Sufism in Ottoman Egypt: Circulation, Renewal and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 9780367135898, 9780429027352

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Sufism in Ottoman Egypt

This book analyses the development of Sufism in Ottoman Egypt, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examining the cultural, socio-economic and political backdrop against which Sufism gained prominence, it looks at its influence in both the institutions for religious learning and popular piety. The study seeks to broaden the observed space of Sufism in Ottoman Egypt by placing it within its imperial and international context, highlighting on one hand the specificities of Egyptian Sufism, and on the other the links that it maintained with other spiritual traditions that influenced it. Studying Sufism as a global phenomenon, taking into account its religious, cultural, social and political dimensions, this book also focuses on the education of the increasing number of aspirants on the Sufi path, as well as on the social and political role of the Sufi masters in a period of constant and often violent political upheaval. It ultimately argues that, starting in medieval times, Egypt was simultaneously attracting foreign scholars inward and transmitting ideas outward, but these exchanges intensified during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the new imperial context in which the country and its people found themselves. Hence, this book demonstrates that the concept of ‘neosufism’ should be dispensed with and that the Ottoman period in no way constituted a time of decline for religious culture, or the beginning of a normative and fundamentalist Islam. Sufism in Ottoman Egypt provides a valuable contribution to the new historiographical approach to the period, challenging the prevailing teleology. As such, it will prove useful to students and scholars of Islam, Sufism and religious history, as well as Middle Eastern history more generally. Rachida Chih is a Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and a member of the Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Central Asian Studies, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France.

Routledge Sufi Series General Editor: Ian Richard Netton Professor of Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

The Routledge Sufi Series provides short introductions to a variety of facets of the subject, which are accessible both to the general reader and the student and scholar in the field. Each book will be either a synthesis of existing knowledge or a distinct contribution to, and extension of, knowledge of the particular topic. The two major underlying principles of the Series are sound scholarship and readability.

Previously published by Curzon Al-Hallaj Herbert I. W. Mason Beyond Faith and Infidelity The Sufi Poetry and Teaching of Mahmud Shabistari Leonard Lewisohn

Published by Routledge Sufism and Jewish-Muslim Relations The Derekh Avraham Order Yafiah Katherine Randall Practicing Sufism Sufi Politics and Performance in Africa Edited by Abdelmajid Hannoum Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī and the Controversy of the Sufi Gaze Lloyd Ridgeon Sufism in Ottoman Egypt Circulation, Renewal and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Rachida Chih For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/middle eaststudies/series/SE0491

Sufism in Ottoman Egypt

Circulation, Renewal and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Rachida Chih

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Rachida Chih The right of Rachida Chih to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-13589-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02735-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of illustrationsvi A note on transliterationvii

Introduction

1

1 Circulation and networks: the role of Cairo and al-Azhar

17

2 Education: how to guide disciples?

51

3 The Muhammadan path (tarīqa Muhammadiyya) and Sufi renewal

77

4 Prophetic heritage, authority and the intercession of saints

110



Conclusion

146

Bibliography Index

149 166

Illustrations

Figures 0.1 Djerdjeh (Jirjā), Upper Egypt 1.1 Al-Azhar, general plan 1.2 Al-Azhar, the courtyard

viii 33 34

Map 0.1 The Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century

vii

A note on transliteration

The system of transliteration adopted in this work for Arabic words consists of a simplified and modified form of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam system. For simplicity’s sake I  have omitted diacritical marks. The letters ā, ū and ī represent the voicing of the long Arabic vowels. Well-known places such as Hejaz, Mecca, Medina and Luxor have been given in accordance with modern spelling. The same holds true for terms which have been sufficiently anglicised to be easily understood, such as ulama, fatwa, Sufi, Sunni, Shi’i, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanafi.

Map 0.1  The Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century

Figure 0.1  Djerdjeh (Jirjā), Upper Egypt Source: Auguste Bartholdi, Djerdjeh (Jirjā) 1855–1856 (BnF-Paris)

Introduction

‘Shaykh al-Hifnī died before the morning of Saturday 17 Rabī‘ I  1181 (23 August 1767). He was buried on Sunday after prayers in a great gathering at alAzhar. It was a very solemn occasion. Thirteen days separated his death from that of the master al-Mallawī. From then on, affliction began to descend on Egypt and conditions began to deteriorate, confirming what Rāghib (Pasha)1 had said – that (al-Hifnī’s) existence had sheltered the people of Egypt from affliction. Indeed, it is a clearly perceived fact that if there is no one among men to speak the truth openly, enjoin the right, forbid the wrong, and establish guidance, the order of the world becomes corrupt and men’s hearts are filled with dissension. When dissension fills men’s hearts, affliction follows. It is known and established matter that the soundness of its community depends on its scholars and kings. The soundness of kings depends on the soundness of scholars, and the corruption of the effect follows from the corruption of the cause. How much more so when the cause [of soundness] was lost. The millstone does not turn without its axis, and (al-Hifnī) was the “pole” of Egypt.’2 These lines penned by ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Jabartī (d. 1825), Egyptian historian and author of the longest and richest historical chronicle of Egypt between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, have an apocalyptic tone because he who had just died was no ordinary man: Muhammad b. Sālim al-Hifnī, Shafi‘i jurist, professor and then rector at the al-Azhar mosque from 1757 until his death in 1767 was also a spiritual master (shaykh) of the Khalwatiyya Sufi path, into which he was initiated by a Syrian, Mustafā al-Bakrī (d. 1749).3 Jabartī, in the long obituary that he devoted to al-Hifnī, painted a picture of a scholar (‘ālim) whose learning was at once exoteric and esoteric, intellectual and spiritual, and who put his learning into practice in the service of mankind. Al-Hifnī represented an ideal in which Jabartī, who was himself a well-educated Sufi (he was initiated into the Khalwatiyya by another of Mustafā al-Bakrī’s disciples, Mahmūd al-Kurdī, d. 1780), was pleased to recognise himself, and that he projected in his chronicle.4 But if the death of Shaykh al-Hifnī had serious consequences for Egypt, it was because he was more than just a Sufi scholar: by giving him the title of pole (qutb), the historian is expressing his opinion that al-Hifnī was the greatest living saint of his time, and thus testifying to a belief that was deeply anchored among eighteenth-century Muslims, whether they formed part of

2  Introduction the scholarly elite, like Jabartī, of the political class, like Raghīb Pasha, or of the masses: the belief in the presence of saints, those ‘friends of God’ (awliyā’ Allāh) who, during their lives as after their deaths, acted on the world. For sainthood in Islam signifies more than just a special bond with God: this bond implies a concrete power over the world and the beings who inhabit it. Thanks to the presence and permanent intercession of the saints the world continued to exist; the saints were in fact the guarantors of stability in a society that was prey to constant and often violent political upheavals. This invisible government was composed of a hierarchy of saints, at the summit of which was the qutb (pole or axis) or ghawth (supreme recourse). Though some of the saints of this hierarchy, alive and present across eternity, were not visible to the eyes of ordinary mortals, the pole was, himself, considered to be visible and physically present in the world. A single unique being in each period, the pole was master of his community, and when his time came to die the consequences, as Jabartī says, were much to be feared. Shaykh al-Hifnī exercised such power, over the leaders of the country as well as over the people (to whose defence he often came), that one of his disciples and hagiographers described him as the Prophet’s earthly representative (khalīfat al-rasūl).5 And yet, no shrine was erected to his memory, nor was any celebration of his birth (mawlid) instigated, as had been done for Ahmad al-Badawī (d. 1276) and Ibrāhīm al-Disūqī (d. 1288), to name but the two greatest among the innumerable saints of Egypt – the mawlid of these two attracted thousands of visitors who hoped to benefit from their divine influx (baraka) and their intercession (shafā‘a) on earth as in the hereafter. However, the Khalwatiyya Sufi path (tarīqa) that Shaykh al-Hifnī helped implant into Egyptian society was to experience an unprecedented expansion in the country. The Shaykh’s reputation even reached the distant and semi-autonomous province of Upper Egypt, ruled over by the tribal chief Shaykh al-‘Arab Hummām (d. 1769), who asked al-Hifnī to send him one of his disciples to propagate the Khalwatiyya in the region. Thus the Khalwatiyya was at the heart of a religious awakening that continued throughout the nineteenth century and still proves resilient even today.6 Thanks to Al-Hifnī’s foreign disciples, the Khalwatiyya also spread from Cairo into sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb, an expansion that was so rapid and extensive that some academic scholars have spoken of it as representing a Sufi renewal. What was the historical context that allowed a man like al-Hifnī, who came – penniless – from his Delta village to Cairo to pursue his religious studies at the celebrated al-Azhar mosque-university, to climb the rungs of its organisation, to establish connections with influential professors and, finally, to acquire such great authority in the eyes of the people, the ulama, and even of the Ottoman Empire’s representative in Egypt himself? What were the consequences, in Egypt’s stable religious landscape, of al-Hifnī’s preaching and of the spread the Khalwatiyya? What was Egypt’s role in the circulation and transmission of Sufism through the Ottoman Empire and beyond, into Africa and Asia? Finally, what were the doctrinal foundations, the social implications and the political effects of Sufi authority? These were the big questions we faced when we began our research into Sufism in Egypt during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as seen through the prism

Introduction  3 of the Khalwatiyya. This book attempts to answer these questions in the light of the historiographical renewal that has for about twenty years been re-examining this period that for too long had remained enclosed within a teleological approach to the history of Islam, being perceived as a decline preceding the birth of Muslim reformism in the nineteenth century.

Why choose the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? According to the conventional chronological distinctions in use in the study of history in France, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries correspond to the Modern Period. This period begins at the end of the fifteenth century with the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and ends at the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution; everything thereafter belongs to what is termed the contemporary period. Nevertheless, when French historians of Egypt speak of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they adopt the Anglo-Saxon usage and refer to the Pre-Modern or Early Modern Periods, thus describing an initial modernity that occurred before direct contact with Europe.7 Egyptian historians speak of the Ottoman period (al-‘asr al-‘uthmānī), which begins with the conquest of Egypt by Ottoman armies in 1517 and ends with the ascension to power of Muhammad ‘Alī in 1805 and the entry of Egypt into the Modern Era (al-‘asr al-hadīth). The present volume covers the period up to the end of the eighteenth century; this date in no way constitutes a rupture in Egyptian Sufism, because the teachings of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sufi masters bore fruit in the nineteenth century, bringing forth new Sufi figures to face new challenges. However, it is certainly the case that the nineteenth century, a time of reforming viceroys, the evolving State, and Occidental interventionism, demands and deserves its own study.8 Although the Ottomans were present in Egypt for three centuries, we have also chosen not to examine the sixteenth century: historians agree that Sufism progressed under the Ottomans until it occupied a preponderant place in society, but the available sources and our improved knowledge of the social and economic history of Egypt since the pioneering work of the French historian André Raymond allow us to refine our chronology of the history of modern Sufism and to observe therein one major inflection or cæsura: after a time of transition and instability during the sixteenth century, from the beginning of the seventeenth century the increased stability, and integration into the country, of the Ottoman political elites allowed them to participate in Egypt’s economy and, thanks to their wealth, to act as patrons for numerous pious foundations, each of which provided a space for the development of a religious culture into which Sufism was integrated. It was not just the political elite who enriched themselves and contributed to the urban development of the country; from 1600, merchants and some prominent ulama were also performing a similar role. The growth in Egypt of international commerce, linked to the opening of maritime and land trade routes, inaugurated a period of intensified exchange at every level, especially among the three Muslim empires, Ottoman, Moghul and Safavid.9 This mobility of men and merchandise brought economic expansion and cultural vitality with it – and not just to Cairo:

4  Introduction studies undertaken on port cities such as Alexandria and Damietta, for which extensive archives exist, show a comparable phenomenon of increased prosperity, one result of which was the construction of numerous religious edifices in these towns.10 Our discovery, in the National Library in Cairo (Dār al-kutub) of an unpublished manuscript on the history of the city of Jirjā, which was the political centre of Upper Egypt during the Ottoman period, has revealed that similar changes also took place in this region. Jirjā experienced an architectural golden age during the seventeenth century, which continued, to a lesser extent, into the eighteenth century. This was the result of a decline of central power and the transfer of land management to the local political elites, the beys and then the Arab amirs, who built Jirjā’s many mosques, in which religious scholars were trained: it was among this group of ulama that the Khalwatiyya would spread and play a role in Sufi education and transmission similar to that played by the Maghrebi Shādhiliyya in the region during the Medieval Period. The three-volume manuscript on Jirjā, written by a native of the city, Muhammad al-Marāghī, called Ta‘tīr al-nawāhī wa l-arjā’ bi-dhikr man ishtahara min ‘ulamā’ wa a‘yān madīnat al-Sa‘īd Jirjā (The regions and districts sweetly scented with the memories of the ulama and notables of the city of Jirjā in Upper Egypt) was the point of departure for the present study.11 Marāghī’s work, which combines biographical notices with historical topography, sheds light on the political, social and economic factors that explain why Shaykh al-Hifnī’s predication found such fertile ground in a region so distant from Cairo. As well as providing first-hand documentary testimony on the evolution of sainthood in the Modern Period, the hagiography of Muhammad al-Hifnī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt fī ba‘d mā li-shaykhinā min al-manāqib wa l-karāmāt (Unsurpassable words on the virtues and prodigies of our Shaykh), which was written during his lifetime by one of his disciples, gives us precious information about the early spread of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt through the constitution of a network of disciples who were sent from Cairo back to their own regions of origin in order to propagate this Sufi path.12 The importance of combining a study of the temporal and spatial expansion of Sufism with that of its genuinely intellectual and spiritual elements was demonstrated in the works of the French historian Jean-Claude Garcin, whose contribution to this field (despite his own doubts as to his qualifications, as a historian of the Mamluk City, to speak of Sufism) is fundamental.13 Garcin noted the presence of Sufis in the city of Cairo during the Medieval Period, and attempted to evaluate their qualitative and quantitative importance by examining the built environment and assessing the number of constructions (some of which were monuments) that were reserved for Sufis (ribāt, khānqāh and zāwiya). Moreover, Garcin attempted to go beyond the inevitable limitations of the observation of architecture by complementing this with social analysis: he found that Sufis were more visible in the late Mamluk Period, when they often appeared as a recourse in the face of an unjust system. Consequently, he asked himself about the links between Sufism and political evolution. When, during the fifteenth century, rural people began to abandon the land and arrive in large numbers in Cairo, bringing with them their more demonstrative forms of piety and their families of saints, urban cultural life

Introduction 5 was altered by the concomitant increase in openness towards the provinces and the countryside. This period marked the beginning of the great movements of the urban masses, who undertook annual pilgrimages to rural saints’ sanctuaries in the Nile Delta. The work of Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen on Ahmad al-Badawī confirms that the cult of this great saint of Tanta became increasingly embedded during the first half of the fifteenth century. Garcin, on the basis of his readings of biographical and hagiographical dictionaries, especially the Tabāqāt by Sha‘rānī (d. 1565), speaks of an ‘Egyptianisation’ of religious culture at this time. All of these changes during the course of the fifteenth century would have an effect on the Sufism of the Ottoman period: the arrival of the Ottomans did not constitute a rupture with the past, even if some new phenomena, linked to the integration of Egypt into the Empire, did make themselves felt; for example, the expansion of the Khalwatiyya.

The state of research to date Sufism in the transition period covering the end of the Mamluks and the beginning of Ottoman rule has been studied by Éric Geoffroy. He has shown that Sufi teachings during this time, at the end of the Medieval Period, had completed their integration into society and been accepted by the ulama, although some debates and controversy did persist.14 The Ottoman era could be described as a period during which the Sufi paths in Egypt consolidated their geographical territory as well as their spiritual, social, economic and political influence.15 We know that for a long time the Ottoman period was considered by Orientalists and Arab nationalist historians to have been a time of brutal exploitation by the Turks, a time of revolts, poverty and decline for Islamic civilisation. As for religious life, it had been studied (with an ideological bias) by the Egyptian historian Tawfīq al-Tawīl, whose book Al-Tasawwuf fī Misr ibbāna al-‘asr al-‘uthmānī, (Sufism in Egypt during the Ottoman Period) published in the 1940s, was long considered to be a reference text. In it, the author presents a very negative image of Ottoman Sufism, holding it responsible, through the Sufi brotherhoods (which he calls ‘a degenerate form of classical Sufism’), for the decline of Islam; in so doing, he puts into place a reductive thesis of a religion with two tiers: a popular Islam, mystical and deviating from the Islamic norms, and a scholarly, scriptural and orthodox Islam. Al-Tawīl claims that the second type was overtaken by the first. Only ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī, the most important Sufi in early modern Egypt, finds favour in the eyes of this historian, escaping the violent criticism he directs towards others.16 In 1994, fifty years after the publication of al-Tawīl’s book, Muhammad Sabrī, who was then part of a new generation of Egyptian researchers bringing fresh life to Ottoman Egypt studies, adopted the same theses critical of Sufism in his book Dawr al-mutasawwifa fī tārīkh Misr fī l-‘asr al-‘uthmānī (The role of Sufis in the history of Ottoman Egypt).17 This modernist and reformist vision of the Sufi brotherhoods that had been elaborated since the end of the nineteenth century and recuperated by Muslim authors remained very pervasive.

6  Introduction As for studies in Occidental languages, there are still too few of these. For a long time the only available work was The Social Structure of the Sufi Associations in Egypt in the 18th Century, the thesis of Israeli researcher Gabriel Moriah, which he upheld at the University of London in 1963. Essentially, this study relies on Jabartī’s historical chronicle, espousing its point of view on the ideal man of religion and ignoring the writings of other authors from the same period. However, the approach adopted by Moriah was nevertheless innovative, since he was the first to analyse the role played by Sufism in society using the technical terms that Sufis themselves associated with this role. In this way he set in motion a reflection on the social function of the Sufis, notably as concerns the concept of salah, at once a necessary attribute of men of religion (piety, uprightness) and a duty that requires them to work towards social well-being and protection: ‘The intrinsic unity of the Shaykh’s social and religious functions, the importance of “providing for people” (qadā’ khawā’ij al-nass) and the ambiguous spiritual and practical significance attached to it find their full expression in the concepts associated with the terms gawth (succour) and madad (relief).’18 He demonstrated the intrinsic unity between religious and temporal authority  – the social functions of a Sufi being merely reflections of his holiness and personal charisma. Today this approach seems self-evident, but this was not the case at the beginning of the 1960s, when the history of Sufism was dominated by a completely different vision, which the present volume discusses.19 Twenty years later, in 1982, another Israeli researcher, Michael Winter, published a book on the life, milieu and works of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī: Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt.20 This pioneering work was followed in 1992 by a study by the same author of Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, the first of its type: a long chapter of this book was devoted to Sufism.21 Meanwhile, during the 1970s and 1980s and before the publication of Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, the US-based Egyptian historian and professor, Afaf Lutfi alSayyid Marsot, had devoted several articles to the upward political and economic trajectory of a minority among men of religion, the great ulama of al-Azhar and families of ashrāf (descendants of the Prophet), who enriched themselves under the Ottomans. She had shown that beyond the ties of mutual self-interest that existed between the political and religious elites there was a closed world within which positions and fortunes were inherited.22 However, here again the research depended mostly on sources in Arabic, especially Jabartī’s chronicle. The originality of Michael Winter’s approach was possible in part because of his knowledge of Turkish as well as Arabic; this permitted him not only to use historical chronicles in both languages, but also to draw upon Ottoman archives. The necessity of working from differing types of sources in order to look at the finer grain of Ottoman Egyptian society was clearly demonstrated, but the way in which Winter described this society called for some improvement or revision. He assigned a chapter to each of the social groups or categories that he had identified: the ruling class; the Bedouins, the Ulama, the Sufis, popular religion, the descendants of the Prophet, Jewish and Christian minorities. It is only with difficulty that this categorisation lends itself to an analysis of the milieu of men of religion, because many

Introduction  7 Sufis were also ulama, solidly implanted at al-Azhar university or in provincial mosques. Some of the ulama of al-Azhar were considered to be holy men whose protection (which was of a divine nature) it was imperative to seek; we have demonstrated this as regards the rector of al-Azhar, Muhammad al-Hifnī. In his chapter on Sufis, M. Winter opposes the terms ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘Sufism’ (Orthodoxy and Sufism – General remarks); he presents the expansion of Sufism as an indicator of a general decline in intellectual and cultural life. This two-tier model, of one popular religion, inclined to the cult of saints, and another for the elite, still survived in the 1990s. The works of Tawfīq al-Tawīl and John Spencer Trimingham provided important reference points for Winter’s Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt. While we do not deny the excellent work of Trimingham in tracing the development of Sufism and the Sufi brotherhoods over the long duration and across the entire Islamic world, it is nevertheless the case that this work is at the root of the paradigm of decline, in that it presents a scheme of Sufi history in three stages: from its Golden age before the thirteenth century (the Golden Age of mysticism) Sufism was constantly on the decline until its final stage, the Age of the Brotherhoods (tā’ifa phase), which Trimingham situates in the fifteenth century, during the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.23 In this reading, the spiritual quest is said to have given way to a hereditary transmission of the baraka, and to the cult of saints being exploited by Shaykhs who were more likely to be charlatans than true masters; these phenomena were believed to be motivated by a desire to amass personal wealth and exploit the superstitious and credulous masses. This paradigm of a decline of Islam and of Sufism has its roots in modernist and reformist theories diffused by Orientalist literature in the nineteenth century, which dominated academic research for most of the twentieth century. These theories are based on colonial notions of a sclerotic Muslim world that for a long time resisted progress, until Occidental penetration opened it to enlightenment and modernity. These ideas strongly influenced the Pakistani nationalist thinker Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), who studied at Oxford under the British Orientalist Hamilton A. Gibb (d. 1971), author with Harold Bowen of the celebrated Islamic Society and the West, and of Whither Islam?24 Rahman mastered and built on the theories (from the French Orientalist school) that H. A. Gibb had popularised, which held that a reform took place in Islam at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of contact with Western ideas. This reform would inevitably bring the end of Sufism and of the cult of saints, which were mere vestiges of a heterodox paganism and would soon be replaced by ‘religion.’25 During the 1960s Rahman undertook a reconstruction of the history of Islam and Sufism on the basis of this theory of the modernisation of Islam. He invented the term neosufism to describe an eighteenth-century puritanical reform movement that had, according to him, reaffirmed a scrupulous attachment to the sharī‘a and the moral example of the Prophet, after breaking with a medieval Sufism that was influenced on the one hand by the pantheistic mysticism of the Andalusian Sufi Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 1240) and on the other by the cult of saints. In the third part of the present volume we examine the concept of neosufism, the debates it has provoked, and the contribution made by this concept to the birth of a historiographical renewal.26

8  Introduction It is today considered contrary to the historian’s spirit to make value judgements opposing Islamic orthodoxy to Sufism, a ‘decline’ to a ‘Golden Age,’ classical Sufism to brotherhood Sufism. Although it is undeniable that each social group had its own cultural expression  – the religious practices of an illiterate peasant were carried out with less concern for the sharī‘a than were those of an ulama who had been trained in jurisprudence (fiqh) – the great scholars of Islam nevertheless encouraged devotion to saints. It is also true that for Sufis the saints were always the ones with true knowledge, the real ulama. The vision of Islam that pictures a two-tier model is simplistic and false, aiming to present Sufism ‘as it should be,’ rather than as it is actually lived. Far from having introduced a period of rupture with the thought of Ibn ‘Arabī, the integration of the Arab provinces into the Ottoman Empire actually stimulated an unprecedented diffusion of his ideas. Recent studies have revealed a genuine intellectual blossoming, in which Sufism played a major role.27 In Medina, in the heart of the Arab provinces, a meeting took place between mystical traditions from Iran, Central Asia (these often arrived via India), and those from Egypt, as transmitted by Sha‘rānī from the lineage of Zakariyyā al-Ansārī (d. 1520). This cross-fertilisation gave birth to an original school of thought, a scholarly Sufism strongly influenced by the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabī. The role of the Arabian city of Medina in the diffusion of these ideas must be underlined: in her book, Il rinnovamento mistico dell’Islam, Samuela Pagani has felt justified in speaking of a ‘Medinese school,’ all the more dominant because it corresponded to religious, legal and spiritual reference points on which the Ottoman State relied.28 This phenomenon has now been well documented by recent research on the Holy Cities during the Ottoman period.29 Cairo continued to be an important centre for the diffusion of learning between the west and the east of the Muslim world. Although the city lost its status as the great capital of a Muslim Medieval power (the Mamluks, 1250–1517), its integration into a vast empire – whose territory at its apogee extended from Hungary to the Indian Ocean, from the frontiers of Iran to Algeria, and covered three quarters of the land bordering the Mediterranean and all of the Arab world except Morocco and Yemen  – made it a crossroads on the pilgrimage routes to Mecca, one of the stages of which was Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad was buried.30 Egyptian Sufism evolved within the international networks of scholars that John Voll and Nehemiah Levtzion have shown to have existed in the Holy Cities, in their work that shed light on the circulation of ideas and currents of thought in the Muslim world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.31 One must also take into account the networks that were woven within Egypt, between Cairo and the provinces; we will study the example of the province of Upper Egypt and the college (riwāq) of Upper-Egyptian students at al-Azhar. This Sufi flowering should be related to a phenomenon that was observed in Near-Eastern Christian communities (which played a pioneering role in the diffusion of a writing culture in the Ottoman Empire) and demonstrated by Nelly Hanna in Egypt: that of an increased diffusion of the written word, swept along by new economic factors, especially the growth of commerce with Italy and Venice, which brought with it a reduction in the cost of paper and therefore an upsurge in

Introduction  9 the production of manuscript books. Individuals, mosques, and zāwiyas began to build up libraries.32 This written culture was often fed by an oral culture, many aspects of which have yet to be studied fully. In this new cultural context, Sufi writings occupied a dominant position, with some of them becoming best-sellers in the public and private libraries of the Muslim world, such as the Dalā’il al-Khayrāt (The Waymarks of Benefits), a collection of prayers of blessing on the Prophet Muhammad by the Moroccan Sufi Muhammad al-Jazūlī (d. 1465) and, to a lesser extent, the ‘Iqd al-jawhar fī mawlid al-nabī al-azhar (The Jewelled Necklace of the Resplendent Prophet’s Birth), a text celebrating the birth and celestial ascension of the Prophet, by the Medinese Sufi Ja‘far b. Hasan al-Barzanjī (d. 1765). The renaissance of the ancient genre of Sufi handbooks for novices clearly indicates the new importance accorded to books, a phenomenon that both fed and benefited from the wider diffusion of the Sufi paths. Stefan Reichmuth observed this for the oeuvre of al-Zabīdī (d. 1791), a Sufi of Yemeni origin who was born in India and settled in Cairo where he wrote his most important works: Ithāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn (The Gift of the God-fearing Sayyids), which is a commentary on Ghazālī’s (d. 1111) Ihyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), and his dictionary, Tāj al-‘arūs (The Bridal Crown). Reichmuth says of Zabīdī: ‘It is however rather the broadening of transmission itself, beyond the exclusive circles of scholars, which stands out in his activities. This attitude makes him highly important for the development of a mass culture of Arabic and Islamic learning and for later movements of literary and religious revival.’33 This desire on the part of Sufi masters to transmit knowledge to the greatest possible number of students and disciples has also been observed in other parts of the Empire. For the first time, at the end of the sixteenth century, a master of the branch of the Khalwatiyya studied by John Curry composed treatises in vernacular Turkish and not in Arabic or Persian as his predecessors had done a century before. He wrote in a clear and simple style to make the teaching of his Sufi path accessible to as many people as possible; this was an important factor in this path’s diffusion throughout provincial central Anatolia. J. Curry interprets this popularisation as a genuine transformation in Sufi thought and culture in the Ottoman Empire at a time when competition for religious authority was intense and increasing.34 For the same period, Derin Terzioğlu observes similar phenomena of popularisation and systematisation in the production and diffusion of manuals of religious instruction (‘ilm-i hāl). These manuals, which first appeared during the fourteenth century to teach the essentials of Islamic faith and practices to the newly converted people of Rumelia, increased in number and reached a peak of popularity in the seventeenth century. Written by leaders of the Qādizādelī movement who were hostile to Sufism, especially as manifested in major Brotherhoods such as the Khalwatiyya, these manuals gradually evolved into puritanical religious treatises on morality aimed at a general Muslim readership. They enjoyed particular success with the urbanised and literate middle classes; they could also be read aloud to illiterate populations.35 This extended diffusion of the written word also affected other domains in the religious sciences, such as the study of law (fiqh). Commentaries (sharh) and glosses (hāshiya), which for a long time were presented as a sure sign

10  Introduction of decline by those who held to an ideal of a Muslim cultural classicism, appear on the contrary to be expressions of popularisation, of a movement to make difficult ancient texts accessible to a larger public; there was much that was new and creative in these explanatory works.36 By emphasising forms of mobility, the circulation of people as of books, networks and influences received and transmitted, our study aligns itself with the new historiographical approach to the Arab provinces during the Ottoman period that has been developed by Anglo-Saxon researchers in the wake of Imperial Studies.37 In parallel with Imperial Studies, Mediterranean Studies and Indian Ocean Studies adopt a similar approach: they bypass national, cultural and ethnic categories that have long been the focus of research, instead emphasising the circulation of people and ideas, exchanges and interactions, and forms of acculturation, integration and interdependence as vectors of development and innovation. Showing the links between the local, regional and international conditions affecting the development of Sufism makes possible an improved understanding of the specific factors that also exist within each country, and within varying socio-political contexts. What is needed is a broadening of the observed space, as suggested by Nelly Hanna in her book, Ottoman Egypt and the Emergence of the Modern World.38

Sufism (tasawwuf) and Sufi path (tarīqa) The Sufis of whom we speak in this book were well versed in the other sciences of Islam – jurisprudence, theology, Quranic exegesis and even belles-lettres.39 They represented the figure of the ideal scholar, as celebrated in Jabartī’s chronicle and in the biographical dictionaries of the period, someone who brought together the exoteric and esoteric sciences. Differences among ulama, between those who concentrated essentially on the law and on the literal meaning of the sacred texts, and those who were inclined more towards the spiritual, did exist, but with the influence of the great figures among fifteenth-century Egyptian Sufi jurists they tended to become attenuated, albeit without disappearing completely.40 It is therefore the case that for this period there is little to distinguish the ulama, trained as jurists, from the Sufis, and thus we will often designate Sufis by the titles either of men of religion or of Sufi scholars, or simply as ulama. Nile Green, the specialist in Sufism in Modern India, even questions the pertinence of using the term ‘Sufism’ itself, preferring to speak of Sufi Islam.41 This acknowledgement of a fluid and open religious world, claiming diverse sources of authority and legitimacy, allows us to include the present work within the terrain marked out by a number of collective volumes published in France and elsewhere in the past ten years, all of which study religious history in the Islamic lands by looking at the concept of men of God (rijāl Allāh, an expression employed by Ibn ‘Arabī), or that of religious authority, the foundations of which are analysed in the light of the itineraries of particular individuals and the different modes of access to religious legitimacy; these different modes could be adopted concurrently or in a complementary way (combining, for example, the exoteric/ zāhirī and the esoteric/ bātinī approaches). The religious legitimacy thus achieved created functions that were just as diverse,

Introduction  11 varied and changeable. The religious authorities are thus constantly placed into the context in which they emerged, around charismatic figures who conformed to models that society recognised.42 This was certainly a religious world that was not closed to debate, but it also laid claim to its own specific identities, even if these may have changed with time: the scholar defined himself above all and before all by his madhhab, that is, by the fact that he belonged to one of the four juridical schools of Sunni Islam; these are systematically mentioned in the biographical dictionaries as an integral component of the subject’s name. In his cursus studiorum he studied the founding texts and authorities of his own school, to which he referred when giving legal opinions (fatwas). Since the Ayyubid period (XIIth-XIIIth), Shafi’ism had been the dominant school in Egypt, followed by Malikism, which predominated in Upper Egypt.43 To this form of belonging can also sometimes be added an affiliation to a Sufi path (tarīqa), which is also part of the subject’s proper name, often coming just after the madhhab. If, in the Muslim world during the fifteenth century, there was still a variety of spiritual paths, from the sixteenth century some of the great brotherhoods became more organised and dominant: they benefited from the support of the political elite who undertook to construct establishments for their activities (zāwiya – tekke in the Turkish-speaking world), to renovate the tombs and shrines of their founding saints, and to donate lands to them. In Egypt, four twelfth/thirteenth-century saints were, from the end of the Mamluk Period and at the beginning of Ottoman rule, considered to be the four poles of Egypt: Ahmad al-Badawī (d. 1276), Ibrāhīm al-Disūqī (d. 1296), Ahmad al-Rifā‘ī (d. 1182) and ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jilānī (d. 1166).44 Present for all eternity, they presided over the destiny of the country; Egypt was divided among the Sufi paths that they founded (the Ahmadiyya, the Burhāmiyya, the Rifā‘iyya and the Qādiriyya), at least until the arrival of the Khalwatiyya. They wove a dense network of communities across the entire Delta region, thanks especially to the attribution to them by the Ottomans of agricultural lands that were not subject to the land-tax (rizaq ihbāsiyya).45 Thus the Ahmadīs, Burhānīs, Rifā‘īs, Shādhilīs and, from the eighteenth century, the Khalwatīs predominate in the biographical dictionaries of the period. One must nevertheless avoid looking at the Sufi path, the tarīqa, according to the model of a formal hierarchical institution, a model diffused by colonial literature under the name ‘brotherhood.’ This term does not express the fundamental and pivotal aspect of the Sufi path, always and to this day: the personal and direct relationship between the disciple and his master. The term ‘brotherhood’ is not completely false, for the path does accord considerable importance to fraternity, solidarity and mutual respect within the group, in line with the rules described in the handbooks of Sufi ethics (adab) that were written for novices. However, it was only the presence of a charismatic master whose aura and whose baraka spread out and covered all of his followers that guaranteed the cohesion stipulated in such handbooks. When a master died, it often happened that the group could not resist the vacuum that he left behind, and ended up breaking up into many different branches, founded by his disciples themselves. In addition, historians have observed a genuine fluidity of the paths in the scholarly circles of the period: some

12  Introduction Sufis claimed several spiritual affiliations, and gave priority, beyond these diverse belongings, to one single path, which they put above all others, the tarīqa muhammadiyya, the Muhammadan path, the development of which is examined in the third chapter of the present study. Multiple affiliation continued to occur during the eighteenth century, at the time that the exclusivist Sufi brotherhoods that still exist today were beginning to appear.

Circulation, renewal and authority Egyptian Sufism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is studied here from three angles: circulation and transmission, renewal and authority, starting with the historical context and a spatial analysis of Sufism, then moving on to texts, to the teaching of Sufism, and to the diffusion of its doctrines, also examining the social and even political effects that followed from these. The first part, Circulation and networks: the role of Cairo and al-Azhar, explores the geographical dimensions of Sufism from several angles: it looks at Cairo, Upper Egypt, the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb, and examines the integration of Sufism into Cairene urban spaces, principally the al-Azhar mosque. This mosque welcomed students from many different provinces (wilāyāt) of Egypt, and from abroad, and foreign scholars (some of great renown) who offered their teachings. We pay particular attention to people from the Maghreb, who had to pass through Cairo on their way to the Holy Cities. The networks and ties that evolved thanks to these new forms of mobility allowed a branch of the Khalwatiyya, brought from Anatolia via Syria by Mustafā al-Bakrī, to spread from al-Azhar across the whole country. This context, so favourable to intellectual exchange and spiritual transmission, brought about the appearance of a growing number of Sufi handbooks – another indication that the masters of the period had an increasing number of disciples. The second part of our book, Education: how to guide disciples? analyses three of these handbooks to establish what they can teach us about Sufi rules and practices during this period, and about the manner in which masters guided their disciples at a time when the Sufi paths, especially the Khalwatiyya, were undergoing a remarkable expansion. The imitation of the Prophet (ittibā’ al-nabī) is an ancient doctrinal theme of Sufism, amplified in the early Modern Period by the claim on the part of Sufi masters to a direct attachment to the person of God’s Messenger. And yet, those who hold to Fazlur Rahman’s thesis of neosufism saw this as a recent phenomenon, appearing only in the eighteenth century. We thus feel the necessity, in this book about early modern Egyptian Sufism, to go back over this ground in a third section, The Muhammadan path (Tarīqa Muhammadiyya) and Sufi renewal, dealing with the controversies and debates on the question of Sufi renewal that shook academic circles, particularly in Germany, throughout the second half of the twentieth century; we give an account of the historiographical advances brought about by these debates. We have attempted, in light of these new findings, a chronology of the circulation of the concept of a Muhammadan path in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, with its networks and modes of transmission. We describe

Introduction  13 the social and political significance of this path of perfection, transmitted by the Prophet, both for Sufis who claimed it and in relation to the temporal authority they exerted. The fourth part, Prophetic heritage, authority and the intercession of saints, uses the hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī to cast light on the mechanisms for the construction of the charisma of a saint, founded on his temporal and eschatological intercession. Al-Hifnī’s awareness of his own role as a guide, and of the soteriological mission untrusted to him by God through his Messenger and the great saints, along with his organisational capacities, explain the success of his Sufi path, the Khalwatiyya. This section of the book therefore examines the extent and nature of the temporal authority exercised by Sufis in a historical context that was marked by competition, ruled by political power and rife with puritanical religious movements that contested the authority of Sufis. In this book we discuss Egypt while reinserting it into its imperial and international context in order, on the one hand, to highlight the specificities of Egyptian Sufism and its history, and on the other to illuminate the links that it maintained with other spiritual traditions that influenced it, just as Egypt’s spiritual tradition in turn influenced Sufism in the rest of the Muslim world. We know that in terms of doctrine and of the diffusion of ideas, and starting in medieval times, Egypt was simultaneously attracting foreign scholars inward and transmitting ideas outward, but these exchanges intensified during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the new imperial and even global context in which the country and its people found themselves.

Notes 1 Rāghib Pasha (d. 1763), governor of Egypt in 1746, and then Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Sultan; close to Sufi milieux, it was in the company of Mustafā al-Bakrī, who was al-Hifnī’s master, that he visited Cairo for the first time in 1746. Sievert, H., Zwischen arabischer Provinz und Hoher Pforte: Beziehungen, Bildung und Politik des osmanischen Bürokraten Rāġıb Meḥmed Paşa (st. 1763), Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2008. 2 Philipp, T., Perlmann, M. and Schwald, G. (eds.), ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Jabartī’s History of Egypt, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994, I, 304. Hereafter cited as: Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-ltarājim wa-l-akhbār’. 3 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, pp. 289–304; Al-Murādī, Muhammad, Silk al-durar fī a‘yān al-qarn al-hādī ‘ashar, Cairo, Dār alkutub al-‘ilmiyya, 1997, IV, p. 65. 4 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 289. 5 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt fī ba‘d mā li-shaykhinā min al-manāqib wa-l-karāmāt, Cairo, Dār al-kutub, tārīkh 1008; al-Azhar library, saqqā 3666. 6 Chih, R., Le soufisme au quotidien: Confréries d’Égypte au XXe siècle, Paris, Sindbad, 2000. 7 Philipp, T. (ed.), ‘Early Modern History of Ottoman Bilād al-Shām’, Arabica 51, 4 (2004); Michel, N., ‘Paysages ruraux de l’Égypte prémoderne (XIIe-XIXe siècles)’ Egypte, Afrique & Orient, 70 (June/July/August 2013) pp. 43–50. 8 Following on from the pioneering work of Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans dans l’Égypte du XIXe siècle (1798–1882), Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1982.

14  Introduction 9 Hanna, N., Ottoman Egypt, and the Emergence of the Modern World, 1500–1800, Cairo, AUC Press, 2014, p. 14. 10 Tuchscherer, M. and Pedani, M. P. (eds.), Alexandrie ottomane 1. Etudes Alexandrines 19, Cairo, Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 2011; Crecelius, D., ‘Observations on Some Religious Institutions in Damiette and Faraskur in the Eighteenth Century’, in Wasserstein, D. J. and Ayalon, A. (eds.), Mamluks and Ottomans, Studies in Honour of Michael Winter, London and New York, Routledge, 2006, pp. 226–240. 11 Al-Marāghī al-Jirjāwī, Muhammad, Ta‘tīr al-nawāhī wa-l-arjā’ bi-dhikr man ishtahara min ‘ulamā’ wa a‘yān madīnat al-Sa‘īd Jirjā, Cairo, ms. Dār al-kutub, tārīkh, 5517. 12 Mayeur-Jaouen, C., Al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawī: un grand saint de l’islam égyptien, Cairo, Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 1994. 13 Garcin, J.C., ‘Les soufis dans la ville mamelouke d’Égypte’, in McGregor, R. and Sabra, A. (eds.), Le développement du soufisme en Égypte à l’époque mamelouke, Cairo, Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 2006. 14 Geoffroy, É., Le soufisme en Égypte et en Syrie sous les derniers Mamelouks et les premiers Ottomans, Damascus, Institut français d’études arabes de Damas, 1995. 15 Chih, R., ‘The Apogee and Consolidation of Sufi Teachings and Organizational Forms (1453–1683)’, in Salvatore, A. Babak Rahimi and Tottoli, R. (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam and Islamic Civilization, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. 16 Al-Tawīl, T., Al-Sha‘rānī imām al-tasawwuf fī ‘asri-hi, Cairo, Dār ihyā’ al-kutub al‘arabiyya, 1945; Al-Tawīl, T., Al-Tasawwuf fī Misr ibbāna al-‘asr al-‘uthmānī, Cairo, Maktaba al-adāb bi-l-jamāmīz, 1946. 17 Sabrī, M., Dawr al-mutasawwifa fī tārīkh Misr fī-l-‘asr al-‘uthmānī, Cairo, Dār al-taqwā, 1994. 18 Moriah, G., The Social Structure of the Sufi Associations in Egypt in the 18th Century, PhD thesis, University of London, 1963 (unpublished). 19 Moriah, G., The Social Structure of the Sufi Associations, p. 239. 20 Winter, M., Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt, New Brunswick and London, Transaction Publishers, 1982. 21 Winter, M., Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798, London, Routledge, 1992. 22 Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, A., ‘The “Ulama” of Cairo in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Keddie, N. (ed.), Scholars, Saints, and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East since 1500, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1972; ‘A Socio-Economic Sketch of the “Ulama” in the Eighteenth Century’, in Colloque International de l’Histoire du Caire, Cairo, Ministry of Culture, 1972, pp. 3131–319; ‘The Political and Economic Functions of the “Ulamā” in the 18th Century’, JESHO, XVI, pp. 130–154. 23 Trimingham, J. S., The Sufi Orders in Islam, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 103. 24 Gibb, H. A. R. and Bowen, H., Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, vol. 1, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1950; Gibb, H. A. R., Whither Islam? London, V. Gollancz, 1932. 25 Laoust, H., ‘Le réformisme musulman des salafiyya et le caractère orthodoxe de son orientation actuelle’, Revue des Etudes Islamiques, VI (1932), pp. 178–324. 26 Rahman, F., Islam, London, Doubleday and Co., 1966. 27 Chodkiewicz, M., ‘La réception de la doctrine d’Ibn ‘Arabī dans le monde ottoman’, in Ocak, A. Y. (ed.), Sufism and Sufis in Ottoman Society, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu (Turkish Historical Society), 2005, pp. 97–120. 28 Pagani, S., Il rinnovamento mistico dell’Islam: Un commento di ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī a Ahmad Sirhindī, Napoli, Istituto Universitario Orientale, Dissertationes III, 2003.

