intersections of nasab and silsila, of which the vari-
ety and complexity are too immense adequately deal with in this short article,
attest to the impact of the family institution upon Ṣūfī organisations.
Ṣūfī Lineages and Families 383
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384 Alatas
During the Islamic Middle Period (i.e. the sixth/twelfth to the seventh/thir-
teenth centuries) Sufism gained continuity and took on a more disciplined,
systematic institutional form based on the master-disciple relationship. From
this period onwards, the institutionalisation of the Ṣūfī path (ṭarīqa) took
place both internally and externally. Internally, the founding generation of
masters gave the path a systematic identity by incorporating spiritual lineages
(silsila), litanies (awrād), invocations (adhkār), the proper inward and outward
attitudes (ādāb), and doctrinal rules (arkān). Externally, the Ṣūfī path became
a pervasive social phenomenon as a result of endeavours by the founders to
communicate the message not only to their own disciples but also to ordinary
members of society and to those in political power, in an effort to solve indi-
vidual and social problems.
In the late mediaeval period, the founding figure (pīr) of the ṭarīqa, seen as
the embodiment of the theological concept of the “perfect human” (al-insān
al-kāmil), was no longer merely a physical figure that satisfied the spiritual
needs of the disciple. He was also recognised as the “path itself,” which enabled
the connection between God, the universe, and man at a cosmic level. The
idea of an eternal (qadīm) Muḥammadan path (al-ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya)
that reaches back to the Prophet Muḥammad through an uninterrupted chain
of masters was embodied in the founding figures of Ṣūfī orders that remain
in existence today. From the seventh/thirteenth century onwards, being initi-
ated by a shaykh, learning the secret invocation formulas (talqīn al-dhikr), and
embarking on a spiritual journey (al-sayr wa-l-sulūk), came to be understood
as one and the same thing. The institution of the ṭarīqa did not lose its essence
with the passing of the founding master; rather, it gained continuity through
the master’s deputies (khulafāʾ). The diversification of Ṣūfī orders that ramified
into sub-branches became possible through deputies that were dispatched
to various places. Often, it was the families and descendants of the founding
masters who played pivotal roles in the consolidation of the spiritual educa-
tion (tarbiya) of the path (Alatas in this volume).
Ṣūfī orders, which took shape around the charismatic authority and status
of Ṣūfī shaykhs, assumed an active role in establishing the unity and coher-
ence of the Islamic community by securing the support of Muslim scholars
and Muslim principalities that emerged in the aftermath of the dissolution of
the caliphate (Hodgson, 203–4). The Saljūqs in Iran and Anatolia, the Ayyūbids
in greater Syria and Egypt, and the Mamlūks in Egypt provided political and
economic support for the establishment of lodges and pious endowments
(waqfs) to fund the maintenance of these sites. This support expedited the
institutionalisation of the Ṣūfī orders and helped to expand the geographical
spread of their networks (Knysh, 173; Ephrat and Pinto, Firouzeh, and Hofer
[Endowments] in this volume). Established Ṣūfī orders led to a model of so-
ciety in which people from a very early age learned to act with Muḥammad
manners and courtesy, leading to the internalisation of the Prophet’s way of
life (Sunna), and even those who were not affiliated with any Ṣūfī order even-
tually emulated the highly refined manners observed in every phase of life.
These orders may also have been accepted by society at large because of the
eclectic way in which the shaykhs internalised religious and worldly sciences;
in addition, their intellectual and spiritual competence was not restricted by
the limitations Muslim scholars faced, and this enabled them to more directly
address the existential problems of individuals (Chih in this volume; Sedgwick
in this volume).
The main Ṣūfī orders that have survived over a long period took their names
from the agnomens (kunya) or surnames (laqab) of the founding pīrs. Dozens
of sub-branches stemmed from the main orders. In general, with regard to the
teaching of spiritual discipline and virtues, the founders of sub-branches made
only minor changes in the fundamental methods of the main order. The sub-
branches made some alterations due to historical or geographical contexts, but
were called (in written sources and in oral traditions) by the name of the main
order they originated from or as distinct ṭarīqas, without reference to the main
order. A number of Ṣūfī orders far from the centre sometimes internalised local
elements to such an extent that they came to appear as heterodox movements.
In any case, all Ṣūfī orders of the early modern period represented themselves
as unbroken lineages of spiritual masters that originated from the Prophet.
With the exception of the Naqshbandiyya, whose lineage came from the first
caliph Abū Bakr, the lineages of all institutionalised orders descended from the
fourth caliph ʿAlī. Even though the Ottoman hagiographical compendium by
Ḥulvī (d. 1064/1654), the Lemeẓāt, mentioned certain types of ṭarīqas that de-
scended from the other two caliphs (namely, ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and ʿUthmān
Established Ṣūfī Orders 387
b. ʿAffān), most orders that have survived to the present day have ʿAlawī lin-
eages (that is, lineages whose main connection to the Prophet Muḥammad
was ʿAlī) (Ḥulvī, 40, 46; Ḥarīrīzāde, I, fol. 8b; Wijdānī, 94).
Ṣūfīs have sometimes classified themselves according to the educational
methods they use and the formulas of invocation they assign to their disciples:
vocal ritual repetition (dhikr/ṭarīq al-jahrī) and silent ritual repetition (dhikr/
ṭarīq al-khafī). Although the silent method was specific to the Naqshbandiyya,
some ṭarīqas practiced both kinds of invocation. Ṣūfī orders that practiced a
vocal type of dhikr differed among themselves as to which method to prac-
tice collectively, i.e. quʿūdī (sitting), qiyāmī (standing), or dawrānī (turning in
concentric circles). Ṣūfī orders that undertake spiritual journeys by chanting
the names of God were called “asmāʾī ” orders, whereas those that chant only
the essential name of God (ism al-dhāt) were called “musammā” orders. The
Naqshbandiyya and the Mawlawiyya/Mevleviyye are examples of musammā
orders, while the Khalwatiyya and the Qādiriyya were asmāʾī orders. According
to another classification, Ṣūfī orders differed on the basis of the main nature of
their spiritual journeying, whether they were nafsānī (journeying within the
self) or rūḥānī (journeying of the spirit). In rūḥānī journeying, all one’s efforts
were concentrated on strengthening the spirit, through litanies and invoca-
tions, with the belief that this neutralised the nafs, which was considered the
source of evil; by contrast, in nafsānī journeying, the traveller tried to pacify
his nafs directly through riyāḍa (ascetic discipline) and mujāhada (spiritual
struggle) (Aydınlı, 123–9, 154–7; Râsim Efendi, 274, 424; Inançer, Rituals). Ṣūfī
authors often note that although Ṣūfī orders used different methods of educa-
tion and discipline, the ultimate goal each aspired to was the same.
The groups (ṭāʾifas) that congregated and organised around charismatic Ṣūfī
masters in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Central Asia, Iran, Anatolia, and
India (the geographical origins of the main Ṣūfī orders) from the sixth/twelfth
to the nineteenth centuries developed common characteristics in terms of so-
cial and spiritual practices (Ohlander, 1). The main Ṣūfī orders that originated
in the centuries in question encompassed a large part of the world through
networks and sub-branches. We present below a tentative cartography of the
main institutionalised Ṣūfī networks, according to their own terms and de-
scriptions, that is, those of their founders and their saints, their successors and
deputies, their main practical or doctrinal characteristics, and their most com-
monly used writings. This cartography is by no means complete and only aims
388 Ceyhan
Mukhtār b. Aḥmad al-Kuntī (d. 1226/1811) spread the order in the western
Sahara. Another son of the founding master, Ibrāhīm, was the ancestor of the
Qādirī sharīfs in a number of cities in Morocco. The Qādiriyya reached Bengal
through a Qādirī shaykh named Pīr Shāh Dawla (d. 942/1535 or 980/1573),
and later spread in the region through Qumays al-Qādirī, a descendant of
ʿAbd al-Razzāq. The order reached the Gujarat through Sayyid Jamāl Phatrī
(d. 971/1564), a descendant of al-Jīlānī’s son ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. In Anatolia,
the Qādiryya formed additional sub-branches: the Ashrafiyya in the ninth/
fifteenth century, the Rūmiyya in Istanbul in the eleventh/seventeenth cen-
tury; the Rasmiyya in the twelfth/eighteenth century; and in the nineteenth
century, the Khāliṣiyya, the Mushtāqiyya, and the Anwāriyya.
The Qādiriyya adopted a vocalised remembrance, with its own particular
rite of dawrān (a concentric circle of dervishes turning clockwise or counter-
clockwise). The short litanies (sing. ḥizb) recited by Ṣūfīs after each prayer were
composed and instituted by al-Jīlānī himself. The Qādirīs performed the spiri-
tual retreat (khalwa) like the Khalwatīs and also practiced the rābiṭa (tying the
heart to the master) as in the Naqshbandiyya. In addition, remembrance and
mawlid ceremonies were held every year at the tomb of al-Jīlānī in Baghdad,
under green banners unfurled by groups of Qādirīs who came from around
the world. The most widely read books by Ṣūfīs were those written by al-Jīlānī:
al-Ghunya, al-Fatḥ al-rabbānī, and Futūḥ al-ghayb (Çakır; Azamat).
