Download PDF | Nathan Hofer - The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325, Edinburgh University Press 2015.
313 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book has been long in gestation and preparation. I would not have finished it without the generous encouragement and support of a number of individuals and organisations. It was not until I finished writing the dissertation upon which this book is based that I actually figured out what I was trying to say about Sufism in Ayyubid and early Mamluk Egypt. I would never have arrived at that point, nor turned that embryonic statement into this book, without the generous and tireless guidance of my dissertation committee. David Blumenthal, Vincent Cornell, Marina Rustow and Devin Stewart all expertly guided me through that process and have long since continued to mentor me in many ways, even after they were no longer contractually obliged to do so. They each taught me a unique set of skills and I owe them all a debt that cannot be repaid. I can only offer this book as a down payment.
I have benefited enormously from my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri. Our bi-weekly works-inprogress seminar has been an invaluable forum to present and improve my sketchy thinking as well as to borrow new ideas and approaches from others. An especially big thank-you to the members of our ‘pre-tenure pact’, Ed Drott, Carrie Duncan, Dennis Kelley and Rabia Gregory, who forced me to keep writing and gently prodded me to clarify my typically muddled prose and organisation. The librarians and staff with Interlibrary Loan at MU have never once been stumped by my requests for obscure Arabic books. To my chair, Chip Callahan, and my dean, Michael O’Brien, a hearty thanks for facilitating and granting me a year away from teaching and service responsibilities to complete the book.
I enjoyed the great privilege of presenting portions of the Introduction and Chapter 3 to the History Seminar at Johns Hopkins University. It was an intense and richly rewarding experience in which the faculty picked through my ideas and sources with laser-like focus and precision. The seminar sharpened my analysis and approach to the sources, completely changing how I thought about my reading audience. Many thanks are owed to a number of people who read drafts of various parts of this manuscript. Each of them offered me expert advice and rescued me from some embarrassingly egregious errors of fact and interpretation. Ahmet Karamustafa, Laury Silvers, Emil Homerin and Richard McGregor all deserve recognition for their kindness, generosity and expertise.
They deserve none of the blame for any remaining errors and illegibility. A wholehearted thank-you to the editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press for making the publication process not just painless, but actually enjoyable. Nicola Ramsey and Ellie Bush have been a delight to work with, answering all my rookie questions with speed and good humour. Eddie Clark and Jonathan Wadman worked tirelessly and expertly to copy-edit the text and prepare it for print. Kate Robertson did a wonderful job with the cover. A number of organisations have contributed financial support to the research and writing of this book. The Research Council of the University of Missouri funded an invaluable trip to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris to examine manuscripts as well as a summer grant that allowed me the luxury of time to transcribe the lengthy manuscript upon which Part Three is largely based. The University of Missouri Research Board generously funded my teaching replacement during the period of my leave.
The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC funded a portion of that leave and provided me with an extraordinary work space in which to complete this project. The book would have taken much longer to complete without the totally distraction-free environment of the Kluge Center and the seemingly limitless resources of the African and Middle Eastern Division of the library. A special thanks in this respect goes to Dr Tadros Fawzi in the AMED for helping me locate and utilise those resources. I would be remiss if I did not also thank my fellow Kluge residents, who were a source of friendship, motivation and fascinating conversation; they even managed to pull me away from the books every once in a while.
Finally, my wife Leah deserves credit for her constant support and for putting up with this work for so long. Were it not for her patience and willingness to take on the burdens of running our household when I was under deadline, not to mention my extended absences, I would never have finished. This book is for her.
Introduction
The Popularity of Sufism
In the mid-seventh/thirteenth century, the Andalusian historian, geographer and literary anthologist Ibn Saʿīd al-Maghribī (d. 685/1286) spent several years in Egypt.1 In his description of Cairo Ibn Saʿīd observes that he found the city ‘particularly welcoming for the poor’ (al-faqīr), a term that clearly includes Sufis: The wandering faqīr feels at ease [in Cairo] because of the large quantity of cheap bread, the prevalence of audition sessions, and pleasures both inside and outside the city. There is little objection to what he does and he is in charge of his own self, whether he wants to dance in the middle of the marketplace, wander alone, get high on hashish, or even to take up with beardless youths and other things like that, all of which differs from the lands of the Maghrib.2 These phenomena, especially dancing, wandering, audition sessions (samāʿāt), eating hashish and gazing at beardless youths (murdān), were all typically associated with Sufis in Mamluk Egypt and were viewed with derision and disdain among certain sectors of society. While one suspects that Ibn Saʿīd exaggerates in order to compare Cairo negatively to his native Maghrib (he also claims that wine, musical instruments and naked women are ubiquitous in the city), his description is nevertheless illustrative of the increasing prominence and visibility of Sufis in early Mamluk Cairo.3 Arabic sources from this period attest to the growing popularity of Sufism across the socio-economic spectrum in Egypt and to the increasingly visible roles Sufi played in a variety of social and political contexts. Ayyubid and Mamluk amīrs and their households competed with each other to patronise, subsidise and curry favour with Sufis. The sultans themselves consulted with prominent Sufi masters on a regular basis. Baybars al-Jāshnakīr (r. 708–9/1309–10) and al-Nāsir Muªammad (r. 693–4, 698–708, 709–41/1293–4, 1299–1309, 1310–41) seem to have had a personal rivalry to outdo each other in founding and funding well-apportioned hospices for Sufis. The people of Cairo and Fustat used to come to the central bayn al-qa‚rayn district in Cairo every week to watch Sufis parade for Friday prayers. Large crowds gathered at mosques, madrasas, khānqāhs and ribā†s from Alexandria to Aswan to hear the Sufis preach and collect a bit of baraka, or blessedness, from the most powerful masters. Visitors to the grave of the Upper-Egyptian Sufi ʿAbd al-Raªīm al-Qināʾī (d. 592/1195) claimed that any request uttered in the tomb’s vicinity would come true. Scores of people used to gather on the banks of the Nile to watch the ‘possessed’ Sufi Mufarrij al-Damāmīnī (d. 648/1250) sail past. Alexandria was practically teeming with Sufi masters from all over the Muslim world, both East and West. Even members of the Jewish community of Fustat began practising their own form of Sufism. These and many other examples have led a number of historians to take note of the widespread popularity of Sufism in Mamluk Egypt, typically describing it as the ‘popular culture’ of its time. But how did Sufism become so popular? While there certainly were Sufis in Egypt before this time, except for Dhū l-Nūn al-Mi‚rī (d. 245/859) and a few others, the extant sources name only a handful before the sixth/twelfth century.4 But towards the end of Fatimid rule (358–567/969–1171) and increasingly thereafter, Sufis begin to appear in the sources more and more