Review of Sufi Studies

Review Article: RECENT THINKING ON SUFIS AND SAINTS IN THE LIVES OF MUSLIM
SOCIETIES, PAST AND PRESENT

Author(s): Dina Le Gall
Source: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 42, No. 4 (November 2010), pp.
673-687
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41308719
Accessed: 23-08-2016 12:40 UTC
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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 42 (2010), 673-687
doi : 1 0. 1 0 1 7/S00207438 1 00009 1 7
Dina Le Gall
RECENT THINKING ON SUFIS AND SAINTS
IN THE LIVES OF MUSLIM SOCIETIES,

PAST AND PRESENT
Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherh

Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Daphna Ephrat, Spiritual Wayfarers , Leaders in Piety: Sufis and the

Medieval Palestine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2
Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Sufism: The Formative Period (Berkeley

University of California Press, 2007).
SCOTT Kugle, Sufis and Saints' Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, an

(Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
ERIK S. OHLANDER, Sufism in an Age of Transition: cUmar al-Suhraw

Islamic Mystical Brotherhoods (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008).
ROBERT Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twent

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell, eds., Sufism and th
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
These books demonstrate in various ways the momentous prog

study of Sufism over the past three decades while pointing to
that remain. Until the 1970s, Western scholarship on Sufism w
paradigms that originated among orientalists, travelers, colonial
Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars pri
insights and poetry of great Sufi masters and championed per
religious forms. Sufism's devotional and corporate aspects were
the Sufi practitioners, especially ragged dervishes and worship
It was common to separate such practitioners and practices fro
cism through a schema of elite versus popular religion. A relat
cast later Sufi practice as a corruption of the classical mystica
prit in a wider decline of Muslim civilization, while yet anoth
brotherhoods as networks of anticolonial Muslim activism and
"fanaticism."
Dina Le Gall is an Associate Professor of History at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: dinalegall@lehman.cuny.edu
© Cambridge University Press 2010 0020-7438/10 $15.00
674 Dina Le Gall
From roughly the mid-1970s, the old paradigms began to give way to new appr
inspired by the growing cachet of social history and informed by new insights eme
from the study of Latin Christendom and the sociology and anthropology of rel
Two influential works, Spencer Trimingham's The Sufi Orders in Islam and Anne
Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam , were at best harbingers of this chan
Trimingham was pioneering in his bid to contextualize Sufi practice and thought,
book remains marred by its modern Protestant bias privileging mysticism as pe
religion and by its espousal of the decline theory.1 Both are at the heart of the trip
schema through which the author traces the evolution of the Sufi orders: the kh
stage, in which Sufism was a natural expression of personal religion; the tariqa s
when new institutional forms led to a domestication of the mystical spirit; and the
stage, with its institutionalized Sufi orders sponsored by states and intertwined
mass popular religiosity, along with the authoritarianism, conformity, and decay
this new configuration engendered.
Schimmel's book is immensely erudite, if more phenomenological in approach.2
is also primarily interested in mysticism, theosophy, and mystical poetry but is att
to vernacular forms of poetry that earlier scholars would have dismissed as aspe
popular religiosity. In addition, she associates institutionalization with decline, if
expressing that equation indirectly through the disapproval of modernists or the int
critique advanced by some Sufis. It took a nonspecialist, Marshall G. S. Hodgson
articulate in The Venture of Islam a more socially grounded approach to the hist
Sufism that continues to inform scholars' thinking up to the present.3 Hodgson high
Sufi theoreticians' positing of a close relationship between sharica-based and Sufi
of religiosity, Sufis' tolerance of local difference and local forms of authority, an
mechanisms of human outreach through which masses of casual followers were br
into the Sufi fold. At the center were the Sufi shaykhs, in whose posthumous f
followers found intercessors and sources of blessing and whose spiritual hierar
replaced forms of unity and order from the high caliphal era. The upshot was th
tradition of intensive interiorization re-exteriorized its results and was . . . able to p
an important basis for social order."4
The central vehicle of the recent transformation in Sufi scholarship has been, how
the publication of an array of specialized studies. An early example, Richard Eaton
ofBijapur , illustrates both a shift in subject matter and a conceptual revaluation.
mattered now was not simply the mystical tradition that Sufis produced and transm
but rather the practitioners themselves, from the loftiest mystics to illiterate de
They needed to be understood, moreover, as integral parts of evolving societies an
real historical actors. More recent scholarship has paid critical attention to Sufis'
political, and economic engagements (sometimes privileging these at the expense
tradition's mystical and spiritual aspects). Scholars have sought a better understa
of Sufi pedagogy, the workings of tariqas, and Sufis' roles in cultural transmissi
Islamization as well as in forging communities.6 Some have begun to reassess the
of dervish religiosity and to challenge dichotomous divisions into elite versus po
religion.7 A number of recent studies have examined Sufi material culture, Sufis
gender, and Sufism as a living tradition.8 One complex of issues that has loomed
throughout much of this scholarship centers on the social construction of sain
via popular recognition, hagiographic consecration, and shrine veneration.9 Shrin
Recent Thinking on Sufis and Saints in the Life of Muslim Societies 675
being studied for their role as centers of devotional life, agents of Islamization, foci
of sacred geography, and venues where saints' symbolic capital was transformed into
social and political power.10
On a methodological level, new studies have set out to historicize Sufi belief and
practice by situating them in appropriate social and cultural contexts and by tracing
and documenting change. New critical approaches are brought to bear on the selection
and reading of sources. Interest has shifted from the great mystical classics to more
mundane sources such as letters, devotional manuals, spiritual genealogies, chronicles,
official correspondence, and now also nontextual evidence.11 Hagiographic literature -
once dismissed as ahistorical - has become central to new inquiries, perused not as
the repository of innocent data but rather for its rhetorical purposes and narrative
mechanisms.12 It is the accumulated effect of these shifts in approach, interests, and
methodology that informs, inspires, and frames the books under review.
SUFISM'S FORMATIVE PHASES
A corpus of new specialized studies published in recent years

