Sufism: A Global History (Introduction)

Introduction From Mysticism to Tradition: Conceptualizing Sufism Sufism has often been defined as Islamic “mysticism,” comprising a set of techniques by which Muslims have sought a direct personal encounter with the divine. While it is true that Sufism encompasses many mystical elements, the broad social reach that it acquired over centuries of expansion rendered it much more than the path of an esoteric elite. In recognition of this problem, in his highly influential introduction to Sufism the Cambridge orientalist A.J. Arberry recognized that Sufism comprised the religious way of both the popular Muslim masses and the smaller number of elevated mystics.1 For Arberry and for many later commentators, the tension in the model of a “mystical” and a “popular” Sufism was resolved through a narrative of decline: what had begun as a genuinely “mystical” movement of individuals seeking personal communion with God was corrupted in the medieval period into a cult of miracle-working saints which held nothing in common with “true” Sufi mysticism. “It was inevitable,” wrote Arberry in scornful tones, “as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion.”2 For Arberry as for many others writing in his wake, the consequence of this decline model was that from the later medieval period onwards Sufism was unworthy of study. This was if nothing else ironic, in that the medieval and early modern periods that saw Sufism reach its greatest influence and success were precisely those which were to be overlooked as the ages of post-classical decline. Over the past thirty years, this model of classicism and decline has been thoroughly rejected, and more recent scholarship on Sufism has done much to overturn the grand narrative of Arberry and such later decline theorists as J.S. Trimingham.3 Even so, in many discussions of Sufism key aspects of the Sufism: A Global History, First Edition. Nile Green. Ó 2012 Nile Green. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2 Sufism: A Global History older tendencies remain, not least the central problem with the earlier school of interpretation that was the model of “mysticism” itself. As conceived by European and American scholars in the early twentieth century, the notion of mysticism relied on a culturally Protestant, temporally modernist and intellectually cosmopolitan construction of religion in which the authority of the solitary individual’s direct, unmediated experience was seen to be the fountainhead of authentic religiosity across all cultures and all periods.4 In similarly Protestant mode, “religion” was itself regarded as a category properly (or at least preferably) distinct from the corruptive sphere of “politics.” When these models were applied to the study of Islam, for many scholars the archetypal Sufi was the antithesis to the legalistic Muslim establishment, whether living in quietist seclusion from the affairs of the world or leading rebellions that ended in passionate martyrdoms.5 Prescriptive rather than descriptive, at times this model of mysticism served as a dogma in its own right. When applied to more distant cultural or temporal contexts from that where it developed, the model tended to castigate or exclude much of what it was meant to explain. In the case of Sufism, such exclusion or castigation concerned many important dimensions of Sufi history that did not fit the model of the individual God-seeker, from hierarchical Sufi brotherhoods and elaborate rituals of saintly intercession ti influence over the decisions of sultans. Yet in contrast to the Western notion of the mystic, many aspects of Sufism were collective and public rather than individualistic and private. The centrality of the master-disciple relationship that emerged as the keystone of Sufi practice shows that even such “mystical” procedures as the destruction of the ego were not the result of private experiences of direct contact with God but were social processes based on disciplinary relationships with human third parties. As Sufi fellowships grew larger, these relationships (and the joint socio-psychological transformations they fostered) became more and more commonplace, such that their effects became even more widespread and collective. In many regions of the world, this saw Sufism shape configurations of social authority into the authoritarian models explored by the North African anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi.6 Along with its neglect of the social, the concept of mysticism also downplayed the physical, placing Sufism firmly within the realms of spirituality when, from their embodied rituals and veneration of relics to their shrine buildings and the blessing powers they were believed to contain in their flesh and blood, Sufis were equally invested in the tangible realms of physicality. Not so much a universally-accessible “mysticism” based on religious experiences which were democratically available to all, Sufism was in many settings an embodied Islam of authority based on blessing powers inherited through prestigious blood lineages. One anthropologist has