frequently. By the turn of the eighth/fourteenth century they are ubiquitous in the historical record. How did the ideas and practices of Sufism become so widespread, so influential and so popular in such a short time? Where did all these Sufis come from? And why at this particular time? Perhaps more fundamentally, what does it actually mean to say that Sufism was ‘popular’? Was it popular because it was a non-elite phenomenon? Or was it popular because everyone was doing it? This book attempts to answer these questions by examining several Sufi collectivities active in Ayyubid and early Mamluk Egypt. In the following pages I present a detailed description of these groups, where they came from, how and why they came together, and the roles they played in spreading and popularising Sufism in Egypt. But my ultimate aim here is not to describe. Rather, these descriptions are in service to larger theoretical concerns, foremost among these being the question of popularisation. In this ‘post-classical’ period of Sufism, Sufis of various stripes could be found at every socioeconomic level and in all the cities and villages of Egypt. In order to understand the processes whereby multiple groups in diverse settings adopted and adapted particular understandings of and orientations to the traditions of Sufism we must focus on the specific and variegated social and cultural contexts in which these processes occurred. Therefore, it is the basic assumption of this study that Sufism, to appropriate Durkheim’s dictum on religion, ‘is an eminently social thing’.5 As such, it is from within the analytical framework of the social that we might begin to formulate an understanding of Sufism’s popularity in medieval Egypt and the mechanisms by which this popularisation occurred. But given the persistent notion that Sufism is a form of mysticism, and thus inherently personal, my insistence on the social may strike some readers as a strange or even misguided approach to the subject. However, if we want to understand how and why Sufism became so popular, some widespread and common-sense approaches to the study of Sufism will have to be overturned. First and foremost are the related assumptions that Sufism is a (or the) fundamentally personal, spiritual and mystical form of Islam, and that as such it offered the most viable and attractive alternative to the essentially impersonal, mundane and legal Islam of the jurists (alfuqahāʾ). There are a number of reasons that scholars have portrayed Sufism in these terms, but for the purpose of describing and explaining its growth and popularisation these terms are simply inadequate at best and misleading at worst. It is difficult if not impossible to describe Sufism as mysticism except in the most simplified and essentialised way. The category of mysticism, like all categories, serves to sort and classify disparate phenomena according to particular epistemic regimes. In the case of mysticism, that sorting took place within and through gendered discourses of subjugation and colonial systems of power.6 These discourses and systems were then brought to bear on a variety of Islamic data. Early in their discursive construction of Islam as an object of inquiry, Europeans described and classified Sufism as the ‘Islamic mysticism’ par excellence. However, this was a mysticism stripped of any overtly Islamic trappings and therefore ‘borrowed’ from non-Arab/Muslim sources.7 Having been rendered ‘mystical’, Sufism became of central interest to comparativist historians of religion.8 But the congruence of ‘mysticism’ and ‘Sufism’ in these constructions is only that: mental constructions for the purpose of cross-cultural comparison, and not a great comparison at that, as Omid Safi and others have shown.9 ‘Mysticism’ is too often used as an analytical placeholder, deployed as a kind of shorthand in lieu of more detailed description and analysis. But unless one uses ‘mysticism’ for specific forms of subversive comparison, it will necessarily obscure more than it discloses at the granular level of analysis. While many historians of Sufism have come to recognise these problems, ‘mystocentrism’ is still widespread in Islamic studies more broadly. Many scholars still use ‘mysticism’ and its cognate adjectives uncritically to subsume a number of disparate movements under a totalising descriptive umbrella.10 For example, to describe both the Karrāmīya and the Sālimīya – two separate devotional movements that preceded the appearance of Sufism – as ‘mysticism’ tells us nothing in particular about either one and makes it much more difficult to disentangle the pre-history of Sufism. For these reasons I do not use the terms ‘mysticism’, ‘mystical’ or ‘mystic’ in this book. In a similar vein, the modern terms ‘Sufism’ and ‘Sufi’ are discursive constructions with their own equally fraught history and a sometimes tenuous relationship to medieval Arabic ta‚awwuf, muta‚awwif or ‚ūfī. However, in this case, these are categories that bear some resemblance to local medieval usage. Individuals did call themselves ‚ūfī or muta‚awwif and groups did argue about the meaning of ta‚awwuf. Thus, rather than abandon a by-now standard convention, I will use ‘Sufi’ and ‘Sufism’ in these pages as an organising heuristic, in much the same way that Shahzad Bashir describes Sufism in his study of Sufi bodies as an ‘analytical horizon that allows me to explore a set of issues in intellectual and social history’.11 That is to say that my investigation of the popularisation of Sufism in medieval Egypt is an analytical question that takes for its object the history of those who have claimed, contested, embraced or rejected the traditions associated with ta‚awwuf (Sufism) and the label ‚ūfī (Sufi).
Nevertheless, even if one were to grant that we can use mysticism profitably as a heuristic shorthand for an array of human phenomena of which Sufism is one example, there is good analytical precedent to treat those phenomena themselves as socially constructed. It has been more than thirtyfive years since the publication of Steven Katz’s influential Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. In that collection Katz and his co-contributors argued that ‘there are no pure (unmediated) experiences’ that are then interpreted post facto in a culturally specific vein.12 Rather, all experience is at its core the product of specific social and cultural contexts and therefore not isolable from larger socio-cultural expectations. Likewise, it has been thirty years since the appearance of Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience, in which he asks, among other thought-provoking questions, not what the content of an experience might be, but why and how certain experiences are labelled as ‘religious’ or ‘mystical’ in the first place, a perspective taken up more recently by Ann Taves.13 I adopt a similar approach here. I interrogate the specific social and political contexts in which Sufis and others articulated their specific claims of authority by means of the discursive and practical traditions of Sufism. Furthermore, the idea that Sufism is at its core the individualised pursuit of a personal mystical experience ignores the highly social character of the medieval evidence. If anything, it is quite clear from medieval Muslim writers themselves – Sufis and non-Sufis alike – that Sufism was a collective pursuit, undertaken in its most basic and irreducible configuration by an individual under the guidance of another. The master-disciple relationship that stands at the conceptual and practical core of Sufism is a social association by definition, albeit one that might take many forms.14 My insistence on the fundamentally social character of Sufism is thus ultimately rooted in and derived from the Sufi texts themselves. All of this is not to say that the only or best way to approach the study of medieval Sufism is through the social. Nor do I wish to deny or downplay the role of experience in the history of Sufism.15 I simply contend that these experiences were shaped by social and cultural processes as much as the clothes Sufis wore or the languages they spoke. Ultimately, the ways