The fact that Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī took a group of disciples from Manṣūr
al-Baṭāʾiḥī (d. 540/1145) was seen as the reason for the early reorganisation of
the Rifāʿiyya in Iraq (Popovic, part I). Manṣūr gave al-Rifāʿī the title “shaykh
of the shaykhs” and settled him in the lodge at Umm ʿUbayda, declaring him
the head of all the lodges that pledged allegiance to him. The ṭarīqa literature
included a prominent story about the Prophet Muḥammad extending his hand
from his tomb for Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī to kiss during his visit to Medina, all of this
witnessed by a large crowd of visitors (al-Dīrīnī, 6–27).
The first person to sit on the sheepskin of spiritual guidance (irshād) in the
lodge (riwāq) of Umm ʿUbayda after al-Rifāʿī was his nephew and son-in-law ʿAlī
b. ʿUthmān (d. 584/1188), then his other son-in-law ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (d. 604/1207)
took on the duty, then his grandson from his first son-in-law Ibrāhīm al-Aʿzab
(d. 609/1212) became the shaykh; thus the position of shaykh continued in the
family. Through Abū l-Fatḥ al-Wāsiṭī (d. 632/1234), whom Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī had
sent to Alexandria, the Rifāʿiyya became one of the earliest ṭarīqas to form in
Egypt. In the time of ʿIzz al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Ṣayyād (d. 670/1271–2), also a de-
scendant of al-Rifāʿī, the order spread in Iraq, Syria, Ḥijāz, Yemen, and Egypt,
thereby making the Ṣayyādiyya the most widespread branch of the Rifāʿiyya.
The founder of the Ḥarīriyya branch, ʿAlī l-Ḥarīrī (d. 620/1223), was a grandson
390 Ceyhan
of al-Rifāʿī through his daughter and is referred to in the sources as the found-
er of the Rifāʿiyya in Syria. The Rifāʿiyya order had sub-branches such as the
Kayyāliyya (Aleppo), the Jandaliyya (Damascus), the Jamīliyya (Iraq), the
ʿAṭāʾiyya (Jerusalem), and the Jabartiyya (Yemen).
Certain acts are considered fundamental features of Rifāʿī rituals, these in-
clude holding fire with bare hands, walking into fire, cooling a piece of hot iron
called a “rose” (Tk. gül) and licking it repeatedly, piercing various parts of the
body with sharp tools such as swords, daggers, skewers etc., holding poison-
ous animals without being harmed, and chewing pieces of broken glass. It was
maintained that these secrets of the order could be performed by anyone in
the service of al-Rifāʿī, with the permission of the shaykh (Tahralı).
The Baghdad-based Suhrawardiyya spread in the regions of Syria, Iran,
China, Turkestan, Iraq, and especially India (Sobieroj). The order is usually
ascribed to Abū Ḥafṣ Shihāb al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), but
some Ṣūfī authors suggested that the order began with Abū l-Najīb Suhrawardī
(d. 563/1168) since he played a major role in the upbringing and education of
Shihāb al-Dīn, who was his nephew as well as disciple (Jāmī, 417–8). Shihāb
al-Dīn founded lodges in Damascus and Aleppo and spread the order over
a vast area from Iran to Turkestan and to India through emissaries (depu-
ties) he sent to those regions. The order remained active in Baghdad at the
lodge of Maʾmūniyya through his son ʿImād al-Dīn Muḥammad Suhrawardī
(d. 655/1257), who succeeded him, and then through ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, his grand-
son. The Suhrawardiyya spread into Iran through the efforts of Najīb al-Dīn ʿAlī
b. Buzghush (d. 678/1280). One of Najīb al-Dīn’s successors, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd
al-Ṣamad, founded the Zayniyya in the ninth/fifteenth century. Zayn al-Dīn
al-Khwāfī (d. 838/1435) established the ṭarīqa in Herat, and from there it spread
to Khurāsān, Ḥijāz, Syria, Egypt, Anatolia, and Rumelia (Öngören, Tarihte). The
Suhrawardiyya entered India through the deputies of the master. The teach-
ings of the order were actively propagated in the Delhi region by Ḥamīd al-Dīn
Nāgawrī (d. 673/1274) and Nūr al-Dīn Mubārak Ghaznawī (d. 632/1234), in the
Bengal region by Jalāl al-Dīn Tabrīzī (d. 641–2/1244), and in Multan by Bahāʾ
al-Dīn Zakariyyāʾ Multānī (d. 661/1262 [?]). In Kashmir in the ninth/fifteenth
century, the Suhrawardī Ṣūfīs from the branch of Jalāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Bukhārī/
Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān (d. 785/1384) were among those who kept Sufism alive.
The lineage of Abū l-Najīb al-Suhrawardī was also called Shihābiyya in ref-
erence to al-Suhrawardī’s nephew Shihāb al-Dīn. When Abū l-Najīb died, his
chief deputy Abū Rashīd Quṭb al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 572/1177) succeeded him
and the Abharī sub-order emerged. After al-Abharī, Awḥad al-Dīn al-Kirmānī
(Awḥadiyya) continued the order through Rukn al-Dīn al-Sujāsī (d. 635/1238).
After Rukn al-Dīn al-Sujāsī, the Zāhidiyya order emerged from Ibrāhīm Zāhid
Established Ṣūfī Orders 391
al-Jīlānī (d. 700/1301). Ibrāhīm Zāhid al-Jīlānī was known as the shaykh who
established the method of spiritual journeying with the invocation of divine
names, and thus his spiritual guidance became renowned in Iran and eastern
Azerbaijan. From the Zāhidiyya order two other orders emerged: the Ṣafawiyya
and the Khalwatiyya.
In the seventh/thirteenth century during the Saljūq period, the Suhrawar
diyya spread in Anatolia through Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī (d. 688/1289)—a deputy
of Bahāʾ al-Dīn Zakariyyā—who had the disposition of a Qalandar (an antino-
mian dervish). In his Ādāb al-muridīn, Abū l-Najīb al-Suhrawardī explained the
general rules that every disciple must comply with, and in the ʿAwārif al-maʿārif,
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī revealed the details of the fundamental principles
of Sufism; these works did not belong exclusively to the Suhrawardī order, but
were works referred to by all Ṣūfī orders teaching the basic manners (Öngören,
Sühreverdiyye, 42–5).
his knowledge of Syriac, Hebrew, and ancient Egyptian languages. He was also
credited with understanding the language of animals and birds and the occult
sciences. Al-Jawhara al-muḍīʾah fī sulūk al-ṭālib wa-nuṣḥ al-barīya, attributed
to Ibrāhīm al-Dasūqī, was the most commonly known source that introduced
his path (Khalaf Allāh, 112–3). Abū l-Fatḥ al-Wāsiṭī, who spread the Rifāʿiyya in
Egypt, was the grandfather of Ibrāhīm al-Dasūqī; in this regard, the Dasūqiyya
had a link with the Rifāʿiyya. Some Ṣūfī scholars (e.g., al-Bakrī, 383) considered
the Dasūqiyya a branch of the Badawiyya or the Shādhiliyya. The Dasūqiyya
ṭarīqa spread more through its disciples than through al-Dasūqī’s family mem-
bers and descendants. The members of the Dasūqiyya, who usually wore green
garments, often chanted the divine name “Yā Dāʾim” during their congrega-
tional recitation (tilāwa) or remembrance ceremonies. The order ramified into
four branches: the Shahāwiyya, named after Sayyid Muḥammad al-Shahāwī
(d. 949/1542); the Sharnūbiyya, named after al-Sharnūbī (d. 994/1586); the
ʿĀshūriyya, named after Ṣaliḥ ʿĀshūr al-Maghribī; and the Tāziyya from al-Tāzī
(De Jong, Ṭuruq; Khalaf Allāh, 289–91).
of the Prophet (al-mawlid al-nabawī), and set up processions with huge ban-
ners and giant timpani-like drums. Masses of people attended these meetings
(al-Munāwī, 127; Maḥmūd, 44–5). To date, members of the Shādhiliyya hold
annual commemoration ceremonies called iḥtifāl. The most frequently recited
texts in the order were al-Shādhilī’s Ḥizb al-baḥr, Ibn Mashīsh’s Ṣalawāt, and
al-Jazūlī’s Dalāʾil al-khayrāt. Al-Ḥikam al-ʿAṭāʾiyya of al-Iskandarī (d. 709/1309)
and Qawāʿid al-taṣawwuf of al-Zarrūq (d. 899/1494) were also commonly read
works. With over a hundred sub-branches, the Shādhiliyya was one of the most
widespread and non-centralised Ṣūfī orders. In the nineteenth century, the
Sanūsiyya in Libya, the Yashruṭiyya in Palestine and the Būzīdiyya in Morocco
were prominent sub-branches of the order.