thus defined Sufi shaykhs as “those in whose blood (recorded in personal genealogies) the Prophet’s Introduction 3 grace (baraka) flows.”7 The concept of mysticism also tends to be associated with the spontaneous and unrehearsed rather than the programmatic and political. Yet even the earliest handbooks on Sufi practice showed deep concerns with questions of etiquette and ceremony. Far from being a disinterested spiritual avant garde, in many regions Sufis were major political players who enjoyed the comforts drawn from vast landholdings and the support of armies of devoted followers. Through the series of developments traced in this book, Sufism became sufficiently authoritarian and antiindividualistic that in the modern period the rise of democratizing and individualizing tendencies among Muslims led millions to desert the teachings of the Sufis in droves. Besides its narrowing and prescriptive tendencies, the model of mysticism also presents particular challenges to the writing of history. For if as “mysticism” the essence of Sufism lies in transcendental private experience, then historians are inevitably condemned to recording only its trivial outward shells by way of texts, institutions and actions. There are certainly different ways of tackling this dilemma. One way (most thoroughly pursued by the French scholar Henry Corbin) is to maintain the mystical model by using a phenomenological approach to historical documents in an attempt to interpretively “re-present” the inward character of past mystical experiences.8 In various degrees and styles, this phenomenological approach has been adopted in a number of successful introductions to Sufism.9 Another way is to move away from the model of mysticism and to conceive Sufism in terms that not only fit better with its complex array of characteristics, but also render it more amenable to historical description. Downplaying the notion of Sufism as the mysticism of a marginal party of God-seekers, the approach taken in this book is to conceive Sufism as primarily a tradition of powerful knowledge, practices and persons.10 As the following chapters argue, from the very moment of its emergence, Sufism was rooted in a wider Muslim model of reliable knowledge in which the sanction and security of past authority (whether of the Prophet or of the saintly “friends” of God) was of overwhelming importance. This historical sensibility even shaped a large proportion of Sufi mystical experiences by way of the countless visionary encounters Sufis recorded with past saints and prophets, encounters which fulfilled their desire to connect themselves with the past luminaries of their tradition.11 This link to the normative and beloved exemplars of tradition is extremely important, for it points not only to the strategy by which the Sufis were able to rhetorically present themselves as the living heirs of the Prophet. It also points to the axiomatically “backward-looking” nature of their teachings which emerged as a consequence of this need for the sanction of past authority and to the existential desire to return to the state of human being enjoyed by the primordial Adam and Muhammad at the beginning of time. As Steven T. Katz has perceptively explained, far from being 4 Sufism: A Global History instantaneous and inventive, mystical experiences are often acts of conservatism; and we might add, of conservation.12 This sense of the Sufis’ deliberate rooting of their words and actions in the legacy of earlier Muslims also helps us recognize the pervasively Islamic character of Sufism that except in certain cosmopolitan cases has set Sufism apart from the universalist “mysticism” into which it has sometimes been categorized. As the French scholar Marijan Mole once explained, even if the Sufis un/knowingly adapted elements from other religious groups, “the Sufis have never wished to be anything other than Muslims; all the doctrines they profess, and all of their actions, customs and usages are based on an interpretation of the Quran and the Prophetic tradition.”13 This is a key point: Sufism developed as a set of teachings, practices and institutions that emerged as Muslims from the ninth century onwards ruminated on the legacy of the earlier exemplary life of the Prophet Muhammad and the revelatory moment of the Quran. In their attempts to channel the knowledge, comfort and authority of God (and his prophets and friends) into their private and public lives, Sufis built their tradition firstly by looking back to the time of the Prophet and revelation and secondly by looking back at the teachings and actions of those they identified as the saints who in turn connected them back to the Prophet’s own communion with God. Whether in terms of texts they wrote, rituals they inaugurated or brotherhoods they founded, it was the many saintly “Friends of God” or awliya allah who appeared in every century who constituted the tradition that we call Sufism. With the exception of certain modernist reformulations, without the saints there is no Sufism. Building on their early claim of inheriting the tradition of the Prophet, over time