in which Sufis transmitted, produced and popularised Sufism in medieval Egypt were all socially negotiated and constructed. Thus, for the theoretical task I have set here – describing and explaining this popularisation – the objects of inquiry are these social and cultural processes and not the unassailable inner worlds of individual experience. The question is a historical and social one; it demands a commensurate approach. To this end, there are two ways I conceptualise the question of popularisation and from which I formulate an answer. The first is to revisit the notion of ‘popular culture’ in a medieval Islamicate context. While many scholars tend to use ‘popular’ as shorthand for ‘non-elite’ forms of culture, following the innovative work of Emil Homerin, Alexander Knysh, Ahmet Karamustafa and others, I widen the lens of the popular to include forms of culture that were widespread across society.16 That is, in order for something to be considered ‘popular’ it ought to be found among all levels of society. Sufism was popular not because the non-elite populace embraced it, but because it was produced and consumed at all levels of society, elite and non-elite alike. Second, this shift in focus to the production and consumption of a popular culture in medieval Egypt will necessitate a move away from the conception of a monolithic Sufism that served as a panacea to cure the spiritual ills of the populace. I argue instead that Sufis (not Sufism) were the agents of popularisation. It was the Sufis, through individual and collective outreach, who promulgated and popularised different forms of Sufism among the people. I will therefore draw on the sociology of institutions and organisations to make sense of the ways that individuals form collectivities and the structures and cultural systems that both constrain and sanction those collectivities’ actions. A byproduct of this kind of analysis is that the protean and diverse nature of Sufi collectivities will become much clearer. Sufis were not all the same and they did not always get along with each other. The epithet ‘Sufi’ did not, in and of itself, particularly mean anything outside the specific social, cultural and political context in which the epithet was claimed or applied. In sum, the central argument of this book is that the institutionalisation of Sufi thought and praxis during the formative period (i.e. the late third/ ninth century and the fourth/tenth century) precipitated and facilitated the mass production of cultures of Sufism in multiple geographic locations and in varied socio-political contexts, resulting in increasingly organised forms of Sufism at all levels of society.17 It was not, as many have argued, that the Muslim populace turned to Sufism out of some vague spiritual longing, crisis of identity or lack of legitimate authority. Rather, it was the Sufis, drawing on an array of institutionalised doctrines and practices, who performed, pro- duced and popularised increasingly diversified Sufi cultures across the Muslim landscape. Thus, I am particularly interested in the agency of Sufi actors, and this study contributes to recent work in the field that has shifted the focus of Sufi studies away from doctrinal-textual studies towards an emphasis on the social agency of Sufis in their own right. Richard Eaton’s work on south Asia, Vincent Cornell on the Maghrib, Daphna Ephrat on Palestine, Ethel Wolper on Anatolia, Erik Ohlander on the Suhrawardīya, Dina Le Gall on the Naqshbandīya, John Curry on the Halvetīya and others have all pioneered an agentive approach to Sufism.18 This focus on agency and social change will first require me to develop an analytical framework concerning the production and popularisation of multiple Sufi cultures. This framework will then be brought to bear on the historical material in the remainder of the book, wherein I examine several case studies involving the popularisation of Sufism in medieval Egypt.
The Problem of Sufism as Popular Culture
A number of historians of medieval Islam have described the growth of Sufism in the late medieval period as a popular response to what many have called the ‘dry legalism’ of Muslim jurists. They imagine Sufism as a kind of spiritual (i.e. mystical) salve that soothed the harsh legalism of juridical (sometimes ‘orthodox’) Islam.19 In this narrative, if there was any rapprochement between ‘the Sufis’ and ‘the jurists’ it occurred only after the synthesis of Abū Óāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), who purportedly ‘evolved a new form of orthodoxy, in which the cold, flat dogmas of the theologians drew warmth and contour from the intuitive and mystical faith of the Íūfīs’.20 These narratives of popularisation generally follow a similar trajectory: in the aftermath of the social and political disruptions of the Crusader and Mongol invasions of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries ce, Sufism met the spiritual needs of the distraught and unlettered masses dissatisfied with normative Islam.21 This account of Sufism relies on three unspoken assumptions: that the Sufis were socially and culturally distinct from the jurists; that the social formation of jurists preceded that of the Sufis; and that non-Sufi Islam is inadequate to the religious needs of the populace. These assumptions are extraordinarily problematic, not least because they ignore the overwhelming evidence that jurists and Sufis were often the same people. Furthermore, Richard Bulliet has argued that in the case of medieval Iran the growth of ascetic, pietist and Sufi movements, actually preceded the development of a class of jurists.22 And Megan Reid has shown that there have been many forms of Islamic piety, including ones associated with jurists, that were not associated with Sufism at all.23 Besides promoting clearly Protestant notions of spirituality, analyses like these elide a more serious conceptual problem that obscures a critical slippage between two different modern discursive constructions of Sufism.24 On one hand, ‘Sufism’ might refer to the classical Sufi manuals of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries in which elite authors consciously constructed a vision of Sufism that drew from and participated in the growing ‘Sunni consensus’.25 In particular, u‚ūlī-minded Sufi authors such as al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), al-I‚fahānī (d. 430/1038) and al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) attempted to link the efforts of the earliest Sufis to the generations immediately following Muªammad and especially to Muªammad himself.26 This was part of a larger process that Vincent Cornell calls the u‚ūlisation of Islamic knowledge, in which ‘innovative’ discourses and practices were cast in terms of the sunna of the prophet, thereby ensuring their ‘traditional’ quality.27 The Sufis’ embrace of this methodology was no different from those writing in other elite scholastic genres, including fiqh (jurisprudence), kalām (theology) and tārīkh (historiography); they authorised new traditions by linking their endeavours to the prophet and his companions in precisely these same ways. In this sense, the emergence and development of a discourse around the practice of Sufism is inextricably linked with the continual (re)formulation of the Sunni consensus itself. On the other hand, ‘Sufism’ might refer to certain Sufi practices that drew the ire and suspicion of some jurists and Sufi masters. Such practices might include the performance of samāʿ (audition), the veneration of Sufi saints and the visitation of saints’ tombs. In this construction, historians often artificially isolate the popular ‘Sufism’ of the masses from the ‘Sufism’ of the elites who wrote sophisticated theoretical treatments.28 Accounts of the growth and spread of Sufism then index popularisation in terms of the praxis of a popular Sufism while ignoring the elite provenance of much of the discursive tradition. The slippage between these two Sufisms relies on the notion of a medieval popular culture isolable from elite cultures and the central role that historians assign Sufism in that popular culture.
