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ṢūfĪ Orders
Ṣūfī orders represent one of the most important forms of personal piety and social organization in the Islamic world. In most areas, an order is called a tarīqah (pl. turuq), which is the Arabic word for “path” or “way.” The term tarīqah is used for both the social organization and the special devotional exercises that are the basis of the order’s ritual and structure. As a result, the Ṣūfī orders or tarīqahs include a broad spectrum of activities in Muslim history and society.
From its inception, Islam had mystical elements that were integral to the spiritual lives of the faithful. There were pious mystics who developed their personal spiritual paths involving devotional practices, recitations, and literature of piety. These mystics, or Ṣūfīs, sometimes came into conflict with authorities in the Islamic community and provided an alternative to the more legalistic orientation of many of the ʿulamāʿ (scholars). However, Ṣūfīs gradually became important figures in the religious life of the general population and began to gather around themselves groups of followers who were identified and bound together by the special mystic path of the teacher. By the twelfth century (the fifth century in the Islamic era), these paths began to provide the basis for more permanent fellowships, and Ṣūfī orders emerged as major social organizations in the Islamic community.
The orders have taken a variety of forms throughout the Islamic world. These range from the simple preservation of the tarīqah as a set of devotional exercises to vast interregional organizations with carefully defined structures. The orders also include the short-lived organizations that developed around particular individuals and more long-lasting structures with institutional coherence. The orders are not restricted to particular classes, although the orders in which the educated urban elite participated often had different perspectives from the orders that reflected a more broadly based popular piety, and specific practices and approaches varied from region to region.
Ṣūfī orders were characterized by central prescribed rituals, which involved regular meetings for recitations of prayers, poems, and selections from the Qurʿān. These meetings were usually described as acts of “remembering Allah” or dhikr. In addition, daily devotional exercises for the followers were also set, as were other activities of special meditation, asceticism, and devotion. Some of the special prayers of early Ṣūfīs became widely used, while the structure and format of the ritual was the distinctive character provided by the individual who established the tarīqah. The founder was the spiritual guide for all followers in the order, who would swear a special oath of obedience to him as their shaykh or teacher. As orders continued, the record of the transmission of the ritual would be preserved in a formal chain of spiritual descent, called a silsilah, which stated that the person took the order from a shaykh who took it from another shaykh and so on in a line extending back to the founder, and then usually beyond the founder to the Prophet Muḥammad. As orders became firmly established, leadership would pass from one shaykh to the next, sometimes within a family line and sometimes on the basis of spiritual seniority/mastery within the tarīqah. At times, a follower would reach a sufficient degree of special distinction that his prayers would represent a recognized subbranch within a larger order; at other times, such a follower might be seen as initiating a whole new tarīqah.
Within all this diversity, it is difficult to provide a simple account of the development of Ṣūfī orders, but at least some of the main features of the different types of orders and their development can be noted.
Premodern Foundations
Different types of orders developed in the early centuries of tarīqah formation. These provide important foundations for the Ṣūfī orders of the modern era.