The Tijāniyya order, founded at the end of the twelfth/eighteenth century
by Aḥmad al-Tijānī (d. 1230/1815), first spread to northwestern African cities,
especially in Morocco and Algeria (Abun-Nasr). With greater influence and
geographical prominence, as a result of its sub-branches, the order has been
popular since its establishment. Al-Tijānī received permission (ijāza) to initiate
people into both the Qādiriyya and Khalwatiyya orders, and according to the
hagiographical tradition, experienced a magnificent spiritual unveiling (kashf),
in which the Prophet directly authorised him to serve as master, whereupon he
named the order Ṭarīqa al-Aḥmadiyya/Muḥammadiyya. For this reason, in the
Tijānī sources, we find lineages connecting the founding master directly to the
Prophet Muḥammad. Sīdī ʿAlī b. ʿĪsāʾ al-Ṭammāsī, Maḥmūd al-Manāʾī, Ibrāhīm
al-Riyāḥī, Aḥmad al-Tijānī’s sons, Muḥammad al-Kabīr and Muḥammad
al-Ṣaghīr, spread the order across North Africa; al-Ḥājj ʿUmar al-Fūtī, al-Ḥājj
Mālik Siy and Ibrāhīm Niyās in Senegal and in a number of neighbouring
countries; Muḥammad al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Mukhtār and Aḥmad b. Amīn al-Shinqīṭī in
Mauritania. The litany of the order is two short ṣalāwats that were (allegedly)
given to al-Tijānī directly by the Prophet. The fact that al-Tijānī was initiated
directly by the Prophet led most Tijānīs to conclude that their ṭarīqa was su-
perior to all others. Thinking that all aspects of law can be received from a
saint who had attained perfect union with the Prophet, Tijānīs emphasised
that such a friend of God does not need the imāms of the four schools of juris-
prudence to derive rulings (al-Tashītī, 50). Yet, in contrast to these arguments,
Tijānī shaykhs have long attached great importance to exoteric Islamic scienc-
es and developed a literature of rebuttals against the criticisms leveled at the
foundations of their ṭarīqa, especially in western Africa (Abun-Nasr, 142–5).
heavily populated by Turks. These orders are the Kubrawiyya, the Yasawiyya,
the Khwājagān Ṣūfīs and their continuation by the Naqshbandiyya, and the
Khalwatiyya. It is noteworthy that these orders have been accepted by the
common folk of the region as well as their rulers.
Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 617/1220), the founder of Kubrawiyya, served as master
in a land ruled by the Khwārazm Shāhs (Algar, Kobraviya i and ii). Ṣūfī hagiog-
raphers claimed that Kubrā courageously faced the Mongols during their siege
of Khwārazm in 618/1221 and was martyred (Khūrd, 528–9). Numerous impor-
tant figures of the period, such as Majd al-Dīn Baghdādī, ʿAlī Lālā, Saʿd al-Dīn
Ḥammūya, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Jīlī, Najm al-Dīn Dāya al-Rāzī, Sayf al-Dīn Bākharzī,
and Bābā Kamāl Jandī, were all caliphs of Kubrā. Majd al-Dīn Baghdadī fol-
lowed in the footsteps of his master in Khwārazm, whereas al-Jīlī, Ḥammūya,
Dāya, and ʿAlī Lālā joined the group of religious scholars and men of letters who
migrated westward before the Mongol invasion. Bākharzī and Jandī remained
in Central Asia and endeavoured to integrate the new Mongolian rulers and
non-Muslim Turkic tribes into the Islamic tradition. Najm al-Dīn Kubrā’s work,
al-Uṣūl al-ʿashara can be described as the methodology of the Kubrawī order.
In it, he considered his order al-ṭarīq al-shaṭṭār, the way of rapture; this con-
sists of achieving union with God at the inception of the path, on the basis of
volitional death (al-mawt al-irādī). This differs from the way of other paths, in
which disciples achieve union with God at the end (Kübrā, 46–9). Following
the first series of Kubrawī caliphs, the order was represented by ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla
Simnānī, ʿAlī Hamadānī, Muḥammad Nūrbakhsh, and ʿAbdallāh Barzishābādī.
The Kubrawiyya spread to Iran, Central Asia, Khurāsān, Anatolia, India, and
China. Through Muḥammad Nūrbakhsh, a caliph of Isḥāq Khuṭṭalānī (a suc-
cessor of Hamadānī), the Shīʿī Nūrbakhshiyya branch emerged, and through
another caliph, ʿAbdallāh Barzishābādī, the Shīʿī Dhahabiyya branch was
formed. By the tenth/sixteenth century, the lineages of the Sunnī branches of
the Kubrawiyya did not disappear, but weakened, whereas the Dhahabiyya and
the Nūrbakhshiyya branches flourished (Gökbulut, 169–80).
In the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries, the Yasawiyya
(named after Aḥmad al-Yasawī, d. 562/1166 who was mistakenly considered
by Naqshbandī sources to be a disciple of Yūsuf al-Hamadānī, d. 535/1140, a
leading figure of Sufism in Central Asia) and the Khwājagān order (ascribed
to ʿAbd al-Khāliq al-Ghijduwānī, a caliph of Yūsuf al-Hamadānī), was insti-
tutionalised (Zarcone, Yasawiyya). The path of al-Yasawī, known as the “pīr
[master] of Turkestan,” first spread to Tashkent, the Seyhun region, Khwārazm,
and Transoxiana thanks to the efforts of his deputies Saʿīd Atā and Ḥakīm Atā;
it then spread to the Volga, Anatolia, and India (Nawāʾī). The Dīwān-i ḥikmat,
which contains the aphorisms attributed al-Yasawī, was one of the most widely
read works on Sufism in verse in modern times. The vocalised remembrance
396 Ceyhan
rite peculiar to the Yasawiyya, performed collectively, was called dhikr-i arra
(lit., “the invocation of the saw” in Persian). As the dhikr progresses, the words
were no longer pronounced distinctly, thus becoming a rattle, which sounded
like a saw.
The order known as the Bakriyya was considered by Naqshbandī authors
such as Üsküdārī (d. 1200/1786) to have begun with the first caliph Abū Bakr.
It was traced to the time of Bāyazid al-Bisṭāmī, at which point it was re-
ferred to as Ṭayfūriyya (from Bāyazid’s name, Ṭayfūr), and this lasted to the
time of Yūsuf al-Hamadānī. It was then known as the “Khwājagān path” until
the time of Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband (d. 791/1389), after which it became the
Naqshbandiyya (Üsküdārī, 28b). According to this Ṣūfī categorisation, Yūsuf
al-Hamadānī must be considered the first name in the Khwājagan order.
However, the more common view current among Naqshbandīs maintains that
the real founder of the Khwājagān ṭarīqa was ʿAbd al-Khāliq al-Ghijduwānī (a
deputy of al-Hamadānī) who was called the “head of the Khwājagān lineage”
(sar-silsila-yi Khwājagān). The eight principles, known as kalimāt al-qudsiyya
(“the holy words”), which determined the spiritual elements of the Khwājagān
order and later that of the Naqshbandiyya, were established by al-Ghijduwānī;
with three additional principles from Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband, the total rose to
eleven. After al-Ghijduwānī, the Khwājagān ṭarīqa continued around Bukhara
with ʿĀrif Rīwgarī, Maḥmūd Anjīr Faghnawī, ʿAlī Rāmitanī, Muḥammad Bābā
Sammāsī, and Amīr Kulāl (Algar, Hâcegân, 431).
The Naqshbandiyya has replaced almost all other orders, especially the
Kubrawiyya and the Yasawiyya, in its native Central Asia, and has spread to
nearly every region of the Islamic world except the Maghrib and sub-Saharan
Africa. Although Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband left no written works behind, he left
two prominent deputies: Muḥammad Pārsā (d. 822/1419–20) and ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn
ʿAṭṭār (d. 802/1400). Pārsā concentrated his efforts on writing books and train-
ing students in the madrasa tradition, whereas the ṭarīqa was continued by
ʿAṭṭār, who had two important caliphs: Niẓām al-Dīn Khāmūsh (d. 853/1449)
and Yaʿqūb al-Charkhī (d. 851/1447). The founder of the Aḥrāriyya branch,
ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār (d. 895/1490), a deputy of al-Charkhī, was a key figure in the
history of Sufism. Through Aḥrār’s caliph ʿAbdallāh Ilāhī Simāwī (d. 893/1487),
the Aḥrāriyya reached Anatolia and Rumelia, thereby planting the seeds of
the early Anatolian Naqshbandiyya. A sub-branch of the Aḥrāriyya known as
Kāsāniyya or Dahbidiyya quickly spread to Central Asia and eastern Turkestan.
This branch of the Naqshbandiyya, which adopted the vocalised invocation and
music, was the most effective ṭarīqa in Central Asia from the tenth/sixteenth
to the twelfth/eighteenth century. However, with the arrival in Central Asia of
large numbers of shaykhs from the Mujaddidī branch of the Naqshbandiyya
Established Ṣūfī Orders 397
(in India), the Kāsāniyya lost its former influence. The Āfāqiyya branch, which
emerged from the Kāsāniyya, was nonetheless very active in China and Tibet
(Papas, parts 1–3).
One of the most important phases in Naqshbandī history was the emer-
gence of the Mujaddidiyya branch in the eleventh/seventeenth century.
