S – Hybrid Learning https://hybridlearning.pk Online Learning Thu, 04 Jul 2024 18:54:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 SYRIA https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syria/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syria/#respond Mon, 12 Mar 2018 18:55:39 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syria/ SYRIA. The Muslim population of Syria is composed of a Sunni majority and four minority Shi’i sects. Exact figures are unavailable, but informed estimates place […]

]]> SYRIA. The Muslim population of Syria is composed of a Sunni majority and four minority Shi’i sects. Exact figures are unavailable, but informed estimates place the Sunni population, found throughout the country, at roughly 70 percent. The largest Shi`i sect, the `Alawis, is concentrated in the northwestern province of Latakia and comprises around 12 percent of the population. The Druzes are only 3 percent of the population but form a dominant majority in the southwestern province of Suwayda. Isma`ilis in central Syria near Hama and Homs and a small number of Twelver Shl’is in the vicinity of Aleppo together account for I percent of the population.
Islam’s place in Syrian society has changed fundamentally in modern times. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire’s political and social elite incorporated Islamic institutions, symbols, and religious scholars (`ulama’). By the second half of the twentieth century, secular tendencies dominated Syria, and movements for restoring Islam’s primacy had become the platform for political dissent.
During the Ottoman era (151’7-1918), sultans legitimized their authority by claiming to rule in accord with Islam. This religious legitimation accorded with the preeminent place of the (`ulama’). in Syria’s urban elite, which mediated relations between province and capital. Among the religious notables the highest offices were jurisconsult (mufti) and doyen of the Prophet’s descendants (naqib al-ashrdf). Other high-status dignitaries included law court judges, assistants to the jurisconsult, teachers at endowed schools, and preachers and prayer leaders at prestigious mosques. Thus Ottoman authority and local religious institutions reinforced each other’s authority.
The religious institution also incorporated scholars and mosque officials outside the provincial elite. Indeed, stratification according to wealth and status among the (`ulama’). mirrored that in urban society at large. High status (`ulama’). enjoyed imperial patronage in the form of rights to farm taxes on rural lands, whose revenues they frequently invested in urban real estate. They also received stipends from the revenues of pious endowments (waqfs). Middle-status (`ulama’). taught at schools and presided at mosques with modest endowments. They often earned the main portion of their livelihood as tradesmen and artisans. The poorest members of the religious institution were petty traders and artisans associated with minor mosques and popular Sufi orders.
The affiliation of the Syrian (`ulama’). with legal schools and Sufi orders manifested their participation in a cosmopolitan learned culture tolerant of diversity. Of the major Islamic legal schools, the Shafi’i had deep roots in Syria, but the Hanafi became more widely accepted among high status (`ulama’). in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because of its status as the official legal school of the Ottoman Empire. An ancient though modest Hanbali tradition persisted as well. A religious student normally studied with scholars of each legal school. This diversity and tolerance also characterized affiliations with Sufi orders. A Muslim might cultivate ties to several cosmopolitan orders, such as the Qadiri, Naqsh-bandi, Rifa’i, and Khalwati orders. Local Sufi orders and minor branches of cosmopolitan orders also attracted their own followings.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Syria’s religious establishment demonstrated its loyalty to the Ottoman sultan by rejecting the call to revolt issued by propagandists of the religious reformist Wahhabi movement in central Arabia. In addition to this political dimension, the Wahhabis’ anathematization of fellow Muslims clashed with the spirit of tolerance that marked relations among Muslims of different legal schools and Sufi orders. By contrast, Syrian Wamd’ proved more receptive to the reformist Sufism of Shaykh Khalid, who revived the Naqshbandi order when he settled in Damascus in the 1820s.
In 1831 an Egyptian army invaded and occupied Syria, bringing it under Cairo’s rule until 1840. Religious dignitaries received a rude shock when Egyptian authorities sharply reduced their role in governing provincial affairs. The restoration of Ottoman rule in 1841 brought relief, but during the next two decades the rise of a secularizing bureaucratic elite in Istanbul and the growing European commercial and missionary presence alarmed Syrian (`ulama’). Anti-European sentiment exploded in 1850 when an anti-Christian outbreak occurred in Aleppo and in 1860 when Muslim mobs massacred Christians in Damascus. Ottoman investigators of the Damascus disturbance accused leading (`ulama’). of inciting the mob and dealt them severe punishments of prison and exile. The Ottoman response marked a turning point in the historical posture of Syria’s (`ulama’). who would never regain their central position of influence. Instead, the Ottomans cultivated a new bureaucratic elite nearly devoid of (`ulama’). participation and more attuned to the secular outlook of Istanbul’s bureaucrats and ministers.
In the last decades of Ottoman rule, the religious establishment received one last boost from Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909). This ruler countered European encroachment and internal political dissent with a policy stressing his religious standing as caliph of all Muslims. In Syria, this allowed the sultan to depict his political opponents, mostly partisans of constitutional government, as enemies of Islam. In addition to emphasizing the duty of Muslims to obey their caliph, Abdulhamid financed a revival of religious institutions, primarily mosques and Sufi lodges. Indeed, one of his chief religious advisers for a time was a Syrian Sufi shaykh, Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi (1849-1909) of the Rifa’i order, and that order became a mainstay of support for the sultan. [See Rifa’iyah.]
A religious reform movement arose, however, that would oppose Abdulhamid’s despotic rule, his claims to legitimacy as caliph of the Muslims, and his patronage for popular Sufi orders. Reformist scholars such as Tahir al-Jaza’iri (1852-1920) and Jamal al-Din alQasimi (1866-1914) also supported the restoration of constitutional government, which Abdulhamid had suspended in 1878. In the early 1900s, a bitter controversy erupted between reformers, known as Salafis, and loyalists over religious practices such as visiting saints’ tombs for intercessionary prayers, and also over Islamic legal theory, particularly the validity of following the opinions of medieval jurists (taqlid) rather than using independent reasoning (ijtihad) to derive rulings from the Qur’an and the sunnah. These religious disputes overlapped with political conflicts both before and after the 1908 restoration of the Ottoman constitution and Sultan Abdulhamid’s deposition the following year. Because of the Salafi reformers’ identification with liberalizing tendencies, they attracted the younger generation of educated Syrians who were sowing the seeds of Arab nationalism. In the last decade of Ottoman rule, religious reformers and advocates of autonomy for Arab provinces contended for power with civil and religious dignitaries who sided with whatever faction prevailed in Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire’s destruction at the end of World War I abruptly terminated this rivalry by altering the grounds of Syrian politics.
First, an independent Arab kingdom under Amir Faysal of the Meccan Hashemite clan struggled to maintain Syrian independence against French pressure. Then in July 192o French forces invaded Syria, expelled Faysal, abolished his government, and under a League of Nations mandate established direct rule that would last until 1946. During that quarter-century, Arab nationalism emerged as the leading ideology of opposition to foreign rule.
This ideology allowed Syrians of all religions-Sunni, Druze, `Alawi, Shi’l, and Christian-to unite against the European power. Nonetheless, Islam had an important part in the nationalist struggle. Even though Syria’s political leaders shared a secular outlook and included no religious dignitaries, the slogans and symbols they used often played on Muslim religious sentiment. Likewise, leading Syrian politicians mobilized religious institutions for the nationalist struggle in order to draw grassroots support from the towns’ popular quarters. The politicians succeeded in large part because of their ability to gain the backing of local mosque preachers, religious teachers, and other (`ulama’).
In the sensitive sphere of law, the French left untouched existing criminal, civil, and commercial codes and courts. When the French attempted to implement revisions in the personal status laws based on Islamic law, Muslim judges successfully resisted. As for education, Ottoman reforms had already largely diluted the influence of the (`ulama’). and during the Mandate era modern Western education continued to develop. The most dramatic confrontation between French authorities and Syria’s religious institution arose over the administration of religious endowments. The French brought greater regularity to their administration and eventually took control over them, an act that triggered Muslim outrage.
Apart from Islam’s place in the nationalist struggle, the Mandate period witnessed the spread of novel grassroots Islamic associations and cultural institutions in
Syria’s cities. Islamic benevolent associations (jam’iyat) appeared in Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama in the 19205 and 1930s. These societies propagated moral and religious reform along lines drawn by the earlier Salafi trend, established schools for religious education, and published periodicals cultivating proper religious culture. Islamic associations combated what they considered the immoral effects of foreign influence represented by nightclubs, casinos, gambling, and alcohol. Moreover, they agitated against the westernization of women’s status and conduct, such as wearing European fashions and appearing at public functions.
On the political front, Islamic associations led opposition to a French proposal in the draft of the 1928 constitution to establish religious equality for all citizens. They also resisted moves to legalize Muslim conversions to other religions and the marriage of Muslim women to non-Muslim men. In the broader Arab arena, religious organizations pressed the Syrian government to support the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, and they raised funds to aid their Muslim brethren there.
During the Mandate era Syrian society changed in several respects, including the more effective integration of the Druze and `Alawi communities into the mainstream of national politics. Whereas during the Ottoman era these communities’ geographical isolation kept them apart from the power structure dominated by Sunni townsmen, in colonial and independent Syria the extension of central authority to remote areas brought them into national politics. A religiously diverse population made the inclusive ideology of secular Arab nationalism more attractive to political figures seeking to appeal to the entire Syrian nation. Conversely, a political program based on Islam would alienate the country’s large nonSunni minority.
The secular thrust of independent Syria became apparent in 1949 when it adopted a new civil code enacted in Egypt that same year. Previously, the Mecelle, an Ottoman code derived from Hanafi law, had regulated civil affairs. By borrowing from Egypt, the Syrian government was inching away from Islamic law. On the other hand, in 1953 the government confirmed Islam’s sway over family life with a new Law of Personal Status governing marriage, divorce, and other family matters. This law applies Islamic law to Sunnis, `Alawis, and Isma’ilis, but the Druze, Christians, and Jews each have their own special codes. Another important reform affecting religious interests was the 1949 initiative to take the administration of religious endowments out of private hands altogether and place them under direct government control.
From independence in 1946 until 1963, Syrian politics consisted of a tumultuous series of military coups, ephemeral civilian cabinets, and a brief period of union with Egypt. The most dynamic political forces were secular Arab nationalist parties such as the Bath and leftist parties. The Muslim Brotherhood, first established in Syria in 1946, represented religious sentiment alarmed at the dominant secular tendencies, but it did not achieve great influence in Syrian politics during this period. The brotherhood’s leader, Mustafa al-Sibd’i (1915-1964), placed the organization in Syria’s political mainstream with his calls for neutrality in the cold war, armed struggle against Israel, an Islamic version of socialism, and limited private property rights. His fundamental difference with other political forces lay in his opposition to secularism. Siba’i left the scene in 1957 because of poor health, and leadership passed on to `Isam al-`Attar, an advocate of political moderation. [See the biography of Siba’i]
On 8 March 1963, a military coup inaugurated the era of Ba’thist rule. Because of this party’s highly minoritarian composition, secularism, and socialist agenda, the political reaction against it took a sectarian hue. Consequently, the most intractable challenge to Ba’thist rule has come from Islamic groups, most notably the Muslim Brothers. The first Islamic rising took place in 1964 in Hama, and other sectarian disturbances followed in 1967. Further protests erupted in 1973 when a new constitution omitted mention of Islam as the state religion. The regime attempted a compromise by adding provisions that the head of state be a Muslim and that Islamic law provide the principal source of legislation, but these points did not satisfy Islamic critics, especially since President Hafiz al-Asad (Hafiz al-Assad) belongs to the minority `Alawi sect, which many Muslims regard as heretical.
By the late 1970s the Ba’thist regime had suppressed or coopted its most threatening secular political rivals. Popular dissatisfaction with the regime’s dictatorial rule, its economic policies, and its management of foreign relations therefore coalesced around the Islamic groups. Significantly, this discontent was centered in Syria’s major cities and did not spread to the regime’s bastion of support in the rural areas. The latter regions historically had been the poorest and most backward parts of Syria, but during Ba’thist rule they witnessed unprecedented progress. Moreover, Syria’s religious minorities
Druze, `Alawis, Christians, and Isma’ilis-are concentrated in rural areas and have no sympathy for Islamic aspirations. Hence the insurrection conducted by Islamic groups between 1979 and 1982 did not spread to the countryside, and with a ruthless campaign of repression the regime quelled the insurrection. Another element in the revolt’s failure lay in the divisions that plagued the Islamic movement. In 1970 the Muslim Brothers alone split into three groups. The Damascus branch followed the moderate line of `Isam al-`Attar. In the northern towns of Aleppo, Horns, and Latakia, branches adopted the strategy of armed struggle to overthrow the regime. A third faction based in Hama also embraced armed struggle but maintained its own independent leadership and organization.
The Syrian regime continues to insist on a strict separation of religion from politics, but otherwise it does not seek to undermine the place of religion in Syrian culture and society. Damascus University has a flourishing faculty of Islamic law, and its Arabic language department teaches courses on early Arab Islamic literature. In 1967 the Ba`thist regime nationalized all private Muslim and Christian schools, but instruction in both religions is still provided in public schools, Muslims studying Islam and Christians studying Christianity. Religious periodicals and literature, including children’s books, are published and widely available. Television and radio broadcasts promote the country’s Arab-Islamic heritage with historical dramas and highbrow cultural programs. Moreover, customary patterns of social intercourse within the bounds of one’s religious community are persistent. Although modern national institutions such as the army and universities contribute to weakening primordial ties of religion and locality, and Syrians commonly socialize across sectarian boundaries, it is still unusual for marriage to take place across them. Broadly speaking, the regime encourages the dissolution of sectarian divisions and promotes a nonpolitical interpretation of Islam wherein the state is responsible for providing the conditions for citizens to fulfill their religious duties, but not for enforcing religious conformity.
Syrian Civil War

The ongoing Syrian Civil War was inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions. It began in 2011 as a chain of peaceful protests, followed by a crackdown by the Syrian Army. In July 2011, Army defectors declared the formation of the Free Syrian Army and began forming fighting units. The opposition is dominated by Sunni Muslims, whereas the leading government figures are generally associated with Alawites. According to various sources, including the United Nations, up to 100,000 people had been killed by June 2013, including 11,000 children. To escape the violence, 4.9 million Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring countries of Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Turkey. An estimated 450,000 Syrian Christians have fled their homes. By October 2017, an estimated 400,000 people had been killed in the war according to the UN.
In an effort to restore law and order, the Russian Federation army claims to have “signed agreements with some 1,571 representatives of the inhabited areas in Syria,” where they have agreed to cease all hostilities against the Syrian government. In addition, some 219 groups in Syria who had formerly been suspected by the government of involvement in armed resistance have agreed to the terms of a ceasefire.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abd-Allah, Umar F. The Islamic Struggle in Syria. Berkeley, 1983. The fullest account of Syria’s Islamic movements from the 1940s to the early 1980s, by a highly sympathetic observer.
Commins, David. Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria. New York and Oxford, 1990. Study of the social, intellectual, and political dynamics of the Salafi trend in Damascus between 1885 and 1914.
Hinnebusch, Raymond A. Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba’thist Syria. Boulder, 1990. Important study of the historical roots of the Ba’thist regime and the mechanisms for its endurance. Contains a chapter on the Islamic opposition to the regime that incorporates the author’s findings published in several articles.
Khoury, Philip S. Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920. Cambridge, 1983. Describes the high status enjoyed by the (`ulama’). in Ottoman Damascus before 1860 and the process of their exclusion from the notable elite by 1920. Khoury, Philip S. Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab
Nationalism, 1920-1945. Princeton, 1987. Definitive study of Syria during this period, focusing on the secular nationalist leadership, but containing as well information on Islam and religious institutions.
Marcus, Abraham. The Middle East on the Eye of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century. New York, 1989. Splendid survey of the city’s social history, containing information on religious life and the religious establishment that shows their similarity to those in Damascus.
Schilcher, Linda S. Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Stuttgart, 1985. Detailed examination of Damascus’ society, economy, and political dynamics, including a wealth of information on the city’s leading families of religious dignitaries.
DAVID COMMINS
 
 

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syria/feed/ 0 SYNCRETISM https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syncretism/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syncretism/#respond Mon, 12 Mar 2018 17:45:45 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syncretism/ SYNCRETISM. Syncretism is the phenomenon by which the practices and beliefs of one religion fuse with those of another to create a new and distinctive […]

]]> SYNCRETISM. Syncretism is the phenomenon by which the practices and beliefs of one religion fuse with those of another to create a new and distinctive tradition. By the terms of this definition, all religions, and most certainly all those that have come to be known as world religions, can be regarded as syncretic in their origins, since each was shaped in dialogue with other faiths. In modern scholarship, however, the concept of syncretism is usually restricted to those religious syntheses that take shape after the initial consolidation of a religion; syncretisms thus diverge from the parent religion’s core or ideal expression. Equally important, however, even as they diverge from normative ideals, syncretisms in believers’ eyes maintain a residual identification with the parent faith. The actual degree of identification varies widely, however, with the result that it is often difficult to distinguish syncretism from simple religious innovation. These analytic problems suggest that the concept of syncretism is closely linked to that of “normative” religion and to the standards of belief and practice whereby believers determine what is and what is not allowable within the faith.

As with all other world religions, Muslim understandings of the normative core of their religion have varied over time and place. This means that any effort to delineate that which is truly Islamic from that which is syncretistic inevitably raises delicate problems of value and judgment. What some believers regard as syncretistic others may hold to be suitably Islamic. This controversy has been a recurring source of debate in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islam, as standards as to what is and what is not properly Islamic have changed.

In the face of these analytic difficulties, it is useful to distinguish two different variants of syncretism within modern Islam: those whose followers still identify themselves as Muslim and those who so thoroughly distance themselves from normative Islam as to embrace an extra-Islamic identity. For analytic purposes, the second of these two variants is most easily distinguished as syncretic, while the first type is syncretic only in light of an orthodox ideal that syncretists themselves may reject. In modern times, some of the most dramatic examples of openly syncretic movements have been found in West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world where Muslims have lived alongside nonMuslims in a social environment strongly influenced by non-Muslim ideals. In West Africa, for example, the expansion of Islam was associated with the development of trade networks and, later, the rise of powerful trading states under the influence of Berber and non-Arabic African rulers. Caravan routes in the region had already been established by the tenth century CE, and the movement of goods and people facilitated the diffusion of elements of Muslim culture well in advance of any fullscale islamization. In the tropical forest and coastal regions of what are today Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria, non-Muslim peoples looked to Muslim traders and craftspeople to provide religious amulets, antiwitchcraft spells, fertility treatments, and a host of other services loosely based on Muslim magical prototypes. In using these items non-Muslims acknowledged Islam’s spiritual power, but regarded it as just one among an array of available spiritual resources.

In nineteenth-century Ghana, the pagan king of Ashanti depended on Muslim traders to serve as intermediaries in the caravan trade and as experts in the manufacture of powerful talismans. The talismans consisted of sentences from the Qur’an inscribed on paper and wrapped in fine cloth. They were worn around the body for everything from treating illness and warding off the evil eye to deflecting the blows of enemies in combat. During times of drought, warfare, and other afflictions, the pagan king called on local Muslims to offer prayers to their God, whom he recognized as the most powerful of deities, alongside the sacrifices to native divinities performed by the king’s own priests. Among the pagan tribes of the southern Sudan, circumcision-elsewhere identified as a symbol of adherence to Islam-appears to have been adopted owing to its high esteem among neighboring Muslim populations. Though an important ritual of male passage, for these practitioners the rite did not imply a commitment to Islam.