the Sufis gradually developed the wherewithal of their own tradition by way of lineages of saints and teachers whose sanction carried supplementary authority of its own. As we will see in Chapter 1, in the early centuries of Sufi history, this construction of a tradition in some cases involved the retrospective claiming as Sufis pious forebears who lived before the term sufi was even used. The emphasis placed here on tradition over mysticism is not to deny that many Sufis underwent mystical experiences which they subsequently held in high value. It is rather to make the point that these private experiences only acquired meaning and credibility through being absorbed into the collective and collaborative venture of different generations of Muslims who over the passage of time remained highly conscious of one another’s exemplary actions and teachings. This sense of the historicity of mystical experience does not aim to reduce it, but rather to locate it in the temporal character of human existence. In this, I am in broad agreement with Steven T. Katz, who has written that “mystical reports do not merely indicate the post-experiential description of an unreportable experience in the language closest at hand. Rather, the experiences themselves are inescapably Introduction 5 shaped by prior linguistic influences such that the lived experience conforms to a pre-existent pattern that has been learned, then intended, and then actualized in the experiential reality of the mystic.”14 As hundreds of Sufi writings make clear, for all of the emphasis on spontaneous individual experience in the twentieth century model of mysticism, Sufis were always acutely conscious of their discursive links to past precedent. It was this consciousness of tradition that rendered them Sufi Muslims rather than charismatic lone stars or prophetic founders of new religions. It is ultimately this self-consciousness of individual Sufis as being members of a larger community reproduced across time through the sanction of authoritative past masters that renders them members and perpetuators of a tradition. For as the sociologist Edward Shils has written, tradition is not only that “which is transmitted or handed down from the past,” but also “that which has exemplars or custodians.”15 Correspondingly, as with the exemplary models of the remembered Sufi saints of yore, “there is an inherently normative element in any tradition of belief which is presented for acceptance.”16 In contrast to the older model of a mysticism of lone marginal individuals, this model of a powerful collective tradition is helpful for making sense of Sufi history on several levels. Firstly, it recognizes the crucial roles of thirdparty external and past authorities in valorizing individual experiences, decisions, teachings and writings. Secondly, it recognizes the many nonspontaneous, authoritarian and at times anti-individualistic dimensions of Sufism. Thirdly, it suits the purposes of a historical survey since unlike the temporal collapsing that comes with the emphatic “now” emphasis of mysticism, the tradition model shows how the recipients of tradition possess their own historical self-consciousness as persons living in a perpetual (if interpretive and often creative) relationship with their past. Fourthly and finally, it allows for the accumulative character of Sufism through its gradual emergence as a multi-generational cultural product that emerges in time, so allowing room for development and diversification. Pointing to this dynamism that is often disguised by the apparent consistency of tradition, Shils describes how “tradition might undergo very great changes but its recipients might regard it as significantly unchanged.”17 It has been this backwardlooking sense of the continuity of the teachings they regard as the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad to his saintly successors that allows us to define Sufism as a tradition in the terms defined by Edward Shils. From Marginality to Power: Contextualizing Sufism Having addressed this issue of tradition as both concept and content, we must now turn to this book’s contextual emphasis by way of its presentation of Sufis as powerful and influential social actors rather than as conscientious 6 Sufism: A Global History objectors acting from the margins of society. As with the book’s switch of emphasis from mysticism to tradition, in its stress on the power rather than the marginality of the Sufis we are dealing with a question of re-emphasis rather than rejection. While there certainly were many marginal (as well as outright antinomian) Sufis, the argument made here is that it was due to its powerful rather than marginal followers that Sufism was able to leave so great an imprint on the societies through which it spread. A result of the historical processes and collective strategies explored in the following chapters, this acquisition of power was certainly gradual. But by the medieval and early modern periods, it was sufficiently real to allow us to speak in many regions of the Muslim world in terms of a Sufi social and religious “establishment.” While