This sub-order was named after the spiritual title of its founder al-Sirhindī
(d. 1034/1624), who was called “Mujaddid-i alf-i thānī” (The renewer of the sec-
ond millennium). Its spread made the Naqshbandiyya one of the most active
orders in India, with the Indian subcontinent becoming the third major centre
of the ṭarīqa, after Central Asia and Anatolia. Giving a new interpretation to
Sufism in his Maktūbāt (The epistles), al-Sirhindī exerted a long-ranging influ-
ence on modern Naqshbandīs. The Khālidiyya is the third largest branch in the
history of the order; it began with Mawlānā Khālid al-Baghdādī (d. 1242/1827),
whose tomb is in Damascus. In addition to Anatolia, this branch spread across
Iraq, Syria, Ḥijāz, the north Caucasus (Dagestan, Chechnya) and Southeast
Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia). The majority of Naqshbandīs in Turkey
are from the Khālidī branch (Tosun, Nakşibendiyye). The Naqshbandiyya has
two major invocations: the name of the sacred essence (ism al-dhāt) and the
invocation of negation (nafy) and affirmation (ithbāt). Disciples were taught
to concentrate on the five subtle points (al-laṭāʾif al-khamsa) in the lower and
upper sections of the chest, the final one being between the eyebrows. After
the invocations came a phase of introspective contemplation (murāqaba) on
the meanings of certain Qurʾānic verses. Another element was the practice of
concentrating on the image of one’s shaykh by trying to visualise his counte-
nance. The Naqshbandiyya’s congregational remembrance ceremony is called
khatm al-Khwājagān. Their invocation was often silent (Tosun, Nakşibendiyye
[Âdâb ve Erkân]).
Two post-mediaeval Ṣūfī orders are worth mentioning: the Ṣafawiyya and
the Khalwatiyya. Named after Ṣafī l-Dīn al-Ardabīlī (d. 735/1334), a deputy of
Ibrāhīm Zāhid al-Jīlānī (d. 700/1301), the Ṣafawiyya order spread over a large
area that included Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Ḥijāz, Anatolia, and
Rumelia (Mazzaoui, ch. 4). Reaching its zenith of power and influence during
the time of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Ardabīlī (better known as Khwāja ʿAlī, a grandson
Ṣafī l-Dīn), the ṭarīqa became more politically-motivated under the leadership
of Shaykh Junayd b. Ibrāhīm Ṣafawī (d. 864/1460), a grandson of Khwāja ʿAlī.
The Ṣafawī order began to incline towards Shīʿism, hoping to thereby gain a
large following among Shīʿa-oriented tribes in Anatolia. In the beginning of the
tenth/sixteenth century, the Ṣafawī order became Iran’s Ṣafavid state, which of-
ficially adopted Twelver Shīʿism as its religious denomination. Owing to the red
turban that Shaykh Junayd wore, the heterodox groups in Anatolia affiliated
398 Ceyhan
with the Ṣafawiyya came to be called Qizilbāsh (lit., “red heads”) (Minorsky, 61;
Yıldırım, Turkomans, 223–4).
According to the literature of the order, ʿUmar al-Khalwatī (d. 800/1397) was
the first master of the Khalwatiyya, and their centre was initially Azerbaijan
(De Jong, Khalwatiyya). He came to be called Khalwatī because he frequently
observed a spiritual retreat (khalwat) in a tree hollow. The second master was
Yaḥyā al-Shirwānī (d. 870/1466), whose tomb was inside the Shirvānshāhlar
Palace in Baku. Through al-Shirwānī’s caliphs, the order first spread to Anatolia,
and from there to the Balkans, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Sudan, Abyssinia,
and Southeast Asia. It was the most common ṭarīqa of Ottoman Anatolia.
The Khalwatiyya ramified into four main branches: the Rūshaniyya (found-
ed by Dede ʿUmar Rūshanī, d. 892/1487), the Jamāliyya (founded by Jamāl
al-Dīn al-Khalwatī, d. 899/1494), the Aḥmadiyya (founded by Aḥmad Shams
al-Dīn al-Marmarawī Yiğitbāshī, d. 910/1504) and the Shamsiyya (founded by
Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad Sīvāsī, d. 1006/1597). From these four branches originated
many sub-branches. The Ramaḍāniyya, a sub-branch of the Aḥmadiyya, was
founded by Ramaḍān al-Dīn al-Makhfī (d. 1025/1616) and spread from Anatolia
to the Balkans; the Shaʿbāniyya, a sub-branch of the Jamāliyya, was founded
by Ḥājjī Shaʿbān Walī (d. 976/1568–9), then spread to Egypt through Muṣṭafā
Kamāl al-Dīn al-Bakrī (d. 1162/1749). Many of the Khalwatī sub-branches in Egypt
were extensions of the Bakriyya. The Khalwatiyya spread to Algeria through the
sub-branch called the Raḥmāniyya. In the early twelfth/eighteenth century, a
sub-branch of the Khalwatiyya called the Jerrāḥiyya was founded. Khalwatīs ob-
served the spiritual retreat for the purification of the soul in accordance with a
specific method and manner. The practice of retreat was based on the Prophet’s
retreat into the cave of Ḥirāʾ before the first revelation. Disciples undertook spiri-
tual travelling with seven divine names. There were seven major attributes of the
self (nafs) that corresponded to the first seven divine names. The wird al-sattār
(beginning with “Yā Sattār”) of Yaḥyā al-Shirwānī was read by all Khalwatīs. On
certain days of the week, the congregation engaged in a remembrance ceremony
called dawrān (a concentric movement turning clockwise or reverse) that was
performed with music, and ḍarb-i asmāʾ (a forceful focus and a rapid movement
of the head to the side of the heart while chanting the divine names). Senior
members of the path have produced a vast body of literature that reflects Ibn
al-ʿArabī’s idea of the “oneness of being” (Ceyhan).
and after the death of its master, ramified into two branches: the Shamsiyya/
Şemsiyye, named after Aq Shams al-Dīn (d. 863/1459), and the Malāmiyya/
Melāmiyye, ascribed to Dede ʿUmar Sikkīnī (d. 880/1475), both were deputies
of Ḥājjī Bayrām Walī. Ṣūfī sources state that Aq Shams al-Dīn, who participat-
ed in the conquest of Constantinople, wrote Meḥmed II a series of letters in
which he exhorted the sultan to persistence and patience, thereby he made a
significant contribution to the conquest. A number of Ḥamzavī shaykhs who
followed the Bayrāmī-Malāmī path were closely scrutinised because of their
heterodox beliefs (Şahin). In the first half of the eleventh/seventeenth century,
the Jalwatiyya order was founded by ʿAzīz Maḥmūd Hüdāyī (d. 1038/1628–9)
in Istanbul. In contrast to the Khalwatiyya practice of spiritual retreat, the
Jalwatiyya adopted the principle of jalwa (being with God in society). The
Bayrāmiyya became widespread in the Balkans through the Jalwatī/Celvetī
branch. Ismāʿīl Ḥaqqī Bursavī, the founder of the Ḥaqqiyya branch of the
Jalwatiyya, was a prolific Ottoman Ṣūfī author (Yılmaz).
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metin), Istanbul 2015.
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2018), 547–608.
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2018), 695–710.
Established Ṣūfī Orders 403
Cyber Sufism
Stéphane A. Dudoignon
Among the widely circulated misconceptions of Sufism is the idea that this
ensemble of initiatory traditions is a form of social withdrawal that encourages
people to turn their backs on social responsibilities and commitments in order
to retreat into a private world of devotion (e.g., Algar). The expansion of Sufism
in cyberspace from the mid-1990s onwards suggests that Ṣūfīs have been able
to utilise increasingly multidirectional media for the reinvention of gnostic
practices and sociability, while showing themselves intensely active on the so-
ciocultural, educational, and even political levels—in Muslim-minority or ma-
jority societies, and against very diverse socioeconomic backdrops. Conversely,
the internet’s very evolution, especially after the irruption of social media (that
is, “social networks”) since the mid-2000s, has exerted, together with the con-
tinuing demographic changes during this period, a deep impact on the on-
going transformation of Sufism itself (on the significance of this historical
moment for the Middle Eastern internet in general, see Gonzalez-Quijano,
Communautés virtuelles, 196).
Three different types of historical factors have favoured these phenomena.
The first is socio-industrial; it is linked to the combination of labour migra-
tion with the redeployment, through emerging electronic media, of social net-
working in diasporic contexts, as well as the development of diasporic public
spheres. In what follows, we see how several ṭuruq, including the most influ-
ential, have tried to adjust to these new global circumstances. The second type
of factor springs from the very nature of the internet and web 2.0, as well as
from the influence that both have exerted on the evolution of Sufism in two
quite different geopolitical contexts—namely, before and after the Maghrib–
Mashriq revolutions and upheavals of 2011 and thereafter. In retrospect, rapid
changes in attitudes toward authority and in methods of mobilisation were ob-
vious and undeniable. The third type of factor pertains to the unique interac-
tions that developed in cyberspace between Ṣūfīs and the widening ranges of
cultural and religious practice, Muslim or not. Here, emulation between Ṣūfīs
and Salafīs—and, more generally, the proliferation of modern forms of pros-
elytising (e.g., El Naggar)—highlight the need for panoramic approaches that
take into account the sum total of the practitioners’ changing relationships to
the media.
Ultimately, the main question is, has the spread of the internet and of
web 2.0 been as revolutionary, for the growth and dissemination of Sufism,
and for the virtualisation of Islamic spirituality, as the diffusion of printed mat-
ter was during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Sedgwick in this
volume)? Once again, the medium is, in part at least, the message. It paves the
way, this time, to a new religious public sphere that innovatively juxtaposes
confessional issues with trade, entertainment, and professional life, multi-
plying horizontal relationships and promoting new hierarchies substituting
webmasters for headmasters (cf. Campbell, 312; Hackett, 73; Eickelman and
Anderson, 14–6). Commodification through the spread of the market princi-
ple of supply and demand also raises issues pertaining to the very meaning of
initiation, membership, and hierarchy, as well as the place of e-Sufism within
the context of the much-debated advent of “post-Islamism.” If confirmed, how
will such trends, all highlighted by social science research since the mid-1990s,
affect our global understanding of this multidimensional socio-technological
change and its challenges, notably, to sociological categories such as commu-
nity and virtual experience?
