The Sufi Orders
The early Sufis, in their pursuit of mystical experience, had
elaborated a series of ‘stages’ which, with their ascetic moral
disciplines, corresponded to the Christian ‘purgative way’. A typical
example of such a series is: repentance, abstinence, renunciation, poverty,
patience, trust in God, satisfaction. From the time of al- Hallaj (see p.
91) some influential Sufi groups had begun to combine with these practical
disciplines ideas derived from gnostic or Plotinian doctrine. This
philosophical tendency was reinforced during the two centuries between
al-Hallaj and al-Ghazali by the diffusion of the Epistles of the Pare Brethren, an encyclopaedia of popularized Neoplatonist natural
philosophy which originated in Ismal’ili or extreme Shi’ite circles.
Under its influence the former purgative stages were related to a ladder of
ascending degrees of ‘absorption’–human nature, angelic nature, power,
divinity. The initiate retraces the stages of cosmic evolution until he
’rebecomes’ God.
Although the Neoplatonist ideas and vocabulary occupy a prominent
place in the works of al-Ghazali, they are still subordinated to the old
Quranic structure of ideas with its purely Muslim terminology. But little
more than a century later all the speculative elements that had entered into
Sufi thought were elaborated into a new eclectic system by the
Spanish-Arabic writer, Ibn al-Arabi of Murcia (d. at Damascus 1240). In view
of the bulk of his writings and the unreconciled contradictions which they
contain, it is not easy to pin down his ideas with precision. But that his
system as a whole is outspokenly monist and pantheistic cannot be denied.
While he appeals to orthodox texts and authorities, he explains away or
glosses over whatever is opposed to his philosophy, and his commentary on
the Quran is a tour de force
of esoteric interpretation.
To the orthodox theologians Ibn al-Arabi was little better than an
infidel, but his works exercised a powerful attraction throughout the
Eastern Islamic world, especially in the Persian and Turkish zones. The
mystical interpretation of Islamic doctrine which he claimed to have been
revealed to himself as the ‘Seal of the Saints’ became a rival
intellectual system to that of the orthodox theology. This was grave enough,
but even graver. perhaps was its
influence on the leaders of the Sufi movement. The schools of mystics became
closed circles of initiates, and the emphasis was shifted from moral
self-control to metaphysical knowledge with its sequence of psychological
ascent to the ‘Perfect Man’, the microcosm in whom the One is manifested
to Himself. By no means all Sufis, of course, were drawn into this
pantheistic religion, and little of it percolated through to the great body
of devout Muslims who adhered to the major Orders, at least; yet it opened
the door to those aberrations and compromises which the Sufi movement was
subsequently to cover with its authority.
A characteristic feature of the literary expression of this later
Sufism is its adoption (following the example set also by Ibn al- Arabi) of
the language of earthly love and passion to express ecstatic communion with
the divine love. The language used is often so much anthropomorphic realism
that even Muslim scholars have sometimes expressed doubts–as, for example,
in regard to the odes of the Persian poet Hafiz–whether the poet is
describing the joys of earthly or of divine love.
But the chief presentations of
pantheistic Sufism are to be found in the mystical poems of the great
Persian Sufis, and especially Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi and Jami. Thus Jami says:
The Eye of the Beloved, seeing what was not, regarded
nonentity as existent.
Although he beheld His attributes and qualities as a
perfect whole in His own Essence,
Yet He desired that they should be displayed to Him in
another mirror And that each one of His eternal attributes should become
manifest accordingly in a diverse form.
Therefore He created the verdant fields of Time and
Space and the life-giving garden of the World,
That every branch and leaf and fruit might show forth
His various perfections.[1]
Elsewhere he puts the same idea into more philosophical
language (derived from Ibn al-Arabi):
The Unique Substance viewed as absolute... is the Real [al-Haqq]. On the other hand, viewed in His aspect of
multiplicity and plurality, under which He displays himself when clothed
with phenomena, He is the whole created universe. Therefore the
universe is the outward visible expression of the Real, and the Real is the
inner unseen reality of the Universe. The Universe before it was evolved to
outward view was identical with the Real, and the Real after this evolution
is identical with the Universe.
The new social evolution of Sufism also owed something to this
intellectual development. If there was a doctrine to be learned, it had to
be taught in some organized fashion. Already al-Ghazali had laid it down
that the disciple [murid]
must of necessity have recourse to a director
[shaikh, or in Persian pir] to guide him aright.