Large Inclusive Traditions
The large inclusive tarīqah tradition has a clearly defined core of devotional literature. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some major figures emerged as the organizers of orders that were to become the largest in the Islamic world. In some cases, the orders may actually have been organized by the immediate followers of the “founders,” but these teachers represent the emergence of large-scale orders. The most frequently noted of these early orders is the Qādirīyah, organized around the teachings of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 1166) of Baghdad; it grew rapidly and became the most widespread of the orders. Two other major orders originating in this era are the Suhrawardīyah, based on the teachings and organization of Abū al-Najīb al-Suhrawardī (d. 1168) and his nephew, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1234); and the Rifāʿīyah, representing the tarīqah of Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī (d. 1182). By the thirteenth century, increasing numbers of tarīqahs were being organized in the traditions of great teachers. Many of these were of primarily local or regional influence, but some became as widespread as the earlier orders. Among the most important of these are the Shādhilīyah (established by Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī, d. 1258) in Egypt and North Africa, and the Chishtīyah (Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī, d. 1142) in Central and South Asia. These large tarīqahs are an important type of order representing a coherent tradition based on a central core of writings by the founder. Within these broad traditions over the centuries, later teachers would arise and create their own particular variants, but these would continue to identify with the main tradition. For example, throughout the Islamic world there are distinctive branches of the Qādirīyah, but these are generally identified as part of the Qādirīyah tradition, as is the case with the Bakkāʿīyah established by Aḥmad al-Bakkāʿī al-Kuntī (d. 1504) in West Africa, or the various branches of the Ghawthīyah originating with Muḥammad Ghawth (d. 1517) in South Asia. This process of creating independent suborders continues to the present and can be seen in the variety of relatively new tarīqahs in the traditions of the early orders, often identified with compound names, such as the Ḥāmidīyah Shādhilīyah of contemporary Egypt.
Orders Based On “Ancient Ways”
A second major style of Ṣūfī order developed within less clearly defined traditions that appealed to the early Ṣūfīs and used some of their prayers and writings but developed their own distinctive identities. Many tarīqah organizers thus traced their inspiration back to early Ṣūfīs like Abū al-Qāsim al-Junayd (d. 910) or Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī (d. 874). One may speak of the Junaydī tradition and the “way of Junayd” as insisting on constant ritual purity and fasting, or of the more ecstatic mood in the tradition of al- Bisṭāmī. However, the great Junaydī or Bisṭāmī orders are independent and have their own separate traditions. Among the most important Junaydī orders are the Kubrawīyah and the Mawlawīyah; orders such as the Yasawīyah and Naqshbandīyah are seen as being more in the Bisṭāmī tradition. Within the broader framework of affirming inspiration and instruction by a chain of teachers that stretches back to the early Ṣūfīs, new orders continue to be created.
Individual-Based Orders
A third type of major order is the tarīqah that develops as a result of the initiatives and teachings of a later teacher and has its own clear identity. These teachers usually affirmed their ties to earlier teachers and tarīqahs, but in some significant ways they proclaimed the unique validity of their particular tarīqah. Sometimes this took the form of an affirmation that the new tarīqah was a synthesis of preceding tarīqahs; sometimes the claim for authority was based on direct inspiration from the Prophet Muḥammad, in which case the order might be called a tarīqah Muḥammadīyah, or from some other special agent of Allah, for example al-Khiḍr orders of this type have been very important in the modern Muslim world and include the Tijānīyah, the Khatmīyah, and the Sanūsīyah.
Shrine Tarīqahs
Local orders centered on particular shrines or families represent another very important type of tarīqah. Teachers with special reputations for sanctity might develop significant followings during their lifetime, but their writings and work might not provide the basis for the development of for a larger order. Tombs of such pious teachers throughout the Muslim world have been important focuses of popular piety, and the rituals surrounding the ceremonies of remembrance and homage become a local tarīqah. Sometimes these might be indirectly identified with some more general Ṣūfī tradition, but the real impact and identity is local. The special centers of popular piety in North Africa that have developed around the tombs of the marabouts, or the various centers of pilgrimage that developed in Central Asia and even survived the policies of suppression by the former Soviet regime, provide good examples of this style of tarīqah.
Foundations Of The Modern Orders
Many observers have proclaimed the effective end of the Ṣūfī orders in the modern era. A major French authority on medieval Sufism, for example, announced in the middle of the twentieth century that the orders were “in a state of complete decline” and that they faced “the hostility and contempt of the elite of the modern Muslim world” (Massignon, 1953, p. 574). This reflects both the long historical tension between the Muslim urban intellectual elites and the tarīqahs and also the specifically modern belief that mystic religious experience and modernity were incompatible. However, by the end of the twentieth century it was clear that Ṣūfī orders remained a dynamic part of the religious life of the Islamic world; moreover, they were at the forefront of the expansion of Islam, not only in “traditional” rural areas but also in modern societies in the West and among the modernized intellectual elites within the Muslim world. These apparently contradictory views reflect the complex history and development of tarīqahs since the eighteenth century.