The most detailed treatment of popular culture in medieval Islam is Boaz Shoshan’s work on Cairo.29 Inspired by Peter Burke’s treatment of the subject in early modern Europe, Shoshan seeks to recover and describe the culture of ‘those socially inferior to the bourgeoisie; hence, supposedly also illiterate, at least by and large’.30 It is ‘the culture of ordinary people’, and Shoshan does amass an impressive array of ‘ordinary’ activities among the medieval Cairene population.31 He goes on to argue that much of this ordinary culture was Sufi in nature: ‘whatever was the religious world of medieval Cairenes, Sufism filled a significant part of it’.32 Here, as in much of the scholarship on popular culture, Sufism has become the culture of the non-elite, the culture that modulates the ‘the dry legalism of the ʿulamāʾ’.33 Nonetheless, Shoshan is careful to note that Sufism was not simply the purview of the masses but that there were elites who adopted certain aspects of popular Sufism as well. In order to explain this, he describes Islamic society in terms of ‘cultural blocks’ in which cultural forms move up and down a cultural ‘escalator’ (a metaphor borrowed from Stuart Hall).34 Shoshan argues that ‘popular forms . . . went up the cultural escalator, and found themselves on the opposite side. The result was a cultural “dialectic of change”; though the distinction popular/ elite remained, the inventories of each of these two sub-cultures did alter in the process.’35 For Shoshan and many others, then, the popular culture of the masses and the high culture of the elites are separate fields, although certain cultural forms may move up and down (for Burke they are ‘sinking’ and ‘rising’) between the two groups.36 The popular culture of Sufism rises up to the elites who then modify aspects of it for dissemination in attenuated form to the masses, and so on. The conceptual heart of such analyses is a two-tiered model of culture: elite and popular. Because Sufism is already understood to be the product of local, personalised, charismatic and especially non-juridical forms of Islam, it becomes synonymous with uncritical notions of ‘popular culture’. Such culture then stands in clear contrast to the ‘elite culture’ of the jurists, the universal consensus of the educated ʿulamāʾ, which is typically, but not always, synonymous with a purported ‘orthodoxy’. Ultimately, then, a series of fascinating correspondences emerges in the scholarship. Non-elite religiosity, often but not always expressed through Sufism, is taken as emblematic of ‘popular culture’ in medieval Islamic society. Elite religiosity, by contrast, is primarily the expression of the jurists and represents ‘high culture’ in medieval Islamic society.37 In this equation, an a priori distinction about what constitutes ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ forms of culture mediates the conceptual congeries of local/innovative/emotional/mystical Sufism (i.e. popular culture) versus trans-local/traditional/dry/orthodox/normative Islam (i.e. elite culture). This hierarchical division (the inherent valence of the hierarchy is itself another issue worth pursuing) is clearly at play in the most common explanation for Sufism’s popularity: the masses found in Sufism a spiritual antidote to the ‘dry legalism’ of the intellectual elites who represent orthodox Islam. This account of popular culture and Sufism should give us pause because of the suspiciously consistent binaries that cut across all kinds of categories: high culture versus low culture; elites versus masses; jurists versus Sufis; great tradition versus little tradition; spirituality versus legalism; orthodoxy versus Sufism. Catherine Bell’s critique of ritual studies is instructive here. She argues that in most studies of ritual, scholars make an a priori theoretical distinction between action (the performance of ritual) and thought (the meaning of ritual). This distinction is then homologised to and reproduced at subsequent levels of analysis, in which ritual is theorised as a mechanism for the integration of action and thought. In other words, the a priori assumption that ritual comprises two components – action and thought – provides the logic for the subsequent analytical apparatus of ritual studies at multiple levels of abstraction.38 The scholars’ original conceptual distinction becomes the very key with which they are then uniquely qualified to unlock the ritual code. This is congruous to treatments of Sufism in which the original distinction between elite jurists and non-elite Sufis reproduces itself at multiple levels of abstraction and analysis. The a priori distinction between elite Islam and popular Sufism then allows the historian to describe and explain the existence of the distinction! The task then becomes to explain how Sufism moves from one cultural sphere (that of the masses) to another (that of the jurists), without demolishing the original distinction. We might respond to these constructions in several ways. First, the evidence that Sufis and jurists were doing different things with respect to a normative sunna is not at all convincing. For every Ibn Taymīya (d. 728/1328) who launched a legal attack against an ‘innovative’ practice associated with the Sufis, there was a jurist like Taqī l-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 756 /1355) who embraced and traditionalised it.39 The social construction of ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ in medieval Islamic society was multivocal and fluid, and Sufis participated in this construction along with many others.40 Vincent Cornell, Emil Homerin and Richard McGregor have all argued against the artificial separation of Sufism from an imagined orthodoxy given that Sufis were often the very elites accusing others of bidʿa (innovative practice).41 Conversely, the arch-critic of bidʿa in medieval Egypt, the jurist Ibn al-Óājj (d. 737/1336), vehemently condemned the ʿulamāʾ of his own day for precisely the kinds of things historians now describe as ‘popular culture’.42 Second, as I noted above, the two-tiered model of culture for medieval Islam has simply become untenable.43 While Boaz Shoshan and Jonathan Berkey in particular have made sophisticated attempts to rescue and deploy the model in innovative ways, it nevertheless relies on an unworkable theoretical foundation, already dismantled by Peter Brown.44 Brown has shown that the basic weakness of the ‘two-tiered’ model is that it is rarely, if ever, concerned to explain religious change other than among the elite. The religion of ‘the vulgar’ is assumed to be uniform. It is timeless and faceless. It can cause changes by imposing its modes of thought on the elite; but in itself it does not change.45 This is precisely how some historians of Islam have depicted medieval popular culture.46 Furthermore, the two tiers of culture, even when connected by an escalator, pre-emptively prevent us from imagining a truly popular culture in which all strata of society participate together to negotiate its multiple meanings. This is not to say there were no such things as elite and non-elite social spaces in medieval Islamic societies. While we can certainly differentiate the world of a blacksmith in Fustat from that of a chancery scribe in the royal dīwān in Cairo, why label one the preserve of the popular and not the other? Both participated in the life of the city and together contributed to the construction of tradition and the popularity of Sufism. The underlying problem with many treatments of medieval popular culture in general is that historians have paid too little attention to the historical and conceptual baggage that the concept carries.47 In the late eighteenth century European elites ‘discovered’ the culture of the peasantry in their folksongs, poetry and folktales. These discoveries served to shore up emergent nationalisms and other political projects by recovering the authentic core of the people in their rediscovered culture.48 Thus we see in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Johann Gottfried von Herder (d. 1803) using the term Kultur des Volkes in contradistinction to the Kultur der Gelehrten, and François-René de Chateaubriand (d. 1848) using the term dévotions populaires to describe the religious practices of the peasantry.49 Since Burke’s study, most scholars of medieval popular culture have taken this distinction between Kultur des Volkes and Kultur der Gelehrten for granted. However, John Storey has recently argued that Europeans did not discover popular culture so much as invent it for their own nationalist and romanticist projects.50 Not surprisingly, subsequent articulations of popular culture continued to rely on and rework these inventions for other ideological ends. The most influential of these inventions – the Volk of Herder and the brothers Grimm, the mass culture of Matthew Arnold, the despised kitsch of the Modernists, and the culture industry of the Frankfurt school – have all been fundamentally predicated on the two-tiered model of culture.51 I would argue that by continuing to posit and describe the existence of distinct popular and elite cultures, medieval studies have been fraught with the conceptual problematic of using categories that are inexorably linked to the capitalist bourgeois economy of the modern industrialised West