For the way of the Faith is obscure, but the Devil’s ways are many and
patent, and he who has no shaikh to guide him will be led by the Devil into
his ways. Wherefore the disciple must cling to his shaikh as a blind man on
the edge of a river clings to his leader, confiding himself to him entirely,
opposing him in no matter whatsoever, and binding himself to follow him
absolutely. Let him
know that the advantage he gains from the error of his shaikh, if he should
err, is greater than the advantage he gains from his own rightness, if he
should be right.
Thus, out of the originally loose and voluntary associations, there
grew up, as Sufism swelled into a popular movement, organized brotherhoods
of ‘poor men’ or ‘mendicants’ (Arabic
faqir, pl. fuqara; Persian darwish).
Pious men of outstanding personality, reputed to be blessed with the gift of
miraculous powers or even of creation exnihilo, found disciples
crowding to them. A simple initiation ceremony was evolved or taken over
from the initiation ceremony of the Shi’ite or Qarmati guilds, in which
the disciple formally pledged devotion. Thereafter he lived in close
association with his shaikh or pir,
until he reached the higher stages of initiation, when he might go out to
teach his master’s ‘way’ (tariqa)
in his turn to new disciples in another centre.
The master’s residence became in this way the centre
of a darwish community, and regular monasteries
(ribat, Persian (khangah) were established, endowed by the
pious gifts of adherents and supporters, so that both shaikhs and disciples
might have no need to engage in secular occupations, but devote themselves
to pious exercises and meditation. Initiates who left the founder’s
monastery often founded daughter monasteries, and from a single centre a
chain of af61iated institutions spread far and wide, linked by ties of
reverence, obedience, and common ritual to the original shaikh or pir.
On the death of the original founder (who was, of course, venerated as a
saint) one of his disciples succeeded to the headship of the community, now
become a definite religious order, comparable to the monastic orders in
Christendom. This successor (called
Khalifa, or Wali al-Sajjada, ‘inheritor of the
[master’s] prayer-carpet’; in Persian
Sajjadeh-nishin) was either elected, or, in orders where celibacy
was not one of the rules, the succession was hereditary in the founder’s
family.
From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries such orders began to spread
their network over the whole Islamic world. Their primitive purpose of
guiding beginners in the ‘Path’ or ‘Way’ was still indicated by the
name of tariqa, but tariqas varied to some extent in degree of organization.
Some were organized in an elaborate ascending scale of hierarchy, with
hundreds of thousands of followers and adherents, some retained the looser
organization or more primitive Sufism, but the main differences between them
lay in their ritual and litany (dhikr),
and in their characteristic religious attitude, according to whether they
were more or less attached to orthodox observances, tolerant or militant,
and so on. Membership was as a rule of two kinds: a higher class of
initiates and disciples engaged in religious duties in the monasteries and
in the collection of revenues, and a large body of ‘lay-members’
attached to the order and meeting on stated occasions for the
dhikr, but otherwise carrying on their secular occupations in
village or town.
The organization of these orders constitutes one of the most
interesting developments in the history of Islam. In recruitment and appeal
they were essentially popular movements; and they were popular movements
mainly because the Sufi missionaries, impatient of the rigid dogmatism of
the orthodox scholars, eased the way to conversion (for the common view that
the ‘simplicity’ of Islam exercises in itself a strong appeal
over-simplifies the facts). At the same time, this weakening in dogmatic
integrity was certain to produce serious consequences. Just as Sufism had
made its way originally by taking up into Islam many older elements of
practice and belief in Western Asia, so now the
darwish orders showed an extreme pliability, and even a dangerous
readiness to compromise with old religious beliefs and customs in other
lands, and to tolerate them provided only that outward adhesion to the
Muslim creed was secured.
The effect of all this was to change the general aspect of Islam to a
remarkable degree. Whereas down to the twelfth century the Muslim Community
was a relatively small homogeneous body (even allowing for doctrinal
schisms), it has since embraced about one-seventh of the entire population
of the world, but at the same time has become a body which presents in
regard to religious beliefs and practices a wide range of differences, not
concealed by common acceptance of certain rituals and doctrinal expressions
or by the common activities of clerics and lawyers. The popular forms of
Islam differ from one another in almost every Muslim country, and often stand in strong contrast to the rigid
system of the orthodox Ulama. On the other hand, the Ulama have continued to
furnish the unifying religious element throughout the whole body, and have
patiently striven to educate the newly converted or semi-converted elements
in the fundamental principles of the Faith.