there were many marginal and deviant Sufis who lived in this period, the Sufi establishment achieved and maintained its status by its members’ successful self-presentation as embodiments of the normative Islam of the Prophet Muhammad and indeed as being nothing less than his living heirs. Even where anti-normative and socially marginal Sufi groups flourished (as in the case of the medieval qalandar movement) it is probably fair to say that their ability to get away with breaching social norms was itself a reflection of the power and prestige which Sufism held by their time. In speaking of the Sufis as powerful, we must delineate three main types of power which they will be seen acquiring in the following chapters: discursive power, miraculous power and economic power. Discursive power refers to the authority acquired by Sufism as a discourse comprising a legitimate vocabulary of words and concepts, influential models of society and cosmos, and exemplary paradigms of behavior and morals. This discourse of Sufism was in itself a configuration of tradition since it drew authority from connecting itself to the Quran and the Prophetic Example (or Sunna) of Muhammad. The discursive power which Sufism acquired through its association with the normative Prophetic Example points to the way in which Sufism was not merely a mode of experience or even belief, but a discourse with the power to shape other people’s actions through their imitation of the exemplary models it provided. Moving us further beyond the emphasis on unmediated experience in the model of mysticism, this powerful ability to shape behavior and action was also a function of tradition in the ability of traditions to foster enduring “patterns or images of actions” and “the beliefs requiring, recommending, regulating, permitting or prohibiting the re-enactment of those patterns.”18 The second type of power which we will see the Sufis acquire was miraculous power through their widely perceived ability to work miracles and wonders as a result of their especial closeness to God. For A.J. Arberry, no less than many twentieth century reformist Muslim commentators, this widespread traffic in the miraculous represented “the dark side of Sufism in its last phase” when “its influence at its most degraded period was wholly Introduction 7 evil.”19 Yet in a historical survey such as this, the aim must be to describe and understand rather than to moralize. Even though the twentieth century’s scientifically disenchanted and culturally Protestant model of mysticism drew a firm line of division between mystics and miracle-workers, the historical fact of the matter is that the Sufis’ claim of working miracles was inseparable from their claim of mystical proximity to God. Once again, it is the saints whose words and deeds constituted Sufi tradition who must be positioned at center stage: the historical mystic was the saintly miracle worker. While there was always the occasional Muslim who challenged the Sufis’ ability to wield such powers, as the following chapters show, from sultans and merchants to peasants and tribesmen, there were many more who sought to draw on these powers by entering relationships with the Sufis. And since, whether with regard to knaves or kings, these were typically relationships of discipleship, the power to wreak miracles was in turn transformed into the currency of social influence. Drawing from and in turn cementing this social influence was the third of the forms of power which the Sufis acquired: economic power. For from the medieval period, prominent Sufis began to receive considerable (and in a few cases vast) endowments of landed property and real estate from disciples drawn from the ruling class as well as smaller offerings in cash or kind from their humbler followers. Despite their rhetoric of pious poverty, these forms of gift-exchange placed prominent Sufis among the tiny privileged elite of the pre-industrial societies in which they operated till modern times. In this respect too, we see the functioning of Sufism as a tradition, since the need to transfer property through family lineages saw the material heirs of economically powerful Sufis configured in parallel as the heirs of the Sufi tradition. Family Sufi lineages therefore typically passed down property alongside teachings and blessing power. Since no form of powerful knowledge can exist in isolation from material forms of power, the economic strength of Sufism was crucial to the overall profile it acquired and so ultimately the discursive, miraculous and economic power of the Sufis were each interdependent. If there was once a tendency to see the emergence of such powerholding as compromising the piety of the Sufi message, to see even religious history in such value-laden terms is sentimental and romantic. Here again it is helpful to think of Sufism as a tradition, for no tradition is ever able to perpetuate and reproduce itself through time without recourse to the material resources that provide homes and stipends for the texts, rituals and remembrancers that constitute traditio as “that which is handed