The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009.
In this portion of the lecture, Prof. Bulliet recounts the rise and fall of Sufi brotherhoods, and how their legacy is reflected in present-day Islam.
9. The Third Big Bang—Sufism
The fighting and the discord die down, and lo and behold you have a new period of inflation along a trajectory that had limped along as a very minor tendency in the 700s, 800s, and 900s, and began to gain a little traction in the 1000s, and then becomes terribly important in the 1200s onward: this is Sufism. Sufism is usually defined as Islamic mysticism, and when you read the books on Sufism that were available until about 20 years ago if appears that all the important Sufis were poets or wonderworkers or crazy people who lived very early in Islamic history. A major part of the buildup of Sufism was to collect the sayings, utterances, poems and stories about these early mystics. But the inflation of Sufism as a pan-Islamic practice dates from about the 1200s after most of these Sufis have long passed into legend. It consists of brotherhoods or fraternities or orders (whatever you want to call them), the word for which in Arabic is tariqa, the plural of which is turuq, which means a “path” or “way.” In this period of the development of Sufism, you go from having an individual wonderworker or poet who has a group of admirers, to having a leader who has followers who are formally bound to him by an oath of allegiance. These constitute a large population of devotees who hope that they themselves will rise through a series of mystic paths to a level of witness of God comparable to their master. These brotherhoods become geographically widespread and are linked so that a single brotherhood might have chapters stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan and India, and may become incredibly numerous. By 1500, it appears that in cities, perhaps a little less so in the countryside, probably each adult male belonged to at least one Sufi brotherhood. They intended to be non-exclusive, but usually you just focused on one. Some of them had women, but generally that is not talked about. In rural areas, the maintenance of a formal brotherhood was more difficult.
You had wandering Sufis who went from village to village and manifested their holiness in return for a little fried chicken or whatever they could get out of the village (laughter). Wandering or moving in God’s spirit was considered a good thing for Sufis; traveling for a particular objective was not considered a good thing. Earning a living was frowned on, but recognized in some cases as being necessary. Ideally you would rely on God’s bounty because part of this Sufi brotherhood had to do with being poor. The word “dervish” comes from the Persian word for a poor person (darvesh), and it becomes the word for Sufi in both Persian and Turkish; faqir is the Arabic word for poor person, and it became the standard word in Arabic for Sufis. The Sufi brotherhoods also had places of assembly that went by different names. The landscape, both urban and rural, became dotted by lodges or convents or inns (whatever you wanted to call them), places where Sufis of a particular tariqa would assemble.
In these places you would have a dovetailing with a simultaneous development that similarly becomes subject to enormous inflation and importance in the same time period, and that is an inflation in the number of places where you could go on a pilgrimage. It is considered one of the obligations of Islam that you should make a pilgrimage to Mecca if you are able once at least during your lifetime. There probably was a pilgrimage to Jerusalem which is as old as that to Mecca, although this is unclear. But you have in the 1200s and afterwards are hundreds or even thousands of places of pilgrimage. Some of them were purely local; all the villages in a particular district would go to a certain place of pilgrimage. But these pilgrimages frequently were the same as the burial places of prominent Sufis or of some other prominent people, rarely people from the government or the military. It was normally either the burial place of a Sufi or the burial place or a member of the family of Ali, that is to say, the family of the Prophet Mohammad through his son-in-law Ali.
Or you had pilgrimages in places that were unidentifiable, that is to say, you would say you are going to the shrine of the kirkuz or the “forty girls.” Who are the “forty girls”? There are “forty girl” pilgrimages places in Turkey where there is no real agreement as to who the forty girls were. In Nishapur where Prof. Bulliet did field work, there was the tomb of Tiflan al-Muslan ? or the “children of Muslim.” What in the world does that mean? Nobody knew who the children of Muslim were (laughter), but it was an impressive tomb. There wasn’t a current pilgrimage there, but clearly there had been pilgrimages in an earlier time.
In the 1200s and 1300s you begin to have manifestations of these pilgrimages in the form of guidebooks of where to go to pray. “When you are in Chicago, you can go and pray at the tomb of so-and-so.” This holds true of Damascus, Cairo, Nishapur, wherever—where do you pray? For Nishapur Prof. Bulliet collected three lists of places that you should pray, all of which emanate from after the date the city was destroyed, because people went to the ruins. In trying to reconstruct the city as it had existed, he would go through these pilgrimage books because it would tell you how to find the grave, and that would give you some notion of the topography of the ruins. There would be certain places that would be fixed landmarks and you could tell people where you could go from there.