There is an underlying continuity of experience in the Ṣūfī orders that provides an important backdrop to specific modern developments. The rituals of popular piety among Muslims — educated and uneducated, rural and urban — cannot be ignored. Although over the past three centuries educated Muslims have paid less attention to the more miraculous and magical elements of saint visitation and other aspects of popular Ṣūfī piety, the intellectual appeal of Islamic mysticism has remained strong, and the sense of social cohesion provided by the Ṣūfī organizations has been important, especially in areas like the Muslim Central Asian societies of the former Soviet Union. Popular participation in regular Ṣūfī gatherings and support for various types of tarīqahs remain at remarkably high levels throughout the Muslim world. Estimates of membership in Ṣūfī orders in Egypt, for example, are in the millions, in contrast to the hundreds or thousands in the more militant Islamic revivalist organizations.
Popular Islamic piety among all classes of people remains strong throughout the modern era and shows little sign of decline at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This popular piety frequently is expressed participation in the activities of tarīqahs or other groups reflecting Ṣūfī approaches to the faith. However, the activities of the organizations of this popular piety do not usually attract much attention, despite their long-term importance. This situation provides the proper background for examining the specific experiences of the more visible Ṣūfī orders of the modern era.
The history of tarīqahs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides an important foundation for understanding the dynamics of the recent development of Ṣūfī orders. Ṣūfī organizations and leadership from this period remain significant in setting the discourse and defining the issues of Islamic piety in the modern era.
Some modern scholars argue that a number of new initiatives can be seen in the development of the Ṣūfī organizations and thought of the early modern era. Among some Ṣūfī teachers there were efforts to remove the more ecstatic and pantheistic elements of the Ṣūfī tradition and to create more reform-oriented Ṣūfī organizations and practices. Fazlur Rahman called this tendency “neo-Sufism” (Islam, Chicago, 1979), a term that came to be used by other scholars as well. “Neo-Sufism” referred to a mood rather than making any claim that the term represented a monolithic school of Ṣūfī thought. Other scholars have tended to reject the term because it seemed to ignore important continuities in Ṣūfī traditions and seemed to assume a greater degree of similarity among movements than might exist.
Regardless of the details of the debate, in the eighteenth century the broad spectrum of Ṣūfī orders and practices extended from the local varieties of popular folk religion to a more sober and sometimes reformist Ṣūfī leadership that did not approve of the popular cultic practices. Whether or not one calls the latter approach “neo-Sufism” is less important than it is to recognize that the less ecstatic and more sharī’a-Sufism existed and that it provided the basis for emerging tarīqahs minded important in the modern era. These orders represented a “new organizational phenomenon” of orders that were “relatively more centralized and less prone to fission than their predecessors” (O’Fahey, 1990, p. 4).
In the context of Islamic societies in the eighteenth century, immediately before the major encounter with the modernizing West, Ṣūfī orders were a significant part of the social fabric throughout the Islamic world. They provided vehicles for the expression of the faith of urban elites, served as networks for interregional interaction and travel, acted as an effective inclusive structure for the missionary expansion of Islam, and in some ways shaped the context within which movements of puritanical reform or spiritual revival developed.
Elite Tarīqahs
In the large urban centers in regions where Islam was the established faith of the overwhelming majority of the population, the orders were vehicles for the expression of piety among both the masses and the elites. New presentations of the old traditions, such as the Qādirīyah, Shādhilīyah, and Khalwatīyah, were important in places like Cairo. By the eighteenth century the larger orders of all types were expanding into many different regions.