and its concomitant nationalist projects. These historical and conceptual roots have been shorn away in medieval studies by theorising popular cultures simply as ‘the cultures of non-elites’. But given that the invention of popular culture is itself ineluctably bound up with economies of production, and thus not a local category anyway, I think it worth asking: what might a production–consumption model of popular culture look like in a medieval context? Rather than describing a popular culture as simply the antithesis of an elite culture, I suggest we imagine medieval popular culture as that which entails the mass production and consumption of cultural goods, regardless of who is doing the consuming. Thus, I follow scholars like Mikita Brottman and David Chidester, both of whom define popularity quantitatively, ‘as dependent on not who is doing the consuming, but on how many are doing the consuming’.52 In other words, ‘popular culture is popular because it is mass produced, widely distributed, and regularly consumed by a large number of people’.53 In our case, the popular cultures of Sufism – or what I would call the popularisation of Sufism – involved large numbers of people across the socio-economic spectrum engaged in the collective and systematic manipulation of the discursive and practical traditions of Sufism.54 This formulation opens up a conceptual space to theorise and describe a truly popular culture that integrates rather than fragments the populace. It gets us away from thinking about the ‘movement’ of Sufism between social spheres and closer to describing Sufism in a more holistic way in which multiple social strata participated collectively to produce and reproduce cultures of Sufism. I therefore suggest the following framework. First, the popularisation of Sufism is fundamentally linked to the social and cultural production of Sufism on a wide scale. By production, I mean the discursive and practical effects of people who call themselves Sufis doing ‘Sufi’ things: dressing in certain ways, dancing, chanting, writing treatises, teaching disciples, parading in the streets and so on. By popularisation, I mean the reception and consumption of those products by large numbers of people, regardless of social status. Second, the production of Sufism necessarily precedes popularisation. Third, and most importantly, the production of Sufism involves the interplay of multiple strata of society and thus cannot be represented as either an elite or a non-elite phenomenon. Despite socio-economic divisions that might obtain in other ways, Sufism was a cultural sphere in which these divisions often came together, even in conflict. Within this framework I find useful John Storey’s argument that any analysis of popular culture must take seriously both the structures of production and the agency of consumption, or what many have called ‘production in use’.55 This raises another vexing question. The social formations and cultures of Sufism I examine here did not exist in Egypt before the Ayyubid period. How, then, do we account for the innovative and widespread production of new Sufi cultures within the context of pre-existing modes of cultural production? In other words, given the structures of medieval Egyptian society, structures that tended to be conservative, how do we explain the social and cultural shifts necessary for the widespread production and consumption of different forms of Sufism?5
The Problem of Structure, Agency and Change
This issue of the relationship of pre-existing social structures to Sufi agents who institute new or modified structures is part of a larger set of questions that have long occupied sociologists. Indeed, arguments about the roles that agency and structure play in social life have been called ‘the heart and soul of sociology’, and oceans of ink have been expended on the subject.57 While most sociologists affirm the importance of both structure and agency, three basic positions concerning their relationship can be marked out, which I will oversimplify for the sake of space.58 On one side, there are sociologists who hold that structure is foundational and for whom all social action is predicated on a delimited range of potential actions constrained by that structure. On the other side, there are those who see individual agency as primary and for whom all social action is predicated first and foremost on the (rational or otherwise) self-reflective choices of individuals. Between these two positions are those who emphasise the dialectical relationship between structure and agency, in which both are mutually reinforcing and reciprocally implicated in social change. To a large extent these debates have not made their way into medieval Islamic studies and W. W. Clifford’s lament about ‘the gravitational pull of traditional research methods’ is still worth repeating.59 Nevertheless, there has been some work in this area and the same structure–agency fault line, albeit on a quite limited scale, has emerged in the study of medieval Muslim societies. On the structural side, early studies of medieval Muslim societies were fundamentally functionalist (or more narrowly, ‘Parsonian’) in their orientation and conclusions. That is, the work pioneered by scholars such as Ira Lapidus and Roy Mottahedeh was indebted to Talcott Parsons’s emphasis on the structures and mechanisms that functioned to maintain equilibrium in a particular society in a given place and time. For these scholars, the study of medieval Muslim societies involved the study of the informal networks and personal relationships that made up the fundamental social structures that facilitated and sustained social equilibrium.60 More recently, however, functionalist sociology has fallen out of favour in the face of conflict theory, structuralism, symbolic interactionism and so on. In the wake of these developments a number of social historians of the pre-modern Middle East have turned to questions of agency. This approach, first adopted in substantive detail by Michael Chamberlain, seeks to describe social dynamics and change, rather than equilibrium, through the repertoire of practices revolving around social competition, conflict and the agency of actors.61 The turn to agency has been taken up in Mamluk studies by Clifford, Jonathan Berkey, Konrad Hirschler, Jo van Steenbergen and Richard McGregor, to name only a few.62 But this focus on competition and change has led several historians to conclude that medieval Islamic societies lacked strong institutions, and that social practice, especially educational practice, was ad hoc and informal. As Joseph Lowry has concluded, ‘the trend in the field [of Islamic studies] seems to be moving in the direction of denying the existence or importance of strong institutions in pre-modern Islamic societies’.63 However, these conclusions stem from an uncritical and underdeveloped conception of institutions and organisations in which a dearth of organised social behaviour is conflated with weak institutional structure. There is, in general, much confusion about the question of institutions in medieval Islamic societies.64 But a more precise understanding of these issues is exactly what is needed, to understand not only the popularisation of Sufism but the social context in which it took place more broadly. In what follows, then, I posit a distinction between, and simple definitions of, institutions and organisations that ought to facilitate the elaboration of more precise descriptions and explanations for the mechanisms of both social equilibrium and change in the medieval Islamicate context. I am especially interested in how the structures of Egyptian society both constrained and enabled Sufis to produce and popularise Sufism on such a large scale. I propose to conceptualise the popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and early Mamluk Egypt as the socially negotiated cultural production of different forms of Sufism. This production is constrained and enabled by the unfolding dialectic of structure/ agency and mediated through the institutions of Sufism. This will require some explanation. ‘Social structure’ is a phrase that has been used across a wide range of disciplines, given a variety of meanings, and used to perform an assortment of analytical duties.65 The primary conceptual divergence in the way scholars use the term is whether structure refers to the relationships between individuals or the relationships between groups.66 Here I will use the term to describe relations between individuals. More precisely, following José Lopez and John Scott I use the term ‘relational structure’ to describe ‘the social relations themselves, understood as patterns of causal interconnection and interdependence among agents and their actions, as well as the positions that they occupy’.67 But more importantly, I take up a critical distinction articulated by John Martin that structure is not an objective description of reality but rather an analytic construct; structure is the name sociologists give to a perceived regularity of action across a set of social actors.68 Thus, when I speak of structure here I refer to the observable and regular interactions of individuals within groups as the medieval sources describe them. For example, when I refer to the social structure of the nascent collectivity of Shādhilī