understand how the Sufi tradition and practice first developed a
now there has not been a monograph that treats these histori
and with an eye to situating discrete developments in appro
contexts. This is what Ahmet Karamustafa's Sufism: The For
while telling a fascinating story of how between the 9th an
became a self-conscious mode of piety, developed a set of th
literary tradition, moved to the center of Muslim social and in
to all levels of urban and rural societies.
The book falls into two roughly even parts. Chapters 1 through 3, devoted to the
emergence of Sufism as a distinct mystical tradition in the 9th and 10th centuries,
evince Karamustafa's masterful ability to make sense of complex, messy, and still
partially obscure developments and to integrate them into a coherent narrative without
compromising his exacting historical approach. Three strategic choices stand out. First,
the author rejects teleological explanations such as the notion of an asceticism turned
proper mysticism, instead offering a meticulous analysis of how an array of ascetic and
mystical ideas, practices, figures, and perspectives - not all designated Sufi at first -
became fused into a tradition centered on what he calls the Iraqi style of piety. Second,
in his discussion of this mode of piety he charts the emergence of a spiritual regimen
and discourse of domesticating the lower self ( nafs ), cultivating the heart, and instilling
a constant remembrance of God ( dhikr ) into one's consciousness in order to facilitate a
journey toward becoming absorbed in God's presence. However, he pays no less attention
to the social and intellectual profile of Sufis. He portrays them as politically quietist,
shunning mendicancy and extreme renunciation, aligned with traditionalist elements and
the hadith folk, and fitting into mainstream urban society, if at times on its edge. Third,
ascetic and mystical currents appearing outside Iraq - in Khurasan, western Iran, Arabia,
and al-Andalus - are analyzed in terms of their ties and affinities, or lack thereof, to the
Sufis of Baghdad. The spread of Sufism in Nishapur and Khurasan emerges in particular
as the product not of simple transmission but rather of an uneven and unpredictable fusion
between Sufism and the indigenous Malamatiyya, whose hallmarks were commitment
676 Dina Le Gall
to social conformity, rejection of public displays of piety, and emphasis on subjec