In these and other instances, the syncretism at issue is of the most nominal sort, involving little or no identification with Islam. Nonetheless, historical and ethnographic studies have shown that in many parts of Africa this syncretistic diffusion contributed to the perception of Islam as a source of mystical power. By acclimating people to the rituals and habits of Islam, it also prepared the way for the conversion of some to Islam.

Syncretistic preadaptations appear to have played a similarly important role in the conversion of South Asian Hindus to Islam. A significant proportion of the Muslim population of premodern India consisted of Muslim immigrants from Persia, Afghanistan, and other northern portions of the Indian subcontinent. In a few areas, most notably Bengali-speaking regions of what is today Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, however, the great majority of Muslims are comprised not of the descendants of invaders, but of Hindu converts, primarily from the lower classes, peaceably converted to Islam in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

In the deltaic frontier of the Ganges River basin, local society was characterized by considerable geographic and socioeconomic mobility, all of which rendered the effective development of Hinduism’s caste hierarchies problematic. In this only partially hinduized context, Islam penetrated through the efforts of wandering Muslim (usually Sufi) pioneers. Like their Hindu counterparts, these settlers first came to engage in trade and open the jungle to cultivation; in an area lacking established lines of authority, however, some eventually assumed leadership roles as pirs (spiritual guides) in a loose network of Sufi believers spreading across the delta frontier. As Asim Roy has explained in his book The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, 1983), eventually the tombs of pir leaders became the nerve centers of Bengali Islam and the institutional foundation for one of the Muslim world’s most remarkable syncretistic traditions.

Though drawing heavily on the symbolism of South Asian Sufism, the cult of pir worship and supplication came to include shrines not only to Muslim saints, but to non-Islamic pioneers, local divinities, and other old and new objects of religious veneration. Though preceded by an Islamic salutation, the propitiation at the heart of pir worship bore a strong resemblance to a popular Hindu rite, known as the vrata, performed to request favors from Hindu divinities. In some areas this syncretic blending was also apparent in Muslim participation in worship of non-Islamic pirs. Conversely, in nearby Assam and Burma, shrines to some of the most celebrated Muslim pirs attracted Chinese Confucians, Burmese Buddhists, and Bengali Hindus. Despite such remarkable syncretism, it is clear that for the most part pirism played a positive role in the conversion of Bengali Hindus to Islam. The theme of an evil Hindu raja defeated by a pious Muslim pir figured prominently in pir mythology; pir shrines were open to low castes and untouchables denied access to Hindu temples or their Brahman priests. In the unsettled circumstances of frontier Bengal, such antihierarchical inexclusivity gave pirist Islam broad appeal.

The great literary traditions of Bengali Islam also displayed a syncretic countenance. Some Muslim writers reacted to the divide between the pious elite and the syncretist populace by repudiating their Bengali identity, claiming Arab or Persian ancestry, and refusing to utilize Bengali in religious writings. Others, mostly of Sufi background, rejected such cultural segregation, however, and acted as cultural brokers, adopting Bengali as their language of proselytization and adapting Bengali myths and narrative styles to Muslim ends. The resulting narrative tradition projected Muslim historical figures into a landscape of fantasy and miracles intelligible to the Bengali populace because closely modeled on Hindu poetic forms. Though Persian and Arabic characters were also drawn into such narratives, the mythic geography in which they were represented was strongly influenced by Hindu ideals. Muslim saints did battle with deities from Hindu cosmology, although other devas were said to be prophets from the time before Muhammad. Similarly, while affirming the importance of conformity to shari’ah, divinity was often presented in immanent and monist terms in a fashion consistent with Hindu mysticism. In the twentieth century, Muslim reformers railed against such syncretistic concessions to Bengali culture, with the result that little of this syncretistic literature has survived to this day.

Islam in modern Southeast Asia has experienced a similar push-and-pull between syncretizing concessions to local sensibilities, on one hand, and reformist efforts to maintain the purity of the message, on the other. As in South Asia, Islam in Southeast Asia at first confronted an already established political and aesthetic tradition. The indigenous aesthetic tradition had been strongly influenced by Southeast Asian variants of the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the raja-centered political system owed much of its pomp and ceremony to Indian precedents. In most cases, however, the islamization of states in this part of the world did not involve the overthrow of existing dynasties. Islamization most commonly occurred through the ruler’s conversion and the gentle reshaping of the structures and idioms of rajaship. The institution preserved many of the symbols and institutions of the pre-Islamic past, although it identified them in terms compatible with Sufi mysticism and Persian-influenced models of rulership.

As with South Asian Islam, however, the development of Islam in this region was also characterized by bitter disputes over the question of to just what lengths Muslims could go in accommodating local customs. Rather than denouncing them as polytheism, most nineteenth-century Javanese and Malays reinterpreted the Hindu deities of the Ramayana and Mahabhdrata within a flexibly syncretic cosmology. Bhatara Guru, Brahma, and Iswara were lowered out of the Hindu firmament and reconceptualized either as distinctive Muslim jinn or as prophets who had lived prior to Muhammad. Islamized in this fashion, the Hindu dewa were also made accessible to human appeal and came to figure prominently in village-based healing cults of exorcism and soul-purification. Though some pious Muslims rejected these practices as polytheistic, others-probably the majority of Malay and Javanese Muslims in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century-continued to regard appeals to devas as fully compatible with Islam.

Throughout the Malay world during this same period, the majority of village communities institutionalized the Islamic requirement for almsgiving not as charity for the poor, but as an annual rite of invocation and offering to guardian and ancestral spirits. Presented with sadaga (“alms”) of festive foods, dance, and other entertainments (in which villagers shared), the spirits of the village were enjoined to watch over the fertility and wellbeing of the community for one more year. Allah was regarded as a transcendent and unapproachable being; village spirits, by contrast, were seen as spirit-familiars easily susceptible to ritual and moral appeal.

As in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, some natives of Southeast Asia interpreted these syncretistic traditions in such a way as to refuse outright affiliation with Islam. In nineteenth-century Java, for example, there were still a few pockets of Buda (the term used for the religion of pre-Islamic Java) settlement, where local ritual and mythology sought to incorporate Islamic influences but resisted full-scale conversion to Islam. One influential tradition identified Ajisaka, the muchloved culture hero of Javanese folklore, as Muhammad’s equal, and insisted that the two figures had reached an agreement to allow Buda and Islam to live as one. In a model of dualistic complementarity owing much to preIslamic concepts of cosmological harmony, Muhammad and Ajisaka were related to each other, it was said, as male is to female, day is to night, sun is to moon, and earth is to sky. Both religions would prosper, it was implied, by respecting this fertile duality. With the development of movements of Islamic reform in the late nineteenth century, such notions of syncretic harmony are today widely rejected. Elements of their syncretizing vision survive, however, in the sheltered meeting-halls of mystical sects (kebatinan) popular among a portion of the urban middle class.

As these examples illustrate, it would be wrong to assume that syncretism primarily consists of non-Islamic survivals, although this is the preferred explanation of the phenomenon among Islamic fundamentalists. In some instances, such as the Bengali pir or the Javanese cult of Ajisaka, it is clear that elements of the syncretic tradition draw on pre-Islamic prototypes. But many syncretic movements are best regarded not as survivals, but as new, dynamic efforts to reshape local traditions in the face of Muslim reformists’ efforts to narrow the range of allowable beliefs by introducing new criteria as to what Islam comprises. In India, Java, and West Africa, some of the boldest syncretic movements in the modern era emerged as responses to Muslim reformists’ repudiation of local understandings of Islam. These reforms jeopardized social relations with non-Muslims and delegitimized customs long regarded as compatible with the faith.

This same tension appears to have played a role in the development of new forms of religious expression not only at the periphery of the Muslim world, but in its heartland. Since the first decades of the nineteenth century, numerous spirit cults, the most famous being the so-called zar, have spread through Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, East Africa, and even the Arabian peninsula and southern Iraq; similar cults of spirit possession (the holey and the bon) have spread from West Africa into North Africa.

Whatever its precedence in pre-Islamic religion or contemporary African possession cults, in most of the areas to which it has spread the zar cult is an intrusive institution, having developed over the past century and a half. The cult’s diffusion has thus been more or less contemporaneous with the rise of modern Islamic reform. Most commonly, zar possession afflicts married women.

Though opposed by Muslim leaders as an unacceptable innovation, the zar has survived in part because, in many people’s eyes, it can be rationalized in Islamic terms. Thus the zar spirits are said to be a special category of Islamic jinn, capricious in. their behavior, hedonistic in their tastes, and predatory (though never life-threatening) on their human hosts. Diagnosis of the affliction requires the services of a female curer (the shaykhah), who in urban areas operates a full-time zar business but in rural settings usually performs only as demand requires. Once afflicted by a zar, a woman can never fully sever the relationship. At best, she is obliged to sponsor intermittent ceremonies in which the spirit (or spirits, since zar possession may involve several spirits) is invoked and, speaking through the mouth of its female host, its wishes are voiced and then satisfied. Affliction is thought most common during times of physical or mental hardship, when a woman’s spiritual guard is lowered and the afflicting spirit can more easily invade its host. In this roundabout way, the cult mobilizes social and material resources for women during periods of stress. It also allows women to make forceful, if oblique, appeals for attention, in a manner that would be otherwise unthinkable in a male-dominated environment.

The spread of zar cults contemporaneous with Islamic reform has led many observers to see in them an assertion of feminine dignity and authority in the face of social trends that have greatly restricted women’s public activities and excluded them from prestigious religious roles. Whatever their complex social-psychology, the cults are a reminder that Islamization often involves not only the diffusion of Qur’anic piety and shari’ah-mind-edness, but an extensive assortment of magical, astrological, and spirit-cult lore. These spirit cults also testify to the ability of Muslims to develop new forms of religious expression in the face of changing needs and social circumstances. This same dynamic has motivated the development of intra-Islamic syncretic movements throughout Islamic history.

The modern popularity of the zar cult is also a cautionary reminder that judgments as to the syncretism of different beliefs or practices are often deeply value laden. Application of the term to specific practices and beliefs must be done with great care and, more specifically, with an understanding of the varied, and sometimes contradictory, ideals through which Muslims in different times and places have given shape to their vision of the faith.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boddy, Janice. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, Wis., 1989. Rich ethnographic study of the zar and its implications for men and women’s divergent understanding of spirits, Islam, and gender.

Golomb, Louis. An Anthropology of Curing in Multiethnic Thailand. Urbana and Chicago, 1985. Insightful ethnographic study of syncretic healing cults among Buddhists and Muslims in southern Thailand.

Hefner, Robert W. Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam. Princeton, 1985. A historical and ethnographic study of syncretism and islamization in modern Java.

Holy, Ladislav. Religion and Custom in a Muslim Society: The Berti of Sudan. Cambridge, 1991. Detailed ethnography of the tensions between Islam and customary tradition in the northern Sudan. Hooker, M. B., ed. Islam in South-East Asia. Leiden, 1983. Collection rich with insights into the interaction of Islamic traditions with Southeast Asian literature, philosophy, law, and politics.

Laderman, Carol. Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine, and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991. Beautifully evocative ethnography of a syncretistic shamanistic tradition in modern Malaysia.

Lewis, I. M., ed. Islam in Tropical Africa. 2d ed. Bloomington and London, 1980. Excellent sourcebook on the dynamics of Islam and local tradition in Africa.

Lombard, Denys. Le Carrefour Javanais. Paris, 1990 Exhaustive study of the interaction between Islamic, local, and occidental influences in Java and the Indonesian archipelago.

Nadel, S. F. Nupe Religion: Traditional Belief and the Influence of Islam in a West African Chiefdom (1954). New York, 1970. Classic study of a traditional African religion on the eve of its islamization. Roy, Asim. The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal. Princeton, 1983. Richly detailed historical study of popular and literary syncretism in premodern and modern Bengal.

ROBERT W. HEFNER

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2018/03/12/syncretism/feed/ 0 SURINAME https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/27/suriname/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/27/suriname/#respond Sun, 27 Aug 2017 02:03:00 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/27/suriname/ Suriname officially known as the Republic of Suriname (Dutch: Republiek Suriname [ˌreːpyˈblik ˌsyːriˈnaːmə]), is a sovereign state on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America. […]

]]> Suriname officially known as the Republic of Suriname (Dutch: Republiek Suriname [ˌreːpyˈblik ˌsyːriˈnaːmə]), is a sovereign state on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America. It is bordered by French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west and Brazil to the south. At just under 165,000 square kilometers (64,000 square miles), it is the smallest country in South America Suriname has a population of approximately 566,000, most of whom live on the country’s north coast, in and around the capital and largest city, Paramaribo.
SURINAME:independence Day

A higher percentage of Muslims five in Suriname-a former Dutch colony on South America’s northeastern shoulder-than in any other country in the Western Hemisphere. An estimated 25 percent of Suriname’s 400,000 citizens profess Islam, according to officials of the country’s largest Muslim organization, the Surinaamse Islamitische Vereniging. Some 50,000 Muslims, however, have emigrated to the Netherlands since independence in 1975. Ethnic strife among the country’s other minorities-Creoles, Amerindians and socalled Bush Negroes- has further bankrupted the oncestrong Surinamese economy.
Throughout most of its history this 163,000-square-kilometer territory, one of the world’s largest bauxite producers, was a Dutch colony and was noted for religious tolerance. In the 1630s, Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Brazil arrived in Suriname, where in 1665 they built South America’s first synagogue at a jungle settlement known as Jodensavanna. In 1667 England ceded Suriname to the Dutch in exchange for New York, and the colony began to prosper from exports of coffee, cacao, sugar, and bananas to Holland.
As is the case with Trinidad and Guyana, which also have sizable Islamic minorities, Muslims first came to Suriname as indentured servants. In 1873 the Lala Rookh arrived in Paramaribo carrying indentured Indian Muslims. Suriname also has a much larger contingent of Indonesian Muslims descended from Javanese rice farmers who settled here between 1902 and 1935. Indonesian Muslims now comprise some 65 percent of the Surinamese Muslim community, with Indian Muslims making up 30 percent and African converts to Islam the remainder.
Some 150 mosques are scattered around Paramaribo and throughout Suriname’s sparsely populated interior.
Indonesian Muslims, however, rarely pray at Indian mosques because of language difficulties-Indian services are conducted in Urdu. During Ramadan, when the two groups sometimes pray together, services are conducted mainly in Dutch.
In the mid-1980s the East Indians inaugurated Suriname’s largest, most elaborate mosque, the Jama Masjid, in the heart of downtown Paramaribo. The building, dominated by four 3o-meter minarets, seats eight hundred people; it is adjacent to Congregation Neve Shalom, an eighteenth-century Ashkenazic synagogue recently restored by the country’s tiny Jewish community. Muslim and Jewish leaders have long been guests of honor in each other’s houses of worship.
Such harmony has not been seen among Suriname’s other ethnic groups in recent years. During most of the 1980s, jungle-dwellers descended from escaped African slaves fought a low-level guerrilla war against military strongman Desi Bouterse. Hundreds of people died in the fighting, which affected mostly eastern Suriname near the French Guiana border. Among Bouterse’s suspected backers was Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, who set up a Libyan People’s Bureau in Paramaribo in the late 1980s, As a result of Suriname’s civil war the Dutch government suspended its $1.5-billion development aid program. In 1990 a bloodless coup led by Bouterse toppled the government. Civilian rule was restored in 1 99 1 with the election of Ronald Venetiaan, and in August 1992 a peace agreement was signed between the government and Suriname’s two guerrilla groups.
Since 1970, `Id al-Fitr has been celebrated as a national holiday, and Muslims-like all religious groupsenjoy full religious freedom. Besides Surinaamse Islamitische Vereniging, seven other groups supervise Muslim affairs in Suriname, the most important being the Surinaamse Moeslim Associatie, Stichting Islamitische Gemeenten Suriname, and Federatie Islamitische Gemeenten in Suriname. Yet Islamic life is stagnating because of a decline in religious education. Less than 3 percent of the Muslim population speaks or reads Arabic; some teachers have recently arrived from Pakistan and Indonesia to give lessons in Arabic and the fundamentals of Islam. Community leaders cite a lack of Islamic literature in Dutch and English and a dearth of qualified personnel, along with the community’s relatively low socioeconomic level and the “brain drain” to the Netherlands and other countries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
French, Howard W. “In Suriname’s Racial Jungle, a Quest for Identity.” New York Times, 23 October 1990.
Luxner, Larry. “Muslims in the Caribbean.” Aramco World Magazine 38 (November-December 1987): 2-11.
Meijer, J. Pioneers of Pauroma: Contribution to the Earliest History of the Jewish Colonization of America. Paramaribo, 1954.
Treaster, Joseph B. “Suriname’s Fall from Paradise: Guerrilla War, Economic Ruin.” New York Times, 13 July 1987.

