SUFISM'S FORMATIVE PHASES

A corpus of new specialized studies published in recent years has helped scholars better understand how the Sufi tradition and practice first developed and spread. However, until now there has not been a monograph that treats these historical dynamics coherently and with an eye to situating discrete developments in appropriate social and cultural contexts. This is what Ahmet Karamustafa's Sufism: The Formative Period achieves while telling a fascinating story of how between the 9th and 12th centuries Sufism became a self-conscious mode of piety, developed a set of theories and practices and a literary tradition, moved to the center of Muslim social and intellectual life, and spread 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 to social conformity, rejection of public displays of piety, and emphasis on subjecting the lower self to constant blame. The fusion may have been linked to the growing local popularity of the Shafiʿi school, with which most Sufis were now associated. The result was that Sufism largely absorbed the Malamatiyya. The Malamati approach never quite disappeared, however, surviving as a subcurrent within the fabric of Sufism and in some cases as a mystical orientation within the Hanafi legal school.

In the last three chapters, Karamustafa examines a series of transformations between the 10th and 12th centuries through which Sufism moved to the center of intellectual life and began spreading throughout urban and rural society. As in the first half of the book, he combines textual analysis with attention to social dynamics. Sufi scholarly production spawned a new genre of specialized writings that set out to present the tradition to new audiences, build solidarity, preserve and evaluate the legacy of early paragons, and draw the boundaries of normative Sufism. A new kind of Sufi guide, the shaykh al-tarbiya, came to prominence, training and closely supervising the spiritual progress of disciples linked to him through intimate yet hierarchical ties of initiation and obedience. Organized around such spiritual guides—and often housed in Sufi lodges (sing. khānaqāh or ribāṭ) that powerful patrons now commonly set up as charitable endowments—Sufi communities were assuming new coherence, fixity, and complexity. Manuals elaborated the rules of etiquette (adab) of Sufi communal living. Sufi theoreticians facilitated the formation of peripheral communities of casual followers, sanctioning their participation in pursuits such as gainful work or associating with rulers, from which the full-fledged Sufis were at least theoretically barred, and allowing them to receive (“for the sake of blessing”) the khirqa or patched cloak symbolizing initiation. Soon these new configurations were woven into the fabric of local societies, as we learn from the criticism that al-Qushayri and al-Hujwiri directed at the authoritarianism of masters and the formalism of Sufi rituals and social markers.

Most crucial in Karamustafa's view was the fusion occurring between the Sufi concept of sainthood or “friendship with God” (walāya) and local cults of saints that had first developed independently. By the 12th and 13th centuries, spiritual guides of small coteries 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 ʿulamaʾ 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 shariʿa-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 Shafiʿi in affiliation) overlapping with traditionalist ʿulamaʾ, 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 of the brotherhoods in the development of Sufism at this time, Ephrat finds the diffusion of Sufi piety in Palestine evolving primarily outside the brotherhoods. Individual Sufis were not identified as the affiliates of particular tariqas nor did the term tariqa denote a social organization. Rather than the tariqas, it was the awliyāʾ (friends of God) and the cults surrounding them that anchored the growth of Sufism as a mass movement. Contemporary sources portrayed the awliyāʾ not as Sufi masters conferring mystical guidance on intimate disciples but as the fount of religious instruction, moral guidance, and charisma bestowed on whole communities. Geographically and architecturally, it was the lodges (sing. zāwiya) and tomb complexes dotting Palestine's landscape that were now the principal locus of both Sufi devotion and the cult of saints. The awliyāʾ were surrounded here by inner circles of disciples and peripheries of occasional visitors, their power increasing posthumously with masses of pilgrims coming to their shrines to partake in their blessing and join in communal celebrations of their birthdays. Shrines altered the layout of cities and were the nuclei around which villages became Islamized, in the process imprinting the stamp of Islam on the human and physical landscape and shaping what Ephrat calls “Islamic public space.”