The history of the Naqshbandīyah in the Middle East provides an important example of this development. It spread from Central and South Asia into Ottoman lands in at least two different forms — that of Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1625), called the Mujaddid or (Renewer) of the second millennium, and the earlier line of ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār. By the eighteenth century, notables in the tarīqah were prominent in Istanbul and other major Ottoman cities like Damascus, where the great Ḥanafī muftī and historian Muḥammad Khalīl al-Murādī (d. 1791) was a scion of a family associated with the Naqshbandīyah. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Shaykh Khālid al-Baghdādī (d. 1827) of the Mujaddidī line led a major movement of revival in the lands of the Fertile Crescent; the activities of the Khālidī branch established the Naqshbandīyah as “the paramount order in Turkey” (Hamid Algar, “Nakshbandīya,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., 1960–, vol. 7, p. 936).
Interregional Networks
The Naqshbandīyah also presents a good example of how the orders provided structures for interregional networks among the ʿulamāʿ and commercial classes. Students, pilgrims, and travelers could move from city to city, finding shelter and instruction in the Naqshbandī centers. One such person was a Chinese scholar, Ma Mingxin (d. 1781), who traveled and studied in major Naqshbandī centers in Central Asia, Yemen, and Mecca and Medina. Combined networks of commercial activities and pious instruction can be seen in the activities of family-based tarīqahs like the ʿAydarusīyah, the order of an important family in the Hadramawt region in the south Arabian Peninsula, the ʿAydarus, with branches in the islands of Southeast Asia, India, South Arabia, and Cairo. The lists of teachers of scholars in the eighteenth century show that major intellectual figures often received devotional instruction in broad interregional networks of Ṣūfī masters.
Missionary Expansion
Ṣūfī orders had also long been vehicles in the missionary expansion of Islam. The less legalistic approach to the faith of Ṣūfī teachers often involved an adaptation to specific local customs and practices. This helped Islam to become a part of popular religious activity with a minimum of conflict. At the same time, the traditions of the Ṣūfī devotions represented ties to the broad Islamic world that could integrate the newer believers into the identity of the Islamic community as a whole. In this way, orders like the Qādirīyah played a significant role in the expansion of Islam in Africa. In Sudan, for example, its decentralized structure allowed specific regional and tribal leaders to assume roles of leadership within the order. In Southeast Asia, the tarīqahs were also important in providing a context within which existing religious customs could be combined with more explicitly Islamic activities. Thus orders like the Shaṭṭārīyah became major forces in the Islamic life of peoples in Java and Sumatra. This missionary dimension was visible wherever Islam was expanding in the eighteenth century — in Africa, southeastern Europe, and central, southern, and southeastern Asia.
Puritan Reformism
Ṣūfī orders also helped to provide concepts of organization for groups actively engaged in efforts to “purify” religious practice and revive the faith. Although the best-known eighteenth-century revivalist movement, Wahhābīyah, was vigorously opposed to the Ṣūfī orders, most revivalists in fact had some significant Ṣūfī affiliations. In West Africa, the leaders of movements to establish more explicitly Islamic states in Futa Jallon and Futa Toro, in the areas of modern Senegal and Guinea, were associated with important branches of the Qādirīyah. The great jihād at the beginning of the nineteenth century in northern Nigeria and neighboring territories was led by Usman dan Fodio, a teacher closely identified with the Qādirīyah. At the other end of the Islamic world of the eighteenth century, the reformist movement called the “New Teaching” that swept through Northwest China in the late eighteenth century was the Naqshbandīyah as presented by Ma Mingxin. In many other areas as well, Ṣūfī orders were associated with the development of reformist and jihadist movements of purification.
The developments of the eighteenth century provide important foundations for later events in Islamic life in general and in the history of Ṣūfī orders in particular. It was the Islamic world as it existed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, not some classical medieval formulation, that encountered the expanding and modernizing West. In those encounters the Ṣūfī orders played an important role, which sometimes does not receive as much attention as do the activities of more radical movements or movements more explicitly shaped and influenced by the West.