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/27/suriname/feed/ 0 Sufi Shrine Culture https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-shrine-culture/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-shrine-culture/#respond Thu, 17 Aug 2017 15:11:11 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-shrine-culture/ In many Muslim countries special shrines have been constructed honoring famous Sufi leaders or “saints” vho, it is believed, could work miracles during their ives […]

]]> In many Muslim countries special shrines have been constructed honoring famous Sufi leaders or “saints” vho, it is believed, could work miracles during their ives and even after their death. This kind of shrine may be called darih, mazar, zdwiyah or maqam in Arabic. In some areas it is called qubbah after the cupola that is the most characteristic architectural element in many shrines. The saint’s tomb is certainly the essential part of such a shrine; it is a place to which people make visits to receive divine blessing (barakah). Thus it becomes one of the focal points of popular Islam. Consequently, Sufi shrine culture, supported enthusiastically by common Muslims, has occasionally been criticized both by rigorous Muslim scholars (`ulama’) and by some modern reformers as bid’ah or heretical innovation added to authentic early Islam.
Historical Origin. Starting as an individual ascetic movement, Sufism had become regarded as a legitimate part of orthodox Islam by the twelfth century. Great Sufi adepts lived according to strict discipline in their training centers or lodges, where disciples followed the way tariqah of training which their master taught them. These gatherings developed into the Sufi orders (also called iarigahs). Drawing recruits mainly from the illiterate masses, which had formerly lacked access to the Islamic teaching that had been largely monopolized by scholars, Sfifi orders gradually spread over various parts of the Muslim world and had become very popular with the Muslim masses by the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Among them were the Qadiriyah, the Rifa`iyah, the Shadhiliyah, the Suhrawardiyah, the Mawlawiyah, and the Ahmadiyah. The first four established many branches in different countries; the last two were concentrated in particular regions, the Mawlawiyah mainly in Anatolia and the Ahmadiyah in the Nile Delta.
As the Sfifi orders penetrated into common Muslims’ lives and influenced their ritual behaviors, some of the Sufi leaders, usually the founders of orders or the heads of branches, began to develop reputations as saints (awhyd’; sg., wah) who had supernatural power or divine blessing (barakah) granted by God. Through this power, it was believed, the saint could work miracles (kardmat) such as foretelling the future, mindreading, flying in the air, treating illness, and other extraordinary acts. Devotees from both within and outside the order often visited the saint asking for a small share of divine blessing, so that he gradually began to be venerated as if he were a divine being. When the saint died, it was firmly believed that he would still respond favorably to requests made at his tomb. Therefore followers erected a special building at the site of the tomb.
Two Cases. Sufi-saint shrine culture displays great variation in factors such as the person enshrined, the social categories of devotees, the architectural structure of the shrine, the rituals performed in and around it, its political and economic significance, and the form and activities of the Sufi order that provides its main support. In order to illustrate its historical development, two examples will be discussed. Although both come from Egypt,, they exemplify respectively a traditional, rural-based Sufi-saint cult and a modern, urban-based one.
Sayyid al-Badawi. Ahmad al-Badawi, also called Sayyid al-Badawi because of his presumed descent from the Prophet, was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1199 and went to Mecca with his family in his childhood. He later visited Iraq, where he was heavily influenced by the thought of two other great Sufis, Ahmad Rifa’i and `Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, and by the activities of the Sufi orders that followed these masters, the Rifa’iyah and the Qadiriyah. Obeying a divine command received in a vision, Ahmad al-Badawi decided to go to Tanta, a town in the Nile Delta. Situated in the center of a rich agricultural area, Tanta then flourished as a large marketplace for agricultural products, as it still does today. Overcoming challenges from other religious leaders, he won over a great number of followers in and around the town. He was said to have worked many miracles, through one of which his first supporter in the town was able to prosper in his business. He was also paid homage by the great Mamluk king, Zahir Baybars, and he even fought against the Crusaders.
Sayyid al-Badawi died in 1276. His senior pupil `Abd al `Al assumed responsibility for the Ahmadiyah and became his successor (khallfah). The saint’s followers from every district flocked to Tanta to pledge their loyalty to his successor; this is said to be the origin of the annual festival or mawlid of Sayyid al-Badawi. `Abd al-`Al commanded that a large building be erected over the Sayyid’s tomb, and this has developed into his shrine together with a large mosque called the Masjid al-Badawi.
The mystical power of the saint began to appeal not only to the peasants and townspeople of the Delta but also to the masses in Cairo and some parts of Upper Egypt, and the devotees of his cult increased greatly. The Ahmadiyah order in due course developed into one of the four largest Sufi orders in Egypt, and his mawlid came to be something of a national festival.
Salama al-Radi. The founder of the Hamidiyah Shadhiliyah order was born in 1867 in a shabby quarter of Cairo and died there in 1939. Unlike traditional-style saints such as Ahmad al-Badawi, he was born into a modern Egypt which the Western powers had come to dominate politically and economically. Egyptian society and modern European ideas, both religious and secular, gradually infiltrated into Muslims’ daily lives. For this reason, the Sufi orders, if they wanted to revitalize their movements and find recruits in the emerging modernist sectors of Egyptian society, had to deal with new problems in accommodating themselves to the rapidly changing social and cultural conditions.
Having memorized the whole of the Qur’an before he was ten, Salama found intellectual satisfaction in Sufi scholarship rather than in the formal school system. While working in a government office as an efficient clerk, he led an ascetic life and joined a Sufi order. In response to a divine vision he decided to set up his own tariqah, the Hamidiyah Shadhiliyah, which was officially recognized as an independent tariqah by the supreme Sufi council in 1926-192’7.
He became venerated as a saint as a result of various apparent miracles, which included the excellence of his religious knowledge without a formal education, his ability to defeat other eminent scholars in debate, and his supernatural power to see everything, including things hidden from normal people. Some educated members of the order, however, apparently discredited these stories of miracles, or at least hesitated to accept them as factual.
After Salama’s death, one of his sons, Ibrahim, became the head of the order. Unlike his father, who attracted people with his personal charisma, Ibrahim tried to extend the order’s influence by means of structural reform. He aimed to establish a more centralized, hierarchical organization. This reform led to the Hamidiyah Shadhiliyah’s becoming one of the Sufi orders that accommodated most fully to social and cultural changes in modern Egypt; however, it also stirred internal conflicts between the new elite members recruited mainly from a somewhat modernized middle class and the senior leaders who had been attracted by the charisma of the founding saint.
The saint’s tomb became one of the focal points in this conflict. Salama’s shrine was first set up in the Bfilaq district of Cairo where he was born and where he established the headquarters of his tariqah. After his death, a mawlid celebration for him was held there every year. Ibrahim died in 1975, and the new elite members, who organized a committee to manage and control the tariqah began to build a large new mosque in Muhandisin district on the opposite side of the Nile from Bfilaq, an attractive residential area for the growing upper and upper-middle classes. Ibrahim’s tomb was set up in this new mosque. Beside it they constructed a fine new tomb for Salama, though it remained empty in 1987 as the old members refused to move his tomb from Bulaq. Moreover, they recognized Ibrahim’s younger brother as head of the tariqah and carried on celebrating Salama’s mawlid separately in Bulaq-the Muhandisin faction of course held the mawlid celebration at the new mosque.
Enshrinement of Non-Sufis. These two examples have been the cases of great Sufis who are venerated as saints and were enshrined after their death. These cases have to be distinguished from others in which the enshrined person is not a Sufi in the strict sense.
First, veneration of the prophet Muhammad must be considered. According to orthodox belief, he is not an equivalent of God but a mere man, though he is deeply respected as the Last Prophet and the ideal human being. However, he has often been venerated as though divine and similar to God by some groups of Muslims, especially among the less-educated masses. Great numbers eagerly visit his tomb in Medina before or after the pilgrimage to Mecca in order to receive divine blessing. The anniversary of his birthday (the twelfth day of Rabi` al-Awwal in the Islamic calendar), called Mawlid al-Nab! (the Prophet’s Birthday), has been celebrated in many cities and villages since the thirteenth century. Visitation to his tomb and celebration of his birthday have been conducted like those of Sfifi saints. Members of the Sufi orders actively participate in events of the Mawlid al-Nabi.
The Prophet’s family is also widely respected in Muslim societies, and Shi’i Muslims have developed especially elaborate cults of the first imam, `Alt, and his descendants. Their tombs are centers of folk Shiism, and many Shi’is visit them to receive divine blessing. `Alt’s tomb in Najaf and that of his son, Husayn in Karbala are the most prestigious, and these towns in Iraq have served as Shi’i sanctuaries. Although much less famous than these, there are a great number of smaller shrines in Shi’i areas, especially in Iran, which are presumed to belong to one of the imams and are generally called imamzadah. They closely resemble Sunni Sfifi-saint shrines in their social and cultural functions. [See Najaf; Karbala; Imamzadah.]
Sunni Muslims also revere Muhammad’s descendants and generally refer to them as sharif (noble person) or sayyid (lord). Some rulers of states, such as the Moroccan and Jordanian kings, and some saints such as Sayyid al-Badaw! claim descent from the Prophet. Some of the Prophet’s descendants are venerated as holy in their own right and are celebrated annually in their own mawlids. The Mawlid al-Husayn, for example, is held annually in Cairo, and a large number of his devotees, many of them members of Sufi orders, visit the mosque-shrine where his head is said to be buried.
Also held in Cairo is the mawlid of Imam Shafi`i (d. 820), the founder of one of the four orthodox schools of Islamic law. His shrine is set up in a shabby district on the eastern periphery of the city. Although he was never a Sufi, people visit his tomb to seek his mystical help, and they hold an annual celebration as they do for a Sufi saint.
Prophets other than Muhammad, together with some of the warrior heroes of early Islamic history, were also enshrined and celebrated, especially in Palestine, where there were many tombs and shrines that were presumed to belong to them. Such biblical figures as Abraham, Moses, David, job, and even Jesus had one or more shrines where people came to receive divine blessing. Some of these shrines also held regular celebrations called mawsim (the season of visiting). Shrines set up for heroes in battle can be found in Palestine, Jordan, and other areas; usually such heroes are called not waft or Sufi but sdlih.
There are various types of holy places in which some natural object such as a tree, a stone, or a cave is treated as sacred, although the (`ulama’) and others have harshly criticized these practices as non-Islamic. Some of them may be related to Sfifi-saint shrine culture. In a Moroccan village, for example, a grotto where a great female spirit (jinniyah) named `A’ishah Qandishah is said to dwell occupies a part of the sanctuary of the Hamdfishlyah order. Two shrines for its founding Sufis have been built there.
In the Maghrib, a local veneration and ritual surrounding a Muslim saint is generally known as “maraboutism.” The word “marabout” means “saint” and is derived from Arabic murabit, which in this context means “a person living in a Sufi lodge.” Some of the marabouts were evidently renowned Sufis in their lifetimes, and their shrines have kept a connection with one of the Sufi orders; others, however, have no direct relation to a particular order. Some marabouts inherit their mystical powers (barakah) through the agnatic line, which results in the formation of a maraboutc family like those of the Sharqdwah in Boujad and the Ihansalen among the Berbers in the High Atlas.
In Sufism proper, both leadership and sainthood are passed on patrilineally and are consequently kept within one family or lineage in many Sufi orders. The Majadhib family in El-Damer in the Northern Sudan is one of numerous examples. The family has kept the leadership of the Majdhubiyah Sufi order, which had considerable political and economic influence in the area before the twentieth century, as well as being venerated as a holy lineage. The shrine of their ancestor has been maintained in the custody of the family.
Spatial Composition. Except in a few cases, the tombs of Muslims are generally very simple in form. They usually have no special decoration except for plaques of ceramic or other materials on which are written personal details of the dead or phrases from the Qur’dn. In contrast, the tombs or shrines of saints, Sufi or otherwise, have distinctive architectural features.
A saint’s tomb is usually set up inside a building specially constructed for it, and it often has a cupola. Sometimes the building or shrine is situated in a cemetery. Other institutions such as mosques, Sfifi training lodges, or facilities for visitors may also be annexed to large shrines.
The tomb itself usually consists of a rectangular boxlike structure with a catafalque, a cloth cover, and other elements, with some variation. The catafalque (tabut) is a wooden box or frame set up over the spot where the saint is buried. It is covered completely with a piece of cloth called kiswah, which is generally donated by a devotee. In a place on the upper part of the catafalque (on one of the shorter sides, or at the center of the rectangle) an `immah is set up, which consists of a wooden post draped in a green cloth, looking like a head with a turban. The immah is supposed to symbolize the saint’s authority.
There are other items, however, that are not necessarily found in all shrines. Some tombs, especially those belonging to renowned saints, are enclosed by a cage. A donation box may be set up to receive money offerings from devotees. Other features may include lamps, candles, copies of the Qur’an, and plaques on which phrases from the Qur’an, are written or on which pictures of sacred places such as the Ka’bah are drawn. Most of these, like the kiswah, are donated by pious devotees. There are of course neither pictures nor statues of the saint anywhere in the shrine.
Some of the items, however, do raise theological problems. In the shrine of Sayyid al-Badawi, for instance, there is a black stone in the corner of the chamber. On it can be seen two footprints, which are said to be those of the Prophet, and many devotees, mostly peasants of the Nile Delta, are eager to touch and rub it. This practice recalls pilgrims’ rituals relating to Abraham’s footprints and the Black Stone in the Ka’bah at Mecca, and many scholars and modernist Muslims criticize it severely as a deviation from orthodox Islam.
The shrine and the other facilities are in many cases maintained financially through a waqf, an endowment provided by the Sufi order related to the saint enshrined. In the case of a small shrine a custodian, and in the case of a large shrine custodians or a committee, are responsible for the upkeep of the buildings and facilities.
Ritual Activities. The Sufi saint’s shrine is one of the focal points of rituals carried out not only by the members of the Sufi order that has a special spiritual relationship with the saint but also by common Muslims who simply admire the mystical power of the saint and venerate him. There are three important types of ritual: visiting the shrine, dhikr rituals conducted there, and the annual festival of the saint.
Visitation. Many devotees of a Sufi saint make frequent visits to his shrine to perform such rituals as special prayers to the saint, circumambulation of his tomb, and kissing its cloth cover. Some of them remain there for a longer period. The main aim of their visit, as with ordinary supplication (du’a’), is to ask for divine blessing in general, as well as for more specific benefits such as success in business or study, or recovery from an illness. They may make a vow (nadhr) to give a suitable donation to the saint if their wishes are satisfactorily realized; many of the items belonging to the shrine are donations from supplicants. If they break the vow and give nothing to the saint as a reward, it is presumed that there will be divine retribution for their negligence.
Visits to some shrines can be regarded as a substitute for the pilgrimage to Mecca. Indeed, a visit to the shrine of Sayyid al-Badawl has been called “the pauper’s hajj.” The shrine of al-Shadhill (d. 1465), the founder of the widespread Shadhiliyah Sufi order, is in a town on the Red Sea coast in southern Egypt. It is said that five visits to his shrine have an effect similar to that of one hajj. It is noteworthy, however, that the visit is not called hajj but ziydrah. Visitors apparently make an essential distinction between the two, even though they may think that repeated visits to a shrine may give them almost the same benefits as the pilgrimage to Mecca. [See Hajj; Ziyarah.]
Dhikr. On the basis of the Qur’an (surah 33. 4I-42), the dhikr ritual, in which participants devoutly repeat the names of God or some formula such as “Allah hayy” (“God is the Eternal One”) with prescribed gestures, has become one of the fundamental rituals for most Sufis. A gathering to perform the ritual, usually called hadrah, usually takes place in the afternoon or at night in the court of a private house, in a public square in a neighborhood, at a lodge, or in an open space near a saint’s shrine.
In some cases a dhikr is conducted after the communal prayers on Friday. For instance, the Hamad al-Nil Sufi order, a Sudanese branch of the Qadariyah, regularly holds a dhikr gathering on Friday afternoon in an open space in front of the shrine of its founding Sufi in a cemetery in a suburb of Omdurman. After the `asr prayer, members of the order march to the place from their nearby mosque and start to perform the dhikr rituals. Repeating the formulas to the rhythm of drums and religious songs, they line up in several rows and move around a pole set up in the center of the space. The ritual lasts until the sunset (maghrib) prayer.
Dhikr rituals, like visits to the shrine, can be carried out at any time. They are, however, enthusiastically conducted on a grand scale on the occasion of the annual festival of the saint. [See Dhikr.]
Annual Festival. The yearly celebration in honor of a saint has several different names in Arab countries. In Egypt it is called a mawlid; the word mawsim (“season,” i.e., for celebrating a saint) is used for the case of a marabout in Morocco as well as for the festival of the prophet Moses in Palestine. Members of the Sufi orders in the Sudan hold annual celebrations of their founders called huliya in commemoration not of their birthdays but of the anniversaries of their deaths. These festivals vary greatly in the way in which they are held, the number of participants, and the rituals performed; we will concentrate on the Egyptian cases.
Except for the mawlid of the Prophet, whose tomb is in Medina, Egyptian mawlid feasts for the Sufi or other saints are celebrated in and around their shrines. The time when these rites are held is an interesting issue. Because the word mawlid originally meant “time and place of birth,” the date of the celebration would appear to be fixed by the birthday of the saint concerned. Many mawlids for famous holy people, including the Prophet and his family, do occur on or about the days of their birth according to the Islamic lunar calendar, although the feasts themselves generally start several days or weeks before the birthday: the Prophet’s mawlid is on 12 Rabi` al-Awwal, Husayn’s on a Wednesday in the latter half of Rabi` al-Thani, Zaynab’s on the middle Wednesday of Rajab, and Shafi’i’s on the middle Thursday of Sha’ban. By contrast, the dates of some mawlids are fixed according to the solar calendar and may change according to historical and social conditions. The mawlid of Ahmad al-Badawi is a typical case.
In the early nineteenth century there were three feasts in honor of al-Badawi. The largest of these was held a month after the summer solstice, which was then the slack season for the peasants in the area. In the second or third decade of the twentieth century, the date of this mawlid was moved to the latter half of October. The development of the irrigation system in the intervening period had resulted in fundamental changes in the annual agricultural cycle of the Nile Delta. Thus October in the Gregorian calendar became the slack season for the peasants, many of whom were enthusiastic devotees of the saint. The date of the great mawlid of Sayyid alBadawi, therefore, is based not on his actual birthday but on the convenience of his devotees.
The space around the shrine of the saint being celebrated naturally becomes a center for the feast and is crowded with visitors to the tomb. There are a number of stands for food and drinks, amusements, and sideshows. Clusters of tents are pitched where Sufis conduct dhikr rituals during the feast days. The number of visitors hoping to receive divine blessing increases remarkably during this period.
Besides the dhikr rituals, Sufis of various orders take part in other events during the feast. Members of some orders used to demonstrate their miraculous powers in front of crowds in performances involving eating live serpents or piercing their bodies with spikes. This kind of bizarre performance has often been criticized for deviation from orthodox belief and proper Sufism. Recently they have tended to disappear, especially in the large cities.
The attractions of a festival also include a procession (mawkib or zaffah) for which various Sfifi orders assemble, forming lines and marching around the town or village. They perform dhikr and other rituals in their own styles, as a demonstration to the local people. The saint’s shrine is often the starting point and/or the destination of these processions.
Political and Economic Functions. Like Sayyid al-Badawi, said to have led soldiers against Crusaders, a number of leading Sufis have played the role of military commanders fighting against tyrannical rulers, ignorant heretics, and invading infidels. Among them was the leader of the Sanusiyah movement, which fought against the Italian invasion of Libya. Founded by Muhammad al-Sanfisi, the Sanfisiyah successfully propagated its beliefs among the bedouin tribes of Cyrenaica in the early stages of its development, by intentionally setting up lodges in the boundary areas between tribal territories. Thus the Sfifis of the order could play the role of mediators in tribal conflicts, and this gave them great authority.
Saintly families in the High Atlas also arbitrate in disputes among Berber tribesmen. Moreover, a collective oath, which is a customary legal procedure for judging the truth or falsity of an accusation, has to be made at a saint’s shrine if it relates to a serious issue. The shrine is also the place where a special ritual alliance between two tribes is contracted. In Boujad in Morocco, alSharqawah, a maraboutic family, plays almost the same role as do the saints of the Atlas.
A number of saint’s shrines can function as sites for conflict resolution and judicial decisions, although they seldom have the military power to enforce them. Because of the divine blessing saints have been granted by God, shrines can become holy places where people are subjected to mystical authority. Some of them have become not only asylums where killers involved in tribal feuds can come to ask for relief, but also sanctuaries where all bloodshed is prohibited.
Since people continuously come and go, and the area around the shrine is relatively peaceful, the place may develop as a market center for the area; or, conversely, an existing market may also become a center for religious training, so that a saint’s shrine is eventually built there. Such towns as Tanta in Egypt (the Ahmadiyah order), Boujad in Morocco (the al-Sharqawah marabout family), and El-Damer in the Sudan (the Majdhubiyah order) are local centers for production, storage, and marketing. While the regular weekly market held in these towns has prospered, the annual saint’s festival has become an occasion on which the town bustles with massive crowds and a large-scale fair is held, so that the festival has considerable economic effect.
The saint and his family may be able to maintain the economic importance of their town by emphasizing their mystical power. In the eighteenth century the Majadhib family was said to escort trading caravans from Shendi to Berber via El-Damer, its home town. They ensured safe travel for the tribesmen and consequently contributed to the prosperity of towns other than their own. Similar cases exist in other areas.
Criticism. As mentioned earlier, criticisms of the Sfifi-saint shrine culture, or at least at certain elements of it, have been expressed by theologians and politicians ever since it developed. Ibn Taymiyah (d. 1328), a strict jurist affiliated to the Hanbali school of Islamic law, was one of the most distinguished critics in the premodern era, although he did not condemn all the activities of the Sufi orders. He stressed that the veneration of a saint would probably lead to the worship of a divine being other than God-to loathsome polytheism-and that showy attractions during feasts were definitely contrary to Islamic law and should therefore be prohibited.
Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1791), one of the theological successors of Ibn Taymiyah, condemned not only the folk customs of saint veneration but the whole of Sufism. The Wahhabi campaign was led militarily by the Sa’ud family, powerful supporters of Ibn `Abd alWahhab’s doctrines, who started from a small oasis in the Nejd and gradually expanded their influence in the Arabian Peninsula. In the end they conquered the Hejaz and gained control of Mecca and Medina by 1804. During this campaign, whenever they encountered Sfifi saints’ shrines or other holy places they did not hesitate to demolish them. Even the dome erected on the spot where the Prophet was born was destroyed. This strong hostility toward saints and Sfifis has been maintained by the contemporary regime in Saudi Arabia, which follows Wahhabism as its state doctrine; officially, no Sfifi activity is permitted there.
Exponents of the Salafiyah movement such as Muhammad `Abduh and Muhammad Rashid Rida openly criticized many elements of Sfifi saint culture. They insisted that a saint could not intercede with God for people in earthly matters and therefore did not have the mystical power to grant good fortune. Rida sternly rebuked participants in the mawlid of Sayyid al-Badawi for committing bid’ah (heretical innovation) through activities such as prayers to the saint’s tomb and circumambulation of it, asking for worldly benefits, whistling, clapping, fortune-telling, selling charms and amulets, noisy music, the assembly of both sexes, and the practice of transvestism; however, he recognized the mawlid itself as legal.
The hostile attitude toward Sufi saint shrine culture has been taken over by Islamic reformist movements, including so-called fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brothers. Not only strict fundamentalists but also secular modernists have intensified their opposition to it. Generally speaking, the more widespread public education has become, the more general has been the criticism of shrine cults as mere superstition. Most contemporary devotees of the cult of saints are recruited from the less-educated urban and rural masses. It is noteworthy that some Sufis, especially those advocating neo-Sufi trends, actively criticize some elements of popular Sufism as bid’ah, just as Islamic scholars from outside Sufi circles do.
[See also Mawlid; Popular Religion; Sainthood; Shrine.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackman, W. S. The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. London, 1927. Detailed ethnography of the Upper Egyptian peasants in the early decades of the twentieth century, with special reference to their folk beliefs and practices. Descriptions of Muslim saints as well as those of the Copts and mawlid feasts are included.
Canaan, Tewfik. Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine. Jerusalem, 1927. Detailed reports on the folk practices of the veneration of Muslim saints in Palestine before the establishment of Israel.
Crapanzano, Vincent. The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973. Study of one of the popular religious brotherhoods in Morocco, the Hamadishah, with reference to its history and rituals. In the sanctuary of this brotherhood is a grotto where a powerful female spirit, `A’ishah Qandishah, is said to dwell.
Daly, M. W., ed. Al-Majdhubiyya and al-Mikashfiyya: Two Sufi Tariqas in the Sudan. Khartoum and London, 1985. Includes two articles on the Sudanese Sufi orders. One of them is a historical study on the Majdhubiyah Sufi order of al-Damir written by `Awad alKarsani.
Eickelman, Dale F. Moroccan Islam. Austin and London, 1976. One of the best anthropological works on maraboutisn. Based on field research conducted by the author with the al-Sharqawah family in Boujad, Central Morocco. His Knowledge and Power in Morocco (Princeton, 1985) contains a case study of the critical attitude of a reform-minded student to traditional maraboutism in the first half of the twentieth century.
Geertz, Clifford. Islam Observed. New Haven and London, 1968. Compact but informative book on Moroccan maraboutism and Indonesian mysticism in their historical, sociological, and ideological contexts.
Gellner, Ernest. Saints of the Atlas. Chicago, 1969. Standard monograph on the saintly families of the High Atlas, Morocco. For his more comprehensive studies of Islam, including maraboutism and fundamentalism, as well as his methodological stance, see his collection of papers entitled Muslim Society (Cambridge, 1981).
Gilsenan, Michael. Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt. Oxford, 1973. Sociological study of the Hamidiyah Shadhiliyah Sufi order from its origin to the 1960s. On the internal conflict in the order after the death of the second shaykh in the 1970s, see his Recognizing Islam (New York, 1982), which includes information on the saint and/or Sufi cultures in Yemen, Lebanon, and other areas.
Goldziher, Ignacz. Muslim Studies. Vol. 2. London, 1971. Collection of papers written by one of the greatest orientalist scholars in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which includes a classic and standard work on the veneration of saints, though its methodological stance could be criticized by today’s criteria.
Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. 2d ed. Cambridge, 1983. Standard study on the sociopolitical thought of great Muslim reformists, whether modernist or fundamentalist, in the modern age. Includes chapters on Muhammad ibn `Abd alWahhab, Muhammad `Abduh, and Muhammad Rashid Rida who rebuked harshly some, or all, of the elements of Sufi-saint culture. Lane, E. W. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). London, 1978. Invaluable encyclopedic ethnography of everyday life mainly in Cairo, in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It is noteworthy that Lane describes the veneration of saints and the mawlid feasts, not in the chapter on “Religion,” but in those on “Superstitions” and “Periodical Public Festivals.”
Ohtsuka, Kazuo. “Toward a Typology of Benefit-Granting in Islam.” Orient 24 (1988): 141-152. In this paper, published in the English bulletin of the Japanese Society of the Near Eastern Society, I propose four types of benefit-granting practices in Islam, using exchange theory as the frame of analysis, and locates the practice by which Muslim saints confer benefits within this typology.
Ohtsuka, Kazuo. “How Is Islamic Knowledge Acquired in Modern Egypt? `Ulama, Sufis, Fundamentalists and Common People.” In Japanese Civilization in the Modern World, vol. 5, Culturedness, edited by Tadeo Umesao et al. Osaka, 1990. My examination of various ways of acquiring “proper” Islamic knowledge in modern Egyptian contexts.
Reeves, E. B. The Hidden Government: Ritual, Clientelism, and Legitimation in Northern Egypt. Salt Lake City, 1990. An anthropological study of Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi and other Muslim saints in Tanta. It includes valuable information about the historical development of the cult of al-Badawi, contemporary saint veneration in the area, and the actual conditions of mawlid and other rituals. Schimmel, Annemarie. And Muhammad is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety. Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1985. Numerous cases of popular veneration of the Prophet are provided mainly from historical and literary sources, although most of them come from Turkey, Persia, and the Indian Subcontinent. Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford, 1971. Thorough, classic study of Sufi orders, and an encyclopedic text on their history, thought, organization, and ritual.
Westermarck, Edward. Rituals and Belief in Morocco. 2 vols. London, 1926. Encyclopedic account of Moroccan folk beliefs and rituals written by a Finnish anthropologist working in London. Westermarck conducted field research in Morocco at the turn of the century and devotes three chapters of his book to describing and analyzing actual cases of the concept of barakah, which he translated as “holiness” or “blessed virtue.”
KAZUO OHTSUKA