Appearing within a short span of each other, the two books reviewed here are natural companions. Karamustafa and Ephrat chart remarkably similar overall trajectories while agreeing in their assessment of many discrete dynamics (Sufism's social embeddedness from its inception, early Sufis' closeness to traditionalist elements and the Shafiʿi school, the critical importance of the awliyāʾ doubling as spiritual guides to intimate disciples and benefactors of whole communities, etc.). Both books fit into and reinforce recent trends in Sufi scholarship. Both authors bring to the story of the evolution and spread of Sufism in its formative phases an ability to craft coherent overviews along with the new scholarship's exacting historical approach.

TARIQAS AND BROTHERHOODS

Featuring only marginally in the books by Karamustafa and Ephrat, the Sufi brotherhoods assume much more prominence in two other recent books. Erik Ohlander's well-researched Sufism in an Age of Transition is ostensibly a biography of the Sufi master, scholar, caliphal envoy, and tariqa eponym ʿUmar al-Suhrawardi (d. 1234). However, the book's broader aim is to gain a better understanding of the “institutionalizing drive” in medieval Sufism and of the genesis of what the author calls tariqa-based Sufism. What emerges is a story (not always easy to discern in Ohlander's dense narrative) of how tariqa-based Sufism was born via a process of exteriorization and routinization of Sufism as a mode of religiosity and a framework of social identity and affiliation. Here, too, Hodgson's enduring influence is often apparent.

Ohlander centers his analysis on Sufis' changing relations with rulers, patrons, ʿulamaʾ, and the world of institutions and learning. He begins with new forms of power and authority that evolved in response to the political instability, movements of peoples, and rise to power of new de facto rulers starting in the 10th century. Seeking legitimacy and stability, these new rulers and officials—and in time al-Suhrawardi's own patron, the caliph al-Nasir li-Din Allah—took to conferring patronage on ʿulamaʾ, Sufis, and (especially Shafiʿi) scholarship in ways that were critical to the institutionalization of Sufi communities. Another crucial dynamic entailed increasingly strong ties and overlap in practice among the culture of the ʿulamaʾ, 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 ʿulamaʾ 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 (ṭāʾifa), the Sufiyya. Whether he was analyzing the Sufi sciences, discussing stages on the mystical path, or distinguishing Sufis from ascetics, Malamatis or ʿulamaʾ, 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, ribāṭ 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 ribāt remained in the hands of his family and whose khirqa continued 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.Footnote 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 significance and principal weaknesses lie in the breadth of the historical processes the 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 of the tariqas and brotherhoods all drew on the shaykhs' ability to provide an alternative model of authority to that of the ʿulamaʾ. As religious office holders, the ʿulamaʾ struck a compromise with the caliphs, acknowledging the latter's role as the Prophet's deputies in the leadership of the umma in exchange for the former being recognized as the arbiters of Islamic law. In this context, the authority of the Sufi shaykhs was a compelling contrast to that of the ʿulamaʾ: independent, untarnished, and responsive to the perennial problem of religious leadership in Islam—the caliphs' failure to uphold the ideal of the subordination of the political to the religious authority. Building on this argument, the author connects the genesis and evolution of the tariqas to successive changes in the shaykhs' spiritual authority and relationship with political power. The process began with the emergence of the Sufi notion of sainthood (walāya) in the 9th century. By the 11th century, Sufi shaykhs were heading spiritual families of laymen, while the notion of walāya became fused with their spiritual authority, especially when they upheld religious norms in defiance of the holders of political power. The period from the 11th to the 13th centuries saw the emergence of the first tariqas in the sense of initiatory paths to God whose affiliates were believed to be linked to the Prophet via the divine grace inherent in the founders' walāya. Abun-Nasr argues that the whole process was intimately related to the decline of the caliphs' religious authority and thus that it is no coincidence that it reached its climax at the time of the collapse of the caliphate in the 13th century.