Ṣūfī Orders In The Modern Era
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the different Ṣūfī traditions were involved in many different ways in helping to shape Muslim responses to the West and also in defining Islamic forms of modernity. At the same time, although in changing contexts, many of the main themes of the older experiences of the orders continue. Among the many aspects of the history of Ṣūfī orders in the modern era, it is important to examine a number more closely: the Ṣūfī orders continued to serve as an important basis for popular devotional life; they were important forces in responding to imperial rule; they helped to provide organizational and intellectual inspiration for Muslim responses to modern challenges to the faith; and they continued to be an important force in the mission of Muslims to non-Muslims.
Popular Piety
Tarīqahs remained very important in the life of popular piety among the masses; however, this important level of popular devotional life is not as visible in the public arena as the more activist roles of the orders. New orders continued to emerge around respected teachers and saintly personalities important in the daily lives of common people. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century it is possible to identify such orders in virtually all parts of the Islamic world. It is especially important to observe that these new devotional paths were not simply the products of rural, conservative, or so-called “traditional” people.
An example is the career of Qarīb Allāh Abū Ṣāliḥ (1866–1936), a pious teacher in Omdurman, Sudan, and a member of the Sammānīyah tarīqah, an order established in the eighteenth century within the Khalwatīyah tradition. He participated in the Mahdist movement in the late nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century attracted disciples from both the poorer people and the emerging modern educated classes in Sudan. His devotional writings and mystic poetry were published and became an important part of the modern literature of Sudan. The Qarībīyah was not politically active as an organization, although its members may have been politically involved as individuals.
Across the Islamic world, similar groups have emerged as a pious foundation for devotional life at all levels of society. Similarly, intellectuals and professionals as well as the general population continued in significant numbers to participate in activities of the older established orders. This phenomenon could be observed, for example, in Cairo during the 1960s at the peak of enthusiasm for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialism. Although the contexts had changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, new orders that served popular devotional needs continued to be created and to flourish in ways that provide a sense of both great continuity and significant adaptability to changing conditions.
Anti-Foreign Resistance
Ṣūfī orders provided significant organization and support for movements of resistance to foreign rule. This was especially true in the nineteenth century, when many of the major wars against expanding European powers were fought by Muslim organizations that originated with Ṣūfī orders. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Sumatra, a revivalist movement building on reform activities initiated by the Naqshbandīyah and Shaṭṭārīyah, and possibly inspired by Wahhābī strictness or the teachings of Aḥmad ibn Idrīs, provided major resistance to Dutch expansion in the Padri War of 1821–1838. The strongest opposition to the French conquest of Algeria, which began in 1830, was provided by a Qādirīyah leader, Amīr ʿAbd al-Qādir, whose resistance lasted until 1847. In the Caucasus region, Naqshbandīyah fighters under the leadership of Imam Shāmil maintained a holy war against Russian imperial expansion for twenty-five years, ending in 1859. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was a tarīqah leader, Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Ḥasan (1864–1921) of the Ṣāliḥīyah, who led a major anti-imperialist holy war in Somaliland against the British. Ṣūfī orders provided the basis for many other movements of resistance, but these examples confirm that the phenomenon was significant and widespread.
Some other Ṣūfī orders that came into conflict with expanding European imperialism also reflect the development of distinctive, new tarīqah traditions. Perhaps the most important of these orders are those established by followers of Aḥmad ibn Idrīs (d. 1837) and others influenced by this Idrīsī tradition. Ibn Idrīs was a North African scholar who taught for several years in Mecca; some of his major students established tarīqahs that became important orders throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The best-known of these groups is the Sanūsīyah, founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī al-Sanūsī (d. 1859). This order established centers in North Africa and Saharan areas, with special centers in Libya. It provided stability and regional coordination among nomadic tribes and became very influential in a vast area in northern Africa. As a result, expanding French imperial forces in many Saharan areas contacted and eventually came into conflict with the Sanūsīyah in the later nineteenth century. When Italy attempted to conquer Libya in the twentieth century, it was the Sanūsīyah that provided the most effective opposition, both during the Ottoman-Italian war of 1911–1912 and after World War I. When the victorious allied powers decided to create an independent Libya, it was the head of the Sanūsīyah who was proclaimed Idrīs I, the king of independent Libya. The Sanūsīyah as a Ṣūfī order was tied to the newly created tradition of Aḥmad ibn Idrīs rather than being solely associated with older tarīqah traditions.