the lower self to constant blame. The fusion may have been linked to the growing
popularity of the Shafici school, with which most Sufis were now associated. The r
was that Sufism largely absorbed the Malamatiyya. The Malamati approach never
disappeared, however, surviving as a subcurrent within the fabric of Sufism and in
cases as a mystical orientation within the Hanafi legal school.
In the last three chapters, Karamustafa examines a series of transformations bet
the 10th and 12th centuries through which Sufism moved to the center of intellectua
and began spreading throughout urban and rural society. As in the first half of the b
he combines textual analysis with attention to social dynamics. Sufi scholarly produ
spawned a new genre of specialized writings that set out to present the tradition t
audiences, build solidarity, preserve and evaluate the legacy of early paragons, and
the boundaries of normative Sufism. A new kind of Sufi guide, the shaykh al-tar
came to prominence, training and closely supervising the spiritual progress of disc
linked to him through intimate yet hierarchical ties of initiation and obedience. Orga
around such spiritual guides - and often housed in Sufi lodges (sing, khanaqah or
that powerful patrons now commonly set up as charitable endowments - Sufi comm
ties were assuming new coherence, fixity, and complexity. Manuals elaborated the
of etiquette (adab) of Sufi communal living. Sufi theoreticians facilitated the form
of peripheral communities of casual followers, sanctioning their participation in pu
such as gainful work or associating with rulers, from which the full-fledged Sufis
at least theoretically barred, and allowing them to receive ("for the sake of blessi
the khirqa or patched cloak symbolizing initiation. Soon these new configurations
woven into the fabric of local societies, as we learn from the criticism that al-Qus
and al-Hujwiri directed at the authoritarianism of masters and the formalism of
rituals and social markers.
Most crucial in Karamustafa's view was the fusion occurring between the Sufi concept
of sainthood or "friendship with God" ( walaya ) and local cults of saints that had first
developed independently. By the 12th and 13th centuries, spiritual guides of small coter-
ies of disciples were doubling as popular saints and becoming the center of posthumous
veneration by local shrine communities. Sufism experienced a phenomenal expansion
in popularity and social reach and attracted keener attention from rulers as well as new
criticisms - both from outside Sufi ranks and from some insiders opposed to Sufism's
social accommodation. In time, the shrines would become venues where descendants
of many Sufi saints converted their forebears' charisma into formidable social and
economic power. Shrine communities also became the focal points around which new
communal identities - often ethnic or tribal in character - took shape.
These transformations have been discussed elsewhere, but here they are woven deftly
into a broad and coherent narrative. Striking, too, is the tight nature of the analysis in these
chapters. Karamustafa shies away from broad speculative generalizations, preferring to
base his analysis on evidence provided by the sources. He identifies and documents
change as it is reflected, for example, in the appearance of new discourses (such as
the rhetoric of obedience to Sufi shaykhs) or of whole new genres (adab manuals,
hagiographies, and guidebooks for visitors to saints' tombs). It is this close reading
of the sources and close attention to historical context - yet always with an eye to
elucidating broad historical processes - that are the hallmarks of this important study.
In Spiritual Wayfarers, Leaders in Piety Daphna Ephrat sets out to explore the same
trajectory of Sufism's transformation from a marginal elite of spiritual wayfarers with
disparate ideas and practices to a religious and social presence embedded in a distinct
tradition of piety, anchored in coherent local associations, and integral to the world of
Muslim scholarship and the fabric of Muslim societies. Ephrat has chosen to ground her
inquiry in the particular story of the diffusion of Sufism in medieval Palestine. At the
same time, she is willing to incorporate insights from a wide array of modern studies into
her analysis. The result is a richly textured picture of the diffusion of Sufism in Palestine
that is locally embedded yet also situated within the broader context of medieval Muslim
societies and attuned to tracing wider patterns in the development of Sufism.
At the core of Ephrat's analysis is the era between the 10th and 13th centuries,
when Sufis consolidated and disseminated their tradition, built institutions, and became
integrated into the world of the culama3 and the fabric of society. Here she traverses
much of the same ground covered in the second half of Karamustafa's book. However,
she shows a keener interest (inspired by Marshall Hodgson, among others) in tying the
transformations affecting Sufism during this time to transformations in other religious
and intellectual arenas and more generally to the changed landscape created by the
dissolution of the old caliphal order and the rise of successor regimes. She is more
emphatic, too, in tracing the emergence - and later dominance - of what she identifies as
a moderate, sober, learned, community-oriented, ethical Sufi tradition, which she places
at the center of Sufism's transformation during this period. The newly refashioned Sufism
was nurtured by authors and practitioners who set out to define central Sufi ideas and
practices, extol Sufism's sharica-mindedness, and cleanse the tradition of uncontrollable
mystical and ecstatic elements. Their vision emphasized mild asceticism, emulation of
the Prophetic model, and normative ethical behavior. In the biographical dictionaries
we thus meet Sufi shaykhs (often Shafici in affiliation) overlapping with traditionalist
culama' teaching in the same institutions, and even recognized as legal experts in their
own right. It was this refashioned "ethical Sufism" that was behind Sufis' ability to
spread their message among larger audiences, as new Sufi shaykhs became moral guides
disseminating Sufi norms and values throughout local communities.
In broader historical terms, Ephrat situates Sufism's move to the center of intellectual
life within the "Sunni revival" of the 11th century, when leaders of scholarship and
piety set out to preserve a unified Islamic community by bridging differences among
various religious traditions and delimiting a commonly accepted form of Islam. On an
institutional level, it was at this time that more coherent legal and scholarly frameworks
such as the madrasa and the legal school were replacing older networks based on
personal ties - and here too new Sufi-inspired institutions were part of the general trend.
Altogether Ephrat offers a compelling analysis, linking transformations in Sufi doctrine
and practice to wider social and intellectual realities. I would qualify, however, the air of
conclusiveness that she confers on what she calls the shift to ethical Sufism. Ethical and
sober elements as well as mystical and ecstatic ones - or the dynamic tension among all
of these - were at the heart of Sufism during this era and long after. One would want a
sense of that continued tension to be more clearly conveyed.
Another set of arguments concerns the 12th through 15th centuries, a time when
Sufism had become a mass movement and elements of Sufi piety were the focus of
lively devotional communal life. In contrast to scholars who have emphasized the role
678 Dina Le Gall
of the brotherhoods in the development of Sufism at this time, Ephrat finds the dif
of Sufi piety in Palestine evolving primarily outside the brotherhoods. Individual
were not identified as the affiliates of particular tariqas nor did the term tariqa d
a social organization. Rather than the tariqas, it was the awliya 3 (friends of God)
the cults surrounding them that anchored the growth of Sufism as a mass movem
Contemporary sources portrayed the awliya 3 not as Sufi masters conferring my
guidance on intimate disciples but as the fount of religious instruction, moral guid
and charisma bestowed on whole communities. Geographically and architecturall
was the lodges (sing, zawiya ) and tomb complexes dotting Palestine's landscape t
were now the principal locus of both Sufi devotion and the cult of saints. The aw
were surrounded here by inner circles of disciples and peripheries of occasional vis
their power increasing posthumously with masses of pilgrims coming to their shri
partake in their blessing and join in communal celebrations of their birthdays. Sh
altered the layout of cities and were the nuclei around which villages became Islam