The height of social reach was achieved by Ṣūfīs in the years following World
War I. Since then, they faced a succession of challenges, from Muslim reform-
ist critique to state regulation and the loss of socioeconomic power. Toward
the middle of the twentieth century, the propagation of movable-type print-
ing and the expansion of schooling to the masses had already generated an
unprecedented pluralisation of religious authority and doctrine, emphasised
by new media technologies and forms of association (e.g., Eickelman, Clash
of cultures, 290–5). The influence of Sufism continued to decline, along with
the social significance of early modern agro-pastoral landholdings on which
its social force had long relied, and in spite of state support of certain ṭuruq in
certain areas at certain times, against rapidly mushrooming Islamist organisa-
tions (e.g., Weismann; Sabra in this volume).
Some Ṣūfī traditions, however, could be passed on, albeit in modern shapes
and forms, or through commodification, e.g., by music recordings. In Europe,
North America, Japan, and Australia, Ṣūfīs began to appeal to audiences in
the ever-growing labour and trading diasporas, in new English, French, or
Russian cultural idioms. And at the turn of the 2000s, with the exile of a num-
ber of leading shaykhs from their countries of origin, new forms of Sufism
appeared, primarily in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation
Cyber Sufism 407
and Development) countries, though in ever closer interaction with the tradi-
tional abode of Islam (Green, 214–5). The enlargement of Sufism’s territorial-
ity itself was largely prepared by the massive migrations, both rural/rural and
rural/urban, which began in the last quarter of the twentieth century (even
in such a polity as the USSR: cf. Shikhaliev). Among other features of this
evolution, we can mention the increasing appeal to urban educated middle
classes, stimulated by shaykhs henceforth equipped with science or medical
degrees and/or allied with pious industrialists; and the blurring of boundaries
between religious and academic discourses—the result of frequent partner-
ships between sacred lineages and university teachers for the redesigning and
modernisation of traditions and saint cults of rural origin (e.g., Dudoignon, A
surrogate aristocracy).
decade later, a new generation of low-cost PCs flooded the international mar-
ket, followed (since 2013) by the mass diffusion of 4G smartphone applications
that opened the era of “micropreneur” activity (cf. Ryan, 181): developing digi-
tal skills was no longer only the preserve of rich countries and upper classes.
What impact did this new turning point have on the role of the fuqarāʾ (ordi-
nary Ṣūfīs) in the practice and diffusion of Sufism? Granted with a hermeneutic
dimension of orality suitable to multiple interpretations and to contestation of
authority and expression of alternative voices, web 2.0 has led to a fragmen-
tation of the canon, which resulted in a challenge to the traditional figures
of authority and in the development of mechanisms of confrontation (Varlik,
50–1, 60–1). Globalisation, however, proceeded diversely, sometimes paradoxi-
cally. Telling illustrations of this complex, sometimes unpredictable evolution
are provided by three ṭuruq of diverse origin, all of which maintain a strong
global presence, especially in cyberspace—viz., the Tijānī Murīds/Mourides,
the Naqshbandiyya Ḥaqqāniyya, and certain branches of the Niʿmatullāhiyya.
Among the Naqshbandīs and the Niʿmatullāhīs, the ṭarīqa itself has come to
coexist with new non-initiatory trends, and today, traditionalist discourses are
often associated with services available to wider audiences. In particular, during
the 2010s, the Ḥaqqānīs’ web presence has grown, thanks to its many YouTube
channels and Google groups, its presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and
the development of iPhone applications (Piraino, 100–3). In addition, the rela-
tive youth of the disciples of the Ḥaqqāniyya, the authoritative role played by
khalīfas in the Naqshbandiyya, and this organisation’s structural fluidity have
allowed its murīds to develop blogs and websites of their own. Moreover, not
content with disseminating knowledge, the Murīds/Mourides, the Ḥaqqāniyya
and the Niʿmatullāhīs display online supernatural powers based on images en-
dowed with the baraka of their respective quṭbs and reformers from the late
nineteenth century, namely Shaykh Aḥmadu Bàmba Mbàkke, Shaykh Nazım
Kıbrısı of Cyprus, and Shaykh Javād Nūrbakhsh. They have also used music
and videos subtitled in several European languages (rather than written docu-
ments in the classical Islamic idiom) the former’s US sites offer the opportunity
to take the bayʿa (oath of allegiance) online (Nielsen, Draper, and Yemelianova;
Haddad; Milani and Possamai, The Nimatullahiya; Bondaz, 261–4; Piraino).
5 Some Conclusions
Participants and internet audiences in the old and new worlds of Islam, es-
pecially those of generations X and Y (born with the internet and with social
media), show an increasingly eclectic, flexible, and practical relationship to
belief, knowledge, and belonging in the context of electronic taṣawwuf as well
as in their overall participation in other spiritual e-sociability. The global chal-
lenge that this phenomenon represents for the long-term viability of the ṭuruq
requires a truly multidisciplinary study of Sufism as the distinct site of varied
online communities. It cannot be dealt with simply through the institutional
and content analyses that still prevail in the field. A combination of global
social science approaches is necessary to comprehend not only the religious
uses of this multidimensional technological revolution, but also the religious
perceptions of this new medium, with particular attention to audience/viewer
usage and practice. The internet per se subverts such categories as “minority
religious groups,” while also questioning the distinction between public and
private, central and marginal, orthodox and heterodox, religious and secular,
and confirming the more general ambivalence of the phenomenon of religion
(Hackett, 73). The flexibility of the information conveyed via web 2.0 has re-
sulted in a form of return to orality and in a new stage of exegetic competition,
one that simultaneously accentuates the symbolic significance of orthopraxy
(e.g., Ryan, 138–9). In spiritual life as in the political sphere during the 2010s,
new technologies of communication have exerted a concurrently liberating
effect in documentation, coordination, and mobilisation. In this context, the
flexible affiliations of e-Sufism allow for the creation of a wide public sphere
that can, eventually, escape the logics of both the state and marketplace
(Gonzalez-Quijano, Arabités numériques, 95–6; Dagnaud, 57).
In the meantime, we can state that Sufism has survived against all odds,
managing to “preserve much of its charm” (Weismann, 280), and maintaining
412 Dudoignon
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Index
Aḥmad Khān Sial 87 Aleppo 111, 111, 112, 130, 132, 148, 232, 241,
Aḥmad Khiḍruwiyya 91 344, 390–391, 399
Aḥmad Rūmī 98 Algeria
Aḥmad Samʿānī 7 anti-colonial resistance/jihād in
Aḥmad al-Sharīf 275, 328, 382 20, 277–278, 318, 326–327
Aḥmad Yasawī 121, 165, 241–242, 395 French colonial rule in 2, 67, 131
