The movement of popular religion in Islam is closely connected with the history of Islamic asceticism and mysticism. Professor Massignon, in a brilliant survey of the whole field of early Islamic mysticism, has sought to prove that the mystical movement was the direct heir of Muslim asceticism, itself derived from the Quoran and the practice of the Prophet. At the end of the third century we find in the works of the great mystic al-Hallāj a hymn to the Prophet:

All the Lights of the Prophets proceeded from his Light; he was before all, his name the first in the Book of Fate; he was known before all things and all being, and will endure after the end of all. By his guidance have all eyes attained to sight. . . . ALL knowledge is a drop from his ocean, all wisdom a handful from his stream, all times an hour from his life.

The spiritual revolution linked with that of Imam al-Ghazāli (d. 1111), a mystic who stands on a level with Augustine and Luther in religious insight and intellectual vigour. The story of his religious pilgrimage is a fascinating and instructive one--how he found himself in revolt against the casuistry of the theologians and set out to seek the ultimate Reality through all the Muslim religious systems and philosophies of his time, and how at length, after a long struggle, bodily, mental and intellectual, he fell back in sheer philosophic agnosticism on personal experience of God and found it in the Sufi path. Imam al-Ghazali's (may Allah be pleased with him) work and influence has been summed up by Professor Macdonald in a classic passage:

First, he led men back from scholastic labours upon theological dogmas to living contact with, study and exegesis of, the Word and the traditions. What happened in Europe when the yoke of medieval scholasticism was broken happened in Islam under his leadership.

Second, in his teaching and moral exhortations he reintroduced the element of fear. It was no time, he held, for smooth, hopeful preaching. The horrors of hell must be kept before men; he had felt them himself.

Third, it was by his influence that Sufism attained a firm and assured position in Islam.

Fourth, he brought philosophy and philosophical theology within the range of the ordinary mind.

Of these four phases of al-Ghazali's work, the first and the third are undoubtedly the most important. He made his mark by leading Islam back to its fundamental and historical facts, and by giving a place in its system to the emotional religious life. He was not a scholar who struck out a new path, but a man of intense personality who entered on a path already blazed and made it the common highway.

The earlier struggle against Greek influences and the heretical sects had shown the theologians the value of organizing and controlling higher education. Until the middle of the fifth century, education had been provided for in an unsystematic and on the whole private way. The mosque served as centre of instruction and every scholar who had perfected himself in some branch or other of religious studies became the centre of a group of students, to whom he in due course issued an ijaza, or authorization to teach to others what they had learned from him. The beginnings of systematic education seem to be connected with the struggle against Shi'ism, which had taken the initiative in establishing regular schools (e.g. al-Azhar, founded by the Fatimid governor in the new city of Cairo in 969). Towards the end of the fifth century a movement began in Persia and spread westwards for the establishment and endowment of madrasas, or institutions for theological instruction, with an official status, salaried teachers, and in many institutions also provision for the maintenance of students as well. Within the next two or three centuries hundreds of these madrasas were set up throughout the eastern Islamic lands and in Egypt, and brought the control of higher education more and more into the hands of the theologians.

In these institutions the upper classes and all the educated elements received a grounding in the traditional disciplines and fundamental doctrines and principles of Islam, which served, though necessarily within a relatively limited sphere, to counteract the antinomian tendencies and laxity manifested in several of the Sūfi groups. By this means there was created in every country an influential body of men, who had the task of leading the half-converted masses gradually into the orthodox fold. Nevertheless, we must admit that this control often had what appeared to us to have been serious results for the future of Islam. Originality and vitality were gradually crushed out of existence, the field of study was restricted except among a favoured few, to a narrowing circle of traditional subjects acquired by rote and endlessly reproduced in lifeless commentaries. The theology of Islam as taught in the madrasas remained in the grip of the dead hand, so going far to give colour to the charge of petrified medievalism which has been laid against the Ulamā almost down to our own day.