Sufis, I refer not to some architectonic social configuration but to the sources’ portrayal of their regularly recurring behaviour and interactions. The effect of collective repetitive action over time is the emergence of stable social institutions that constrain and enable all subsequent interactions. Therefore, following Martin again, I heuristically separate structure from the institutions that structure produces.69 In other words, the repeated and regular interaction of individuals (structure) will ultimately produce patterned and predictable ways of acting. Once these patterned ways of acting enter the discursive realm of the actors – that is, once actors describe and name them – I call these institutions. Institutions are thus quite simply the socially constructed and accepted ‘ways of doing things’.70 They are the rules that govern social intercourse and ‘regulate the relations of individuals to each other’.71 There are five essential elements of an institution as I will use the concept in the following chapters. First, institutions are social. They are generated by and exist in the repeated interpersonal relations of members of a group. The primary focus of any institutional analysis must therefore be on the set of individuals performing any given regularised behaviour. Second, institutions are normative. They both constrain and enable the behaviours of the actors of a given collectivity by comprising a social grammar, or what Bruno Latour calls ‘complex repertoires of action’ for any given situation.72 Third, institutions are linguistically and mimetically performative. The difference between structure and institution is that the latter has entered the collective discourse. As such, institutional analysis must pay attention to the language used by actors of a given group and the array of mimetically learned behaviours linked to that language.73 Thus, one method to locate and describe institutions in a pre-modern setting is to attend closely to the standardised vocabularies of doctrine and practice in texts. This also provides a way to address the claim that there is insufficient quantitative data to allow speculation on patterned group behaviour for this period.74 Fourth, institutions are objective for the actors who perform them. As actors mimetically accumulate social knowledge over time, this knowledge, which Émile Durkheim famously called ‘social facts’, becomes constitutive of social reality itself.75 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann call this ever-accumulating and evolving store of objective social knowledge the ‘sedimentation of meaning’.76 The sedimentation of social facts that order social interactions has the effect of externalising the rules of social intercourse. Thus, these mimetic and linguistic performances that objectively pattern subsequent behaviour tend to reproduce themselves over time, giving stability to social interaction.77 In other words, while institutions are socially constructed they nevertheless appear to be the objective and time-honoured ‘ways of doing things’. Finally, institutions are fundamentally dynamic and subject to change. In this regard, Anthony Giddens has done much to clarify the fluid relationship between agency and structure as they impinge on social change.78 He does this by means of what he calls ‘structuration’, the idea that there is a ‘duality of structure’ – the structure and the actor – that continually interact over time. Humans do not simply react to their social environment like very large amoebas. They are thinking beings who at any given moment can reflect on and explain why they are doing something. Institutions are those social facts that provide self-reflective actors with a delimited range of potential actions. The continual feedback loop of intentional acts and unintentional consequences is how institutions emerge and how they change over time. Thus, for Giddens, structure is always recursively constituted by individuals in action and is itself the very grounds of social change. The duality of structure, or structuration, is the ongoing and recursively constituted dialectic of agency and structure, mediated through institutions. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and the habitus is instructive here. The objectively observed rules of social intercourse are inculcated in individual subjects through the embodied performance of those rules and their attendant social knowledge. Bourdieu’s habitus is composed of these ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures . . . principles which generate and organise practices’.79 The habitus, to put it rather too simply, is the embodied knowledge of institutions and the somatic source of practical sense, it is ‘social necessity turned into nature’.80 Both Giddens and Bourdieu are well known (and have been criticised) for attempting to theorise such a clear middle ground between structure and agency in such a way as to foreground social change.81 But their interventions are extraordinarily helpful for our popularisation question because if we want to track the popularisation of Sufism we must describe the institutional elements of Sufism and Egyptian society as well as the agential production of new social forms across multiple social strata within those institutional contexts. As I use the term, then, institutions both constrain and enable social behaviour. They enable by providing actors with a ‘complex repertoire’ of possible actions for any given situation. They constrain by limiting that repertoire to a mimetically learned set of intelligible and self-reflective actions. The relationship of the actor to the institution is admittedly a thorny one. But here I will insist – analytically and heuristically – on the priority of institutions through which actors express agency, who in turn recursively constitute the institutions anew, and so on. In this sense, it is the institutions of Sufism that constrain and enable the production of Sufi culture in any given time and place. A critical subset of this concern with structure and agency is the question of goals and the pursuit of interests. This is a question of organisation, which will be quite helpful in sorting out of some of the relational structures I examine in the following chapters. Richard Scott has noted that institutions and organisations have been conflated a great deal in much social analysis and this is certainly the case for scholarship on medieval Islam.82 In order to differentiate institutions from organisations, some sociologists describe organisations as the deliberate and corporate instantiation of one or more institutions for a specific purpose, or as ‘tokens’ of ‘types’ of institutions.83 Other sociologists describe organisations as collective frameworks for the pursuit of mutual interest. The literature on organisations, like that of institutions, is vast.84 But based on my reading of some of this literature, I propose a simple hybrid definition that organisations arise from within highly institutionalised social fields, wherein actors draw upon one or more institutions in the deliberate and collective pursuit of mutual or overlapping interests and goals. For example, the deliberate instantiation of the institutions of waqf (endowment), u‚ūl al-fiqh (formal jurisprudence) and ijāza (licence to teach or transmit) within a brick-and-mortar structure for the purposes of patronising and pursuing scholarship is an organisation known as a madrasa. Another distinction is relevant here, that between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ organisations. Formal organisations are those in which ‘social positions and the relationships among them have been explicitly specified and are defined independently of the personal characteristics and relations of the participants occupying these positions’.85 Informal organisations are those in which ‘it is impossible to distinguish between the characteristics of the positions and the prescribed relations and the characteristics and personal relations of the participants’.86 In other words, social roles in formal organisations are fixed independently of personality while informal organisations are dependent on the personalities of constituent actors. This will become a critical distinction in the chapters that follow as I describe the organisation of the statesponsored khānqāh in Cairo as formal, while I would characterise organised Sufi brotherhoods (at least in their early stages) as informal. To summarise: I theorise the popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and early Mamluk Egypt as the result of the socially negotiated production of different Sufi cultures at multiple socio-economic sites and across several political contexts. This production was constrained and enabled by the unfolding dialectic of structure/agency and mediated through the institutions of Sufism. While I am particularly concerned with Ayyubid and early Mamluk Egypt, I locate the beginning of this process in the formative period of Sufism: Baghdad in the middle of the third/ninth century. Prior to that time there were a number of distinct pious and devotional movements across the Muslim East. Sara Sviri has shown that there were several different groups whose defining characteristic was the wearing of wool (‚ūf ) and were known as ‚ūfīs. 87 In Nishapur and its environs