These pilgrimages were terribly important. What this has to do with Sufism is the notion of baraqa or blessing. Blessings can be received by proximity to or contact with the sacred. If you were a Sufi, the blessings would be involved with your association with the sheikh or leader of your Sufi order, or the local chapter of your Sufi order. But if you go to the grave of a Sufi, then the blessing is that you’re at the grave. Or it may be that the family of an important Sufi will inherit blessings from a previous generation. The way this works out in different areas will be quite different, but in the area that Prof. Bulliet knows best of Nishapur, when you went to the grave of a Sufi on a pilgrimage, you made a prayer that you hoped would be fulfilled through the blessing of the saint, and then you took a little piece of cotton and you tied it to a twig on the tree growing out of the tomb of the saint. The tree growing out of the buried body of the saint was the locus of the baraqa for that saint.
The variety of expression in Sufi brotherhoods from West Africa to Indonesia is stunning. The variety of hadith was remarkable, the variety of legal interpretations was striking, but the variety of Sufi expressions is nothing less than stunning, because the localization of charisma in the structure of Sufism and of local pilgrimages permitted local traditions to be assimilated into Islam without having to have any centralized control. What Sufism was in place or another would be different, but it would partially be an expression of what the local assimilation was between Islam and other traditions. So Sufism flourished everywhere but in particular it flourished on the geographical peripheries of Islam following the resumption after the year 1000 of the expansion of Islam as a world-faith community.
Sufism was a phenomenally creative and fertile area of religious expression, including music, dance, art, and architecture. And yet it is very hard to call it mysticism in its later phase, even though the ideal was some sort of eventually union with God. Some orders have different sets of rules for Sufis and another set for wannabes, those people who really wish they could be a Sufi, but if they can’t be a Sufi, they would rather hang around with the Sufis—“fans” is what they would call them now (laughter).
What you have is a type of collective piety—the Sufis would meet regularly, often weekly or in a different format in the case of a pilgrimage. The idea of regular group assemblage and participation in a ritual specific to the group became the essence of Sufism. Whether or not you had an experience of God or whether you just visualized that, someday as you became more advanced you might have a sense of a direct experience of God, you would still gain from the collective participation in a Sufi ritual. This growth was almost beyond imagining. When the French conquered in Algeria in 1830, they set up a commission to make a list of all the Sufi brotherhoods in Algeria. That list was published and there were hundreds and hundreds of Sufi brotherhoods just in the areas that the French took over in Algeria. If you extrapolate that to the entire Muslim world, there must have been thousands of Sufi brotherhoods.
10. The Third Big Crunch—anti-Sufi campaigns
Now there are very few, because we have reached a contraction point, and most of the Sufi brotherhoods disappeared. This contraction has a lot to do with a feeling of revulsion and subsequently a feeling of intercultural embarrassment by highly educated Muslim scholars who felt that the Sufi brotherhoods represented superstition. They felt that they should be weeded out, calmed down or made sober so they wouldn’t embarrass Muslims in the eyes of the Europeans, who themselves were never superstitious or fanatic (laughter).
You had anti-Sufi campaigns, you had campaigns to destroy local pilgrimages and some of this will become the substance for later lectures because this occurs largely in the 18th century, but even more in the 19th and early 20th centuries, where it reaches an extreme in the origin of the Turkish republic in the 1920s with the banning of all Sufi brotherhoods and the conversion of all the convents and inns to non-religious purposes.
11. The Fourth Singularity—Qur’an + sunnah + sharia + tariqa
So here we have a new singularity, because the Sufi brotherhoods are tamed subject to this enormous contraction, but there is a residue. What Sufi brotherhoods had represented, once shorn of aspects of paganism, spiritualism or superstition, was the idea of people bonding in a collective expression of Islam. The notion of Islam being realized in groups seems to be what is left. When we look at the Muslim world today we find that there are Islamic parties, Islamic associations, even Islamic militant organizations that carry out acts of violence. This is something that is part of this tariqa, or the idea that Islam is appropriately expressed within a particular group.
Now a lot of this growth of Sufism can perhaps be attached to something that happened in 1258, which was the destruction of the Caliphate, the central political expression of Islam when the Mongols destroyed the city of Baghdad. My impression as an historian is that, in the post-Caliphate period, the importance of the pilgrimage to Mecca vastly increases over what it had been before, so that Mecca replaces the Caliphate as the center of Islam. Later rulers, whether they are Ottoman Turks or Saudi Kings, describe themselves in their official titulature as the “Servants of the Two Holy Places” or the Al-Khadimul Haramain Sharifain. Being in charge of the pilgrimage becomes a vastly more important thing, but it is paralleled on a local basis by the growth of these local pilgrimages and by the growth of the idea that the blessing of saints and the exercise of pious behavior within groups is appropriate to this period after the centrality of the expression of political Islam disappears. (Prof. Bulliet will talk about the Caliphate at a later point. )
The next post covers the final wave of expansion of Islam, one that is going on today, that comes through the propagation of the faith through mass media at the end of the 19th century, through electronic media in the 20th century, and the Internet during the 21st. Prof. Bulliet gives his predictions about the future of Islam, and concludes with his metahistorical musings comparing the unfolding of Christianity as opposed to Islam.
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