SUFISM

Sufi Orders

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-shrine-culture/feed/ 0 Sufi Orders https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-orders/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-orders/#respond Thu, 17 Aug 2017 15:02:07 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-orders/ Sufi orders represent one of the most important forms of personal piety and social organization in the Islamic world. In most areas, an order is […]

]]> Sufi orders represent one of the most important forms of personal piety and social organization in the Islamic world. In most areas, an order is called a tariqah (pl., turuq), which is the Arabic word for “path” or “way.” The term tariqah is used for both the social organization and the special devotional exercises that are the basis of the order’s ritual and structure. As a result, the “Sufi orders” or tariqahs include a broad spectrum of activities in Muslim history and society.
Mystical explanations of Islam emerged early in Muslim history, and there were pious mystics who developed their personal spiritual paths involving devotional practices, recitations, and literature of piety. These mystics, or Sufis, sometimes came into conflict with authorities in the Islamic community and provided an alternative to the more legalistic orientation of many of the `ulama’. However, Sufis gradually became important figures in the religious life of the general population and began to gather around themselves groups of followers who were identified and bound together by the special mystic path tariqah of the teacher. By the twelfth century (the fifth century in the Islamic era), these paths began to provide the basis for more permanent fellowships, and Sufi orders emerged as major social organizations in the Islamic community.
The orders have taken a variety of forms throughout the Islamic world. These range from the simple preservation of the tariqah as a set of devotional exercises to vast interregional organizations with carefully defined structures. The orders also include the short-lived organizations that developed around particular individuals and more long-lasting structures with institutional coherence. The orders are not restricted to particular classes, although the orders in which the educated urban elite participated had different perspectives from the orders that reflected a more broadly based popular piety, and specific practices and approaches varied from region to region.
In all Sufi orders there were central prescribed rituals which involved regular group meetings for recitations of prayers, poems, and selections from the Qur’an. These meetings were usually described as acts of “remembering God” or dhikr. In addition, daily devotional exercises for the followers were also set, as were other activities of special meditation, asceticism, and devotion. Some of the special prayers of early Sufis became widely used, while the structure and format of the ritual was the distinctive character provided by the individual who established the tariqah The founder was the spiritual guide for all followers in the order, who would swear a special oath of obedience to him as their shaykh or teacher. As orders continued, the record of the transmission of the ritual would be preserved in a formal chain of spiritual descent, called a silsilah, which stated that the person took the order from a shaykh who took it from another shaykh in a line extending back to the founder, and then usually beyond the founder to the prophet Muhammad. As orders became firmly established, leadership would pass from one shaykh to the next, sometimes within a family fine and sometimes on the basis of spiritual seniority within the tariqah At times, a follower would reach a sufficient degree of special distinction that his prayers would represent a recognized subbranch within a larger order; at other times, such a follower might be seen as initiating a whole new tariqah
Within all this diversity, it is difficult to provide a simple account of the development of Sufi orders, but at least some of the main features of the different types of orders and their development can be noted.
Premodern Foundations. Different types of orders developed in the early centuries of tariqah-formation. These provide important foundations for the Sufi orders of the modern era.
Large inclusive traditions. One type of order is the large inclusive tadgah tradition with a clearly defined core of devotional literature. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some major figures emerge as the organizers of orders that were to become the largest in the Islamic world. In some cases, the orders may actually have been organized by the immediate followers of the “founders,” but these teachers represent the emergence of large-scale orders. The most frequently noted of these early orders is the Qadiriyah, organized around the teachings of `Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166), which grew rapidly and became the most widespread of the orders. Two other major orders originating in this era are the Suhrawardlyah, based on the teachings and organization of Abu al-Najib al-Suhrawardi (d. 1168) and his nephew, Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 1234); and the Rifa’iyah, representing the tariqah of Ahmad al-Rifa’i (d. 1182). By the thirteenth century, increasing numbers of tariqahs were being organized in the traditions of great teachers. Many of these were of primarily local or regional influence, but some became as widespread as the earlier orders. Among the most important of these are the Shadhiliyah (established by Abu al-Hasan alShadhili, d. 1258) in Egypt and North Africa, and the Chishtiyah (Mu’in al-Din Chishti, d. 1142) in Central and South Asia.
These large tariqahs are an important type of order representing a coherent tradition based on a central core of writings by the founder. Within these broad traditions over the centuries, later teachers would arise and create their own particular variants, but these would still maintain an identification with the main tradition. For example, throughout the Islamic world there are distinctive branches of the Qadiriyah, but these are generally identified as part of the Qadiriyah tradition, as is the case with the Bakka’iyah established by Ahmad alBakka’i al-Kunti (d. 1504) in West Africa, or the various branches of the Ghawthiyah originating with Muhammad Ghawth (d. 1517) in South Asia. This process of creating independent suborders continues to the present and can be seen in the variety of relatively new tadgahs in the traditions of the early orders, often identified with compound names, such as the Hamidiyah Shadhiliyah of contemporary Egypt.
Orders based on “ancient ways.” A second major style of Sufi order developed within less clearly defined traditions that appealed to the early Sufis and utilized some of their prayers and writings but developed distinctive identities of their own. Thus many tariqah organizers traced their inspiration back to early Sufis like Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd (d. 910) or Abu Yazid alBistami (d. 874). One may speak of the Junaydi tradition and the “way of Junayd” as insisting on constant ritual purity and fasting (Schimmel, 1975, p. 255) or the more ecstatic mood in the tradition of al-Bistami. However, the great “Junaydi” or “Bistami” orders are independent and have their own separate traditions. Among the most important Junaydi orders are the Kubrawiyah and the Mawlawiyah; orders such as the Yasawiyah and Naqshbandiyah are seen as being more in the Bistami tradition. Within the framework of affirming inspiration and instruction by a chain of teachers that stretches back to the early Sufis, new orders continue to be created within this broader framework.
Individual-based orders. A third type of major order is the tariqah that develops as a result of the initiatives and teachings of a later teacher and has its own clear identity. These teachers usually would affirm their ties to earlier teachers and tariqahs, but in some significant ways they would proclaim the unique validity of their particular tariqah. Sometimes this would take the form of an affirmation that the new tariqah. was a synthesis of preceding tariqahs, sometimes the claim for authority would be based on direct inspiration from the prophet Muhammad, in which case the order might be called a tariqah. Muhammadiyah, or from some other special agent of God, for example al-Khidr. Orders of this type have been very important in the modern Muslim world and include the Tijaniyah, the Khatmiyah, and the Sanusiyah.
Shrine tariqahs, Local orders centered on particular shrines or families represent another very important type of tariqah. Teachers with special reputations for sanctity might develop significant followings during their lifetime, but their writings and work might not provide the basis for a larger order to develop. Tombs of such pious teachers throughout the Muslim world have been important focuses of popular piety, and the rituals surrounding the ceremonies of remembrance and homage become a local tariqah. Sometimes these might be indirectly identified with some more general Sufi tradition, but the real impact and identity is local. The special centers of popular piety in North Africa that have developed around the tombs of the “marabouts,” or the various centers of pilgrimage that developed in Central Asia and even survived the policies of suppression by the former Soviet regime, provide good examples of this style of tariqah.
Foundations of the Modern Orders. Many observers have proclaimed the effective end of the Sufi orders in the modern era. A major French authority on medieval Sufism, for example, announced in the middle of the twentieth century that the orders were “in a state of complete decline” and that they faced “the hostility and contempt of the elite of the modern Muslim world” (Massignon, 1953, P. 574). This reflects both the long historical tension between the Muslim urban intellectual elites and the tariqahs, and also the specifically modern belief that mystic religious experience and modernity were incompatible. However, by the end of the twentieth century it was clear that Sufi orders remained a dynamic part of the religious life of the Islamic world; moreover, they were at the forefront of the expansion of Islam, not only in “traditional” rural areas but also in modern societies in the West and among the modernized intellectual elites within the Muslim world. These apparently contradictory views reflect the complex history and development of tariqahs, since the eighteenth century.
There is an underlying continuity of experience in the Sufi orders which provides an important backdrop to specific modern developments. The rituals of popular piety among Muslims-educated and uneducated, rural and urban-cannot be ignored. Although over the past three centuries educated Muslims have paid less attention to the more miraculous and magical elements of saint visitation and other aspects of popular Sufi piety, the intellectual appeal of Islamic mysticism has remained strong, and the sense of social cohesion provided by the Sufi organizations has been important, especially in areas like the Muslim Central Asian societies of the former Soviet Union. Popular participation in regular Sufi gatherings and support for various types of tariqahs, remain at remarkably high levels throughout the Muslim world. Estimates of membership in Sufi orders in Egypt, for example, are in the millions, in contrast to the hundreds or thousands in the more militant Islamic revivalist organizations.
Popular Islamic piety among all classes of people remains strong throughout the modern era and shows little sign of a decline at the end of the twentieth century. This popular piety frequently is expressed in terms of participation in the activities of tariqahs, or other groups reflecting Sufi approaches to the faith. However, the activities of the organizations of this popular piety do not usually attract much attention, despite their long-term importance. This situation provides the proper background for examining the specific experiences of the more visible Sufi orders of the modern era.
The history of tariqahs, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides an important foundation for understanding the dynamics of the recent development of Sufi orders. Sufi organizations and leadership from this period remain significant in setting the discourse and defining the issues of Islamic piety in the modern era.
Some modern scholars argue that a number of new initiatives can be seen in the development of the Sufi organizations and thought of the early modern era. Among some Sufi teachers there were efforts to remove the more ecstatic and pantheistic elements of the Sufi tradition and to create more reform-oriented Sufi organizations and practices. Fazlur Rahman called this tendency “neo-Sufism” (Islam, Chicago, 1979), a term that came to be used by other scholars as well. “Neo-Sufism” referred to a mood rather than making any claim that the term represented a monolithic school of Sufi thought. Other scholars have tended to reject the term because it seemed to ignore important continuities in Sufi traditions and also seemed to assume a greater degree of similarity among movements than might exist.
Regardless of the details of the debate, in the eighteenth century the broad spectrum of Sufi orders and practices extended from the local varieties of popular folk religion to a more sober and sometimes reformist Sufi leadership that did not approve of the popular cultic practices. Whether or not one calls the latter approach “neo-Sufism” is less important than it is to recognize that the less ecstatic and more shari`ah-minded Sufism existed and provided the basis for emerging tariqahs important in the modern era. These orders represented a “new organizational phenomenon” of orders that were “relatively more centralized and less prone to fission than their predecessors” (O’Fahey, 1990, p. 4).
In the context of Islamic societies in the eighteenth century, immediately before the major encounter with the modernizing West, Sfifi orders were a significant part of the social fabric throughout the Islamic world. They provided vehicles for the expression of the faith of urban elites, served as networks for interregional interaction and travel, acted as an effective inclusive structure for the missionary expansion of Islam, and in some ways shaped the context within which movements of puritanical reform or spiritual revival developed.
Elite Fariqahs. In the large urban centers in regions where Islam was the established faith of the overwhelming majority of the population, the orders were vehicles for the expression of piety among both the masses and the elites. New presentations of the old traditions, such as the Qadiriyah, Shadhiliyah, and Khalwatlyah, were important in places like Cairo. By the eighteenth century the larger orders of all types were expanding into many different regions.
The history of the Naqshbandiyah in the Middle East provides an important example of this development. It spread from Central and South Asia into Ottoman lands in at least two different forms-that of Ahmad Sirhind! (d. 1625), called the Mujaddid or renewer of the second millennium, and the earlier line of `Ubaydullah Ahrar. By the eighteenth century, notables in the tariqah were prominent in Istanbul and other major Ottoman cities like Damascus, where the great Hanafi mufti and historian Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi (d. 1791) was a scion of a family associated with the Naqshbandlyah. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Shaykh Khalid alBaghdadi (d. 1827) of the Mujaddidi line led a major movement of revival in the lands of the Fertile Crescent; the activities of the Khalid! branch established the Naqshbandlyah as “the paramount order in Turkey” (Hamid Algar, “Nakshbandiyya,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., 1960-, vol. 7, p. 936).
Interregional networks. The Naqshbandlyah also presents a good example of how the orders provided structures for interregional networks among the `ulama’ and commercial classes. Students, pilgrims, and travelers could move from city to city, finding shelter and instruction in the Naqshband! centers. One such person was a Chinese scholar, Ma Mingxin (d. 1781), who traveled and studied in major Naqshbandlyah centers in Central Asia, Yemen, and Mecca and Medina. Combined networks of commercial activities and pious instruction can be seen in the activities of family-based tariqahs like the `Aydarusiyah, the order of an important family in the Hadramawt, the `Aydarus, with branches in the islands of Southeast Asia, India, South Arabia, and Cairo. The lists of teachers of scholars in the eighteenth century show that major intellectual figures often received devotional instruction in broad interregional networks of Sufi masters.
Missionary expansion. Sufi orders had also long been vehicles in the missionary expansion of Islam. The less legalistic approach to the faith of Sufi teachers often involved an adaptation to specific local customs and practices. This helped Islam to become a part of popular religious activity with a minimum of conflict. At the same time, the traditions of the Sufi devotions represented ties to the broad Islamic world that could integrate the newer believers into the identity of the Islamic community as a whole. In this way, orders like the Qadiriyah played a significant role in the expansion of Islam in Africa. In Sudan, for example, its decentralized structure allowed specific regional and tribal leaders to assume roles of leadership within the order. In Southeast Asia, the tariqahs, were also important in providing a context within which existing religious customs could be combined with more explicitly Islamic activities. Thus orders like the Shattariyah became major forces in the Islamic life of peoples in Java and Sumatra. This missionary dimension is visible wherever Islam was expanding in the eighteenth century-in Africa, southeastern Europe, and central, southern and southeastern Asia. [See Da’wah.]
Puritan reformism. Sufi orders also helped to provide concepts of organization for groups actively engaged in efforts to “purify” religious practice and revive the faith. Although the best-known eighteenth century revivalist movement, the Wahhabis, was vigorously opposed to the Sufi orders, most revivalists in fact had some significant Sufi affiliations. In West Africa, the leaders of movements to establish more explicitly Islamic states in Futa Jallon and Futa Toro, in the areas of modern Senegal and Guinea, were associated with important branches of the Qadiriyah. The great jihad at the beginning of the nineteenth century in northern Nigeria and neighboring territories was led by Usuman dan Fodio, a teacher closely identified with the Qadiriyah. At the other end of the Islamic world of the eighteenth century, the “neo-orthodox reformist movement” called the “New Teaching” that “swept Northwest China” in the late eighteenth century was the Naqsh-bandiyah as presented by Ma Mingxin (A. D. W. Forbes, “Ma Ming-Hsin,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., 1960-, vol. 5, p. 850). In many other areas as well, Sufi orders were associated with the development of reformist and jihadist movements of purification.
The developments of the eighteenth century provide important foundations for later events in Islamic life in general and in the history of Sufi orders in particular. It was the Islamic world as it existed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, not some classical medieval formulation, that encountered the expanding and modernizing West. In those encounters the Sufi orders played an important role, which sometimes does not receive as much attention as the activities of more radical movements or movements more explicitly shaped and influenced by the West.
Sufi Orders in the Modern Era. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the different Sufi traditions were involved in many different ways in helping to shape Muslim responses to the West and also in defining Islamic forms of modernity. At the same time, although in changing contexts, many of the main themes of the older experiences of the orders continue. Among the many aspects of the history of Sufi orders in the modern era, it is important to examine a number more closely: the Sufi orders continued to serve as an important basis for popular devotional life; they were important forces in responding to imperial rule; they helped to provide organizational and intellectual inspiration for Muslim responses to modern challenges to the faith; and they continued to be an important force in the mission of Muslims to non-Muslims.