A second principal argument concerns the rise of the full-grown brotherhoods in the 18th century. Whether new networks or branches of existing tariqas, urban or rural based, these entities were a new breed. The founders claimed to be the Prophet's deputies in the religious leadership of the umma and in a new project of Muslim revival. They targeted society as a whole, encouraging followers to continue their daily pursuits and opening affiliation to all via the adoption of a prescriptive devotional “rule.” Yet they also demanded exclusive allegiance to their spiritual authority, ending the practice of multiple tariqa affiliations. The result was the emergence of distinct religious communities—a far cry from the decentralized networks that were the old tariqas. Moving to the colonial era, Abun-Nasr distinguishes between “upstart” shaykhs who led anticolonial movements and the more established ones who chose accommodation with colonial regimes while seeking to sustain their spiritual authority by adhering to locally accepted norms of conduct and advocating strict religious observance. As a result of the latter type of behavior, Sufi shaykhs would find themselves on the defensive in the postcolonial era, when Muslim revivalism coalesced around the Salafiyya movement. Altogether, the second half of the book is better grounded than the first, building on insights that the author had honed in his earlier work. However, some qualms remain. Not all of the practices that Abun-Nasr identifies as critical innovations defining the new brotherhoods were dramatic departures from the past. On a historiographical level, it is curious that he has chosen not to engage explicitly with the scholarship on neo-Sufism, with which his analysis has much to share.

Abun-Nasr's is an ambitious survey. The author has taken upon himself the complex task of tracing broad patterns in the history of Sufism and of situating the story of 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 awliyāʾ in their independent authority, their ability to offer a substitute to the authority of the caliphs and the ʿulamaʾ, 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 ʿulamaʾ, 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 awliyāʾ 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 explore Sufism in the period after the rise of the tariqas and the “triumph of sainthood” (in Karamustafa's words). A superbly rich study of Sufis' engagement with the body and especially the ways in which saints' bodies were made to generate religious meaning and communal solidarity, the book opens a whole new field of inquiry in the study of Sufism. In the process, Kugle makes a critical contribution to the study of the social construction of Muslim saints and does much to deconstruct the dichotomy of elite versus popular religion. He demonstrates the relevance of saints' lives (and posthumous memory) to the politics of their societies and illustrates the vitality of Sufism in areas far from the Islamic heartlands and in periods of Islamic history that are still sometimes associated with “decline.”

The starting point is the work of theoreticians of embodiment who have conceptualized the body as not just a physical object but also an expressive medium and a dynamic locus of symbolic meaning. Noting that Islam has been absent from these discussions, Kugle argues that Sufism is the ideal place to begin an inquiry into “the body” in Islamic cultures, because Sufis have engaged with the body more deeply and meaningfully than other Muslims. Each chapter presents a case study devoted to a particular saint and a particular organ of the body, and all focus on how saints' bodies were made to generate religious meaning and communal passions. Together they rely on a remarkable variety of sources including hagiographies and poems (which often incorporate and preserve elements from oral culture) as well as legal and devotional manuals, records of spiritual lineage, dream stories, and rituals practiced at tombs. Here are three examples of how Kugle proceeds.

Chapter 1 explores the discovery in 1438 of the tomb and “intact bones” of Mawlay Idris, a descendant of the Prophet (sharīf) and the founder of the city of Fes in Morocco, who had died six centuries before. This was a time of heightened discontent with the Marinid regime and its inability to respond to Portuguese coastal attacks. Kugle shows how the discovery and celebration of Idris' tomb and body were inspired by the crisis, how they generated political passions and a new notion of divinely appointed kingship, and how they strengthened the city's Sharifian clans, thus playing a critical role in the overthrow of the Marinids within one generation and in the rise of the Sharifian Saʿdi dynasty within another three. In addition, he illustrates through an analysis of a 17th-century hagiography of Mawlay Idris and of the rituals that continue to be practiced at his tomb today the complexity of the process of constructing saintly power, one that involves a dynamic interplay between popular memory, hagiography, and ritual practice at tombs.