Introduction  15 29 El-Rouayheb, K., ‘Opening the Gate of Verification: The Forgotten Arab  – Islamic Florescence of the 17th Century’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 38, 2 (May 2006), pp. 263–281; Pagani, S., Il rinnovamento mistico dell’Islam. op. cit; Nafi, B. M., ‘Tasawwuf and Reform in Pre-Modern Islamic Culture: In Search of Ibrāhīm al-Kūrānī’, Die Welt des Islams 3, 42 (2002), pp. 307–365; Chih, R., ‘Rattachement initiatique et pratique de la voie selon al-Simt al-majīd d’al-Qushshāshī (m. 1661)’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2010, pp. 189–208. 30 Raymond, A., Grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane, Paris, Sindbad, 1985, p. 46. 31 Loimeier, R. and Reichmuth, S., ‘Zur Dynamik religiös-politischer Netzwerke in muslimischen Gesellschaften’, Die Welt des Islams 36, 2 (1996), pp. 145–185; Eich, T., ‘Islamic Networks’, in European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz (published online). 32 Hanna, N., In Praise of Books, A Cultural History of Cairo's Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, New York, Syracuse University Press, 2003; Hitzel, F. (ed.), Livres et lecture dans le monde ottoman, Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, 87–88 (1999); El-Morsy, T., Les zawiyas au Caire des origines à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, PhD thesis, Université de Provence, 2008. 33 Reichmuth, S., ‘Murtadā Az-Zabīdī (d. 1791) in Biographical and Autobiographical Accounts. Glimpses of Islamic Scholarship in the 18th century’, Die Welt des Islams, 39, 1 (1999), p. 69. 34 Curry, J. J., The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350–1650, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 35 Terzioğlu, D., ‘Where ‘İlm-i ḥāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization’, Past & Present, 220, 1 (August 2013), 79–114. 36 Hanna, N., ‘Culture in Ottoman Egypt’, in Daly, M. W. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, vol. 2, p. 95; Johansen, B., ‘Legal Literature and the Problem of Change: The Case of the Land Rent’, in Mallat, C. (ed.), Islam and Public Law, Classical and Contemporary Studies, London and Norwell, MA, Graham and Trotman, 1993, pp. 29–47. 37 Philipp, T., ‘Early Modern History of Bilād al-Shām’; Hathaway, J., The Arab Land under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800, Harlow, Pearson-Longman, 2008; Masters, B., The Arabs of the Ottoman Empire, 1516–1918, A Social and Cultural History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. 38 Hanna, N., Ottoman Egypt and the Emergence of the Modern World, op.cit. 39 Ralf Elger underlines this point in his study of Mustafā al-Bakrī; Elger, R., Mustafa al-Bakri: zur Selbstdarstellung eines syrischen Gelehrten, Sufis und Dichters des 18. Jahrhunderts, Schenefeld, EB-Verlag, 2004. 40 Éric Geoffroy has outlined some aspects in his thesis; Geoffroy, É., Le soufisme en Égypte et en Syrie sous les derniers Mamelouks et les premiers Ottomans, op. cit. 41 Green, N., Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840– 1915, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 19–20. 42 Chodkiewicz, M., Le Sceau des saints. Prophétie et sainteté dans la doctrine d’Ibn ‘Arabī, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p. 121; Iogna-Prat, D. and Veinstein, G. (eds.), Histoires des hommes de Dieu dans l’islam et le christianisme, Paris, Flammarion, 2003; Gaborieau, M. and Zeghal, M. (eds.), ‘Autorités religieuses en islam’, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 125 (2004); Cohen, M., Joncheray, J. and Luizard, P. J. (eds.), Les transformations de l'autorité religieuse, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2004; Krämer, G. and Schmidtke, S. (eds.), Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, Leiden, Brill, 2006; Aigle, D. (ed.), Les autorités religieuses entre charismes et hiérarchie. Approches comparatives, Turnhout, Brepols, 2011; Clayer, N., Fliche, B.

16  Introduction and Papas, A. (eds.), L’autorité religieuse et ses limites en terres d’islam, Leiden, Brill, 2013. 43 Lapidus, I., ‘Ayyoubid Religious Policy and the Development of the Schools of Law in Cairo’, in Colloque international sur l’histoire du Caire, Cairo, Ministry of Culture, 1974, pp. 279–286. 44 Mayeur-Jaouen, C., ‘La vision du monde par une hagiographie anhistorique de l’Égypte ottomane, les Tabaqāt sharnūbiyya et les quatre Pôles’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane/Sufism in the Ottoman Era, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2010, pp. 129–150. 45 Mayeur-Jaouen, C. and Michel, N., ‘Cheikhs, zāwiya-s et confréries du Delta central: un paysage religieux autour du XVIe siècle’, in Afifi, M., Chih, R., et al. (eds.), Sociétés rurales ottomanes/Ottoman Rural Societies, Cairo, IFAO, 2005, pp. 139–162.

1 Circulation and networks The role of Cairo and al-Azhar

In 1517 the Ottoman Sultan Selim conquered Egypt, putting an end to nearly three centuries of Mamluk reign (1250–1517). The Ottomans were to establish long-term control of and settlement in Egypt, remaining in power until the nineteenth century. From having been the central crossroads of the Islamic world, Egypt was relegated to the status of a province within the Ottoman Empire, governed by Turkish Pashas sent from Istanbul for short periods by the Sultan, under whose close control they remained.1 This province became one of the breadbaskets of the Empire: the governors of Egypt and Syria were tasked with organising the caravan that travelled to Mecca each year during the pilgrimage season, transporting grains, money and a new embroidered cloth (kiswa) for the Ka‘ba.2 During the seventeenth century the situation of Egypt within the Empire was altered by the fact that it was no longer the point of departure for Ottoman military expeditions to the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean; this brought about a reduction in the number of troops stationed in the country.3 Some of the Mamluks who had pledged allegiance to Selim were given administrative positions with the titles ‘bey’ (or sanjaq bey) or amir. During the seventeenth century the beys came to occupy the most important of these roles: commander of the pilgrimage caravan (amīr al-hajj), treasurer (defterdār), and governors of the provinces (hukkām al-aqālīm). The Ottomans preserved the Mamluk administrative division of the country into fourteen provinces, seven in the south (qiblī) and seven in the north (bahrī); along with four governorates (muhāfazāt), Alexandria, Rosetta (Rashīd), Damietta and Suez; for the Ottomans the strategic value of these zones justified their special status. The Ottoman beylicate was not a continuation of the Mamluk system, but rather one component of a new political and military structure in the context of a decentralisation of power. This system was analysed by the American historian Jane Hathaway in a pioneering work.4 The power of the beys was founded on the patronage provided to groups of clients, or ‘households’ (bayt in Arabic), which brought together their protégés (tabī’, pl. atbā’; they also carried the name – laqab – of their patrons) with diverse ethnic and social origins: soldiers, merchants, men of religion. The beys were not alone in forming such households in Egypt – the Pasha of Egypt, members of the military administration, and soldiers from across the seven regiments also did so. Thus the Mamluk beys dominated political life during the first half of the seventeenth century, but were defeated in 1660 by the Ottoman Pasha and his allies; they then fell into obscurity, to re-emerge during

18  Circulation and networks the eighteenth century, when they formed alliances with the household of the Qazdughlī. The elimination of the beys left a political vacuum that was filled by regimental officers who were wealthy thanks to having acquired rural iltizām (tax farms) and control of the coffee trade.5 They in their turn formed important bayt with the influx of Anatolian mercenaries and soldiers; the Qazdughlī household was founded by Mustafā al-Qazdughlī, a Janissary officer who arrived from Anatolia during the 1640s. It would dominate Egyptian political life in the next century. During the eighteenth century, a new phase of decentralisation in the Empire would allow these provincial elites to continue to amass extensive wealth (the granting of lifelong and hereditary iltizām became widespread as early as the end of the seventeenth century); they also acquired military capacities, while becoming increasingly integrated into society through learning the language, through their commercial activities and, especially, through their prestigious construction programmes and the financial support they offered to cultural and religious life. Thus the beys became dominant anew, since the Ottoman government no longer exercised authority over the country. They were at their apogee with ‘Alī Bey al-Kabīr (r. 1760–1772); he eliminated all of his rivals, among them the powerful tribal chief of the Hawwāra, Shaykh al-‘Arab Hummām, amir of Jirjā in Upper Egypt. ‘Alī Bey possessed political supremacy (ri’āsa) and had the title of shaykh al-balad (‘The elder of the city’). He extended his power beyond the borders of an Egypt that was then relatively secure and independent, but after his invasion of Syria his ally, Muhammad Abū Dhahab, turned against him, fighting for power and beating him in the Delta. When Abū Dhahab died in 1776, rivalries for power among the Qazdughlī, between Ismā‘īl Bey (the former Mamluk of ‘Alī Bey), and two of Abū Dhahab’s Mamluks, continued until the arrival of the French in 1798.6 Although historians agree that Sufism progressed under the Ottomans, advances in the domain of the economic and social history of Egypt, from the pioneering work of the French historian André Raymond to the recent findings of Nelly Hanna and the Egyptian school of Ottoman history, today allow us a better understanding of the historic factors at play in this progress, and of the political, economic and social conditions that allowed this Sufism to anchor itself in Egyptian society.7 The recovery of the economy and of international commerce at the end of the seventeenth century was, in Egypt, accompanied by a period of prosperity that lasted until 1770, and by a major political change, the rise of the Mamluk amirs. These elites possessed landed wealth, and with some of their property they established waqfs (inalienable endowments) whose revenues would be conceded to their pious foundations in perpetuity. In Cairo as in the provinces, the work that went into building or renovating religious edifices brought with it a cultural blossoming.

A cosmopolitan milieu of Sufi scholars As early as the Medieval Period Egypt was already a destination for foreign scholars, both Sufi and non-Sufi. Cairo was then the capital of the Mamluks, an important power in medieval Islam. Under the Ottomans, Egypt became an outlying province of a vast empire whose capital was now Istanbul. However, its situation

Circulation and networks  19 at the crossroads between the Muslim east and west, its prosperity and relative political stability, the patronage offered by its elite to culture and religion, the prestige of its mosques, and the many great shrines of saints and members of the Prophet’s family (Ahl al-bayt) that were found there meant that Egypt retained its attraction for foreign scholars, many of whom made extended stays, with some settling there permanently. The presence in Cairo of the mosque-university of alAzhar also played a part in its appeal to scholars: the many endowments assigned to it confirm the predominant role as an intellectual and religious centre for all of Egypt that al-Azhar had begun to acquire under the Mamluks. Not only foreign scholars, but also and especially provincial Egyptians were keen to study at al-Azhar; these men came to Cairo to continue an education the groundwork of which had been laid in their local mosques. Scholars from other countries passed through Cairo and al-Azhar to attend courses, but they also taught in the colleges (riwāq), in which students were grouped according to their geographical origins. It was not just at al-Azhar that encounters took place – on the contrary, students most often heard the masters in the majlis (salons) of private houses, for the transmission of Sufism, as with the other religious sciences, was not attached to an institution, but to a spiritual master at the centre of a larger or smaller circle of disciples. Some of the visitors from abroad, such as the Syrian Mustafā al-Bakrī (d. 1749), the Yemeni ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-‘Aydārūs (d. 1778) and his disciple from India, Murtadā al-Zabīdī (d. 1791), all three of whom are buried in Cairo, did not teach at al-Azhar, and yet they exerted a remarkable influence on the Egyptian and foreign azharī whom they received in their Cairo homes. Another group of visitors who had an influence on Sufism in Egypt from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the Maghrebis. Many Egyptian saints had Maghrebi origins, so much so that the greatest among them, Ahmad al-Badawī, was reputed to have come from Fez in Morocco. Al-Badawī and another Egyptian, Ibrāhīm al-Disūqī, and the two Iraqis ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī and Ahmad al-Rifā’ī, made up the four mystical poles (al-aqtāb al-arba‘a) that were venerated by Egyptian Muslims.8 These four saints were also the founders of the most important Sufi brotherhoods in Egypt: the Ahmadiyya of Badawī, the Burhāmiyya of Disūqī, the Qādiriyya of Jīlānī, and the Rifā’iyya of Rifā‘ī. The Shādhiliyya, brought from Morocco by Abū l-Hasan al-Shādhilī (d. 1258), spread from Alexandria to Upper Egypt through his Egyptian disciples. These Sufi paths enjoyed a new period of expansion during the Ottoman period, and gained increasing influence on society thanks to the patronage of the amirs. This ancient and stable religious landscape was to undergo a genuine change with the renewal of the Khalwatiyya in the first half of the eighteenth century: coming from Turkey via Aleppo, it spread across all of Egypt and beyond towards sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the circulation of, and encounters between, foreign and Egyptian scholars at al-Azhar. Maghrebi travellers in Cairo We attach a particular importance to Maghrebis because they had been present in Egypt for so long – the Fatimids, who conquered Egypt in 969 and built the

20  Circulation and networks al-Azhar mosque, came from Tunisia – and because their influence was renewed during the Ottoman era. They travelled for religious reasons, since Egypt was an obligatory halt on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and for economic reasons because of the intensification of international commerce, in which Maghrebis, especially merchants from Fez, played an important role. The historian André Raymond has estimated that the annual pilgrimage caravan brought together 30,000 to 40,000 pilgrims from the Maghreb and the interior of Africa.9 During the eighteenth century the number of Maghrebis in Cairo was second only to that of Turks.10 They were also numerous in Alexandria, where Andalusian masters belonging to the school of the Sufi Abū Madyān (d. 1198 in Tlemcen, Algeria) contributed to the renewal of spirituality during the twelfth century. Abū Madyān was the teacher of ‘Abd al-Salām Ibn Mashīsh of Morocco (d. 1228), who became the master of Abū’l-Hasan al-Shādhilī. Abū l-‘Abbās al-Mursī (d. 1287), the propagator of the Shādhiliyya, was buried in Alexandria; the mosques that were built on his tomb and on those of his disciples became important sites for religious life in the city.11 The implantation of the Shādhiliyya in Upper Egypt was a natural consequence of the settlement by Maghrebi Sufis in the region due to geo-political circumstances: during the Medieval Period, when the Crusades prevented people from travelling in the north of the country, Maghrebi pilgrims (and also merchandise) took the route via Upper Egypt to the port of ‘Aydhāb on the Red Sea, where they sailed to Jeddah in Arabia and continued to the Holy Cities from there. Maghrebi Sufis who had settled in ribats (centres for Sufi communities) transmitted the path of Abū Madyān and were at the origins of the earliest Sunni awakening in the region, then under Shi‘i Fatimid rule.12 Two of their representatives were considered to be the mystical poles of Upper Egypt (aqtāb al-Sa‘īd), and are still the object of very active veneration to this day: ‘Abd al-Rahīm al-Qinā’ī (d. 1196), patron saint of Qinā, and his disciple Abū-l-Hajjāj al-Uqsūrī (d. 1244), of Luxor. According to legend, the latter of these two men gained his status as patron saint of the town after having conquered it from a Christian woman, who ultimately converted to Islam.13 Jirjā also carries traces of this Maghrebi presence with its Sīdī ‘Abd al-Salām b. Mashīsh al-Maghribī mosque (also called the mosque of the Maghrebis), which is reputed to contain the tomb of the Moroccan saint ‘Abd al-Salām b. Mashīsh, the master of Abū’l-Hasan al-Shādhilī and the author of Salat al-Mashīshiyya, a prayer of invocation asking for divine blessing on the Prophet, which is very popular in Egypt. Finally, the patron saint of Jirjā, Sayyid Duhays Abū ‘Amra, came from the Maghreb, with his daughter ‘Amra, at the time of the Mamluk Baybars (thirteenth century). According to a legend collected by Muhammad al-Marāghī, the historian of Jirjā, Abū ‘Amra was at the origin of the urban development of the town, which at his arrival had been only a small village under the protection of a shaykh called Sahl. A ‘builder’ saint, Abū ‘Amra put his followers to work and enlarged the town with his many constructions. Eventually he ousted and replaced Shaykh Sahl as local patron saint. Each year at the time of his mawlid a procession transports the new tawb, the cloth that covers the catafalque beneath which the body of the saint is buried.

Circulation and networks  21 Under the Ottomans, Moroccan people, with their long tradition of voyages in search of knowledge and trade, were the most numerous among all the Maghrebis who travelled to Mecca. The Libyan researcher Ahmad al-Gohaider has listed sixteen modern-period rihla hijāziyya (pilgrimage narratives) in which the journey passed through Tripolitania, and of these, fourteen were written by Moroccans.14 The travelogues of Abū Sālim al-‘Ayyāshī (d. 1679), Mā’ al-Mawā’id, known as al-Rihla al-‘Ayyāshiyya (The Travel of al-‘Ayyāshī); Ahmad b. Nāsir (d. 1717), al-Rihla al-nāsiriyya ilā al-diyār al-muqaddasa (Ibn Nāsir’s Journey to the Holy Lands); and Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Salām b. Nāsir (or al-Nasīrī, d. 1823), al-Rihla al-sughrā (The Lesser Journey) and al-Rihla al-kubrā (The Greater Journey) are celebrated for the wealth of information they contain about the countries traversed and the Sufi masters and scholars encountered.15 This westward movement of Maghrebis increased markedly at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and Sufis going to Mecca would pause in Cairo along the way in order to meet other Sufis, do some teaching, buy books, and visit the shrines of saints and of the Prophet’s family. When al-‘Ayyāshī arrived in the Egyptian capital in 1653–54, he was determined to find lodging near al-Azhar – to be close to the mosque, but also because the ulama made their homes nearby. This Moroccan scholar stayed in Cairo for a relatively short time, only one month, while awaiting the departure of his caravan for Mecca; he hoped to use this time profitably to meet as many masters and attend as many halqa (study circles) as possible. It was rare for such encounters to take place at al-Azhar; they occurred more frequently in private homes. Because it was the high season for pilgrimage, al-‘Ayyāshī could not find lodgings in the immediate neighbourhood of al-Azhar, and had to be content to rent a room from a shopkeeper, near Al-Husayn’s Mosque.16 By tradition the poorest Maghrebi pilgrims, who couldn’t afford to rent lodgings, would stay, with their baggage and animals, in the Ibn Tulūn mosque; this practice came to an end around 1650 when it was forbidden. Al-‘Ayyāshī brought his stay in Cairo to a close with visits to several shrines: that of Sayyida Nafīsa (d. 823), the great-granddaughter of the Prophet’s son-in-law and cousin, Imam ‘Alī; that of Imam al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 820), jurist and founder of the Shāfi’ī school of law, considered a saint; that of the Sādāt al-Wafā’iyya, a family of ashrāf (descendants of the Prophet) affiliated to the Shādhiliyya; and that of Ibn ‘Atā’ Allāh (d. 1309), another famous Shādhilī. Let it be noted that al-‘Ayyāshī was himself a Shādhilī, affiliated to the Nāsiriyya of Muhammad b. Nāsir (d. 1674), whose zāwiya was in Tamgroute, southern Morocco. Some Moroccan scholars stopped off in Cairo to teach, their scholarship being prized as much by their compatriots there as by Egyptians and other foreigners who followed the Maliki school of law (predominant in the Maghreb). They gave their lessons in the al-Azhar Maghrebi college (riwāq), which was among the oldest and largest of these institutions, along with those of the Syrians and the Turks: according to the Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442), it was founded by the Mamluk Sultan Qalāwūn (d. 1290) and then renovated by Sultan Qāyt Bāy (d. 1496) in 1476. During the Ottoman period, it received financial support from the large and wealthy Maghrebi community in Cairo. According to Jabartī,

22  Circulation and networks Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Salām al-Nāsirī stopped there on his way to Mecca, to teach Bukharī’s Sahīh and the Shamā’il (this probably refers to the work by Tirmidhī, Al-Shamā’il al-muhammadiyya, in which the author brought together the hadīths that described the perfection of the Prophet Muhammad’s character and beauty).17 He initiated those who asked him into his Sufi path, the Nāsiriyya; those initiated included a close disciple of Shaykh al-Hifnī, the Egyptian Muhammad al-Munīr al-Samanūdī (d. 1785), whose treatise on the Khalwatiyya path we present in the next chapter.18 He also initiated the renowned Maliki jurist Muhammad al-Amīr al-kabīr (d. 1817).19 The Shādhiliyya was very influential in scholarly circles in Egypt during this period, and when the Khalwatiyya was introduced at al-Azhar under the influence of Shaykh al-Hifnī, scholars tended to combine the two paths in their collections of chains of spiritual transmission (isnād). Muhammad al-Hifnī himself had first been affiliated to the Shādhiliyya by Ahmad al-Shādhilī al-Maghribī, before taking the oath of the Khalwatiyya.20 Maghrebi Sufis in Cairo transmitted their teachings and in their turn received new affiliations. For two of them, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Azharī (d. 1793) and Ahmad al-Tijānī (d. 1815), their passage through Egypt was decisive: they became part of the Sufi networks linked to the Khalwatiyya, and in their turn founded the Rahmaniyya and the Tijāniyya in what is today Algeria; the historic role these two Sufi paths played in Africa has been studied fairly extensively.21 Other less wellknown Sufis were present, too, such as Ahmad al-Saqallī (d. 1764), who belonged to a family of ashrāf from Fez; after having obtained an authorisation (ijāza) from Shaykh al-Hifnī in Egypt, he returned to his home town to found the Khalwatiyya Saqalliyya.22 In their Fez zāwiya this group practised a form of spiritual audition (samā’) to which al-Saqallī had been initiated by al-Hifnī – however, some Moroccan scholars disapproved of their ritual, among them the celebrated Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Salām al-Nāsirī. In a text in which he takes on the role of censor of zāwiya practices, this latter points the finger at the habits of Shaykh al-Saqallī, whose movements during the dhikr he compares to a dance (raqs); he classifies the Moroccan branch of the Khalwatiyya among the Sufi paths that have gone astray (al-tawā’īf al-dālla).23 Yet Ahmad al-Saqallī initiated a famous name from the scholarly circles of Fez: ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Tāzī (d. 1792), who would become the master of Ahmad b. Idrīs and Muhammad al-Sanūsī. When Al-Tāzī passed through Cairo in 1753 during his pilgrimage to Mecca, he was also initiated directly by al-Hifnī, and then by another Khalwatī, Mahmūd al-Kurdī. The Qadi of Fez, Ibn Sūda (d. 1795), also encountered Mahmūd al-Kurdī when the latter was teaching at al-Azhar, where Khalwatī scholars already occupied the most important positions. Muhammad b. al-Tayyib al-Qādirī, author of the Nashr al-mathanī (The Chronicles), relating the history of Morocco during the eighteenth century, was initiated by al-Hifnī and received an ijāza from him. In his biographical notice on the Egyptian master, he underlines the importance of al-Hifnī’s contribution to the development of the study of hadīth and tasawwuf in his homeland, Morocco.24 While men and their ideas were circulating, books were also in transit. Maghrebi scholars took advantage of their sojourns in Cairo to buy books; the production

Circulation and networks  23 of manuscripts in the city was already intensifying in a way that foreshadowed its role as the greatest nineteenth-century centre for printing in Arabic.25 In his systematic research in private and public libraries on sources dealing with religious and intellectual life in Libya under the Karamānlīs (1711–1835), Ahmad al-Gohaider observed that a very large number of the manuscripts were written in a middle-eastern hand script (mashriqiyya); he affirms with certainty that these were purchased along the pilgrimage route, in Egypt and the Hejaz.26 From his four voyages to the Holy Cities Ahmad b. Nāsir brought back numerous books bought in Cairo, Medina and Mecca; these enriched the library of his zāwiya in Tamgroute, which had been created by his father Muhammad b. Nāsir. When the latter died in 1674, the library, which was among the largest in the Maghreb, contained thousands of manuscripts and was at the centre of an important book culture that had developed in Morocco during the seventeenth century.27 The stock of this library focussed on all of the religious sciences, and the fiqh in particular. In the domain of Sufism, Ahmad and Muhammad b. Nāsir had works that were already considered to be classics (before the arrival of printing) brought to them from Cairo: Kitāb al-ta‘arruf li-madhhab al-tasawwuf (The Doctrine of the Sufis) by al-Kalābādhī (d. 995), Qūt al-qulūb (The Nourishment of Hearts) by Abū Tālib al-Makkī (d. 998), ‘Awārif al-ma‘ārif (Benefits of Intimate Knowledge) by al-Suhrawardī (d. 1234) and al-Futuhāt al-makkiyya (Meccan Revelations) by Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 1240).28 The Nāsirī had an important contact in Cairo in Muhammad Murtadā al-Zabīdī (d. 1791). Muhammad b. Nasīr, who met him several times in 1782–1783, described him with admiration: ‘You find him (Zabīdī) continuously buying, and copying against payment or borrowing, books from remote regions; other books being sent to him as presents. Apart from that he makes gifts and donations. . . . He is a highly prolific author. By God he is the Suyūtī of his time . . . far beyond ordinary men.’29 Near-eastern scholars and Ottoman patrons Zabīdī’s master, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-‘Aydarūs (d. 1778) from Yemen, had awakened in his disciple the desire to see Cairo by speaking to him of its scholars and men of letters, and of its amirs who were likely to be well-disposed towards them (according to Jabartī, al-‘Aydarūs had much influence with the military elite); he also spoke of Cairo’s numerous shrines of members of the family of the Prophet (Ahl al-bayt). Al-‘Aydarūs came from Tarim in the Hadhramaut, an important centre for the transmission of Sufi knowledge and affiliation, which attracted pilgrims coming from India or South-east Asia who stopped there to study before continuing their travels towards the Holy Cities.30 The expansion of Sufism in South-east Asia at the beginning of the Modern Period is inextricably linked to the development of commercial routes that created a network of cultural exchanges among Yemen, India and the Malay world. As early as the fifteenth century, Yemeni scholars with an excellent grounding in juridical sciences as well as in Sufism were emigrating to India, especially to the Gujarat and the Deccan, where they occupied the highest educational and religious positions. They continued to

24  Circulation and networks maintain ties with Yemen, sending their children there to be educated in the city of Tarim.31 The largest of these Yemeni families was that of the ‘Aydarūs, which had its own chain of mystical transmission, the ‘Aydarūsiyya.32 One of the members of this family was the teacher of Nūr al-dīn al-Rānīrī (d. 1658); this religious scholar was born in Gujarat to an Arab family from the Hadhramaut, then left to make a career for himself in the Sultanate of Aceh, following the example of his uncle, Muhammad Jīlānī, who had been employed as a teacher in Aceh in 1580.33 ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-‘Aydarūs was 18 in 1740–41 when he accompanied his father to India; they stopped off in the towns of Bandar al-Shahar, Sūrat and Barūj in the Gujarat to receive spiritual affiliations from members of their family who had settled there. ‘Abd al-Rahmān’s father then returned to Tarim, leaving his son in Sūrat, with another of his sons and their maternal uncle Zayn al-‘Ābidīn Ibn al-‘Aydarūs. After spending ten years in India, ‘Abd al-Rahmān returned to Tarim, and from there travelled several times to the Holy Cities. The route of the pilgrimage was more secure during the Ottoman period, and the number of pious foundations (waqfs) attributed to Mecca and Medina, of which the Ottoman Sultan presented himself as the servant, had increased, bringing about a parallel increase in the numbers of pilgrims and students (mujāwirīn) as well as of scholars studying and teaching there. For example, according to sources consulted by the historian Soraya Faroqhi, in Medina in 1579–1580 the Ottoman authorities estimated that 8,000 people were receiving a State subsidy to live as mujāwirīn, whereas in 1641 there were 23,000 mujāwirīn (not including their families) receiving official support from the State.34 The pioneering work of John Voll and Nehemia Levtzion, along with more recent studies, have demonstrated the existence in the Holy Cities of a cosmopolitan intellectual milieu where, perhaps for the first time, many meetings and exchanges among Sufi scholars from India, central Asia, the Near East and the Maghreb became possible.35 In Medina, al-‘Aydarūs studied with Indian masters from the Sind region: Muhammad Hayāt al-Sindī, Abū-l-Hasan al-Sindī, Ibrāhīm Ibn Fayd Allāh al-Sindī, Muhammad al-Dāghistānī and many others.36 Al-‘Aydarūs went to Egypt for the first time in 1745. The primary purpose of this trip was to visit some of Egypt’s numerous tombs of saints, pious men, religious scholars and members of the Prophet’s family, many of which had been renovated by the Ottomans. He would later return to Egypt three more times for shorter or longer periods, during which he travelled to several Delta towns to visit the shrines of the great saints of Egypt: al-Badawī in Tantā, Ibrāhīm al-Disūqī in Disūq and Abū-l-‘Abbās al-Mursī in Alexandria. Thanks to the patronage of the chiefs of the Hawwāra tribe, who governed in the southern regions, he was also able to visit Upper Egypt six times, while in Cairo the city’s notables, scholars and brotherhood shaykhs also wanted to meet and speak with him.37 Al-‘Aydarūs was visited there by ‘Abd al-Khāliq al-Wafā’ī (d. 1748), a member of the well-known Sufi and Sharifian Sadāt Wafā’iyya family, on whom he made a big impression: the Shaykh gave al-‘Aydarūs the robe of the Wafā’īs and the honour of the kunya (surname) Abū-l-Mahārim (the father of mercies) and authorised him to transmit the wafā’īyya affiliation. The people who came to visit him, frequently from

Circulation and networks  25 very far away, often found him in a state of spiritual rapture. He died in Cairo and, after the ritual prayer for the dead had been said at al-Azhar by Shaykh Ahmad al-Dardīr, his body was transported to the south-west of the city and buried opposite the mosque in which his ancestor, Sayyida Zaynab (the Prophet’s granddaughter), reposes. Almost all of the writings in the list of fifty-eight works attributed to al-‘Aydarūs by Jabartī are in the domain of Sufism: collections of initiatic chains, handbooks on the Sufi path and its stages, poems on mystical love, collections of spiritual prayers, texts about the Naqshbandiyya and the Qādiriyya, about the practice of the dhikr, hagiographies of his own family, celebrations of the virtues of the Ahl al-bayt, the family of the Prophet from whom the ‘Aydarūs claimed descent via his grandson al-Husayn. Many of his poems, often of great finesse, were collected by Zabīdī in his Mu‘jam: Jabartī reproduced a few of these in his chronicle of Egypt, among them a poem on the doctrine of the unicity of being (wahdat al-wujūd).38 Like his predecessor Mustafā al-Bakrī, of whom we speak herein, al-‘Aydarūs was a fervent follower of Ibn Arabī, and propagated his ideas among his visitors in Cairo: ‘Abd Allāh al-Sharqāwī, the future Shaykh of al-Azhar, testified that al-‘Aydarūs had taught him a great deal about the doctrine of wahdat al-wujūd, because ‘he spoke of this and this alone.’39 When al-‘Aydarūs visited Cairo for the second time in 1755 he could no longer cope with the growing number of people coming to ask for spiritual affiliations from him, some of whom came from as far afield as central Asia and India.40 He asked Zabīdī, who was a master in the art of classifying Sufi chains, to collect all his spiritual transmissions in a single document called al-Nafha al-qudsiyya bi-wāsitat al-bid‘a al-‘aydarūsiyya (Sacred Gift as Passed on through Al-‘Aydarūs) which al-‘Aydārūs gave to his visitors as a form of ijāza. Al-Zabīdī made several copies of this, which were very rapidly diffused.41 The Egyptian shaykh Muhammad al-Amīr al-Kabīr (d. 1817), a professor at al-Azhar, received this ijāza, which he in his turn transmitted to his disciple Ahmad al-Sāwī (d. 1825): this helps demonstrate that multiple affiliation continued well into the nineteenth century.42 In his survey of Sufi teachings and practices in nineteenth century Egypt, Gilbert Delanoue also found that multiple affiliation was very common in this period, and cited numerous examples.43 Zabīdī decided to follow in his master’s footsteps: ‘My soul longed to see Cairo, so I came with the pilgrimage caravan and what happened, happened.’44 He never left Cairo again. When he arrived in 1754, the prestige of the Egyptian capital seemed to be at its height. The country was ruled over by the household of the Qazdughlīs, one of whom, ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhūdā (d. 1776), invested part of his enormous fortune in the construction of mosques, kuttābs (elementary schools), fountains and an extensive restoration of al-Azhar mosque. André Raymond considered him ‘the greatest builder of the Ottoman period, and one of the most active ever known in Cairo.’45 His successor, ‘Alī bey al-Kabīr, who governed the country from 1760 to 1772, built a mosque near the tomb of Ahmad al-Badawī, extending the legitimacy of the cult of the saint of Tantā and giving him a quasi-national importance.46 Another Qazdughlī, Ridwān al-Jalfī (d. 1754), brought together in his own home a circle (majlis) of literary figures, poets and

26  Circulation and networks scholars of religious sciences, who discussed literature and sang the praises of their host and benefactor. The majlis was a space in which a culture of the panegyric developed. Some ulama also had their own poets, following the example of the Shaykh of al-Azhar, ‘Abd Allāh al-Shubrāwī (d. 1757), who was the patron of the poet ‘Abd Allāh al-Idkāwī. When Shaykh al-Shubrāwī died, al-Idkāwī sought the protection of Muhammad al-Hifnī, who had replace al-Shubrāwī at the head of al-Azhar.47 Majlis were as frequently organised in patrician homes as in those of members of the sort of middle class that was represented by merchants and artisans, or those of the great ulama; these gatherings also fulfilled the needs and appealed to the tastes of a large proportion of the general population.48 The Syrian ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731) has left us a vivid description of the predominantly poetic and mystical majlis he frequented during his stay in Cairo.49 Al-Zabīdī was an intellectual personality of great stature, described by Stefan Reichmuth in the study he devoted to Zabīdī’s work as the last representative of the intellectual tradition of a period that produced writings of an encyclopaedic amplitude, imprinted with a humanism that was specific to this milieu. He travelled a great deal, from his birthplace, India, to his adoptive home in Yemen, Zabīd, from which he took his name. But it was Egypt that offered him the intellectual ferment and the material means necessary to the production of major works such as his dictionary, the Tāj al-‘arūs, and his great commentary on Ghazālī’s Ihyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn. After having had his mosque built opposite that of al-Azhar, the then master of Egypt, Muhammad bey Abū Dhahab, paid 100,000 dirham in silver to buy the Tāj al-‘arūs, which he then placed in the library of his mosque.50 In Cairo, therefore, it was possible for al-Zabīdī not only to sell his books but also to find those he needed to consult in order to write them. He explained that on his arrival in the city he was guided by a disciple of Shaykh al-Hifnī, who helped him in his search for manuscripts.51 According to his pupil Jabartī, al-Zabīdī had the ear and the respect of the highest in the land, to whom he distributed ruqya, Quranic verses written in his own hand and designed to avert evil.52 Al-Zabīdī’s reputation extended beyond the borders of Egypt; in the Maghreb he enjoyed great renown and a veneration that, again according to Jabartī, sometimes verged on idolatry: ‘If one of them reached Cairo while on pilgrimage and did not visit him or bring him anything, his pilgrimage was incomplete. . . . You would see them during the days of the departure of the pilgrimage and on its return flocking to his gate from dawn to sunset.’53 Pilgrims brought gifts according to their means, or relayed messages to al-Zabīdī from scholars in their own towns and villages in the hope of receiving a response from the master. The Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Muhammad b. Abdallāh (r. 1757–1790) in person, came to visit him, laden with gifts. Al-Zabīdī held a salon in his home, not far from al-Azhar. He was at the centre of a vast network of international scholars, from the Maghreb as we have seen, but also from Sudan, Palestine and Anatolia. Conscious that intellectual and religious life was not limited to the capital, he also travelled in the interior of Egypt, visiting the then-flourishing towns of Damietta, Rosetta and Mansūra in the Delta to meet their scholars and notables, to pray at the tombs of local saints, and to take note

Circulation and networks  27 of the Sufi paths that existed in these regions. He went no less than three times to Upper Egypt, to the Farshūt home of the Shaykh al-‘Arab Hummām at his personal invitation, and formed ties of friendship there with several local religious personalities, among them a shaykh from the nearby town of Jirjā, ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Khayyāt, whom he had probably first encountered when the latter visited Cairo and spent time at al-Azhar. Shaykh ‘Abd al-Mun‘im was in the capital on the day that Zabīdī presented the finished manuscript of his Tāj al-‘arūs before an assembly of scholars.54 Zabīdī was able to establish these contacts in Upper Egypt in part thanks to the help of ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī (d. 1775), who was in his lifetime probably the most celebrated al-Azhar scholar from the region, and who wrote letters of recommendation for Zabīdī, addressed to the Hawwāra chiefs.55 Is it permissible to speak of Zabīdī having influenced Egyptian Sufism? It seems that the Yemeni scholar was able to take advantage of the cosmopolitan intellectual milieu that existed in Cairo, as well as of the patronage of the amirs who ruled over the country, to continue his personal work of collecting and compiling chains of spiritual transmission, and of adding to them the affiliations of Egyptian scholars along with details of the origins, ramifications and practices of their paths. When he had only just arrived in Cairo he wrote one of his first collections for Shaykh Muhammad al-Hifnī, Luqat al-La’ālī min al-jawhar al-ghālī (The Gathering of Pearls among Precious Jewels), a classification of the Egyptian master’s chains of transmissions, accompanied by the text of the ijāza that al-Hifnī had given him.56 Zabīdī’s concern was to preserve for future generations the memory of a spiritual tradition that was several centuries long. For this purpose he consulted earlier treatises on khirqa and received direct transmission from the shaykhs of their spiritual chains.57 Such of his writings as the Mu‘jam (Lexicon) or the ‘Iqd al-jawhar al-thamīn fī-l-dhikr wa-turuq al-ilbās wa-l-talqīn (The String of Precious Jewels on the Dhikr and on the Paths of Initiatic Investiture and Spiritual Transmission), two works that provide alphabetical lists of his masters and the affiliations he received, bear witness to his research and intentions: these affiliations were, essentially, transmitted to him by his master, al-Aydarūs.58 Continuing Zabīdī’s work into the nineteenth century were Muhammad al-Sanūsī (d. 1859), author of the Salsabīl al-ma‘īn fī-l-tarā’iq al-arba‘īn (The Heavenly Springs that Flows over the Forty Paths) and the Turk, Muhammad Kamāl al-dīn al-Harīrī (d. 1882), with his Tibyān al-wasā’il al-haqā’iq fī bayān salāsil al-tarā’iq (The Demonstration of the Means of Access to the Divine Realities by the Exposition of the Chains of the Sufi Paths).59 Zabīdī wrote the aforementioned ‘Iqd al-jawhar al-thamīn at the request of an Egyptian Sufi from Kafr Khamīs, in the Delta; in it he presents the 125 Sufi paths to which he was affiliated, with their chains of transmission. This manuscript, which Zabīdī finished in Kafr Khamīs itself, on the tomb of the Egyptian Sufi’s ancestor, takes the form of an ijāza, the transmission of which was allowed by its author, as explained by S. Reichmuth who describes the ‘Iqd al-jawhar as ‘a comprehensive historical overview of the Sufi tradition as a whole, tying it into a single package for further transmission.’60 For the German historian, these isnads also represent a sign of the development of a piety that was oriented

28  Circulation and networks towards the quest for a spiritual influx transmitted by the Prophet himself, to whom people felt very close: ‘Apart from its function as a scholarly tool of verification, the isnad was increasingly seen as a source of blessing and spiritual closeness to the Prophet, a development of great significance which has hardly been studied until now.’61 These nomenclatures are not necessarily the sign of an increasing rigidity and codification in the paths, but rather that the Sufism of the time was an open world, feeding and regenerating itself from different spiritual traditions. For the author of al-Salsabīl al-Ma‘īn, Muhammad al-Sanūsī, citing al-Ithāf al-dhakī by Ibrāhīm al-Kurānī (d. 1690), ‘the paths differ among themselves only by the method of transmission of the dhikr (talqīn al-dhikr), the forms of the oath of allegiance (akhdh al-‘ahd), and the investiture (lubs al-khirqa): as numerous as mankind, they are merely multiple expressions of a single path. For this reason, there is no doubt that it is a good thing to affiliate oneself to several among them (akhdh al‘ahd ‘an turuq kathīra hasan bilā rayb).’62 Along with the notion of multiple affiliation we also see the emergence in the same scholarly circles of exclusive behaviours, when attachment to a master and affiliation to a path tend to be identified as the same thing, especially in the case of the Khalwatiyya. This path from the Turco-Persian world, where Sufi brotherhoods were more structured, was introduced into Egypt by a Syrian master, Mustafā al-Bakrī.

Al-Azhar, centre of the Khalwatiyya Mustafā al-Bakrī first appeared in the historiography of the Sufi paths as the propagator of the renewed Khalwatiyya in Egypt and, from there, into sub-Saharan Africa.63 More recently, the German historian Ralf Elger has unearthed different facets of this prominent figure: more than just a Sufi renewer, he was also a man of letters, well-versed in the literary culture of his times. The fact remains, however, that the arrival of al-Bakrī in Cairo during the first half of the eighteenth century marked a turning point in the history of Sufism in Egypt. In the cosmopolitan scholarly circles of the city, al-Bakrī surrounded himself with disciples from different countries, transmitting to them the Khalwatiyya, a Sufi path that espoused the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabī. Al-Bakrī had himself been initiated into the work of the ‘greatest master’ (Shaykh al-akbar, as Ibn ‘Arabī is known) by ‘Abd al-Ghānī al-Nābulusī (d.1731), a representative of the Akbarian school in Ottoman Syria.64 The Khalwatiyya was already present in Egypt before the arrival of Mustafā al-Bakrī, having been implanted there as early as the end of the fifteenth century by disciples of ‘Umar Rushānī (d. 1486), an Anatolian Turk who had settled in Tabrīz (Iran) under the patronage of Uzun Hasan, the ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu dynasty (1378–1508). Rushānī was a khalīfa (lieutenant) of the Khalwatiyya’s founder in Azerbaijan, Yahyā al-Sirwānī al-Bākūwī (d. 1463), who came from Shirwān, west of Baku.65 Al-Bākūwī is the fourth, rather than the first, link in the chain of initiatic transmission of the masters of this path, but he was the first to name representatives among his disciples, whom he sent to various parts of

Circulation and networks  29 Azerbaijan and the Caucasus, and as far as northern Anatolia, to diffuse the path; from these places it began to grow in the Ottoman Empire. Al-Bākūwī’s name features in all the branches of this path, for which he composed particular litanies, among them his famous wird al-Sattār (a prayer for divine protection). He wrote nineteen texts, essentially on mystical subjects, among them his Sharh merātib-i asrāru-l qulūb, in which he describes the seven stages of the initiatic journey and the seven degrees of purification of the soul (nafs). Al-Bākūwī was a prominent figure, who has to some extent overshadowed the masters who preceded him: according to John Curry, whose research has helped begin to clarify the rather blurred period of the Khalwatiyya’s origins, the seven-stage path of spiritual progression is sometimes attributed to al-Bākūwī, although its roots in fact appear to lie much earlier, in the period of Ibrāhīm Zāhid (d. 1296).66 External factors also contributed to the success of the Khalwatiyya, which from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries became the most influential and widespread Sufi Brotherhood in the Ottoman Empire: the Sultans, who in the fourteenth century had relied on rural Turkish dervishes for their military campaigns, turned in the fifteenth to well-organised urban Brotherhoods, the teachings of which covered the sharī‘a as much as the haqīqa (transcendent truth). It was thus that the Khalwatiyya obtained favour from the Ottoman sovereigns during the rule of Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), thanks to the Turkish master, Chelebi Khalīfa (d. 1494 or 1499); this situation lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. The Khalwatīs were to become champions of Sunnism in the face of menaces from beyond the Empire by the Safavids, and from the population groups within the Empire that were linked to them. The expansion of the Khalwatiyya followed the route of the Ottoman conquests: its shaykhs had tekkes built for or attributed to them, to which were assigned the revenues from various landholdings; this enabled the insertion and diffusion of this path throughout society.67 The three Khalwatīs who arrived in Egypt shortly before the conquest in 1517 knew the country well: Muhammad al-Demirdāsh (Timūrtāsh, d. 1523–1524), born in Shirwān, Azerbaijan, and Shāhīn al-Khalwatī (d. 1528?) were Mamluks under Sultan Qāyt Bāy of Egypt (r. 1468–1496); they had gone to be trained by Rūshānī in Tabrīz. As for Ibrāhīm al-Gulshānī (or Kulshānī, d. 1534), an Anatolian Turk, he was already living in Tabrīz in proximity to his master when the town was taken by Shāh Ismā‘īl (in 1501); he was forced to flee and join the ranks of Sunni scholars and Sufis who had sought refuge in the Near East.68 Although these three Sufis received their training from the same master, they nevertheless differed from one another a great deal in spiritual terms, and the impact that each of them had on Egyptian society was thus different. While Shāhīn al-Khalwatī lived as a hermit in the Muqattam mountain, a limestone plateau that borders the city to the east and is considered in Islamic tradition to be sacred (his contemporary, the Egyptian sufi ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī, wrote that Ottoman amirs and viziers used to visit him there),69 Ibrāhīm al-Gulshānī first settled in Birkat al-Hajj on the outskirts of Cairo, remaining there until Sultan Qānsūh al-Ghurī (r. 1501–1516) the last Mamluk sultan of Egypt, who had succeeded Qayt Bāy, offered him lodgings in the Bāb Zuwayla quarter. Described in his Manāqib

30  Circulation and networks (hagiography) as a malāmatī (‘man of blame’) and a poet inspired by Rūmī, as had been his master ‘Umar al-Rūshānī, who had written three Mathnawī (poetic collections),70 Gulshānī gained influence with the Ottoman army in Egypt: Side Emre describes him as a power broker in Egypt and the Empire. If the impact of Gulshānī, who taught only in Anatolian Turkish and Persian, was restricted to the Turco-Persian milieux of Cairo, this was not true in the case of Demirdāsh, who spoke Arabic and thus fitted more easily into Cairo’s social fabric. According to Arabic sources, both Shāhīn al-Khalwatī and Muhammad Demirdāsh were disciples of a Shādhilī master, Ahmad al-Hadhramī (d. 1490) until his death, before travelling to Tabrīz to seek spiritual guidance from ‘Umar Rushānī. The influence of this Shādhilī education is clearly perceptible in the Rasā’il by Shaykh Demirdāsh.71 From his zāwiya, which he had built in the northern suburb of the city, in the area of Khandaq al-Mawālī, today called al-‘Abbassiyya, Muhammad al-Demirdāsh also transmitted teachings that were deeply impregnated with the writings of Ibn ‘Arabī, which he encouraged his students to read (his master Rūshānī had been a great apologist for the Shaykh al-akbar).72 He was the only one of the three men to leave writings in Arabic, and for this reason had a certain influence on later Egyptian Sufis. Ahmad al-Dardīr (d. 1786), one of the agents of Khalwatiyya renewal in eighteenth-century Egypt, was to write a commentary on the Risāla al-tawhīd (Epistle on Unicity) by Demirdāsh on the Akbarian doctrine of wahdat al-wujūd (the unicity of being). We know that the Turco-Persian realm was more open to the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabī, whereas when the Ottomans first arrived in Syria and Egypt they found there a real animosity to this master.73 Elsewhere, Demirdāsh developed a form of spirituality that encouraged isolation and asceticism. The fact that his zāwiya contained several cells demonstrated the importance he accorded to spiritual retreat (khalwa). Such Egyptian masters as al-Hifnī and al-Dardīr practised the khalwa but did not advise the neophytes among their disciples to undertake it. The Khalwatiyya’s second wave of expansion in Egypt, set in motion by Mustafā al-Bakrī during the second half of the eighteenth century, was so large and rapid that historians have spoken of a ‘renewal’ of this Sufi path in Egypt and in the Arab world, just as it was beginning to fade in the Balkans and Anatolia.74 This renewal was kindled in Aleppo, the largest city in northern Syria and terminus of the routes from Asia; here large numbers of Sufis from Anatolia, the Caucasus, Iran and central Asia were able to meet. The city, an intellectual and commercial crossroads and important staging post on the pilgrimage to Mecca, benefited simultaneously from the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and from the arrival of many of the Sunni scholars who had been expelled from Iran after the imposition of Shi’i Islam by the Savafids. Very soon after the conquest Aleppo was already a relay point between initiatic paths from all over the vast TurcoPersian domains; in fact, it is in Anatolia that the roots of the Egyptian renewal of the Khalwatiyya can be found, since this renewal was directly linked to ‘Alī Qarābāsh (d. 1686), a master from Kastamonu and the author, among numerous other mystical treatises, of a commentary on Ibn ‘Arabī’s Fusūs al-Hikam (The Seals of Wisdom). The Qarābāshiyya was itself born from the expansion during

Circulation and networks  31 the second half of the seventeenth century of the Khalwatiyya Sha‘bāniyya, which was founded by Sha‘bān al-Qastamūnī (d. 1568); the Ottoman sultan Murād III (r. 1574–1595) was affiliated to this latter Sufi path.75 Mustafā al-Bakrī was initiated into the Qarābāshiyya by ‘Abd al-Latīf al-Halabī (d. 1708), an Aleppo master, and a disciple of Mustafā Efendi, who was himself the son and disciple of ‘Alī Qarābāsh. Al-Bakrī visited Cairo for the first time in 1720–21, and there initiated the Medinese Muhammad ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Sammān (d. 1775), the Kurdish Mahmūd al-Kurdī (d. 1780), and the Egyptian Muhammad al-Hifnī (from a village in the Nile Delta). In all he made three trips to Cairo, and on his third visit in 1748 decided to settle there definitively; he died the following year and was buried in one of the city’s cemeteries.76 In 1757, eight years after al-Bakrī’s death, his khalīfa (successor) Muhammad al-Hifnī became the eighth Shaykh of al-Azhar mosque: this scholar’s renown and prestige were at their highest and, thanks to the newly increased mobility of students and scholars between al-Azhar and the Egyptian provinces, the mosque became an essential relay in the network that was spreading the Khalwatiyya across the whole country. At the end of the eighteenth century there were 3,000 students at al-Azhar, of whom about a third were from abroad; the mosque-university benefited from an education system that was developing everywhere in the country thanks to economic growth and the resulting urban expansion.77 About twenty mosques in Cairo, and a similar number of mosque-madrasas, offered religious instruction or teaching: among the most important, other than al-Azhar, were the mosque of al-Husayn, the madrasa Ashrāfiyya, the mosque Ibn Tūlūn, and the mosquemadrasa Muhammad bey Abū Dhahab. Some of these functioned as annexes of al-Azhar; for example, the Ibn Tūlūn mosque, where Maghrebi students were traditionally welcomed upon their arrival in Cairo and prepared for their entrance to al-Azhar.78 Provincial towns such as Ibyār, Tantā, Fuwwa and Rosetta in the Delta, and Asyūt, Banī ‘Adī, Marāgha and Jirjā in Upper Egypt, were famous for their mosques, which had replaced madrasas as educational institutions. Al-Azhar continued to grow; building works were undertaken by ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhudā al-Qāzdughlī, who was chief of the Janissaries from 1751 to 1765.79 He transformed the prayer hall, renovated the Taybarsiyya madrasa that had been built by the Mamluk amir Taybars, created colleges (for students from Upper Egypt, the Holy Cities and Bilād al-Takrūr in West Africa), and endowed the mosque, funding the creation of several teaching chairs and supporting numerous students.80 Al-Azhar also owes him its fine porch, as well as the Barbers’ Gate (Bāb al-Muzayyinīn, so-called because the students had their hair shaved off in front of this entrance), the gate leading to the Upper-Egyptian students’ college, and the Soup Gate (Bab al-Shurba) where soup was served to students. The amir had a shrine built for himself inside the mosque, where he was buried when he died. Unlike Maghrebis and Syrians, Egyptians tended not to travel outside their own country very much; when they sought masters and their teachings, and, where applicable, positions, they followed the routes from their provincial hometowns

32  Circulation and networks and villages to Cairo. Thus the very large number of people from the provinces present at al-Azhar was a new and important phenomenon during this period. A list of fourteen rectors of the mosque during the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth shows that all but one of them were from the provinces, the exception being Hasan al-‘Attār, who was born in Cairo.81 This demonstrates that the university offered a greater possibility of upward social mobility than did other civil society institutions. In addition, the university was where students received their initiation into Sufism. As we have shown, some of these affiliations were to foreign masters who had settled in Cairo, but primarily and above all they were to Egyptians, masters and professors at al-Azhar. Muhammad al-Samanūdī, whom we mentioned previously, received affiliations to the Nāsiriyya from the Moroccan ‘Abd al-Salām b. Nāsir, as well as to the Naqshbandiyya and the ‘Aydarusiyya from the Yemeni ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-‘Aydarūs  – but he was also affiliated to the Shinnāwiyya (a branch of the Egyptian Ahmadiyya) by Shaykh ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī al-‘Adawī, a professor at al-Azhar, to the Shādhiliyya by Shaykh Ahmad al-Jawharī, also a professor at al-Azhar, and to the Ahmadiyya by Sayyidī Mujāhid, before receiving the Khalwatiyya from Shaykh al-Hifnī and becoming one of his khalīfas.82 The expansion of the Khalwatiyya from al-Azhar occurred thanks to the networks of students that formed at the mosque on the basis of their common geographical origins and ethnic identities.