Though there is a measure of truth in this charge, it does some injustice to the Ulamā at the same time. A fully developed theology is not lightly to be changed or set aside, nor can it be, so long as it meets the needs of the community which it serves. It may at most be restated in terms of the changing thought-forms of the community. From the thirteenth to the nineteenth century no new currents of thought entered into the Islamic community to stimulate intellectual speculation, partly because it had attained a measure of internal equilibrium, and partly because it was isolated from the influence of the Western Renaissance. Not that, as it is sometimes supposed, these were centuries of complete intellectual stagnation, for within the community the conflict of Sūfi monism or pantheism with orthodox theology remained a live issue.

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The rigidity of orthodox theology, as it was taught in the madrasa’s or seminaries, can be to some extent justified by the inner conflict with Sūfism. Under the genial influence of recognition, certain tendencies which had always existed in Sūfi thought developed with startling rapidity. At the same time, from a discipline confined to small and free associations of adepts, Sūfism expanded into a network of organizations that spread from end to end of the Muslim world, with their own hierarchies, rituals, and schools.

The early Sūfis, 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-Hallāj (see p. 91) some influential Sūfi 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-Hallāj and al-Ghazāli by the diffusion of the Epistles of the Pure Brethren, an encyclopedia of popularized Neo-Platonist 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 is cleansed and becomes a mirror of God.

Although the Neo-Platonist ideas and vocabulary occupy a prominent place in the works of al-Ghazāli, they are still subordinated to the old Koranic structure of ideas with its purely Muslim terminology. But little more than a century later all the speculative elements that had entered into Sūfi 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 Koran 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 Sūfi 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 Sūfis, 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 Sūfi movement was subsequently to cover with its authority.

A characteristic feature of the literary expression of this later Sūfism is its adoption (following the example set also by Ibn alArabi) 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 Hāfiz-whether the poet is describing the joys of earthly or of divine love.

But, the chief presentations of pantheistic Sūfism are to be found in the mystical poems of the great Persian Sūfis, and especially Jalal ad-Dīn ar-Rūmi and Jāmi. Thus Jāmi 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.

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 Sūfism 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-Ghazāli had laid it down that the disciple [murīd] must of necessity have recourse to a director [shaikh, or in Persian pīr] 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 Sūfism swelled into a popular movement, organized brotherhoods of 'poor men' or 'mendicants' (Arabic faqīr, pl. fuqarā; Persian darwīsh). Pious men of outstanding personality, reputed to be blessed with the gift of miraculous powers or even of creation ex nihilo, 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 pīr, until he reached the higher stages of initiation, when he. might go out to teach his master's 'way' (tarīqa) in his turn to new disciples in another centre.

The master's residence became in this way the centre of a darwīsh community, and regular monasteries (ribāt, Persian khāngāh) 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 affiliated institutions spread far and wide, linked by ties of reverence, obedience, and common ritual to the original shaikh or pīr. 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 Khalīfa, or Walī al-Sajjāda, 'inheritor of the [master's] prayer-carpet'; in Persian Sajjāddeh-nishīn) 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 tarīqa, but tarīqas 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 Sūfism, 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 Sūfi 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 Sūfism had made its way originally by taking up into Islam many older elements of practice and belief in Western Asia, so now the darwīsh 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 oneseventh 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 Ulamā. On the other hand, the Ulamā 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 Ulamā 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 connection with early Shi'ism both in the fact that the spiritual lineage of the Sūfi saints is carried back to early Shi'ite figures (such as Salmān '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 Shi'ism as a whole is hostile to the darwīsh 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 Ulamā 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 Qādirīya, named after Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī or Gīlānī (1077-1166). Originally a philologist and Hanbali jurist, his popularity as a teacher at Baghdad led to the building of a ribāt 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 Koran, 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 Qādiri 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 Qādirīya 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 Rifā'īya, was founded by al-Jīlānī's nephew Ahmad al-Rifā'i (d. 1182), 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 7th Crusade a Rifā'i disciple, the Egyptian Ahmad al-Badawi (d. 1276), played a notable part in stirring up the population to resist the invaders. The order which he founded, called after him the Badawīya or Ahmadīya, 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 Bayyūmi and Dasuqi orders, are both offshoots of the Badawīya.