Other similarly independent orders that developed in this Idrīsī tradition were the Khatmīyah, which became one of the major Islamic organizations in the modern Sudan; the Ṣāliḥīyah and Rashīdīyah, which were important in East Africa; and the Idrīsīyah, established by the family of the original teacher. These orders, along with the Sanūsīyah, represent a major Ṣūfī tradition in the modern era, especially in Africa. Less directly, teachers influenced by the Idrīsī tradition had some impact in southeastern Europe and South and Southeast Asia.Another independent Ṣūfī tradition developed as a result of the work of Aḥmad al-Tijānī (d. 1815). The Tijānīyah was an exclusive order that claimed 2@to be a synthesis of major tarīqah traditions inspired and instructed initially by the Prophet Muḥammad himself. The order became an important force in North Africa but did not get involved in opposition to French expansion in the Mediterranean countries. However, the Tijānīyah expanded rapidly into Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. Al-Ḥajj ʿUmar Tal (d. 1864) organized a major holy war under the Tijānīyah banner in the regions of Guinea, Senegal, and Mali; ultimately his successful movement was restricted and then ended by the consolidation of French imperial control in the region. However, the Tijānīyah was more than an anti-foreign movement. It became a major vehicle for intensification of Islamic practice in already Muslim areas and for the expansion of Islam into non-Muslim areas. By the end of the twentieth century, the Tijānīyah had become a major force throughout the Sudanic region, with growing numbers of supporters as far east as Darfur in Sudan.
It is clear that major orders like the Sanūsīyah and Tijānīyah, which were established in the nineteenth century, were not simply anti-imperialist movements in Ṣūfī form. They represented an important style of cohesive social organization based on the traditions of tarīqah structures. They were not necessarily alternatives to emerging modern state structures but were autonomous within the developing polities defined as sovereign nation-states. This alternative mode is also seen in the developments of distinctive orders whose self-definition was more closely identified with older Ṣūfī traditions. Thus the Naqshbandīyah suborder established by Said Nursî in Turkey in the twentieth century became an important vehicle for the articulation of a revivalist Islamic worldview in the context of an officially secular state. Similarly, a number of orders provided important foundations for the unofficial, “underground” Islam that was so essential for the survival of the Muslim sense of community in Central Asia under Soviet rule.
Responses To Modernity
Ṣūfī orders also were important in helping to shape the responses to the challenges to Muslim faith in the modern era. In the nineteenth century this was more in terms of providing organizational bases for opposition to European expansion and in the direct continuation of the traditions of activist reformist movements such as the Naqshbandīyah. In the twentieth century, tarīqahs responded to specific societal needs in a variety of ways. In some countries orders provided the direct organizational basis for modern-style political parties. In Sudan, for example, the Khatmīyah provided the foundation for the National Unionist Party, then the People’s Democratic Party; late in the twentieth century the head of the order was also the president of the Democratic Unionist Party. In Senegal, the Murīdīyah provided an organization for the development of cash crops and played an important role in modernizing the agricultural sector of the Senegalese economy. In the days of Soviet communist rule in Central Asia, the popular local tarīqahs and the established traditional ones like the Naqshbandīyah provided the framework within which Islamic communal identity could be maintained in the face of the official efforts to suppress religion. In the holy war in Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation in 1979, leaders of established orders like the Qīdirīyah and Naqshbandīyah Mujaddidīyah were among the most important organizers of mujāhidīn groups. These examples affirm the fact that in many different areas, the organizational traditions of the Ṣūfī orders provided important bases for responding to specific challenges.