Chapter 2 examines the story of Amina, a 16th-century mad female saint (majdhūba), also from Fes, and her extraordinary transgression. She broke every patriarchal code by leaving her husband and ʿulamaʾ family to become the intimate associate of a scandalously behaved majdhūb man. Her story was also aberrant in the way her hagiographers chose to frame her sainthood, presenting her not as the paradigmatically devoted wife of a famous saint nor as a man in a woman's body (as was said of the 8th-century saint Rabiʿa) but as a woman who was made exempt from her religious obligations by the loss of her rational faculties. Kugle argues that it was the political role attributed to Amina in the struggle against the Portuguese that truly explains the preservation of her story in the popular imagination and later in writing and institutional forms. She was known to wake up in bed covered in miraculous wounds as if she had participated in the jihad. It was this public display of bleeding that made her a player in dynastic struggles and marked her as an embodiment of the Moroccan people.

Chapter 3 focuses on Muhammad Ghawth, a South Asian Shattari saint and protégé of the Mughal emperor Humayun. In 1526, at the age of twenty-five, Ghawth experienced an episode of ascension (miʿrāj) to God reminiscent of that of the Prophet, later describing his journey in a provocative account. Sufis had always viewed the story of the Prophet's miʿrāj as archetypal, invoking it in poetry and aspiring to emulate it through spiritual discipline. However, Ghawth was different, claiming defiantly that his was a bodily, not visionary, ascension. Kugle argues on the basis of newly uncovered sources that it 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.Footnote 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 the Sufi brotherhoods were perceived until fairly recently as anachronisms incompatible with modern life and ripe for extinction except perhaps in some traditional enclaves. They could not be relevant to modernizing sectors of Muslim societies and had little appeal to scholars. Valerie Hoffman was one of the first to challenge these notions in her 1995 study of Egyptian Sufism, and in subsequent years there have been a number of monographs devoted to contemporary Sufis as well as a growing readiness to extend longer-term surveys of Sufism and Sufi communities all the way to the present.Footnote ¹⁵ In that respect the two books reviewed here both continue and attest to a virtual revolution in the study of 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 (ʿurs) of the Chishti saint Baba Farid in Pakpattan. Rozehnal attended the ʿurs, 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 he views as part of a larger project of challenging the state's discursive hegemony and reclaiming Sufism as the heart of Islamic orthodoxy.

Written evidence and ethnographic research combine also in elucidating how Sabiris negotiate tradition and change. The Sabiri masters at the center of Rozehnal's story were fully enmeshed in the modern world and capable of moving among different universes and of making Sufi teachings and practice relevant to modern devotees. As public writers and spokesmen, they used new media, addressed new audiences, and envisioned a socially engaged and shariʿa-minded Sufism rooted in tradition yet compatible with modern life. At the same time they are remembered in texts and in oral discourse as paradigmatic Chishti saints: heirs of the Prophet, “physicians of the heart,” and practitioners of a spiritual discipline centered on prayer, dhikr, and Sufi adab. Interviews with devotees illustrate how Sabiri Sufism continues to be rooted in an interpersonal network of teaching and in a process of self-refashioning through ritual discipline. Rozehnal's informants—modern, urban, educated, middle-class men and women representing the inner circle of devotees—place at the core of their Sufi experience a bond to the shaykh constituted by guidance, obedience, and love, even in the absence of sustained physical contact. They experience rituals of initiation as moments of profound transformation, and they describe participation in ʿurs celebrations as a singular opportunity to confer with the shaykh and fellow devotees, partake in communal ritual practice, and experience the order's identity as a moral community.