In North-West Africa, the Sūh movement developed along peculiar lines and with stronger political connections. During the first three centuries of Islam, Berber reaction against Arab domination took the form of adhesion to the Khārijite 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 Tūmart, the Ahmohad movement was linked up from the first with the Sūfi 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-countrymen to the ethical and mystical principles of Eastern Sūfism. 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 Abū 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, Sūfi 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 Sūfi 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 (alūfa) 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 Zāhiri school (p. 70), he was initiated into Sūfism by Yūsuf al-Kūmi, a personal disciple of Abū Madyan. The other was al-Shādhili (d. 1258), who had studied in Fez under another disciple of the same master. Al-Shādhili 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 tarīqa, which spread over North Africa and into Arabia. The town of Mokha (in the Yemen) in particular adopted al-Shādhili as its patron saint and venerates him as the originator of coffee-drinking.

The Shādhilīya order is in general more extravagant in ritual and more ecstatic than the Qādirīya, but is remarkable especially for the large number of sub-orders to which it gave rise, both directly and in conjunction with the Qādirīya. Among the best known are the Isawīya, with its famous sword-slashing ritual, and at the other extreme the orthodox and austere Derqāwā 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 Yasawi/Yesevīya, 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 Bektāshis. 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 Shi'ism 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 Bektāshi 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 Mevlevīya, founded by the famous Persian mystical poet Jalāl ad-Dīn al-Rūmi (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 (Qādiris, Naqshbandis, etc.) and an important order of the same type which is peculiar to India, the Chishti order (founded by Mu'īn al-Dīn 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 (bē-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 'faqīrs', 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 preHindu 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 darwīsh 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 Saddū. Cases are recorded in the Mughal period of bread, and cheese, and they also observed the practice of confession to their superiors (babas). The Bektāshi 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 Mevlevīya, founded by the famous Persian mystical poet Jalāl ad-Dīn al-Rūmi (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 (Qādiris, Naqshbandis, etc.) and an important order of the same type which is peculiar to India, the Chishti order (founded by Mu'īn al-Dīn 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 (bē-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 'faqīrs', 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 connection with Islam is purely nominal. Hindu and even preHindu 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 darwīsh 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 Saddū. 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 Iqbāl, himself a mystic:

Is the organic unity of Islam intact in this land? Religious adventurers set up different sects and fraternities, ever quarrelling with one another; and there are castes and sub-castes like the Hindus. Surely we have outHindued 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.

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 Sūfism was represented by the wandering and often ill-balanced darwīsh, it became a clog on their social and religious life. But so strong was the pull it exerted that the opposition of the Ulamā gradually weakened, in spite of the vigorous resistance of a few outstanding figures, such as Ibn Taimīya (d. 1328), who condemned saint-worship and Sūfi practices and theology root and branch.

In Western Asia the Sūfi 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 Melāmīya2 had its followers in the higher ranks of the administration. The only way by which the Ulamā could hope to maintain the balance between orthodoxy and Sūfism was to reform Sūfism from within. Their enrolment led to a considerable revival and extension of the more orthodox orders, especially the Naqshbandīya (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 Mustafā al-Bakri (d. 1749).

This fresh infusion of Sūfism 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 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 Nāblus (1641-1731), and the Indians Ahmad Sarhindi (1563-1624) and Shah Walī-Allāh of Delhi (1702-62).

Even among the Shi'ite divines of Persia, in spite of strong opposition, the influence of Sūfi 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 Bāqir Majlisi (d. 1699). But alongside this, the earlier flowering of Sūfi 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 similitude’s' ('ālam al-mithāl), 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-Dīn ( Mullā Sadrā, d. 1640), the human spirit can attain to the different levels corresponding to those of the 'ālam al-mithāl 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-Ahsā (d. 1826), 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 similitude’s' and the contemporary orthodox Sūfism. The principal doctrine of the Shaikhis, however, seems to have been the necessity for a living channel of communication with the 'Hidden Imām', and this was the root from which the Bābi movement sprang in the nineteenth century.

Courtesy: Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey. Contributors: H. A. R. Gibb Author, Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1970.

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