in the process imprinting the stamp of Islam on the human and physical landscap
shaping what Ephrat calls "Islamic public space."
Appearing within a short span of each other, the two books reviewed here are na
companions. Karamustafa and Ephrat chart remarkably similar overall trajectories
agreeing in their assessment of many discrete dynamics (Sufism's social embedded
from its inception, early Sufis' closeness to traditionalist elements and the Shafici sch
the critical importance of the awliya 5 doubling as spiritual guides to intimate disc
and benefactors of whole communities, etc.). Both books fit into and reinforce re
trends in Sufi scholarship. Both authors bring to the story of the evolution and sprea
Sufism in its formative phases an ability to craft coherent overviews along with the
scholarship's exacting historical approach.
TARIQAS AND BROTHERHOODS
Featuring only marginally in the books by Karamustafa and Ephrat, the Sufi
hoods assume much more prominence in two other recent books. Erik Ohland
researched Sufism in an Age of Transition is ostensibly a biography of the Su
scholar, caliphal envoy, and tariqa eponym TJmar al-Suhrawardi (d. 1234). H
the book's broader aim is to gain a better understanding of the "institutionaliz
in medieval Sufism and of the genesis of what the author calls tariqa-based
What emerges is a story (not always easy to discern in Ohlander's dense nar
how tariqa-based Sufism was born via a process of exteriorization and routini
Sufism as a mode of religiosity and a framework of social identity and affiliat
too, Hodgson's enduring influence is often apparent.
Ohlander centers his analysis on Sufis' changing relations with rulers,
culama' and the world of institutions and learning. He begins with new
power and authority that evolved in response to the political instability, m
of peoples, and rise to power of new de facto rulers starting in the 10th century
legitimacy and stability, these new rulers and officials - and in time al-Suhraw
patron, the caliph al-Nasir li-Din Allah - took to conferring patronage on cula
and (especially ShafiH) scholarship in ways that were critical to the institutionali
Sufi communities. Another crucial dynamic entailed increasingly strong ties an
in practice among the culture of the culama' the world of religious learning, and the praxis
of Sufis in their lodges - all worlds that Sufi masters such as al-Suhrawardi inhabited
as a matter of course. These worlds were increasingly dominated by institutions - both
physical ones and what the author calls "institutions of process," such as specialized
modes of preaching, disputation, and scholarly exchange. It was in this environment
that Sufis began to develop those replicable forms of praxis and organization, such as
the codes of adab regulating the life of lodges, that would be so vital to the emergence
of a sustainable mode of Sufism. The culture of adab was very much in the air. Sufis
encountered it in the world of the culama3 and replicated it in their lodges. The lodges
also reproduced the porousness of the culture of religious learning, as Sufi shaykhs
and theoreticians demarcated a hierarchy of varying levels of affiliation, offering casual
followers an opportunity to partake in Sufi piety. An analysis of al-Suhrawardi 's writings
reveals yet another dynamic that was conducive to institutionalization. Sufism was, for
him, a matter of asserting identity, legitimacy, and authority as much as of searching for
spiritual insight and perfection. He saw himself as the spokesman of a group (taHfa),
the Sufiyya. Whether he was analyzing the Sufi sciences, discussing stages on the
mystical path, or distinguishing Sufis from ascetics, Malamatis or culama' the project
was often one of mapping boundaries and asserting his group's superiority. Even while
on diplomatic missions on behalf of the caliph, al-Suhrawardi is said to have been
committed above all to that consistent agenda.
Although Ohlander has constructed a compelling analysis - one that extends beyond
the work of Karamustafa and Ephrat - of some of those dynamics of exteriorization and
routinization that led to the emergence of tariqa-based Sufism, he ends by pointing to
another aspect of the rise of the brotherhoods that his book can do little to elucidate.
That al-Suhrawardi became a tariqa eponym had much to do with his wide-ranging
roles as a Sufi master, preacher, hadith transmitter, ribat director, jurist, and caliphal
envoy, which together secured the "permanence of his memory in multiple narratives
and for multiple groups" (p. 136). However, there were others who engaged in similar
activities yet did not become tariqa eponyms. Such was the famous al-Qushayri, whose
ribat remained in the hands of his family and whose khirqa contim d to be transmitted
after his death but who did not become a tariqa eponym or the subject of a hagiography.
Ohlander points to the connection between the popular recognition of a future eponym,
the presence of disciples who take to writing a hagiography, and the emergence of a
brotherhood. However, he admits that how these things played out remains enigmatic.
In the case at hand, we know little about when or how those who saw themselves as
al-Suhrawardi's spiritual heirs became aware of their initiation into a tariqa named after
him or began to employ the term Suhrawardiyya in reference to a teaching lineage. To
begin to grapple with those sorts of questions, one would have to focus on the more
diffuse and elusive environment following the death of the eponym.13 Inquiries of this
nature are critically necessary if we are to better understand the genesis and early history
of the Sufi brotherhoods.
Muslim Communities of Grace by Jamil Abun-Nasr is a very different book. Abun-
Nasr takes a broad approach to the genesis, evolution, and sources of appeal of the tariqas,
and brotherhoods, as they developed out of the Sufi tradition of the 9th century, through
the dislocations of the 13th, and down to the emergence of distinct religious communities
(the full-grown "brotherhoods") in the 18th century and beyond. The study's main
680 Dina Le Gall
significance and principal weaknesses lie in the breadth of the historical process
author has chosen to examine and in a series of sweeping arguments he makes.
The core argument is that the credibility of the Sufi shaykhs and the appeal o
tariqas and brotherhoods all drew on the shaykhs' ability to provide an alterna
model of authority to that of the culama' As religious office holders, the culama3 st
compromise with the caliphs, acknowledging the latter's role as the Prophet's depu
the leadership of the umma in exchange for the former being recognized as the a
of Islamic law. In this context, the authority of the Sufi shaykhs was a compe
contrast to that of the culama3: independent, untarnished, and responsive to the per
problem of religious leadership in Islam - the caliphs' failure to uphold the ide
the subordination of the political to the religious authority. Building on this argu
the author connects the genesis and evolution of the tariqas to successive c
in the shaykhs' spiritual authority and relationship with political power. The p
began with the emergence of the Sufi notion of sainthood ( walaya ) in the 9th ce
By the 11th century, Sufi shaykhs were heading spiritual families of laymen,
the notion of walaya became fused with their spiritual authority, especially whe
upheld religious norms in defiance of the holders of political power. The period from
1 1th to the 13th centuries saw the emergence of the first tariqas in the sense of ini
paths to God whose affiliates were believed to be linked to the Prophet via the d
grace inherent in the founders' walaya. Abun-Nasr argues that the whole proce
intimately related to the decline of the caliphs' religious authority and thus that
coincidence that it reached its climax at the time of the collapse of the caliphate
13th century.
A second principal argument concerns the rise of the full-grown brotherhoo
the 18th century. Whether new networks or branches of existing tariqas, urban o
based, these entities were a new breed. The founders claimed to be the Prophet's d
in the religious leadership of the umma and in a new project of Muslim revival.
targeted society as a whole, encouraging followers to continue their daily pursui
opening affiliation to all via the adoption of a prescriptive devotional "rule." Yet the
demanded exclusive allegiance to their spiritual authority, ending the practice of mu
tariqa affiliations. The result was the emergence of distinct religious communities
cry from the decentralized networks that were the old tariqas. Moving to the coloni
Abun-Nasr distinguishes between "upstart" shaykhs who led anticolonial movem
and the more established ones who chose accommodation with colonial regimes