The college (riwāq), a network of affiliation to the Sufi paths Although Shaykh al-Hifnī had been authorised by al-Bakrī to initiate disciples, he did not himself begin to do so straightaway. He wanted to see his master first, and went to visit him in Jerusalem (although it is well-known that Egyptian ulama in general seldom travelled abroad except on the pilgrimage to Mecca). In Jerusalem he spent four months being intensively initiated by al-Bakrī into the seven names that correspond to the seven stages of initiatic progression in the Khalwatiyya. At the end of this time, al-Hifnī received from his master the Sufi cloak (khirqa) and the cap that symbolises gnosis (tāj al-‘irfān), and when he returned to Cairo he threw himself energetically into propagating the path. Until then mostly limited to Turco-Persian milieux in Cairo, the Khalwatiyya, according to Jabartī who was to become an adept in this path, became ‘a true Egyptian path’: al-Hifnī accepted the allegiance of a large number of aspirants and organised dhikr sessions around the clock. He had many disciples at al-Azhar, to such an extent that belonging to this path became synonymous with belonging to the azharī institution, and to a milieu that was urban, cosmopolitan and educated. Al-Azhar functioned like a university as the term was understood in Europe during the Medieval Period; that is, as a corporation of masters each of whom had his circle of students/disciples, to whom he could give a teaching licence (ijāza) once the course of studies was successfully completed. Such a system provided fertile ground for clientelism, a type of relationship that permeated political and social structures in Egypt at that time: neither the transmission of knowledge nor the assignment of positions was assessed by examination; there were no curricula

Circulation and networks  33

Figure 1.1  Al-Azhar, general plan Source: Pascal Coste, Architecture arabe ou monuments du Kaire, Paris, Imprimeurs de l’Institut de France, 1839 (The Library of the French Institute of Oriental Archeology in Cairo)

or diplomas, and the choice of a master was left to the students and their families. Once his education was complete, the student received from his master (and not from the institution) an ijāza countersigned by witnesses, through which, in the publicly stated opinion of his masters and co-disciples and with the approval of the State, he was proclaimed worthy to teach. Ulama from other countries might travel great distances to receive an ijāza, for until the end of the nineteenth century it was only the master’s reputation that guaranteed the degree of knowledge attained. The sought-after masters at al-Azhar were in a minority. One has only

34  Circulation and networks

Figure 1.2  Al-Azhar, the courtyard Source: Pascal Coste, Architecture arabe ou monuments du Kaire, Paris, Imprimeurs de l’Institut de France, 1839 (The Library of the French Institute of Oriental Archeology in Cairo)

to read the notices of ulama in biographical dictionaries to observe that the same names crop up again and again, and that these are often the names of Khalwatīs. The Khalwatiyya was the path of the azharī elite; after al-Hifnī and until the end of the nineteenth century nine Khalwatīs would occupy the position of Shaykh of al-Azhar. The roots of the Khalwatiyya in this mosque are so deep that still today the shaykh of al-Azhar, Ahmad al-Tayyib (b. 1946–), is a Khalwatī. This makes it easy to understand why young provincial students freshly arrived in Cairo and with no ties of any kind in the capital would want to affiliate themselves with this Sufi path: thus would they ensure their rapid integration into university networks. For example, Muhammad al-Samanūdī had been initiated into the Ahmadiyya in his home village in the Delta, where that Sufi path reigned under the protection of its eponymous founder, Ahmad al-Badawī, but when, at the age of 20, he arrived at al-Azhar, he became a disciple of al-Bakrī, and then of his khalīfa, Muhammad al-Hifnī.83 The same is true of the future Shaykh of al-Azhar, ‘Abd Allāh al-Sharqāwī, who, according to his own testimony, put himself under the direction of al-Hifnī the moment he arrived from his home in the countryside (hīna qadimtu min al-rīf ijtama‘tu bi-shaykhinā).84 The hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī by one of his closest disciples, Hasan Shamma, entitled Manāqib al-shaykh al-Hifnī (Virtues and Prodigies of Shaykh al-Hifnī) is presented in Chapter 4: this is an exceptional document, for although it places great emphasis on miracles, it also contains much historical information on the beginnings of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt. The second chapter of the hagiography is devoted to biographical notices of all the master’s closest disciples. He named no fewer than twenty-five successors during

Circulation and networks  35 his lifetime, an unusually high number, the majority of whom were azharīs. Ten of these men came from towns and villages in the Delta: Fuwwa, Samanūd, Za‘īra, Damanhūr, Quhāfa (a suburb of Tantā), Zurqān, Kafr al-Zayyāt, Ma‘sarā, Tantā and Rosetta, while only four came from Upper Egypt (Fashn in the Bahnasā region, Banī ‘Adī and Qinā). The rest of them were foreign students, from Syria (Khidr Raslān), Iranian Kurdistan (Mahmūd al-Kurdī), and Morocco (Ahmad al-Saqallī al-Maghribī).85 Al-Hifnī adopted a form of proselytism that was reminiscent of the early expansion of the Khalwatiyya from Azerbaijan during the time of Yahyā al-Bakūwī and his disciple ‘Umar al-Rūshānī. He sent his representatives and successors (nuqabā’ and khulafā’) back to their regions of origin to propagate the path: Ahmad al-Bannā al-Fuwwī and Muhammad al-Sanhūrī al-Fuwwī returned to Fuwwa, Yūsuf al-Rashīdī to Rashīd (Rosetta), Muhammad al-Samanūdī was authorised to return to Samanūd, and ‘Alī al-Qinā’ī was sent back to Upper Egypt but stayed there only one year; on his return to Cairo he received authorisation (idhn) to go to Yemen, where he initiated disciples and organised dhikr sessions. Muhammad al-Za‘īrī, from Za‘īra in the Delta, asked his shaykh for authorisation to travel to Upper Egypt, which was granted; he was eventually buried there and his tomb became the object of pious visits. And it was in Upper Egypt that the Khalwatiyya Sufi path saw its greatest increase in numbers, thanks to Ahmad al-Dardīr al-‘Adawī (from Banī ‘Adī) and to his position as Shaykh of the college (riwāq) of students from Upper Egypt at al-Azhar. The college of Upper-Egyptian students During the 1970s and ’80s, John Voll and Nehemia Levtzion developed the concept of networks of Arabic, Indian and Asian scholars, who, according to them, were at the origin of a Sufi and anti-Sufi renewal, one aspect of which was the appearance of Wahhabism on the Arabian peninsula during the 1740s and ’50s. This idea, of networks of scholars, inspired a research group in Germany around Roman Loimeier and Stefan Reichmuth, which was able to examine and explain many aspects of the circulation of ideas and currents of thought in the Muslim world from the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.86 The concept of networks can also be applied to the relationships formed inside al-Azhar between professors and students. These relationships were often determined by factors that had to do with identity: geographical origin, attachment to a particular school of legal thought (madhhab), etc., and they were first formed within a college, the riwāq. Riwāq can be translated as ‘college’ because the institution was similar in many ways to the colleges in Anglo-Saxon universities: at al-Azhar the riwāqs were mostly spaces between two rows of pillars where students, who lived, listened to lectures and studied, were grouped according to their regional and ethnic origins. There was a riwāq for students from each province of Egypt: Upper Egypt, Buhayra (the north-west of the Delta), Fayum (an oasis south-west of Cairo), the Sharqiyya (the north-east of the Delta), the Minūfiyya (the southern Delta, called hārat al-Shinnāwāniyya because it was traditionally managed by a member of the Shinnāwī family), and, finally, the Fashniyya (the central Delta). There were

36  Circulation and networks also colleges for different juridical schools: the Aqbughawiyya madrasa (built by the Mamluk amir Aqbagha) was for the Shafi‘is and Hanafis, while the Taybarsiyya madrasa, which for a long time welcomed students from Sharqiyya province (until a riwāq was built for them on the initiative of ‘Abd Allāh al-Sharqāwī, Shaykh of al-Azhar from 1793 to 1812), was open to Shafi‘is only. Students from different regions of the Muslim world also had their own colleges; those of the Maghrebis, Syrians and Turks were among the oldest, to which were added the colleges of the Kurds, the Indians, the Iraqis (riwāq al-Baghdādiyya), the Nubians (riwāq al-Barābira), and those of students from the Sultanate of Borneo, from Jabart (on the Somali coast), from Takrūr (west Africa), from Mecca and Medina (riwāq Al-Haramayn), from Indonesia and the Malay-speaking world (riwāq al-Jawāh), from Khorasan (Iran), from Afghanistan (riwāq al-Sulaymaniyya), and from southern Arabia (Yemen). This system had been in existence since at least the fourteenth century (at the beginning of the fifteenth century Maqrīzī mentioned a riwāq in which 750 students, indigenous and foreign, were living); it was to disappear with the construction in the 1930s of new annexes to the mosque, used exclusively for teaching. Al-Azhar was a holy place, whose students were called mujāwirīn, a reference to the mujāwirīn of Mecca. Those among the students who did not live in the colleges had lodgings in the khān and wakāla (hostels for travellers and merchants) that surrounded it. They were able to survive thanks to the attribution of a food ration (jirāya), the amount of which varied according to the degree of studies (darāja) attained. The jirāya was difficult to obtain because requests far outstripped the available supply, and there were long waiting lists. Once a student had left the university or died, his jirāya was re-attributed. It could also be transmitted from father to son, as shown by one example among many found in a register of nominations to the positions supported by pious endowments (Dafātir taqārīr al-nizāra): ‘Abd al-Wahhāb b. Ahmad al-Hanafī, a shaykh in Ibn Mu‘ammar riwāq, received a daily ration of three dawīdārī loaves (raghīf) (these were named after the founder of this waqf, amir Dawīdār) and eight sultānī loaves (from the Sultan’s waqf); he had inherited these from his father, Shaykh Ahmad al-Hanafī, who had ceded his jirāya to his son (fāragha lahu) in July 1727.87 Each riwāq had its own shaykh, along with its director (naqīb) who kept the register of food rations, its professors and its own sources of revenue. The shaykh of each riwāq answered to the shaykh of one of the four juridical schools and to the shaykh of al-Azhar, and acted as spokesman for communications from the students under his authority. Heyworth-Dunne wrote that al-Azhar was conceived so that the students from one riwāq would have little contact with students from the others, each student being confined to the circle of his own college and his professors. According to Edward Lane, on the rare occasions when students of different riwāq encountered each other, violence often ensued: those from Upper Egypt and the Maghreb were particularly notorious for their fighting spirit. However, at the highest levels of the azharī hierarchy ulama from different juridical schools maintained ties that were often very close, as indicated by Jabartī’s chronicle. The college of students from Upper Egypt (riwāq al-Sa‘ā’īda) was founded in 1760 by ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhudā al-Qāzdughlī. Before this was constructed,

Circulation and networks  37 the Sa‘īdīs could live in the riwāq of the Maghrebis, as they belonged to the same Maliki juridical school. The new college was in the enlarged prayer hall: it had its own entrance (bāb al-Sa‘ā’ida) and students reached it by a stairway. It also contained a main hall with rooms off it, a kitchen and toilets, and a library. The maintenance of the space, and the students’ food, were paid for from the amir’s waqf, and by the wives of certain amirs and Cairene merchants. Students who did not lodge at al-Azhar lived together in a part of the Būlāq quarter, where they had a shaykh, as in the riwāq. During this period Būlāq was a very busy and animated port, where travellers and merchandise poured into Cairo, and there were many shops and hostelries in the neighbourhood; this was still a quarter for UpperEgyptian students during the first half of the twentieth century.88 There are no statistics on Sa‘īdīs students at al-Azhar before the end of the nineteenth century, when the institution began to keep archives. By reading the works of Jabartī and of ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak we can observe that the Sa‘īdīs at al-Azhar mostly came from towns what are today in the governorates of Asyūt and of Qinā (Asyūt, Jirjā, Tahtā, Qinā, Manfalūt, Banī ‘Adī and Marāgha), with very few from the Aswan region, which is the most southerly of Egypt. Later jirāya registers (1867–68) show a clear predominance of students from Banī ‘Adī (‘Adāwī), a town that provided al-Azhar with many illustrious ulama.89 Of the twenty professors at the college at the time, one third had the nisba (name denoting origin) ‘Adawī (this percentage was still the same in 1887–88).90 ‘Adāwīs were favoured when they joined the college of Upper-Egyptian students, for from its creation men from this town controlled this college, and they continued to do so until the end of the riwāq system at the beginning of the twentieth century.91 The first position as head (shaykh) of this college was attributed for life to the well-respected ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī al-‘Adawī.92 The shaykh of a riwāq, who often held the grade of professor (mudarris), had very extensive powers: he administered the finances of the college, so that he was also administrator (nāzir) of its endowment. Like the shaykh of the trade corporations (tā’īfa) at the same period, he protected and defended the interests of the students and represented them before the State; it was the shaykh who would be contacted by the chief of police if a student committed a crime.93 During the eighteenth century, the riwāq of Upper-Egyptian students became the seat of the Malikis, so that the shaykh of the riwāq was often also the Maliki Mufti (shaykh al-qibla al-Mālikiyya), and therefore a very powerful figure at the mosque-university, since this position was considered second only to that of Shaykh of al-Azhar. When he died, ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī was replaced by one of his students who, like him, came from Banī ‘Adī: Ahmad al-Dardīr al-‘Adawī. Ahmad al-Dardīr (d. 1786) Ahmad al-Dardīr presented one example among many of the success that was possible at al-Azhar. Having arrived from his birthplace in Upper Egypt with no family connections, he eventually reached the very top of the institution. He owed this success primarily to his scholarship, excelling as much in theology (according to Jacques Jomier, his verse profession of faith, al-Kharīda, was ‘the most

38  Circulation and networks celebrated theological poem composed in the eighteenth century by a professor at al-Azhar’),94 as in Maliki fiqh (he was called the little Mālik by his contemporaries).95 Al-Dardīr wrote a summary of Maliki doctrine, Aqrāb al-Masālik limadhhab al-imām Mālik, which, after 1870, was often printed in Cairo, along with his own commentary, Sharh al-saghīr li-aqrāb al-masālik; he was also the author of a lengthy commentary in four volumes on the well-known summing up of fiqh by the Egyptian, Khalīl b. Ishāq, Al-Sharh al-kabīr ‘alā mukhtasar Khalīl.96 His success was also due in part to his relationships with influential professors within the mosque: in theology and Maliki fiqh his master was the most famous jurist of his time, Shaykh ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī; they both came from Banī ‘Adī. For his study of hadīth he followed the lessons of Shafi‘i professors, who had a reputation for excellence in this science: Muhammad al-Hifnī, Muhammad al-Dafrī (d. 1747),97 Ahmad al-Malāwī (d. 1767),98 and Muhammad al-Jawharī (d. 1800–1801),99 as well as those of the Alexandrian Maliki scholar, Ahmad b. Mustafā al-Sabbāgh.100 Once again we can observe that in scholarly circles at al-Azhar the quest for exoteric knowledge, like the spiritual affiliations, went beyond juridical and regional identities. In 1746, when he was 33, al-Dardīr began his initiation with Shaykh al-Hifnī, which lasted several years. He described the experience in his book Tuhfat al-Ikhwān (The Gift of Brothers), a short work on the path (presented in the next chapter); he also reproduced the text of the ijāza he received in 1758101; this authorised him to initiate disciples in his turn (idhn bi l-irshād) and made him the spiritual heir and representative of his master.102 This form of patronage, blending ties of regional solidarity with intellectual and spiritual kinship, eased the way for Ahmad al-Dardīr to rise to higher functions at the university. When ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī died in 1775, al-Dardīr replaced him as the head of the Upper-Egyptian students’ riwāq, and as Maliki Mufti; this made him very respectable in the eyes of Maghrebis, who, as we know, formed a large and important community in Cairo. He was consulted from Morocco by the Sultan himself, Muhammad b. ‘Abd Allāh, who in 1784 sent him a sum of money sufficient to allow him to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca and to build a zāwiya behind al-Azhar (in the al-Ka‘kīyīn quarter), in which he was buried.103 Al-Dardīr initiated numerous students from his riwāq into the Khalwatiyya; in turn, they propagated the path throughout the Nile valley. All of the Upper-Egyptian branches of this Sufi path today pass through him and his khalīfa, Ahmad al-Sāwī (d. 1825).104 This latter-named began his initiation when he was around 12 years old, almost as soon as he had arrived in Cairo, which shows that students could be affiliated to a Sufi path from a very early age. This goes some way towards explaining Sāwī’s very strong attachment to Dardīr, whose youngest khalīfa he was to become when Dardīr died; the master’s other disciples seem then to have gathered around Sāwī.105 The historic conditions for the success of the Khalwatiyya in Upper Egypt During the nineteenth century the Khalwatiyya supplanted all other Sufi paths in Upper Egypt.106 Jirjā and its surroundings were an important centre for the propagation of this Sufi path around a master, Ahmad Sharqāwī (d. 1899), whose

Circulation and networks  39 circle of close disciples consisted of azharīs from Upper Egypt.107 Yet Shaykh Sharqāwī himself never went to al-Azhar. He studied in local mosques and was initiated into the Khalwatiyya by a Sufi from Tahta, a neighbouring town; this master had himself been initiated by a disciple of Ahmad al-Dardīr. There was intense literary activity around Ahmad Sharqāwī – he and his disciples produced many writings, essentially on the path, that were printed in Cairo during their lifetimes. Jirjā in the nineteenth century was therefore a very active provincial intellectual centre, yet it is little known, as are the specific local conditions that allowed the training in this town of these scholars among whom the Khalwatiyya awoke such a strong response. These local conditions can certainly be traced back to the Ottoman period, and more precisely to the seventeenth century, when Mamluk amirs took up residence in Jirjā and invested a part of their property wealth in the construction of mosques, zāwiyas and public baths; thus they contributed not only to the urbanisation of the town but also to the birth of a local religious life. Similar efforts were made during the eighteenth century by the chiefs of the Hawwāra tribe, whose reign over the province reached its apogee with the powerful Shaykh al-‘Arab Hummām: Jabartī praised the hospitality and generosity of this great patron, whose wealth rested on his numerous iltizām: Shaykh Hummām progressively accumulated these to the extent that by 1767 he was practically the sole multazim of the Sa‘īd region between Minyā and Aswan.108 He became the patron of many scholars, including the celebrated Murtadā al-Zabīdī, who visited him several times and wrote an epistle (no longer extant) on the genealogical origins of the Hawwāra, Raf’ al-sitāra fī nasab al-Hawwāra (Raising the Veil on the Genealogies of the Hawwāra), in which he shows descent from the Prophet on the maternal side.109 When the shaykh ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Zayyāt (d. 1768) was sent to Upper Egypt by his master al-Hifnī, at the request of a cousin of the Shaykh al-‘Arab Hummām, he settled in the village of Bahjūra, near Farshūt, a fiefdom of the Hummām. His only baggage was a coat and an ijāza, both given to him by his shaykh. The Hummām gave him the use of a spacious house, lands and servants. This material ease allowed him to devote himself to his teaching and juridical activities, and to organising dhikr sessions. His fortune – in land, cattle and slaves – grew along with his reputation.110 All of the religious edifices built in Jirjā, along with the names of their founders, were listed by the historian Muhammad al-Marāghī (1865–1942), a religious scholar (ālim) who trained at al-Azhar and was initiated into the Khalwatiyya by Ahmad Sharqāwī; the title of his massive work is Ta‘tīr al-nawāhī wa l-arjā’ bidhikr man ishtahara min ‘ulamā’ wa a‘yān madīnat al-Sa‘īd Jirjā (The Regions and Districts Imbued with the Sweetly Scented Memory of the Celebrated Ulama and Notables of the Town of Jirjā in Upper Egypt). It is at once a work of historical topography (Khitat) and a biographical dictionary, written after ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak’s Khitat al-tawfīqiyya al-jadīda (Tawfiq’s New Plans, published between 1886 and 1888), and drawing inspiration from it. Al-Marāghī presented the history of the foundation of the town’s religious edifices, the political elites who funded them, the local ulama who studied and worked in them; essentially this is a history of the town’s urbanisation and of the development of its cultural and religious life over nearly 400 years, from the fifteenth century to the end of

40  Circulation and networks the nineteenth. This is a unique document because the author referred to archives belonging to Jirjā’s tribunal (mahkama), the seat of the Ottoman qadi, and none of Jirjā’s registers from before the nineteenth century have survived to our times, Asyūt and Esna being the only towns of the Sa‘īd to have preserved any registers from before the eighteenth century.111 Evidently these archives were still in existence at the end of the nineteenth century, since al-Marāghī drew on them, particularly on waqf documents of amirs and local notables. His ties with the scholarly milieu of the town also gave him access to some private family archives. Nestor L’Hôte’s 1828 drawing of Jirjā gives some idea of its past grandeur, showing its domes and beautiful minarets from the Ottoman period and, on the horizon, the towers of the seventeenth century mosques of ‘Alī bey and ‘Uthmān bey offering themselves to the gaze of the floating traveller on the Nile.112 Other travellers, artists and photographers were seduced by the town’s beauty: Maxime Du Camp was the first to photograph it, in 1852, followed by the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, who took his photos in 1856 during his trip up the Nile in a dhahabiyya (sailboat).113 Twenty Ottoman-period mosques ‘resembling those in Cairo’ were counted by ‘Alī Pasha Mubarāk. In Asyūt at this time there were only half a dozen mosques providing teaching, some of which offered only preparatory courses for entry into al-Azhar.114 Al-Marāghī was able to provide dates for fourteen of the mosques he mentioned: two from the fifteenth century, six from the seventeenth and another six from the eighteenth; most of these were founded by beys, who often had themselves buried inside their edifices. The single madrasa, the only one ever to have been built in Jirjā, dates from the sixteenth century. Of the eighteen buildings designated as zāwiya, only half could be dated by our author: seven of them had been founded by local ulama during the eighteenth century and carried the name of the saint buried within; only two of the zāwiyas, both dating to the seventeenth century, were attributed to beys. Madrasa, mosque and zāwiya Any distinctions that existed between these three religious institutions in Egypt during the Mamluk period disappeared from the fifteenth century onwards; little by little the Sufism of the zāwiyas penetrated the madrasas and the mosques, and this phenomenon continued and spread throughout the entire Modern Period.115 Under the Ottomans, with the decline of the Mamluk madrasas, all forms of religious activity were concentrated within the mosques, and, to a lesser degree, in the zāwiyas: worship, teaching and such Sufi practices as the dhikr were all supported by the waqfs assigned to these edifices. There were no institutions specific to Sufism, and the zāwiya in Egypt was very different from what historians and anthropologists of the Maghreb call the Maghrebi zāwiya, referring to a complex social and religious phenomenon that was very diffuse across space and time. In Cairo as in the provinces of Egypt, a zāwiya was most often a small building for prayer, sometimes having lost its status as a Friday mosque (jāmi‘) because of having insufficient revenue to employ an Imam/preacher (imam/khatīb). In rural areas the zāwiya was most often a simple space for prayer, a small mosque

Circulation and networks  41 dedicated to the saint whose tomb lay within, comparable to the country oratories in modern Europe. Al-Yūsufī mosque, named for its founder Yūsuf Ghaytās, hākim (governor) of Jirjā from 1618 to 1627–1628, was the first building known to have been founded by a Mamluk bey in Jirjā; it was also called al-madrasa al-Jammāliyya, since it was in the Street of Camels (hārat al-Jammala). The amir’s tomb is just outside the mosque, built against its eastern wall. The powerful ‘Alī bey, hākim of Jirjā from 1634 to 1653, built two mosques – one on the shores of the Nile and one in the centre of the town – and a public bath.116 It is to his successor, Muhammad bey, hākim from 1653–54 to 1657, that we own al-Sīnī (Chinese) mosque, probably so-called because of glazed ceramic that covered its walls. In 1687 amir ‘Isā Aghā, a member of the household of ‘Alī bey and the administrator of his waqf, founded a zāwiya known as the zāwiya of Lady (sitt) Salma, who died in 1758 (according to the date engraved on her stele) and was buried beside the amir: she is identified as having been his daughter and the administrator of his waqf after his death.117 This zāwiya provides an example of a building being at once a zāwiya and a jāmi‘, since revenues were allocated to it for the employment of an Imam/preacher, who was in charge of the five daily prayers, as well as the sermon and the prayers on Fridays, and the two principal religious feasts: that marking the end of the Ramadān fast and that of the Sacrifice (al-‘īdayn). Al-Marāghī could discover nothing about al-Muqaddam mosque except the date of its foundation, 1682. A zāwiya-sabīl (public fountain) from the seventeenth century was called Qā’immaqām, after its founder, Ahmad Qā’immaqām, who, according to al-Marāghī, was one of ‘Alī bey’s sons. Finally, we have two edifices from the seventeenth century, dedicated to local saints and designated as mosques by al-Marāghī: Sayyīdī ‘Alī al-Manqūl mosque, built by ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Qattān between 1651 and 1655  (al-Marāghī stated that, according to a waqf document he consulted, the grandson of this shaykh, ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti b. ‘Abd al-Karīm b. ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Qattān administered the waqf for this mosque in 1785–1786); and ‘Alī b. Sultān mosque, built by ‘Abd al-Jawād b. Yāsir, muqaddam bi-wilāyat Jirjā, which was supported by the revenues from four feddan of land. The Bedouin renaissance of the eighteenth century made little difference to the architecture of the town because the Hawwāra capital was no longer in Jirjā, but in nearby Hū. In 1732, the Shaykh al-‘Arab Rayyān Abī ‘A’īd (d. 1735) finished the renovation of the old Sirāj al-dīn mosque, near the butter-market (sūq al-Zibda), which was known as al-Fuqarā’ mosque (the mosque of the poor in God). The tomb of Shaykh Mansūr is inside this mosque, which al-Marāghī said was the biggest in the district (bandar), and an important place of worship and instruction. In 1765 the Shaykh al-‘Arab Hummām only undertook the renovation of the old Dāwūdiyya madrasa, transforming it into a mosque. When he died, first amir ‘Alī bey al-Kabīr and then Muhammad bey Abū Dhahab got their hands on his iltizām: the huge waqf of Muhammad Abū Dhahab, published by Daniel Crecelius, consists of a long list of villages in Jirjā province whose revenues were devoted to maintaining the large mosque that the amir had built in Cairo.118 The last major

42  Circulation and networks beylic foundation was that, in 1743, of the amir ‘Uthmān al-Qāzdughlī al-Jirjāwī, Mamluk of the celebrated Ibrāhīm Katkhudā al-Qāzdughlī who had been sent to regain control of the Sa‘īd.  ‘Uthmān al-Qāzdughlī financed the building of the large mosque that carries his name, in al-‘Imara street; it was restored by the amir of the hajj, Mūrād bey, in 1791. The date of the Arab amir Dāwūd’s installation (888h) is inscribed on one of the columns of this mosque, indicating that it dates back to his time. Another eighteenth-century edifice, al-Shurbajī (or Jurbajī) mosque, was founded by Muhammad b. Sulaymān al-Shurbajī, commander of the Janissaries (sirdār mustahfazān). Al-Marāghī was unable to discover the date of construction of the Jalāl Aghā mosque although since an aghā is a regimental commander in the Ottoman army this is probably an Ottoman construction. Our historian also mentions the town’s only takkiyya (from the Turkish tekke), built by the chief of the Janissaries: located in al-Takkiyya street, it was converted into a mosque in 1780 by amir Yūsuf al-Nazīr. In Egypt during the eighteenth century many rizqas (parcels of agricultural land that were not subject to land-taxes) passed into the hands of the more important local men of religion. In Jirjā these notable figures came from families of ulama in which teaching, judiciary and preaching positions were transmitted from father to son. These families took part in efforts to restore, renovate or construct religious edifices, mostly zāwiyas, that were more modest than the richly endowed mosques built by the amirs. In 1704 ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Khayyāt built the ‘Alī al-Kurdī zāwiya, which had originally been a wakāla (caravanserail). When the tomb of the Sufi ‘Alī al-Kurdī was destroyed by the flooding of the Nile, his body was transported to this zāwiya and re-buried there. In 1759–1760 ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Khayyāt’s son, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Khayyāt, who had become an important religious figure in Jirjā, built al-Suyūtī mosque (named after its Imam, Muhammad al-Suyūtī), and with the left-over construction materials built the ‘Alī Abī Līf zāwiya in Shaykh Abī Līf street; this was a space for prayer with a well, toilets and taps providing water for ablutions. This man’s grandson, ‘Abd al-Mun‘im b. ‘Abd al-Rahmān b. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Khayyāt  (d. 1808–1809), renovated al-Sīnī mosque in 1794. The largest waqf known to have been established by a local family was that of ‘Abd al-Jawād al-Ansārī (d. 1783–1784); its deed (waqfiyya), established on 20 September 1781 (shawwāl 1195h) with the Turkish Hanafi judge of the tribunal at Jirjā, still exists and is held by the descendants of the wāqif, who were kind enough to furnish us with a copy of the document and authorise us to publish it in an article.119 The charitable foundation supported two mosques, a sabīl-maktab, and a zāwiya with the revenues from eight parcels of agricultural land and some income in kind. This waqf was in addition to two preceding waqfs relating to shops and residential buildings. Al-Jabartī wrote a short obituary of ‘Abd al-Jawād al-Ansārī, underlining his immense riches, his generosity and the noble descent of his family. This wealth allowed him to make frequent visits to Cairo, where he and his family eventually settled in a luxurious house.120 In 1775– 1776 al-Ansārī transformed Sīdī Jalāl al-dīn al-Mahhallī zāwiya (a seventeenthcentury construction, named after the great Quranic exegete who died in 1459), which belonged to the waqf of amir ‘Alī bey, into a large mosque employing

Circulation and networks  43 nearly 100 people. Located in the Street of Tailors (sūq al-khayyātīn), it contained the tombs of Sīdī Jalāl and Sīdī Yūsuf b. ‘Abd al-Warīth al-Majdhūb. In 1781, he built al-Nafāda mosque on a piece of his own land in al-Dāwūdiyya street, near the tanners’ quarter (al-Dabbāgīn), as well as the ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Mughnī zāwiya and the ‘Abd al-Jawād al-Ansārī zāwiya, so that this latter edifice might ‘serve as a masjid for the five daily prayers.’ This zāwiya had a minaret and a basin for ablutions; built in a cemetery near the tomb of the saint ‘Alī b. ‘Ayyāsh, to whom an annual celebration was devoted, it also contained the tomb of saint Sahl. Al-Marāghī mentioned a great many small zāwiyas that served as chapels for a saint’s tomb; some of these were in the town’s cemetery, while others could be used as neighbourhood mosques. The dates of foundation for these small buildings in which the cult of saints might be celebrated is almost always unknown, but they could well date back to the Mamluk period; they include the ‘Alī Shabāna zāwiya, which had originally been a tomb (maqbara); the ‘Abd Allāh al-Khalwatī zāwiya in al-Khalwatī street; the Awlād Majīd zāwiya near the tombs of the Awlād Majīd; the Sulaymān al-Labīdī zāwiya, near the tomb of Shaykh al-Labīdī; and the Husayb zāwiya, named after the saint who was known as rā‘ī qasab. These last three zāwiyas were in the cemetery, near the mosque that had been built for the tomb of the town’s patron saint, Duhays Abū ‘Amra. Al-Marāghī supplied a long list (455 notices) of scholars educated in these places, which is clear evidence of the impact that the proliferation of such private mosques had. Their influence also extended into the surrounding countryside; many of the names on the list reveal tribal or neighbouring village origins, such as that of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Warīth al-Huwwī al-Jirjāwī (alive in 1656), from Hū, a student of Shaykh Mansūr al-Bardīsī al-Jirjāwī from Bardīs. The family of our first-hand informant himself, Muhammad al-Marāghī, came from Marāgha, north of Jirjā. His recent ancestors had come to study in the town and had eventually obtained positions and settled there definitively. Al-Marāghī informed us that after finishing his studies at al-Azhar he began his career by offering free instruction to students from the surrounding countryside. An intense religious activity built up around these institutions of learning and worship, bringing with it a new sort of urban life with the rise of local families who passed on and accumulated the most prestigious religious positions in a quasi-hereditary manner; in fact, such transmission from father to son or from uncle to nephew was sometimes legalised in documents of waqf. The function of imam/khatīb of al-Sīnī mosque stayed in the al-Masrī family until the end of the nineteenth century; ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Khayyāt mosque was better known under the name of al-Suyūtī, because it was always a member of that family who occupied the position of imam/khatīb.121 In these families positions were often combined: ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Khayyāt, one of the town’s few scholars to appear in Jabartī’s chronicle, where he receives the title mufti of Jirjā, studied at al-Azhar with the Maliki jurists of his day.122 When he returned to his home town, he was appointed to several jobs: reading aloud in al-Mitwallī and al-Umarā’ mosques the account of the miraculous night journey and celestial ascension of the Prophet (qissat al-isrā’ wa-l-mi‘rāj), the benefits of the night of the middle of the month

44  Circulation and networks of sha‘bān (fadā’il laylat nisf min sha‘bān), the story of the Prophet’s birth (qissat al-mawlid al-sharīf) and the benefits of the night of destiny (fadā’il laylat al-qadr). He also taught Quranic exegesis (tafsīr) in al-Mu‘allaq mosque and was employed to read Bukhārī’s Sahīh in Sirāj, ‘Abd al-Salām b. Mashīsh, al-Yūsufī and Badriyya mosques. There was more: he was also Imam of al-Fuqarā’ mosque until 1770 (1184h), when he was replaced by ‘Alī b. Makkī al-Suyūtī. Qattān, Khayyāt, Masrī, Suyūtī: it was among these important families that the Khalwatiyya took root. At al-Azhar, ‘Abd al-Mun‘īm al-Khayyāt was a disciple of Ahmad al-Dardīr and then of Muhammad al-Amīr (d. 1817), a Maliki jurist from Upper Egypt who was affiliated to the Khalwatiyya by Shaykh al-Hifnī, to whom he became very close.123 According to al-Marāghī, who called him shaykh al-mashāyikh (master among masters), everyone in Jirjā who could be considered a scholar studied with ‘Abd al-Mun‘īm al-Khayyāt on his return from alAzhar. Through his prominent position in the town he was able in his turn to initiate members of important local families such as the Masrī or the Suyūtī.124 Al-Marāghī himself was initiated into the Khalwatiyya by Ahmad Sharqāwī, among whose close colleagues were a member of the al-Masrī family, Muhammad Hasan al-Masrī al-Jirjāwī (d. 1877), district judge (mudīriyya) of Asyūt and of Jirjā, and an al-Suyūtī, ‘Abd al-Rahīm al-Suyūtī (d. 1936), a teacher, Imam and preacher (wā’iz).125 Looking at Qūs in Upper Egypt during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Jean-Claude Garcin underlined the links between the foundation of madrasas there, urban development, and the flowering of a local religious and intellectual life. He also highlighted the important links between these madrasas and a specific Sufi path, the Shādhiliyya from the Maghreb; it was very influential among ulama, but this left space for other tarīqas to grow among the social groups that the Shādhiliyya did not reach.126 Similarly, sources reveal the presence in Jirjā of the Ahmadiyya, whose eponymous saint Ahmad al-Badawī had, as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century and under the Ottomans, acquired pre-eminence in Egyptian hagiology, with his mawlid having quasi-national status. From the second half of the eighteenth century the Khalwatiyya, which arrived from Syria via Turkey, took over the space among ulama that the Shādhiliyya had occupied during the Medieval Period. This process began among the ulama of al-Azhar, before reaching those who had come from the provinces to study at Cairo’s great mosque. The further expansion of this path was made possible by the existence in Jirjā of centres of religious teaching that provided basic instruction to young boys, sufficient to allow them to take up higher education at al-Azhar; what is more, alAzhar underwent transformations under the Ottomans that allowed it to receive such students and continue to educate these rural people without losing its strong attraction for foreign scholars. Al-Dardīr is more than a common link among all the branches of the Khalwatiyya in Upper Egyt. He left his disciples a handbook on the Sufi path, Tuhfat al-ikhwān fī adab ahl al-‘irfān, inspired by Mustafā al-Bakrī’s; this would become an important and much-imitated text during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.127 We present this work in the next chapter, along with two other Sufi handbooks from

Circulation and networks  45 the same period, in a quest to understand how the masters of the Sufi paths, and of the Khalwatiyya in particular, adapted their teaching in the face of this massive and probably unprecedented increase in the numbers of their new disciples.

Notes 1 On the political history of Egypt from its conquest by the Ottomans until the end of the eighteenth century, cf.: Winter, M., Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798, London, Routledge, 1992; Hathaway, J., ‘Egypt in the Seventeenth Century’, in Daly, M. W. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 34–58; Crecelius, D., ‘Egypt in the Eighteenth Century’, in Daly, M. W. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 59–86; the introduction to A. Raymond’s book, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, Damascus, IFEAD, 1973; Cairo, Ifao-Ifead, 1999. 2 Faroqhi, S., Pilgrims and Sultans, The Hajj under the Ottomans, London, Tauris, 1984, p. 85. 3 Hathaway, J., The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 7. 4 Hathaway, J., The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt. 5 In the iltizām system, villages or fractions of villages were farmed for the benefit of members of the dominant caste, but also, and increasingly through the eighteenth century, for the benefit of bourgeois city-dwellers or ulama. Tax farms were sold each year in September, the farmer/purchaser receiving the right to levy taxes in a specific village, with a supplement on top of this that allowed him to make a profit. Along with this system of periodic re-allocation of villages, a form of organisation came into being that established these villages as being almost like private property; the right to their taxes could sometimes be transmitted as an inheritance. Cf. Raymond, A., ‘Les rapports villes-campagnes dans les pays arabes à l’époque ottomane’, in Cannon, B. (ed.), Terroirs et sociétés au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient, Lyon, Maison de l'Orient Méditerranéen, 1987, p. 33. 6 Raymond, A., ‘Les provinces arabes XVIe-XVIIIe siècles’, in Mantran, R. (ed.), Histoire de l’Empire ottoman, Paris, Fayard, 1989, p. 341. 7 Raymond, A., Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle; Hanna, N. and Abbas, R. (eds.), Society and Economy in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean 1600–1900, Essays in Honor of André Raymond, Cairo and New York, The American University in Cairo Press, 2005. 8 Mayeur-Jaouen, C., ‘La vision du monde par une hagiographie anhistorique de l’Égypte ottomane’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2010, pp. 129–150. 9 Raymond, A., Grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane, p. 47. 10 The economic weight and social structure of this presence have been studied by André Raymond and more recently by the Egyptian historian Husām ‘Abd al-Mu‘tī: Raymond, A., Commerçants et artisans, p. 470; Raymond, A., ‘Les quartiers de résidence des commerçants et artisans maghrébins au Caire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Revue d’Histoire Maghrébine 31–32 (December  1983), pp.  355–364; ‘Abd al-Mu‘tī, H., Al-Buyūt al-tijāriyya al-maghribiyya fī Misr fī-l-‘asr al-‘uthmānī, PhD thesis, University of Mansūra, 2002; ‘The Fez Merchants in Eighteenth Century Cairo’, in Hanna, N. and Abbas, R. (eds.), Society and Economy in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean, pp. 115–140. 11 Geoffroy, É. (ed.), Une voie soufie dans le monde: la Shadhiliyy, Paris, MaisonneuveLarose, 2005.