there were also competing movements like the Karrāmīya and the Malāmatīya.88 The writings of al-Óakīm al-Tirmidhī (d. circa 295–300/905–10) represent an apparently unique ascetic or devotional movement from Khurāsān.89 In Ba‚ra there were the Sālimīya, a group of devotional theologians named after Muªammad b. Sālim (d. 297/909) and his son Aªmad (d. 356/967) but who traced their authority to Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 283/896).90 Ba‚ra was also home to Abū Óātim al-ʿA††ār (d. 260s/870s or 880s), who may have forged a link between earlier renunciant wool-wearing groups and the later Sufis.91 And of course, there were the Íūfīya of Baghdad, a collectivity primarily comprising the circle of devotees around the figure of Abū l-Qāsim al-Junayd (d. 298/910).92 It is this collectivity from which ‘classical’ Sufism developed and through which most subsequent Sufis would trace their authority. The disciples of these early Sufis, men like Abū Bakr al-Wāsi†ī (d. circa 320/932), would venture outside Baghdad, particularly into Khurāsān and Transoxiana, bringing the institutionalised outlook and programme of the Íūfīya with them.93 ‘Sufism’s eventual success was secured by the vigorous propaganda of its values that was launched by a number of Baghdad-trained Sufis.’94 The encounter between Baghdadi Sufism and these local traditions precipitated the contestation and discursive construction of Sufism as a discrete tradition. These constructions mined many of the earlier devotional movements in order to create a coherent history connecting the Sufis to the first generations of Muslims. But it was the local structure of the Baghdad Íūfīya, a structure that quite clearly produced a technical vocabulary and repertoire of praxis – that is, institutions – that enabled and facilitated these constructions. Already in the late fourth/tenth century we see attempts to fit the textual traditions from earlier movements into the institutionalised vocabulary of the Baghdad Íūfīya and wrangle them into particular forms for particular ends. Both al-Kalābādhī (d. 380s/990s) and al-Sarrāj (d. 378/988), for example, systematised and organised diverse materials and apophthegmata to construct and promote a version of Sufism for a non-Baghdadi audience of interested readers.95 Conversely, Abū ˝ālib al-Makkī (d. 386/996), a member of the Sālimīya who also studied with Sufis like Abū Saʿīd Ibn al-Aʿrābī (d. 341/952), deployed the institutionalised vocabulary and praxis of the Íūfīya within a non-Sufi framework. His Qūt al-qulūb seems to me to be a synthesis of the two movements, the Sālimīya and the Íūfīya, wherein he deployed materials from the latter in order to bolster the traditions of the former.96 Thus, the late fourth/tenth century represents this fecund moment when authors were using the institutionalised doctrines and practices of several different devotional movements for diverse and competing social ends, a phenomenon not unusual in the Būyid period.97 And it was precisely at this time, spurred perhaps by an emergent Sufi discourse, that the formerly imbricated ªadīth folk and renunciants mutually disaggregated into separate movements.98 The literary ‘systematisation of the Sufi tradition’, or ‘construction of Sufism as a tradition’, reflected these earlier movements and developments while also creating the discursive framework that would become the hallmark of Sufism.99 Thus, for example, Abū Nuʿaym al-I‚fahānī (d. 430/1038) extensively mined the first centuries of Islam to construct a monumental history of Sufism by connecting the Sufis to the first four caliphs, famous jurisprudents and a large number of early pious and renunciant Muslims.100 The individual perhaps most responsible for the normative construction of Sufism was Abū ʿAbd al-Raªmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), who was truly catholic in his use of earlier material to construct his vision of Sufism.101 What is particularly noteworthy in these early texts, from my perspective, is the extent to which these authors articulated their contested positions in an already institutionalised technical vocabulary. As I noted above, the presence of a standardised vocabulary linked to a practice indicates quite clearly the institutionalisation of those practices. This means that by the time of al-Kalābādhī, al-Sarrāj and al-Makkī, and especially by the time of al-Khargūshī (d. 407/1016), alSulamī (d. 412/1021), al-I‚fahānī (d. 430/1038), al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) and al-Hujwīrī (d. 465–9/1073–7), the discourse and praxis of Sufism were already highly institutionalised.102 Ibn al-Aʿrābī recorded an anecdote in his ˝abaqāt al-nussāk concerning Abū l-Óusayn al-Nūrī (d. 295/907) that illustrates my point quite well. AlNūrī was one of the key figures of the early Íūfīya, a member of al-Junayd’s circle who spent almost his entire life in Baghdad.103 However, for fourteen years he lived in the Syrian city of Raqqa and lost touch with his Sufi companions. He later returned to Iraq and was brought to al-Junayd, who was overjoyed to see his old companion. However, after listening to al-Junayd and his companions discuss Sufism for a time, al-Nūrī fell silent. They asked him to say something and he replied, ‘You are using terms (alqāb) that I do not know and speech (kalām) that I am not familiar with. Just let me listen so I might understand your point.’104 This narrative provides us with a remarkable window onto how quickly the doctrine and speech of the Baghdad Íūfiya produced a formal vocabulary. In the fourteen years of his absence, the language of the group had become more precise, specialised and technical, all the hallmarks of institutionalisation. This is not to say the meanings of these terms were fixed at this point. Rather, it marks one early moment in the institutionalisation of Sufism. The famous lament of al-Būshanjī (d. 348/960) is actually quite apropos here: Sufism ‘is a name without a reality, but it used to be a reality without a name’.105 That is, the local structure of the Baghdad Íūfīya was the social reality that gave rise to the institutionalisation and, obviously, naming of Sufism as an object of construction and contention. My larger point here is that it was the development and institutionalisation of Sufi doctrine and practice during the early formative period that would become foundational for subsequent Sufi constructions of authority and claims of legitimacy.106 Thus, when I write of the institutionalisation of Sufism I intend the period immediately prior to the classical manuals of Sufism and not the so-called ‘post-classical period’. It was institutionalisation that actually precipitated and facilitated the writing of these manuals. This claim marks a substantial break from most scholarship on Sufism, wherein ‘institutionalised Sufism’ describes the emergence of khānqāhs and ribā†s in the fifth/eleventh or sixth/twelfth centuries, or the Sufi orders of the seventh/ thirteenth century and beyond. While these developments certainly drew on the institutions of Sufism and produced new institutions of their own, I would describe them as the organisation of Sufism. Not only is this a more precise description of the way in which Sufism developed after the formative period but it is useful in understanding how Sufism spread so quickly after the fourth/tenth century. It was the institutions of Sufism, developed by the Baghdad Sufis and practised by their successors, that enabled and facilitated its rapid spread. Sufis – through the structured and patterned practice of an institutionalised Sufism – produced the conditions of their own social formation. Wherever Sufis went, they produced Sufi culture, ‘thereby reproducing the conditions of [their] own perpetuation’.107 While this took place on a relatively small and localised scale prior to the fifth/eleventh century, several developments took place that would ramp up production: the Seljuks’ state sponsorship of Sufism enacted primarily through the endowment (waqf ) and stipendiary position (man‚ib); the development of dispensations (rukha‚) for Sufis with day jobs by Abū l-Najīb al-Suhrawardī (d. 563/1168); the collapse of the Iranian economy that sent many Persian-speaking Sufis to the West; and the increasingly sophisticated outreach of individual Sufis, among many others. It was the prior institutionalisation of Sufism that enabled all these developments. For example, it was the institutions of adab and ‚uªba (both attested very early and increasingly formalised during this period, although perhaps not to the extent described by Fritz Meier) that patterned the relational structure of the state-sponsored ribā†s in Baghdad.108 The institution of walāya (sanctity) and its social manifestation in the awliyāʾ (saints) patterned and facilitated the interaction between Sufis and the increasing numbers of those who came to them for blessing. These institutionalised practices and doctrines were the very means by which the Sufis produced Sufism on an ever-widening scale.109 Admittedly, the preceding account is overly schematic, lacks detail and requires more substantive research to flesh it out, but it should set the stage for the following chapters, in which I describe how these institutions constrained and enabled the production and popularisation of Sufism in Egypt.