But again, amongst the orders themselves, there were marked
differences in their relations with the orthodox church. One particularly
significant line of cleavage was that between ‘urban’ orders founded and
maintained by elements of the city populations which were in fairly close
association with the Ulama and the madrasas, and ‘rustic’ orders, which
spread chiefly in the villages, and being less open to their influence were
liable to diverge more widely from the strict tenets of orthodoxy. As
regards their relations with the Shi‘a, there are strong traces of their
original connexion with early Shiasm both in the fact that the spiritual
lineage of the Sufi saints is carried back to early Shi‘ite figures (such
as Salman ‘the Persian’) and thence to the Caliph Ali and the Prophet
himself, and still more from the underlying assumption that the gnosis, or
apprehension of secret spiritual knowledge peculiar to the order, is derived
directly from the secret knowledge communicated to Ali by the Prophet. On
the other hand, dogmatic Shiasm as a whole is hostile to the darwish fraternities, and they are found in consequence
almost exclusively among Sunnis. Indeed the wretched and degraded state of
the majority of Shi‘ite darwishes
furnishes a striking measure of the success attained by the Sunni Ulama in
defence of orthodox standards.
The total number of orders or fraternities in the Muslim world is
very large, and there is no room here to do more than mention a few examples
of different types in different countries and to note briefly some of their
special features.
The most typical urban order is that of the Qadiriya, named
after Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani or Gilani (1077–1166). Originally a
philologist and Hanbali jurist, his popularity as a teacher at Baghdad led
to the building of a ribat for him by public subscription outside the
gates of the city. His writings are generally orthodox in content, with a
tendency to mystical interpretation of the Quran, but the enthusiasm of his
later followers credited him with all manner of miracles and claims to
pre-eminence in the mystical hierarchy. He is said to have had forty-nine
children, of whom eleven sons carried on his work and with other disciples
carried his teaching into other parts of Western Asia and Egypt. The head of
the order and keeper of the tomb at Baghdad is still a direct
descendant. At the end of the nineteenth century there were a vast number of
provincial congregations, extending from West Africa to the East Indies,
loosely connected to the central institution in Baghdad, which is visited by
great numbers of pilgrims every year.
The Qadiri order is on the whole amongst the most tolerant and
progressive orders, not far removed from orthodoxy, distinguished by
philanthropy, piety,. and humility, and averse to fanaticism, whether
religious or political. It seems unlikely that the founder instituted any
rigid system of devotional exercises, and these in fact differ in the
various congregations. A typical dhikr
is the following, to be recited after the daily prayers: ‘I ask pardon of
the mighty God; Glorified be God; May God bless our Master Mohammed and his
household and Companions; There is no God but Allah’, each phrase repeated
a hundred times.
The looseness of the Qadiriya favoured the development of numerous
sub-orders, some of which have grown into independent organizations. One of
the most important of these in Western Asia, the Rifa‘iya, was founded by al-Jilani’s nephew Ahmad
al-Rifa‘i (d. II82), also in Iraq. This order was distinguished by a more
fanatical outlook and more extreme practices of self-mortification, as well
as extravagant thaumaturgical exercises, such as glass-eating, fire-walking,
and playing with serpents, which have been imputed to the influence of
primitive Shamanism during the Mongol occupation of Iraq in the thirteenth
century.
During St. Louis’s invasion of Egypt in the Seventh Crusade a
Rifa’i disciple, the Egyptian Ahmad al-Bedawi (d. 1276), played a notable
part in stirring up the population to resist the invaders. The order which
he founded, called after him the Bedawiya or
Ahmadiya, is the most popular ‘rustic’ order in Egypt, and
became notorious for the orgies, inherited from early Egyptian practices,
which until recent times accompanied the fairs around his tomb at Tanta, in
the Delta. The other two popular orders in Lower Egypt, the Bayyumi and
Dasuqi orders, are both offshoots of the Bedawiya.
In North-West Africa, the Sufi movement developed along peculiar
lines and with stronger political connexions. During the first three
centuries of Islam, Berber reaction against Arab domination took the form of
adhesion to the Kharijite or Shi’ite heresies, but the masses remained
strongly attached to their primitive animistic beliefs, especially in the
magical powers of ‘holy men’. The first native dynasty of more than
local importance, the Almoravids (eleventh century) initiated a religious
movement on orthodox lines, but they succumbed after a brief period to a new
Berber dynasty, the Almohads (twelfth century). Through its spiritual
director, the Mahdi Ibn Tumart, the Ahmohad movement was linked up from the
first with the Sufi movement, and the religious enthusiasm which it
generated brought Islamic influences to bear for the first time upon the
main body of the Berbers.
The agents in this campaign were mostly local men, often illiterate,
whose aim was to attract and convert their fellow-country-men to the ethical
and mystical principles of Eastern Sufism. Most of them had attached
themselves for a time to some celebrated saint in Spain or Egypt, and then
returned to their native villages to spread a few simple maxims of religious
devotion and renunciation. The most famous is Abu Madyan (d. end of twelfth
century) whose whole doctrine was contained in a single verse: ‘Say
“God”, and abandon all that is material or pertains thereto, if thou
desirest to attain the true end.’