46  Circulation and networks 12 Garcin, J. C., Un centre musulman de la Haute-Égypte médiévale: Qūs, Le Caire, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1976, pp. 158–165; Gril, D., La Risāla de Safī al-Dīn ibn Abī-l-Mansūr ibn Zāfir: Biographies des maîtres spirituels connus par un cheikh égyptien du VIIe/XIIIe siècle, edited by Gril, D., Institut français d'archéologie orientale du Caire, 1986. 13 Garcin, J. C., Qūs, p. 158; Chih, R., ‘Abu-l-Hajjaj al-Uqsuri, saint patron de Louqsor’, Égypte-monde arabe, 14 (1993), note 32. 14 Gohaider, A., ‘The Sources for the Study of the Intellectual Life in Lybia During the Karamanli Era (1711–1835)’, (précis in English, article in Arabic), Revue d’histoire maghrébine 59–60, 3 (1990), pp. 581–681. 15 Al-‘Ayyāshī, Abū Sālim ‘Abd Allāh, Al-Rihla al-‘Ayyāshiyya (Mā’ al-Mawā’id), Abū Dhabī, Dār al-Suwaydī, 2006; Ahmad b. Nāsir, Fez, al-Matba‘a al-Fasiyya 1902; AlRihla al-nāsiriyya ilā al-diyār al-muqaddasa, lithographed in Fez in 1902; Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Salām b. Nāsir, Al-Rihla al-sughrā and al-Rihla al-kubrā, ms. Al-Khizāna al-malakiyya (The Royal Library), Rabat. 16 Al-Ayyāshī, Abū Sālim ‘Abd Allāh, Al-Rihla al-‘Ayyāshiyya, p. 227. 17 Philipp, T., Perlmann, M. and Schwald, G. (eds.), ʿAbd al-Rahmān al-Jabartī’s History of Egypt, Stuttgart, F. Steiner Verlag, 1994. 18 Al-Sharqāwī, Ahmad, Shams al-tahqīq wa-ʿurwat ahl al-tawfīq, followed by Nasīhat al-dhākirīn wa-irghām al-mutakabbirīn, Cairo, al-Maktaba al-khayriyya, 1307h/1889, pp. 36–37. 19 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, IV, 285. 20 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 49. 21 Salhi, M. B., Étude d’une confrérie religieuse – La Rahmaniya à la fin du XIXe siècle et dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, PhD thesis, Paris, EHESS, 1979; Triaud, J. L. and Robinson, D. (eds.), La Tijāniyya: Une confrérie musulmane à la conquête de l'Afrique, Paris, Karthala, 2000. 22 Ouarith, A., ‘Al-Tawāsul al-sūfī bayna Misr wa-l-Maghrib: al-Tarīqa al-Saqalliyya al-Khalwatiyya’, Manshūrāt kuliyyat al-ādāb, silsilat al-nadawāt 9, Jāmi‘a al-Hasan al-thānī, al-Muhammadiyya. 23 Ibn Nāsir, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salām, al-Mazāyā fīmā ahdatha min al-bida’ bi-umm al-zawāyā, cited by Ouarith, A., ‘al-Tawāsul al-sūfī bayna Misr wa-l-Maghrib’, p. 94. 24 Muhammad b. al-Tayyib al-Qādirī, Nashr al-Mathānī: The Chronicles, edited by Cigar, Norman, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981; Levtzion, N., ‘The Role of the Shari‘a-Oriented Sufi Turuq in the Renewal and Reform Movements of the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in Carmona, A. (ed.), El Sufismo y las normas del Islam, Murcia, Consejeria de Education y Cultura, 2006, p. 392. 25 Atiyeh, G., ‘The Book in the Modern Arab World: The Cases of Lebanon and Egypt’, in Atiyeh, G. (ed.), The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, New York, SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 233–255. 26 Gohaider, A., ‘The Sources for the Study of the Intellectual Life in Lybia during the Karamanli Era (1711–1835)’, p. 598. 27 Gutelius, D., ‘Sufi Networks and the Social Contexts for Scholarship in Moroco and the Northern Sahara 1660–1830’, in Reese, S. (ed.), The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa, Leiden, Brill, 2004. 28 Gutelius, D., ‘Sufi Networks’, p. 27, note 26. 29 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, (1732–91). Life, Networks and Writings, Oxford, Gibb Memorial Trust, 2009, p. 72. 30 Azra, A., The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia Publications Series, Crows Nest, NSW, Allen and Unwin, 2004. 31 Wormser, P., ‘La rencontre de l’Inde et de l’Egypte  dans la vie et l’œuvre du savant religieux d’expression malaise Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī (m. 1658)’, in Chih, R. and MayeurJaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane/Sufism in the Ottoman Era, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2010, pp. 56–57.

Circulation and networks  47 Peskes, E., Al-‘Aydarus and seine Erben, Stuttgart, Frantz Steiner, 2005. Wormser, P., ‘La rencontre de l’Inde et de l’Egypte’, p. 211. Faroqhi, S., Pilgrims and Sultans, p. 85. Levtzion, N. and Voll, J. (eds.), Eighteenth Century Revival and Reform in Islam, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1987; Azra, A. The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia; Nafi, B. M., ‘Tasawwuf and Reform in Pre-Modern Islamic Culture’; Copty, A. ‘The Naqshbandiyya and Its Offshoot, the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the Ḥaramayn in the 11th/17th Century’, Die Welt des Islams 43, 3 (2003); El-Rouayheb, K. ‘Opening the Gate of Verification’; Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century. Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015; Pagani, S., Il rinnovamento mistico dell’Islam. 36 For more on Muhammad Hayāt al-Sindī and his circle of scholars in Medina, see Voll, J., ‘Muhammad Hayāt al-Sindī and Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb: An Analysis of an Intellectual Group in Eighteenth-century Medina’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 38, 1 (1975), pp. 32–38. 37 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 27. For more on him and his lineage, cf. Peskes, E., Al-‘Aydarus und seine Erben. 38 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 37. 39 Al-Sharqāwī, ‘Abd Allah, Sharh hikam al-kurdiyya, Cairo, Dārat al-karaz, 2005, p. 17. 40 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 27. 41 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 48. 42 Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans, p. 199. 43 Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans, p. 200, note 31. 44 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 196. 45 Raymond, A., ‘Les construction de l’émir ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhūda au Caire’, Annales Islamologiques, tome XI (1972), p. 235. 46 Mayeur-Jaouen, C., Histoire d’un pèlerinage légendaire en islam. Le mouled de Tantā, Paris, Aubier, 2004, pp. 141–144. 47 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 352. 48 Hanna, N., In Praise of Books, pp.  72–73; Al-Nābulusī, ‘Abd al-Ghanī, al-Haqīqa wa-l-majāz fī rihla ilā bilād al-Sham wa Misr wa-l-Hijāz, edited by al-Harīdī, Ahmad, Cairo, Hay’at al-kitāb, 1986. 49 Hanna, N., In Praise of Books, pp. 72–73. 50 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 198. 51 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 44. 52 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 196–198. 53 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 200–201. 54 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, III, 199. 55 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 47. 56 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 48. 57 Gril, D., ‘De la khirqa à la tarīqa’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2010, pp. 76–77. 58 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 118, item 109; p. 107, item 46. 59 For more on the analysis of this type of literature, see Gril, D., ‘De la khirqa à la tarīqa’, pp. 57–81. 60 Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 50. 61 Reichmuth, S., ‘Murtadā Az-Zabīdī (d. 1791) in Biographical and Autobiographical Accounts’, p. 72. 62 Al-Kūrānī, Ibrāhīm, Ithāf al-dhakī bi sharh al-Tuhfa al-mursala ilā l-Nabī; see the list of Kūrānī’s writings in Ismā‘īl al-Baghdādī, Hadiyat al-‘ārifīn, Istanbul Maarif Basimevi 1955–57, vol. 1, 35–36; Brockelmann, C., Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (GAL) (1–3), Supplementband, Leiden, Brill, 1937–1942, II, 505 and S. II, 520;Al-Sanūsī, Muhammad, ‘Al-Salsabīl al-ma‘īn fī-l-tarā’iq al-arba‘īn’, in Muhammad ‘Abduh Ibn Ghabūn 32 33 34 35

48  Circulation and networks (ed.), Bughyat al-maqāsid  fī khulāsat al-marāsid, Cairo, Matba‘a al-ma‘āhid, 1935, Manchester, n.d., 1990, p. 6. 63 De Jong, F., ‘Mustafa Kamal al Din al Bakri (1688–1749): Revival and Reform of the Khalwatiyya Tradition?’ in Levtzion, N. and Voll, J. (eds.), Eighteenth Century Renewal and Reform in Islam, pp. 117–132. 64 Von Schlegell, B., Sufism in the Ottoman Arab World: Shaykh ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143 /1731), PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1997. 65 Curry, J. J., The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010; Trimingham, J. S., The Sufi Orders in Islam, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 74–78; Martin, B. G., ‘A Short History of the Khalwatiyya Order of Dervishes’, in Keddie, N. (ed.), Scholars, Saints and Sufis, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 275–305. 66 Curry, J. J., The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire, p. 57. 67 Clayer, N., Mystiques, État et Société: Les Halvetis dans l’aire balkanique de la fin du XVe siècle à nos jours, Leiden, Brill, 1994. 68 Emre, S., Ibrahim-i Gulshani and the Khalwati-Gulshani Order. Power Brokers in Ottoman Egypt, Leiden, Brill, 2017; Curry, J., ‘ “Home Is Where the Shaykh Is”: The Concept of Exile in the Hagiography of Ibrahim-i Gülsheni’, Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean, 17, 1 (March 2005), pp. 47–60. 69 Winter, M., Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt, p. 105. 70 Yazici, T., ‘Gulshānī’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, Leiden, Brill, vol. 2, p. 1136. 71 Geoffroy, É., Le soufisme en Égypte et en Syrie sous les derniers mamelouks et les premiers ottomans, p. 40. 72 Chodkiewicz, M., ‘Shaykh Muhammad Demirdāsh: un soufi akbarien du XVIe siècle’, Horizons Maghrébins, 51 (2004), pp. 19–28. 73 Geoffroy, É., Le soufisme en Égypte et en Syrie sous les derniers mamelouks et les premiers ottomans, p. 134. 74 Martin, B. G., ‘A Short History of the Khalwatiyya Order of Dervishes’, pp. 275–305. 75 Curry, J., ‘Sha‘bāniyya’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. IX, pp. 155–156; Curry, J., The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire. 76 Al-Murādī, Muhammad, Silk al-durar, IV, p. 161. 77 Raymond, A., Artisans et commerçants, vol. 2, p. 419. The first statistics appeared in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; for the year 1875, Heyworth-Dunne gives the figure of 11,095 students, of whom 1,214 were foreign. There were 20,000 in 1907 and 87,000 at the beginning of the 1980s, cf. Heyworth-Dunne, J., An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt, London, Franck Cass, 1968; Raymond, A., Grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane, chap. 1. 78 ‘Abd al-Mu‘tī, H., ‘Riwāq al-maghāriba fījāmi‘ al-Azhar fī-l-‘asr al-‘uthmānī’, Ruzname 3 (2005), p. 170. 79 Raymond, A., ‘Les constructions de l’émir ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhudā au Caire’, pp. 235–251. 80 Mustanadāt wa waqfiyyāt riwāq al-Sa‘ā’īda (Documents and foundation deeds in support of the college of Upper-Egyptian students), Ministry of Awqāf. 81 Winter, M., Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, p. 114. 82 Al-Sharqāwī, A., Shams al-tahqīq, pp. 36–37. 83 Chih, R., ‘Les débuts d’une tarīqa: formation et essor de la Khalwatiyya égyptienne au XVIIIe siècle à partir de l’hagiographie de son fondateur, Muḥammad b. Sālim al-Hifnī (m. 1181/1767)’, in Chih, R. and Gril, D. (eds.), Le saint et son milieu, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2000, pp. 137–150. 84 Al-Sharqāwī, ‘Abd Allah, Sharh hikam al-kurdiyya. 85 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 61.

Circulation and networks  49 86 Loimeier, R. and Reichmuth, S., ‘Zur Dynamik Religiös-politischer Netzwerke in Muslimischen Gesellschaften’, pp. 145–185; Eich, T., ‘Islamic Networks’. 87 Dafātir taqārīr al-nizāra, Dār al-wathā’iq al-qawmiyya (National Archives of Cairo). 88 Hanna, N., An Urban History of Būlāq in the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1983. 89 Al-Marāghī devoted a biographical work to them: Shadd al-‘urf al-nadī fī dhikr ‘ulamā’ Banī ‘Adī, Dār al-Kutub, tārīkh 5801. 90 Sijillāt qayd al-jirāyāt bi l-jāmi‘ al-Azhar (Al-Azhar Mosque’s Jirāya Registers), 1284h (1867–68)/1336h (1917–18), Cairo, Dār al-wathā’iq al-qawmiyya. 91 ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak provided a list of shaykhs who were head of the riwāq in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī al-‘Adawī (d. 1775), Ahmad al-Dardīr al-‘Adawī (d. 1786), Ahmad al-Bīlī al-‘Adawī (d. 1798), Abd Allāh al-Qādī al-‘Adawī, Ahmad Kabwah al-‘Adawī, Muhammad Kabwah al-‘Adawī, Hamad Ismā‘īl al-Hāmidī, Hasan Dāwūd al-‘Adawī, Muhammad b. Mahmūd al-‘Adawī, Ahmad Nasr al-‘Adawī; ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak Al-Khitat, vol. IV, p. 51; Zāfir al-Azharī, M., Al-Yawāqīt al-thamīna fī a‘yān madhhab ‘ālim al-madīna, Cairo, (?) 1324h. 92 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 414. 93 Al-Shinnāwī, ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, ‘Arwiqat al-Azhar’, Cairo, Dirāsāt fī-l-hadāra al-islāmiya 2 (1987), p. 11. 94 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Al-Kharīda al-bahiyya fī-l-‘aqā’id al-tawhīdiyya, Cairo, Subayh, 1954; Jomier, J., ‘Un aspect de l’activité d’al-Azhar du XVIIe aux débuts du XIXe siècle: les ‘aqā’id ou professions de foi’, Cairo, Colloque international sur l’histoire du Caire, 1969, p. 249. 95 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, al-Tawjih al-asnā bi nazm asmā’ Allāh al-husnā’, edited by al‘Awd, Sālih, Cairo, Dār Ibn Hazm, 2008, p. 12. 96 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Aqrāb al-Masālik li-madhhab al-imām Mālik, first published in 1864, Cairo, Būlāq Press, then in 1865, Cairo, Shāhīn Press; Dardīr’s commentary was published in 1865, then 1870, Būlāq Press; Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans, pp. 196–197. 97 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 166. 98 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 286–287. 99 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, III, 164–166. 100 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 166. 101 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Tuhfat al-ikhwān fī ādāb ahl al-‘irfān, Cairo, Maktaba al-Jumhūriyya al-‘arabiyya, 1310/1892, p. 22. 102 Mahmūd, ‘Abd al-Halīm, Abū-l-barakāt sayyidī Ahmad al-Dardīr, Cairo, Dār al-ma’ārif, 2001, p. 66. 103 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 147. 104 For more on Ahmad al-Sāwī, see Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans, p. 188. 105 Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans, p. 199. 106 De Jong, F., Turuq and Turuq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Historical Study in Organizational Dimensions of Islamic Mysticism, Leiden, Brill, 1978, p. 124. 107 Chih, R., ‘Reform and Diffusion of Sufism in Egypt at the End of the 19th Century: An Analysis of Shams al-tahqīq wa ‘urwa ahl al-tawfīq by Ahmad b. Sharqāwī (d. 1899)’, in Chih, R., Mayeur-Jaouen, C. and Seesemann, R. (eds.), Sufism, Literary Production and Printing in the 19th Century, Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2015, pp. 299–318. 108 ‘Abd al-Latīf, L., Al-Sa‘īd fī ‘ahd shaykh al-‘arab Hummām, Cairo, al-Hay’at almisriyya al-‘āmma li-l-kitāb, 1987, pp. 109–110. 109 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 344. 110 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 286.

50  Circulation and networks 111 Michel, N., ‘Les paysans et leur juge dans la campagne d’Esna (Haute-Égypte) au XVIIIe siècle’, Studia islamica 90 (2000), pp. 125–151. 112 Lefebvre, J. and Harlé, D., Sur le Nil avec Champollion: Lettres, journaux et dessins inédits de Nestor L'Hôte; premier voyage en Égypte, 1828–1830, Orléans-Caen, Paradigme Éditions, 1993. 113 Maxime Du Camp, Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, Lille, Imprimerie Photographique de Blanquart-Evrard, about 1853, plate  14; Bartholdi en Égypte et en Orient (Exhibition Catalogue), Heule, Snoeck Publishers, 2012. 114 Al-Khitat al-tawfīqiyya al-jadīda, Cairo, Al-Hay’at al-misriyya al-‘āmma li l-kitāb, 1981. 115 Berkey, J., The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 49–50 and pp. 56–59. 116 The mosques have been destroyed but the hammam still exists; ‘Abd al-Sattār ‘Uthmān, M., ‘Jirjā wa atharihā al-islāmiyya fī-l-‘asr al-‘uthmānī’, Cairo, Dirāsāt āthāriyya islāmiyya 3 (1988), pp. 209–269. 117 A copy of this waqf, dated 15 July 1687, was published by Badr, H. and Crecelius, D., ‘The Waqf of the Zawiya of the amir ‘Isa Agha Cerkis. A Circassian Legacy in XVIIIth Century Jirje’ Annales Islamologiques 32 (1998), pp. 239–247. 118 Crecelius, D., ‘The Waqf of Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dhahab in Historical Perspective’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 23, 1 (1991), pp. 57–81. 119 Chih, R., ‘Mosquées et zāwiya de Jirjā d’après un document de waqf du XVIIIe siècle’, Afifi, M., Chih, R., et  al. (eds.), Sociétés Rurales Ottomanes/Ottoman Rural Societies, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2005. 120 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 188. 121 Al-Marāghī, Nūr al-‘uyūn fī dhikr madīnat Jirjā, ms Dār al-kutub, tārīkh 5802, edited by al-Namakī, Ahmad, Tārīkh wilāyat Jirjā fī-l-‘asrayn al-mamlūkī wa-l-‘uthmānī, Cairo, 1998, p. 193. 122 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 197. 123 Mubārak, ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak, Al-Khitat al-tawfīqiyya, X, p.  119. Muhammad al-Amīr al-kabīr was also afilliated to the Shādhiliyya and his most important work of tasawwuf is devoted to that path, Al-Wazīfa al-shādhiliyya, Damascus, 1302/1885. In his chronicle Jabartī wrote a long obituary of al-Amīr, who had been a student of his father Hasan al-Jabartī; Al-Jabarti, IV, 284–286. Muhammad al-Amīr al-kabīr should not be confused with his son, Muhammad al-Amīr al-saghīr (d. 1830), who was also a well-regarded master at al-Azhar. 124 ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak, Al-Khitat al-tawfīqiyya, ‘Jirjā’, X, p. 118. 125 Chih, R., ‘Reform and Diffusion of Sufism in Egypt at the End of the 19th Century’, p. 304. 126 Garcin, J. C., Qūs, p. 316. 127 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 103; Brockelmann, C., Geschichte des Arabischen Literatur (GAL), II, 353, S. II, 479. His creed (‘aqīda) was presented by J. Jomier in ‘Un aspect de l’activité d’al-Azhar du XVIIe aux débuts du XIXe siècle’, and his manual on the path has been translated into French by Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’, MIDEO 8 (1964–1966), pp. 1–74.

2 Education How to guide disciples?

In Ottoman Egypt as in other times and places, the aspirant wanting to become a Sufi generally had to attach himself to a living master, establishing close and direct ties with him, following the spiritual path (tarīqa) taught by him, and imitating him. It was also necessary to form relationships with his master’s other companions. This approach was modelled on the example of the Prophet and his companions, the ashāb.1 The tarīqa is therefore simultaneously internal and external, a vertical progression towards God and a horizontal brotherhood among disciples (ikhwān), and thus a form of sociability. Clearly the two dimensions of the path, spiritual and social, cannot be separated, for without its spiritual and esoteric substance the tarīqa as a social entity would have no reason to exist.2 The hierarchy within the group is merely the external reflection of the degree of internal spiritual progress of each disciple, a progress whose stages may vary in number in different Sufi paths. Each master transmits a method, a tradition that he himself has received from the masters who preceded him along an initiatic chain (silsila, isnad, sanad) going back to the Prophet, the initiator of all paths. There are as many spiritual methods as there are Sufi paths. If the end of the Mamluk period represented the endpoint of medieval Islamic culture, what changes came about in the domain of Sufism, and of Sufi paths in particular, as a result of the new modern and Ottoman context? The German Islamologist Bernd Radtke has observed one important difference: there was an increase in the number of handbooks (shurūt handbooks) devoted to the rules and norms (ādāb) of the Sufi path and intended for the novice.3 Since their appearance between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, these handbooks have expounded upon the notion of the close relationship between proper conduct and spiritual realisation: with his Risāla (Epistle), Qushayrī (d. 1074) would create a highly effective synthesis of all preceding literature, addressing both masters and disciples; this explains its great success to this day.4 ‘The Benefits of Intimate Knowledge’ (‘Awārif al-ma‘ārif), by Suhrawardī (d. 1234), written during the thirteenth century when Sufism had achieved its social integration, is almost entirely devoted to the etiquette that should be observed by the disciple with regard to the master, to other members of the brotherhood, and to society at large, once he has set out on the path.5 At the beginning of the Ottoman period Sha‘rānī wrote ādāb treatises reflecting the increasing importance in society of zāwiyas, as madrasas

52  Education were disappearing. The zāwiya directed by Sha‘rānī himself, in Bāb Sha‘riyya, functioned as a space providing both religious instruction and the integration of a rural population into the city. In ‘al-Anwār al-qudsiyya fī ma‘rifa qawā‘id al-Sūfiyya’ (The Holy Illuminations in the Knowledge of the Rules of the Sufis), his most celebrated handbook, which inspired generations of Sufis, three different aims were served at once: spiritual ethics, sociability and initiatic progress; here Sha‘rānī evoked the rules that had to be respected in the zāwiya, along with details of its organisation and of the assignment of tasks.6 There was a distinct revival in the handbook genre during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the rules to be followed by disciples had not changed; every important master of the period composed his own manual of ādāb. The man at the origin of the renewal of the Khalwatiyya that spread from Egypt, Mustafā al-Bakrī, was a prolific author who wrote almost nothing in the field of Sufism except handbooks, wa-l-treatises, litanies and collections of prayers (ahzāb and awrād). This renewal coincided with a double phenomenon: the expansion of the Sufi paths and the development of a culture of the written word and books.7 What can these Sufi handbooks that speak equally of spiritual practice and social relations teach us about the modern evolution of the Sufi paths, and about ways of guiding increasing numbers of disciples?

Three handbooks for aspirants on the Sufi path To reply to this question we have closely examined three Sufi handbooks from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk (Spiritual Wayfaring and the Journey towards the King of Kings) is by Qāsim al-Khānī (d. 1697), who was a native of Aleppo. This text was very successful in Egypt among masters of the Khalwatiyya, including two close disciples of Shaykh al-Hifnī, Muhammad al-Munīr al-Samanūdī (d. 1785) and Ahmad al-Dardīr (d. 1786), who both quoted it and used it as a reference point, the former in Tuhfat al-sālikīn wa dalā’il al-sā’irīn li-manhaj al-muqarrabīn (The Treasure of the Wayfarers, and the Proofs of Seekers on the Path of Closeness to God), and the latter in Tuhfat al-ikhwān fī ādāb al-tarīq (The Treasure of the Brothers, on the Rules of the Sufi Path); both of these works are also presented in this chapter. These three texts were read, transmitted and copied by generations of Sufis. They circulated in manuscript form and were then among the first texts to benefit from the dawn of printing in Arabic; in addition, all three of them have recently been re-issued.8 Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk appears to have been printed for the first time in Fez in 1897–1898 (1315h); its success in Sufi milieux linked to al-Azhar and the Khalwatiyya continued unabated throughout the nineteenth century: the work by the Upper-Egyptian Khalwatī shaykh ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Hāfiz (d. 1886), entitled Hidāyat al-rāghibīn fī l-sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk rabb al-ʿālamayn, is a summary of the Sayr wa-l-sulūk and of Dardīr’s Tuhfat al-Ikhwān; the same author produced another condensed version of these two texts in Luqtat al-ʿajlān wa tuhfat al-ikhwān, of which al-Azhar library holds more than twenty copies from the college of Upper-Egyptian students. Another Khalwatī Sufi from Upper Egypt, Ahmad Sharqāwī (d. 1899), reminded readers of his treatise on the dhikr

Education  53 and companionship, Shams al-tahqīq wa-ʿurwat ahl al-tawfīq (The Sun of Realisation and the Ties Between those Who Have Succeeded in their Mystical Union) that the Sayr wa-l-sulūk was recommended by Ahmad al-Dardīr, and strongly advised his disciples to read it.9 The circulation of Khānī’s work was not limited to Egypt – it was often cited by the masters who were presented as being at the origin of Sufi renewal in Africa; for example, by Muhammad al-Sanūsī (d. 1859), founder of the Sanūsiyya, in his Bughyat al-Maqāsid (Aspiration to the Objectives of Islam); and by Muhammad Majdhūb (d. 1820), a Sudanese disciple of Ahmad b. Idrīs, whose Risālat al-sulūk (Epistle on Spiritual Wayfaring) is largely a reproduction of Khānī’s text.10 The other two handbooks, Tuhfat al-sālikīn by Samanūdī and Tuhfat al-ikhwān by Dardīr, were written for disciples of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt at the request of the master of this Sufi path, Shaykh al-Hifnī, and they circulated mostly among his affiliates. A  first, lithographic, edition of Tuhfat al-sālikīn appeared in 1870 (1287h), and it was then printed in 1888 (1305h). The printed copy in al-Azhar library dates from 1918 (1335h). Tuhfat al-ikhwān was inspired by Mustafā al-Bakrī’s Bulghat al-murīd (Most Complete Rules for the Aspirant on the Path), a didactic poem on the Sufi path that would be taken up and imitated by all Khalwatīs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for, as the historian al-Jabartī pointed out, although al-Hifnī was the propagator of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt, it was al-Bakrī who formalised the rules for its practices. Tuhfat al-ikhwān was published for the first time in Cairo in 1864, then in 1890 and in 1913, and it has been re-issued continually since.11 These handbooks were written by ulama who were also teachers, muftis and spiritual guides, as well-versed in jurisprudence and the hadīth as in Sufism. Designed for aspirants, they described the spiritual progression, the sulūk, with its different stages and the rules of conduct (ādāb al-tarīq) that were to be adopted in order to progress along the path towards God; these texts were part of the literature specific to the paths. Spiritual realisation being inseparable from wellmannered behaviour, the contents of these handbooks were at once theoretical and practical, transmitting teachings and at the same time defining the rules for individual conduct and for the collective way of life that would prepare the disciple to receive these teachings. Essentially there is nothing new in this, since the authors often borrowed from the writings of masters who had preceded them, particularly from the aforementioned Anwār al-Qudsiyya by Sha‘rānī. Nevertheless, differences in the treatment of this single theme of the education of disciples do appear among our three authors: where Khānī’s treatise concentrates on the spiritual journey towards God that he describes according to a very complex scheme of psycho-spiritual states, the handbooks of Samanūdī and Dardīr tend instead to take the form of practical guides, focussing almost exclusively on the rules governing the recitation of the Khalwatiyya’s own wird, the collective practice of the dhikr, and the social behaviour of the disciple (towards master and companions, and in every possible circumstance). These differences in approach spring from the precise historical period, scholarly milieu, spiritual tradition and professional career that characterise each author. Al-Samanūdī and al-Dardīr were

54  Education both spiritual successors (khalīfa) of al-Hifnī, they received authorisations (idhn) from him to transmit the dhikr and initiate new disciples, and through their teaching and their writings they contributed to widening the circle of Khalwatī affiliates. At that time in Egypt the Khalwatiyya was expanding rapidly; we have seen in the preceding chapter how it spread through the network of students at al-Azhar University, where al-Samanūdī and al-Dardīr occupied pre-eminent positions, the former as shaykh al-qurrā’ wa-l-muhaddithīn (Shaykh of the Quran-readers and transmitters of the hadīth) and the latter as Maliki mufti and Shaykh of the college of students from Upper Egypt. There is no particular known Sufi affiliation for Khānī. Originally from Aleppo, the great city of northern Syria and an important commercial crossroads, he first travelled across the whole Ottoman Empire for his business, but gave this up a few years later to devote himself to teaching and being Hanafi mufti in the important madrasa al-Halawiyya. Little is known of his training except that he was initiated into the Sufi path by a certain Ahmad al-Humsī. Khānī, who described his joining of the path as the result of a personal evolution, did not speak of his masters, about whom we have discovered nothing, nor did he mention any affiliation to a specific Sufi path. It seems that he did not himself found a Sufi path, nor even lead a group of disciples. According to his own statement, reported by al-Mūrādī, when he returned to Aleppo he felt the need to isolate himself from other people, abandon commerce and follow the path of humility and poverty; one may deduce from this that he underwent a sort of mystical crisis: ‘I then changed my companions, my vestments and my interior attitude (gayyartu al-jullās wa l-hullās wa l-anfās), I fought my carnal soul (nafs) and its enemies (the pleasures of this lowly world) through hunger and wakefulness for seven years under the direction of my masters. For two years I ate only once every sixteen hours, a handful of flour that I made into a soup and sweetened with a spoonful of honey. And I continued to eat very little thereafter, following in this the counsel of my masters. At the end of these seven long years of combat, God brought forth in me the desire to study exoteric science, which I did for two years with great masters before beginning to teach in my turn.’ 12 (A very similar story is reported on the subject of Shaykh al-Dardīr, who is said also to have spent seven years in a cell, eating only raisins.) In his treatise Khānī developed a model of spiritual progress with seven stages, corresponding to the seven degrees through which one moves in perfecting the soul; this model would be taken up by the Khalwatīs of Egypt. The notion of progression through seven stages was not new, having existed in the Khalwatiyya since its foundation and described by Yahyā al-Bakūwī in his Sharh marātib-i asrār-l qulūb (Expounding the Inner Degrees of the Hearts); we also find it in other Sufi paths such as, for example, the Bayyūmiyya and the Qādiriyya.13 However, the Moroccan Sufi scholar Abū Salīm al-‘Ayyāshī, who travelled to Egypt in the middle of the seventeenth century, noted that Khalwatīs from the Demirdashiyya branch were initiated into seven Names, but recited the ten divine Names (Allah’s Names and Attributes) during dhikr (remembrance of God) sessions. ‘Their path (the Khalwatiyya) is founded on the repetition (dhikr) of lā ilah illa Allāh (There is no god but God) according to a particular method, then they

Education 55 pronounce the Jalāla (Allāh), and then the rest of the ten Names in the following order: Hū (God), Haqq (the Truth), Hayy (the Ever Living), Qahhār (the Dominant One), Wahhāb (He who grants), Fattāh (the Revealer), Wāhid (the Unique One), Samad (the Impenetrable One), Qayyūm (the Subsisting One).’14 The Sayr wa-l-sulūk offered a particularly elaborate and detailed explanatory model of the initiatic progress, its stages and states (maqāmāt and ahwāl), accompanied by a precise description of the psycho-spiritual effects resulting from rigorous exercises in inner purification during solitary retreat. The author demonstrates a finegrained grasp of the psychology of novices, which makes it easy to understand the great influence that his treatise has had among Sufi ulama (and Islamologists).15 The seven stages of spiritual realisation In Chapter 3 of his book, entitled Fī bayān al-hujub allatī bayna Allāh wa-l-‘abd (On the veils between God and His servant), Khānī reminds readers that it is impossible for the aspirant to know God in His essence: for those of His creatures who have reached the final stage of spiritual wayfaring, God manifests Himself only behind the veil of His Names and Attributes (maqām tajallī al-asmā’ wa tajallī al-sifāt). The author develops his teaching on the basis of the hadīth according to which there are seventy veils of shadow and light between the Creator and His servant (Inna Llāh sab‘īn hijabān min nūr wa dalma), with the path consisting of using the recitation of the divine Names to tear these veils away gradually, in seven stages with ten veils for each stage. Each veil is of a finer weave than the preceding one, and the same is true for the soul as it purifies itself.16 To raise these veils one must make an internal journey towards the seven subtle organs or centres of one’s human being (latīfa, latā’if); this is the reason for the Sufi adage ‘Know yourself and you will know God.’ These subtle centres are: the internal reality of the soul, the heart (qalb), the spirit (rūh), the secret (sirr), the secret of secrets (sirr al-sirr), the hidden (khafī), and the most hidden (al-akhfā). The science of man’s subtle organs or centres was developed by Najm al-dīn Kubrā (from Khwarazm in Central Asia, d. 1221) and his disciples and transmitted in Turkey and Syria by the Hamadaniyya Sufi path.17 It was on this basis that Khānī devised a spiritual progression in seven stages, corresponding to the seven states of the soul, the seven subtle centres of a man, and the seven corresponding organs. The novice follows these until the last stage, which is that of the mushāhada, direct vision of divine manifestations (tajalliyāt), seen not through the eyes but with the heart, during which the creature is reunited with his Creator: this is the station of mystical union. To each stage corresponds the invocation of one of the Names of God, and these seven Names also represent the seven states of the soul.18 At the first stage the lower soul is opaque and shadowy, its nature is animal, it is turned towards cupidity and lust, it incites to evil (al-nafs al-ammāra bi-sū’, Quran 12 :53), it acts at the level of the chest (its physical envelope, sadr), and the world to which it corresponds is that of manifestation (‘ālam al-shahāda). At this station the lower soul is travelling towards God (sayruhā ilā-Llah), its dhikr is lā ilah illa Allāh, its domain of activity is the

56  Education revealed law (sharī‘a), and its attributes are ignorance, avarice, cupidity, distraction, nastiness, hatred, interfering in other people’s business, doing harm.19 At the second stage, the lower soul imputes blame (al-nafs al-lawwāma, Quran 85 :2), it is travelling for God (sayruhā li-Llāh), it corresponds to the intermediary world, its physical envelope is the heart (qalb), its spiritual condition is love (mahabba), its domain of activity is the initiatic path (tarīqa), its attributes are blame (of oneself), reflection, self-glorification, speaking ill of others, hidden hypocrisy, the quest for glory and power. By the third stage the soul is inspired (al-nafs al-mulhama, Quran 91 :8), it is travelling on God (‘alā-Llāh, its gaze is constantly resting on God), its world is that of spirits (‘ālam al-arwāh), its physical envelope or the place in which it manifests itself is the spirit (rūh), its spiritual state is passionate love for God (‘ishq), the domain in which it acts is gnosis (ma‘rīfa), its attributes are generosity, moderation, science, humility and patience, and it must say Hū. At this stage the novice should attach himself to his shaykh and practise the dhikr in his presence as often as possible.20 After the trials of the first three stages, which are the most difficult and dangerous because constant vigilance is required of the novice (and his guide) if he is not to fall back into darkness, the soul enters into light. The fourth stage corresponds to the beginning of perfection. During this stage and those that follow, the wayfarer has little need of his shaykh (lā yahtāj fihi al-sālik ilā al-musallik illā al-qalīl), for God has lighted the lamp of perfection in his heart and he is now one of the people of the path. He wears their cloak in order to pass to the stage of mastery. The soul is finally at peace, it travels with God (sayruhā ma‘a Llāh), it originates in Muhammadan reality (al-haqīqa al-muhammadiyya), its physical centre is the secret (al-sirr), its spiritual state sincere serenity, its field of activity is certain secrets of revealed law (ba‘d asrār al-sharī‘a), its attributes are generosity, confidence, magnanimity, devotion, gratitude, satisfaction with divine decree and patience in the face of trials. This is the stage of stabilisation (tamkīn) and of the vision of certitude (‘ayn al-yaqīn); the word to be spoken is al-Haqq (the Truth).21 The fifth stage is that of the satisfied soul (rādiya, from divine will, Quran, 89 :28), it travels in God (fī-Llāh), it originates in al-Lahūt (the world of Names and divine Attributes), its physical home is the secret of secrets (sirr al-sirr), its spiritual state is that of extinction (fanā’), its attributes are renunciation of all that is not God, sincerity, scrupulous devotion (wara‘), and having a heart that is satisfied with all that may come about in the universe without shuddering or pushing away what is unpleasant, since the soul is completely absorbed in contemplation of absolute beauty: it is during this part of the progression that it is particularly appropriate for the disciple to retreat into a cell (khalwa). The traveller towards God must say Hayy, the Living One, at this stage. At the sixth stage, the soul is approved (al-nafs al-mardiyya, Quran 89 : 28), it travels from God (‘an Allāh), it originates in the world of manifestation (‘ālam al-shahāda), its physical home is the hidden (al-khafī), its state is stupefaction (al-hayra), and its domain is again the revealed law. The traveller on the path has realised the prophetic saying (hadīth qudsī) and God has become ‘his hearing

Education  57 through which he hears, his sight through which he sees, his hand through which he grasps, and his foot through which he walks.’ At this stage, the soul has returned to the world of the senses in order to take its turn to guide men from the darkness into light and reunite the creature with his Creator; the soul is raised to the level of khilāfa, God’s vice-regency on earth. The dhikr for this degree is al-Qayyūm, the Subsisting One. The seventh soul is perfect (al-nafs al-kāmila), it travels by God (bi-Llāh), originates in multiplicity in unicity and unicity in multiplicity, its physical home is the most hidden (al-akhfā), its state is permanence in God (al-baqā’), it says al-Qahhār (the Dominant One), and the soul has arrived at perfect dominion. The one who attains this stage desires nothing but God, he is the perfect man, the saint, the friend of God. During its long journey the soul of the wayfarer towards God passes through all the degrees, from initial darkness first to light, then to secrets, perfection, union, manifestations of acts, and finally to manifestations of the Names and divine Attributes; the lower soul has passed from the phenomenal world to the world of the spirit.