seeking to sustain their spiritual authority by adhering to locally accepted nor
conduct and advocating strict religious observance. As a result of the latter ty
behavior, Sufi shaykhs would find themselves on the defensive in the postcoloni
when Muslim revivalism coalesced around the Salafiyya movement. Altogether,
second half of the book is better grounded than the first, building on insight
the author had honed in his earlier work. However, some qualms remain. Not all
practices that Abun-Nasr identifies as critical innovations defining the new brotherh
were dramatic departures from the past. On a historiographical level, it is curiou
he has chosen not to engage explicitly with the scholarship on neo-Sufism, with
his analysis has much to share.
Abun-Nasr's is an ambitious survey. The author has taken upon himself the com
task of tracing broad patterns in the history of Sufism and of situating the sto
organized Sufism within the broader history of Muslim societies. Students and lay readers
will find ample material for thought especially concerning the full-grown brotherhoods
and how they fit into the history of Islam, modernity, and the colonial experience. The
story told is of vast geographic and chronological scope, though the book is better
grounded in its study of the modern period and biased toward western regions of the
Islamic world at the expense of eastern ones.
However, no overarching paradigm has the power to explain the workings and appeal
of the tariqas and brotherhoods everywhere. Specifically locating the appeal of the
shaykhs, the tariqas, and the awliya 3 in their independent authority, their ability to
offer a substitute to the authority of the caliphs and the culama5, and their penchant for
upholding religious norms in defiance of the holders of political power is problematic
in a number of ways. The evidence marshaled, such as the tracing of Sufi lineages back
to the Prophet via his close companions, some of them early caliphs, is unconvincing.
Such propositions also ignore the fluidity that often obtained in the relationship between
Sufis and culama' as Ohlander has noted. And they underestimate the significance of
Sufism as a devotional discipline and path to God and that of the shaykhs and awliya 5
as spiritual exemplars who could uphold but also subvert religious norms. In all this
Abun-Nasr provides no less of an outsider's view than Trimingham - and one no less
schematized in its approach - although he does not subscribe to the decline paradigm
that the latter embraced. Together, both books reviewed in this section, although radically
different from each other, point to how much remains to be learned about the genesis and
workings of the Sufi brotherhoods (and more generally about the workings of Sufism
after the 13th century), a point to which I return in the conclusion.
SAINTS' BODIES AND SOCIETY
Scott Kugle's Sufis and Saints ' Bodies is a model of how to explor
after the rise of the tariqas and the "triumph of sainthood" (in K
A superbly rich study of Sufis' engagement with the body and
which saints' bodies were made to generate religious meaning and
the book opens a whole new field of inquiry in the study of Su
Kugle makes a critical contribution to the study of the social co
saints and does much to deconstruct the dichotomy of elite versu
demonstrates the relevance of saints' lives (and posthumous mem
their societies and illustrates the vitality of Sufism in areas far from
and in periods of Islamic history that are still sometimes associat
The starting point is the work of theoreticians of embodiment wh
the body as not just a physical object but also an expressive med
locus of symbolic meaning. Noting that Islam has been absent f
Kugle argues that Sufism is the ideal place to begin an inquiry int
cultures, because Sufis have engaged with the body more deeply
other Muslims. Each chapter presents a case study devoted to a
particular organ of the body, and all focus on how saints' bodies
religious meaning and communal passions. Together they rely on
of sources including hagiographies and poems (which often inco
elements from oral culture) as well as legal and devotional manua
682 Dina Le Gall
lineage, dream stories, and rituals practiced at tombs. Here are three examples o
Kugle proceeds.
Chapter 1 explores the discovery in 1438 of the tomb and "intact bones" of Ma
Idris, a descendant of the Prophet ( sharlf ) and the founder of the city of Fes in M
who had died six centuries before. This was a time of heightened discontent wit
Marinid regime and its inability to respond to Portuguese coastal attacks. Kugle
how the discovery and celebration of Idris' tomb and body were inspired by the
how they generated political passions and a new notion of divinely appointed kin
and how they strengthened the city's Sharifian clans, thus playing a critical role
overthrow of the Marinids within one generation and in the rise of the Sharifian
dynasty within another three. In addition, he illustrates through an analysis of a
century hagiography of Mawlay Idris and of the rituals that continue to be pract
his tomb today the complexity of the process of constructing saintly power, on
involves a dynamic interplay between popular memory, hagiography, and ritual p
at tombs.
Chapter 2 examines the story of Amina, a 16th-century mad female saint ( majdhu
also from Fes, and her extraordinary transgression. She broke every patriarch
by leaving her husband and 'ulama3 family to become the intimate associate of a
dalously behaved majdhub man. Her story was also aberrant in the way her hagiograp
chose to frame her sainthood, presenting her not as the paradigmatically devote
of a famous saint nor as a man in a woman's body (as was said of the 8th-centur
Rabica) but as a woman who was made exempt from her religious obligations by t
of her rational faculties. Kugle argues that it was the political role attributed to A
in the struggle against the Portuguese that truly explains the preservation of her
in the popular imagination and later in writing and institutional forms. She was k
to wake up in bed covered in miraculous wounds as if she had participated in the
It was this public display of bleeding that made her a player in dynastic struggl
marked her as an embodiment of the Moroccan people.
Chapter 3 focuses on Muhammad Ghawth, a South Asian Shattari saint and prot
the Mughal emperor Humayun. In 1 526, at the age of twenty-five, Ghawth experien
episode of ascension ( micraj ) to God reminiscent of that of the Prophet, later descr
his journey in a provocative account. Sufis had always viewed the story of the Pr
mi'raj as archetypal, invoking it in poetry and aspiring to emulate it through sp
discipline. However, Ghawth was different, claiming defiantly that his was a b
not visionary, ascension. Kugle argues on the basis of newly uncovered sources th
was above all the manner in which the saint described his ascension that was at stake
in the persecution unleashed against him in Gujarat, where he had found refuge after
Humayun's defeat by Afghan forces. At his trial he was enjoined to renounce those
statements in his ascension narrative implying that he had seen God with his eyes and
had united with Him in body, but he refused, fleeing the city at night before the final
showdown with his accusers.
Kugle's endeavor in this book is more than academic. He wants to rescue Islam from
its portrayal as a rigidly abstract religion hostile to the body, which he sees as emanating
both from discourses of Western modernity and from the agendas and political power
of "Wahhabis." In the conclusion, he engages in an anti-Wahhabi diatribe that another
reviewer has already critiqued.14 From my perspective, a more pertinent reservation is
that the five saints at the center of Kugle's story may not be the ideal media for exploring
how mainstream Sufis have valued and engaged with the body "in ways fuller and
deeper than other Muslim authorities" (p. 4). Kugle is partial to fiercely transgressive
saints. Amina and Muhammad Ghawth both stood at the defiant margin of the Sufi
mainstream while Mawlay Idris was not, strictly speaking, a Sufi saint. Ironically it is
through an analysis of a 19th-century Sufi innovator, Hajji Imdadullah, and the tradition
on which he drew (Chapter 5) that Kugle is able to examine the mainstream tradition of
Sufi engagement with the body as a vehicle for spiritual transformation. There is ample
room for further inquiry into how that tradition evolved in different times and places.
However, this does not diminish the extraordinary scope of the insights Kugle offers or
of the paths that his book has opened in the study of Sufism and the body, Sufism and
gender, and the social construction of Muslim sainthood.
CONTEMPORARY SUFISM AS A LIVING TRADITION
Viewed through a modernist prism, contemporary Sufism and th