down.” If in relation to many earlier presentations of Sufism, the shift in emphasis here towards power and tradition marks something of a Hobbesian turn, then this is perhaps a necessary corrective. For this sense of a powerful tradition not only renders more understandable the following the Sufis acquired, but also the opposition they increasingly provoked as their 8 Sufism: A Global History influence grew, whether from rival religious authorities in the medieval period, state-builders in the early modern period or Muslim reformers in the modern period. It is after all power, influence and privilege that typically garner the strategies of appropriation, incorporation and opposition that have so regularly punctuated the history of Sufism. If as a history of the Sufis rather than their rivals the following chapters inevitably place the Sufis into the spotlight, then the calls of their rivals from the shadows should be seen to echo the high status gained by Sufis proclaimed as the axis or qutb around which the whole cosmos turned. From Contexts to Characteristics: Defining Sufism In offering an outline of the basic characteristics of Sufism, it is essential in a historical survey such as this to note first that the defining profile we are about to read emerged only gradually through the series of developments traced in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. This historicizing caveat accepted, we can now offer a basic definition of Sufism as a powerful tradition of Muslim knowledge and practice bringing proximity to or mediation with God and believed to have been handed down from the Prophet Muhammad through the saintly successors who followed him. From their earliest appearance, Sufis rarely perceived themselves to be anything other than Muslims and as Sufi tradition expanded its influence, for many millions of Muslims Islam appeared to be inseparable from Sufism. While convention prevents it, we might do better speaking of “Sufi Islam” than of “Sufism.” For, with the exception of certain antinomian (“rule-breaking”) groups, Sufis have generally followed the lifeways of Islamic custom, offering regular formal worship (salah), keeping the fast in the holy month of Ramadan, and abiding by whatever form of Shari‘a was observed in their community. Crucially, Sufis have also followed a series of supererogatory (“above what is required”) exercises, most importantly the chanted “remembrance” (dhikr) of God; meditation (muraqaba) on different aspects of the psyche and God; the cultivation of moral virtues (ihsan) through the observance of formal rules of etiquette (adab); and respectful interaction (suhba) with their master. Some (though by no means all) groups of Sufis used the ritualized listening (sama‘) to music and poetry as a means to reach ecstatic states (ahwal) in which they were brought closer to God or the saints. Sufis have long emphasized that all such practices must be pursued under the direction of a master (murshid) who has been a recipient of the tradition and so (in theory, at least) already trodden this path beforehand. Complete obedience to the master has widely been considered as fundamental to the Sufi life. Since the medieval period, such masters and disciples have conceived and grouped themselves in the form of “brotherhoods” (tariqas, literally Introduction 9 “Paths”). These brotherhoods formed the conceptual and eventually the institutional channels through time and space that served to constitute Sufism as a tradition regarded by its followers as the secret legacy of the Prophet. Rituals of initiation into such a “Path” or brotherhood and its accompanying pledge of allegiance (bay‘a) to a master marked the formal entry to discipleship. While such initiations have often been undertaken by adult Muslims seeking spiritual enlightenment, in practice many Muslims received such initiations as children, assuring them of the social and supernatural protection of their masters on their own paths through life. In theory, the purpose of entering a brotherhood has been to learn the practices of adab (etiquette), dhikr (chanting) and muraqaba (meditation) passed down by its masters, with the aim of experiencing the destruction (fana) of the lower-self (nafs) that leads to the survival (baqa) of the higherself (ruh). Mapped out as formal “places” (maqamat) on the ascent towards God, such experiences have been seen as lending Sufis the authority to guide – to chastise and even punish – other Muslims. The claim to have passed through these “places” on the way to God has meant that both during and after their lifetimes the most celebrated masters have been regarded as the special intimates or “Friends” (awliya) of God. The most venerated and feared of these saints have been seen as living “interfaces” (barzakh) between the human and divine worlds, serving as intermediaries between the ordinary believer and the celestial hierarchy of the saints, prophets and God. In varying degrees all of the saintly masters have been regarded as having access to God’s divine qualities by way of their special knowledge (ma‘rifa) and their ability to