Popular piety. Tariqahs remained very important in the life of popular piety among the masses; however, this important level of popular devotional life is not as visible in the public arena as the more activist roles of the orders. New orders continued to emerge around respected teachers and saintly personalities important in the daily lives of common people. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century it is possible to identify such orders in virtually all parts of the Islamic world. It is especially important to observe that these new devotional paths were not simply the products of rural, conservative, or so-called “traditional” people.
An example is the career of Qarib Allah Abu Salih (1866-1936), a pious teacher in Omdurman, Sudan, and a member of the Sammaniyah tariqah. an order established in the eighteenth century within the Khalwatlyah tradition. He participated in the Mahdist movement in the late nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century attracted disciples from both the poorer people and the emerging modern educated classes in Sudan. His devotional writings and mystic poetry were published and became an important part of the modern literature of Sudan (Tahir Muhammad ‘Ali al-Bashir, Al-adab al-Sufi ft al-Sudan, Cairo, 1970). The Qaribiyah was not politically active as an organization, although its members may have been politically involved as individuals.
Across the Islamic world, similar groups have emerged as a pious foundation for devotional life in all levels of society. Similarly, intellectuals and professionals as well as the more general population continued in relatively significant numbers to participate in activities of the older established orders. This phenomenon could be observed, for example, in Cairo during the 1960s at the peak of enthusiasm for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialism (Voll, 1992). Although the contexts had changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the end of the twentieth century, new orders which served popular devotional needs continued to be created and to flourish in ways that provide a sense of both great continuity and significant adaptability to changing conditions.
Antiforeign resistance. Sufi orders provided significant organization and support for movements of resistance to foreign rule. This was especially true in the nineteenth century, when many of the major wars against expanding European powers were fought by Muslim organizations that originated with Sufi orders. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Sumatra, a revivalist movement building on reform activities initiated by the Naqshbandiyah and Shattariyah and possibly inspired by Wahhabi strictness or the teachings of Ahmad ibn Idris, provided major resistance to Dutch expansion in the Padri War of 1821-1838. The strongest opposition to the French conquest of Algeria, which began in 1830, was provided by a Qadiriyah leader, Amir `Abd al-Qadir, whose resistance lasted until 1847. In the Caucasus region, Naqshbandiyah fighters under the leadership of Imam Shamil maintained a holy war against Russian imperial expansion for twenty-five years, ending in 1859. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was a tariqah. leader, Muhammad `Abd Allah Hasan (1864-1921) of the Salihiyah, who led a major anti-imperialist holy war in Somaliland against the British. Sufi orders provided the basis for many other movements of resistance, but these examples confirm that the phenomenon was significant and widespread.
Some other Sufi orders that came into conflict with expanding European imperialism also reflect the development of distinctive, new tariqah. traditions. Perhaps the most important of these orders are those established by followers of Ahmad ibn Idris (d. 1837) and others influenced by this Idris! tradition. Ibn Idris was a north African scholar who taught for a number of years in Mecca; some of his major students established tariqahs, that became important orders throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The best-known of these groups is the Sanusiyah, founded by Muhammad ibn `All al-Sanfis! (d. 1859). This order established centers in North Africa and Saharan areas, with special centers in Libya. It provided stability and regional coordination among nomadic tribes and became very influential in a vast area in northern Africa. As a result, expanding French imperial forces in many Saharan areas contacted and eventually came into conflict with the Sanusiyah in the later nineteenth century. When Italy attempted to conquer Libya in the twentieth century, it was the Sanusiyah that provided the most effective opposition, both during the Ottoman-Italian war of 1911-1912 and following World War I, when the victorious allied powers decided to create an independent Libya, it was the head of the Sanusiyah who was proclaimed Idris I, the king of independent Libya. The Sanusiyah as a Sufi order was tied to the newly created tradition of Ahmad ibn Idris rather than being solely associated with older tariqah. traditions.
Other similarly independent orders which developed in this Idrisi tradition were the Khatmiyah, which became one of the major Islamic organizations in the modern Sudan; the Salihiyah and Rashidlyah, which were important in east Africa; and the Idrisiyah, established by the family of the original teacher. These orders, along with the Sanusiyah, represent a major Sufi tradition in the modern era, especially in Africa. Less directly, teachers influenced by the Idrisi tradition had some impact in southeastern Europe and South and Southeast Asia.
Another independent Sufi tradition developed as a result of the work of Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815). The Tijaniyah was an exclusive order that claimed to be a synthesis of major tariqah. traditions inspired and instructed initially by the prophet Muhammad himself. The order became an important force in North Africa but did not get involved in opposition to French expansion in the Mediterranean countries. However, the Tijaniyah expanded rapidly into Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. Al-Hajj `Umar Tal (d. 1864) organized a major holy war under the Tijanlyah banner in the regions of Guinea, Senegal, and Mali; ultimately his successful movement was restricted and then ended by the consolidation of French imperial control in the region. However, the Tijanlyah was more than an antiforeign movement. It became a major vehicle for intensification of Islamic practice in already Muslim areas and for the expansion of Islam into non-Muslim areas. By the end of the twentieth century, the Tijaniyah had become a major force throughout the Sudanic region.
It is clear that major orders like the Sanusiyah and Tijaniyah which were established in the nineteenth century, were not simply anti-imperialist movements in Sufi form. They represented an important style of cohesive social organization based on the traditions of tangah structures. They were not necessarily alternatives to emerging modern state structures but were autonomous within the developing polities defined as sovereign nation-states. This alternative mode is also seen in the developments of distinctive orders whose self-definition was more closely identified with older Sufi traditions. Thus the Naqshbandiyah suborder established by Said Nursi in Turkey in the twentieth century became an important vehicle for the articulation of a revivalist Islamic worldview in the context of an officially secular state. Similarly, a number of orders provided important foundations for the unofficial, “underground” Islam that was so essential for the survival of the Muslim sense of community in Central Asia under Soviet rule.
Responses to modernity. Sufi orders also were important in helping to shape the responses to the challenges to Muslim faith in the modern era. In the nineteenth century this was more in terms of providing organizational bases for opposition to European expansion and in the direct continuation of the traditions of activist reformist movements such as the Nagshbandiyah. In the twentieth century, tariqahs, reponded to specific needs in a variety of ways. In some countries orders provided the direct organizational basis for modern-style political parties. In Sudan, for example, the Khatmiyah provided the foundation for the National Unionist Party, then the People’s Democratic Party; late in the twentieth century the head of the order was also the president of the Democratic Unionist Party. In Senegal, the Muridiyah provided an organization for the development of cash crops and played an important role in modernizing the agricultural sector of the Senegalese economy. In the days of Soviet communist rule in Central Asia, the popular local tariqahs and the established traditional ones like the Naqshbandiyah provided the framework within which Islamic communal identity could be maintained in the face of the official efforts to suppress religion. In the holy war in Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation in 1979, leaders of established orders like the Qadiriyah and Naqshbandiyah Mujaddidiyah were among the most important organizers of mujahidin groups. These examples affirm the fact that in many different areas, the organizational traditions of the Sufi orders provided important bases for responding to specific challenges.
In the twentieth century, however, the role of the orders was sometimes different. The established tariqahs might seem ineffective in meeting particular challenges of modernity, but the basic structures or the general approach might still provide models for new Islamic revivalist and reformist movements.
Sufism and participation in a reform-minded tariqah was, for example, an important part of the early experience of Hasan al-Banna’ (d. 1949), the founder of one of the major modern Muslim revivalist organizations in the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. As a young man, al-Banna’ was impressed by accounts of the strictness of a Sufi shaykh, Hasanayn alHasafi (d. igio), and became an active member of the tariqah he had founded, the Hasafiyah. Al-Banna’ was involved with the tariqah for twenty years and maintained a respect for this strict style of Sufism throughout his life. It appears to have influenced his organizational thinking in terms of the methods of instruction in his Muslim Brotherhood and the daily rituals required of its members. Another major Islamic activist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, has some similar aspects. Many of its early organizers came from families strongly identified with tariqahs, in Sudan. The most prominent of the leaders in the Sudanese Brotherhood in the second half of the twentieth century is Hasan alTurabi, who came from a religiously notable family whose center was a school-tomb complex of a traditional localized Sufi type. One of his ancestors in the eighteenth century had proclaimed himself to be a Mahdi bringing purification to the Muslims. Turabi emphasized the continuing need for humans to reinterpret the implications of the Islamic faith in changing historical circumstances. In this, one active member of Turabi’s movement noted that “Turabi’s revolution” was a “reaffirmation of the ancient Sufi ethic, with its emphasis on the spirit rather than the letter of Islam” (Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Turabi’s Revolution, London, 1991). The Sufi organizational traditions thus both provided direct means for meeting challenges in modern situations and also helped to inspire new approaches.
Missionary expansion. The Sufi orders continued in the modern era to serve as important vehicles for the expansion of Islam in basically non-Muslim societies. In many areas, this is simply a direct continuation of past activities. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, under colonial rule the Sfifi orders were among the few types of indigenous social organizations that imperial administrators would allow. As a result, they became very important structures both for the expression of indigenous opinion and for the expansion of Islam. It was under colonial rule in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Islam was able to make significant advances in areas south of the Sudanic savannas.
More remarkably, the Sufi orders have become important vehicles for Islamic expansion in modern Western societies, where the open inclusiveness and the aesthetic dimensions of the great Sufi philosophies have considerable appeal. Sufi thought was important in influencing nineteenth-century Western intellectuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson; in the later twentieth century, the writings of Idries Shah became very well known and could be found in bookstores that appealed to popular as well as intellectual tastes. Important Western converts to Islam in the twentieth century were often Sufi in orientation and institutional affiliation. The writings of Martin Lings and his description of the tariqah of the Tunisian Sufi Shaykh Ahmad al-`Alawi are significant examples.
Sufi orders are active organizationally in Western societies. They provide a clearly satisfying and effective vehicle for the expression of religious life and values in modern Western societies and have an appeal among professionals and the general population. The communities established by orders in western Europe and the Americas have been strengthened in the second half of the twentieth century by the significant growth of the Muslim communities through both immigration and conversion. A good example of this tariqah activity is the expansion of the Ni’matullahi order, which by 1990 had centers in nine major cities in the United States, published a magazine, Sufi, and worked with academic institutions in organizing conferences on Sufism. In ways like this, Sufi orders continue to serve as an important means for the modern expansion of Islam.
Challenges and Future Prospects. Throughout Islamic history there have been strong critics of Sufi teachers and organizations. In one of the most famous instances, a medieval mystic, al-Hallaj (d. 922), was executed for proclaiming his mystical union with God in an extreme manner. More literalist and legalist interpreters of Islam have opposed the practices of the Sufi orders as providing vehicles for non-Islamic practices and beliefs. In the eighteenth century, some of the strongest opposition to the tariqahs came from the developing Wahhabi movement. In the modern era, modernizing reformers strongly criticized the orders for encouraging and strengthening popular superstitions, and Islamic modernists attempted to reduce the influence of Sufi shaykhs in their societies.
Such modernist opposition can be seen in actions of reformers throughout the Islamic world. Wherever the Salafiyah modernist movement-which emerged with the thought and actions of late nineteenth-century scholars such as Muhammad `Abduh (d. 1905) of Egypthad influence, there was strong opposition to the popular devotional practices and influence of the Sufi orders. This can be seen in the activities and teachings of `Abd Allah ibn Idris al-Sanusi (d. 1931) in Morocco, the Association of Algerian `Ulama’ organized in the 1930s, the Muhammadiyah in Indonesia throughout the twentieth century, the Jadidist movement within the old Russian Empire, and many other areas. In addition, more explicitly westernizing reform programs attempted to eliminate the influence of the orders, best illustrated in the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk during the 1920s and 1930s in the new republic of Turkey.
Many observers also thought that as societies became more modern and industrialized, the social functions of the Sufi teachers and their organizations would decline. In the mid-twentieth century, many analyses painted a picture of reduced and possibly disappearing Sufi orders. Despite the opposition and the predictions, however, Sufi orders continue to be remarkably strong in most of the Islamic world and also in communities of Muslims where they are minorities.
The Sufi orders continue to provide vehicles for articulating an inclusive Islamic identity with a greater emphasis on individual devotional piety and small-group experience. The contrast with the more legalist orientation with its emphasis on the community as a whole is a longstanding polarity in Islamic history. It is clear that the great transformations of the modern era have not destroyed the basis for this polarity.
In the changing contexts of the late twentieth century, the traditions of the Sufi orders have special strengths in situations where there is a high degree of religious pluralism. They allow the believer to maintain an individual Islamic devotional identity in the absence of a national or societywide Muslim majority. These traditions also allow for an articulation of Islam in a form compatible with secularist perspectives. Thus Sufism has importance in the non-Muslim societies of Western Europe and North America. In addition, as it becomes clear that it is not possible simply to transfer institutional copies of Western-style associations such as labor unions, political parties, and other nongovernmental organizations, tariqah traditions may provide ways of adapting modern institutions to the needs of emerging civil societies throughout the Islamic world.
[See also Chishtiyah; Idrisiyah; Khalwatiyah; Khatmiyah; Mawlawiyah; Muhammadiyah; Murildiyah; Naqshbandi-yah; Ni’matullahiyah; Qadiriyah; Rifa’iyah; Sanusiyah; Shadhiliyah; Shattariyah; Tijaniyah; and the biographies of `Alawi, Bakka’i al-Kunti, Dan Fodio, Ibn Idris, Tijdni, and `Umar Tal.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Awn, Peter J. “Sufism.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 14, pp. 104-123. New York, 1987. Good introduction to the medieval foundations of Sufi beliefs and orders.
SUFISM: Sufi Shrine Culture            117
Baldick, Julian. Mystical Islam: An Introduction to Sufism. New York and London, 1989. Broad historical presentation providing critiques of a number of interpretations of Sufism in the modern era as well as a helpful list of major orders.
Bennigsen, Alexandre, and S. Enders Wimbush. Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union. Berkeley, 1985. The best source on the experience of Sufi orders under Soviet rule.
Gilsenan, Michael. Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt. Oxford, 1973. Important analysis of the general issues involved in the development of orders in the modern era, using the Hamidiyah Shadhiliyah as a case study.
Hoffman-Ladd, Valerie. Sufism, Mystics, and Saints in Modern Egypt. Charleston, S.C., 1995. Important study showing the continuing vitality of Sufi organizations at the level of popular religion.
Jong, F. de. Turuq and Turuq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Leiden, 1978. Careful and detailed discussion of Egyptian orders and their relations with the state.
Lings, Martin. A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaykh Ahmad al-`Alawi. Berkeley, 1973. Sympathetic presentation showing the basis for the continuing appeal of Sufism in the modern era.
Mardin, Serif. Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. Albany, N.Y. 1989. Study of the experience of a revivalist Sufi tradition in the context of official Turkish secularism.
Martin, B. G. Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-Century Africa. Cambridge, 1976. Well-documented study of major African activist orders in their historical context.
Massignon, Louis. “Tarika.” In Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by H. A. R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers, pp. 573-578. Leiden, 1953. An old but still useful summary of the development of the orders, with a long descriptive list.
O’Fahey, R. S. Enigmatic Saint: Ahmad Ibn Idris and the Idrisi Tradition. London and Evanston, Ill., 1990. Very important study of a major tariqah tradition that emerged at the beginning of the modern era.
Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975. Sound and readable presentation of the full range of issues related to understanding Sufism.
Schimmel, Annemarie. Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. Leiden, 1980. Very helpful interpretation giving special attention to the role of the orders in South Asia.
Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford, 1971. The single most comprehensive presentation of the origin and development of the orders.
Voll, John Obert. “Traditional and Conservative Orders.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 52¢ (November 1992): 66-78. Discussion of the more conservative orders and their role in the modern period.
JOHN O. VOLL