The path as moral training Before writing about the progression in seven stages in his Chapter  4, Khānī uses his introductory chapter, Fī dhamm al-dūniyā wa ladhdhātihā wa bayān haqīqatihā (On the blameable reality of this world here below and its pleasures) to explain what the path (tarīq) towards God consists of, and the principles (arkān) that support it. In his second chapter he writes of the conditions of his own spiritual journey (Fī-l hathth ‘alā-l-sulūk fī hadhihi al-tarīq wa bayān fadlihi: ‘On spiritual wayfaring and its benefits’). From the beginning he warns the reader of the difficulties he will face, and tells him that travelling on this path is not within the grasp of everyone. The path means rejecting this earthly world (dunyā) and purifying one’s lower soul until it discovers its true nature. It is a genuine moral training, a discipline for the novice, who will be supported in his journey by his master and companions. In his preface to the Sayr wa-l-sulūk Khānī offers a list of definitions of the technical terms used by the people of the path (ahl al-qawm, also called the people of spiritual realisation, ahl al-tahqīq), to which the novice may refer each time he encounters an unknown term in his reading (kullamā marrat bika kalima gharībat al-ma‘nā tarji‘u ilā al-muqaddima).22 Here Sufism (tasawwuf) is defined in many ways: the science of wayfaring towards God (‘ilm al-sulūk), the science of ethics (‘ilm al-akhlāq), the science of the purification of the lower soul (‘ilm āfāt al-nafs) and of its spiritual training (‘ilm al-riyāda); the science of realities, of the mystical stages and states (‘ilm al-haqā’iq wa-l-manāzil wa-l-ahwāl); the science of hearts (‘ilm al-qulūb), the science of inner knowledge (‘ilm al-ma‘ārif), the science of the secrets (‘ilm al-asrār), the science of the allusive signs (‘ilm al-ishārāt), the noblest science (ashraf al-‘ulūm), and the fruit and endpoint of all the sciences (thamrat al-‘ulūm kullihā wa ghāyatuha).23 This science is the true path (towards God), that of the acquisition of the noble character of the prophets and messengers (tarīq al-haqq min akhlāq al-anbiyā’ wa-l-mursalīn)24; it means a journey along a path (sulūk), consisting of the

58  Education purification of the carnal soul (nafs) by removing its wrongful attributes, revealing its noble qualities (al-takhallī ‘an al-awsāf al-dhamīma wa-l-tajallī bi-l-awsāf al-hamīda). The author also employs another term, takhalluq, to mean change, transformation of one’s character (‘takhallasū min jamī‘ al-sifāt al-dhamīma wa takhallaqū bi-l-awsāf al-hamīda’), since Sufis claim to embody God’s Attributes or ethics (takhalluq bi-akhlāq Allāh) through their battle against (mujāhada) and victory over their carnal souls. The blameworthy attributes of the lower soul (al-awsāf al-dhamīma) are ignorance (jahl), anger (ghadab), hatred (hiqd), envy (hasad), avarice (bukhl), pride (ta‘āzhum), self-importance (kibr), conceit (‘ujb), duplicity (ghurūr), love for honours and power (hubb al-jāh wa-l-ri’āsa), loquacity (kathrat al-kalām), jests and laughter (mizāh, dahik), mockery (tahājī), greed (hirs) and poor character (sū’ al-khuluq). The praiseworthy attributes are science (‘ilm), goodness (hilm), inner purity (safā’ al-bātin), generosity to others (ikrām), submission (tadhallul), goodwill (rifq), humility (tawādu‘), patience (sabr), gratitude (shukr), ascesis (zuhd), absolute trust in God (tawakkul), love (mahabba), modesty (hayā’), acceptance of divine will (ridā), purity of intention (ikhlās), authenticity (sidq), inner vigilance (murāqaba), the examination of conscience (muhāsaba), compassion (shafaqa), mercy (rahma), love in God (hubb fī-Llāh), tears (bukā’), sorrow (huzn), the search for solitude (hubb al-‘uzla), a sincere attitude (nush), restriction of speech (qillat al-kalām), contrition (khushū‘), obedience (khudū‘) and a good character (husn al-khuluq).25 The prophet Muhammad’s exemplary behaviour provides the model, one that is to be imitated and aspired to, and one to which the author refers constantly, citing the hadīths, virtually the only source he uses for this text except for very occasional quotations from the Sufi masters of the past. The ego (nafs) The nafs (the ego, the lower soul) is the main obstacle standing in the way of spiritual knowledge. It causes narrowness of heart (tadayyuq al-qalb) and is a prison for the spirit (sijn al-rūh). The aspirant must do battle against it (riyādat/ mujāhada mujāhadat al-nafs), and this battle against oneself requires much effort and perseverance. Khānī never stops warning the disciple against everything that might hold back or prevent his progress (ta‘arrada al-hāl) and block the ultimate transformation of his lower soul, which prepares it to receive the divine light. The disciple’s training requires him to change his habits, first reducing the amount of food, sleep and speech he requires, then isolating himself from other people, practising the dhikr and meditating. Ahmad al-Dardīr also repeats these principles in his rules, but replaces the final one of the six, meditation, which is a solitary practice, with attachment to the shaykh. Another part of this training is the rejection of the dunyā, that is to say cutting oneself off from the world until one has forgotten family and friends: ‘distance yourself so far from men, until they say about you that you are mad.’26 For Khānī, to enter into the path is to change one’s life completely, or rather to allow the path to take over one’s life and rule it (al-khilāfa ‘alayhi). For this to happen, the disciple must demonstrate

Education  59 his taqwā (fear of God) and his great spiritual energy (himma); he must also seek the support of his wayfaring companions. He may arm himself against his worst enemies – the devil and his ego (nafs) – with continual remembering of the Names of God (the dhikr). Khānī constantly refers the reader back to the early chapters of his work, incessantly reminding disciples of the many things that could at any moment pull his soul back to its initial state unless he maintains constant vigilance, especially during the first three stages of his spiritual progression, which are acknowledged to be the most difficult. The third stage in particular is that of confusion (mahall talbīs), for the disciple does not yet know how to distinguish the signs he is receiving: are they divine or diabolical, true or false, good or evil, heresy (zandaqa) or realisation (tahqīq)? He has not yet detached himself completely from the material world, and cannot be certain. This stage is a turning point in the path, the time when the disciple who is approaching his goal risks falling back into the shadows; at any moment he may adopt Satan as his guide. Only the one who makes divine law, the sharī‘a, into his own nature, who keeps his soul pure and generous and whose will is powerful can surmount the troubles of this phase. The principle duty (wājib) of the disciple at this stage is to follow and model himself on his guide (al-murshid al-musallik). The murshid, who has already travelled this way, will act as his scout, casting light on the dangers that surround the path and helping the novice to leave the shadows of the phenomenal world behind and enter into the light of divine manifestations. To do so successfully, the disciple must reveal all his thoughts, whether good or harmful, to his master, obey him in all things, submit to him and live with him like ‘the corpse in the hands of the washer of the dead,’ according to the well-known Sufi saying. 27

Teaching proper behaviour and good manners (ādāb) Khānī writes that setting out on the path means changing one’s life and adopting a new ethics of behaviour (ādāb), that of the Sufis; he cites an oft-quoted saying of the Nishapūr master Abū Hafs al-Haddād (d. between 877–8 and 883–4), reported by Sulāmī (d. 1021): ‘Al-tarīqa kulluha ādāb,’ ‘All of the path is proper manners.’ However, in Sufism ādāb also means teaching, education and moral training (riyāda); on this subject al-Samanūdī mentions in his treatise the sessions of ādāb (majlis al-‘ilm wa-l-adab) that the disciples have a duty to attend.28 Along with their initiatic teachings, the Sufis have developed corresponding rules of conduct, in order to educate the disciple and make him more likely to absorb these teachings and thus progress towards God. These rules apply within the framework of the path to determine the behaviour of the disciple towards his master, that of the companions among themselves and, finally, that of the disciple towards himself. They also describe the necessary conduct during dhikr sessions (ādāb al-dhikr); these rules are transmitted to the novices orally. Of the three authors we have consulted for this chapter, al-Samanūdī provides the longest description of the requisite comportment towards the master; much of this part of his text is copied from medieval Sufi handbooks, but he

60  Education also draws upon his own experience with shaykh al-Hifnī. In his treatise, Tuhfat al-sālikīn, al-Samanūdī several times mentions his profound attachment to his master, thus supporting Jabartī’s opinions of him as the first disciple of Shaykh al-Hifnī: ‘He (Samanūdī) was very devoted to his shaykh, and stayed by his side for all of the latter’s life. The shaykh awakened him spiritually and illuminated his heart, and he received great benefit from him. al-Hifnī was his only master.’29 By reading the biographies of shaykhs of the period we can observe that some disciples lived permanently or mostly with their masters, whereas others only joined them for certain well-defined occasions. What’s more, although al-Hifnī left few writings on the Sufi path, we know that he maintained a constant correspondence with some of his khalīfas, advising them on how to behave with their own disciples and reminding them of the necessity of being kind and well-mannered towards them; a letter sent to one of them, a man called Ahmad, is reproduced by Jabartī.30 Quite apart from any rules, the relationship between master and disciple is an act of absolute love of each for each, like the act of love by which God created humanity. This offering of self by each party is sealed by a pact. The making of the pact (bay‘a) and the transmission of the dhikr (talqīn al-dhikr) The bay‘a is an oath of allegiance to one’s shaykh, sealed by a ceremony during which the novice makes a vow of obedience to his future guide. He submits to and obeys his shaykh in his outward actions (travelling, marrying) and his inner spiritual realisation. And, while the disciple submits, the master also has a duty to transmit. When the pact between them is enacted, the shaykh transmits to the disciple one of the divine names that make up the dhikr of his path. As we have seen previously, in Khānī’s treatise as in the Egyptian Khalwatiyya, there are seven of these: lā ilah illa Allāh (There is no god but God), Allāh, Hū (God), Haqq (The Truth), Hayy (The Living One), Qayyūm (The Subsisting One) and Qahhār (The Dominant One). Making a pact is not something to be done lightly, for once it has been sealed the agreement cannot be broken by the novice. Because of this, handbooks of ādāb often describe ways of distinguishing a genuine master from a charlatan. Many Sufis first see their future spiritual guide in their dreams; when he was 18 years old and still living in Kūrān, his village in Iranian Kurdistan, Mahmūd al-Kurdī dreamed of Shaykh al-Hifnī. Later, al-Kurdī himself appeared in a dream to the future Shaykh of al-Azhar, Abd Allāh al-Sharqāwī, while they were both disciples of Shaykh al-Hifnī. After al-Hifnī’s death ‘Abd Allāh al-Sharqāwī, who had only progressed as far as the first two Names of the dhikr (in his writings he admitted that initially he wasn’t very serious about following the Sufi path, becoming more committed as time passed), attached himself to Shaykh Muhammad Mujāhid (a master of the Ahmadiyya who was later buried next to Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawī in Tantā), from whom he received the dhikr ahmadī; however, he practised neither the wird nor the prayer on the Prophet that this master recommended to him. Al-Sharqāwī also frequented the

Education  61 Yemeni master ‘Abd al-Rahmān ‘Aydarūs, and said he had learned a great deal from him, especially on the subject of the wahdat al-wujūd (doctrine of unicity of being), ‘the subject about which he spoke the most.’ Then he had several dreams in which Shaykh al-Hifnī appeared to him, commanding him to attach himself to Shaykh Mahmūd al-Kurdī, an injunction that he could not help but obey, ‘and thanks to God under his direction I received all the benefits of progression along the path.’31 Al-Bakrī wrote to his khalīfa in Egypt, Muhammad al-Hifnī, explaining to him the manner in which aspirants should seal the pact with him, once he (al-Hifnī) had been initiated in Jerusalem. Hasan Shamma re-copied this, the first known description of the Khalwatiyya initiation rite, in his hagiography of al-Hifnī, and his version is again taken up, in its entirety, in Jabartī’s chronicle: ‘This way of affiliating disciples was sent to me by my master and recourse, sayyid al-Siddiqī al-Bakrī al-Khalwatī, when he authorised me to initiate others to the path of the masters (al-sāda) of the Khalwatiyya. Contained within this text was the manner of vowing allegiance.’ The aspirant sits before his master so that their knees are touching. The master is facing Mecca, which is the locus of the orientation of the union (jihat al-wusla); he recites the Fātiha (opening surah of the Quran). The aspirant puts his right hand into that of the master, surrendering his soul to him and requesting his help. The master tells the aspirant to repeat three times ‘I ask forgiveness from God, the Immense,’ and then ‘I seek refuge in God from Satan the accursed.’ Then the master asks the aspirant to recite the Quranic verse on repentance, ‘Believers, turn to God in sincere repentance’ (Quran 66: 8) and the verse on allegiance, ‘Those who swear fealty to you swear fealty in truth to God’ (Quran 48: 10). The shaykh then recites the Fātiha again, prays for the aspirant, his companions and his masters, and then he asks the novice to place his hands on his (own) knees, close his eyes, listen and repeat three times, after him, the first of the seven Names of the dhikr, Lā ilah illā Allāh. Once again, the shaykh recites the Fātiha, this time asking for success for himself and for the aspirant, to whom he recommends regular recitation of the supererogatory prayers proper to the path (the awrād). When the shaykh perceives signs that the aspirant is ready to move to a higher degree, he reveals the second Name, Allāh, to him, that he may realise his aspirations (amānī) and that the door of the unicity of actions may be opened to him (tawhīd al-af‘āl), there being but one Agent. When he reaches the third Name, Hū, he accedes to the knowledge of the unicity of the Names of God (tawhīd al-asmā’) and of the supreme secret (al-sirr al-asmā’), and the fourth Name, Haqq, reveals the unicity of attributes (tawhīd al-sifāt). Arriving at the fifth Name, Hayy, the knowledge of the unicity of essence (tawhīd al-dhāt) is unveiled, and at the sixth and seventh Names, Qayyūm, Qahhār, the rest of the secrets (yukmilu lahu al-tawābi‘).32 In his Tuhfat al-ikhwān, al-Dardīr offers his readers a very personal account of his initiation by al-Hifnī, and follows this with the text of his ijāza (diploma).33 This initiation lasted several years. Beforehand, al-Dardīr received a sign (ishāra) that indicated to him that he would follow al-Hifnī’s path. He had a precise recollection of the day he first met his master, a Thursday at the beginning of the

62  Education Muslim month of Muharram in the year of the Hegira 1160 (1747). He went to the shaykh’s home after the afternoon prayer: I approached him to be initiated into the dhikr (li-qasd al-talqīn), I put my hand in his, and after having invoked God and begged for His forgiveness (al-istighfār wa-l-du‘ā’), he told me: “Listen to the dhikr three times and then afterwards repeat it three times with your eyes closed.” He pronounced “There is no god but God”, which I repeated three times. From that very moment, bad thoughts on the love for worldly things ceased to assail me, thanks to the beneficial influx (baraka) of my master. I stayed like this for six months until the dhikr ended up burning my body (ahraqa al-dhikr jismī) and melting my flesh and my blood (adhhaba lahmī wa damī) so all that remained was my skin lying over my bones. He revealed the second name to me; he brought his mouth up to my right ear and said Allāh three times with fervour, prolonging the first ‘a’ (ālif), until I  disappeared to myself (hatta ghibtu ‘an wujūdī). In my turn I repeated Allāh three times. On the night of Thursday to Friday during the last ten days of Ramadān of the year 1163 (1750), after the sunset prayer, he revealed the third name, which is Hū, saying this, too, into my right ear. At this stage (maqām), I was often tired, unconscious of the condition I was in, savouring my humiliation, glad of my own baseness. On the Monday before sunrise, on 13 dhū al-hijja, he revealed the fourth Name to me, which was Haqq, spoken into my right ear, and he said to me: “you have reached the station at which the murīd for the first time sets foot on the path of the men of God (ahl Allāh).” He added: “May you be able to maintain a good (tayyib) spiritual state”, or something of the sort. On the fifth day of the month of Rajab 1164 (30 May 1751), a Sunday, before sunrise, he revealed to me the fifth Name, which was Hayy, spoken in my right ear, and then on the fifth day of the month of Shawwāl (27 August  1751) he told me the sixth Name, which was Qayyūm, still speaking into my right ear. Once I  had reached this stage, I  continued to speak to people in the best possible fashion, but I was no longer conscious of my states – people spoke to me, but I could not hear what they said, and they did not know my state because I  kept the appearance of a healthyminded man in full possession of his reason. This was an incredible state of mind, which only those who have experienced it could understand. On the night of the Sunday to Monday 26 Ramadān 1165 (7 August 1752), he revealed the seventh Name, which was Qahhār, spoken into my left ear, and he transmitted to me a secret that is known only to Sufis. Having reached this degree I became a bit more lucid and stood before the door, waiting for the veil to be lifted.34 Having put him through years of struggle, Shaykh al-Hifnī brought al-Dardīr into the Presence of presences (adkhalnā hadrat al-hadarāt), the station that sums up all of the others (al-hadra al-jāmi’a), beyond which there can be no further or higher degree.

Education  63 The reader of this testimony can observe the long-standing relationship of mutual trust and love that had been established between al-Dardīr and his master even before the latter had transmitted any of his spiritual states: the Sufi path is first and foremost to live in closeness with a shaykh in order to impregnate oneself with his words and actions, and then to bring oneself into line with them; only then could one hope to be able to receive his states. Companionship (suhba) and its rules The filial and intellectual relationship called suhba is not specific to Sufism, being the principal mode of transmission of knowledge in Islam.35 It is characterised by absolute obedience to the master and can last several years. In Sufism, attachment to the master lasts for the rest of the disciple’s life, and the initial meeting between them is experienced by him as a rebirth. Sufis model this relationship on that between the Prophet and his companions (ashāb).36 For the disciple, the shaykh must be the person he loves and respects most, for he is God’s representative on earth, khalīfat Allāh. Al-Dardīr goes so far as to write that ‘the presence of the shaykh is the very presence of God’ (hadrat al-shaykh hadrat Allāh). This being the case, the master can examine his disciple’s sincerity by putting him to the test, even ordering him to commit acts that run counter to the sharī‘a, such as interrupting his fast or his prayer.37 There are many vivid biographical and autobiographical accounts of this intimate relationship between master and disciple, and in the Turko-Ottoman world the number of these accounts increased noticeably; they took the form of letters sent by disciples to their masters. Sultan Murād III (r. 1574–1595) even requested that the lengthy correspondence he maintained with his shaykh, Sücā’ Dede (d. 1588), be brought together in a single volume.38 The spiritual conduct and social etiquette of the disciple towards his master (ādāb al-shaykh) was subject to very strict rules (usūl), and to break or abandon these was seen as an obstacle to spiritual realisation (wusūl). Al-Samanūdī speaks of the shaykh as a sacred person (hurmat al-shaykh), surrounded by prohibitions that had to be respected inwardly and outwardly by the disciple if he wanted to avoid breaking the pact he had made with his master, and being sent away.39 These rules reinforced the holiness and inviolability of the shaykh as an infallible being (ma‘sūm). The disciple must enter the shaykh’s presence in a state of ritual purity (mutahharan), wearing his most beautiful clothes and having previously asked forgiveness from God for his sins. He must not knock on the door, but make manifest his presence by invoking God aloud and waiting until the shaykh authorises him to enter – in the absence of such authorisation he must leave. Once he is with his shaykh, the disciple must wait to be asked before seating himself, and remain silent with his head bowed, not speaking until his shaykh has invited him to do so. If the disciple is permitted to speak, he must avoid raising his voice and hide nothing of his thoughts, good or bad. By confiding all his thoughts to his shaykh he allows the latter to observe his progress along the path. The disciple must rise when the shaykh does and leave the room only with his permission. In the shaykh’s presence he must not yawn or stretch, still less fall asleep; he may

64  Education lean against something or cross his legs only after having received permission. He must not eat if the shaykh is looking at him. The disciple must behave before his shaykh like the believer (‘abd) before his Lord, expressing submission and veneration; in his relationship with his master he must be guided by love, respect, deference, patience and sincerity. He must never question him, but rather intuit what is expected of him without his master being obliged even to speak, trusting to the signs that he sends him, particularly when they are in the presence of people who are not part of the Sufi community (laysa min ahl al-qawm). Al-Samanūdī used the vocabulary of family origin and ancestry (nisba) to describe the bond uniting the disciple and his shaykh, speaking of filiation, paternity and even of maternity (the shaykh is like a ‘lioness with its cub’). To fail to observe the proper etiquette towards one’s shaykh is not only to deprive oneself of his beneficial influx (baraka) and annihilate one’s progress towards God, but above all to set out on the road to a rupture of the pact. This pact, which is undertaken in a solemn ceremony, is a freely accepted agreement between two people, but it cannot be broken or betrayed by the disciple, who might, as a result, forfeit everything and then die. To speak polemically, to argue with or contradict one’s shaykh, could cause a rupture, for the man who speaks polemically to his shaykh or calls his words into question puts himself on an equal footing with his master; this being the case he must immediately be sent away before he corrupts his fellow disciples. This harm may occur when the disciple sees too much of his master, whom he should meet only in three specific circumstances: during the session that is open to everyone (majlis li-l-‘āmma), during the restricted session for a selected number of participants (majlis li-l-khāssa), and, finally, during his private one-to-one sessions with his master, when the disciple is often reprimanded for his lack of energy (himma) in the path. Several days must pass between these private sessions.40 For the disciple to visit (ziyāra) a shaykh other than his own, or attach himself to another, would also constitute a cause of rupture of the pact and expulsion. At the beginning of his progression the disciple has a ‘narrow’ (dayyiq) heart, and can follow only his own shaykh’s path, praising only his own shaykh. When he has reached the highest degree of spiritual wayfaring, that of the people of perfection (darajat al-kummāl min al-rijāl), and has received the knowledge of the unique source from which all the paths originate (and his initiation is thus complete), then and only then may he visit shaykhs other than his own. The ziyāra might destroy many disciples at the first stage of their progression, their lower soul still being prey to passions; this would lead them to forbidden actions. To visit a shaykh other than one’s own is to be a hypocrite and traitor towards one’s master and one’s entire group (jamā‘a). Although this attachment is described as an absolute obedience to the master, there is nevertheless a mutual gratitude and respect in the pact, too, and all three handbooks insist on this: the master has duties towards his disciples, and spiritual guidance is also the object of an ādāb that must be respected. Al-Samanūdī devotes a chapter to the etiquette that is appropriate for the master towards his disciples (al-shaykh wa ādābihi); in fact, this chapter precedes the one that touches on the behaviour the disciple should observe towards his shaykh.

Education  65 The duties of the master mirror those of the disciple The respect that the disciples have for themselves and for their shaykh must be a reflection of that which the shaykh demonstrates for his own person and for his disciples. The disciples must respect the shaykh’s personal space, and, reciprocally, one of the fundamental rules pertaining to the shaykh is that he must keep a certain distance from his disciples. This means that he must not be always in their company, nor may he eat with them at every meal. If one of them asks to visit the shaykh or share his meal, even if he comes from the same neighbourhood or village, the shaykh must not respond, so as not to rupture his inviolability (hurma) in their eyes.41 Regularity, constancy and moderation are required of the disciples, and they must find an example of these virtues in their shaykh. For example, the disciples are not meant to miss a dhikr session, but the shaykh must also avoid letting a day pass without fulfilling his obligation to guide and teach them. The shaykh must be neither too rigid nor too relaxed with his disciples; he must address them with goodwill while respecting each man’s age and rank in spiritual progress: he will use the respectful term ‘lord’ or ‘uncle’ (sayyidī, ‘ammī) when speaking to someone, even a disciple, who is older than he. He will address people of his own generation as ‘brother’ or ‘my dear friend’ (yā ākhī, yā habībī), and use ‘son’ (yā waladī) as a term of paternal affection for a young disciple. He must watch his language and avoid offence, insults or blasphemy. The disciple’s duty is to serve his master, but the master must not treat his servant with contempt: he should greet his disciple affably, kiss the head of the one who kisses his hand, invite him to retire without waiting for the disciple to ask his permission. The shaykh must maintain impeccable manners and a neat appearance before his disciple, wearing clean clothes and scent. In the company of his disciples, he should adopt a dignified and serene attitude, cover his head and avoid fidgeting, playing with his beard or clothing, falling asleep, stretching out his legs, or staring at one or the other among his disciples. Instead he must keep his gaze lowered and not rush to reply to their questions. If the disciples are too talkative, he should remain silent or else stand up. If one of them is absent he must find out the reasons for this, showing understanding and compassion without being irritable, for in truth the disciples see only right, goodness, science, forgiveness and proper manners (ādāb) in their shaykh. Becoming part of a community: respectful interaction with companions in the path The suhba, companionship, is essentially based on the relationship that unites the disciple and his master, whereas ikhwa, brotherhood, is a more specific evocation of the relationship between brothers in the path. All Sufi handbooks underline the importance of the rules for living with one’s companions, and the necessity of maintaining a group solidarity in which the behaviour of each contributes to the spiritual progress of all. This progress is at once individual and collective, and the path itself is also an ideal of community in which each knows his place and

66  Education knows how to behave towards others at every moment and stage of this journey. Al-Samanūdī devotes a long chapter to this ādāb with one’s brothers (fī bayān ādāb al-murīd ma‘a ikhwānihi).42 The disciple must love his brothers in God’s name and avoid scrutinising their faults in order not to fall into error himself; if such a thing were to happen to him, he would want his brothers to be merciful and compassionate towards him. Thus he must wish the best for them and for himself, guide them, remind them of the hours for ritual and supererogatory prayers with gentleness and goodwill; he must never consider that his religious fervour is superior to their laziness. He must not put himself higher than his brothers, nor want to govern them (rī’āsa). He must forgive them inwardly and outwardly without bitterness for any harm they may have caused him. He must serve them, and forgive them if they show no gratitude, remaining deaf to any calumnies and lies that circulate among them; he must set an example by being assiduous in his observation of dhikr sessions. Each disciple must guide his brothers towards respect of Islamic law and custom. He need not be more educated than they; the fact that he is close to them before God is often forgotten. He should always show his willingness to perform the tiresome tasks of daily life, such as carrying wood, and also the tasks that prepare him for the hereafter, such as remaining wakeful all night. He must avoid tyrannical and oppressive behaviour towards his brothers, and encourage them to do likewise. He must visit his brothers when they fall ill, and take care of them, especially at night if they are alone, helping them financially if they are in need and remembering them in his prayers (du‘ā’), begging for divine pardon and mercy for them as often as he can, both day and night. The disciple who wants to ask forgiveness of his brother whom he has offended must do so as follows: he must stand upright, uncover his head, place his right hand over his left, express his repentance and remain in this position until God takes him into his mercy. On his part, the offended brother must accept the apology offered. Maintaining their ties of friendship is very important for brothers who live together in one place. In the service of the master and the companions: the nuqabā’ There is a hierarchy within the group of companions that simply reflects the degree of progress that each disciple has made along the spiritual path; this often relates to the number of years that each disciple has been serving their shaykh and thus to the intimacy of the relationship each disciple has with their master. The servants of the master and his companions live permanently in the zāwiya. Al-Samanūdī describes them as the ones who aid and assist the shaykh (mu‘āwinīn al-shaykh), comparing them to the Ansār, the ‘companions of the first hour’ who protected and helped the Prophet. He adds that four nuqabā’ are sufficient for the zāwiya to function; the role of each of these is defined by precise rules drawn directly from medieval treatises, reminiscent of those spoken of by Ghazalī and Suhrawardī.43 At the bottom hierarchically, but the most spiritually elevated, is the one who takes responsibility for sandals (naqīb al-ni‘āl). He cleans, maintains and puts away the sandals according to the rank (rutba) of the wearer, without making

Education  67 mistakes as to which pair is whose. He must perform his task for God and in all humility. Above him is the brother responsible for transporting and distributing water (sāqī al-mā’). He is in charge of cleaning the pitchers and goblets. He must obey strict rules of hygiene, keeping his hands and clothes clean, not blowing his nose or spitting while distributing water, and refusing water to no one, not even people who are not part of the community of brothers. When he distributes water, he must begin with the person sitting to the master’s right and end with the one who sits to his left. He must know the etiquette of drinking (ādāb al-shurb) in order to teach it to the others, such as always being seated while drinking, taking the pitcher in the right hand and swallowing three mouthfuls only, breathing between them and remembering each time to recite the basmala and the hamdala (‘In the Name of God’ and ‘Praise to God’). The water must be distributed before the dhikr session begins – never during or after the session, for water extinguishes the warmth of God’s love – as well as at the end of each meal and after the reading of the Fātiha. Finally, the person responsible for water is charged with washing the disciples’ clothes without feeling resentment or balking at the task. As for the brother who is responsible for the table, he must be capable, energetic, clean, virtuous, a good cook and a model of scrupulousness and ascesis (wari‘an wa zāhidan). When he is serving the meal he must recite the Fātiha, requesting divine permission inwardly for this meal, and its blessing, according to an established formula.44 He then lays the plate on the table, according to a prearranged order, assisted by the water carrier (as the two tasks are closely related), all the while reciting the surah al-Ikhlās (Sincere religion, Quran 112), which dispels demons. During the meal he must remain standing and ready to serve his brothers, while reciting inwardly the Quraysh surah (Quran 106) as a guard against any abdominal trouble related to food. At the end of the meal he will gather the leftovers and share them with the water carrier. When he is clearing the table, he must thank God for this meal, wishing for it to bring strength and health, light and purity to those who have partaken of it. He must always ensure that enough food remains for any visitors that may pass and after having served such visitors he must not let them eat alone, but sit with them and keep them company. He must not touch the prepared food before serving it (except if he needs to taste it), and not show favouritism, which would betray his engagement on the path and warrant his dismissal. If someone brings a gift to the zāwiya he must not keep it for himself but give it to the master who will dispose of it as he thinks best. He must, of course, know about good table manners and be able to teach the many nuances of these to the novices; for example, the obligation to remain on one’s knees or extend the right leg only, to take small bites and chew them well and slowly, to avoid blowing one’s nose or spitting during the meal, to turn the face away if the need to sneeze or cough becomes irresistible, not to return food that has been in one’s mouth to the serving-dish, neither leaning over nor stretching at the table, not to put meat or cheese into one’s bread, not to tear off pieces of bread with one’s teeth, to take just the right amount of food, neither too little nor too much, to wait until one has received permission before starting to eat, to throw nothing on the ground (such as watermelon rinds, which must be placed in front of oneself), to eat with three

68  Education fingers only, and, finally, to begin one’s meal by taking a bit of salt, if there is any – this custom was supposed to ward off disease. At the top of the hierarchy, the naqīb al-nuqabā’ (chief intendant) is the depository of the shaykh’s secret. It is through him that one accedes to the shaykh (mahall sirr al-shaykh wa bābuhu), and he represents the shaykh in his absence. He also leads the novices into the shaykh’s presence to perform the pact and stands in for him at dhikr sessions. Al-Dardīr describes him as a mature and experienced man, and therefore as one who has reached a certain age. He must be of good character (husn al-khuluq) with a conciliatory nature, perfectly honest, and set an example for others by showing great spiritual energy. When a brother is absent the naqīb al-nuqabā’ must ask after him, and the brothers must respect him and obey his orders, even if they are older than he.45 His role is often that of a supervisor and intendant. For al-Samanūdī, the naqīb al-nuqabā’ must be learned, knowledgeable about the path and its rules, making sure the disciples respect them – especially those having to do with their behaviour towards the master and those relating to dhikr sessions. He must be able to address each disciple at his level, and speak to him softly, without ever raising his voice, joking with him or staring at him. If the disciple needs information about how the zāwiya operates, he must not ask the shaykh, but address his questions to his naqīb. He will, however, speak directly to the shaykh about his dreams, inspirations or visions, but for this he will need to wait until the master has retired into his private space. The naqīb al-nuqabā’ is also called naqīb al-hadra or naqīb al-jamā‘a, as he is responsible for the organisation and the smooth running of the dhikr sessions (hadra). The rules of invocation: the dhikr ‘The path of the Sufis is a cloth in which the warp is the ādāb and the weft is the dhikr, both are indispensible in its creation,’ wrote Ahmad al-Dardīr, who made the collective and individual remembrance of God the central subject of his handbook, Tuhfat al-ikhwān.46 For him, as for many other Sufis, the first duty of the novice is to learn and know precisely the words, methods and times of invocation. In its format as in its style and contents, al-Dardīr’s handbook was innovative. It does not devote much space to the scriptural and theological foundations of the dhikr as discovered by Sufis in the sacred texts of Islam and explained in the numerous works to which al-Dardīr refers his readers. He does not have space to go into this, for his treatise is presented as a twenty-six–page opuscule; Al-Dardīr was a master of this style of writing, having composed several other celebrated concise handbooks (mukhtasar) on theology, which were studied at al-Azhar. Al-Dardīr himself made clear that his treatise, which was an abridgment, must absolutely be accompanied by complementary reading: among other texts, two books by the Egyptian Sufi ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī, Lawāqih al-anwār al-qudsiyya (The Fertile Holy Lights) and Latā’if al-Minan wa-l-akhlāq (The Subtle Blessings and Virtues), all those of Sayyid Mustafā al-Bakrī, Ghazālī’s Ihyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn and its abridged version (Kashf al-qulūb), the Hikam (The Book of Wisdom) of Ibn ‘Atā’ Allāh as well as his Tanwīr fī isqāt al-tadbīr (Enlightenment by the Suppression of the Individual Will), Qushayrī’s

Education  69 Risāla (Epistle) and, finally, the Sayr wa-l-sulūk, the only text for which al-Dardīr did not give the author’s name, which leads us to believe that in his circles it was already considered a classic. Which litany is appropriate at which time of day? How does one pronounce the Names of God with the correct intonation during the dhikr? Such themes predominate in the Tuhfat al-ikhwān. This in itself is nothing new, they are common in many of the oldest Sufi handbooks; the novelty resides in the extent of the codification adopted by al-Dardīr when describing the ādāb of invocation, something that he took much further than any Sufi handbook from earlier periods. His aim was to give his Sufi path, the Khalwatiyya, its own ritual practices, its own corpus of prayers and litanies with specifications as to the times and forms of their recitation, making a distinction between the individual and the collective dhikr. In the Modern Period, the different forms of dhikr became the principle distinguishing feature of the various paths. When he founded the tarīqa ‘Aydarūsiyya, ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-‘Aydarus wrote a treatise on the performance of dhikr proper to his path.47 For al-Sanūsī, only the methods of transmission of the dhikr differentiate the paths from one another, and he always cites these methods as he introduces each of the forty Sufi paths that feature in his treatise, al-Salsabil al-ma‘īn. When he laid down the foundations of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt, al-Bakrī made no changes to the path, but rather transformed the practice of the dhikr by including within it prayers and litanies that he had written: he was the author of at least sixty of these, among them the wird al-Sahar (‘A litany just before dawn,’ also called al-Fath al-qudsī because it was composed while al-Bakrī was in Jerusalem), which was to be recited at the end of the night. This wird contains Quranic verses, a request for God’s forgiveness (repeated seventy times) and a prayer offered to God in order to reach spiritual realisation and selfannihilation in the Unicity: Allāhumma! (O my God!) You have opened the hearts of the elect, and You have liberated them from the prison of the body. Free their interior senses from the tendency to look at things other than You. Annihilate us so that we no longer perceive ourselves, so that we may testify only to Your grandeur. Allāhumma! We have come to You imploring You to accept us; we beg forgiveness for our sins. Allāhumma! Refuse not Your forgiveness. Your honour suffices for us because we are the servants of the most High and the servants of Your illustrious and exalted Being. Allāhumma! We do not want to turn away from You, because we shall never find any other than You, and so wherefore would we turn away from You?48 Al-Bakrī made the recitation of Yahyā al-Bakūwī’s wird al-Sattār the pivot of the ritual; it was to be recited aloud by a single person while those present listened silently. This wird consists mostly of the recitation of the ‘beautiful Names of God,’ beginning with: ‘Yā Sattār, yā Sattār, yā ‘Azīz, yā Ghaffār (O Protector, O Protector, O Powerful One, O most Clement One)

70  Education After having briefly described the rules to be observed by Sufis in general (bi-tarīq al-qawm ‘alā al-‘umūm) before, during and after the dhikr session, al-Dardīr presents ‘the dhikr as it is practised in our path (tarīqatunā), according to the method of the masters of the Khalwatiyya (tarīq al-sāda al-Khalwatiyya), and the recitation of the awrād during collective gatherings.’ For all Sufi paths, the awrād are litanies and supererogatory prayers to be recited at specific times of the day or night, daily and in addition to the five ritual prayers. These awrād are formed from various surahs of the Quran, from the plea for God’s forgiveness (istighfār), from the prayer of benediction on the Prophet (tasliya), and from the praise of God (tasbīh, takbīr). They are taught to the disciple when he makes the pact, and each Sufi path has its specific awrād. In Tuhfat al-ikhwān, the litanies continue through the day without interruption, taking their timing from the five canonic prayers that start at dawn (fajr) and end at sunset (maghrib). Al-Dardīr himself wrote a collection of litanies that are still in use today at the collective dhikr sessions of branches of the Khalwatiyya that trace their lineages through him: the Salawāt al-Dardīr, the Musabba‘āt and his Manzūma fī asmā’ Allāh al-husnā (a didactic poem on the beautiful Names of God).49 Ahmad al-Sawī, disciple and khalīfa of al-Dardīr, wrote a commentary on the Musabba‘āt, claiming that they can be traced back to the prophet al-Khadīr (or al-Khidr), who had taught them to Moses.50 In the Quran, al-Khadīr initiated Moses, and their relationship is considered by Sufis to be an archetype of that between master and disciple. In addition, al-Khadīr is often presented in hagiographical writings as the initiator of the greatest saints, and, more specifically, of the founders of Sufi brotherhoods. 51 These Musabba‘āt consist of short surahs and verses from the Quran, invocations, and blessings on the Prophet, each of which is to be recited seven times. They begin with a recitation of the Fātiha (seven times), followed by the surahs Mankind (seven times), The Dawn (seven times), The Pure Religion (seven times) and The Disbelievers (seven times). These are followed by the verse of the Throne, Ayat al-Kursī (from The Cow surah, also seven times) and then by praising God, ‘Glory and praises to God, there is no god but God, God is the most high, there is no strength or power except in God the Most High, the Inaccessible’ (seven times), after which comes the Abrahamic prayer, al-Salāt al-Ibrāhīmiyya: ‘O my God! Pray upon Your servant Muhammad and Your messenger as You have prayed upon Abraham. Bless Muhammad and the family of Muhammad as You have blessed Abraham and the family of Abraham’ (seven times), followed by the plea for God’s forgiveness (istighfār), ‘O my God! Forgive us, and forgive our families, all believers and all Muslims, living and dead’ (seven times); the Musabba‘āt draws to a close with a recitation of two of the Names of God, al-Jabbār (the Dominant One) and al-Mutakabbir (the Immense One) (twenty-one times). The Salāwāt dardīriyya generally contain prayers for divine protection against trials and suffering, both physical and mental, in life here below and in the afterlife. They all begin with the words ‘My God, I seek refuge in You’: My God, I seek refuge in You from the instigations of demons, I seek refuge in You, my God, from their presence. Allāhumma! I seek refuge in You from

Education  71 powerlessness and laziness, I seek refuge in You from cowardice and avarice, I seek refuge in You from the weight of debts and tyranny (three times). Allāhumma ! I seek refuge in You from misery and burdens, I seek refuge in You from all misfortune, I seek refuge in You from any poverty but that which leads to You, from humiliation unless it is for You, from fear except fear of You. These invocations are followed by prayers of blessing on the Prophet and close on a recitation of al-Dardīr’s poem on the beautiful Names of God. In addition to these prayers there are also the Salāt al-mashīshiyya and the tasliya, and the recitation, morning and evening, of the Hizb al-Nawawī. This Hizb, which, like al-Dardīr’s Salāwāt, was the subject of a commentary by Mustafā al-Bakrī, contains prayers of supplication appropriate for all of life’s circumstances.52 As for the Salāt al-Mashīshiyya, on which Ahmad al-Sāwī wrote a commentary, it is a prayer of blessing on the Prophet as the pre-eternal reality and the first individuation (haqīqa muhammadiyya), and a request for spiritual realisation and mystical union through his intercession and his presence (a translation of this prayer into English is given in Chapter  3). When he is starting out, the novice may have trouble remembering all these prayers and litanies, which would explain why these collections of prayers, often called majmū’ awrād, were among the earliest texts to be printed: the nineteenth-century Khalwatī shaykh of Upper Egypt, Ahmad Sharqāwī, asked his disciple, Hasanayn Makhlūf, to prepare for publication a volume of prayers and litanies composed by the masters of the path; this was printed in 1890 under the title Awrād al-sāda al-khalwatiyya (nowadays, these booklets are kept in little cupboards with the Qurans, and distributed to disciples at the beginning of dhikr sessions).53 Whereas for Khānī the dhikr was an individual practice undertaken during solitary retreat in order to subdue one’s animal soul, al-Dardīr emphasised the collective dhikr (dhikr al-jamā‘a) in the presence of a responsible leader, the naqīb al-jamā‘a, and of a singer of Sufi poetry (munshid), but without accompaniment by musical instruments. The dhikr sessions could take place at any time during the week, but larger and longer assemblies took place on the nights preceding Fridays and Tuesdays: al-Samanūdī placed great emphasis on the importance of assiduity and punctuality for people attending these sessions, just as would be expected of those coming to Friday prayers and to the lessons providing religious instruction and education (majlis al-‘ilm wa-l-adab). If a disciple arrived late, he was expected to join a group discreetly, without disturbing them, and not to be the first to leave once the session was finished, for this would preclude him from enjoying the positive after-effects of the dhikr, as well as weakening his ardour for these practices. The disciples were enjoined to prepare for the dhikr by eating and drinking less than usual beforehand, in order to avoid bowel movements during the session (which would entail performing one’s ablutions afresh); this recommendation was especially important in the case of the long Friday dhikr, which came just after the congregational prayer and was followed immediately by the canonical afternoon prayer. It was understood that the disciple would not

72  Education leave a dhikr session as long as his shaykh was still present unless he had received authorisation from the latter to do so. Collective dhikr sessions played an important role in the Sufi path, strengthening the spiritual energy of the disciples, an energy that could be passed to those who might have less. It was the duty of the disciple gently to encourage his brothers to join in the dhikr with his companions (fuqarā’) in the morning and the evening; a disciple who missed dhikr sessions could be expelled by his master.54 Muslim travellers, keen and intrigued observers of the religious practices elsewhere in the Dār al-islām, brought back lively accounts of dhikr sessions they had witnessed. The Maghrebi Muhammad al-Tayyib al-Qādirī, author of the Nashr al-Mathānī, spent time in Cairo and attended a dhikr session at Shaykh al-Hifnī’s home: ‘Shaykh al-Hifnī practised the samā’ (listening to music and poetry), he asked his companions (ashābihi) to gather around him according to a precise plan (bi-hay’at makhsūsa) and to utter al-haylala (lā ilah illa Allāh). Some of them were swaying from right to left and dancing; they recited verses by Ibn Farīd, al-Shushtarī, al-Bur‘ī and other similar poets.’55 These observations are upheld, with a few slight modifications, by another Maghrebi, Sulayman al-Hawwāt: ‘God is called by his Names, [they are] seated and standing, moving by swaying their bodies up and down in a sort of ecstasy. The companions surround Shaykh al-Hifnī and sing verses by Ibn Farīd, al-Shustarī, al-Murādī and other poets, lovers of God (ahl al-mahabba); the singing reinforces their energies, and the majlis of the shaykh reflects the inner submission in the hearts of the disciples and their elevation to the station of mutamakkinīn (those who master spiritual states).’56 Thus we know that Shaykh al-Hifnī practised the samā’, a spiritual audition of sung poems that brings about a higher spiritual state in all those present, and that during these sessions there was no distinction between the dhikr and the samā’, with the latter introducing and accompanying the former. As concerns spiritual initiation, Maghrebi observers underlined the effect of the master’s presence and the way in which energies were communicated to every participant during the dhikr. The divine presence that descended upon the gathering passed through the spiritual influx (madad) of the Prophet and of the masters of the path, who were invoked at the end of the session. Poetry took pride of place, especially that of the ‘Sultan of lovers (of God),’ Ibn Farīd (d. 1335), of al-Shushtarī (d. 1269), an Andalusian mystical poet, and of al-Bur‘ī (d. 1400), a Yemeni Sufi who was known for his panegyrics on the Prophet. The Sufi handbooks that we have presented here were not only guides for the people for whom they were written, aspirants on the path towards God; since the time of the very first treatises of this kind, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but they also had the ideal aim of providing a source of advice on individual conduct and social etiquette for all Muslims, helping them emulate the exemplary behaviour of the Prophet and his companions as reported in the hadīths, and in perfect harmony with Quranic precepts. One must not look for originality and novelty in these later writings that were seeking to transmit teachings formalised in preceding centuries. As for the question of the uses to which these handbooks were put, it is one to which a full reply is difficult, at least in the quantitative sense. The

Education  73 increase in the numbers and reach of Sufi handbooks during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries naturally ran alongside that of manuscript books in general, and was linked to the social and economic conditions brought to light by Nelly Hanna. This increase was also part of the movement towards literacy supported by the kuttāb (Islamic elementary school), zāwiya and mosques that were multiplying in Cairo as in the provinces, as we have shown for the town of Jirjā in the previous chapter.57 This expansion of instruction bred a greater interest in books in both the religious and secular domains: the improvements in standards of living and education among the middle classes brought with them a new desire for books on social etiquette in high society (that is to say, the Egyptian aristocracy).58 As with the other sciences of Islam, in which books were traditionally read aloud by the master to his students, knowledge in Sufism was transmitted orally and by the emulation of the master. Access to actual books was a delicate question for many Sufis, who chose not to put their science into writing, as exemplified in the celebrated case of Abū l-Hasan al-Shādhilī, for whom his disciples were his books. During the period that concerns us, an important Sufi such as Nābulusī was able to express his belief that the book could replace the master, something that was also suggested by Khānī; both men incited disciples to obtain direct access to books, without any mediation by masters. Al-Dardīr also encouraged disciples to read, when he wrote that it was essential for novices to read Sufi books that dealt with ādāb – for him, as a professional teacher, a book was made to be read, and his own were written for his disciples who were sometimes also his students. Nevertheless, some books were considered inappropriate for beginners. Authors would then create works of popularisation in order to make sometimes-hermetic doctrines easier to understand, following the example of Sha‘rānī, whose writings on the œuvre of Ibn ‘Arabī coincided with a period during which the Sufi paths were increasingly opening up to larger numbers of aspirants. In the next chapter we show how integration of the Arab lands into the Ottoman Empire would effectively facilitate the diffusion to a wider audience of complex notions on walāya (proximity to God, hence sainthood) and on the reality or essence of the Prophet (haqīqa muhammadiyya) as a Light that was present throughout eternity; these notions had been developed by earlier masters and then elaborated by Ibn ‘Arabī.

Notes 1 Gril, D., ‘Le modèle prophétique du maître spirituel en Islam’, in Filoramo, G. (ed.), Maestro e discepolo. Temi e problemo della direzione spirituale tra VI secolo a.C. e VII secolo d.C., Brescia, Centro di Alti Studi in Scienze Religiose di Piacenza, 2002, pp. 345–360. Denis Gril’s analysis echoes an article by Michel Chodkiewicz on the same theme; Chodkiewicz, M., ‘Le modèle prophétique de la sainteté en Islam’, AlMasaq 7 (1994), pp. 201–226. 2 Chih, R., ‘What Is a Sufi Order? Revisiting the Concept through the Case-Study of the Khalwatiyya in Contemporary Egypt’, in Van Bruinessen, M. and Howell, J. (eds.), Sufism and the Modern in Islam, London, Tauris, 2007, pp. 21–38; Geoffroy, É., ‘Tarīqa’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, volume X, pp. 243–246; Papas, A., ‘No Sufism Without Sufi Order: Rethinking Tarīqa and Adab with Ahmad Kāsānī Dahbidī (1461–1542)’, Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies 2–1 (2008), pp. 4–22.

74  Education 3 Radtke, B., ‘Sufism in the Eighteenth Century: An Attempt at a Provisional Appraisal’, Die Welt des Islams 36/3 (1996), pp. 326–364. 4 Knysh, A. (trans.), Al-Qushayri's Epistle on Sufism: Al-Risala al-qushayriyya fi ‘ilm al-tasawwuf, Reading, Garnet Publishing, 2007. 5 Ohlander, E., Sufism in an Age of Transition: ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī and the Rise of the Islamic Mystical Brotherhoods, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2008. 6 Al-Sha‘rānī, ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, al-Anwār al-qudsiyya fī ma‘rifa qawā‘id al-Sūfiyya, Cairo, Maktaba al-‘ilmiyya, 1962. 7 Hanna, N., In Praise of Books. 8 Brockelmann, C., Geschichte des Arabischen Literatur (GAL), II: 344; S. II: 472. There are numerous manuscript copies of Khānī’s treatise in orientalist libraries; we have used two editions, those of Ibrāhim Shams al-dīn and Sa‘īd ‘Abd al-Fattāh. This latter is based on the manuscript of the University of Cairo (tasawwuf 15511) dating from 1118h, shortly after the death of Khānī. Al-Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wal-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk, edited and annotated by Ibrāhīm Shams al-dīn, Beirut, Dār al-kutūb al-‘ilmiyya, 2005; edited and annotated by Sa‘īd ‘Abd al-Fattāh, Cairo, Maktaba al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 2008. Al-Samanūdī, Tuḥfat al-sālikīn wa dalā’il al-sā’irīn li-manhaj al-muqarrabīn, Cairo, Maktaba al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 2008 (new edition, Beirut, Dār Sādir, 2009). Al-Dardīr, Tuhfat al-ikhwān fī ādāb ahl al-‘irfān, Beirut, Dār al-hadīth al-Kattāniyya, 2011. 9 ‘Abd al-Hāfiz, ‘Alī, Hidāyat al-rāghibīn fī-l-sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk rabb al-ʿālamayn, Cairo, ‘Īsā al-Halabī, 1343/1925; ‘Abd al-Hāfiz, ‘Alī, Luqtat al-ʿajlān wa tuhfat al-ikhwān, Cairo, Al-Hamīdiyya press, 1923/1905; Sharqāwī, Ahmad, Shams al-tahqīq wa ʿurwat ahl al-tawfīq, followed by Nasīhat al-dhākirīn wa-irghām al-mutakabbirīn, Cairo, Al-Maktaba al-khayriyya, 1307/1889; cf: Chih, R., ‘Reform and Diffusion of Sufism in Egypt at the End of the 19th Century’; Soler, R., ‘Transmission and Practice in Sufi adab of the Ḥāfiẓiyya Khalwatiyya, a Sufi brotherhood of Middle-Egypt (19th  – 20th Century)’, in Chiabotti, F., Feuillebois-Pierunek, E., Mayeur-Jaouen, C. and Patrizi, L. (eds.), Ethics and Spirituality in Islam. Sufi Adab, Leiden, Brill, 2017, pp. 649–668. 10 Hofheinz, A., Internalising Islam: Shaykh Muḥammad Majdhūb, Scriptural Islam, and Local Context in the Early Nineteenth Century Sudan, PhD thesis, University of Bergen, 1996, p. 336. (folk.uio.no/albrech/Hofheinz-Internalising-Islam-dr.philos.version.pdf)‎. 11 Brockelmann, Geschichte des Arabischen Literatur (GAL), II: 353, S. II: 479. Al-Bakrī, Mustafā, Bulghat al-murīd wa mushtahā al-muwaffaq al-sa‘īd fī ādāb al-tarīq, Cairo, Dār al-kutub, tasawwuf 799. Al-Bakrī’s son, Muhammad Kamāl al-Dīn al-Bakrī, wrote a commentary that is as well-known as his father’s poem, Al-Jawhar al-farīd hall Bulghat al-murīd wa mushtahā al-muwaffaq al-saʿīd fī ādāb al-tarīq, Cairo, Dār al-kutub, tasawwuf 60. 12 Al-Murādī, Muhammad, Silk al-durar, IV, p.  24; Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’. 13 Cf. Chodkiewicz, M., ‘Note complémentaire sur les rites d’initiation dans les turuq’, in Addas, C. (ed.), ‘À la distance de deux arcs ou plus près’. La figure du Prophète chez ‘Abd al-Karīm Jīlī (self-published), 2008, p. 48, note 4. 14 Al-‘Ayyāshī, Abū Sālim ‘Abd Allāh, Rihla, 2, p. 218. 15 Radtke, B., ‘Sufism in the 18th Century: An Attempt at a Provisional Appraisal’, Die Welt des Islams, 36, 3 (1996), pp. 326–364; Giordani, D., ‘Le metamorfosi dell'anima e gli stadi della via spirituale: considerazioni intorno a “Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malikil-mulūk” dello “shaykh” Qāsim ibn Salāh al-Dīn al-Khānī di Aleppo (1619–1697)’, Divus Thomas (Rivista quadrimestrielle dello studio filosofico) 48, 3 (September– December 2007), pp. 117–134. 16 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 27.