Four centuries later, Sufi leadership stimulated the Muslim reaction
against Spanish and Portuguese pressure in Morocco. Yet the Berbers remained
animists through and through; and the persistence of the old beliefs and
practices has given a characteristic feature to Berber Islam, the prevalence
of ‘Maraboutism’ or the cult of living ‘holy men’, possessing
magical powers (baraka).
The Sufi movement in the Barbary States had a twofold radiation. On
the one hand it spread into the Negrolands on the Niger, where (with a
similar background of animism) the local marabout
(alufa) replaced the old ‘medicine-man’ of
negro Fetishism. On the other hand, it exercised a powerful influence on
Eastern Islam through two outstanding personalities.
One of these was no other than Ibn al-Arabi, the apostle of
pantheistic mysticism. Originally a follower of the puritan Zahiri school
(p. 70), he was initiated into
Sufism by Yusuf al-Kumi, a personal disciple of Abu Madyan. The other was
al-Shadhili (d. 1258), who had studied in Fez under another disciple of the
same master. Al-Shadhili eventually settled in Alexandria, where a circle of
pupils gathered round him. He had no monastery. and no set forms of ritual,
and he discouraged his adherents from giving up their trades and professions
for the contemplative life. But little more than a generation later, his
disciples adopted the normal organization of a tariqa, which spread
over North Africa and into Arabia. The town of Mokha (in the Yemen) in
particular adopted al-Shadhili as its patron saint and venerates him as the
originator of coffee-drinking.
The Shadhiliya
order is in general more extravagant in ritual and more ecstatic than
the Qadiriya, but is
remarkable especially for the large number of sub-orders to which it gave
rise, both directly and in conjunction with the Qadiriya. Among the best
known are the Isawiya, with its famous sword-slashing ritual, and at
the other extreme the orthodox and austere Derqawa of Morocco and
Western Algeria.
Among the Turks and Mongols also, Muslim propaganda came into close
contact with animism, in the form of shamanism, and had to reckon with
deeply rooted Turkish customs. The oldest Turkish mystical order, the
‘rustic’ order of the Yeseviya,
for example, owed to Turkish custom the unique feature that women took part
in the dhikr
unveiled.
Amongst the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia and Europe the most
characteristic order was another ‘rustic’ order, that of the Bektashis.
This, which was said to be an offshoot of the Yesevis and was fully
established at the end of the fifteenth century, was a peculiar synecretism
apparently connected on the one side with esoteric Shiasm and on the other
with a good deal of popular Christianity and Gnosticism. The Bektashis went
much farther than other orders in regarding the outer ceremonies of Islam as
unimportant and negligible; and in their rituals there were some remarkable
analogies to those of Christianity. For example, in place of a regular
liturgical dhikr, they had a sort of communion with the
sharing of wine, bread, and cheese, and they also observed the practice of
confession to their superiors (babas). The Bektashi order acquired
enormous prestige through its association with the Ottoman janissaries, but
since their suppression in 1826 it has been gradually declining and now
surves only in Albania. The principal ‘urban’ order amongst the Ottoman
Turks was the Mevleviya,
founded by the famous Persian mystical poet Jalal ad-Din al-Rumi (d. at
Konia 1273), whose dhikr
was remarkable for the pirouetting exercise of the adepts (‘dancing
dervishes’). Since the secularization of the Turkish Republic, the
Mevlevis are reduced to a few tekkes
in Aleppo and other towns of the Middle East.
It is, however, in India that popular Islam presents the most
bewildering diversity of orders, rituals, and beliefs. In addition to the
adherents of the great universal orders (Qadiris, Naqshbandis, etc.) and an
important order of the same type which is peculiar to India, the Chishti
order (founded by Mu’in al-Din Chishti of Sistan, d. at Ajmir in 1236),
each with several sub-divisions, a very large proportion of Indian Muslims
are connected with the so-called irregular
(be-shar‘) orders. These are of all kinds, ranging from less
reputable offshoots of the regular orders, through a great variety of
independent orders–of which the most famous is the itinerant
Qalandari, (the ‘Calenders’ of the
Arabian Nights)–down to unorganized wandering mendicants or
‘faqirs’, who claim to be associated with the shrine of some saint or
other. The varieties of beliefs, rituals, customs and so on associated with
these irregular orders naturally correspond to their number, and in many
cases their connexion with Islam is purely nominal. Hindu and even pre-Hindu
customs and tenets (which have influenced even some of the great orders) are
more or less predominant in these, and the practices of their members
have contributed more than anything else to bring the term darwish
into general disrepute.