Aḥmad-i Jām French opposition to Sufism in 354–355
on Abū Saʿīd b. Abī l-Khayr 260 rehabilitation of Ṣūfī institutions in 69,
political involvement of 261 285
on sanctity 265 ṭarīqa admitting women in 349
shrine of 121, 158, 159, 163, 166 ṭarīqa officials in 348
Aḥmadiyya. see Badawiyya worship of saints in 152
Aḥmadiyya Idrīsiyya Shādhiliyya 408 see also under specific dynasties, regions/
Aḥmadu Bàmba Mbàkke 50–51, 229, cities, Ṣūfī orders
282–283, 319, 409 ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib 41–42, 96, 145, 307, 348, 369,
Aḥrār, Khwāja ʿUbaydallāh 386–387
agricultural enterprise of 121–122, Alī b. ʿUthmān 389
242–243 ʿAlids, cult of 147
political influence of 127, 262, 324 Alī l-Khawwāṣ 198, 267
protection system of 39, 121–122, 206 Alī l-Riḍā 41–42
and succession 381 al-ʿAllāmī, Taqī l-Dīn 266
supernatural powers of 309, 311 Almohad dynasty 259
mention of 398 Almoravid dynasty 259
ʿĀʾisha 363 alms (ṣadaqa) 81, 218, 219, 271
Ajmer 107–108, 127, 148–149, 158, 168, 400 alms tax (zakāt) 58, 167, 218, 219, 271
Akbar, Mughal emperor 127–128, 149, 310 altruism
(akbar) jihād (greater jihād) 117, 257, 315, legal regulation of 218
320 pre-Islamic notions of 219
akhadha ʿan-hu al-ṭarīqa 368 profits to benefactors of 218
akhawāt (sisters) 170 in Sufism 14, 17, 91, 218–225
akhī associations 37–38, 208, 231, 343 terminology used for 219
see also futuwwa brotherhoods see also alms; alms tax; donations; waqfs
akhīs (brothers). see futuwwa brotherhoods Amasya 244, 245
Akhlāq matbūliyya (al-Shaʿrānī) 205 ʿAmīlī, Bahāʾ al-Dīn 83
Akhlāq-i muḥsinī (Kāshifī) 267–268 al-Amīn 92
Akkoyunlu (Āq Qoyūnlū) 270, 312, 324 Amīr Khusraw 127
AKP (Justice and Development Party; Turkey) amīr al-muʾminīn 277, 278, 325, 326, 327,
47 329
akrama (to treat with reverence, to amīrs (senior local governors) 38–39, 114
honor) 219 ʿāmma (common believers) 189
al-Aksarāyī, Ḥamīd al-Dīn (Somuncu Anatolia
Bābā) 399 futuwwa brotherhoods in 14, 37, 38,
ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khaljī 84 93–95, 208, 343
Alatas, Ismail Fajrie 21, 374–382 rural Sufism in 18, 242–248
al-ʿAlāwī, Aḥmad 138, 393 Ṣūfī institutions in
ʿAlawī dynasty 34, 153, 340 political influence of 129
ʿAlawī lineages 386–387 shrine complexes in 119, 124–125
ʿAlawiyya 138, 377, 380, 393, 408 tekkes in 114–115, 159
Albania 234, 281–282, 342, 355, 358 and urbanisation 228, 231, 232
Index 417
Ṣūfī orders from 398–400 awliyāʾ Allāh (friends of God) 117, 189–190
see also under specific dynasties, cities, Awrād al-aḥbāb wa-fuṣuṣ al-ādāb
Ṣūfī orders (Yaḥyā Bākharzī) 193
Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party) 281 Awrangabad 82, 86, 158, 168
Anawati, Georges Chehata 6 Awrangzeb, Mughal emperor 168, 317
al-Andalūs 115, 175, 178 al-ʿAydarūs family 379
Anṣārī l-Harawī, ʿAbdallāh 17, 42, 43, 81, 121, ʿAyn Māḍī 133, 327
165, 209, 260, 297 ʿAynī, Ṣadr al-Dīn 99
Anṣār/Mahdiyya 201, 283 ʿayyār (class of warriors) 91–92
antinomian Sufism 30, 37, 227, 260, 341 Ayyub Khan, Muhammad 284
al-Anwār al-qudsiyya fī maʿrifat qawāʿid al- Ayyūbid dynasty
ṣūfiyya (al-Shaʿrānī) 194, 197–198 patronage of Ṣūfī activities by 13, 32, 64,
apotropaic saints (abdāl) 272, 273 85, 108, 161, 266, 386
Āq Qoyūnlū (Akkoyunlu) 270, 312, 324 relations between Ṣūfīs and sultans of
Aq Shams al-Dīn 265, 400 266
Āqāsī, Mīrzā Ḥājjī 312 see also under specific rulers
ʿaqd (contracts) 336–337 Aʿẓam Shāh 168
Arab Socialist Renaissance Party (Ḥizb Azerbaijan 126, 270, 323, 381, 391, 397, 398
al-Baʿth al- ʿArabī l-Ishtirākī) 279–280
Arabic language 17, 92–94, 95–96, 99 Bā ʿAlawī 380
Arberry, Arthur John 2–3, 5, 345 Bābā, Sīdī 203
arbitration. see mediation/arbitration Bābā Farīd 340, 355
architecture, of Ṣūfī lodges 162–166 Bābā Ilyās Khurāsānī 243, 244, 245,
Ardabil 126, 166, 229, 269 259–260
Arghūn, Īlkhānid ruler 306, 307 Bābā Isḥāq 259–260
Arslān-bāb (Bābā) 241 Bābā Kamāl Jandī 395
al-ʿArūsī, Aḥmad 220 Bābā Palangpūsh 82, 86, 221, 317
asceticism (zuhd) 10, 13, 19, 28–29, 92, 201, Baba Selim Kaliçani 281–282
225, 294, 300, 316, 337, 341, 362–363 Bābā Ṭāhir ʿUryān 260
(aṣghar) jihād (lesser jihād) 117, 257, 315 Bābā Tükles 242
aṣḥāb al-balad (masters of the city) 272 Bābāʾī revolt 246, 249, 259–260
aṣḥāb al-nawba (people of the turn) 272 Bābāʾīs 259–260
ʿAshīra Muḥammadiyya (Muḥammadan Babakhanov family 279
Clan) 356 Bābur, Abū l-Qāsim, Timūrid prince
ashrāf (noble descendants of the Prophet) 308–309
278, 350 Bābur, Mughal ruler 263
asmāʾī orders 387 Badawiyya (Aḥmadiyya) 392, 393
Asrār al-tawḥīd fī maqāmāt al-shaykh Abū Badr al-Dīn (Bedreddīn) 249
Saʿīd (Muḥammad b. Munawwar) 107 Baghdad 14, 37, 62–63, 64–65, 69, 83, 84,
assemblies (majlis) 19, 204, 299–300 92, 107, 116, 122, 132, 133, 148, 149, 158,
āstānas, use of term 157–158 175–177, 190–193, 227, 241, 256, 257, 276,
Atatürk, Muṣṭafā Kemāl 134, 152, 355 292, 294, 295, 299, 300, 304, 336, 337,
ʿAṭṭār, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn 396 344, 345, 347, 353, 364, 366, 370, 376,
authority 379, 388–90, 399
imitatio Muḥammadi 269, 274 al-Baghdādī, Mawlānā Khālid 133, 194–195,
Sharifian model of 268, 269 397
of Ṣūfī saints 267–273 Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband 83, 153, 163, 164,
ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (al-Suhrawardī) 116–117, 262, 297, 396
192, 193, 196, 208, 363, 367, 391 Bahāʾ al-Dīn Walad 297, 305, 310, 311
418 Index
Bahāʾ al-Dīn Zakariyyāʾ Multānī 390, 391 Bektaş Veli, Hacı (Bektāsh, Ḥājjī) 35, 41, 122,
Bākharzī, Sayf al-Dīn 262, 395 124, 125, 153, 243, 399
Bākharzī, Yaḥyā 193 Bektāshiyya/Bektāşiyye
l-Bakrī, ʿAlī 278 abolition of 35, 342
al-Bakrī, Muḥammad 36, 47, 278 and akhī associations 208
al-Bakrī, Muṣṭafā 194 establishment of 398
Bakriyya 36, 396, 398 founder of. see Bektaş Veli, Hacı
Bālim Sulṭān 399 and Janissaries 35, 265, 317–318, 342, 399
Balkans. see under specific countries/regions organisational structure of 342
Balkh 42–43, 256, 294, 364 political influence of 35
al-Balkhī, Shaqīq 257, 368 re-establishment of 281–282
Balyānī, Amīn al-Dīn 85, 261 relations between sultans and 265
Bamba, Amadu 179, 209 and Sayyid Ghāzī’s shrine 125
banning spiritual practices of 399
of Ṣūfī activities spread of 22, 123, 232
in Albania 355 Ben Badis/Bin Bādīs 152
in China 136, 355 Bengal 40, 67, 389, 390, 400
in Malaysia 69 Berke Khān 262
in Saudi Arabia 151, 355 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali 284
in Turkey 46, 48–49, 135, 152, 210, 234 Bible 337
in USSR 136, 152, 279, 355 Bidar 163, 163, 168
see also state control Bishr b. Ḥārith al-Ḥāfī 89
Bāqī bi-Llāh 126–127 al-Bisṭāmī, Abū Yazīd 190, 297, 396
Baqīʿ cemetery 151 Black, Christopher 343
baraka (blessings) 16, 17, 21, 59, 83–86, blessings (baraka) 16, 17, 21, 59, 83–86,
117–119, 128, 129, 137, 150, 161, 187, 188, 117–119, 128, 129, 137, 150, 161, 187, 188,
190, 203, 211, 284, 339, 367–368, 374, 190, 203, 211, 284, 339, 367–368, 374,
375, 401, 409 375, 401, 409
baraka bureaucracy 19, 256, 279–285 Boko Haram 320
Bardhi, Baba Reshat 281–282 Bosnia-Herzegovina 15, 67, 69, 135, 228–229
basant festival (spring festival) 87 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 285
al-Bashīr, ʿUmar 283 Braudel, Fernand 12
Basra 176, 241, 293, 362, 364 brothers (ikhwān) 94, 170
bathhouse workers 97, 99 see also disciples/students/followers
bayʿa (oath of allegiance) 196, 204, 297, 326 Brown, Peter 189, 206