Education  75 17 Geoffroy, É., ‘La seconde vague: fin XIIIe-XVe siècle’, in Popovic, A. and Veinstein, G. (eds.), Les voies d’Allah. Les ordres mystiques dans le monde musulman des origines à aujourd’hui, Paris, Fayard, 1996, p. 62. 18 Giordani, D., ‘Le metamorfosi dell'anima e gli stadi della via spirituale’. 19 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 105. 20 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 138. 21 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 155. 22 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 29. 23 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, introduction. 24 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 25; Giordani, D., ‘Le metamorfosi dell'anima e gli stadi della via spirituale’. 25 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 80. 26 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 123. 27 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 137. 28 Al-Samanūdī, Muhammad, Tuhfat al-sālikīn wa dalā’il al-sā’irīn li-manhaj al-muqarrabīn, Cairo, Maktaba al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 2008 (new edition, Beirut, Dār Sādir, 2009), p. 130; Geoffroy, É., ‘Tarīqa’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. IX, pp. 262–265; Ohlander, E. S., ‘Adab in Sūfism’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 3, fasc. 2009– 1, pp. 40–43. 29 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, II, 94. 30 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 294. 31 Al-Sharqāwī, ‘Abd Allāh, Sharh hikam al-kurdiyya, p. 17. 32 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p.  52; Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 289. 33 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Tuhfat al-ikhwān, p. 22. 34 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Tuhfat al-ikhwān, p. 23. 35 Vajda, G., La transmission du savoir en islam (VIIe-XVIIIe siècles), London, Variorum Reprints, 1983. 36 Gril, D., ‘Le modèle prophétique du maître spirituel en Islam’, pp. 345–360. 37 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Tuhfat al-ikhwān, p. 5; Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’, p. 25. 38 Curry, J., ‘ “The Meeting of the Two Sultans”: Three Sufi Mystics Negotiate with the Court of Murād III’, in Curry, J. and Ohlander, E. (eds.), Sufism and Society: Arrangements of the Mystical in the Muslim World, 1200–1800, London, Routledge, 2011, p. 226. 39 Al-Samanūdī, Muhammad, Tuhfat al-sālikīn, p. 107. 40 Al-Samanūdī, Muhammad, Tuhfat al-sālikīn, p. 122. 41 Al-Samanūdī, Muhammad, Tuhfat al-sālikīn, p. 100. 42 Al-Samanūdī, Muhammad, Tuhfat al-sālikīn, pp. 125–136. 43 Feuillebois-Pierunek, Eve, ‘La maîtrise du corps d’après les manuels de soufisme (Xe-XIVe siècles)’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 113–114 (2006), pp. 91–107. 44 Al-Samanūdī, Muhammad, Tuhfat al-sālikīn, p. 153. 45 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Tuhfat al-ikhwān, p. 19. 46 Al-Dardīr, Ahmad, Tuhfat al-ikhwān, p. 9; Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’, p. 29. 47 Peskes, E., ‘Sainthood Patrimony: ‘Abd Allāh al-‘Aydarūs (d. 1461) and his Descendants’, in Mayeur-Jaouen, C. and Papas, A. (eds.), Family Portraits with Saints, Berlin, Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2014, p. 150. 48 Al-Bakrī, Mustafā, Majmū’ awrād, Cairo, Matba‘a al-taqaddum al-‘ilmiyya, 1348h/1929; Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’, p. 9. 49 The Manzūma was translated into French by Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’, p. 65.

76  Education 50 Al-Sāwī, Ahmad, al-Asrār al-rabbāniyya wa-l-fuyūdāt al-rahmāniyya ‘alā al-salawāt al-dardīriyya, Cairo, Matba‘at al-Maymuniyya, n.d., p. 4. 51 Gril, D., ‘La Voie’, in Popovic, A. and Veinstein, G. (eds.), Les voies d’Allah. p. 87. 52 Al-Nawawī (d. 1277) is best known for his commentary on the Forty hadīth (al-Arba‘īn) and his collection of hadīth on spiritual life, Riyād al-Sālihīn. 53 Sarkīs, Yūsuf, Mu‘jam al-matbū‘āt al-‘arabiyya, Cairo, Wizārat al-tarbiyya wa-lta‘līm, 1958, vol. 1, p. 648. 54 Al-Samanūdī, Muhammad, Tuhfat al-sālikīn, p. 145. 55 The Nashr al-mathānī li-ahl al-qarn al-hādī ‘ashar wa-l-thānī is a biographical work and a chronicle of events that affected Morocco during the eighteenth century. AlTayyib al-Qādirī, Muhammad, Nashr al-mathānī li-ahl al-qarn al-hādī ‘ashar wa-lthānī, tahqīq Muhammad Hajjī wa Ahmad Tawfīq, Rabat, Maktaba al-tālib, 1986, vol 4, p. 182 (English translation, The Chronicles, edited by Cigar, Norman, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981) cf; Ouarith, A., ‘al-Tawāsul al-sūfī bayna Misr wa-lMaghrib’, p. 91. 56 Al-Hawwāt, Sulayman, Al-Fawada al-maqsūda, cited by Ouarith, A. ‘al-Tawāsul al-sūfī bayna Misr wa-l-Maghrib’, p. 92. 57 El-Morsy, T., Les zāwiyas au Caire des origines à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, PhD thesis, Aix Marseille University, 2008. 58 Hanna, N., In Praise of Books, p. 55.

3 The Muhammadan path (tarīqa Muhammadiyya) and Sufi renewal

Historians of Sufism have observed a cluster of associated phenomena in the Islamic world, starting at the end of the fifteenth century and carrying on through the sixteenth; these provide evidence of an evolution towards a greater social visibility of veneration for the person of the Prophet Muhammad. This occurred in the ancient genres of literature on the Prophet, among them the Dalā’il alnubuwwa (The proofs of the prophecy) and the Khasā’is al-nabawiyya (The characteristics of the Prophet), which underwent a genuine renewal during this period, especially in Egypt with authors such as al-‘Asqallanī (d. 1449) and Suyūtī (d. 1505).1 These works, aiming to determine the characteristics that distinguished the prophet Muhammad from his community (umma) and from the other prophets, displayed an increasing tendency to emphasise, and give more attention to, the miracles (mu‘gizāt), virtues (shamā’il) and divine origin of the Prophet, and to the devotion due to him. Progressively greater numbers of collections of prayers on the Prophet, and panegyrics on his birth (mawlid), appeared, with the Dalā’il al-Khayrāt, by the Moroccan al-Jazūlī (d. 1465) and the Mawlid by the Medinese al-Barzanjī (d. 1764) among those that achieved international success.2 The notion of a ‘Muhammadan path’ (tarīqa muhammadiyya) emerged in scholarly circles, among both Sufis and non-Sufis, relating either to a return to the model of the Prophet or to a direct attachment to his person as a path to sainthood. The Sufi paths began to integrate the recitation of prayers of blessing upon the Prophet, composed by the Sufi masters, into their dhikr sessions, particularly the Salāt al-mashīshiyya, which was attributed to the Moroccan mystic ‘Abd al-Salām b. Mashīsh. There was nothing new doctrinally in these themes, which had been developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, fully elaborated by Ibn ‘Arabī and then diffused by those who followed him; rather, new and favourable contexts evolved, allowing these references  – to the Prophet as primordial and cosmic reality (haqīqa muhammadiyya), as the light that gave birth to the world (nūr muhammadī), as a perfect being (insān kāmil) who brings together in his person divine realities and human qualities – to spread beyond scholarly circles and become anchored in society, institutionalised and normalised. During the Modern Period this context was provided by a new geographical expansion of Sufism, and this was probably the time when it permeated society most completely,

78  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal encouraged by sultans and emperors. In Morocco, the birth of the Sharifian state during the sixteenth century, in the context of the reconquest of Christianoccupied territories, gave a new social, political and cultural importance to the Prophet and his descendants, among whom the holy families of the large zāwiyas, as well as the Sultan, counted themselves. Scholars and mystics played a central role in the transmission of prayers intended to sustain devotion to the Prophet, among them the famous Dalā’il al-Khayrāt.3 From 1516, Ottoman Sultans, presenting themselves as protectors of the Holy Cities, put the Prophet at the centre of religious life and encouraged the various forms of veneration of his person, particularly by developing the celebration of the mawlid in the court. They commissioned vast Prophetic epics, such as the Siyar-i nabi (Life of the Prophet), which was composed for Murad III in 1594–1595 and contained more than 800 miniatures, many of which featured the Prophet. Richly illuminated copies of the En‘am-i Sherif were executed by famous calligraphers at the request of powerful members of the Sultan’s entourage; this text had long been one of the most popular collections of prayers in the Ottoman Turkish world; the oldest known illustrated copy of it dates back to the middle of the eighteenth century. These contained representations of the Holy Cities and images relating to the figure of mercy and to the eschatological role of the Prophet: his mantle and the banner of praise (liwā al-hamd) under which, according to a hadīth transmitted by Tirmidhī and Ibn Maja, the Prophet will bring together all his people on the day of resurrection. The relics of the Prophet, such as his footprint, are abundantly represented here, but also his sword and banner, important insignia of power. During the conquest of the Arab provinces in 1516–1517, Selim had seized the Prophet’s relics, which were transferred to Istanbul and kept in the chamber of the Caliphate (Beytü-l-hilafe) in Topkapi palace.4 Art historians have cast light on the motives for including these sorts of images in such manuscripts: Prophetic representation in these texts had less to do with religious traditions than with the cultural and political realms. They were commissioned by powerful men who wanted to inscribe Islam within the historic and prophetic epics of the past: these images helped fix the legitimacy of a temporal power within the context of all the many cultures that had succeeded one another across the centuries.5 Alignment with a Prophetic heritage helped to legitimise the Ottomans’ exercise of power over the newly conquered Muslim-majority Arab provinces. In this chapter we examine how Sufis laid claim to a Prophetic heritage through the concept of a Muhammadan path, as well as the specific doctrinal, social and political developments to which such claims led. These developments took place in different countries and contexts, and at various religious or cultural intersections, but we can observe that at the time of the creation of Muslim empires there was a generalised spread of a spirituality that turned directly towards the Prophet. In the domain of religious history, one seeks out the moments when a particular doctrine is expressed, propagated and exteriorised, and the socio-political, or even economic, factors linked to this expansion. The expression ‘Muhammadan path’ was already found in the Arab world during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (in a treatise by a disciple of Ibn Taymiyya, Ahmad ‘Imad al-Wāsitī [d. 1311],

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  79 al-Sulūk wa-l-sayr illā-llāh),6 but the idea became increasingly important from the sixteenth century with the expansion of the Sufi paths. The term was employed in Morocco by al-Ghazwānī (d. 1528–29), a Sufi who followed al-Jazūlī’s path.7 During the seventeenth century in Medina, al-‘Ujaymī (d. 1702) wrote down a definition transmitted by the Moroccan Sufi Al-‘Ayyāsī who moved in the Holy City’s scholarly circles: ‘As for the tarīqa Muhammadiyya, it is the one that takes its name from Muhammad, grace and peace be upon him; the master of masters, Abū Sālim al-‘Ayyāshī, may God have mercy on him, spoke as follows on this subject: the special thing about this path is that it claims descent from the Prophet, although all paths go back to him and benefit from his assistance; this path consists for he who follows it of becoming closer to the Prophet by assiduous recitation of the prayer upon him (tasliya), until it invades the consciousness to the extent that when he hears his name he trembles, his heart is overwhelmed beholding him, and the visible appearance of the Prophet appears present to the eyes of inner vision (basīra) during his sleep (manāman) or when he is awake (yaqazatan). He can then ask him whatever he wants.’8 This text, which was mentioned by al-Zabīdī and al-Sanūsī, clearly expressed the concept: the recitation of the prayer upon the Prophet is the foundation and the principal method of the Muhammadan path, and the vision of God’s messenger, who is the goal of this path, becomes a stage in the initiatic progress, one that denotes a high degree of spiritual realisation (maqām sharīf); this vision confers superior knowledge of the law and of religion, since it emanates from the Prophet, who is questioned in person by the Sufi. While they still retained their spiritual guides on earth, the Sufis thus laid claim to a superior transmission from the Prophet, either directly or through a very short chain of transmitters, for the tarīqa muhammadiyya then itself became a path with authenticated isnad.9 What, then, are the resulting links between the renewal of the Sufi paths during the modern period and the Sufis’ claim to Prophetic heritage on earth and in the life beyond? The Muhammadan path has indeed been presented as one of the important aspects of modern Sufism. However, the expression tarīqa muhammadiyya meant different things for different authors and in the varied contexts in which it appeared. We describe its uses by Sufi masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and attempt to put into a temporal framework the circulation, networks and modes of transmission of this path: from Morocco to India via the Hejaz, with Cairo and Medina as major meeting places for the different aspects of this transmission.

Neosufism, an outdated but tenacious concept Much has been written in academic milieux on the subject of the tarīqa muhammadiyya, because it was formerly linked to the now-abandoned concept of neosufism. The term ‘neosufism’ was invented in the 1960s by Fazlur Rahman, a Muslim scholar of Pakistani origin. It appeared for the first time in his book, Islam, published in London in 1966 and re-issued by the University of Chicago in 1979.10 Islam is a textbook in fourteen chapters, covering the history of Islam

80  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal from its foundations to the twentieth century, including such subjects as the prophecy of Muhammad, the Quran, the formation of the different Islamic sciences (hadīth, theology, fiqh), its major doctrinal currents, and modern developments in Islam. The expression ‘neosufism’ appears in its penultimate chapter, Premodernist reform movements; this chapter deals with the history of Islam in the Modern Era, from the end of the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century – a very long period corresponding in part to the Moghol, Savafid and Ottoman Empires, and later to the Muslim world’s confrontation with colonialism. The author develops the idea that there was a rupture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, inaugurating a new era of reaction within Islam, aiming to reform Sufism and religion. Labelled neosufism, which Rahman defines as ‘Sufism reformed on orthodox lines and interpreted in an activist sense,’ this idea of reform had several facets, one of the most important of which was the tarīqa muhammadiyya. In fact, according to Rahman’s logic, the Muhammadan path was said to explain all the other characteristics of neosufism. Rahman presents neosufism as marking a break with a pantheistic and mystical medieval Sufism, dominated by the metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabī, and reaffirming a scrupulous attachment to the sharī‘a. He writes that ‘Modern education and the impact of western ideas joined hands in this respect with the pre-modernist reformism and gradually dislodged the medieval forms of Sufism from their central position, a process that still continues.’11 Naturally, this rejection of medieval Sufism and its ecstatic practices (dance, the ‘noisy’ dhikr, the ‘submission’ of the disciple to his master) accompanied a rejection of the cult of saints; all of these practices were associated by Rahman with religious syncretism, and he claimed they had denatured and corrupted the true nature of Islam, especially in India (where Rahman was born). He believed that medieval Sufism and the metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabī had been replaced in the Modern Period by a spirituality oriented towards the moral life of the Prophet, whose example was to be followed in every way – this was the explanation for the reform movements that claimed to follow the path of Muhammad, the tarīqa muhammadiyya. In addition, then, the neosufis were said to have advocated a renewal in the study of hadīth, the rejection of taqlīd (imitation) and the right to exercise ijtihād (independent reasoning) in jurisprudence. They were presented – by historians who adhered to the concept of neosufism – as militants, activists engaging with the social and political destinies of their countries, determined to write their own histories. Among these important reformers were Ahmad Sirhindī (d. 1624) and Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762) in India, and Ahmad al-Tijānī (d. 1815), Ahmad ibn Idrīs (d. 1837), and the latter’s disciples Muhammad al-Sanūsī (d. 1859) and Muhammad al-Mirghānī (d. 1853) in the Maghreb and Sudan. All of these men came from areas that were on the periphery of the Islamic heartland and they founded Sufi brotherhoods that were part of a renewal, such as the Indian Naqshbandiyya, or that were new, such as the Tijāniyya (in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa), along with the Sanūsiyya and the Mirghānīyya (also called the Khatmiyya) Sufi brotherhoods which were born from the teachings of Ahmad Ibn Idrīs. Their preachings were said to have been at the root of jihadist movements and of militant anti-colonialism. Thus neosufism

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  81 was presented as an ensemble of organised groups, with socio-political aims, that swept across the entire Muslim world during the nineteenth century and unequivocally and ineluctably brought about Muslim reformism. A linear and ideological vision of Islam The concept of neosufism must be put into the context of the overall vision that its author had of the evolution of Islam and of the relationship between Islam and Sufism. Rahman postulated an internal dichotomy at the heart of Islam, explaining that the end of the Medieval Period and the entry into modernity were marked by tensions between orthodox Islam on the one hand and Sufism on the other. Subscribing to a vision of an Islam passing from its golden age into decadence (as diffused by orientalist literature), Rahman distinguished two periods in the history of Sufism: an early period at the beginnings of Islam during which Sufism developed a moral discipline allowing religious values to be embodied  – this period was represented by the jurist and theologian al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) – and, after Ghazālī, a second period, or decadence, during which Sufism was corrupted by two phenomena: its mass appeal, which led to the introduction of superstitious practices within the popular Sufi orders, and an elitist Sufism oriented towards speculative metaphysics and influenced by neoplatonism. This was the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī, described by Rahman (who was referring to the doctrine of unicity of being, wahdat al-wujūd) as theosophy with a coating of Muslim theology. From the thirteenth century onwards, in the face of these developments in Sufism, a reactionary movement led by such men as the Hanbalite jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and his disciple Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), who were, according to Rahman, the first reformists, sought to reconcile Sufism with Muslim orthodoxy by emphasising the features of Sufism having to do with moral purification and rejecting all its other aspects: ‘this type of neo-Sufism, as one may call it, tended to regenerate orthodox activism and reincalculate a positive attitude to this world. . . . Ibn Taymiyya and his disciples employ the whole range of essential Sufi terminology and try to instil into it a puritanical, moral meaning and an orthodox ethos. Two types of Sufism come to be radically distinguished: An Islamic Sufism and an un-Islamic Sufism . . . mainly ecstatic with its auto-hypnotic visions, orgiastic rituals and a motley of superstitious beliefs and practices, which further degenerated quite commonly into gross exploitation and charlatanism. This was the spiritual situation of Islam when, during the eighteenth century, a sense of anxiety and urgency of religio-social reform gripped the greater part of the Muslim word, expressing itself in different areas in Reform movements and schools which, allowing for differences in spiritual experiences and environment of each region, exhibit fundamentally similar character.’12 This reformist movement was observed by Rahman to have existed as early as the sixteenth century in his own country, pre-partition India, where the spread of the Sufi brotherhoods contributed to the penetration into Sufism of Hindu practices and beliefs: ‘un-Islamic forces had invaded Islam until they threatened its very existence.’13 Rahman considered the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar

82  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal (1556–1605) to have been a first crisis for Islam: Akbar, who built his capital around the tomb of the saint Salim Chistī (d. 1572), in Fatehpur-Sikrī near Agra, appropriated Sufi teachings and culture as well as some components of Hindu culture to create his own cult, the dīn ilahī. Here the Emperor was designated as the perfect man (insān-e kamil) and guide (murshid).14 These un-Islamic forces were combatted, according to Rahman, by Ahmad Sirhindī who replaced the monist metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabī with an ethics centred on the application of the sharī‘a. But he attributes the reconstruction of this original ideal to Shah Walī Allāh, who, he says, took on the social and political responsibilities that Muslims had abandoned.15 The concept of neosufism stemmed from a construction or reconstruction of the history of Islam by an author for whom academic research and politico-religious activism were always blended together, and this occurred in the context of decolonisation, with its creation of new independent Muslim states. This approach is characterised by the sort of anti-Sufism that was typical of Muslim intellectuals in the twentieth century, particularly Indo-Pakistani modernist nationalists. The ideal of a ‘reconstruction’ of Islam was very much in the spirit of Rahman’s mentor, also considered to be the father of the Pakistani nation, Muhammad Iqbāl (d. 1938), as expressed, for example, in his book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930): for Iqbāl it was necessary to rediscover the dynamism and spiritual and moral values of Islam in its early centuries, before it had been corrupted by elements that were foreign to it.16 As Rahman saw it, neosufism was just the beginning of a religious reawakening that would find its realisation in the creation of Pakistan, a modern nation-state founded on the values of Islam. Fazlur Rahman made value judgements on Islam. His approach was dogmatic and ahistoric, and it had nothing to do with the realities of the period he studied. He sought to describe an ideal of Islam rather than a specific period of its history. For him, Islam was not a set of practices and beliefs to which Muslims adhered at a certain point in history, but an absolute truth to which some were faithful and others not.17 He considered historical Islam to be a heritage that was better dispensed with, in order to return to the ‘original’ message of Islam. Rather than being the result of an attentive and contextualised reading of the sources, his approach was guided by the reformist and modernist theses of the orientalists who dominated social sciences for much of the twentieth century, into whose company Rahman was initiated during his Oxford studies when he was a student of the British orientalist Hamilton A. Gibb, author with Harold Bowen of the well-known Islamic Society and the West.18 One need only look at the bibliography of Rahman’s Chapter 13, Premodernist reform mouvements, to discover the extent of the influence on him of this AngloSaxon orientalist school of thought that drew on European perceptions of Muslim countries at the time of their colonisation; it features the following texts, among others: Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt; Hamilton Gibb, Wither Islam?; Gustave E. Von Grunebaum, Modern Islam; Albert Hourani, Syria and Lebanon; Snouck Hurgronje, The Achenese; Murray Titus, Indian Islam (Titus was an American missionary evangelising Muslims in India who, for the purpose

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  83 of his evangelism, had sought to define their identity and determine the exact nature of the numerous interpenetrations between Muslim and Hindu practices, especially in relation to shared holy sites); St John B. Philby, Arabia (Philby was a traveller and British agent in Arabia, aligned with King ‘Abd al-Azīz al-Sa‘ūd and the Wahhabites); Wilfred C. Smith, Modern Islam in India and Islam in Modern History.19 The perceptions of these authors, part of a school that brought forth the discipline called ‘Oriental Studies,’ were of a Muslim world stretching from the Maghreb to Asia, an ‘Orient’ long closed to progress, which had been opened up to reform and modernity by occidental intervention.20 The colonial task was imagined to rest upon the transfer of European technologies and ideas, the secularisation of the individual, and Muslim reformism  – a concept invented by French orientalists to describe the developments brought about in Islam by its contact with Europe. This notion of Muslim reformism first appeared in the well-known article by Henri Laoust, Le réformisme musulman des salafiyya (Muslim reformism among the Salafiyya), and then in the no less well-known book by H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam.21 Sufism and the cult of saints, as examples of phenomena from a condemned traditional world, were enjoined, and expected, to disappear.22 In orientalist literature on later periods in Islam one often finds this paradigm of decline, and the two-tier model of religion – especially relating to periods after the sixteenth century, but also applied to earlier times, as in the work edited by Von Grunebaum, Classicisme et déclin culturel dans l’histoire de l’Islam (Classicism and Cultural Decline in the History of Islam).23 Sufism, and especially brotherhood Sufism, were judged to have played a considerable role in this ‘decline.’ In the bibliography of Rahman’s Islam, one finds a single work in French, Les confréries religieuses musulmanes (The Muslim Religious Orders, 1897) by Octave Depont and Xavier Coppolani: the last great classic work of French colonial literature on the Sufi brotherhoods in Algeria.24 It was from this work that Rahman drew his information on the Sanūsiyya, which, according to him, had diffused neosufism in North Africa: ‘Sanusi and his descendants undertook moral and religious reform, in the framework of a militant organisation with political aims, in a country that was at the time prey to social decadence and political and economic collapse.’25 During the nineteenth century the Sanūsiyya was presented in a very negative light by the French colonial administrators, as a sort of anti-Christian, anti-colonialist and pan-Islamic secret society. Now, thanks to the magisterial study by Jean-Louis Triaud, La légende noire de la Sanūsiyya (The black legend of the Sanūsiyya) we know that the vision of this Sufi brotherhood communicated by police reports (the use of such sources is the reason for the description of such works as Les confréries religieuses musulmanes as ‘literature of surveillance’), was actually a myth forged by a colonial administration that was in search of enemies. This vision of Islam, projected by orientalist literature and the reports of officials in colonial administrations, had a profound influence on ways of seeing Islam in the West, but it also brought about a concrete transformation in the image that Muslim intellectuals themselves had of their religion. The case of Fazlur

84  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal Rahman, who, like many nationalists, absorbed and assimilated these colonial perceptions, images and metaphors, is one example among many. For Algeria, James MacDougall has clearly shown that one cannot understand Muslim reformism in isolation from the colonial relationship, because it is a creation of this relationship, a completely new cultural form rather than a simple reaction that appeared independently. Islam itself was re-imagined in the very terms of the power relations imposed by the fact of colonisation. The notion of reformism thus became a re-articulation, in an endogenous discourse, of the colonisers’ gaze upon the colonised societies. In Die Islamisierung des Islam (The Islamisation of Islam) Aziz Al-Azmeh also speaks of this ‘strange alliance’ between European orientalists and Muslim fundamentalists, in which one party satisfies the essentialist fantasies of the other.26 New historiographical approaches27 During the 1970s and 1980s neosufism was taken up and made famous under a new name, that of ‘revival,’ by various authors: John S. Trimingham in The Sufi Orders in Islam, speaking of an ‘age of brotherhood (tā’ifas),’ of reforming Sufi orders, and of a movement of revival in the nineteenth century; ‘revival’ was discussed by John Voll in Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World and John Voll with Nehemiah Levtzion in Eighteenth-Century Renewal and Reform in Islam, which stated that Sufism had developed into a fundamentalist and activist movement along the lines advocated by Ibn Taymiyya, the origins of which were to be found in the scholarly circles of Mecca and Medina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this form of Sufism was very distant from the ‘apolitical universe’ of Ibn ‘Arabī. While, in the meantime, an article published in 1993 had strongly criticised the paradigm of renewal (we speak of this critique later), in 2004 Azyumardi Azra, an Indonesian researcher, published The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, re-stating the theses of his professor, John Voll. Finally, the 2003 article ‘Muslim Culture and Reform in 18th Century South Asia,’ by Jamal Malik, described an ‘enlightenment’ in Northern India said to have taken place even before European penetration, similar to what Peter Gran described for Egypt in his Islamic Roots of Capitalism. The vanguard of this movement was said to be the masters of the Naqshbandiyya. Malik presented Shāh Walī Allāh as a reformist proponent of an Islam impregnated with a moralistic and puritanical mysticism in the vein of that of the tarīqa muhammadiyya. Associated with the emerging urban merchant class, this form of Islam was compared with the pietist movement that appeared in European Protestant circles during the seventeenth century (these links had already been established by A. Hofheinz in ‘Illumination and Enlightment Revisited’ and S. R. O’Fahey, ‘Pietism, Fundamentalism and Mysticism’) because it stemmed from an individualist piety, resting on an independent relationship with God and on direct access to the sacred texts, particularly the hadīth, accompanying this view with a rejection of the former social order. This active piety, in opposition to a mysticism that was disconnected from social realities and economic and political changes, was said to have been felt by men who wanted

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  85 to grasp their own destinies.28 Some of the ideas in Malik’s article were expressed by the German researcher Reinhard Schulze (following in the footsteps of Peter Gran) in a 1990 article ‘Das Islamische Achtzehnte Jahrhundert. Versuch einer historiographischen Kritik’ (Islam in the Eighteenth Century: Attempting a Historiographic Critique). In this article Schulze describes the existence of modernity and of an enlightenment in Islam even before European penetration, thus shattering the long dominance of a concept of history according to which modernity was brought to the Orient by the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt of 1798.29 The concept of neosufism dominated historiography on Islam and modern Sufism for nearly thirty years until it was critiqued and firmly rejected first by Rex S. O’Fahey and Bernd Radtke in a seminal article, ‘Neo-Sufism Reconsidered’ and then by Radtke in ‘Between Projection and Suppression.’30 The approach adopted by these two scholars led them to study the writings of the Moroccan Ahmad Ibn Idrīs and his disciples, Muhammad al-Sānusī and Muhammad al-Mirghānī. Their philological work on these allowed them to refute the theses of neosufism point by point, proving that the arguments supporting it were not valid and that nothing in the doctrinal content of Sufism had changed between earlier periods and the time in question. Their joint article underlines all the elements of continuity between medieval and modern Sufism and by doing so rejects the notion of the existence of an eighteenth-century Muslim enlightenment analogous to the enlightenments that took place in Europe at that time.31 It is undeniable that between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth there was a new circulation of men and ideas in the Islamic world, with Mecca and Medina acting as crossroads for exchanges, and Voll and Levtzion are to be commended for having drawn attention to this phenomenon; however, subsequent critiques take issue more with their claim of the existence of organised networks diffusing a common ideology. It is also true that the arguments of Radtke and O’Fahey rested on evidence from a relatively small group of Sufis, Ibn Idrīs and his disciples, but subsequently numerous other Sufi figures who had been presented as reformers have been reexamined with similar results, including the Indians Ahmad Sirhindī and ‘Abd al-Haqq al-Dihlawī (d. 1642) and the Syrians Mustafā al-Bakrī and ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī. Research on Ahmad Ibn Idrīs has been undertaken by a group of historians based at Bergen University.32 Several points were clarified by all of these studies: the positions of religious scholars of the period were more nuanced, complex and diverse than was allowed in the one-dimensional vision of Islam propagated by orientalist literature and later imposed by Muslim reformists, and overall these Muslim scholars, where they were not completely immersed in Sufi culture, were at least well-disposed to the concept of sainthood. Although there were genuine disagreements on how to interpret texts, and the positions of different scholars rarely achieved complete consensus, these differences led to everrenewed debate and exchange. Sufi teachings of the time displayed numerous areas of continuity with the Medieval Period, and, far from rejecting Ibn ‘Arabī, Sufi scholars were continuing to spread his ideas. Mustafā al-Bakrī, who was responsible for the renewal of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt, was in fact a disciple of ‘Abd al-Ghānī al-Nābulusī, the greatest modern commentator on Ibn ‘Arabī.

86  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal Bakrī himself wrote a treatise addressed to his disciples in which he explains the doctrine of wahdat al-wujūd.33 The future shaykh of al-Azhar, ‘Abd Allāh al-Sharqāwī, who had spent a lot of time with Shaykh ‘Abd Rahmān al-‘Aydarūs before attaching himself to the Khalwatī master Mahmūd al-Kurdī, informed us that ‘Aydarūs spoke exclusively about the wahdat al-wujūd and said that for this reason he had learned a great deal about the doctrine.34 As for the renowned path of Muhammad, the tarīqa muhammadiyya, this was far from representing a rejection of Ibn ‘Arabī, emanating as it did from a milieu of scholarly Sufis who were profoundly impregnated with his ideas. Among these Sufis there were some who, like the Shaykh al-Akbar, laid claim to the degree of Seal of Muhammadan sainthood, as their heritage in the order of the Seal of the Prophets, Muhammad. For these masters the tarīqa Muhammadiyya did not represent a rejection of union with God, but rather the best mode of returning to the source of all light, whether cosmic or metaphysical, since the Prophet was considered to be the primordial light (nūr muhammadī) giving birth to creation. It was by practicing prayer on the Prophet that the believer could, through him, reach union with God. This mystical doctrine had an impact on all Sufi milieux, and in this context it is not surprising that the Dalā’il al-khayrat, diffusing the theme of the primordial reality of Muhammad, were so spectacularly successful in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, the role of renewer of the religion (mujaddid) that certain Sufis of this period, especially in India, claimed for themselves or had attributed to them by their disciples, had nothing to do with nineteenth-century reformism: this theme of the tajdīd is, for historical reasons, very traditional in Islam; this complex concept rests on the well-known hadīth al-tajdīd, ‘On the eve of every century, God will send to this community the one who will renew its religion.’ This hadīth was interpreted in various ways by medieval Muslim scholars.35 For most Sunni scholars and Sufis in the pre-modern and Modern Period these interpretations cannot be reduced to a reformism aiming for a return to the Islam of the Prophet’s time, purified of post-Prophetic innovations (bid‘a), as twentieth-century fundamentalist reformists would understand the term. Rather, tajdīd was understood in relation to the concept of the metahistorical reality of the Prophet (haqīqa Muhammadiyya), which was gaining prominence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in relation to the historical re-actualisation of the Prophetic model by Sufis, with all the active responsibilities towards the community that the embodiment of this model implied. The Sufis found direct links between the tajdīd and the doctrine of sainthood, the walāya, and with the messianic figure of the renewer, identified with the qutb, the supreme pole. The reason for the return of this theme of the tajdīd in the Modern Period is that the Prophet became the initiator of numerous Sufis who were renewing old Sufi paths or founding new ones: Sirhindī, Shāh Walī Allāh, al-Bakrī, Tijānī, Sammān, all of these masters claimed the same status in the order of sainthood as that of the Prophet within his community. The case of Ahmad Sirhindī, the founder of the Mujaddidī branch of the Naqshbandiyya, who was regarded as a model by India’s militant Muslim nationalists, has been well-studied. Among this master’s ideas Fazlur Rahman retained only

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  87 his rejection of Ibn ‘Arabī and the Sufism of his day, his call for a strict application of the sharī‘a, and his political ambitions. He ignored the spiritual dimension of Sirhindī’s thought, and his explanations of his role as a mystic. Sirhindī, like all Sufis, believed in the metahistorical reality of the Prophet, present across all eternity; he also believed in a category of men, the supreme poles, who were the holders of the spiritual heritage of Muhammad, and he presented himself as an earthly manifestation of Muhammad’s spiritual entity, sent to renew religion and fulfil all the political and social functions implied by this role. His disciples called him ‘the renewer of the second millennium’ (mujaddid al-alf al-thānī) because he started his preaching at the beginning of the second Islamic millennium, in 1591. However, according to one of his famous commentators, ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, and as demonstrated by Samuela Pagani, Sirhindī’s tajdīd took its place within the tradition of mystical Islam: it did not constitute a restoration of the original forms of Islam, but was presented as ‘the uninterrupted process of revelation through the infinite spiritual interpretation of the sacred texts.’36 It was in his role as the one who re-actualises the Prophetic model that Sirhindī supported a return to following the Sunna: he considered himself and three of his descendants to be qayyūm – this Name of God means ‘the Subsisting One,’ and corresponds to the highest rank in Muslim spirituality, charged with the task of renewing the religion and keeping it intact.37 Sirhindī’s remarkable awareness of the role conferred upon him by God, of the authority he inherited from the Prophet, and thus of his independence from all worldly authority, along with the organisational capacities of the Naqshbandiyya, explain the success of his Sufi path, the Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya, in India. Ahmad Sirhindī, like many Naqshbandīs, had ambitions in Indian society, which accorded an important place to Sufis during this period: he wanted to impose his own path (with a moralising and puritanical bent) by distinguishing himself from the masters of the past, despite the fact that he was influenced by all of them, particularly the most important, Ibn ‘Arabī. One of his affiliates was the great figure of Indian Islam, Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762), famed as a religious reformer and political leader who tried to unite his community against non-Muslims. As is the case for Sirhindī, his spiritual doctrine, and the teachings exposed in his mystical works, such as al-Tafhīmāt al-ilāhiyya (Divine Instructions), which were very complex, have been to some extent overshadowed by his political engagement.38 And yet, Shāh Walī Allāh, who was initiated into several Sufi paths, knew the writings of Ibn ‘Arabī well and partook of his legacy. He attributed to himself a spiritual status superior to that of Ibn ‘Arabī, considering himself to be invested by God with a specific mission: he said he had reached the degree of hikma (wisdom), the last degree before that of prophethood, and that God had bestowed upon him the robe of the mujaddidiyya, meaning that his mission was to renew the Islamic faith and restore its initial purity. Shāh Walī Allāh even claimed that he had been invested with the robe of haqqāniyya, the degree of divine truth, meaning that his words were divinely inspired and God was speaking through him.39 His political position was not associated with new religious orientations but can be understood alongside the troubled situation in his country and his individual reaction to it. He attributed to himself a critical role

88  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal (mu‘ātaba), to get his community to face up to its errors and divergences from the straight path. He castigated many: scholars who had given up studying prophetic traditions to examine grammar or Greek philosophy; false Sufis; perverted preachers; kings who had abandoned the defence of Islam; rich men corrupted by wine, gambling and prostitution; soldiers who thought only of entertaining themselves; adulterous artisans . . . this clearly demonstrates his intention of instituting puritanical reforms in his community, for its salvation in this world and the next. He was definitely opposed to the cult of saints, judging pilgrimage to a saint’s tomb to be a greater sin than murder or adultery. In his desire to neutralise all the particularities of Sunni Muslim tradition, because they were causes of division in the community, he called for a harmonisation and synthesis of the juridical schools in order to remove any divergence among them. He also sought to erase differences between Sufi paths, proclaiming his support for unity in multiplicity and the idea that all Sufi paths were manifestations of a single path.40 This traditional theme of unity in Sufism reappeared very markedly among several important nineteenth-century authors, such as Mā’ al-‘Aynayn (d. 1910), from today’s Mauritania, whose text, Mufīd al-rāwī ‘alā annī mukhāwī, is a commentary on a poem about unity and fraternity in Islam and in Sufism, written at a time when Muslims were being assailed on all sides by Christian imperialist powers. The text begins thus: ‘Truly I am in brotherhood with all the paths/ Brotherhood of faith with all believers/ I do not distinguish one saint from another/ Like one who does not distinguish one prophet from another (Quran 2:285) . . ./ When one contemplates the divine unity of all creation/ To discriminate thus is senseless/ Either for external Law or for essential Reality (haqīqa)/ And this is even more true for the paths/ Which all depend on the path of the Prophet/ while those that differentiate themselves are not real/ In truth I am in brotherhood with all the paths.’41 The Moroccan Ahmad Ibn Idrīs went further than Shāh Walī Allāh in calling into question the schools of legal thought (madhhab), but the doctrinal foundations of his positions, such as the idea of the superiority of mystical inspiration over the human reasoning of jurists, were not very different from those of the Indian scholar. In his Risālat al-radd ‘alā ahl al-ra’y (An Epistle in Reply to the Authorities of the Legal Schools),42 Ibn Idrīs argued that the founding Imams of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence had only as much authority as any common Muslim, and had never pretended to have more. He was thus opposed to the historical development that their writings had undergone, insisting that the basis of any legal judgement had to come from the Quran and the Sunna. However, this legal judgement was not to be made through the intervention of reason – it had to be directly inspired by God in a believer who conformed to the Prophetic model. These juridical debates among Sufis in the eighteenth century do not represent a turning point, and one has to go back to the sixteenth century and Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī to find the source of inspiration for eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Sufis: relying on a metaphysical principle derived from the thought of Ibn ‘Arabī, this Egyptian Sufi explained that divergences in juridical interpretation were simply diverse manifestations of a single transcendent reality. Still following Ibn ‘Arabī, he underlined the superiority of the mystical inspiration of the Sufi,

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  89 who receives knowledge of the legal judgements in a waking vision, directly from the Prophet.43 During the seventeenth century there was a mention in the Kitāb al-Ibrīz, which relates the words of the Moroccan Sufi ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Dabbāgh, of the omniscience and infallibility (ma‘sūm) of the believer who has conformed in his outward behaviour and his inner life (ma‘nawī) to the Prophetic model; this places him above theologians and jurists for his knowledge of God and for the continuous interpretation of the law through fath, spiritual opening.44 This recent academic research demonstrates how much the tarīqa muhammadiyya, which put the Prophet at the heart of spiritual realisation and set itself above affiliations and the particular, informed doctrinal developments in Sufism and in Islam in general during the Modern Period. On the basis of these new historiographical advances, we attempt the necessary definition of periods in the history of the concept of tarīqa muhammadiyya, its transmission networks and the geography of its circulation. We show the effects of the development of this path on religious history in modern Egypt, both on doctrine and on the practices of popular piety.