Apart from these orders Hindu influences play a preponderating part
in the religious life of the illiterate and only partly converted Muslim
villagers. Innumerable villages still preserve intact the idolatrous worship
of local gods, and demon-worship has left its mark in the respect often
paid, particularly amongst women, to the mythical Shaikh Saddu. Cases are
recorded in the Mughal period of suttee amongst Muslims, and there are
several communities which keep up the ritual of the sacred fire. Even caste
has found its way into Indian Islam. The position was summed up thus by one
of the leaders of Islam in modern India, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, himself a
mystic:
Is the organic unity of Islam intact in this land? Religious adventurers
setup different sects and fraternities, ever quarrelling with one another;
and there are castes and sub-castes like the Hindus. Surely we have
out-Hindued the Hindu himself; we are suffering from a double caste
system–the religious caste system, sectarianism, and the social caste
system, which we have either learned or inherited from the Hindus. This is
one of the quiet ways in which the conquered nations revenge themselves on
their conquerors.[2]
Despite all the services of the more high-principled
orders, the tendency to resort to extravagant methods of auto-hypnosis and
to compromise with traditional animistic practices not only opened the way
to charlatanism, but lowered the moral standards of the greater part of the
Muslim community. In so far as Sufism was represented by the wandering and
often ill-balanced darwish,
it became a clog on their social and religious life. But so strong was the
pull it exerted that the opposition of the Ulama gradually weakened, in
spite of the vigorous resistance of a few outstanding figures, such as Ibn
Taimiya (d. 1328), who condemned saint-worship and Sufi practices and
theology root and branch.
In Western Asia the Sufi movement reached its climax with the
establishment of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. It would seem
that every village and every trade-guild and class in the cities was
affiliated to one or other of the orders, and even the antinomian
Melamiya [3]
had its followers in the higher ranks of the administration. The only
way by which the Ulama could hope to maintain the balance between orthodoxy
and Sufism was to reform Sufism from within. Their enrolment led to a
considerable revival and extension of the more orthodox orders, especially
the Naqshbandiya (originally founded in Central Asia in the
fourteenth century and now propagated from India) and the Anatolian order of
Khalwatiya, propagated in Egypt and Syria in the eighteenth century
by Shaikh Mustafa al- Bakri (d. I749).
This fresh infusion of Sufism could not fail to leave its mark on the
structure of religious thought and orthodox education. During the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a succession of remarkable scholars
strove to restate the bases of Islamic theology in a manner which broke away
from the form the formalism of the orthodox manuals and laid new stress upon
the psychological and ethical elements in religion. Among the more
outstanding figures in this movement, which has not yet received the
attention it deserves, were the Syrian Abd al-Ghani of Nablus (1641-1731),
and the Indians Ahmad Sarhindi (I563-I624) and Shah Wali-Allah of Delhi
(1702-62).
Even among the Shi‘ite divines of Persia, in spite of
strong opposition, the influence of Sufi ideas was not wholly eliminated.
The official establishment of the Shi‘ite doctrine by the new Safavid
rulers in the sixteenth century had of course stimulated the production of a
formal scholastic literature, both in Persian and in Arabic, on Shi‘ite
religious topics, the results of which were authoritatively summed up in the
works of Mohammed Baqir Majlisi (d. I699). But alongside this, the earlier
flowering of Sufi poetry in Persia and the doctrines of Ibn al-Arabi
continued to exercise an attraction which no theological condemnations could
uproot .
Among the more general doctrines was that of a ‘world
of similitudes’ (‘alam al-mithal), a world of images or
metaphysical realm in which the gross bodies from the material realm from
below are changed by the substitution of subtle bodies or images. In the
writings of the philosopher Mohammed Sadr ad-Din
(Mulla Sadra, d. I640), the human spirit can attain to the different
levels corresponding to those of the ‘alam al-mithal and thus gain
freedom from the finite existence of the material world. This influenced the
development of a new Shi‘ite heterodoxy called, after its systematizer
Shaikh Ahmad of al-Ahsa (d. I826), the Shaikhiya. Little as the real
character and doctrines of this sect are known, there is an unmistakable
point of resemblance with the ‘world of similitueds’ and the
contemporary orthodox Sufism. The principal doctrine of the Shaikhis,
however, seems to have been the necessity for a living channel of
communication with the ‘Hidden Imam’, and this was the root from which
the Babi movement sprang in the nineteenth century.