337, 348–349, 367, 409 al-Budshīshī, Shaykh Ḥamza 408
Baybars i, Mamlūk sultan 353 Bukhara 35, 99, 153, 163, 164, 193, 242, 380,
Baybars ii al-Jāshnikīr, Mamlūk sultan 32, 396
221–222, 338 Burhān al-Dīn Gharīb 82, 85, 264, 400
Bāyezīd ii, Ottoman sultan 228, 265 butchers 85, 96–98
Bayrāmiyya/Bayrāmiyye 22, 399–400
Baysunghur, Timūrid prince 42 Cairo
Bayt al-Ḥikma 63 khānqāhs in 32, 33, 36, 85, 108, 232, 235,
bazm (royal banquets) 299, 300, 311 266, 342, 399
Bedreddīn (Badr al-Dīn) 249 as religious centre 149, 347, 353
begging (suʾāl) 13, 29, 82, 89, 90, 167, 212, shrine complexes in 41, 83, 120
222–223 veneration of Ṣūfī masters in 119, 220,
begging bowls (kashkūls) 341, 342 272
Begtimur, Armanid ruler 304 zāwiyas in 158, 194
behaviour, rules of. see rules of conduct cash waqf 62
Index 419
Cook, David 19–20, 315–320 death commemorations (ʿurs) 44, 86, 149,
Cooley, Charles Horton 11 170, 200, 339, 355
Coppolani, Xavier 2 decline
Corbin, Henry 4 in Ṣūfī lodges 130–132, 345
Cornell, Vincent 37, 39 in Sufism 3, 195, 233–234, 406, 408, 410
Coşan, Esat 281 deconstruction, concept of 2
council of godly men (dīwān al-ṣāliḥūn) dede (grandfather). see Ṣūfī masters
272–273 Dede Garkın 243, 244, 245
council of the saints (dīwān al-awliyāʾ) 256, Dedeköy 244
272, 278–279, 297–298 Delhi 82, 84, 86, 126–127, 132, 133, 168, 169,
countryside. see rural areas 263, 276, 390
court advisers Democratic Unionist Party (al-Ḥizb
Ṣūfīs as al-Ittiḥādi al-Dīmūqrāṭī) 356
in early period 303–306 Deobandi 16, 151, 410
in modern period 312 Depont, Octave 2
in post-Mongol period 306–312, deputies (muqaddam) 20, 187, 210, 347–350
344–345 dergāh (central shrine) 35, 137–138
see also under specific Ṣūfī masters Derrida, Jacques 2
craftsman. see merchants/craftsman dershanes (classrooms) 356
crusades/crusaders 108, 316 Dhakhīrat al-mulūk (Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī)
cult of saints. see Ṣūfī saints 267
customs (ʿādāt) 328 dhikr ceremonies (ḥaḍra) 170, 200, 210, 348,
351, 352, 354
daaira (circle) 235 dhikr/ ṭarīq al-khafī (silent ritual repetition)
al-Dabbāgh, Abd al-ʿAzīz 272 387
al-Dāghestānī, ʿAbdallāh 138 Dhū l-Nūn al-Miṣrī 147, 190
dahiras (religious societies) 51–52 digitalisation 408
Dallas, Ian (Abdelqadir) 180 Dingiray 325
Damascus 43, 64, 65, 86, 109–110, 132, 133, disciple-master relationship
138, 150, 159, 178, 204, 232, 241, 266, 272, in general 187, 191, 195–199, 336
276, 277, 280, 300, 304, 338, 342, 345, based on Qurʾān and Sunna 196–197
353, 390, 391, 397, 399 and love and trust of master 202–203
Damāwandī, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Naṣr Allāh reciprocity in 204
312 and rules of conduct. see rules of conduct
l-Daqqāq, Abū ʿAlī 89, 197, 368–369 and serving the master 199–204
daras (estates) 51 and shaykhs’ attitude 198
dargāh (shrine complexes). see Ṣūfī al-Sulamī on 368
shrine complexes disciples/students/followers (murīds) 207
Darqawiyya 180, 393 in general 348–349
darvīsh (beggar), use of term 341 relationships of
Darwīsh Āhū-pūsh 260 with master. see disciple-master
al-Dasūqī, Ibrāhīm 388, 392, 393 relationship
Dasūqiyya 392–393 with other disciples 205, 208
Data Darbar (Lahore) 44–46 dispensations (rukhṣa/rukhaṣ) 193, 366
Dātā Ganj Bakhsh (al-Hujwīrī). see al-Hujwīrī dīwān al-awliyāʾ (council of the saints) 256,
Dāʾūdiyya branch 388 272, 278–279, 297–298
Dāya al-Rāzī, Najm al-Dīn 267, 395 dīwān al-ṣāliḥūn (council of godly men)
Ḍayfa Khātūm 112 272–273
De Jong, Frederick 6, 47 Dīwān al-Waqf al-Sunnī (Iraq) 69
Index 421
Islamic Law and Society (journal) 60 Janissary Corps (elite Ottoman troops) 19,
Islamic mysticism 35, 265, 317–318, 342, 399
definitions of 335 Javād Nūrbakhsh, Shaykh 7, 409, 410
organisation of Javānmard Qaṣṣāb 97–99
in general 335–336 javānmardī (chivalry). see futuwwa
as debasement 335 Jawāmiʿ ādāb al-ṣūfiyya (al-Sulamī) 192
disciple-master relationship. see al-Jawhara al-muḍīʾah fī sulūk al-ṭālib wa-
disciple-master relationship nuṣḥ al-barīya (Ibrāhīm al-Dasūqī) 393
futuwwa brotherhoods. see futuwwa Jaysh Rijāl al-Ṭarīqa al-Naqshbandiyya (Men
brotherhoods of the Army of the Naqshbandiyya) 320
itinerant brotherhoods 341–342, 358 al-Jazūlī, Muḥammad 40, 116, 268–269,
lodges. see Ṣūfī lodges 346, 394
orders. see Ṣūfī orders/networks/paths Jazūliyya Shādhiliyya 18, 149, 178, 247, 256,
studies on 335 268–269, 346, 347
Islamic mysticism: A short history (Knysh) Jerusalem 18, 108, 109, 110, 232, 342, 390, 391
9–10 al-Jibāwī, Saʿd al-Dīn 391
Islamic Society of North America (isna) Jibrīl b. ʿUmar 274
69–70 jihād
Islamisation 67, 146, 211, 229, 240–242, 257, of Abdelkader (Algeria) 277–278, 318,
264–265 326–327
see also jihād of Aḥmad Barelwī (India) 276–277, 278
Ismāʿīl, Khedive 354 of Aḥmad al-Sharīf (Libya) 275, 328, 382
Ismāʿīl Ḥaqqī Bursavī 400 against crusaders 316
Ismāʿīl i, Ṣafavid ruler 126, 312, 324, 381 of Dan Fodio (Nigeria) 273–274, 318,
Ismāʿīl al-Inbābī 119 324–325
Ismāʿīl Khān 270, 271 lesser vs. greater 257, 315
Ismāʿīl Rūmī 124 of Shāmil (Caucasus) 277, 278, 319–320,
isnāds (chains of transmission) 348, 327–328
367–368, 376 Sufism and 257, 317–320
ʿiṣyān (rebellion). see insurrections/revolts of Tall (Mali and Senegal) 274, 319,
Italy, colonialism of 275, 328–329, 382 325–326
īthār (preferring the other). see selflessness types of 315–316
itinerant brotherhoods 20, 30, 211, 341–344, use of term 315
358 see also frontier spirit; insurrections/
revolts
al-Jabanyānī, Abū Isḥāq 257 al-Jīlānī, ʿAbd al-Qādir 122, 158, 298
Jadidism 151 books of 389
al-Jaghbūb 229 Dan Fodio’s vision of 318
Jahānabādī, Shāh Kalīm Allāh 82 saintly eminence of 388
Jahangir, Mughal emperor 310 shrine of 69, 347, 389
Jalāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Bukhārī 390 worship of 148
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Mawlānā 2, 122, 124, 125, mention of 369, 379
137, 153, 166, 167, 170, 231, 265, 297, 305, al-Jīlī, Jamāl al-Dīn 395
344, 358, 399 Jinnah, Ali 284
Jalwatiyya/Celvetiyye 22, 399, 400 Job, biblical figure 98
Jamāl Phatrī, Sayyid 389 Jong, Frederick de 6, 47
Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān 43, 243, 268, 307 The Journal of Economic and Social History of
Jamʿiyyat al-ʿUlamāʾ al-Muslimīn the Orient 60
(Ulamāʾ Association) 152 journeying (rūḥānī) 387
426 Index
Majd al-Dīn Baghdādī 395 master’s deputies (khulafāʾ) 21, 200, 385,
majdhūb (enraptured by God) 31, 211–212 401
majlis (assemblies) 19, 204, 299–300 Mathnavī-yi maʿnavī (Rūmī) 2, 230–231
al-Majlis al-Āʿlā lil-Ṭuruq al-Ṣūfiyya (Supreme Mauritania 51, 209, 229, 234, 319, 394
council of Sufi orders) 135, 354 mausoleums. see Ṣūfī shrines
Majlis al-Qawmī lil-Dhikr wa-l-Dhākirīn Mauss, Marcel 264
(National assembly of remembrance and Maussian gift obligations 264
those who remember) 283 Mawlānā Khālid al-Baghdādī 275, 276
Majlis al-Ṣūfī (Sufi Council) 21, 354, 358 Mawlānā Nāṣirī Siwāsī 95, 96–97
Maktūbāt (al-Sirhindī) 397 Mawlawiyya/Mevleviyye
Malāmatiyya/Melāmīs 90–91, 227, 233, 341, establishment of 123, 398
365 as musammā order 387
Malaysia 69, 393, 397 relations between sultans and 130, 265
Maldives 67 spiritual practices of 399
Malfūẓāt-i Naqshbandiyya 82, 317 spread of 22, 347, 399
Mali 46, 153, 229, 235, 274, 325, 379 tekkes of 66, 137, 158
Mālik b. Dīnār 362 Mawlāy Idrīs 272
Malik Ḥusayn 262 Mawlāy Sulaymān, Moroccan sultan 133
