Introduction

The Sufi order known as the Shādhilīya was one of the most popular Sufi movements of the Islamic Middle Ages, counting adherents across north Africa, Egypt and Greater Syria. The order's eponymous ‘founder’, Abū l-Oasan al-Shādhilī (d. 656/1258), was born in the Maghrib but eventually settled in Alexandria in the 1240s with the explicit sanction of the Ayyubid regime. While al-Shādhilī and his cohort rejected overt state sponsorship, they did cultivate warm relations with Ayyubid and early Mamluk rulers, as well as many of Egypt's most prominent ʿulamāʾ. These alliances permitted al-Shādhilī to intercede on behalf of his disciples and clients and to travel freely across Egypt to teach his form of Sufism– advantages he did not enjoy in his previous home in Tunis. Al-Shādhilī met with great success in Egypt, establishing a reputation as a powerful Sufi master and an ally of people across the socio-economic spectrum, attracting a large numbers of followers in the process. Indeed, within roughly fifty years of al-Shādhilī's death, a nascent social movement tied to his name had emerged that persists to the present day in multiple branches and sub-orders. But how did this informal and localised teaching circle become a trans-regional voluntary association of Sufis who conceptualised themselves as a coherent social body tied together by the teachings of an eponymous master?

This question is not, of course, unique to the Shādhilīya. The historical development of all the so-called ‘Sufi orders’ (al-t uruq al-‚ ūfīya) is a perennial and notoriously difficult issue. Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence have written that the ‘first and major point to make about Sufi orders is simple but perplexing: We don't understand them, or at least we haven't figured out how to understand them as historical developments’. This perplexity is fundamentally rooted in the fact that nearly all the textual source material on orders is teleological in nature. Most of the texts produced by members of Sufi orders postdate the emergence of the order and tend to back-project subsequent social formations onto the lives of the eponymous master and his disciples.