were perceived until fairly recently as anachronisms incompatib
and ripe for extinction except perhaps in some traditional enclave
relevant to modernizing sectors of Muslim societies and had littl
Valerie Hoffman was one of the first to challenge these notions
Egyptian Sufism, and in subsequent years there have been a num
devoted to contemporary Sufis as well as a growing readiness to
surveys of Sufism and Sufi communities all the way to the present.
two books reviewed here both continue and attest to a virtual revo
modern Sufism.
In Islamic Sufism Unbound , Robert Rozehnal studies the Chishti Sabiri order in
late-colonial India, postcolonial Pakistan, and contemporary Malaysia with the aim of
elucidating the workings of Sufism as a "living tradition." Two central themes run
through the book. First, Rozehnal shows Sabiris (especially in Pakistan) living in a
fragmented landscape of religious authority and participating in intense battles over
identity politics. Second, he constructs the story of modern Sabiri Sufism around the
dynamic negotiation between continuity and change. It is this negotiation that enables
Sabiris to adapt an old tradition of piety and teaching to new realities, fashioning what
the author calls an "alternative modernity."
Rozehnal bases his inquiry on a combination of textual analysis and ethnographic
research. The fragmented world in which Sabiris move comes to life through the careers
and writings of three 20th-century Sabiri masters, Muhammad Zauqi Shah, Shahidullah
Faridi, and Wahid Bakhsh Sial Rabbani. These fierce apologists for Sufism sought to
project in their writings an "alternative religious identity" in which Sufism was valorized
as the essence of Islamic orthodoxy, a bastion against Western cultural encroachment,
and the bedrock of Pakistani nationalism. A similarly contested landscape emerges from
a discussion of the 2001 incident in which over 100 Sabiri devotees were crushed to
death in a stampede during the death anniversary (curs) of the Chishti saint Baba Farid in
Pakpattan. Rozehnal attended the curs , later interviewing a number of other participants.
He shows how devotees, the state, and shrine custodians all constructed their own
understanding of the event. Devotees sought to sacralize the tragedy, a response that
684 Dina Le Gall
he views as part of a larger project of challenging the state's discursive hegemon