In the twentieth century, however, the role of the orders was sometimes different. The established tarīqahs might seem ineffective in meeting particular challenges of modernity, but the basic structures or the general approach might still provide models for new Islamic revivalist and reformist movements.
Sufism and participation in a reform-minded tarīqah was, for example, an important part of the early experience of Ḥasan al-Bannā (d. 1949), the founder of one of the major modern Muslim revivalist organizations in the twentieth century, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. As a young man, al-Bannā was impressed by accounts of the strictness of a Ṣūfī shaykh, Ḥasanayn al-Ḥaṣāfī (d. 1910), and became an active member of the ṭarīqah he had founded, the Ḥaṣāfīyah. Al-Bannā was involved with the tarīqah for twenty years and maintained a respect for this strict style of Sufism throughout his life. It appears to have influenced his organizational thinking in terms of the methods of instruction in his Muslim Brotherhood and the daily rituals required of its members. Another major Islamic activist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, has some similar aspects. Many of its early organizers came from families strongly identified with tarīqahs in Sudan. The most prominent of the leaders in the Sudanese Brotherhood in the second half of the twentieth century is Ḥasan al-Turābī, who came from a religiously notable family whose center was a school-tomb complex of a traditional localized Ṣūfī type. One of his ancestors in the eighteenth century had proclaimed himself to be a mahdī bringing purification to the Muslims. Turābī emphasized the continuing need for humans to reinterpret the implications of the Islamic faith in changing historical circumstances. One active member of Turābī’s movement noted that “Turābī’s revolution” was a “reaffirmation of the ancient Ṣūfī ethic, with its emphasis on the spirit rather than the letter of Islam” (Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Turābī’s Revolution, London, 1991). The Ṣūfī organizational traditions thus both provided direct means for meeting challenges in modern situations and also helped to inspire new approaches.
Missionary Expansion
The Ṣūfī orders continued in the modern era to serve as important vehicles for the expansio(n of Islam in basically non-Muslim societies. In many areas, this is simply a direct continuation of past activities. In sub-Saharan eAfrica, for example, under colonial rule the Ṣūfī orders were among the few types of indigenous social organizations that imperial administrators would allow. As a result, they became important structures both for the expression of indigenous opinion and for the expansion of Islam. It was under colonial rule in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Islam was able to make significant advances in areas south of the Sudanic savannas.
More remarkably, the Ṣūfī orders have become important vehicles for Islamic expansion in modern Western societies, where the open inclusiveness and the aesthetic dimensions of the great Ṣūfī philosophies have considerable appeal. Ṣūfī thought was important in influencing nineteenth-century Western intellectuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson; in the later twentieth century, the writings of Idries Shah became very well known and could be found in bookstores that appealed to popular as well as intellectual tastes. Important Western converts to Islam in the twentieth century were often Ṣūfī in orientation and institutional affiliation. The writings of Martin Lings and his description of the tarīqah of the Tunisian Ṣūfī shaykh Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī are significant examples.
Ṣūfī orders are active organizationally in Western societies. They provide a clearly satisfying and effective vehicle for the expression of religious life and values in modern Western societies and have an appeal among professionals and the general population. The communities established by orders in Western Europe and the Americas have been strengthened in the second half of the twentieth century by the significant growth of the Muslim communities through immigration and conversion. A good example of this tarīqah activity is the expansion of the Niʿmatullāhī order, which by 2007 had centers in thirteen major cities in North America, published a magazine&u, Sufi, and worked with academic institutions in organizing conferences on Sufism. In ways like this, Ṣūfī orders continue to serve as an important means for the modern expansion of Islam.
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Last Update: 02/2021
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