Chronology, circulation and transmission networks for the Muhammadan path Regarding the emergence of the idea of a Muhammadan path, for the Maghreb at the end of the fifteenth century Vincent Cornell attributes a founding influence to the Moroccan Sufi al-Jazūlī and his disciples, and a central role to Egypt as the country through which this doctrine was transmitted to the rest of the Muslim world, thanks to the new Ottoman context. Al-Ghazwānī (d. 1528–29) employed the term in his work entitled Al-Nuqta al-azaliyya fī sirr al-dhāt al-muhammadiyya (The Eternal Point in the Secret of the Muhammadan Essence), and carried on a correspondence on the subject of the tarīqa muhammadiyya with the Egyptian Sufi and jurist Muhammad al-Laqqānī (d. 1528–29), who was one thread in the web that spread this method eastward as far as India.45 In Egypt at this time the masters around Sha‘rānī lived in hope, searching for a permanent link with the Prophet. Ahmad al-Zawāwī (d. 1517) did not use the precise expression tarīqa muhammadiyya, but his testimony as reported by Sha‘rānī contained the essential elements of the definition of this path that would be given by al-‘Ujaymī in the seventeenth century: ‘Our path consists of the assiduous recitation of the tasliya until the Prophet is by our side even when we are awake, and we become companions just like the Companions, and we are able to ask him about religious questions and about the hadīth that our scholars have declared to be weak, this so that we may work according to his word; for as long as this does not come about, it will be because we are not among those who practise the tasliya assiduously.’46 From 1491 Nūr al-dīn al-Shūnī (d. 1537), another of Sha‘rānī’s masters, instituted the majlīs salat ‘alā al-Nabī at al-Azhar, a whole night of prayers devoted to the Prophet, a practice that was attacked by certain jurists (fuqahā’).47 This practice spread rapidly in other regions of the Muslim world; for example, it was introduced in Damascus in the Umayyad mosque by a disciple of al-Shūnī.48 Finally,

90  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal and far from Morocco and Egypt, in sixteenth-century India references to the Prophet were at the heart of the spirituality of the Indian Sufi Muhammad Gawth (d. 1563) and his circle of disciples. His Jawāhir al-khams (The Five Jewels) exposing the akbarian doctrine of the ‘unicity of being,’ and the Risāla al-musammā bi l-haqīqa al-muhammadiyya (Epistle entitled ‘the Muhammadan Reality’), by his disciple Wajīh al-dīn ‘Alawī (d. 1589–1590), written in Arabic and dealing with the primordial Muhammadan reality, were both transported to Medina along the route of the pilgrimage to Mecca.49 Muhammad Gawth was accused by his opponents of having attributed to himself a spiritual status as elevated as the Prophet’s when he claimed that he had, like God’s messenger, ascended (mi‘rāj) to the divine throne; this experience was described in his Awrād-i gawthiyya.50 One of his disciples, Lashkar Muhammad ‘Arif (d. 1585), was devoted to the Prophet to such an extent that he could say it was easy to know God, manifest as He was in all creation, but much more difficult to attain the degree of perfection represented by the Prophet.51 The combined influence of these spiritual traditions, encountering each other from Morocco and Egypt on the one hand and India and the Persian world on the other, would allow this Muhammadan path to make its way to Medina, which, more than Mecca, was a genuine intellectual crossroads for Muslim scholars during the seventeenth century. In that city, where the Prophet’s body rests, the tarīqa muhammadiyya reached its fullest development thanks to the meeting of two Sufis: the Indian of Iranian origin Sibghat Allāh, a disciple of Wajīh al-dīn ‘Alawī, and the Egyptian Ahmad al-Shinnāwī, descendent of a prestigious lineage of masters linked to Sha‘rānī. From this meeting in Medina was born a school of scholarly thought deeply imbued with the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabī. Medina Shaykh Sibghat Allāh b. Rūh Allāh al-Husaynī al-Barūjī (or Barwājī, d. 1606) originating, as indicated by his nisba (part of the name designating geographical or tribal origin), in the town of Barauch in the Gujarat, was the most influential Indian Sufi of his day in Medina: his disciples came from Palestine, Yemen, Kurdistan, India and Egypt (in the person of Ahmad al-Shinnāwī (d. 1619), greatgrandson of Muhammad al-Shinnāwī, the master of Sha‘rānī).52 To al-Shinnāwī, Sibghat Allāh transmitted his Persian and central Asian spiritual affiliations, received from his own master, Wajīh al-dīn, and he also acceded to this disciple’s request and translated the Jawāhir al-Khams by Muhammad Gawth from Persian into Arabic; Ahmad al-Shinnāwī later wrote a commentary on this text, Tajalliyyāt al-basā’ir.53 This dual heritage from India and Egypt was perpetuated through Shinnāwī’s Medinese disciple, Ahmad al-Qushshāshī (d. 1661); from his master he received not only his numerous central Asian and Indian affiliations (khirqa) but also the Egyptian ones passing through Shaykh Sha‘rānī and going back to various sources: to the great saint Ahmad al-Badawī; to Ibn ‘Arabī via Suyūtī; to the Shādhiliyya and Ibn Mashīsh, master of Shādhīlī; and, finally, to the Egyptian Suhrawardiyya via Zakariyya al-Ansārī.54

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  91 After Sibghat Allāh and Shinnāwī had died, Ahmad al-Qushshāshī in his turn became an influential master in Medina: his teaching and company were sought after, especially by students from the non–Arabic-speaking Muslim regions such as India, Indonesia and Kurdistan – so much so that researchers have presented him as being the originator of the international networks of scholars in the Holy Cities.55 He wrote a Sufi handbook on initiatic investiture and the progress on the path of spiritual realisation, Simt al-Majīd (Glorious Pearl Necklace), in the second part of which he adds an enumeration of his numerous spiritual affiliations. Although his attachment to the Prophet was not explicitly called a Muhammadan path, the principles of such a path were clearly expressed: for Qushshāshī this meant that one attached oneself to the spiritual entity of the Prophet (rūhāniyya) while still having an external master, and that the Prophetic transmission (khirqa) was added to one’s numerous other khirqas. Al-Sanūsī, author of the Salsabīl, a collection of forty Sufi paths of which he presents himself as the inheritor, makes an attribution in this text – which was probably, like the rest of the Salsabīl, copied from the Risāla by al-‘Ujaymī (a disciple of Qushshāshī) – of the first known definition of the Muhammadan path: to Abū Salīm al-‘Ayyāshī, another close disciple of Qushshāshī. Zabīdī cites the same definition in his ‘Iqd al-jawhar, indicating some other chains of transmitters for this path: that of ‘Abd Allāh al-Mirghānī (d. 1792) which was transmitted to him by the malāmatī shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Zarhūnī, who received it from the Prophet; that of Sha‘rānī, which passed through his master ‘Alī al-Khawwās, who received it from the Prophet; that of the Egyptian shaykh, al-Mallawī (d. 1767), transmitted by Shaykh al-Ashtūkī, who received it from the Moroccan ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Fāsī (d. 1680), who received it from the Prophet. As for Zabīdī’s master, the Yemeni ‘Abd Allāh al-‘Aydārus, he was directly initiated by the Prophet, who transmitted to him the jalāla (Allāh), the first Name of the dhikr. 56 In the initiatic chains mentioned by Zabīdī the role of the Maghreb and Egypt in the transmission of the Muhammadan path is evident. Sanūsī cites as transmitters of this Sufi path several Egyptian masters from Sha‘rānī’s entourage: Nūr al-dīn al-Shūnī, Ahmad al-Zawāwī, ‘Alī al-Khawwās and Muhammad al-Manzalāwī. From the Holy Cities the term travelled as far as India, to Delhi, where it found a home in the circle of disciples around Muhammad Nasīr ‘Andalib (d. 1759) and his son, Mir Dard (d. 1785), who gave their path the name tarīqa muhammadiyya. Shāh Walī Allāh, Mazhar Jān-i Jānān (d. 1781) and Mir Dard (d. 1785) each received divine revelations of their status as earthly khalīfa of the Prophet.57 Finally, the Muhammadan path survived into the twentieth century with the Sudanese Muhammad ‘Uthmān al-Burhānī (d. 1983), founder of the Burhāniyya, who laid claim to the tarīqa muhammadiyya in a book condemned by al-Azhar, Tabri’at al-dhimma fī Nush al-umma (Relieving the Conscience by Advising the Community).58 The Muhammadan path is thus a concept that evolved over the long term, through encounters and exchanges among Sufis from diverse spiritual traditions, and consequently it is difficult to establish its starting point – despite the strong claim of the Maghreb to be at the origins of this path, since it was so powerfully

92  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal expressed there from the end of the eighteenth century in the teachings of Ahmad al-Tijānī, of Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahmān, and of Ahmad Ibn Idrīs and his successors, who made union with the Prophet the goal of their path. Bernd Radtke has underlined the links these Sufis had with the Khalwatiyya in Egypt and with its founder, Mustafā al-Bakrī, and his two khalīfas, Muhammad al-Hifnī and Mahmūd al-Kurdī.59 Al-Tijānī was a disciple of al-Sammān, who was initiated by al-Bakrī after having been initiated in Cairo by the Algerian master, Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Azharī, who was himself a close disciple of Muhammad al-Hifnī and then of Mahmūd al-Kurdī. In 1771, while isolated in the desert on his return from the pilgrimage to Mecca, al-Tijānī received in a waking vision a message from the mouth of the Prophet, telling him to leave the Khalwatiyya and found his own path, the tarīqa muhammadiyya, which would take his name: the Tijāniyya.60 Although Mustafā al-Bakrī seems not to have mentioned the tarīqa muhammadiyya, his disciple Muhammad ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Sammān (d. 1775) played a central role in the elaboration of this path, and in its propagation towards subSaharan Africa. This Medinese Sufi was the author of a short treatise, al-Futuhāt al-ilāhiyya fī l-tawajjuhāt al-rūhiyya li l-hadra al-muhammadiyya (The Divine Revelations and the Spiritual Guidance to the Presence of Muhammad) in which he describes the modes of attachment to the Prophet (ta‘alluq) through assiduous recitation of the tasliya with the aim of reaching mystical union with the spirit of God’s messenger (rūh muhammadī); thanks to the work of Claude Addas we now know that this text was a word-for-word copy of a fourteenth-century treatise, the Qāb Qawsayn by the Yemeni ‘Abd al-Karīm Jīlī (d. 1409), one of the main propagators of the teachings of Ibn ‘Arabī (Valerie Hoffman was the first to indicate the importance of the text by Jīlī, demonstrating that the quest in Sufism for mystical union with the Prophet was in no way a new theme; she did not at the time have access to enough elements to make the link between Jīlī and the eighteenth-century Sufis).61 From Morocco to India, via Egypt and Medina, the expression ‘Muhammadan path’ was increasingly important in Sufi writings across the Muslim world, with variations in the use of this concept since, for example, the Moroccan context under the Saadians was not the same as the situation in the Arab lands under the Ottomans. Next we present the principles and aims of this path as it was practised by the Sufi masters who, in some cases, made it the foundation for new Sufi paths.

The Prophet, inspiration for the renewal of the Sufi paths Imitation of the Prophet as the path to Muhammadan sainthood According to al-Sanūsī’s definition, the tarīqa muhammadiyya is a path, although not an organised tarīqa, conceived as a spiritual concentration on the Prophet by the practice of prayer upon him, performed in such a way as to bring forth his presence and establish a bond with him (ta‘alluq), like the bond a disciple has with his master: ‘As for the tarīqa Muhammadiyya, for the one who follows it, it consists of beholding the Prophet by the recitation of the prayer upon him (tasliya).’ This

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  93 was a form of transmission of esoteric knowledge from the Prophet directly to the disciple or via a very short chain of transmitters. The knowledge was transmitted during visions of the Prophet, appearing while the disciple was awake, asleep or in a half-way state between the two. For Ahmad al-Zawāwī those who saw and spoke to the Prophet were equal in rank to his companions who believed in him and followed him, an idea already expressed during the fourteenth century by ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī in his Qāb qawsayn, in which he gives a detailed description of the physical appearance of the Prophet ‘to allow you to imagine this noble constitution and to see it at every moment until it is present for you: thus you will attain the rank of those who behold him, you will obtain the supreme happiness and join the companions, may God be satisfied with all of them.’62 Sanūsī specified that only someone who conformed to the Sunna, purified his soul, and ate licit foods exclusively could practice the prayer on the Prophet until God’s messenger became his shaykh. He reminded his readers that the Egyptian Sufis Nūr al-dīn al-Shūnī, Ahmad al-Zawāwī, ‘Alī al-Khawwās and Muhammad al-Manzalāwī practised the prayer on the Prophet until they were initiated by him (ya’khudhuna ‘anhu), and that the Prophet educated them without intermediaries (wasīta): ‘Be with the Prophet as the disciple with his shaykh, you must fill your heart with an absolute love for him until you can see his visible appearance present before you with the eyes of inner vision (timthālihi bayna ‘aynay basīratika) . . . and if you persevere in the recitation of the prayer on the Prophet, God will cover you with graces and the eye of your inner vision (sawād basīratika) will become the throne of divine manifestations and the receptacle for his lieutenancy on earth (khilāfa).’63 The Prophet may appear by himself to the Sufi, or accompanied by al-Khadīr and/or the great saints, as Muhammad al-Hifnī experienced, in numerous visions finding himself in the presence of the Prophet and the Egyptian saint Ahmad al-Badawī.64 For Ibn Idrīs the tarīqa muhammadiyya illustrates the mystical wayfaring of the disciple as a continuation of the imitation of the Prophet (ittibā‘ al-nabī) under the guidance of a master, with the aim of reaching a state in which vision of Muhammad is possible. In his famous prayer, al-Salāt al-‘azīmiyya (A prayer of Glorification) transmitted to him by al-Khadīr on the order of and in the presence of the Prophet, Ibn Idrīs asks God to join him with the Prophet here in this world and in the world beyond: ‘And join me with him, just as You joined the spirit with the soul, outwardly and inwardly, in wakefulness and in sleep.’65 Some Sufi masters integrated the prayer invoking God’s blessing on the Prophet Muhammad into their methods of spiritual teaching and practice, for their disciples’ use: ‘O my God! Pray upon Muhammad Your servant and messenger as You have prayed on Abraham. Bless Muhammad and the family of Muhammad as You have blessed Abraham and the family of Abraham.’66 In the seventeenth century Khānī recommended this, along with the awrād, as daily exercise, in his Sufi handbook al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk.67 The Aleppo master did not use the term tarīqa muhammadiyya – he went even further, speaking of a sharī‘a muhammadiyya, Muhammadan law, since the path could only be founded on the strict observance of the Prophet’s Sunna. His work refers frequently to the hadīth of the Prophet (of

94  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal which he demonstrated complete mastery) and seldom calls on Sufi texts. Khānī went so far as to write that although it was recommended that an aspirant attach himself to a master, if he could not find a qualified spiritual guide and possessed the required capacities himself he could follow the path on his own, as long as he made sure to apply the sharī‘a strictly and follow the example of the Prophet. The Egyptian, Ahmad al-Sawī, a close disciple of Shaykh al-Dardīr, considered the prayer on the Prophet to be equal in importance to the dhikr; that is to say, to the recitation of the Names of God.68 Those who called themselves followers of the path of Muhammad were generally accomplished Sufis who had already learned from one or more masters and been initiated into several paths. For example, the Medina scholar Ahmad al-Qushshāshī has been presented either as a Naqshbandī or as a Shattārī, when in fact he claimed no specific affiliation for himself among the twenty-odd Sufi paths into which he was initiated; although the masters of Ahmad b. Idrīs were Shādhilī, he never presented himself as belonging to this path69 because, like Qushshāshī and some other contemporaneous masters, he deferred to a superior affiliation, through the transmission of the Prophet.70 Zabīdī’s ‘Iqd al-Jawhar mentions many Sufis who had established direct spiritual relations with the Prophet Muhammad or other prophets, and who were initiated by their spiritual entities (rūhāniyya). Although the tarīqa muhammadiyya was not an organised path, it was nevertheless at the root of the newly founded or renewed paths of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The founders of these tarīqas were initiated by the Prophet, from whom they directly inherited their spiritual science; that is to say, a way of knowing God according to the Muhammadan model within akbarian hagiology. Ibn ‘Arabī identified the ‘Perfect man’ (insān kāmil) as the heir to the sainthood of Muhammad.71 This Muhammadan sainthood was claimed by many masters of the Modern Period, from Qushshāshī to Tijānī, and including al-Bakrī and ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Sammān, some of whom identified with the Prophet to the point of calling themselves the Seal of saints, just as Muhammad was the Seal of the prophets. The Prophet transmitted the entire Quran to Qushshāshī, who, following the example of Ibn ‘Arabī, did not found a new Sufi path but presented himself as the Seal of saints, explaining that the khatmiyya was a very elevated spiritual degree and that each period of history until the end of time would have its own seal. Tijānī also received the Quran directly from the Prophet, and it was via this very short chain that he transmitted it to Sanūsī in Fez: ‘I learned from him, and I took the Koran from him, and he told me that he had taken it from the Prophet, asleep and awake. And he excelled in following his, may God bless him and grant him peace, example in all his actions, and he honoured me by letting me take the Koran from him, by this noble sanad, after he had taken it from him (the Prophet).’72 And, like Muhammad who founded a new religion by divine command, Tijānī followed the Prophetic injunction to found a Sufi path that he called the tarīqa muhammadiyya: the Prophet even transmitted to him the prayer specific to his new path, the Jawharat al-kamāl (The Jewel of Perfection), and commanded him only to initiate disciples in the chain of God’s messenger.73 Ahmad al-Tijānī claimed the titles of katmiyya and khatmiyya, ‘the sealed seal,’ and, having teleported to the sacred

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  95 mountain of ‘Arafa, he acceded to the qutbiyya al-‘uzmā, becoming the ‘supreme pole’ who leads the hierarchy of saints. ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Sammān, the founder of the Sammāniyya, was recognised by his disciples as the seal of sainthood and was seen in a dream above the four poles (al-aqtab al-arba‘a), and in another at the right hand of the Prophet, with whom, in the end, he identified.74 As for al-Hifnī’s Algerian disciple Muhammad ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Azharī, after he had returned from Egypt to Algeria and founded his own Sufi path, the Rahmaniyya, he had seven visions of the Prophet telling him that all those who followed his path, attached themselves to him, visited him or prayed on his tomb would be saved from fire on the day of the Last Judgement. The verse version of these ‘seven visions’ was recited by his disciples during weekly dhikr sessions, and there were festivities associated with visits to the tomb of this saint.75 Finally, al-Jabartī, who was a disciple of Mahmūd al-Kurdī, writes in his Chronicles that his master had such frequent visions of the Prophet that few nights passed without one: ‘he even has visions of God in dreams, one of which [visions] one day announced to him, “O Mahmūd, I love you, and I love those who love you.” ’ He confided in his disciple ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Rāfi’ī, telling him (as reported by al-Jabartī), ‘The Prophet has said that those who love him will enter into paradise, I have received divine authorisation to say the same thing.’76 In the same way as adherence to Islam (the last monotheist religion that completes all those that preceded it) is exclusive and brings with it duties and interdictions, these new Sufi paths placed themselves above all other paths, which were included in and completed by them; members were enjoined to make a total and exclusive commitment.77 This claim to be above all other paths was justified by the superior status attributed to the founders; this is very apparent in the Egyptian Khalwatiyya. The diffusion of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt happened so soon after its arrival there, and was so rapid, that historians have referred to this as a Sufi renewal, or even a reform; this analysis stems from colonial literature, especially the aforementioned book by Depont and Coppolani in which the Khalwatiyya is represented as a ‘Syrian and Egyptian reformist movement.’ During the 1960s, E. Bannerth referred to a reformed branch of the Khalwatiyya, introduced by al-Bakrī into Egypt, whereas for J. S. Trimingham and B. G. Martin (taken up by John Fletcher) it was at the origin of the vast movement of Sufi revival in the second half of the eighteenth century, one that inspired all the other reform movements in Africa and Arabia and served as a model for the Sufi paths born from the teachings of Ahmad Ibn Idrīs in the nineteenth century.78 The Egyptian Khalwatiyya was not a new Sufi path, born as it was from the Turkish Khalwatiyya, the essential principles of which it conserved. Al-Bakrī made few changes, merely adding some prayers and litanies of his own composition to the dhikr ritual. Nevertheless, the eschatological role accorded to his successor, Muhammad al-Hifnī, who was designated by his hagiographer under the title of pole (qutb) and of supreme intercessor in the hereafter for all existing followers of his path and those who were to come, places the Khalwatiyya above the other Sufi paths. Some of the new paths had founding texts that were directly inspired by the Prophet, such as Tijānī’s Jawharat al-kamāl, Mir Dard’s Warīdat (‘words divinely inspired’), and ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Azharī’s

96  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal Seven Visions; that of the Khalwatiyya was the hagiography of al-Hifnī, Manāqib al-Hifnī, composed during his lifetime and probably under his supervision by a close disciple to whom he recounted his many visions, in particular that of the day when he was invested with the function of pole (taqattaba) by the Prophet, with the great saints as witnesses. This text, which we present in the next chapter, circulated widely among the nineteenth-century masters of the Khalwatiyya, becoming a hagiological support that allowed disciples to feel they belonged to an exceptional nasab (genealogy). A nineteenth-century Khalwatiyya ijāza cites Ahmad al-Dardīr, who described the Khalwatiyya as containing and completing all other paths, and then his khalīfa, al-Sāwī, who says that those who follow this path will be saved from hellfire by the baraka of Shaykh al-Hifnī, whose manāqib bear witness to this fact.79 In the eighteenth century the Muhammadan path certainly brought forth many imposing figures among its masters, who were influential in the founding or renewal of Sufi paths that would go on to have an impact on the history of Sufism throughout the nineteenth century. Although the veneration of the Prophet was naturally not limited to Sufis, they did play a decisive role in its diffusion, in diverse modes and across all of society. We have seen that for the khāssa (Sufis), devotion to the Prophet was expressed through spiritual progress; for the rest of society, the ‘āmma, Sufis produced an entire literature celebrating the Prophet, emphasising his divine origin and his eschatological function (shafī’). These texts evoked the Prophet so as to make him seem present nearby; they served to establish in the reader a strong and intimate bond with the Prophet through the expression of love for him. According to the hadīth, the Prophet himself encouraged this love for his person when he said that only those who loved him were true believers who would be saved from hellfire.80 Prayers on the Prophet, collections of praises for him (madīh), tales of his birth (mawlid) or of his ascension into heaven (mi‘rāj) – all these ancient genres underwent a renewal and increased in popularity from the sixteenth century on. Original accounts were composed, such as the Mawlid of Barzanjī and al-Dardīr, along with commentaries on celebrated narratives, such as Ahmad al-Dardīr’s on the Mawlid of Muhammad al-Ghaythī.81 The venerated Prophet The practice of invoking in prayer God’s blessing on the Prophet was not exclusive to Sufis; this request was included in canonical prayer and recited on various occasions by all Muslims.82 However, Sufis produced numerous variations on this prayer, which helped diffuse themes that were specific to Sufi doctrine throughout society. These themes were linked to the figure of the Prophet, exemplary model and perfect being, present throughout eternity, manifestation of mercy and supreme intercessor. The work of Fritz Meier, and Amine Hamidoune’s doctoral thesis, show that the periods during which the practice of the tasliya became generalised were the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the period from the end of the fifteenth through the sixteenth century, and the period from the end of the eighteenth through the nineteenth century. Each of these periods corresponds to

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  97 the development of Sufi paths or to a new wave of their expansion. The new tasliya that appeared during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were attributed to the great medieval mystics and saints: ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, Ahmad al-Rifā’ī, Ibn Mashīsh, Ahmad al-Badawī, and Ibn ‘Arabī, some of whom became the eponymous founders of the major Sufi paths. These prayers were integrated within the litanies (ahzāb, awrād) particular to these paths. In Jīlānī’s Minor Prayer (Salāt al-sughrā) the Prophet was ‘light preceding the creation, whose manifestation is a mercy for the worlds’ (al-sābiq li-l-khalq nūruh wa rahma li-l-‘alamīn zuhūruh); Rifā’ī, in his prayer Jawharat al-asrār (The Jewel of the Secrets) invokes the Prophet through whom God ‘set free the secret of existence’; in Ahmad al-Badawī’s Hizb the Prophet is described as ‘the tree of the luminous origin,’ and as ‘the mine of the divine secrets’: Allāhumma, accomplish Your prayer, greet and shed Your blessing upon our lord and our master Muhammad, the tree of luminous origin (shajarat alasl al-nūrāniyya), the brilliance of the handful of the Merciful, the best of human creatures, the noblest of corporeal images, the vessel of the Lord’s secrets (al-asrār al-rabbāniyya) and of the chosen treasures of the sciences, the owner of the original handful, of the radiant splendour and of the elevated degree, the one beneath whose flag (liwā’) all the prophets are aligned; they extend from him to Him. During the Ottoman period the production of collections of prayers on the Prophet again increased; in addition, all of the known commentaries on medieval collections date from this time. This demonstrates the exteriorisation of the veneration of the Prophet in Islamic society at the end of the Medieval Period – a phenomenon to which Sufis contributed a great deal.83 As early as the fifteenth century and through the Ottoman period, the art of the commentary became the primary mode for Islamic intellectual activity and for the transmission of knowledge. Particularly in Egypt, the favourable conditions highlighted by the historian Nelly Hanna – among them a reduction in the cost of paper imported from Italy – allowed the production of such texts in great quantities; thanks to the new possibilities of mobility and circulation within the Ottoman Empire, manuscript copies were transported throughout the Muslim world.84 From the sixteenth century the prayer attributed to the Moroccan ‘Abd al-Salām Ibn Mashīsh (d. 1228), which was known by the name Salat al-mashīshiyya, was increasingly important for Sufis in the Ottoman Empire (as was the case for the Dalā’il, which we present subsequently); we know this because of the very numerous commentaries on this prayer that began to appear during this period. The first commentary in Turkish was composed in 1701 by Ismā‘īl Haqqī al-Bursawī (d. 1725) and re-issued many times. Mustafā al-Bakrī alone was the author of no fewer than four commentaries or accounts of commentaries on this prayer.85 From this time, the recitation of the prayer became an essential component of the dhikr for many Sufi paths; in the second chapter of the present work we have seen that Ahmad al-Dardīr integrated it into the collection of litanies and prayers of the

98  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal Khalwatiyya, recommending that it be recited morning and night. It is so wellknown and widespread among Sufis until today that it merits a full translation: ‘O my God, bless the one from whom secrets derive and illuminations spring forth. Bless the one in whom realities arise and in whom descended the sciences of Adam, so that not one of us can seize his immensity, whether in the past or the future. The gardens of the spiritual world are ornamented by the flower of his beauty, and the fountains of the world of the Omnipotent spill over with the flow of his light. Nothing exists that is not bound to him, for if there was no mediator, all that relies on him would disappear. O my God, grant him a blessing such as is his due, from You and on Your behalf, according to the great extent of his dignity. O my God, make me part of his posterity and grant me a place among the Just by his agency. Let me know him with a knowledge that turns me away from the wells of ignorance and makes me quench my thirst from the wells of virtue. Carry me on his path, wrapped in Your succour, towards Your presence. Use me to strike all vanity in order to destroy it. Plunge me into the oceans of Oneness, pull me from the quagmire of the way and towards Unity, drown me in the pure spring of the ocean of Unicity that except through it I may neither see, nor hear, nor be conscious, nor feel anything. Make of the supreme veil the life of my spirit, and of his spirit the secret of my reality, and of his reality all my worlds, through the realisation of the first Truth. O First, O Last, O Manifest, O Most Hidden, hear my call, as You heard the call of Your servant Zachary; come and save me, help me to align myself towards You, realise the union between me and You, and erase all bonds between me and what is not You. Allah ! Allah ! Allah ! ‘He who imposed the Recitation upon you shall surely restore you to a place of homing.’ (Quran 28: 85) ‘Our Lord, give us mercy from You, and furnish us with rectitude in our affairs’ (Quran, 18: 10) ‘God and His angels bless the Prophet; O believers, do you also bless him, and pray him peace’ (Quran 33: 56) May the graces, the peace, the greetings, the mercy and the blessings of God be bestowed on our lord Muhammad, the unlettered Prophet who is Your servant, Your Prophet and Your messenger. May they also be bestowed on his family and on his companions, and may they be as numerous as the perfect and blessed words of our lord. ‘Glory be to your Lord, the Lord of Glory, above that they describe! And peace be upon the Envoys. And praise belongs to God, the Lord of all beings.’(Quran, 37: 180–182)

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  99 The most famous collection of prayers on the Prophet doubtless remains the Dalā’il al-khayrāt wa shawāriq al-anwār fī dhikr al-salāt ‘ala-l-Nabī al-mukhtār (The Waymarks of Benefits and Brilliant Burst of Lights in the Remembrance of Blessings on the Chosen Prophet) by al-Jazūlī. Starting in the sixteenth century, the extent of the diffusion of this text was spectacular; it was spread along the routes of trade and of the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Moroccan al-‘Ayyāshī brought it to Medina during the first half of the seventeenth century, and from there it was carried eastwards to Indonesia and Central Asia, where it was memorised in Dalā’il-khāna or Salawāt-khāna, spaces that had been founded specifically for this purpose.86 It affected all strata of society, in places becoming the most-read religious text after the Quran and acquiring a similar sacred status. The Dalā’il was unique in the extent of its diffusion, but also because, with the En‘am-i Sharīf, it was one of the very rare religious books to contain illustrations. The presence of the illuminations bears witness to the elevated position accorded to collections of prayers on the Prophet. The book became a talismanic object, considered to be laden with baraka, with thaumaturgic and prophylactic virtues. It is not unusual to find healing formulae, magic squares and prayers warding off evil written in its margins.87 The Ottoman scholar Hajjī Khalīfa (Kātip Çelebi) considered the Dalā’il to be among the signs of God. Even if it remained unread, the fact of possessing a copy of this work (for those who could afford it), or of carrying it on one’s person in a worked-leather pouch as a talisman, had a protective effect. Readers were paid to recite the Dalā’il in mosques and shrines, during religious festivals and the wakes of Ramadān. In Egypt, the popularity of this text was so great that some copyists lived exclusively from copying the Dalā’il; it could be purchased at all price levels, which certainly indicates its diffusion across all social milieux.88 In Jirjā as early as the sixteenth century the revenues from the substantial waqf of ‘Alī bey were allocated to the organisation of regular sessions during which the Salawāt al-jazūliyya were read aloud in the mosque founded by this amir; this demonstrates the rapidity with which the Dalā’il spread throughout Egypt as soon as it arrived in the country. The Dalā’il was conceived as a collection of weekly prayers; it begins with hadīth on the merits and benefits of prayer on the Prophet, the assiduous recitation of which is strongly recommended. This introductory chapter is followed by a list of the 201 names of the Prophet (asmā’ al-Nabī) – mostly drawn from the Quran and the Sunna – and then by a description of his tomb in Medina (sifāt al-rawda). In the following chapters, after the author has specified his underlying intentions in composing this collection, there are more than 400 prayers, divided into sections (hizb, pl. ahzāb), each of which is then divided into quarters (arbā’) and then thirds (athlāt). Each hizb corresponds to a day of the week, and their weekly recitation is perfectly ordered. Nearly 100 of the prayers relate to the names and attributes of the Prophet, giving details of his election, his mission and his privileged relationship with God.89 The names of the Prophet have been systematically studied by A. Hamidoune, who has found recurring themes: the ‘light of Muhammad,’ the ‘Muhammadan Reality,’ ‘the perfect man,’ the ‘initiatic model,’ ‘divine love,’ ‘the eschatological intercession of the Prophet,’ and ‘divine mercy.’ These themes recur in another genre aiming to nourish popular devotion to the Prophet, that of mawlid: tales celebrating his birth and his vocation as God’s messenger.

100  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal Accounts of the birth of the Prophet (mawlid) Mawlid narratives became widespread as early as the fifteenth century, and were recited on various occasions, especially on the first twelve nights of the month of rabī’ I – the twelfth day of that month is the Prophet’s birthday, celebrated with festivities that are also called Mawlid.90 During the sixteenth century, when the celebration of the birth of the Prophet was introduced to the Ottoman court, the production of these texts increased, and, as with the Dalā’il, a class of specialists came into being to recite them: the mevlidhān, who were famous for their beautiful voices; several among them attracted the Sultan’s attention and have featured in historical records. The best-loved mawlid narrative in the Turkish world since Ottoman times is by the great poet Suleyman Chelebi (d. 1422). This was translated from Ottoman Turkish into all the languages of the Empire (Arabic, Persian, Albanian, Kurdish, Circassian, Bosnian and Greek); one can still find numerous printed versions of this text in today’s Turkey, where it is recited on various occasions throughout the year.91 The mawlid genre reached its apogee during the eighteenth century in Medina with the narrative composed by Jaʿfar b. Hasan al-Barzanjī (d. 1765): ‘Iqd aljawhar fī mawlid al-nabī al-azhar (The string of pearls of the resplendent Prophet’s birth), better known as the Mawlid al-Barzanjī.92 Al-Barzanjī was a jurist and Shafi‘i mufti, Imam of the Prophet’s mosque; he belonged to the influential sharifian and scholarly Medinese family of Kurdish origin, the Barzanjiyya.93 His Mawlid is the most popular panegyric of the Prophet ever written in Arabic, recited by Sunni Muslims around the world. It was translated into several of the other languages of Islam, and was the subject of numerous commentaries across the Muslim world; it was immensely popular in Indonesia and East Africa, where it is still used today, recited in verse or prose during the celebrations around the Prophet’s birthday, but also recited to solicit divine blessings on special occasions such as the birth of a child, moving into a new house, or the opening of a new business.94 In Sudan, Barzanjī’s Mawlid is the oldest such text that is still in use among the Qādirī and the Sammānī.95 In Egypt, where it was very popular during the nineteenth century, it was recited during the first twelve nights of the month of rabī’ I.96 The Egyptian shaykh Muhammad ‘Ilīsh (d. 1882) wrote a well-known commentary on it, Al-Qawl al-munjī ‘alā mawlid al-Barzanjī.97 In the version that we consulted, which was edited by a Sufi family, the Khazrajī, Barzanjī’s text is preceded by a refutation of Wahhabite theses on the ordinary humanity of Muhammad; it also re-affirms the pre-existence of God’s messenger in the form of a light that gives life to the world, and confirms the Prophet’s infallibility, describing him as the embodiment of the religion (‘Kāna dīn yatajassadu,’ ‘Sayyidinā al-mustafā huwa al-islām’).98 Like all mawlid texts, Barzanjī’s takes its inspiration from two ancient genres, the literature of shamā’il (the noble qualities of the Prophet) and of the dalā’īl alnubuwwa (the proofs of the prophecy); these had inspired many Sufi poems praising the Prophet, the best-known of which was al-Burda (the Ode of the Mantle) by the Egyptian Muhammad al-Busīrī (d. 1298), so-called because of the miraculous

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  101 healing of the poet by the Prophet, who laid his mantle over his semi-paralysed body. This rich literature, particularly abundant in Egypt, evolved over the centuries to give an increasing importance to the Prophet’s blessed conception and birth, his miraculous exploits, his virtues and noble character, and to the devotion that was due to his person. It was based on the biography of the Prophet, the Sīra of Ibn Ishāq, embellished with the marvellous and miraculous events that took place both before and after his birth and vocation as Prophet; the proofs that he was the last Prophet are also included. This literature overflows with tales of miracles in which men and animals recognise Muhammad as God’s messenger. Barzanjī’s Mawlid begins with a section consisting of greetings and salutations to the Prophet, which name him according to his numerous qualities, his character, his virtues and miracles, in order to remind the reader of his human perfection and his status as an eternally chosen being. These salutations are followed by Quranic verses on the election of the Prophet: ‘Innā fatahnā laka fathan mubīnan’: ‘Surely We have given you a manifest victory  .  .  .’ (Surah The Victory: 1–2–3); ‘Laqad jā’ākum rasūlun min anfusikum’: ‘Now there has come to you a Messenger among yourselves.’ (Surah Repentance: 128); ‘Inna Allāh wa malā’īkatahu yusallūna ‘alā al-nabīyy, yā’āyyuhā al-ladhinā amānū sallū ‘alayhi wa sallamū taslīman’: ‘God and His angels bless the Prophet. O believers do you also bless him, and pray him peace.’ (Surah The Confederates: 56). The main theme of this text is the light of the Prophet (nūr muhammadī), from which God created the world.99 The doctrine of the primordial light of the Prophet, as created out of divine light, was elaborated by mystics on the basis of the hadīth of Jabīr, the Prophet’s companion, who asked God’s messenger what God’s first creation was: ‘The light of your Prophet, Jabīr.’ There is another version of this hadīth in which Muhammad was asked when he became Prophet: ‘I was a Prophet already when Adam was still between water and mud.’ The story of the creation of this primordial light is recounted in a mawlid that is well-known in Egypt, Mawlid al-bashīr al-nadhīr (The Birth of the Bringer of Good Tidings and the One who Warns) by Ahmad al-Dardīr. Issued as an inexpensive pamphlet many times during the nineteenth century, and commented on by the Shaykh of al-Azhar Ibrāhīm al-Bājūrī (d. 1860) in his Hāshiyat Ibrāhīm al-Bajūrī ‘alā mawlid Abī al-Barakāt Ahmad al-Dardīr, this mawlid sets out the ancient traditions upholding the preexistence of Muhammad as the first of God’s creations and the last of His prophets; for example: ‘Abd al-Razzāq has related that, according to Jābir Ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Ansārī, this latter asked, “O Envoy of God, I beg you by my father and my mother, inform me about the first thing that God created before [the other] things?” He said, “Jābir, before every thing God created from His light the light of your Prophet. By His power He made this light move wherever He wanted it. In that time, neither the Preserved Tablet, nor the Pen, nor heaven, nor hell, nor angel, nor sky, nor earth, nor sun, nor moon, nor djinn, nor man existed. When God the Most High wanted to create humankind he divided this light into four parts. From the first part he created the Pen, from the second the

102  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal Preserved Tablet, from the third the Throne; then he divided the fourth part into four more parts. From the first he created the sight of the believers, from the second the light of their hearts, which is inner knowledge (ma‘rīfa) of God the Most High, and from the third their affability (uns), which is their faith in a single God: there is no god but God.”100 The story of the apparition of this primordial Muhammadan reality in flesh and blood is told in Chapter 4 of Barzanjī’s Mawlid: When it was God’s will to make the Reality of Muhammad appear; and to make it manifest in body and spirit, in its form and its spiritual entity/ He laid him down in the mother-of-pearl of Amina of the Banū Zuhra, and God the Most Near, who answers prayers, granted her the privilege of being the mother of His Elect One/ It was then announced in the heavens and on earth that she carried his essential lights within her; All lovers were transported by the breath of its breeze/ The earth, after a long dry season, was covered with fine brocade; Fruit ripened and trees bowed down so that their fruits could be picked/ All the animals of the tribe of Quraysh announced his imminent birth in pure Arabic/ Thrones and idols crumbled on their faces and their mouths/ The wild beasts of east and west, and the sea-creatures, announced this good news; In joy, all the worlds drank from the cup of his wine/ The djinns announced the arrival of his times; The diviners were defeated and the monks full of fear/ All the great scholars spoke of him and were fascinated by the jewel of his beauty/ People came to find his mother, and they told her: ‘You are pregnant with the lord of worlds and the best of creatures/ When you bring him forth call him Muhammad, for his end shall be full of praises.’ Narratives of the celestial ascension of the Prophet (Mi‘rāj) The mi‘rāj genre, relating the celestial ascension of the Prophet, is derived from mawlid narratives; Ja‘far al-Barzanjī wrote a Qissat al-mi‘rāj that is as celebrated as his Mawlid. The two texts are often sold together in African and Indonesian bookshops. Written in prose or in verse, the mi‘rāj is recited on the night of the twenty-seventh day of the month of rajab, date of the celebration of the ascension of the Prophet from heaven to heaven and to the threshold of the divine presence, at ‘a distance of two bow lengths or nearer’ (Quran 53:9).101 In Egypt the most popular mi‘rāj tale was probably that of Najm al-dīn Muhammad al-Ghaythī (d. 1573/74), on which Ahmad al-Dardīr wrote a commentary that is still read today during evening sessions in Indonesia, where, known simply under the name of Dardīr, it seems to be as popular as Barzanjī’s Qissat al-mi’rāj itself.102 On reading Ottoman-period Egyptian registers of the positions supported by waqf or consulting the actual waqf documents, one observes that substantial numbers of people were employed to read the mi‘rāj and the mawlid in the country’s mosques. Once again we can mention the example, in Jirjā, of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Khayyāt, who was employed to read texts on the Benefits of the fifteenth night

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  103 of the month of Sha‘bān, as well as the narrative of the Prophet’s celestial journey, his panegyric, and accounts on the Benefits of the night of Destiny (the twentyseventh night of Ramadān) in three different mosques in the town. The stories of the Prophet’s celestial ascension are generally structured around three miraculous episodes: that of the purification by angels of all sin from the Prophet’s heart, either in the form of an ablution or, as in Barzanjī’s text, by the opening of the Prophet’s chest; that of the night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem on the winged horse Burak; and, finally, the episode of the Prophet’s actual ascent, from heaven to heaven, to the seventh heaven, during which he visited paradise and hell, appeared before God, and returned to Mecca. This mi‘rāj was an important reference for the Sufis who described their initiatic wayfaring leading to the walāya, that is to say, to their own progression towards God, as an imitation of the Prophet’s ascension.103 In the works of Khānī, Samānudī and Dardīr we have seen that the soul’s journey comprises seven stages – the symbolic number refers to the seven heavens through which the Prophet travelled on his way to the divine throne. In the same way as the Prophet returned to Mecca, the saint who has arrived at the end of his spiritual journey and there experienced illumination and spiritual opening (fath), acceding to the divine world, then goes back down to humanity to offer his guidance. Certain Sufi masters, however, went as far as to lay claim to the same experience as the Prophet, following the example of the Indian Sufi, Muhammad Gawth, who affirmed that he had, like the Prophet before him, reached as far as God; for this he was condemned by the ulama of Gujarat.104 Once again, we observe the extent to which the claim to prophetic heritage on the part of Sufi masters of high stature, who were impregnated with the teachings of Ibn ‘Arabī, went as far as total identification with God’s messenger. Conclusion It is indisputable that there was an intensification of fervour and piety around the person of the Prophet in all regions of the Muslim world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: this turning point occurred in a specific context, that of the formation of the great Ottoman, Savafid and Mughal Muslim Empires. A messianic effervescence took hold right around the Mediterranean: sultans and emperors rode to the conquest of new territories (in the case of the Ottomans and the Mughals), or the reconquest of territories that had been lost to the Christians (for the Sultans of Morocco). These conquerors drew parallels between their time and that of the Prophet of Islam, seeing themselves as renewers of his community and appropriating his spiritual and temporal heritage. To reinforce this filiation from the Prophet (with motives that included political legitimisation), they encouraged devotion to his person through the organisation of great festivities commemorating his birth. Devotional practices around the person of the Prophet were organised by the Sufi brotherhoods, whose geographical expansion and social influence were then at their height. Islam, inspired by Sufism, and particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, developed a doctrine of the cosmic reality of the Prophet, primordial light giving birth to the world, and of his metahistorical role as the

104  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal final intercessor for his community and for all of humanity. The doctrine of the ‘Muhammadan reality’ reached far beyond Sufi circles and was carried forward into the modern period by the collections of prayers on and praises of the Prophet that were recited, either during popular festivals in his honour or in a domestic setting. Above and beyond their emotional function and the support they provided for ritual practice, the texts containing prayers, mawlid and mi‘rāj narratives diffused a doctrine that Sufis held dear, that of the perfection of the Prophet, image of God and ultimate cause of all creation. After Muhammad’s death, this perfection was transmitted to his heirs (wurathā’), the awliyā’, initiated by the spiritual entity of the Prophet through a path that eventually carried the name tarīqa muhammadiyya. Sufis considered the saints to be the real heirs of the Prophet, the scholars and spiritual guides of Muhammad’s community, as in the Prophet’s hadīth, ‘the Ulamas are the heirs of the Prophets.’ The time of prophetic missions was succeeded by the time of sainthood; even after Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets, there was a return to the source of the Revelations of the Prophets, which the saints would inherit. After all, Akbarian doctrine, which places the Prophet at the heart of sainthood, does recognise and take into account the timescale of human history as a sort of in-between space after the end of prophecy and before the end of times, a space that is for humans to construct, with the necessary help of guides who are capable of understanding divine speech and interpreting it: exegetes, which is what the word ‘prophet’ means in Greek and is the role fulfilled by the Jewish and Christian prophets, among whom Muhammad included the scholars of Islam in the celebrated hadīth, ‘The ulama of my community are like the prophets of the sons of Israel.’ In our final chapter we show that this sainthood of a Muhammadan nature signified, for the one who claimed it and in whom it was recognised, a concrete authority on earth and a role as intermediary and intercessor (shafī’) in earthly existence and in the hereafter.

Notes 1 Meier, F., ‘A Resurrection of Muhammad in Suyūtī’, in Meier, F. (ed.), Essays on Islamic Piety and Mysticism, translated by O’Kane, J. with editorial assistance of B. Radtke, Leiden, Brill, 1999, pp. 505–549. 2 Hamidoune, A., La pratique de la prière sur le Prophète en islam, PhD thesis, University of Aix en Provence, 2012. 3 Ferhat, H., ‘Chérifisme et enjeux du pouvoir’, Oriente Moderno 79, 2 (1999), pp. 473– 481; Sebti, A., ‘Chérifisme, symbole et histoire’, Oriente Moderno 79, 2 (1999), pp. 629–630. 4 Bain, A., ‘The En‘am-i Sherif: Sacred Text and Images in a Late Ottoman Prayer Book’, Archivum Ottomanicum 19 (2001). 5 Fisher, C. G., ‘A Reconstruction of the Pictorial Cycle of Siyar-i Nabī of Murād III’, Ars Orientalis 14 (1984), pp.  75–94; cf. Hazan, O., ‘Entre l’auréole, le voile et la flamme, les métamorphoses corporelles du Prophète dans des manuscrits arabes, persans et turcs (XIVe-XIXe siècle)’, in Hazan, O. and Lavoie, J. J. (eds.), Le Prophète Muhammad: entre le mot et l’image, Montréal, Fides, 2011, pp. 115–147; Bain, A., ‘The En‘am-i Sherif’. 6 Geoffroy, É., ‘Le traité de soufisme d’un disciple d’Ibn Taymiyya: Ahmad ‘Imad al-Wāsitī (m. 711/1311)’, Studia Islamica 82 (1995), pp.  83–103. Ahmad ‘Imad

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  105 al-Wāsitī was not the only author studied by É. Geoffroy to have used the expression tarīqa muhammadiyya; it also appears among the masters of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, Ibn Maymūn al-Fāsī (d. 1511) and Shaykh ‘Alwān (d. 1530); Geoffroy, É., Le soufisme en Syrie et en Égypte, p. 270, note 3. 7 Cornell, V., Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism, Austin, Texas, University Press, 1998, p. 219. 8 Al-Sanūsī, Muhammad, al-Salsabīl al-ma‘īn, p.  7; Al-Zabīdī, Murtadā, Iqd al-jawhar al-thamīn fī-l-dhikr wa turuq al-ilbās wa-l-talqīn, edited by Koçak, A. Y., Al-Murtazā al-Zabīdī ve ‘ikd al-cavhar al-samīn’i, Istanbul Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1986, p. 129; Addas, C., ‘À la distance de deux arcs ou plus près’, p. 20; Radtke, B., ‘Between Projection and Suppression. Some Considerations Concerning the Study of Sufism’, in De Jong, F. (ed.), Shī’a Islam, Sects and Sufism, Utrecht, Houtsma Stichting, 1992, pp. 74–75. 9 Al-Zabīdī, Murtadā, ‘Iqd al-jawhar al-thamīn, p. 130. 10 Rahman, F., Islam, Chicago, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, 2nd edition University of Chicago Press, 1979. 11  Rahman, F., Islam, p. 206. 12 Rahman, F., Islam, p. 195. 13 Rahman, F., Islam, p. 202. 14 Richards, J. F., ‘The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir’, in Muzaffar, A. and Subrahmanyam, S. (eds.), The Mughal State 1526–1750, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 126–167. 15 Rahman, F., ‘Revival and Reform in Islam’, in Holt, P. M., Lambton, A. K. S. and Lewis, B. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Islam, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, vol. II, p. 637. 16 Iqbal, M., The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Redwood, Stanford University Press, 2013. 17 Pagani, S., ‘Sufismo, “neo-sufismo” e confraternite musulmane: il confronto con il mondo moderno’, in Tottoli, R. (ed.), Le religioni e il mondo moderno: Islam, Torino, Einaudi, 2009, p. 32; Mujiburrahman, S., ‘Fazlur Rahman’s Critiques of Sufism’, in Carmona, A. (ed.), El Sufismo y las normas del Islam, Murcia, Consejeria de Education y Cultura, 2006, pp. 438–440. 18 Gibb, H. A. R. and Bowen, H., Islamic Society and the West, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1957. vol. 1. 19 Adams, C. C., Islam and Modernism in Egypt, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1933; Gibb, H. A. R., Wither Islam? London, 1932,  reprint New York, Routledge, 2000; Von Grunebaum, G. E., Modern Islam, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1962; Hourani, A., Syria and Lebanon, London, Oxford University Press, 1946; Hurgronje, S., The Achenese, Leiden, 1906; Murray Titus, Indian Islam, London, Oxford University Press, 1930; St Philby, J. B., Arabia, London, E. Benn, 1930; Smith, W. C., Modern Islam in India, London, 1946 and Islam in Modern History, Princeton, 1957. 20 Chih, R., Mayeur-Jaouen, C. and Seesemann, R. (eds.), Sufism, Literary Production and Printing in the 19th century, introduction. 21 Laoust, H., ‘Le réformisme musulman des salafiyya et le caractère orthodoxe de son orientation actuelle’ Revue des Etudes Islamiques, 6 (1932); Gibb, H. A. R., Modern Trends in Islam, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1945. 22 Goldziher, I., ‘Le culte des saints chez les musulmans’, Revue de l’histoire des religions, II (1880). 23 Von Grunebaum, G. E. (ed.), ‘Classicisme et déclin culturel dans l’histoire de l’Islam’, Actes du symposium international d’histoire de la civilisation musulmane, Bordeaux, 1956, Paris, G. P. Maisonneuve, 1957. 24 Depont, O. and Coppolani, X., Les confréries religieuses musulmanes, Algiers, Adolphe Jourdan, 1897. 25 Rahman, F., Islam, pp. 206–207.