reclaiming Sufism as the heart of Islamic orthodoxy.
Written evidence and ethnographic research combine also in elucidating how S
negotiate tradition and change. The Sabiri masters at the center of Rozehnal's stor
fully enmeshed in the modern world and capable of moving among different uni
and of making Sufi teachings and practice relevant to modern devotees. As pub
writers and spokesmen, they used new media, addressed new audiences, and envi
a socially engaged and sharica-minded Sufism rooted in tradition yet compatible
modern life. At the same time they are remembered in texts and in oral disco
paradigmatic Chishti saints: heirs of the Prophet, "physicians of the heart," and p
tioners of a spiritual discipline centered on prayer, dhikr , and Sufi a dab. Interview
devotees illustrate how Sabiri Sufism continues to be rooted in an interpersonal ne
of teaching and in a process of self-refashioning through ritual discipline. Roz
informants - modern, urban, educated, middle-class men and women representin
inner circle of devotees - place at the core of their Sufi experience a bond to the
constituted by guidance, obedience, and love, even in the absence of sustained ph
contact. They experience rituals of initiation as moments of profound transform
and they describe participation in curs celebrations as a singular opportunity to
with the shaykh and fellow devotees, partake in communal ritual practice, and exper
the order's identity as a moral community.
The same modernizing milieus and reliance on both texts and ethnographic res
feature in Bruinessen and Howell's edited volume Sufism and the ' Modern ' in
The project originated in a realization that in Indonesia, and apparently in other M
societies, Sufism had become part of a diverse modern religious scene, and Sufi-in
ideas, practices, and groups were engaging modern, educated segments of the m
class. Contributors set out to explore such realities comparatively and in a vari
places. They pay critical attention to the dynamic relationship between Sufism
modernity and focus on localized ground-level practices while seeking to pose n
questions, reassess received wisdoms, and problematize the very notion of Sufism
is how these imperatives are addressed in a number of individual chapters.
In her chapter on the Khalwatiyya of Egypt, Rachida Chih portrays an order t
more adaptable and less hierarchical than is often assumed. Devotional practice an
terns of authority and association vary considerably depending on the personality
shaykh and the needs of the community yet without diminishing the order's recogn
core. Disciples perceive their affiliation as one with a shaykh, not a tariqa, and they
in it a quality of reciprocity that is lost in common depictions of tariqas as organi
based on premodern notions of hierarchy and obedience. Brian Silverstein finds
adaptability in his study of a Naqshbandi Istanbul branch. His informants transf
the Naqshbandi devotional concept of hizmet (service to the shaykh) into a new
of community service commensurate with their functioning as a benevolent assoc
registered as a foundation ( vakif ). Sohbet (keeping the company of the shaykh and
disciples) also assumed new forms, even becoming a kind of "mediated sociality"
congregants listened to the shaykh (who resided for a time in Australia) via satellite
read his address in the order's monthly magazine.
In Part III, devoted to Sufism in new globalized settings, Pnina Werbner expl
number of Pakistani Sufi groups in Britain, showing how they bring virtual strange
relationships of amity and "intimate sociality" while cutting across ties of kinship and
village and transcending boundaries of class, age, and gender. Given such configurations,
we should refrain from static understandings of Pakistani Sufi orders as always based
in traditional kinship and village ties and of modernity as entailing by definition a
weakening of community in favor of voluntary association. Moving to Indonesia, Julia
Howell examines Sufism's new appeal among that country's expanding educated middle
classes. Beginning in the 1970s, social changes spawned by globalization, development,
and economic recovery have upended an older critique of Sufism and older "high
modern" definitions of religion (which previously had been sustained by law and by the
state's regulation of religion). Among the urban educated middle classes, these changes
created new spiritual needs and a new religious marketplace. It is in this context that we
see a blossoming of networks comprising a wide array of providers of Sufi and Sufi-
related spiritual services (private university-type courses on Sufism, alternative-health
groups, TV preachers, etc.). As a result, Sufi brotherhoods and shaykhs have themselves
become more open to new spiritual needs and expectations and new organizational
forms.
AN ONGOING TRANSFORMATION
The books reviewed here continue a remarkable transformation in

