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RECENT THINKING ON SUFIS AND SAINTS IN THE LIVES OF MUSLIM SOCIETIES, PAST AND PRESENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2010

Dina Le Gall
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Extract

These books demonstrate in various ways the momentous progress achieved in the study of Sufism over the past three decades while pointing to lacunae and problems that remain. Until the 1970s, Western scholarship on Sufism was shaped by a set of paradigms that originated among orientalists, travelers, colonial officials, and modernist Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholars privileged the mystical insights and poetry of great Sufi masters and championed personal and unmediated religious forms. Sufism's devotional and corporate aspects were unappreciated, as were the Sufi practitioners, especially ragged dervishes and worshippers at saints' tombs. It was common to separate such practitioners and practices from “genuine” mysticism through a schema of elite versus popular religion. A related paradigm of decline cast later Sufi practice as a corruption of the classical mystical tradition and a culprit in a wider decline of Muslim civilization, while yet another focused on the Sufi brotherhoods as networks of anticolonial Muslim activism and hence purveyors of “fanaticism.”

Type
Review Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 673 - 687
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

NOTES

1 Trimingham, J. Spencer, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar. For his tripartite schema of the evolution of the orders, see esp. pp. 102–104.

2 Schimmel, Annemarie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

3 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), esp. 201–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid., 218.

5 Eaton, Richard Maxwell, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

6 Examples include Paul, Jürgen, Die politische und soziale Bedeutung der Naqšbandiyya in Mittelasien im 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ernst, Carl W., Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992)Google Scholar; DeWeese, Devin, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Buehler, Arthur F., Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Ernst, Carl W. and Lawrence, Bruce B., Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Le Gall, Dina, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

7 An excellent example is Karamustafa, Ahmet T., God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

8 Examples include, respectively, Frembgen, J. W., Kleidung und Ausrüstung islamischer Gottsucher: Ein Beitrag zur materiellen Kultur des Derwischwesens (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1998)Google Scholar; Malamud, Margaret, “Gender and Spiritual Self-Fashioning: The Master–Disciple Relationship in Classical Sufism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996): 89–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hoffman, Valerie J., Sufism, Mystics, and Saints in Modern Egypt (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Cornell, Vincent J., Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Green, Nile, Indian Sufism Since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books, and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

10 Examples include McChesney, R. D., Waqf in Central Asia: Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine, 1480–1889 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Christopher S., In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyāra and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999)Google Scholar; Wolper, Ethel Sara, Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Medieval Anatolia (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Green, Indian Sufism.

11 For the last of these see Lifchez, Raymond, ed., The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Frembgen, Kleidung.

12 See, for example, Cornell, Realm; Ernst, Eternal Garden; and DeWeese, Islamization.

13 Devin DeWeese, Vincent Cornell, and Carl Ernst have tackled similar questions in other contexts. See, for example, DeWeese, Devin, “The Legitimation of Bahāʾ ad-Dīn Naqshband,” Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 60 (2006): 261–305Google Scholar.

14 Seesemann, Rüdiger, “Sufis and Saints' Bodies, Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power. By Scott Kugle,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76 (2008): 514–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See, respectively, Hoffman, Sufism, Mystics, and Saints; Werbner, Pnina, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love.