Sufi Shrine Culture

SUFISM

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufi-orders/feed/ 0 SUFISM https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufism/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufism/#respond Thu, 17 Aug 2017 15:01:29 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufism/ SUFISM. [This entry comprises three articles: Sufi Thought and Practice Sufi Orders Sufi Shrine Culture The first provides an overview of the traditional themes, practices, […]

]]> SUFISM. [This entry comprises three articles: Sufi Thought and Practice Sufi Orders
Sufi Shrine Culture
The first provides an overview of the traditional themes, practices, literatures, and institutions of Sufism; the second surveys the development and spread of Sufi orders throughout the Muslim world; and the third treats the spiritual, social, and political significance of Sufi shrines. See also Sufism and Politics.]
Sufi Thought and Practice
In a broad sense, Sufism can be described as the interiorization and intensification of Islamic faith and practice. The Arabic term sufi, however, has been used in a wide variety of meanings over the centuries, both by proponents and opponents, and this is reflected in the primary and secondary sources, which offer diverse interpretations of what Sufism entails. Western observers have not helped to clarify the matter by referring to Sufism as “Islamic mysticism” or sometimes “Islamic esotericism.” Such terms are vague and often imply a negative value judgment, as well as encouraging people to consider as non-Sflfi anything that does not fit into preconceived notions.
The original sense of sufi seems to have been “one who wears wool.” By the eighth century the word was sometimes applied to Muslims whose ascetic inclinations led them to wear coarse and uncomfortable woolen garments. Gradually it came to designate a group who differentiated themselves from others by emphasis on certain specific teachings and practices of the Qur’an and the sunnah. By the ninth century the gerund form tasawwuf, literally “being a Sufi” or “Sufism,” was adopted by representatives of this group as their appropriate designation.
In general, the Sufis have looked upon themselves as Muslims who take seriously God’s call to perceive his presence both in the world and in the self. They tend to stress inwardness over outwardness, contemplation over action, spiritual development over legalism, and cultivation of the soul over social interaction. On the theological level, Sufis speak of God’s mercy, gentleness, and beauty far more than they discuss the wrath, severity, and majesty that play important roles in both fiqh (jurisprudence) and kalam (dogmatic theology). Sufism has been associated not only with specific institutions and individuals but also with an enormously rich literature, especially poetry. [See Fiqh; Theology.]
Given the difficulty of providing an exact definition of Sufism, it is not easy to discern which Muslims have been Sufis and which have not. Being a Sufi certainly has nothing to do with the Sunni/Shi’i split nor with the schools of jurisprudence. It has no special connection with geography, though it has played a greater role in some locations than in others. There is no necessary correlation with family, and it is common to find individuals who profess a Sufi affiliation despite the hostility of family members, or people who have been born into a family of Sfifis yet consider it an unacceptable form of Islam. Both men and (less commonly) women become Sufis, and even children participate in Sfifi ritual activities, though they are seldom accepted as fullfledged members before puberty. Sufism has nothing to do with social class, although some Sfifi organizations may be more or less class specific. Sufism is closely associated with popular religion, but it has also produced the most elite expressions of Islamic teachings. It is often seen as opposed to the state-supported jurists, yet jurists have always been counted among its devotees, and Sufism has frequently been supported by the state along with jurisprudence. The characteristic Sfifi institutions-the “orders” (tariqahs)-do not begin to play a major role in Islamic history until about the twelfth century, but even after that time being a Sfifi has not necessarily entailed membership in an order.
Working Description. Specialists in the study of Sufism have reached no consensus as to what they are studying. Those who take seriously the self-understanding of the Sfifi authorities usually picture Sufism as an essential component of Islam. Those who are hostile toward Sufism, or hostile toward Islam but sympathetic toward Sufism, or skeptical of any self-understanding by the objects of their study, typically describe Sufism as a movement that was added to Islam after the prophetic period. The diverse theories of Sufism’s nature and ori
gins proposed by modern and premodern scholars cannot be summarized here. The best one can do is to suggest that most of Sufism’s own theoreticians have understood it to be the living spirit of the Islamic tradition. One of the greatest Sfifi teachers, Abfi Hamid alGhazali (d. 1111), gives a nutshell description of Sufism’s role within Islam in the very title of his magnum opus, Ihya’ `ulum al-din (Giving Life to the Sciences of the Religion).
Understood as Islam’s life-giving core, Sufism is coextensive with Islam. Wherever there have been Muslims, there have been Sufis. If there was no phenomenon called “Sufism” at the time of the Prophet, neither was there anything called “fiqh” or kalam in the later senses of these terms. All these are names that came to be applied to various dimensions of Islam after the tradition became diversified and elaborated. If one wants to call the Sufi dimension “mysticism,” then one needs an exceedingly broad description of the role that mysticism plays in religion, such as that provided by Louis Dupre, who writes that religions “retain their vitality only as long as their members continue to believe in a transcendent reality with which they can in some way communicate by direct experience” (“Mysticism,” Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade, New York, 1987, vol. 10, p. 247).
In historical terms, it is helpful to think of Sufism on two levels. On the first level-which is the primary focus of the Sufi authorities themselves-Sufism has no history, because it is the invisible, animating life of the Muslim community. On the second level, which concerns both Muslim authors and modern historians, Sufism’s presence is made known through certain observable characteristics of people and society or certain specific institutional forms. Sufi authors who looked at Sufism on the second level wanted to describe how the great Muslims achieved the goal of human life, nearness to God. Hence their typical genre was hagiography, which aims at bringing out the extraordinary human qualities of those who achieve divine nearness. In contrast, Muslim opponents of Sufism have been anxious to show that Sufism is a distortion of Islam, and they have happily seized on any opportunity to associate Sufism with unbelief and moral laxity (see Carl Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism, Albany, 1985, pp. 117ff.).
The attacks on Sufism frequent in Islamic history have many causes. Not least of these has been the social and political influence of $fife teachers, which often threatened the power and privileges of jurists and even rulers. Although the great Sufi authorities set down many guidelines for keeping Sufism squarely at the heart of the Islamic tradition, popular religious movements that aimed at intensifying religious experience and had little concern for Islamic norms were also associated with Sufism. Whether or not the members of these movements considered themselves Su fis, opponents of Sufism were happy to claim that their excesses represented Sufism’s true nature. The Sufi authorities themselves frequently criticized false Sfifis, and the dangers connected with loss of contact with the ahistorical core of Sufism could only increase when much of Sufism became institutionalized through the Sfifi orders (see, for example, the criticisms by the sixteenth century Sufi `Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha’rani in Michael Winter, Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt: Studies in the Writings of `Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha’rani, New Brunswick, N.J., 1982, pp. 102ff.). If Sufism is essentially invisible and ahistorical, the problem faced by those who study specific historical phenomena is how to judge the degree to which these deserve the name Sufism. The Sufi authorities typically answer that the criteria of authentic Sufism are found in correct activity and correct understanding, and these pertain to the very definition of Islam.
In looking for a Qur’anic name for the phenomenon that later generations came to call Sufism, some authors settled on the term ihsan, “doing what is beautiful,” a divine and human quality about which the Qur’an says a good deal, mentioning in particular that God loves those who possess it. In the famous hadith of Gabriel, the Prophet describes ihsan as the innermost dimension of Islam, after Islam (“submission” or correct activity) and iman (“faith” or correct understanding). Ihsan is a deepened understanding and experience that, in the words of this hadith, allows one “to worship God as if you see him.” This means that Sufis strive always to be aware of God’s presence in both the world and themselves and to act appropriately. Historically, islam became manifest through the shad ‘ah and jurisprudence, whereas iman became institutionalized through kalam and other forms of doctrinal teachings. In the same way, ihsan revealed its presence mainly through Sufi teachings and practices (see W. C. Chittick, Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts, Albany, 1992, parts i and 4). [See !man.]
By codifying the shari`ah jurisprudence delineates the exact manner in which people should submit their activities to God. Kalam defines the contents of Islamic faith while providing a rational defense for the Qur’an and the hadith. For its part, Sufism focuses on giving both submission and faith their full due. Hence it functions on two levels, theory (corresponding to iman) and practice (corresponding to islam). On the theoretical level, Sufism explains the rationale for both faith and submission. Its explanations of faith differ from those of kalam both in perspective and in focus, but they are no less carefully rooted in the sources of the tradition. On the practical level, Sufism explains the means whereby Muslims can strengthen their understanding and observance of Islam with a view toward finding God’s presence in themselves and the world. It intensifies Islamic ritual life through careful attention to the details of the sunnah and by focusing on the remembrance of God’s name (dhikr), which is commanded by the Qur’an and the hadith and is taken by the Sufi authorities as the raison d’etre of all Islamic ritual. Dhikr typically takes the form of the methodical repetition of certain names of God or Qur’anic formulas, such as the first Shahadah. In communal gatherings, Sufis usually perform dhikr aloud, often with musical accompaniment. In some Sufi groups these communal sessions became the basic ritual, with corresponding neglect of various aspects of the sunnah. At this point Sufi practice became suspect not only in the eyes of the jurists, but also in the eyes of most Sufi authorities.
Like other branches of Islamic learning, Sufism is passed down from master (typically called a shaykh) to disciple. The master’s oral teachings give life to the articles of faith, and without his transmission, dhikr is considered invalid if not dangerous. As with hadith, transmission is traced back through a chain of authorities (called silsilah) to the Prophet. The typical initiation rite is modeled on the handclasp known as bay’at al-ridwan (the oathtaking of God’s good pleasure) that the Prophet exacted from his companions at Hudaybiyah, referred to in the Qur’an, surah 48.1o and 48.18. The rite is understood to transmit an invisible spiritual force or blessing (barakah) that makes possible the transformation of the disciple’s soul. The master’s fundamental concern-as in other forms of Islamic learning-is to shape the character (khuluq) of the disciple so that it conforms to the prophetic model. [See Dhikr; Shaykh; Barakah.]
If molding the character of students and disciples was a universal concern of Islamic teaching, the Sufis developed a science of human character traits that had no parallels in jurisprudence or theology, though the philosophers knew something similar. Ibn al `Arab! (d. 1240), Sufism’s greatest theoretician, described Sufism as “assuming the character traits of God” (Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge, Albany, 1989, P. 283). Since God created human beings in his own image, it is their duty to actualize the divine character traits that are latent in their own souls. This helps explain the great attention that Sufi authorities devote to the “stations” (maqdmdt) of spiritual ascent on the path to God and the “states” (ahwal) or psychological transformations that spiritual travelers undergo in their attempt to pass through the stations.
Sufi theory offered a theological perspective that was far more attractive to the vast majority of Muslims than kalam, which was an academic exercise with little practical impact on most people. From the beginning, the kaldm experts attempted to understand Qur’anic teachings in rational terms with the help of methods drawn from Greek thought. In keeping with the inherent tendency of reason to discern and differentiate, kalam fastened on all those Qur’anic verses that assert the transcendence and otherness of God. When faced with verses that assert God’s immanence and presence, kaldm explained them away through forced interpretations (ta’wil). As H. A. R. Gibb has pointed out, “The more developed theological systems were largely negative and substituted for the vivid personal relation between God and man presented by the Koran an abstract and depersonalized discussion of logical concepts” (Mohammedanism, London, 1961, p. 127). Ibn al `Arabs made a similar point when he said that if Muslims had been left only with theological proofs, none of them would ever have loved God (Chittick, Sufi Path, p. 180). [See the biography of Ibn al-`Arab!.]
The Qur’an speaks of God with a wide variety of terminology that can conveniently be summarized as God’s “most beautiful names” (al-asmd’ al-husnd). For the most part, kalam stresses those names that assert God’s severity, grandeur, distance, and aloofness. Although many early expressions of Sufism went along with the dominant attitudes in kaldm, another strand of Sufi thinking gradually gained strength and became predominant by the eleventh or twelfth century. This perspective focused on divine names that speak of nearness, sameness, similarity, concern, compassion, and love. The Sufi teachers emphasized the personal dimensions of the divine-human relationship, agreeing with the kalam authorities that God was distant, but holding that his simultaneous nearness was the more important consideration. The grand theological theme of the Sufi authors is epitomized in the hadith qudsi in which God says, “My mercy takes precedence over my wrath,” which is to say that God’s nearness is more real than his distance.
If kalam and jurisprudence depended on reason to establish categories and distinctions, the Sufi authorities depended on another faculty of the soul to bridge gaps and make connections. Many of them referred to this faculty as imagination (khayal) and considered it the power of the soul that can perceive the presence of God in all things. They read literally the Qur’anic verse, “Wherever you turn, there is the face of God” (2:115), and they find a reference to imagination’s power to perceive this face in the Prophet’s definition of ihsan: “It is to worship God as if you see him.” Through methodical concentration on the face of God as revealed in the Qur’an, the Sufis gradually remove the “as if’ so that they are left with “unveiling” (kashf), the generic term for suprarational vision of God’s presence in the world and the soul. Ibn al-‘Arabi asserts that unveiling is a mode of knowledge superior to reason, but he also insists that reason provides the indispensable checks and balances without which it is impossible to differentiate among divine, angelic, psychic, and satanic inrushes of imaginal knowledge.
Spectrums of Sufi Theory and Practice. One way to classify the great variety of phenomena that have been called Sufism in Islamic history is to look at the types of responses they have made to basic Islamic theological teachings. Tawhid, the fundamental assertion of Islam, declares that God is one, but it also implies that the world is many. The connection between God’s oneness and the world’s manyness can be found in God’s eternal knowledge of all things, on the basis of which he creates an infinitely diverse universe and reveals scriptures that differentiate between true and false, right and wrong, absolute and relative, and all other qualities that have a bearing on human salvation. Oneness and manyness represent two poles not only of reality but also of thought. Imaginal thinking tends to see the oneness and identity of things, while rational thinking focuses on manyness, diversity, and difference. A creative tension has existed between these two basic ways of looking at God and the world throughout Islamic history. By and large, the kalam authorities and jurists have emphasized the rational perception of God’s distance, while the Sufi authorities have countered with the imaginal perception of God’s nearness. On occasion the balance between these two perspectives has been broken by a stern and exclusivist legalism on one hand or an excessively emotional religiosity on the other. In the first case, the understanding of the inner domains of Islamic experience is lost, and nothing is left but legal nit-picking and theological bickering. In the second case, the necessity for the divine guidance provided by the shad `ah is forgotten, and the resulting sectarian movements break off from Islam’s mainstream. In modern times these two extremes are represented by certain forms of fundamentalism on one side and deracinated Sufism on the other (for an interesting case study, see Mark Woodward, Islam in Java, Tucson, 1989, especially pp. 234ff.).
Within the theory and practice of Sufism itself, a parallel differentiation of perspectives can be found. Many expressions of Sufism vigorously assert the reality of God’s omnipresent oneness and the possibility of union with him, while others emphasize the duties of servanthood that arise out of discerning among the many things and discriminating between Creator and creature, absolute and relative, or right and wrong. In order to describe the psychological accompaniments of these two emphases, the Sfifis offer various sets of terms, such as “intoxication” (sukr) and “sobriety” (sahw) or “annihilation” (fand’) and “subsistence” (baqa’). Intoxication follows upon being overcome by the presence of God: the Sfifi sees God in all things and loses the ability to discriminate among creatures. Intoxication is associated with intimacy (uns), the sense of God’s loving nearness, and this in turn is associated with the divine names that assert that God is close and caring. Sobriety is connected with awe (haybah), the sense that God is majestic, mighty, wrathful, and distant, far beyond the petty concerns of human beings. God’s distance and aloofness allow for a clear view of the difference between servant and Lord, but his nearness blinds the discerning powers of reason. Perfect vision of the nature of things necessitates a balance between reason and imaginal unveiling.
The contrast between sober and drunk, or the vision of oneness and the vision of manyness, reverberates throughout Sfifi writing and is reflected in the hagiographical accounts of the Sfifi masters. Those who experience intimacy are boldly confident of God’s mercy, while those who experience awe remain wary of God’s wrath. By and large, drunken Sufis tend to deemphasize the shari`ah and declare union with God openly, whereas sober Sufis observe the courtesy (adab) that relationships with the Lord demand. The sober fault the drunk for disregarding the sunnah, and the drunk fault the sober for forgetting the overriding reality of God’s mercy and depending on reason instead of God. Those who, in Ibn al-`Arabi’s terms, “see with both eyes” keep reason and unveiling in perfect balance while acknowledging the rights of both sober and drunk.
Expressions of sobriety and intoxication often have rhetorical purposes. An author who disregards rational norms has not necessarily been overcome by the divine wine-if he had, he would hardly have put pen to paper. So also, sober expressions of Sufism do not mean that the authors know nothing of intoxication; typically, sobriety is described as a station that follows intoxication, since the sobriety that precedes intoxication is in fact the intoxication of forgetfulness. Sfifis always wrote for the purpose of edification, and different teachers attempted to inculcate psychological attitudes reflecting the needs they perceived in their listeners.
Drunken expressions of Sufism predominate in Sufi poetry, which is ideally suited to describe the imaginal realm of unveiled knowledge, the vision of union and oneness. In contrast, reason is locked into theological abstractions that keep the servant distant from the Lord; it is perfectly adapted to the expression of system, order, and rules. If Sfifi poetry constantly reminds us of God’s presence, Sfifi prose tends toward a rational discourse that is ideal for manuals of doctrine and practice-works that always keep one eye on the opinions of the jurists and the kaldm experts. Poetic licence allowed the Sfifi poets to say things that could not be expressed openly in prose. In the best examples, such as Ibn alFarid in Arabic, `Attar, Rumi, and Hafiz in Persian, and Yunus Emre in Turkish, the poetry gives rise to a marvellous joy and intoxication in the listener and conveys the experience of God’s presence in creation. Since this experience flies in the face of juridical and theological discourse, it is sometimes expressed in ways that shock the pious (for a good study of the role of poetry and music in contemporary Sufism, see Earl H. Waugh, The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song, Columbia, S.C., 1989). [See Devotional Music; Devotional Poetry.]
For many Western observers, whether scholars or would-be practitioners, “real” Sufism has been identified with the drunken manifestations that denigrate the external and practical concerns of “orthodox” Islam. It is seldom noted that many of those who express themselves in the daring poetry of union also employ the respectful prose of separation and servanthood. Drunken Sufism rarely demonstrates interest in juridical issues or theological debates, whereas sober Sufism offers methodical discussions of these topics that can quickly prove tiring to any but those trained in the Islamic sciences. The poets address the highest concerns of the soul and employ the most delicious and enticing imagery; the theoreticians discuss details of practice, behavior, moral development, Qur’anic exegesis, and the nature of God and the world. Drunken Sufism has always been popular among Muslims of all classes and persuasions, and even the most literal-minded jurists are likely to enjoy the poetry while condemning the ideas. Sober Sufism has attacted the more educated Sufi practitioners who were willing to devote long hours to studying texts that were no easier than works on jurisprudence, kalam, or philosophy.
For Sufism to remain whole, it needs to keep a balance between sobriety and drunkenness, reason and unveiling-that is, between concern for the shari` `ah and Islamic doctrine on one hand and for the experience of God’s presence on the other. If sobriety is lost, so also is rationality, and along with it the strictures of isldm and imdn; if drunkenness is lost, so also is religious experience, along with love, compassion, and ihsdn. Within Sufism’s diverse forms, a wide range of perspectives is observable, depending on whether the stress falls on oneness or manyness, love or knowledge, intoxication or sobriety. Too much stress on either side means that Sufism becomes distorted and ceases to be itself, but where the line must be drawn is impossible to say with any precision.
The classic example of the contrast between drunken and sober Sufism is found in the pictures drawn of Hallaj (d. 922) and Junayd (d. 91o). The first became Sufism’s great martyr because of his open avowal of the mysteries of divine union and his disregard for the niceties of shariatic propriety. The second, known as the “master of all the Sufis” (shaykh al-td’ifah), kept coolly sober despite achieving the highest degree of union with God. Another example can be found in the contrast between the two high points of the whole Sufi tradition, Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 1240) and Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273). The former wrote voluminously in Arabic prose and addressed every theoretical and practical issue that arises within the context of Islamic thought and practice. His works are enormously erudite and exceedingly difficult, and only the most learned of Muslims who were already trained in jurisprudence, kalam, and other Islamic sciences could hope to read and understand them. In contrast, Rumi wrote more than seventy thousand verses of intoxicating poetry in a language that every Persianspeaking Muslim could understand. He sings constantly of the trials of separation from the Beloved and the joys of union with him. But the contrast between the two authors should not suggest that Rum! was irrational or unlearned, or that Ibn al-`Arabi was not a lover of God and a poet; it is rather a case of rhetorical means and emphasis. Among Western scholars, Henry Corbin argues forcefully that Rumi and Ibn al-`Arabi belong to the same group of fideles d’amour (Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn `Arabi, Princeton, 1969, pp. 70-71).
In the classical Sufi texts there are two basic and complementary ways of describing Sufism. If the drunken side of Sufism is stressed, it is contrasted with jurisprudence and kalam; if sobriety is stressed, it is viewed as the perfection (ihsan) of right practice (isldm) and right faith (iman). The great theoreticians of Sufism, who speak from the viewpoint of sobriety, strive to establish a balance among all dimensions of Islamic thought and practice, with Sufism as the animating spirit of the whole. These thinkers include Sarraj (d. 988), Kalabadhi (d. 99o), Sulami (d. 1021), Qushayri (d. 1072), Hujwiri (d. 1072), Ghazali, Shihab al-Din `Umar Suhrawardi (d. 1234), Ibn al-`Arabi, Najm al-Din Razi (d. 1256), and `Izz al-Din Kashani (d. 1334/35) In contrast, the actual everyday practice of Sufism, especially in its popular dimensions, tends to appear antagonistic toward legalistic Islam, even though this is by no means always the case (see, for example, Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo, Princeton, 1992, especially chapter 3, which makes clear that Sufis and jurists have sometimes been indistinguishable).
Sufism in the Modern World. In the modern period many Muslims have sought a revival of authentically Islamic teachings and practices, not least in order to fend off Western hegemony. Some have responded largely in political terms, while others have tried to revive Islam’s inner life. Among most of the politically minded, Sufism became the scapegoat through which Islam’s “backwardness” could be explained. In this view, Sufism is the religion of the common people and embodies superstition and un-Islamic elements adopted from local cultures; in order for Islam to reclaim its birthright, which includes modern science and technology, Sufism must be eradicated. Until recently most Western observers have considered the modernist reformers to be “Islam’s hope to enter the modern age.” Nowadays, the dissolution of Western cultural identity and an awareness of the ideological roots of ideas such as progress and development have left the modernists looking naive and sterile. In the meantime, various Sufi teachers have been busy reviving the Islamic heritage by focusing on what they consider the root cause of every disorderforgetfulness of God. Especially interesting here is the case of the famous Algerian freedom fighter `Abd alQadir Jaza’1ri (d. 1883), who devoted his exile in Syria to reviving the heritage of Ibn al-‘Arabi (see Emir Abd el-Kader, Ecrits spirituels, translated by M. Chodkiewicz, Paris, 1982). [See the biography of `Abd al-Qadir.] Today grassroots Islam is far more likely to be inspired by Sufi teachers than by modernist intellectuals, who are cut off from the masses because of their Westernstyle academic training. The presence of demagogues who have no qualms about manipulating religious sentiment for their own ends complicates the picture immensely.
Parallel to the resurgence of Sufism in the Islamic world has been the spread of Sflfi teachings to the West. In America, drunken Sufism was introduced in the early part of this century by the Chisti shaykh and musician Inayat Khan (The Complete Works, Tucson, 1988); his teachings have been continued by his son, Pir Vilayet Inayat Khan, a frequent lecturer on the New Age circuit. In Europe, sober Sufism gained a wide audience among intellectuals through the writings of the French metaphysician Rene Guenon, who died in Cairo in 1951 (The Symbolism of the Cross, London, 1958). More recently hundreds of volumes have been published in Western languages that are addressed to Sufi seekers and reflect the range of perspectives found in the original texts, from sobriety to intoxication. Many of these works are written by authentic representatives of Sflfi silsilahs, but many more are written by people who have adopted Sufism to justify teachings of questionable origin, or who have left the safeguards of right practice and right thought-!slam and !man-and hence have no access to the ihsan that is built upon the two.
Contemporary representatives of sober Sufism emphasize knowledge, discernment, and differentiation and usually stress the importance of the shari’ah. Best known in this group is Frithjof Schuon (Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, London, 1976), who makes no explicit claims in his books to Sufi affiliations but, as reviewers have often remarked, writes with an air of spiritual authority. He is said to be a member of the Shadhiliyah-`Alawiyah order of North Africa (G. C. Anawati and L. Gardet, Mystique musulmane, Paris, 1968, p. 72). He takes an extreme position on the importance of discernment and offers a rigorous criticism of the roots of modern antireligion. The main thrust of his writings seems to be to offer a theory of world religions based on the idea of a universal esoterism, the Islamic form of which is Sufism. He frequently asserts the necessity for esoterists of all religions to observe the exoteric teachings of their traditions, this being the shari `ah in the case of Islam. Titus Burckhardt (Fez: City of Islam, Cambridge, England, 1992) represents a similar perspective, but his works are more explicitly grounded in traditional Sufi teachings. Martin Lings (What is Sufism?, Berkeley, 1975), who has also published under the name Abu Bakr Siraj ed-Din (The Book of Certainty, London, 1952), presents a picture of Sufism that is intellectually rigorous but firmly grounded in explicit Islamic teachings. The noted Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Sufi Essays, London, 1972) also stresses intellectual discernment more than love, and he repeatedly insists that there is no Sufism without the shari`ah. The books of the Turkish Cerrahi leader Muzaffer Ozak (The Unveiling of Love, New York, 1982) present shari’ah-oriented Sufism that is much more focused on love than on intellectual discernment. The Naqshbandi master Nazim al-Qubrusi (Mercy Ocean’s Divine Sources, London, 1983) offers a warm presentation of desirable human qualities, again rooted in a perspective that stresses love and often discusses the shariatic basis of Sufism. The Iranian Ni’matullahi leader Javad Nur-bakhsh (Sufi Symbolism, vols. 1-5, London, 1984-1991) has published several anthologies of classic Sflfi texts; his own perspective falls on the side of intoxication, with emphasis on oneness of being and union with God. He pays little attention to the shari`ah, but he discusses the importance of Sufi communal activities such as sessions of dhikr. Even more to the side of love and intoxication are the works of Guru Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (Golden Words of A Sufi Sheikh, Philadelphia, 1982), who presents a synthesis of Sufism and Hindu teachings that is recognizably Islamic only in its terminology.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Addas, Claude. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn `Arab!. Cambridge, 1993. Fascinating study of the inner life and historical context of Sulism’s greatest theoretician.
Andrae, Tor. In the Garden of Myrtles: Studies in Early Islamic Mysticism. Albany, N.Y., 1987. Sympathetic account of trends in early Sufism, with frequent comparisons to Christianity.
Ansari al-Harawi, `Abd Allah ibn Muhammad. Les etapes des itinerants vers dieu. Translated by Serge de Laugier de Beaurecueil. Cairo, 1962. French translation of a classic text on the stations of the Sufi path, Manazil al-sa’irin.
Awn, Peter J. Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology. Leiden, 1983. Illustrates how Sufis could offer unusual insight into the human condition by reversing the normal theological perception of things.
Baldick, Julian. Mystical Islam. New York and London, 1989. Study of the origins and development of Sufism by perhaps the last specialist to believe that the key to understanding Sufism lies in tracing lines of historical influence.
Bowering, Gerhard. The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Quranic Hermeneutics of the Suft Sahl At-Tustari (d. 283/896). New York, 198o. Erudite study of an important early Sufi.
Chittick, William C. The Sufi Path to Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. Albany, N.Y., 1983. Anthology of Rami’s poetry, arranged to illustrate the theoretical underpinnings of his worldview. Chodkiewicz, Michel. An Ocean without Shore: Ibn ‘Arabi, the Book, and the Law. Albany, N.Y., 1993. Fine exposition of Ibn al’Arab-i’s grounding in the Qur’an.
Corbin, Henry. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Boulder, 1978. Fascinating study of the role of light and imagination in Sufi theoretical teachings.
Farid al-Din `Attar. Muslim Saints and Mystics. Translated by A. J. Arberry. Chicago, 1966. One of the classics of Sufi hagiography, partially translated by a prolific translator of Sufi texts.
Farid al-Din `Attar. The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. New York, 1984. Successful poetic version of a symbolic tale by the Persian poet `Attar.
Ghazali, Abu Hamid al-. Freedom and Fulfillment: An Annotated Translation of al-Ghazali’s al-Munqidh min al-Daldl and Other Relevant Works of al-Ghazali. Translated by Richard J. McCarthy. Boston, 1980. The best study of al-Ghazali’s Sufism.
Hujwiri, ‘Ali ibn `Uthman al-. The Kashf al-Mahjub: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism. Translated by Reynold A. Nicholson. Reprint, London, 1970. One of several still useful translations and studies by a great scholar of Sufism.
Lings, Martin. A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century. 2d ed. London, 1971. Sympathetic account of a contemporary Sufi master of North Africa.
Massignon, Louis. The Passion of al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam. 4 vols. Princeton, 1982. Monumental study of al-Hallaj’s historical context and importance in Sufism.
Murata, Sachiko. The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought. Albany, N.Y., 1992. Broad survey of Sufi and philosophical views on God, the cosmos, and the human soul, with special attention to the Islamic views of male and female.
Najm al-Din Razi, `Abd Allah ibn Muhammad. The Path of God’s Bondsmen. Translated by Hamid Algar. Delmar, N.Y., 1982. Readable translation of a classic Persian text that provides one version of Sufi cosmology and psychology and their relevance to a life of devotion to God.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Islamic Spirituality, vol. 1, Foundations; vol. 2, Manifestations. New York, 1987-iggo. The best overview of the whole range of Sufism’s teachings and historical manifestations. Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975. The best overview of the Sufi tradition.
Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford, 1971. Good historical survey of the orders, along with descriptions of basic Sufi teachings and practices.
WILLIAM C. CHITTICK