As a group the authors have honed a new scholarly agenda in whi
treated as real historical actors, Sufi thought and practice are un
social and cultural contexts, and sources have expanded in range
new critical analyses. A number of them have developed produ
oral tradition or living informants, transcending dichotomous pa
popular religion, and capturing localized ground-level Sufi pract
to the uneven reach and scope of such new approaches and meth
One complex of issues on which our understanding is still lac
genesis and early workings of the Sufi brotherhoods. In a numb
construction of sainthood, the workings of contemporary Suf
Sufism, gender, and the body - it is the very breakthroughs tha
made that recommend and call for further research. In geograp
Sufism has been at the forefront of new inquiries, and areas th
deemed peripheral, such as Indonesia, are no longer so; paradoxica
and Arab-Ottoman contexts where scholarship on Sufism is now
In chronological terms, it is arguably the centuries following t
hood" and the rise of the brotherhoods where the need for more
substantial. This was a time in which Sufism had already been as
and Sufis had also begun spreading into new frontier regions wh
participate in dynamic religious scenes. Sufi lodges and saints' sh
and elements of Sufi piety anchored lively devotional commun
interacted with political elites in new ways. New and bold forms
became widely influential - and much debated. Mystical poetry
intellectual life throughout a vast region, while songs and stories
portrayed the lives and teachings of Sufi saints to large audience
saturated with Sufi imagery. It is precisely this period, in which Su
686 Dina Le Gall
institutions associated with them, were already so diverse, rich, and ingrained in
societies, that requires much more historically oriented research. Sufism's soci
geographic expanse makes this a daunting enterprise, while specific methodolo
and conceptual challenges also remain. In the Ottoman context, in particular, one
hindering a more concerted attention to Sufism may be scholars' focus on the
and formal institutions. Other challenges include the not quite extinct paradigm o
versus popular religion and the elusiveness of trying to understand how a mode o
was projected onto society. Recent contributions, including some reviewed here, u
score the gaps that remain while suggesting productive new approaches and avenu
research.
NOTES
1J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Pr
tripartite schema of the evolution of the orders, see esp. pp. 102-104.
2Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University
Press, 1975).
3Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), esp. 201-22.
4Ibid., 218.
5 Richard Maxwell Eaton, Sufis ofBijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).
6Examples include Jiirgen Paul, Die politische und soziale Bedeutung der Naqsbandiyya in Mittelasien im
15. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991); Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism , History , and Politics
at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992); Devin DeWeese,
Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tiikles and Conversion to Islam in Historical
and Epic Tradition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Arthur F. Buehler, Sufi
Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia, S.C.:
University of South Carolina Press, 1998); Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The
Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Dina Le Gall, A Culture
of Sufism: Naqshbandls in the Ottoman World, 1450-1700 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press,
2005).
7 An excellent example is Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic
Middle Period 1200-1550 (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1994).
8 Examples include, respectively, J. W. Frembgen, Kleidung und Ausriistung islamischer Gottsucher: Ein
Beitrag zur materiellen Kultur des Derwischwesens (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1998); Margaret
Malamud, "Gender and Spiritual Self-Fashioning: The Master-Disciple Relationship in Classical Sufism,"
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996): 89-117; and Valerie J. Hoffman, Sufism, Mystics,
and Saints in Modern Egypt (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995).
9See, for example, Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism
(Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1998); and Nile Green, Indian Sufism Since the Seventeenth Century:
Saints, Books, and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (New York: Routledge, 2006).
10Examples include R. D. McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia: Four Hundred Years in the History of a
Muslim Shrine, 1480-1889 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Christopher S. Taylor, In
the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1999); Ethel Sara Wolper, Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Urban Space
in Medieval Anatolia (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); and Green, Indian
Sufism.
11 For the last of these see Raymond Lifchez, ed., The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art and Sufism in
Ottoman Turkey (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992); Frembgen. Kleidung.
12See, for example, Cornell, Realm' Ernst, Eternal Garden ; and DeWeese, Islamization.
13Devin DeWeese, Vincent Cornell, and Carl Ernst have tackled similar questions in other contexts. See,
for example, Devin DeWeese, "The Legitimation of Baha3 ad-DIn Naqshband," Asiatische Studien/Etudes
Asiatiques 60 (2006): 261-305.
,4Rudiger Seesemann, "Sufis and Saints' Bodies, Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power. By Scott
Kugle," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76 (2008): 514-21 .
15 See, respectively, Hoffman, Sufism, Mystics, and Saints', Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthro-
pology of a Global Sufi Cult (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003); and Ernst and Lawrence,
Sufi Martyrs of Love.

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Review Article: RECENT THINKING ON SUFIS AND SAINTS IN THE LIVES OF MUSLIM

SOCIETIES, PAST AND PRESENT

RECENT THINKING ON SUFIS AND SAINTS

IN THE LIVES OF MUSLIM SOCIETIES,

Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherh

Daphna Ephrat, Spiritual Wayfarers , Leaders in Piety: Sufis and the

Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Sufism: The Formative Period (Berkeley

SCOTT Kugle, Sufis and Saints' Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, an

ERIK S. OHLANDER, Sufism in an Age of Transition: cUmar al-Suhraw

ROBERT Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twent

These books demonstrate in various ways the momentous prog

© Cambridge University Press 2010 0020-7438/10 $15.00

SUFISM'S FORMATIVE PHASES

A corpus of new specialized studies published in recent years

to social conformity, rejection of public displays of piety, and emphasis on subjec

TARIQAS AND BROTHERHOODS

SAINTS' BODIES AND SOCIETY

CONTEMPORARY SUFISM AS A LIVING TRADITION

Viewed through a modernist prism, contemporary Sufism and th

he views as part of a larger project of challenging the state's discursive hegemon

The books reviewed here continue a remarkable transformation in

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