work miracles (karama). If claims to predict the future and make protective talismans have in modern times been seen as belonging more to the realm of “superstition” than “mysticism,” then they have both been important services which disciples have asked of their Sufi masters. Since the miraculous powers of the saints ranged from curing sick children to shaping the outcome of battles, the disciples of such masters have included sultans no less than peasants. Even so, these disciples were no less important than their saintly masters for the continuation of Sufi tradition. For through their reception of teaching and miracles as much as their provision of patronage and commemoration, such followers allowed the actions and teachings of their masters to be celebrated and passed on. In reflection of these twin components of tradition, for the purposes of this book both masters and disciples are considered equal participants in the tradition of Sufism. Given the centrality of these ties between disciples and masters, far from being the individualistic pursuit of personal liberation, Sufism can be regarded as the sum total of similar sets of relationships: between saints and their followers; between the readers and writers of Sufi texts; between the Prophet, the mediating master and the humble believer; between the subjects 10 Sufism: A Global History and objects of the devotion that has been the emotional heartbeat of Sufi tradition. Insofar as Sufis have pursued personal quests for salvation, they have usually done so by navigating these relationships between the living and the dead, the physical and the textural, the visible and invisible. It is this quintessentially relational profile of Sufism that has positioned its various expressions and exponents at the center of so many Muslim societies, which were themselves bound together by sets of relationships that became infused and intertwined with the blessed bonds of the Sufis. It is the consequences of these relationships that unfolded as Sufi tradition accrued in many places over many centuries that form the focus of this book. The Narrative in Overview What the following pages present is a narrative history of the emergence of Sufi tradition and the social and geographical expansion that attended its gradual acquisition of power and prestige. The need for a coherent and flowing narrative has meant that there is little explicit evaluation of different primary or secondary source materials, and so for critical evaluations of the historiography students should refer to the recent review articles written by such scholars as myself, Alexander Knysh and Dina Le Gall.20 To help readers place the Sufis into larger conceptions of Islamic, comparative and ultimately global history, the narrative is divided into four fairly conventional periods, albeit periods which are argued as enclosing distinct developments within Sufi history itself. Covered over the course of four chapters, the periods in question are: the early medieval period (800–1100), the medieval period (1100–1400), the early modern period (1400–1800) and the modern period (1800–2000). The chapters are conceived in progressively different ways. While Chapter 1 focusses on the early thinkers and texts that provided the foundations and subsequent resources of Sufi tradition, Chapter 2 focusses on the processes by which this tradition was able to adapt and expand into different geographical and social contexts. Dealing with the period of “globalizing” Sufi expansion into Africa, Southeast Asia and even China, Chapter 3 is conceived in geographical terms, while Chapter 4 turns to political periodization to trace the fortunes of Sufi tradition in a modern era conceived in terms of two inter-related periods of colonization and postcolonial globalization. Given the changing character of the source materials for these different periods, and the different kinds of scholarly expertise and approach that these materials have attracted, there is inevitably a shifting degree of focus as these chapters progress, from a focus on the writings of individual urban “great men” in the first chapter to the gradual incorporation of perspectives on other social groups and developments other than the doctrinal. Introduction 11 More astute readers will easily recognize this as part of the venture of both historical research and Sufi history itself: as more varied kinds of Sufis handed down different kinds of legacies – textual, material, ritual – to their successors, so have scholars been able to reconstruct fuller pictures of their worlds. Yet, unlike in previous surveys of Sufism, approximately equal space is devoted to each of the four periods, though given that the earlier periods have received much fuller synthetic coverage it is fair to say that specialists will find much that is already familiar in parts of the first two chapters’. However, in pursuing the incrementally global expansion of the Sufis, Chapter 2 and particularly Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 provide coverage for regions in Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia and ultimately Europe that have usually been seen as marginal to the Sufis’ supposedly Middle Eastern “homelands.” Even if individual readers do in places find themselves on familiar ground, it is hoped that the scope of coverage and the overall model of a tradition being gradually elaborated and distributed to so many different contexts lends originality to the narrative as a whole. The risk of attempting to cover so much material within a single volume is a loss of clarity amid the overall mass of data, especially in the periods which saw Sufism increasingly expand in the early modern and modern eras. For this reason, it may be useful at this point to lay out in the simplest terms the overall interpretation of Sufi history that is embedded in the narrative. The argument in outline is that Sufi tradition was gradually constructed in the early medieval period among the same circles in which the normative Muslim notion of the Prophetic Example or Sunna was conceived. In the ninth and tenth centuries, a disparate group of thinkers based in Iraq and Iran wrote a series of Arabic works that became foundational in the sense of providing the lexical and conceptual resources that would be passed down to subsequent generations. Adopted as loanwords into various Muslim languages, this Sufi lexicon and the discursive models it elaborated would still lay the conceptual framework for Sufis in modern times.21 From the early eleventh century, the third- and fourthgeneration of Sufis built on the sometimes contradictory ideas of these early theorists by constructing lineages and pedigrees for their teachings that would link them back in time to the Prophet. From this moment forwards, this backward-looking tendency became crucial to the historical selfconsciousness that constituted the teachings of individual Sufis as a tradition that they could present as the higher doctrine passed down unbroken from the Prophet Muhammad himself. Fortified with what during the medieval period they transformed from a discursive rhetoric to a concrete institutionalization of tradition, the Sufis were able to maintain their respectable and normative position when the collapse of central Muslim authority rendered Sufis crucial middlemen for the weak tribal polities who patronized them in return. While then expanding 12 Sufism: A Global History into new frontier regions in Southeast Asia no less than Africa during the early modern period, the Sufis were able to maintain this establishment status even amid their increasing incorporation into more powerful imperial states and the crisis of conscience that followed the turn of the Muslim millennium in 1591. Amid the tumultuous collapse of Muslim commercial and political power in the modern era, Sufism was among the few premodern Muslim institutions to survive European colonization substantially intact. As the embodiments of Prophetic no less than Sufi tradition in the many societies in which they still possessed landholdings and controlled networks of teaching and initiation, the continued prominence of the Sufis in the nineteenth century saw them pulled in different directions by the demands of both local followers and colonial rulers. Entering the twentieth century in many cases confirmed in their high status by recent alliances with colonial no less than Muslim states, the oppositional politics of Islamic reform rendered this Sufi establishment the natural target of competition and critique. Whether at the hands of upwardly-mobile reformists from such non-traditional backgrounds as government schoolteaching or journalism, or at the hands of scientifically-educated modernists who rejected Sufism as the epitome of the degenerate traditionism that allowed the Muslims to be colonized, from the 1900s Sufism came under its most sustained and successful attack. While at the end of the twentieth century many millions of Muslims maintained their ties to the dead saints and living teachers of Sufi tradition, and globalization allowed entrepreneurial Sufi distributors of tradition to find new followers in America and Europe, for educated Muslims in particular Sufism had come to represent corruption, superstition and backwardness. It is finally worth clarifying what is intended by the book’s use of the term “global.” What is “global” about the history presented here is not a direct engagement with the literature on globalization theory, but an attempt to provide coverage of each region of the planet to which Sufism expanded over the course of more than a thousand years. This incrementally global coverage is, moreover, pursued as a history of connectivity, showing Sufism to be a cultural technology of inter-regional connection and exchange. Ranging from the Eastern and Western Mediterranean to Central and South Asia in the medieval period to gradually reach into Southeast Asia, China and Africa in the early modern period and ultimately Western Europe, North America and even Australia by the early twentieth century, it is a reasonable claim that the scale of Sufi expansion was indeed global. More substantially, the narrative attempts to outline some of