Malik Zayn al-Dīn 264 mawlids (saints’ birthdays) 44, 47, 60, 119,
Mamlūk dynasty 16, 30, 33, 38, 62, 65, 111, 148, 187, 207, 210, 220, 339, 351, 352, 389,
112, 148, 165, 240, 266, 292, 311, 345, 353, 392, 394
386 Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine 16, 145–153, 205
see also under specific rulers al-Mayūrqī, Abū Bakr 259
al-Maʾmūn, Abbāsid caliph 62–63, 92, 293 mazārs (shrines). see Ṣūfī shrines
Manāqib al-ʿārifīn (Aflākī) 94–95 McGregor, Richard 17, 218–225
Manbaʿ al-abḥār fī riyāḍ al-abrār meals, preparing and serving of 201–202
(Khazīnī) 268 Mecca 15, 28, 42, 43, 60, 108, 117, 132–133,
Manṣūr al-Baṭāʾiḥī 389 149, 176, 178, 219, 274, 325
Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj 303 Meclis-i Meşāyiḥ (Council of Shaykhs) 354
Mantaz 120 mediation/arbitration 39, 84, 190, 205–206,
maqāms. see Ṣūfī shrine complexes; Ṣūfī 262, 311–312, 340
shrines Medina 28, 116, 151, 219, 277, 283, 363, 389,
Maqdīsh, Maḥmūd 273 400
al-Maqdisī, Abū l-Faḍl (Ibn al-Qaysarānī) Meḥmed ʿAlī, Ottoman governor 36, 47
366 Meḥmed ii, Ottoman sultan 42, 66, 400
maraboutism (miuridizm) 149, 278 Meier, Fritz 10
Marabouts et khouan (Rinn) 2 merchants/craftsman
Maratha rulers/nobility 86 futuwwa and 37–38, 91–95
Marīnid dynasty 38, 65, 116, 147, 249, see also guilds
268–269 metaphors of royalty
see also under specific rulers in general 292–293
marriage 51, 52, 190, 197, 338–339, 350, 352 in Christianity 293
Marsy, François-Marie de 2 in Islam 293
Maryamiyya 138 in Judaism 293
Mashhad 42, 146 in Sufism
mashhads 146 and adab 294–298
Masjid Touba (New York City) 52 and royal banquets 299–300, 311
Maṣmūda Berbers 178 Mevlānā. see Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn
Massignon, Louis 5 Mevlana Museum 170
Index 429
Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn (Mevlānā) Ṣafī l-Dīn al-Ardabīlī 126, 166, 229, 269, 323,
poetry of 137, 230–231 381, 397
on relationship Ṣūfīs and Ṣafwat al-taṣawwuf (al-Maqdisī) 366
rulers 305–306 ṣaḥāba (Companions) 116, 187
shrine of 125, 153, 166, 167 sāḥas (zāwiyas in Upper Egypt) 202–203,
tekke of 170, 358 206
mention of 2, 122, 124, 265, 297, 344, 399 Said, Kurdish Khālidī Shaykh 48
rural areas Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ/Ṣalāḥiyya (Cairo) 32, 85,
illiteracy in 240 108, 266
Ṣūfī institutions in, functions of saints’ birthdays (mawlids) 44, 47, 60, 119,
246–248 148, 187, 207, 210, 220, 339, 351, 352, 389,
Sufism in 392, 394
in general 39–40, 239–241 Saladin. see Ṣalāh al-Dīn b. Yūsuf, Ayyūbid
Naqshbandiyya 242–243 ruler
and nomadic tribes 243, 245–246 Salafism/Salafīs 41, 46–47, 69, 150, 153, 195,
non-conformist dimension 320, 405
of 248–249 Salafiyya 132, 134
sources on 240 Ṣalāh al-Dīn b. Yūsuf, Ayyūbid ruler
Wafāʾiyya 243 founding of khānqāhs by 32, 85, 108, 266
Yasawiyya 241–242 khānqāh in commemoration of 111, 111,
see also cities 112, 112
Russia 4, 131, 151, 273, 277, 319, 327, 406 ‘Ṣalāḥiyya’ (Jerusalem) 108, 109, 110
see also Soviet Union al-Salāḥiyya Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ 85
Salāmān va Absāl (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī)
Sabra, Adam 13–14, 27–53 268
al-Sabtī, Abū l-ʿAbbās 224 Ṣāliḥ, Ibrāhīm 283–284
Sabzevar 86 Salīm Chishtī 128, 169
ṣadaqa (alms) 81, 218, 219 Sālimiyya 176
Saʿdī dynasty 34 Saljūq dynasty
Saʿdiyya 391–392 and Qalandars 260
Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Ardabīlī 269, 323 relations between Ṣūfīs and sultans
Ṣadr al-Dīn Ibrāhīm Ḥammūya 261 in 243, 246, 260, 265, 305
Ṣadr al-Dīn Shāh 87 state patronage of Sufism by 15, 32,
SADUM (Spiritual Directory of the Muslims 38–39, 64, 107, 113–114, 165, 167–168
of Central Asia) 279 see also under specific rulers
Ṣafavid dynasty Salmān al-Fārsī 96, 97
founding of 34, 126 al-Samanūdī 196
relations between Ṣūfīs and 269–270 sanctity (walāya) 19, 117, 118, 147, 189, 198,
repression of futuwwa brotherhoods 206, 227, 256, 265, 268, 271, 272, 292,
by 343 379
and Ṣafaviyya 323–324, 381 Ṣanhāja Berbers 178
see also under specific rulers al-Sanhūtī, Yāsīn b. Ibrāhīm 306
Ṣafaviyya Sanjar b. Malikshāh, Saljūq sultan 260
establishment of 126 al-Sanūsī, Muḥammad b. ʿAlī 67, 206, 275,
founder of. see Ṣafī l-Dīn al-Ardabīlī 348, 381
leadership of 269 Sanūsiyya 20, 67, 209, 229, 275, 319,
and Ṣafavid dynasty 323–324, 381 328–329, 381–382, 394
spread of 397 founder of. see al-Sanūsī, Muḥammad b. ʿAlī
temporal sovereignty of 269–270 saqqāʾ (water-carriers) 201, 347–348
Index 435
al-Sulamī, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (cont.) Tāj al-ʿĀrifīn Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Baghdādī 388
on clothing 365 Tajammuʿ al-Waḥda al-Waṭaniyya
duwayra of 176, 370 al-ʿIrāqī (Coalition of the Iraqi National
on al-Ḥaddād 190 Unity) 285
on Ibrāhīm b. Adham 256–257 Tajikistan 136, 279
on master-disciple relationships 368 tājs (felt hats) 341, 342
teaching of Sufism by 64 takiyyas 158, 159
on visiting shrines 148 ṭalibés (disciples, students) 51, 325, 329
al-Sulamī, Izz al-Dīn b. ʿAbd al-Salām 297 see also disciples/students/followers
Sulaymān Bāqirghānī (Ḥakīm Ātā) 242, 395 Tall, ʿUmar b. Saʿīd 274, 319, 325–326
Sulaymāniyya 49–50, 285 Tamerlane. see Tīmūr, Timūrid ruler
Süleymān i, Ottoman sultan 125 Ṭanṭā 20, 44, 340, 392
sulṭān, use of term 297 Tarim Basin 130, 270–271, 323, 351
Sulṭān Walad 98, 265, 297 ṭarīqa (Ṣūfī orders). see Ṣūfī orders/networks/
sultans, relationships with Ṣūfī paths
masters 260–273, 303–312 al-ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya
Summer, William Graham 11 (Muḥammadan way) 268, 269, 271, 274
Sunayd b. Dāwūd al-Miṣṣīṣī 296 tasbīhs (rosaries) 341
Sunnī Islam 39, 108, 115, 148, 191, 265, 268, Tāshufīn ibn ʿAlī, Almoravid sultan 258–259
307, 317, 341, 342 taṣrīf, taṣarruf (supernatural powers). see
superintendents (khādim) 20, 170, 199–200, supernatural powers
203, 339, 340, 347 tawakkul (complete trust in God) 82,
supernatural powers 89–90, 224
online display of 409 al-Tawfīq 278
of Ṣūfī masters 198, 255, 263, 303, 309, Tāybād 163, 164
311 al-Ṭayyib, Muḥammad 202–203
Supreme Council of Sufi Networks (Egypt) Tegüder Aḥmad 261
48 tekkes/tekiyye/tekye (Ṣūfī lodges)
Supreme council of Sufi orders (al-Majlis in Anatolia 114–115
al-Āʿlā lil-Ṭuruq al-Ṣūfiyya) 135, 354 in Bosnia-Herzegovina 135
al-Suyūṭī 267 of Hacı Bektaş 35
Sy, Muṣṭafā 282 use of term 157–159, 338
Sy, Tidjane 282 Templar knights 316
Syria terminology
Ṣūfī activities in, state control of 93, 135, used for
136, 149, 319, 397, 398, 401 address 94, 170
Ṣūfī institutions in altruism/selflessness 219
in general 14, 15, 108, 113, 136, 165, 177 Ṣūfī lodges 31, 157–159, 174–175, 178, 338,
bureaucratisation of 256, 279–280 370
Ṣūfī orders from 391–392 Ṣūfī shrines 145–146
waqf policy in 64 temporal power 297–298, 311
waqfs system in 68 see also metaphors of royalty
Thāqib Dede 399
Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya (Anṣārī) 81 Thibon, Jean-Jacques 21, 362–371
Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya (al-Sulamī) 368 Threshold Society 356
Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī (Jūzjānī) 263 Tidhkārbāy Khātūn 33
table manners 202 al-Tijānī, Aḥmad 133, 194–195, 274, 284, 394
Tabrīzī, Jalāl al-Dīn 390 Tijāniyya
Taflīqa, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Bū 285 apolitical stance of 327
Ṭāhir Dhū l-Yamīnayn 92, 188 establishment of 133, 194–195, 394
Index 441