Sufi Orders

Sufi Shrine Culture

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/17/sufism/feed/ 0 SUAVI, ALI https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/suavi-ali/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/suavi-ali/#respond Sun, 13 Aug 2017 15:38:56 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/suavi-ali/ SUAVI, ALI (1839-1878), a popular reformist figure of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Suavi exemplifies the ideas of conservative Ottomans who were drawn into a struggle […]

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SUAVI, ALI (1839-1878), a popular reformist figure of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Suavi exemplifies the ideas of conservative Ottomans who were drawn into a struggle for the expression of the popular will. Although trained in the modern educational system of the rusdiye, the secular postprimary schools established during the Tanzimat reforms, he assumed the role of a spokesperson for a type of popular discontent with the Tanzimat which was expressed in a religious idiom. His ideas acquired a wide audience when he began to contribute to a newspaper published in Istanbul, Muhbir.
Suavi joined the Young Ottoman leaders Mehmet Namik Kemal and Mehmet Ziya Pasa when they fled to Europe, and he was the editor of the first newspaper published by these exiles, also titled Muhbir. It soon became clear that there were fundamental differences between his political ideals and those of Kemal and Ziya. Suavi was suspicious of parliamentary government, and his idea of democracy was one in which the just ruler dealt directly with his subjects. After leaving the Young Ottomans, Suavi devoted himself to the publication of Ulum, an encyclopedic periodical. This attempt to demonstrate that conservative Muslims like himself could keep abreast of Western scientific knowledge predated that of better-known nineteenth-century Muslim thinkers, such as Jamdl al-Din al-Afghani (1838/39-1897) who wrote in the same vein. Returning from France, where he had established himself after the dethroning of Sultan Abdulaziz (1876), he was made the director of the Galatasary Lycee, a school for training the Ottoman elite in conformity with a French program of instruction. He was dismissed owing to his incompetence. Abdiilaziz’s successor, Murad V, had a short reign, having been found mentally unbalanced. In 1878, Suavi attempted to reestablish Murad, but was killed during the coup that he organized.
Suavi’s populism was bolstered by an Islamic conception of politics that underscores the differences between his worldview and that of the Young Ottomans. Suavi found Kemal’s principle of popular sovereignty to be meaningless. In response to the Young Ottomans’ separation of powers, he proposed the “unity of the imamate,” referring to all forms of leadership. Suavi also believed that violence was a legitimate means of achieving the just political system; here, too, he was at odds with Kemal. Suavi believed that the natural social hierarchy was one where the `ulama’ occupied a position of arbiter of sociopolitical regulations. This type of elitism coexisting with a sincere populism provides us a model of the ideas that were to appear much later in the thought of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989) and underlines the necessity to see Islamic social ideals as incommensurable with those of Western democracy. Suavi’s literary style was also a harbinger of “pure” Turkish to be used increasingly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was one of the first persons to explore the original identity of Ottomans as “Turks” in a wellknown article that appeared in his Ulum, published in Europe after his split with the Young Ottomans.
[See also Tanzimat; Young Ottomans; and the biography of Kemal. ]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mardin, Serif. 1962. Uzuncarsili Ismail Hakki. “Ali Suavi ve Ciragan Sarayi Vak’asi.” Belleten 8 (1944): 71-I18.
The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. Princeton,
SERIF MARDIN

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/suavi-ali/feed/ 0 STEREOTYPES IN MASS MEDIA https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/stereotypes-mass-media/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/stereotypes-mass-media/#respond Sun, 13 Aug 2017 15:29:18 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/stereotypes-mass-media/ STEREOTYPES IN MASS MEDIA. Numerous Americans come to know approximately 250 million Arabs and more than one billion Muslims from mainstream mass media, in particular, […]

]]> STEREOTYPES IN MASS MEDIA. Numerous Americans come to know approximately 250 million Arabs and more than one billion Muslims from mainstream mass media, in particular, television programs and motion pictures, which provide virtually most images citizens have of the peoples of the world.