The Argument and Structure of this Book
This book is divided into three parts of three chapters each. In each part I focus on one particular collectivity and the ways its members creatively worked with and on the institutionalised traditions of Sufism to produce the conditions that popularised Sufism in Egypt. As I hope to make clear here, the ways in which Muslims creatively drew on the institutions of Sufism in the service of new social formations were truly remarkable and gave rise to one of the most substantive and widespread social transformations in Egypt before the Ottoman period. I have organised these three collectivities according to a simple socio-political heuristic framework based on the relationship of each group to the Ayyubid and early Mamluk states, or more precisely their relationship to the actors constituting those polities.110 Broadly speaking, I conceptualise the Ayyubid and Mamluk states as composed of those members of the military patronage system who administered regional financial institutions (jizya, kharāj, iq†āʿ, aªbās etc.) and claimed to protect and defend the Muslim umma and the non-Muslim dhimmī communities of their geographical territory.111 Following Weber, then, my definition of these states is fundamentally related to a claim to legitimacy.112 The relationship of Sufi collectivities to the state is integral to my investigation because the production of Sufism was at least partially a function of their complementary claims to legitimacy. Both of these claims were rooted in varying conceptions of walāya/wilāya – authority derived from proximity to power, whether mundane or divine.113 The question is, how did different Sufis understand or represent their claims in relationship to the claims of Ayyubid and Mamluk polities? How did these claim to protect and promote Islam square – or not – with the claims made by different groups of Sufis to represent a normative Islam? The answers will not parse out according to a simple binary – aligned or not aligned – but rather along a continuum of socio-political configurations. I argue that it was the ways these claims of legitimacy interfaced that, in addition to the other social factors mentioned here, constrained and enabled certain forms of Sufi agency, cultural production and social formation. Part One is a study of the state-sponsored Sufis of the khānqāh Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ in Cairo. Saladin founded the khānqāh in 569/1173 as part of his effort to recruit Sunni scholars, whose approval and cooperation he needed to rule the populace effectively. In doing so, he created an organisational setting that led to an influx of scores of Sufis into Cairo from the East. These Sufis came to the khānqāh for a variety of reasons and in pursuit of different interests, most of which overlapped with those of the state. Importantly, the Sufis of the Saʿīd al-Suʿadāʾ often came together in public spaces to perform and promote these mutual interests. These performances were one way in which they produced and popularised Sufism in Cairo. In Part Two I turn to the state-sanctioned Sufis of the nascent Shādhilī brotherhood. Abū l-Óasan al-Shādhilī (d. 656/1258) and his successors worked with the tacit sanction of the Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers to produce and propagate their particular vision of Sufism across Egypt. In particular, I focus on the creation of an institutionalised identity linked to al-Shādhilī’s personality, which led to the informal organisation of the Shādhilī brotherhood. It was one of al-Shādhilī’s successors, Ibn ʿA†āʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī (d. 709/1309), who discursively mapped the nascent communal identity of al-Shādhilī’s followers onto the biography of al-Shādhilī. This biography then functioned metonymically as the perfect ‘Shādhilī Sufi’. In other words, alIskandarī constructed an ideal type in the biography of al-Shādhilī, a type his followers then embodied performatively by emulating that ideal. The performed hagiography, in combination with a rhetorically sophisticated Shādhilī outreach, created the conditions that produced and reproduced a stable Shādhilī social identity that spread across Egypt. In Part Three I turn to the unique context of Upper Egypt. One of the salient features of Upper Egypt during this period was the Ayyubid and Mamluk states’ ambivalent relationship to the region. Other than collecting taxes and putting down serial rebellions, the rulers tended to ignore Upper Egypt. Furthermore, unlike in other regions of Egypt, Ayyubid and early Mamluk sultans and amīrs did not found or fund any madrasa or khānqāh there. The Sufis took it upon themselves to establish and propagate a normative Sunni praxis, build hospices and madrasas, and regulate communal boundaries. The Upper Egyptian context thus produced a very different form of Sufism from those described so far. These Sufis were antagonistic to the state and wary of its patronage, and formulated their authority explicitly in terms of their ability to perform miracles (karāmāt). In the public performance of this rhetoric of sainthood, they not only popularised Sufism in Upper Egypt, but radically changed the region’s social and religious profile. There are many other individuals and groups of Sufis I might have examined in these pages (I return to this subject in my concluding remarks). But the three groups I bring together here are broadly representative of larger trends and might serve as a framework for future study. Nevertheless, in bringing together these very different groups I want to emphasise at the outset that the category or label ‘Sufi’ is not in and of itself terribly meaningful or indicative of any kind of stable identity; nor should it lead us to any a priori conclusions about that identity. The epithet only makes sense within very specific historical, social and political contexts. While the label ‘Sufi’ indicates some engagement with a larger discursive and practical tradition, what it meant to be a Sufi at the khānqāh often differed substantially from what it meant to be a Sufi in Qū‚ or a follower of al-Shādhilī. What all the individuals I examine here had in common was recourse to and contestation of a shared discursive and practical tradition transmitted through the institutions of Sufism. But the nature of this engagement – its specific valence and substance in any given instance – was entirely contingent.
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