the processes by which a religious tradition formed in a particular spatial and temporal (no less than linguistic and discursive) context was transformed – adapted, vernacularized, institutionalized – through its introduction to new environments on an incrementally global scale. And on the other side of the coin, the narrative traces the problems that Introduction 13 such global expansion presented to Sufism as a result of its adaptation to so many different milieux, particularly during its most rapid geographical expansion during the “globalizing” early modern and modern eras. Of particular importance here was the way in which from the seventeenth century the adaptive processes by which Sufism expanded into new areas resulted in a proliferation of locally variant forms of Sufi tradition. When this global strategy of adaptation combined with the economic and political upsets of the ages of globalizing capitalism and colonialism, it fed into a Muslim crisis of conscience that sought to reform and ultimately suppress the tradition that the Sufis had cherished and promoted over the past millennium. The cultural adaptation of tradition through incorporation of local vernaculars and customs was thence set in reverse by Sufis and ultimately anti-Sufis who sought to strip back the “accretional” momentum of tradition through a renewed emphasis on Arabic learning and the Prophetic Sunna. By the beginning of the twentieth century, when Muslims came into ever closer contact with European forms of knowledge, a Sufism that had ridden the wave of Islam’s early modern global expansion increasingly became a casualty of its own earlier success. There was, then, an inherent push-pull dynamic that reveals itself through such a long-term and globally distributive survey. While this outline presents only the briefest sketch of the main developments pursued in the following chapters, it should be clear that the overall aim of the narrative is to present the history of Sufism as shaped by a set of longue duree processes through which a tradition was gradually created, expanded, reconfigured and, for many, finally rejected in the twentieth century in the face of competition from the many alternative Islams offered in the global religious marketplace. Notes 1. A.J. Arberry, Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950). 2. Arberry (1950), p. 119. 3. J.S. Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 4. L.E. Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism’,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, 2 (2003), pp. 273–302. 5. See e.g. H. Dabashi, Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn alQudat al-Hamadhanı (London: Routledge, 1999) and L. Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, 4 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 [1922]). 6. A. Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 7. I.M. Lewis, Saints and Somalis: Popular Islam in a Clan-Based Society (Lawrenceville: The Red Sea Press, 1998), p. 9. 14 Sufism: A Global History 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. N.S. Green, “Between Heidegger and the Hidden Imam: Reflections on Henry Corbin’s Approaches to Mystical Islam,” in M.R. Djalili, A. Monsutti & A. Neubauer (eds), Le Monde turco-iranien en question (Paris: Karthala, 2008). W.C. Chittick, Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2000), C.W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), and A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). For an excellent case study of the inner-workings of tradition in one Sufi brotherhood, see C.W. Ernst & B.B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). N.S. Green, “The Religious and Cultural Roles of Dreams and Visions in Islam,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13, 3 (2003), pp. 287–313. S.T. Katz, “The ‘Conservative’ Character of Mystical Experience,” in Katz (ed.), Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). M. Mole, Les Mystiques musulmans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), p. 4, my translation. S.T. Katz, “Mystical Speech and Mystical Meaning,” in Katz, Mysticism and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 5. E. Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 12, 13. Shils (1981), p. 23. Shils (1981), p. 14. Shils (1981), p. 12 Arberry (1950), p. 122. For critical evaluations of the historiography of Sufism, see N.S. Green, “Making Sense of ‘Sufism’ in the Indian Subcontinent: A Survey of Trends,” Religion Compass (Wiley-Blackwell Online, 2008); A. Knysh, “Historiography of Sufi Studies in the West,” in Y.M. Choueiri (ed.), A Companion to the History of the Middle East (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005); and D. Le Gall, “Recent Thinking on Sufis and Saints in the Lives of Muslim Societies, Past and Present,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, 4 (2010), pp. 673–687. On this Sufi lexicon, see N.S. Green, “Idiom, Genre and the Politics of SelfDescription on the Peripheries of Persian,” in N.S. Green & M. Searle-Chatterjee (eds), Religion, Language and Power (New York: Routledge, 2008).