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 intel-
lectually 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 Prescrip-
tive 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 destruc-
tion 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 em-
bodied 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 dis-
interested 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 anti-
individualistic that in the modern period the rise of democratizing and
individualizing tendencies among Muslims led millions to desert the teach-
ings 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 out-
ward 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 experi-
ences.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 conser-

vatism; 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 knowl-
edge, 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 retro-
spective 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 subse-
quently 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 lan-
guage 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 third-
party external and past authorities in valorizing individual experiences,
decisions, teachings and writings. Secondly, it recognizes the many non-
spontaneous, 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 dyna-
mism 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 backward-
looking 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 chap-
ters, 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 prohi-
biting 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 econom-
ically 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 inter-
dependent. If there was once a tendency to see the emergence of such power-
holding 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 remem-
brancers 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 knowl-
edge 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 (mur-
aqaba) 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 disci-
pleship. 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 protec-
tion 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 higher-
self (ruh). Mapped out as formal “places” (maqamat) on the ascent
towards God, such experiences have been seen as lending Sufis the au-
thority 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 re-
garded 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 conven-
tional periods, albeit periods which are argued as enclosing distinct devel-
opments 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 pers-
pectives 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 succes-
sors, 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 loan-
words 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 fourth-
generation 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 self-
consciousness that constituted the teachings of individual Sufis as a tradi-
tion 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 school-
teaching 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 cus-
toms 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 develop-
ments 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 al-
Qudat 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. 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).
9. 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).
10. 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).
11. 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.
12. S.T. Katz, “The ‘Conservative’ Character of Mystical Experience,” in Katz (ed.),
Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
13. M. Mole, Les Mystiques musulmans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1965), p. 4, my translation.
14. S.T. Katz, “Mystical Speech and Mystical Meaning,” in Katz, Mysticism and
Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 5.
15. E. Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 12, 13.
16. Shils (1981), p. 23.
17. Shils (1981), p. 14.
18. Shils (1981), p. 12
19. Arberry (1950), p. 122.
20. 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.
21. On this Sufi lexicon, see N.S. Green, “Idiom, Genre and the Politics of Self-
Description on the Peripheries of Persian,” in N.S. Green & M. Searle-Chatterjee
(eds), Religion, Language and Power (New York: Routledge, 2008).