Thorough examination of more than 500 feature films and hundreds of television programs, comic books and strips, music recordings, newspapers and magazines (complete with advertisements, crossword puzzles, and editorial cartoons), plus school textbooks, novels and reference works, computer and video games, and scores of graphic images emanating from other communication channels reveals stereotypical portraits of Arab Muslims. Although more than 15 million Arab Christians reside in the Middle East-ranging from Eastern Orthodox to Roman Catholic to Protestant-they are invisible in the media. Thus, the Arab-as-Muslim theme positions itself firmly in peoples’ psyches.
Seemingly mindlessly adopted and casually adapted, prominent images present the Muslim as the bogeyman, the quintessential Other. How else to explain the actions taken by a student at the University of Wisconsin who sent this message to an Iranian student: “Death to all Arabs, die, Islamic scumbags” (“College Debate: Free Speech versus Freedom from Bigotry,” Chicago Tribune, 8 March 1991, p. 2). Often, imagemakers lump together Arab, Iranian, or Turkish Muslims as dark-complexioned people, flaunting beards or moustaches.
Selective media framing makes belittling Islam feasible. Screen scenarios often reinforce audiences’ misperceptions by declaring that the Muslim man deceives, suppresses, and abuses white Western females. In Not without My Daughter (1990), for example, the Iranian protagonist treats his American wife like chattel; he slaps her face and keeps her prisoner in their home, boasting, “I’m a Muslim.” The film contends that Muslims are hypocrites; breaking his oath sworn on the Qur’an, the husband says, “Islam is the greatest gift I can give my daughter.” As his family leaves the mosque, posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini are featured, suggesting Muslims and ayatollahs are one and the same.
Rigid and repetitive news images of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein blend with scores of fictional motion pictures and television programs featuring Muslim terrorists shouting, “Allah be praised,” while murdering innocents. Deceptive portraits are mainstays; skewed documentaries are tagged The Sword of Islam and The Islamic Bomb, books are labeled The Assassins: Holy Killers of Islam, The Dagger of Islam, The Fire of Islam, Holy Wars, Inflamed Islam, and Militant Islam, and magazine essays are stamped “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (Atlantic Monthly, 1991) and “The Muslims Are Coming, The Muslims Are Coming!” (National Review, 1991). As a result of these representations, the media’s Arab Muslim lacks a human face.
Demonized and delegitimized, the Muslim surfaces as different. In Under Siege (1986), a television movie written in part by Bob Woodward, Muslims hailing from Dearborn, Michigan, are presented as anti-American “religious fanatics” willingly sacrificing their lives in “holy wars” for “the cause.” They topple the dome of the U.S. Capitol building and kill scores of American civilians. The FBI director explains to his associate that “those people,” Arab/Iranian Muslims, are different. The writers and producers, unable to distinguish Arabs from Iranians, portray them as one ethnic group, in spite of the fact that each group has its own distinctive origin, ethnicity, language, and cultural heritage. Subsequently, throughout the film, “Arab” is used interchangablely with “Iranian.” Referring to atrocities being committed by Muslims in the United States, the FBI director tells his associate: “It’s a whole different ball game. I mean the East and the Middle East. They have their own notion of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s worth living for and dying for. But we insist on dealing with them as if they’re the same as us. We’d better wake up!”
Stereotypical images and statements transmitted by media have a telling effect. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to the Gulf War. During this time, two prominent Americans, Senator J. J. Exon of Nebraska and former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Edward Peck offered comparable commentary about Arabs and Muslims. In remarks for which he later apologized (according to Casey Kasem), Exon said, “In the Arab world, life is not as important as in the non-Arab world” (Omaha World Herald, 3o August 1990, p. 3). Edward Peck stated on television, “We in the West tend to think of our New Testament heritage, where you turn the other cheek and you let bygones be bygones and forgive and forget. [But] the people of the Middle East are the people of the Old Testament. With Muslims there’s much more of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. You don’t forget and you don’t forgive; you carry on the vendetta and the struggle long after people in the West would be prepared to say it’s all right, it’s over, let’s not worry about it any longer” (NBC Nightly News, 16 January 1991).
To enhance the myth of Muslim otherness, imagemakers clothe him in foreign garb, such as strange “bedsheets.” Made up to have dark features, he is unattractive and in need of a shave. Speaking with a “foreign” accent, he poses an economic threat by using oil and/or terrorism as a weapon against developed societies. Most important, he is painted as worshiping a different deity and possessing an unprovoked hatred of “civilized” peoples, notably American Christians and Jews. “These bastards [Muslim hijackers] shot those people in cold blood. They think it’s open season on Americans,” explains a passenger in the television movie, Hostage Flight (1985). Journalist Edward R. Murrow said that what we do not see is as important, if not more important, than what we do see. Seldom do audiences see or read about a devout Muslim caring for his wife or children, writing poetry, or attending the sick.
Children’s cartoons, such as Inspector Gadget and Heathcliff, show Muslims glorifying not God, but idolizing Westerners. In an episode of Heathcliff, Egyptians, perceiving Heathcliff to be their ancient ruler, bow before the cat. When, in a Mr. Gadget episode, Gadget discovers an ancient relic, Arab hordes worship him. Falling to their knees, they mumble “the chosen one, the chosen one.”
Consider how the media paint two holy cities, Mecca and Jerusalem. In 1991, on CBS-TV’s top-rated 6o Minutes program, Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, neglects to mention Jerusalem’s Muslim population, stating instead that Jerusalem is a city inhabited by “Christians, Jews, and Arabs.”
The city of Mecca is the birthplace of Muhammad and the site of the Grand Mosque, the most sacred place in the Islamic World. Yet, dream merchants transform Mecca into a corrupt town, where offensive antics govern the moment. In 1966, producers of the successful television series I Dream of Jeannie represented Mecca not as a holy city with devout worshipers, but as a topsy-turvy bazaar filled with thieves robbing Western tourists (episode no. 16). The plot focused on Jeannie, a two-thousand-year-old genie, who will soon die unless she visit’s Mecca’s “thieves market.” In the “First National Bank of Mecca,” Jeannie’s friend performs ridiculous rituals. To save her life, he must “raise his right arm, . . . face the minaret of the rising sun, and repeat the sacred words: `bottle to genie, genie to master, master to Mecca. Ronda!’ ”
The dialogue and imagery in I Dream of Jeannie is designed to amuse; instead, it narrows our vision and blurs reality. In 1987, Ishtar, a $5o-million comedy, starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman continued this trend. Riddled with anti-Arab sentiments-Arab culture is labeled “devious,” and Hoffman is told, “Go act like an Arab”-Ishtar also lampoons Mecca with “I Look to Mecca,” a song concerning a romantic rendezvous under a tree. Islam’s holiest city and the pilgrimage to Mecca, a sacred journey that Muslims look forward to making all their lives, are belittled by sexual innuendo. There is a dangerous and cumulative effect when imagemakers continually transmit rigid and repetitive pictures of Muslims. Such imagery does not exist in a vacuum. Teaching viewers and readers whom to fear and whom to hate, the Muslim stereotype affects perceptions and subsequently U.S. public opinion and policy decisions.
Some public figures are recognizing the differences between image and reality. On 8 March 1991, following the Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf made these remarks to departing American troops in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: “You are going to take back home the fact that `Islam’ is not a word to be feared, a religion to be feared. It’s a religion to be respected, just as we respect all other religions. That’s the American way.” Although the general’s comments appeared in the Washington Post, his statements about Islam were not widely circulated.
Even imagemakers are gradually addressing negative portraits of Muslims. In the 1990s, producers of documentaries and feature films, print journalists, and others are presenting more accurate and humane portraits. Islam: A Civilization and Its Art (1991), is an informative ninety-minute documentary focusing on Islamic civilization, culture, and art. Legacy (1992), a PBS television documentary series, points out that Islam is “the true basis” of our culture. Host Michael Wood reveals that “the West’s rediscovery of its ancient science and knowledge of the Italian Renaissance was indebted to the Muslims.” Revealing scenes of mosques, mosaics and calligraphy, and devout Muslims at prayer underscore his commentary: “When Europe was still in the dark ages, the fertile crescent entered another glorious phase of its culture. Here, in the universities and libraries of Baghdad, Babylonian astronomy, Hindu mathematics, Chinese science and technology were passed on by Arabs. It was one of the great multicultural epochs of all time. The triumph of the modern West was made possible by a flood of ancient learning and science from Islam.”
The feature film, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), introduces Azeem, a Moorish Muslim. He is devout, intelligent, innovative, and Robin’s equal, both as a combatant and as a humanist. With Robin in the English countryside, Azeem takes his prayer rug, faces Mecca, and prays. He refuses to drink alcohol, “I must decline, Allah forbids it,” and he is tolerant of other faiths, “it is vanity to force other men to our religion.” Also, Azeem embraces other races and colors: “Allah loves wondrous variety.” Equipped with scimitar, Arab headdress, and robe, he not only manages to deliver a breech baby, but to save Robin’s life and the day by introducing the telescope and gunpowder to the British Isles. Robin acknowledges the Moor’s humanity, saying, “You truly are a great one.”
In Chicago magazine, journalist Gretchen Reynolds describes a service at a mosque, calling it “a revelation. Canonical and dignified, moving even if you don’t know the language, it evokes deep visceral emotion in Muslims attending. Some of the women start to cry. The people attending stand and kneel, call back to the khatib leading them. Anyone looking to have western preconceptions of Arab religion confirmed would be disappointed: There is no fanaticism here, only faith” (April 1991, p. 26).
Mindful that American Muslims are either dehumanized or neglected in media, on 6 February 1992, for the first time, the U.S. Senate invited an imam, W. Deen Mohammed, to offer the opening prayer. As for the future, the ultimate result should be an image of the Muslim as neither saint nor devil, but as a fellow human being, with all the potentials and frailities that condition implies.
JACK G.SHAHEEN

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/13/stereotypes-mass-media/feed/ 0 SOMALIA https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/12/somalia/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/12/somalia/#respond Sat, 12 Aug 2017 16:55:26 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/12/somalia/ SOMALIA. The Muslims of Somalia constitute almost 99 percent of an estimated population of eight to ten million. Four Sufi orders-the Qadiriyah, Ahmadiyah, Salihiyah and […]

]]> SOMALIA. The Muslims of Somalia constitute almost 99 percent of an estimated population of eight to ten million. Four Sufi orders-the Qadiriyah, Ahmadiyah, Salihiyah and Rifa’iyah-have greatly influenced Somali Islamic practices. As in other cultures, Somali Islam has incorporated some pre-Islamic customs, for example, obligatory prayers for rain often involving young children. Somali lore divides society into two main categories, the man of religion (wadaad) and the warrior (waranleh, literally “spearbearer”). Ideally, a wadaad is expected to mediate clan conflicts, thus remaining aloof from politics. Most Somalis belong to one of five clan-families subdivided into clans, subclans, and lineage groups.

Somalia’s geography has influenced its history; for centuries the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean have facilitated long-distance trade. The ancient world knew Somalia as the Land of Punt, a source of frankincense and myrrh. The Islamic epoch, starting in the tenth century, accelerated trends toward trade and settlements. Citystates such as Zeila, Bulhar, Berbera, Mogadishu, Merca, and Barawa were established. Forms of Islamic administration were adapted to the decentralized pastoral society. Islamic commercial laws and regulations, systems of weights and measures, navigation technologies, and security arrangements facilitated trade.
During the sixteenth century, highland Abyssinian (Ethiopian) rulers invaded the Muslim state of Adal to secure a passage to the sea. The Muslims were avenged by the famed Imam Ahmed Gurey (Ahmad Grafi). Pushing deep into the highlands, Imam Gurey turned the defensive wars into an expansionist campaign. He was eventually killed in 1542 when the Abyssinian armies were joined by at least four hundred Portuguese bearing modern firearms.
Contrary to its expansionist phase, Islam in Somalia found itself on the defensive during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the late nineteenth century, the British, French, and Italians and the Abyssinian Emperor Menelik colonized various parts of Somali territory. This led to the emergence of a radical Islamic revivalist movement, led by Sayyid Mohamed Abdille Hassan (Muhammad ibn `Abd Allah Hasan) from 1899 to 1920. His earlier efforts to mediate clan disputes and to preach anticolonialism won him fame and recruits. Sayyid Mohamed was also a great poet in a land of poets. However, his attempts to convert Somalis from the popular Qadiriyah into the puritanical Salihiyah sect met stiff resistance, bringing out a fanatical tendency in him. In 19o9 the Sayyid was allegedly implicated in the murder of the charismatic Qadiriyah shaykh Uways, who was propagating his order’s teachings in the southern interior among nominal Muslims and non-Muslims. In 1920 the British conducted aerial and ground assaults of his fortress at Taleh; the Sayyid escaped, and though defeated, he died peacefully in 1921. Many Somalis have derived one major conclusion from his legacy-the need to separate religious inspiration from secular power.
The fanaticism of the Sayyid was replaced during the 1920s and 1930s by the cautious reformism of two Islamic modernist leaders, Hajji Farah Omar in Somaliland and Maalim Jama in Mogadishu. Hajji Farah formed the Somali Islamic Association, a cultural organization that blended the best in Islamic education with aspects of Western education. However, modern Somali nationalism remained secular in outlook, despite the presence of leaders with religious backgrounds. Among the founders of the main southern nationalist party, the Somali Youth League, were the unassuming Shaykh Abdulkadir Sekhawedin and Hajji Mohamed Hussein, who inclined toward Nasserism and Islamic socialism. Somali nationalism was obsessed with irredentism in the form of unification with Somalis in French Djibouti, Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, and northern Kenya.
The Somali Republic operated a multiparty parliamentary system between 1960 and 1969. Islamic issues were secondary, except for the policy of providing a script for Somali: the Latin alphabet was favored by the governments and bureaucratic elite; a chauvinistic group advocated an invented script called Osmania; and a number of educational and cultural leaders preferred the Arabic alphabet. During this period a remarkable group of religious leaders interested in agricultural production emerged and led grassroots voluntary development organizations: Shaykh Mohamed Raghe in the north, and Shaykh Bananey’s solidarity cooperative in the south.
In 1969 General Mohamed Siyad Barre carried out a military coup and proclaimed scientific socialism as the official ideology. The Latin script was adopted for writing Somali. The military dictatorship imported Soviet methods of repression and waged campaigns against religion. In 1975, Barre executed ten religious leaders for peacefully protesting his imposition of a new family and marriage law that violated Islamic regulations. In protest against the regime’s hostility, many embraced an Islamic renewal: regular prayers and fasting, religious dress, and the public display of rosaries. Students wearing Islamic dress were arrested and often jailed. In 1989 and again in 1990 Barre’s troops massacred hundreds of religious leaders and their followers. Islam had fared better under European colonialism than under his dictatorship.
From bases in Ethiopia, clan-based armed oppositions successfully challenged Siyad’s forces. On 15 May 1990 more than one hundred former political leaders and administrators issued a public manifesto asking him to resign. A similarly large group of religious leaders issued the “Islamic Call” on 7 October 1990 The Call accepted parliamentary democracy as a general objective but insisted on an Islamic shura institution. Barre’s fall in January 1991 culminated in chaos, civil wars, banditry, and famine leading to a humanitarian intervention by the United Nations under American leadership in December 1992.
An Islamic resurgence, manifested in increased forms of piety, continues among Somalis at home and abroad. There are, however, pockets of Islamic fundamentalists among the clan-based armed movements. For the moment they do not have a charismatic leader, and clanism continues to act as a check against Islamic radicalism. The main Somali fundamentalist movement, al-Ittihad al-Islami (Islamic Unity), has been more active in the northeast; in June 1992 it seized control of the port of Bosaso but was expelled after heavy losses by the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF). It retreated to the nearby port of Las Khorey where it retained control as of March 1993, allegedly receiving assistance from the Sudan and Iran. Although Islam will continue to play a critical role in Somali culture and politics, it remains to be seen how much and what kind of Islam are compatible with, or necessary for, Somali political development.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adam, Hussein M. “Islam and Politics in Somalia.” Unpublished ms., 1991. Contains interview material and documentary sources not available in libraries.
Andrzejewski B. W., and I. M. Lewis. Somali Poetry. Oxford, 1964. Contains a useful introduction to Somali practice of Islam, as well as a collection of religious poetry in Arabic.
Cassanelli, Lee V. The Shaping of Somali Society. Philadelphia, 1982. Provides an excellent study of Islamic themes in southern Somali history, including saints, practices, and sects; complements I. M. Lewis’s studies of Somali Islam in the north.
Esposito, John L., ed. Islam and Development. Syracuse, N.Y., 1980. Collection of insightful essays providing critical theoretical constructs.
Lewis, I. M. “Sufism in Somaliland: A Study in Tribal Islam.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17.3 (1955): 581602, and 18.1 (1956): 145-160. Excellent and insightful study of popular forms of Islam in the former British Somaliland.
Lewis, I. M. “Shaikhs and Warriors of Somaliland.” In African Systems of Thought, edited by Meyer Fortes and Germaine Dieterlen, pp. 204-223. London, 1965. Detailed study of the ironies and ambiguities in Somali notions of religious and secular power.
Lewis, I. M., ed. Islam in Tropical Africa. London, 1966. Provides a useful comparative framework and contains Lewis’s chapter on conformity and contrast in Somali Islam.
Trimingham, J. Spencer. Islam in East Africa. Oxford, 1961. Historical and general overview of Islam in East Africa, including a useful bibliography.
HUSSEIN M. ADAM

]]> https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/12/somalia/feed/ 0 SINGAPORE https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/11/singapore/ https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/11/singapore/#respond Fri, 11 Aug 2017 16:28:49 +0000 https://hybridlearning.pk/2017/08/11/singapore/ SINGAPORE. The geographical position of Singapore defines the history and contemporary position of its Muslim community. Singapore is the northernmost island in the Riau archipelago, […]

]]> SINGAPORE. The geographical position of Singapore defines the history and contemporary position of its Muslim community. Singapore is the northernmost island in the Riau archipelago, which links the east coast of Sumatra with peninsular Malaysia. This territory is the traditional home of the Malay people. Malay history is intimately linked with Islam, and the first MalayMuslim trading city, Melaka (Malacca), flourished in the fifteenth century. The sacking of Melaka by the Portuguese in 1511 marked the beginning of an era of intrusions by various colonial powers interested in the strategic sea lanes through the Straits of Melaka.
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In 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles founded the British colony of Singapore, which quickly flourished as an entrepot trading center for the region. Singapore remained a British colony until it was granted selfgovernment in 1959 In 1963 it became a state within the Federation of Malaysia, and in 1965 it separated from the Federation to become the independant Republic of Singapore.
In terms of ethnic percentages, Singapore’s population has remained relatively stable since the midnineteenth century. The major demographic change occurred early in the nineteenth century, when the Chinese gradually overtook the originally predominant Malays. By 1891 Chinese numbered 67.1 percent of the population, Malays 19.7 percent, Indians 8.8 percent, and others (including Europeans) 4.3 percent. A century later in 1990, the resident Singapore population was 2.7 million, with Chinese forming the majority (77.7 percent), followed by Malays (14-1 percent), Indians (7.1 percent), and others (1.1 percent).
Colonial Period. The nineteenth-century Singapore Muslim community was divided into two broad categories: Muslims indigenous to the region (mostly Malays) who formed the majority, and a minority of wealthy and better-educated Indian Muslims, Arabs, and Jawi Peranakans (indigenized Indian Muslims), who formed the social and economic elite. This elite spearheaded the flowering of Singapore as a Muslim publishing and educational center for the region. Arab families such as the Alsagoffs, the Alkaffs and the Aljunieds were prominent contributors to Muslim mosque-building funds, educational institutions, and other charitable Muslim organizations.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the Dutch took repressive measures to prevent Muslims in the Dutch East Indies from performing the pilgrimage, and so Singapore increasingly became a focal point for such departures. The British reluctantly realized the need to intervene in the affairs of the Muslim community, beginning with quarantine controls on departing and arriving pilgrims.
In 1880 the British government passed the Mahomedan Marriage Ordinance; in 1905 the Mahomedan and Hindu Endowment Board was set up to regulate trusts (awqaf, sg., waqf); and in 1915 the Muhammedan Advisory Board was constituted to advise the government on matters pertaining to the Muslim community.
Post-independence Period. In August 1966, a year after Singapore’s independence, the Singapore parliament passed the Administration of Muslim Law Act (AMLA), ushering in a new phase in the legal and administrative history of Islam in the country. The Singapore Muslim Religious Council (Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura or MUIS) was constituted under the Act and inaugurated in 1968. MUIS is the supreme Islamic religious authority in Singapore and advises the government on matters relating to Islam. MUIS administers the mosque-building program, manages mosques and endowment properties, and coordinates the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
The Shariah Court and Registry of Muslim Marriages were set up in 1958. In addition to hearing divorce petitions, the Shariah Court also considers applications for inheritance certificates relating to Muslim estates. All appeals to either the Registry or the Shariah Court are channeled to an appeals board formed by MUIS. MUIS, the Shariah Court, and the Registry of Muslim Marriages are administered within the Ministry of Community Development. There is also a Minister in Charge of Muslim Affairs who acts as a liaison between the Muslim community and the political leadership.
The government has attached a great deal of importance to improving the standard of living of the MalayMuslim minority. Traditionally this community has tended to lag behind the Chinese majority in terms of educational achievement, occupational advancement, and income levels. Government policy has been to emphasize and support self-help groups within the community, such as MENDAKI (Council on Education for Muslim Children) and the AMP (Association of Muslim Professionals).
In sum, Singapore is a Chinese-majority, secular state located in the Malay-Muslim world of Southeast Asia. The Singapore Malay-Muslim community is cognizant of its position as a national minority that is also part of a larger regional Muslim majority.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad bin Mohamed Ibrahim. The Legal Status of the Muslims in Singapore. Singapore, 1965. The most complete book on the history of Muslim law in pre-independent Singapore.
Djamour, Judith. The Muslim Matrimonial Court in Singapore. New York, 1966. Interesting collection of court cases from the 1950s. Hussin Zoohri, Wan. The Singapore Malays: The Dilemma of Development. Singapore, 1990. Serves as a summary of key community developments in the post-independence period.
Roff, William R. The Origins of Malay Nationalism. New Haven, 1967. Classic on the development of the nationalist movement in Singapore and British Malaya.
Siddique, Sharon. “The Administration of Islam in Singapore.” In Islam and Society in Southeast Asia, edited by Taufik Abdullah and Sharon Siddique, pp. 215-331. Singapore, 1987. Discusses the bureaucratization of Islam in independent Singapore.
Yegar, Moshe. Islam and Islamic Institutions in British Malaya. Jerusalem, 1979. Well-researched directory of the development of Islamic institutions under colonial rule.
SHARON SIDDIQUE

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