The same modernizing milieus and reliance on both texts and ethnographic research feature in Bruinessen and Howell's edited volume Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam. The project originated in a realization that in Indonesia, and apparently in other Muslim societies, Sufism had become part of a diverse modern religious scene, and Sufi-inspired ideas, practices, and groups were engaging modern, educated segments of the middle class. Contributors set out to explore such realities comparatively and in a variety of places. They pay critical attention to the dynamic relationship between Sufism and modernity and focus on localized ground-level practices while seeking to pose new questions, reassess received wisdoms, and problematize the very notion of Sufism. Here 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 that is more adaptable and less hierarchical than is often assumed. Devotional practice and patterns of authority and association vary considerably depending on the personality of the shaykh and the needs of the community yet without diminishing the order's recognizable core. Disciples perceive their affiliation as one with a shaykh, not a tariqa, and they sense in it a quality of reciprocity that is lost in common depictions of tariqas as organizations based on premodern notions of hierarchy and obedience. Brian Silverstein finds similar adaptability in his study of a Naqshbandi Istanbul branch. His informants transformed the Naqshbandi devotional concept of hizmet (service to the shaykh) into a new kind of community service commensurate with their functioning as a benevolent association registered as a foundation (vakıf). Sohbet (keeping the company of the shaykh and fellow disciples) also assumed new forms, even becoming a kind of “mediated sociality” when congregants listened to the shaykh (who resided for a time in Australia) via satellite then read his address in the order's monthly magazine.

In Part III, devoted to Sufism in new globalized settings, Pnina Werbner explores a number of Pakistani Sufi groups in Britain, showing how they bring virtual strangers into 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 scholarship on Sufism. As a group the authors have honed a new scholarly agenda in which Sufi practitioners are treated as real historical actors, Sufi thought and practice are understood in appropriate social and cultural contexts, and sources have expanded in range and become subject to new critical analyses. A number of them have developed productive ways of engaging oral tradition or living informants, transcending dichotomous paradigms of elite versus popular religion, and capturing localized ground-level Sufi practice. Yet they also attest to the uneven reach and scope of such new approaches and methodologies.

One complex of issues on which our understanding is still lacking is that of the genesis and early workings of the Sufi brotherhoods. In a number of areas—the social construction of sainthood, the workings of contemporary Sufism, and the nexus of Sufism, gender, and the body—it is the very breakthroughs that scholars have recently made that recommend and call for further research. In geographic terms, South Asian Sufism has been at the forefront of new inquiries, and areas that once may have been deemed peripheral, such as Indonesia, are no longer so; paradoxically, it is in the Ottoman and Arab-Ottoman contexts where scholarship on Sufism is now trailing.

In chronological terms, it is arguably the centuries following the “triumph of sainthood” and the rise of the brotherhoods where the need for more research is particularly substantial. This was a time in which Sufism had already been assimilated into society and Sufis had also begun spreading into new frontier regions where they would come to participate in dynamic religious scenes. Sufi lodges and saints' shrines were ubiquitous, and elements of Sufi piety anchored lively devotional communal life. Sufi shaykhs interacted with political elites in new ways. New and bold forms of theosophical Sufism became widely influential—and much debated. Mystical poetry in Persian permeated intellectual life throughout a vast region, while songs and stories in vernacular languages portrayed the lives and teachings of Sufi saints to large audiences, and court poetry was saturated with Sufi imagery. It is precisely this period, in which Sufis and saints, and the institutions associated with them, were already so diverse, rich, and ingrained in Muslim societies, that requires much more historically oriented research. Sufism's social and geographic expanse makes this a daunting enterprise, while specific methodological and conceptual challenges also remain. In the Ottoman context, in particular, one factor hindering a more concerted attention to Sufism may be scholars' focus on the state and formal institutions. Other challenges include the not quite extinct paradigm of elite versus popular religion and the elusiveness of trying to understand how a mode of piety was projected onto society. Recent contributions, including some reviewed here, underscore the gaps that remain while suggesting productive new approaches and avenues for research.