106  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal 26 Al-Azmeh, A., Die Islamisierung des Islam. Imaginare Welten einer politischen Theologie, Frankfurt, Campus Verlag, 1996, p. 202. 27 For an overview on the debates and advances in the history of modern and contemporary Sufism, the reader may refer to the enlightening synthesis by Samuela Pagani, ‘Sufismo, “neo-sufismo” e confraternite musulmane: il confronto con il mondo modern’, pp. 29–68. 28 Gran, P., Islamic Roots of Capitalism, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1979; Malik, J., ‘Muslim Culture and Reform in 18th Century South Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13, 2 (2003), pp. 227–243; O’Fahey, S. R., ‘Pietism, Fundamentalism and Mysticism. An Alternative View of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Islamic World’, in Dyrvik, S., Ersland, G. A. and Hovland, E. (eds.), Festskrift til Historisk institutts 40-års jubileum, Bergen, Historisk institutt, Universitetet i Bergen, 1997, pp. 15–66; Hofheinz, A., ‘Illumination and Enlightment Revisited, or: Pietism and the Roots of of Islamic Modernity’ (paper published online) https://folk.uio.no/albrech/ Hofheinz_IllumEnlightenment.pdf. 29 Schulze, R., ‘Das Islamische Achtzehnte Jahrhundert. Versuch einer historiographischen Kritik’, Die Welt des Islam 30 (1990), pp. 140–159. 30 O’Fahey, R. S. and Radtke, B., ‘Neo-Sufism Reconsidered’, Der Islam 70 (1993), pp.  52–87; Radtke, B., ‘Between Projection and Suppression. Some Considerations Concerning the Study of Sufism’, pp. 70–82. 31 Two periodicals appointed themselves as tribunal for these debates that shook up German orientalists, Die Welt des Islam and Der Islam. There is a synthesis of these polemics in O’Fahey, S., ‘Pietism, Fundamentalism and Mysticism’. 32 Friedman, Y., Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī. An Outline of his Thought and a Study of his Image in the Eyes of Posterity, Montreal and London, McGill University, 1971; Ter Haar, J. G. J., Follower and Heir of the Prophet: Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) as Mystic, Leiden, Het Oosters Instituut, 1992; Kugle, S., ‘Abd al-Haqq al-Dihlawī, An Accidental Revivalist: Knowledge and Power in the Passage from Delhi to Makka’, Journal of Islamic Studies 19, 2 (2008), pp. 196–246; Elger, R., Mustafa al-Bakri; Von Schlegell, B., Sufism in the Ottoman Arab World: Shaykh ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143 /1731); Pagani, S., Il rinnovamento mistico dell’Islam; O’Fahey, R. S., Enigmatic Saint: Ahmad Ibn Idris and the Idrisi Tradition, London, Hurst, 1990; Radtke, B., O’Kane, J., Vikør, K. S. and O’Fahey, S., The Exoteric Ahmad Ibn Idris. A Sufi’s Critique of the Madhāhib and the Wahhābīs, Leiden, Brill, 1999. Vikør, K. S., Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge. Muhammad b. ‘Alī al-Sanūsī and his Brotherhood, London, Hurst & Company, 1995. 33 Al-Bakrī, Mustafā, Kitāb al-murid al-‘adhb li-dhawī al-wurūd wa-kahsf wahdat al-wujūd, Dār al-kutub, tasawwuf majāmi’ 175; Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’, p. 11. 34 Al-Sharqāwī, ‘Abd Allah, Sharh hikam al-kurdiyya, p. 17. 35 Lazarus-Yafeh, H., ‘Tajdīd al-dīn: A Reconsideration of its Meaning, Roots and Influence in Islam’, Brinner, W. and Ricks, S. (eds.), Studies in Islamic and Judaic Tradition, Institute of Islamic and Judaic Studies, Denver University, Scholars Press, Atlanta, 1986, pp. 99–108; Landau-Tasseron, E., ‘The Cyclical Reform: A Study of the Mujjadid Tradition’, Studia Islamica 70 (1989), pp. 79–117. 36 Pagani, S., ‘Renewal before Reformism. ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī’s Reading of Ahmad Sirhindī’s Ideas on tajdīd’, Journal of the History of Sufism 5 (2007), pp. 291–317. 37 Schimmel, A. M., And Muhammad is His Messenger, The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1985, p. 218. 38 For more on the mystical thought of Shāh Walī Allāh, see Hermansen, M., ‘Shāh Walī Allāh's Theory of the Subtle Spiritual Centers (latāʾif  ): A Sufi Model of Personhood and Self-Transformation’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 47, 1 (January, 1988), pp. 1–25.

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  107 39 Schimmel, A. M., Pain and Grace, A Study of Two Mystical Writers of EighteenthCentury Muslim India, Leiden, Brill, 1976, p. 15; In al-Tafhimāt al-ilāhiyya, Schimmel, A. M., Pain and Grace, p. 15. 40 Pagani, S., ‘Sufismo, “neo-sufismo” e confraternite musulmane’, p. 39. 41 Patrizi, L., ‘Transmission and Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Maghreb: Naʿt al-bidāyāt wa-tawsīf al-nihāyāt by Māʾ al-ʿAynayn (d. 1910)’, in Chih, R., MayeurJaouen, C. and Seesemann, R. (eds.), Sufism, Literary Production and Printing in the 19th Century, p. 327. 42 Radtke, B., O’Kane, J., Vikør, K. S. and O’Fahey, S., The Exoteric Ahmad ibn Idrīs. 43 Pagani, S., ‘The Meaning of the “ikhtilāf al-madhāhib” in ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha‘rānī’s “al- Mīzān al-kubrā” ’, Islamic Law and Society XI, 2 (2004), pp. 177–212. 44 Radtke, B., ‘Ibriziana: Themes and Sources of a Seminal Sufi Work’, Sudanic Africa 7 (1996), pp. 113–158. 45 Cornell, V., Realm of the Saint, p. 220. 46 Al-Sha‘rānī, Lawāqih al-anwār al-qudsiyya fī bayān al-‘Uhūd al-muhammadiyya, Aleppo, Dār al-Qalam al-‘Arabī 1993, p. 284; Addas, C., ‘À la distance de deux arcs ou plus près’, p. 22; Hamidoune, A., La pratique de la prière sur le Prophète en islam, p. 580. 47 Al-Sanūsī, Muhammad, al-Salsabīl al-ma‘īn, p. 28. 48 Geoffroy, É., Le soufisme en Égypte et en Syrie, p. 93. 49 Gawth, Muhammad, Al-Jawāhir al-khams, Cairo, al-Matba‘a al-‘alamiyya, 1973–1975. 50 Ernst, C., ‘Persecution and Circumspection in Shattārī Sufism’, in De Jong, F. and Radtke, B. (eds.), Islamic Mysticism Contested. Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, Leiden, Brill, 1999, pp. 416–435; Kugle, S., ‘Heavens’s Witness: The Uses and Abuses of Muhammad Ghawth’s Mystical Ascension’, Journal of Islamic Studies 14, 1 (2003), pp. 1–36. 51 Ernst, C., ‘Persecution and Circumspection in Shattārī Sufism’, pp. 427–428. 52 Al-Muhibbī, Khulasāt al-athar, II, 243–244; Rizvi, S. A. A., A History of Sufism in India, II, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1983, pp. 329–330; Al-Ziriklī, Khayr al-Dīn, al-A‘lām. Qāmūs tarājim li-ashhar al-rijāl wa-l-nisāʾ min al-ʿarab wa-l-mustaʿrabīn wa-l-mustashriqīn, Beirut, Dār al-ʿilm li-l-malāyīn, 1980, I, p. 181. 53 Al-Qushshāshī, Ahmad, al-Simt al-majīd fī sha’n al-bay‘a, wa-l-dhikr wa talqīnihi wa salāsil ahl al-tawhīd, Hayderabad, Dā’irat al-ma‘ārif al-nizāmiyya, 1909, p. 174; Ahmad al-Shinnāwī, Tajalliyyāt al-basā’ir, hashiyya ‘alā kitāb al-Jawāhir li-l-Gawth al-Hindī, al-Baghdādī, Hadiyat al-‘ārifīn, I, 154–155; Brockelmann, C., Geschichte des Arabischen Literatur (GAL), II, 514 S, II, 534. 54 Al-Qushshāshī, Ahmad, al-Simt al-majīd, pp. 104–105. 55 Azra, A., The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia; Nafi, B. M., ‘Tasawwuf and Reform in Pre-Modern Islamic Culture’. 56 Al-Zabīdī, ‘Iqd al-jawhar, p.  130; Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 396. 57 Schimmel, A. M., And Muhammad Is His Messenger. 58 Cf. Hoffman, V., ‘Annihilation in the Messenger of God’, IJMES 31, 3 (1999), pp. 351–369. 59 Radtke, B., ‘Sufism in the 18th Century’. 60 Vikør, K. S., Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge, Muhammad b. ‘Alī al-Sanūsī (1787– 1859), PhD thesis, University of Bergen, 1991, p. 61 (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1995). 61 Addas, C., ‘À la distance de deux arcs ou plus près’; presentation of the Futūhāt al-ilāhiyya by Radtke, B., ‘Sufism in the 18th Century’, pp. 326–364; Hoffman, V., ‘Annihilation in the Messenger of God’. 62 Addas, C., ‘À la distance de deux arcs ou plus près’, p. 50. 63 Al-Sanūsī, Muhammad, al-Salsabīl al-ma‘īn, p. 9. 64 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt. See Part IV.

108  The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal 65 Radtke, B., O'Fahey, R. S. and O'Kane, J., ‘Two Sufi Treatises of Ahmad Ibn Idrīs’, Oriens 35 (1996), p. 162; Radtke, B., ‘The Question of Authority: Ahmad Ibn Idrīs, the madhāhib, and the Tarīqa muhammadiyya’, in Geoffroy, É. (ed.), Une voie soufie dans le monde, la Shādhiliyya, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005, p. 252; Addas, C., ‘À la distance de deux arcs ou plus près’, p. 19. 66 Meier, F., Bemerkungen zur Mohammedverehrung: Teil I: Die Segensprechung über Mohammed; Teil II: Die tasliya in Sufischen Zusammenhänger, edited by Radtke, B. and Schubert, G., Leiden, Brill, 2005; in French the most complete study is the thesis by Amine Hamidoune, La pratique de la prière sur le Prophète en islam. 67 Khānī, Qāsim, Al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, p. 140. 68 Khānī, Qāsim, al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk, 138; Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans, p. 215. 69 Radtke, B., ‘The Question of Authority: Ahmad Ibn Idrīs, the Madhāhib, and the Ṭarīqa Muhammadiyya’, in Geoffroy, É. (ed.), Une voie soufie dans le monde, la Shādhiliyya, p. 250. 70 For A. Azra, Qushshāshī is mostly known as one of the masters of the Shattāriyya who contributed to the introduction of that path in Indonesia, where it is also called the Qushshāshiyya; Azra, A., The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, pp. 17, 85. For D. Le Gall, even if the Shattāriyya appears to be central in the lineage of Qushshāshī, the Naqshbandiyya was far from being a secondary or symbolic affiliation; Le Gall, D., A Culture of Sufism. Naqshbandis in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700, Albany, Suny Press, 2005, p. 100. S. Pagani also thinks that the Naqshbandiyya played a central role in Qushshāshī’s circles during the seventeenth century; Pagani, S., Il rinnovamento mistico dell’Islam, pp. 34–46. 71 Chodkiewicz, M., Le Sceau des saints, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, pp.  79–94 (English translation, The Seal of the Saints. Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ‘Arabī, Cambridge, The Islamic Texts Society, 1993). 72 Vikør, K. S., Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge, p. 63. 73 Wright, Z., On the Path of the Prophet: Shaykh Ahmad Tijānī and the Tarīqa Muhammadiyya, Atlanta, African American Islamic Institute, 2005; Hamidoune, A., La pratique de la prière sur le Prophète en islam, p. 382. 74 Manāqib Muhammad al-Sammān, Dār al-kutub, tārīkh taymūr 462; Gril, D., ‘Sources manuscrites de l’histoire du soufisme à Dār al-Kutub’, Annales Islamologiques 28 (1994), p. 116. 75 Hanif, N., Biographical Encyclopaedia of Sufis, New Delhi, Sarup and Sons, 2002, p. 1. 76 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 63. 77 Muhammad al-‘Arabī al-Tijānī, al-Bughyat al-mustafīd li-sharh munyat al-murīd, Beirut, Dār al-Kitāb al-‘Ilmiyya, 2003, pp. 76–84. 78 Martin, B. G., ‘A Short History of the Khalwatiyya Order’, p. 300; Fletcher, J., ‘Les voies (turuq) soufies en Chine’, in Popovic, A. and Veinstein, G. (eds.), Les ordres mystiques dans l’Islam, cheminements et situation actuelle, Paris, Ehess, 1986, p. 18. 79 Al-Tāhir, Ahmad, al-Ijāza al-ahmadiyya li-hadrat al-yūsufiyya, Cairo, Matba‘a al-Sa’āda, 1910. 80 Katz, M. H., ‘The Prophet Muhammad in Ritual’, in Brockopp, J. E. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 139. 81 Al-Barzanjī, Hasan Ja‘far, Qissat al-mi‘rāj, Cairo, [publisher not identified], 1898; Al-Ghaythī, M., Qissat al-isrā’ wa l-mi‘rāj, Cairo, Matbaʻa Mustafā al-Bābī al Halabī, 1948. 82 Meier, F., ‘Invoking Blessings on Muhammad in Prayers of Supplication and When Making Requests’, in Meier, F. (ed.), Essays on Islamic Piety and Mysticism, translated by O’Kane, J. with editorial assistance from B. Radtke Leiden, Brill, 1999, pp. 549–588.

The Muhammadan path and Sufi renewal  109 83 Such works constitute two thirds of the treatises recorded by Amine Hamidoune; La pratique de la prière sur le Prophète en islam. 84 Hanna, N., In Praise of Books, pp. 16–17, 86–88. 85 Hamidoune, A., La pratique de la prière sur le Prophète en islam, p. 83. 86 Meier, F., ‘The Mystic Path’, in Lewis, B., et al. (eds.), The World of Islam. Faith, People, Culture, New York, Thames and Hudson, 1976, p. 123. 87 Abid, H., Recherches sur la production manuscrite des Dalā'il al-khayrāt au Maghreb du XVIe au XIXes, PhD thesis, Paris, École pratique des hautes études, 2017. 88 Hanna, N., In Praise of Books, p. 98. 89 Hamidoune, A., La pratique de la prière sur le Prophète en islam, pp. 355–369. 90 Holmes Katz, M., The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, London and New York, Routledge, 2007; Kaptein, N. J. G., Muhammad's Birthday Festival: Early History in the Central Muslim Lands and Development in the Muslim West until the 10th/16th Century, Leiden, Brill, 1993, pp. 48–67. Knappert, J., ‘Mawlid’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, VI, pp. 896–897. 91 Zarcone, T., ‘Mevlid Kandili. La fête de la naissance du Prophète en Turquie’, in Clayer, N. and Kaynar, E. (eds.), Penser, agir et vivre dans l’Empire ottoman et en Turquie, études réunies pour François Georgeon, Paris, Louvain, Peteers, 2013, pp. 307–320. 92 Brockelmann, Geschichte des Arabischen Literatur (GAL), II, 310; Al-Ziriklī, Khayr al-Dīn, al-Aʿlām, II, p. 123. Holmes Katz, M., The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, p. 169, note 1. 93 Al-Ziriklī, Khayr al-Dīn, al-Aʿlām, II: 123. 94 J. Knappert mentions translations into Swahili, Somali and Malay, ‘Mawlid’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, op. cit. 95 Trimingham, J. S., Islam in the Sudan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1949. 96 Delanoue, G., Moralistes et politiques musulmans, p. 601. 97 Muhammad ‘Ilīsh, Al-Qawl al-munjī ‘alā mawlid al-Barzanjī, Cairo, Matbā‘a alKhayriyya, 1319h. 98 This edition is published online, Mawlid al-Barzanjī, Abū Dhabī, Isdārāt al-sāha alKhazrajiyya, 2008. (https://ia601606.us.archive.org/16/items/MawlidAl-barzan jiarabic/Barzanji-ar.pdf). 99 Rubin, U., ‘Pre-existence and Light: Aspects of the Concept of Nūr Muhammadī’, Israel Oriental Studies (1975), pp. 62–115. 100 Bannerth, E., ‘La Khalwatiyya en Égypte’, p. 15. 101 Addas, C., ‘À la distance de deux arcs ou plus près’. 102 Knappert, J., ‘Mi‘rādj’, The Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, VII, pp.  99–107; Ahmad al-Dardīr, Hāshiyat al-imām al-‘ārif bi-Llāh ta‘ālā Abī l-Barakāt Sīdī Ahmad al-Dardīr ‘alā Qissat al-mi‘rāj li l-‘allāma al-humām birkat al-anām Najm al-Dīn al-Ghaythī, Būlāq, 1287 [1870]; Matbaʻa Mustafā al-Bābī al Halabī, 1948 (printed 1949). 103 Chodkiewicz, M., Le Sceau des saints, p. 183. 104 Kugle, S., ‘Heavens’s Witness: The Uses and Abuses of Muhammad Ghawth’s Mystical Ascension’, p. 1–36.

4 Prophetic heritage, authority and the intercession of saints

The introduction of the present volume features the 1767 death notice of Muhammad b. Sālim al-Hifnī, Shaykh of al-Azhar, the author of which – al-Hifnī’s contemporary, Jabartī – describes his death as a great tragedy for Egypt. Al-Jabartī’s Chronicle immortalised Shaykh al-Hifnī in the image of the ideal scholar who concentrated not only on exoteric and esoteric religious knowledge, and on his disciples and students, but also on the well-being of his community, never hesitating to protect its members against any injustice or exactions they might suffer, often from amirs. Along with most Muslims of the time, Jabartī believed in the power of saints, the ‘friends of God’ who acted on the world; he considered al-Hifnī to be the mystical pole of Egypt (qutb), the greatest living saint of his time, the recourse (gawth), the one whose mediation was sought by all, particularly the political elites: No matters, of state or otherwise, were completed without his knowledge and consent. When the amirs living in Cairo began to raise an army against ‘Alī Bey and Sālih Bey and asked al-Hifnawī’s consent, he denounced them and would not give permission, as has been narrated above. Knowing that their intention could not be realised while the master stood in the way, they diverted his attention and poisoned him. Afterwards, finding no one to forbid or deter them, they sent out their armies, and the result was their defeat and destruction in an exemplary punishment. ‘Alī Bey came to power; with no one to deter him, he too did as seemed best to him, and as a result affliction descended on Egypt, Syria, and the Hijāz, and spread to include the whole world and all the countries. This is the open secret (al-sirr al-zāhirī), which is an indubitable consequence of the inner (secret, bātinī) – which consists of respect for the inheritors of prophecy, complete conformity (to them), making the foundations firm, setting up the guideposts of the right way and Islam, and strengthening the edifice of piety. For such men are God’s trusted ones in the world, the choicest of the sons of Adam. “Those are the inheritors who shall inherit Paradise, therein dwelling forever (Qur. 23: 10–11).”1 Sufis considered themselves Jabartī’s ‘inheritors of prophecy,’ tasked with pointing out ‘the right way,’ responsible for ‘the virtuous state (salāh) of the

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  111 community’; their prophetic inheritance was a result of their access to walāya, ‘proximity to God,’ which we have translated as ‘sainthood.’ Jabartī wrote about ‘God’s trusted ones’: from the beginning, Sufis established a hierarchy before God, relying on Quranic verse 35: 32, in which three categories of believers are mentioned, distinguishing between the ordinary believers (‘āmma), the spiritual elite (khāssa) and the elite within the elite (khāssat al-khāssa), with which they identified, defining themselves as a separate and superior group, al-qawm, or ‘the people of divine knowledge,’ as they were designated by Sarrāj in his Kitāb al-Lumā’ (The Book of Scintillating Lights, tenth century). Claiming to embody God’s attributes or ethics (takhalluq bi-akhlāq Allāh) through their victory in the battle waged against their carnal souls, Sufis recognised themselves in ‘the friends of God’ (awliyā’ Allāh) mentioned in the Quranic verse (Quran 10: 62–65). Awliyā’ is the plural of walī, a polysemic term containing a subtle interplay between the spiritual function and the earthly one, as shown by Michel Chodkiewicz: walī is formed on the semantic root of the verb waliya which means assistance, protection, sanctuary, alliance, kinship, proximity; the word expresses the double relationship of divine friendship and protection that is also reflected in the Roman concept of amicitia used in Late Antiquity, as identified and studied by Peter Brown.2 The first doctrinal elucidation of the concept of walāya was undertaken by al-Hakīm al-Tirmidhī (d. 898), in his Kitāb khatm al-awliyā’, (Book of the Seal of the Saints). With his theory of sainthood (walāya) and its relation with prophecy (nubuwwa), which had been elaborated during a period when the Abbaside Caliphate was weakening, Tirmidhī grants the mystic prerogatives similar to those of the Prophet, of whom he is the heir, and sets him in competition with other religious figures around the eternally debated question of authority in Islam. Nelly Amri, a historian of sainthood in the medieval Maghreb, writes that with Tirmidhī the walī was brought into the religious and historic consciousness of Muslims ‘among those who believed they were invested [with walāya] and manifested themselves to their contemporaries, and those who recognised or on the contrary denied such a quality to these men and, finally, those who projected onto them their ideal of human perfection, their need for assistance and succour in the face of material and moral adversity, and the assurance (or at least the hope) of salvation.’3 In Jabartī’s words, ‘Saints dwell in paradise forever’; this implies their function as intercessors and mediators in the salvation of the souls of believers. Raised to the status of protector, the Sufi/walī was the person with whom it became desirable, or even preferable, to establish a relationship. Despite some local variation, the functions of saints remained constant over the long term, even if certain political junctures are considered by historians to be turning points, when Sufis were especially solicited for assistance, comfort and help in adversity. Indeed, hagiographical sources show that people submitted to a saint not so much because he represented a model of moral and spiritual perfection, as for his baraka, the divine blessing benefiting those who had journeyed towards God and then returned from Him to guide, support and intercede for humankind, reproducing the prophetic model of authority; they brought with them a hope of happiness here below and in the hereafter. The medieval concept of ‘invisible government’ (dawla bātiniyya), the hidden hierarchy of saints that

112  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints presides over the destiny of the earth, became increasingly important during the Modern Period in many parts of the Muslim world, from the Maghreb to central Asia; this attests to the very concrete power acquired in society by saints.4 Modern hagiographies refer to this occult assembly whose composition varies in different Muslim regions. During the seventeenth century a legendary hierarchy of the four poles (al-aqtāb al-arba‘a), characteristic of Egyptian Sufism, was put into writing: in transhistoric hagiographical texts the Egyptian patron saints, Ahmad al-Badawī and Ibrāhīm al-Disūqī, take their places alongside the Iraqi saints, ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī and Ahmad al-Rifā‘ī, in the celestial assembly that governed the world at the time when the Sufi brotherhoods of which they were the eponymous founders, the Ahmadiyya, the Qādiriyya, the Rifā‘iyya and the Burhāmiyya, were expanding anew and covering all of Egypt with their numerous zāwiyas. These four saints were said to have been present for all of eternity, as attested by their cosmic and eschatological role.5 The hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī that we examine in this chapter fulfils specific social and religious functions: it embeds the religious and social legitimacy of the Khalwatiyya within an ancient religious landscape that had been stable since medieval times, while also staking a claim for al-Hifnī’s sainthood in a collective memory dominated by the image of Ahmad al-Badawī as the greatest saint of Egypt. Essentially, the hagiography reconstitutes the sacred history of the Khalwatiyya brotherhood through the filiation of its founder with the Prophet and the great saints of Islam. In this text, the life and destiny of Shaykh al-Hifnī follow the same pattern as the Prophet’s, whose model he was able to embody: a saint from birth, founder and saviour, he was confirmed by God’s messenger and by Egypt’s greatest saint, Ahmad al-Badawī, in his status as pole of his time (that is, as an earthly substitute [nā’ib] for the Prophet), and in his mission as a founder and intercessor for men before God.6 Founding saint of a sacred community, al-Hifnī sent his first disciples, whom he considered to be his companions, out across the country, from the Delta to Upper Egypt, so that they might disseminate his Sufi path. In his journey towards sainthood as described in the hagiography that was aimed at his followers, Shaykh al-Hifnī appears as a protective figure, someone who can act as an intercessor in the context of political and social instability. During the second half of the eighteenth century the Ottoman government no longer exercised much authority in Egypt, where political life was dominated by conflict between the beys over power and the country’s economic resources, particularly the rural iltizām. Shaykh al-Hifnī is presented taking responsibility for the material needs of the population and using his influence with the powerful to protect the people from their exactions. Three factors made his intercession effective: the general belief in the miracles of saints, the consolidation of his economic wealth, and the weakening of central power.

The Hagiography of Shaykh Muhammad al-Hifnī In Islam, hagiography (manāqib) is also hagiology – an apologetic and doctrinal discourse on sainthood, its models and functions, of which the life of the saint

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  113 is an illustration. Such a text is the story of a divine election and a predestination, reporting a series of actions and behaviours that are recognised as attributes and signs of sainthood. Corresponding to the miracles (mu‘jizāt) of the prophets, which demonstrate the truth of their mission, are the spiritual graces (karamāt) of the saints, which demonstrate that they enjoy divine favour. The hagiographer’s work consists of putting into writing the miracles performed by the saint, both during his life and after his death when people have started to make pious visits to his tomb (ziyāra). These miracles are based on motifs from the Quran and the life of the Prophet (sīra), or on prophetic tales (qissas al-anbiyā’) that everyone from the elite scholar to the profane worker knows. The hagiographer must edify the reader, inciting him to venerate the saint, but also to imitate him. In his typology of saints, Ibn ‘Arabī describes the Muhammadan saints as the most perfect heirs of the Prophet. Akbarian hagiology was part of the intellectual and spiritual environment of Modern Period Sufis, who considered it possible to establish direct contact with the cosmic essence of the Prophet, the ‘Muhammadan reality’ (haqīqa muhammadiyya) – also called ‘Muhammadan light’ (nūr muhammadī) – in the intermediate world of the barzakh, and thus to elevate oneself from the intelligible world to the contemplation of divine realities. The cycle of prophecy having reached its end with Muhammad, it became the responsibility of the divinely inspired saints (through the metahistorical source that was the Prophet) to continue the mission of guiding men until the end of time. Thus Sufis became models to be followed, as Muhammad was for his community; they were worthy of a veneration equal to that displayed by the first Muslims towards the Prophet. The hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī reflects this Muhammadan model, preponderant over other models of sainthood as early as the time of Sha‘rānī in the sixteenth century. The great saints’ lives that were written in Egypt during the Ottoman period – especially that of Badawī, which drew on an earlier oral tradition – served as models for all modern hagiographies and assigned special importance to prophetic descent. The hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī, entitled Muntahā al-‘ibārāt fī ba‘d mā li-shaykhinā min al-manāqib wa-l-karāmāt (Unsurpassable Words on the Virtues and Marvels of our Shaykh), which is also known by the title of Manāqib Shaykh al-Hifnī, was written during the life of its subject, and possibly under his supervision, by his close disciple Hasan b. ‘Alī Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī (d. 1763). There are two manuscript copies of this text in Cairo: one at the National Library (Dār al-kutub) and one at the Library of al-Azhar. We have used the manuscript from Dār al-kutub, which was copied by a certain Muhammad al-Sandiyūnī at the request of Muhammad ibn Sayyid ‘Alī al-Bakrī al-Hamawī, and finished in Sha‘bān 1176h (February 1763).7 The author, whose family came from Fuwwā in the Egyptian Delta, was born in Mecca in 1729–1730, and grew up there. He received his early training from Egyptian teachers in the Holy City, and when he was 20 he went to Cairo to study at al-Azhar. Like many scholars of the time, Hasan Shamma was affiliated to several Sufi paths: the Burhāmiyya – he wrote a commentary on the litanies (hizb) attributed to its founder, Ibrāhīm al-Disūqī, Masarrat al-‘aynayn bi-sharh hizb Abī l-‘aynayn – and probably the Shādhiliyya,

114  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints on which Sufi path he wrote a treatise, al-Hulal al-Sundusiya ‘alā asrār al-dā’ira al-Shādhiliyya. Finally, the list of his writings mentions a gloss on the commentary by Zakariyyā al-Ansārī on the Burda, the celebrated poem in praise of the Prophet by al-Būsīrī; a commentary on the Hamziyya, another poem on the same theme by al-Būsīrī; and an account of the birth and vocation of the Prophet (Qissat al-mawlid).8 Shamma was thus familiar with this genre of devotional literature on the Prophet, which would serve as a model for the composition of the hagiography of his master al-Hifnī. Manāqib Shaykh al-Hifnī belongs to a sub-genre of Muslim hagiographical literature, that of lives of founders of Sufi brotherhoods as composed by their direct disciples. The author collected testimonies from the master, his entourage and his close disciples (ikhwān al-akābir), blending these with personal recollections – thus there is no effect of temporal distortion. This text was not diffused outside of khalwatī circles, and circulated in the form of manuscript copies until it was eventually published in 1374h (around 1950) by the descendants of Shaykh Salīh al-Sibā‘ī, who was khalīfa of Ahmad al-Dardīr and shaykh of the Khalwatiyya Sibā‘iyya.9 The text is divided into three parts, on a pattern typical of accounts of saints’ lives: the first chapter, which is called ‘Spiritual states and glorious deeds from the time of his birth [to date]’ (Ahwāl wa ma’āthir al-shaykh mundhu ibtidā’ mawlidihi), is devoted to recounting his birth, childhood, education and miracles; the second chapter covers his initiation into the Khalwatiyya and the disciples he initiated in his turn (Sulūkihi fi tarīqa al-Sāda al-Khalwatiyya wa bayān hulafā’ihi wa-l-ākhadhīn ‘anhu); the third chapter is a collection of poems in praise of the shaykh, composed by his masters and disciples and other people who knew him (fī mā madahuhu bihi ashyākhuhu wa mu‘āsiruhu wa talamidhatuhu). Birth and education Shaykh al-Hifnī was a saint from birth, even if, as for the Prophet, his mission was revealed to him at a later date. This elect status would manifest itself throughout his life until the moment of revelation by signs (ishārāt, mubashshirāt), in the same way as signs of prophecy had appeared to Muhammad. The shaykh had double ties, spiritual and genealogical, to the Prophet, but his hagiography specifies that the spiritual genealogy (al-nisba al-bātina) is superior to that of blood, and thus that it is not necessary to be descended from the Prophet to be a saint. Al-Hifnī is described as a Husaynid sharīf, descendent of the Prophet’s grandson al-Husayn through his paternal grandmother, Sayyida Turk, daughter of Sayyid Sālim b. Muhammad b. ‘Alī b. ‘Abd al-Karīm b. al-Sayyid Barta‘, a saint who was buried in Birkat al-Hajj, the first stop on the pilgrimage route from Cairo to Mecca. On his birth in 1688–89, al-Hifnī was given the name Ahmad after a multazim (tax farmer) from his village, al-Hifnā near Bilbays in the Delta. But his father, who was a Cairo tax-collector (mustawfī), demanded that he be called Muhammad, just as the Prophet himself was first called Ahmad and then given the name Muhammad by his grandfather ‘Abd al-Mutallib. The author then moves on to an account of the shaykh’s studies and career at al-Azhar, a prestigious

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  115 institution if ever there was one, citing the long list of subjects studied and the names of his professors as a guarantee of the solidity of his grounding in exoteric sciences. These professors all praised his exceptional capacities for learning and understanding.10 Al-Hifnī regularly undertook long spiritual retreats in the zāwiya of Shāhīn al-Khalwatī on the slopes of the Muqattam, a chalky plateau to the east of Cairo that is sacred in Islamic tradition. Having earlier been a place of retreat for Christian ascetes, it was then favoured by Muslim mystics; there are cells and mihrab carved into the stone there that date back at least to the Fatimid period.11 The zāwiya in which Shaykh al-Hifnī preferred to take his retreats carries the name of the Khalwatī Sufi who had made it his hermitage.12 Al-Hifnī spent entire nights there in prayer and meditation. This need for solitude on his part recalls the Prophet’s retreats, before the revelation, in the cave of Mount Hirā’, on the Jabal al-Nūr. As a young student, al-Hifnī was visited by holy men, among them a malāmatī (a saint who avoided religious pretence) called Muhammad al-Zuhhār. Like most al-Azhar students, the shaykh lived in poverty (which could appear surprising, given that his father was a tax-collector); during the many long years that he spent at the mosque-university he copied manuscripts to make ends meet. This parallel activity left him little time for his studies, something that worried him a great deal until he eventually received a grant of money from an amir, and could abandon this work and devote himself fully to his lessons without financial worries. He began teaching in 1710–11, aged barely 20, which is relatively precocious for the period and signifies that after only six years of study he had already acquired the knowledge necessary for a professor at al-Azhar. ‘He teaches the fiqh as well as logic (mantīq), the science of the traditions of the Prophet (hadīth) as well as dogmatic theology (kalām), drawing on celebrated works such as the lesserknown commentaries: his lessons (durus) discussed al-Ashmūnī’s commentary on the Alfiya by Ibn Mālik, Subkī’s Jam‘ al-jawāmi‘, and Sa’d’s Mukhtasar.’ Eventually he followed the Shādhiliyya Sufi path of his shaykh, Ahmad al-Shādhilī al-Maghribī. He was about 30 years old at the time of the arrival in Cairo of the man who would become his true spiritual master, the Syrian Mustafā al-Bakrī; their encounter would, according to his hagiography, change the fate of Egypt. 13 The journey to Jerusalem and the initiation by Sayyid al-Bakrī Al-Hifnī was introduced to Sayyid al-Bakrī by one of the latter’s disciples, ‘Abd Allāh al-Salfītī. From the moment the two men first set eyes on each other in the Sayyid’s house a bond of the heart grew up between them (their meeting, like the rest of al-Hifnī’s life, was predestined). Al-Hifnī rose and, after asking the master’s permission, went to sit by his side. Al-Bakrī, of whom it was said that he preferred the aspirant to take some time for reflection before sealing the pact with him, immediately accepted al-Hifnī’s allegiance. One night, when al-Hifnī was plunged into inner struggle and the recitation of the dhikr that al-Bakrī had taught him, he dreamed of the Sayyid and Shaykh Ahmad al-Shādhilī seated side by side. Al-Shādhilī had disapproved of the pact between his disciple and al-Bakrī,

116  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints because for a Sufi to visit (ziyāra) or attach himself to a shaykh other than his own was a form of perjury and a possible reason to rupture their pact. In the dream, al-Bakrī asked Shaykh al-Shādhilī, ‘Has he (al-Hifnī) in his possession something that you have given him?’; ‘Yes,’ replied al-Shādhilī, ‘I entrusted him with something that belongs to me.’ A palm branch suddenly appeared in al-Bakrī’s hands: ‘Is this it?’ When Shaykh  al-Shādhilī replied in the affirmative, al-Bakrī broke the branch in two and threw the pieces at the shaykh’s feet, telling him to take back his possession. Upon hearing his account of this dream, al-Bakrī explained to al-Hifnī that he had undone his external bond with Shaykh al-Shādhilī, saying that there existed between himself and al-Hifnī the same strong inner affinity by which Salman the Persian and Suhayb of Byzantium became part of the house of the Prophet, as expressed by the poet Ibn Farīd in his Yā’iyā: ‘By the laws of love there subsists between us a relation stronger Than the ties of blood’ And in his Tā’iyā, Ibn Farīd has the Prophet say: ‘Even though in exterior form I am the son of Adam, in my interior nature I declare myself his father.’ Which means that Adam was the Prophet’s father in his external relationship, but the Prophet was the father of Adam in his internal relation. For Adam was the substitute for the Prophet, and received revelation after him. He had the revelation of divine majesty through the Prophet’s mediation, and when the Prophet interceded with God on his behalf Adam’s repentance was accepted and the love that Adam bore for the Prophet grew greater. It is therefore clear that the second type of relationship is stronger than the first, for only this relationship bears fruit.14 This account is intended to show that the earlier spiritual relationship between Shaykh al-Hifnī and Ahmad al-Shādhilī was not fruitful, whereas his bond with the Sayyid had been inscribed in destiny for all eternity by divine design. In the same way, his mission as founding saint and intercessor, later revealed to him by al-Bakrī, was also predestined, for it was a continuation of that of the Prophet, whose light was the source of all divine creation. Al-Hifnī progressed in the path, and received from his master the first, second and third Names of the dhikr. He observed towards al-Bakrī a behaviour imbued with the extreme politeness and absolute respect (kamāl al-adab) due to a master towards whom he demonstrated the utmost sincerity (al-sidq al-tāmm). On his side, al-Bakrī raised him higher than all others. But in 1139h (1721) al-Bakrī had to return to Jerusalem via the Hejaz to accomplish the pilgrimage to Mecca; from abroad, he wrote a letter to his disciple in which he had inscribed and circled the Name Haqq (the True One), authorising him to seal the pact of allegiance (ta’khudhu al-‘uhūd) and initiate aspirants into the path.15 However, al-Hifnī did not feel ready for such great responsibility, and carried on as before, restricting himself to his teaching activities at the university. His heart longed for his

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  117 master; this situation lasted several years until the day, in 1149h (1736–37), when he received an invitation from the Sayyid to join him in Jerusalem. At this, the shaykh dropped everything – his teaching, his students, his status – and got rid of his luxurious clothes, putting on the patched cloak (khirqa) of the Sufis and adopting the ascetic life. He cast off everything in order to be ready to receive that which his master would transmit to him. The people around him thought he had gone mad and tried to persuade him back to a normal life, but in a dream the Prophet’s grandson, al-Husayn, supported him. Then rumours about the shaykh’s departure from the country began to circulate; those around him became increasingly worried, because he was the mediator (wāsita) and the recourse, necessary to the country. Delegations of ulama tried all sorts of arguments to persuade him to stay, but to no avail, and his departure was announced. The long route through the desert from Cairo to Jerusalem was unsafe – caravans were regularly attacked and pillaged by Bedouins – but by a miracle the shaykh and his porters reached the gates of the Holy City safely. There the shaykh was told by which of the eight gates of the town it was customary to enter, and advised to say two entire prayers (rak‘a) and then visit the shrine of a certain saint. The shaykh replied that he had not come to Jerusalem for a pilgrimage, but to see his master, and that he would enter through his door and pray in his home: ‘Had it not been for him, I would never have come to this city.’ Sayyid al-Bakrī provided his disciple with a room (khalwa) in which he could devote himself to prayer, remembrance of God, retreat and solitude. Al-Hifnī confided his memories of this time to Hasan Shamma; they reveal much about the Sayyid’s methods of teaching his disciple: When I was in my khalwa he called me. I went to him and found him seated at a laden table. ‘Are you fasting?’ he asked me. I replied that I was. Then he ordered me to eat, and I obeyed. ‘Listen well to what I am about to tell you,’ he began, ‘If you wish to pray, fast and submit to spiritual discipline, do so when you have returned to your home. As long as you are here with me, make the most of my company and do not shut yourself up in your cell all the day long, giving yourself over to ascetic practices: do these things in a measured way, according to your capacities. Eat, drink and be happy.’ I obeyed him and thus spent four months by his side, which to me seemed to last an hour: I was with him every moment, inwardly (fī l-khalwa) as in public (fī l-jalwa).16 During this time the master revealed spiritual secrets to al-Hifnī, dressed him in the robe of consent (khil‘at al-qubūl), whether it be God’s or mankind’s, and crowned him with the crown of gnosis (‘irfān). He granted him access to the world of light and of contemplation of the divine Presences, sent him into a state of union with God where all except God was erased, and then brought him back from this state and into a simultaneous consciousness of the union of all things in God and of their separate existences, as had happened for the Prophet and the great saints; thus was he prepared for the accomplishment of his mission in this world.17

118  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints Shaykh al-Hifnī’s return to Egypt was saluted by joyous acclaim; Shamma declared that truth (al-haqq) had returned and falsehood (bātil) departed. From that day, the shaykh ceaselessly initiated and guided disciples, revivifying the Sufi path that had been in decline and saving the souls of those who had been lost in ignorance. His influence extended to the far-flung edges of the country. In each village he had a representative or a khalīfa, as well as disciples – young and old, men, women and children – all of whom evoked God according to his method. For these faithful followers, as for Shamma and for Jabartī, who reproduced entire pages of Shamma’s hagiography in his chronicle, Shaykh al-Hifnī was the spiritual pole of his times. In the face of this massive influx of would-be disciples, al-Hifnī asked for advice from his master al-Bakrī, who replied thus: ‘Prevent no one from being initiated by you, not even a Christian.’18 Shamma attributes numerous conversions among erstwhile Copts to the shaykh; one of these, who had been adopted by al-Hifnī and brought up in great piety, became Shaykh Muhammad al-Mahdī (d. 1815), who rose to the rank of prominent scholar at the university of al-Azhar. Al-Hifnī’s stay in Jerusalem corresponds to the Prophet’s exile in Medina, and his triumphal return to Egypt and the start of his Sufi predication could also recall the Prophet’s return to Mecca as a conqueror, that is, the accomplishment of his mission and the foundation of Islam. In his Manāqib the shaykh appears in the same way as does the Prophet in the hadīth, as an instructor, a transmitter of the divine message, and as one whose example is to be imitated through contact and companionship with him, as in the Quranic precept, ‘You have had a good example in God’s Messenger for whosoever hopes for God and the Last Day, and remembers God oft’ (Quran 33 :21). On his physical appearance, his perfect character and his virtues (hilya wa-sajāyā wa-shamā’il) When he is describing the physical appearance and moral character of his master, Shamma employs terms habitually associated with description of the Prophet (hilya al-sharīfa, sajāyā, shamā’il). This is no longer the territory of the Sufis’ imitatio muhammadi, but of a total identification of the person of the shaykh with that of the Prophet. The physical and moral description of God’s messenger, abundant in the hadīth, served as models for a genre that was very rich in Egypt, the literature of shamā’il (plural of shamīla, meaning merit, virtue, positive trait, good character), in which the Prophet is described as the model of human perfection. The first known work of shamā’il  was written by al-Thirmidhī in the eleventh century (Shamā’il al-muhammadiyya), and the most famous is certainly the Kitāb al-Shifā’ bi-ta‘rīf huqūq al-Mustafā (Healing Through the Recognition of the Rights of the Chosen One), more familiar under the title al-Shifā’, by the Andalusian jurist and theologian Qādī ‘Iyād (d. 1149). In this text the author provides the most complete description of the physical and moral attributes and characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad, breathing new life into the model of perfection that he incarnated and underlining his privileged status, at once human and divine,

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  119 and the veneration due to him.19 From the time of its appearance in eleventhcentury Andalusia to the present day, this has remained the text on the life, qualities and miracles of the Prophet that has been the most read, commented upon and printed. Al-Shifā’ has even, like Jazūlī’s Dalā’il al-Khayrāt or Busīrī’s Burda, acquired a quasi-sacred character, being used as a talisman to protect against misfortune.20 Later Egyptian scholars distinguished themselves by their devotional literature on the Prophet; among the most prominent of these works is Ahmad al-Qastallānī’s al-Mawāhib al-laduniyya bi-l-minah al-muhammadiyya (The Divine Gifts Granted to the Prophet Muhammada, 1494), which was inspired by several other texts, in particular by the Shifā’ of Qādī ‘Iyād, but also by the Fath al-Bārī (Victory of the Creator, written between 1414 and 1428) by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalānī, a vast commentary on Bukhārī’s Sahīh, which was an extensive collection of hadīths. The same virtues of protection and benediction are attributed to the famous Hilya (literally ‘ornament’), short descriptions of the inner and outer beauty of the Prophet, beautifully produced by the greatest Turkish calligrapher of the end of the seventeenth century, Hafiz Osman. Inscribed within circles beneath which was written in large letters the Quranic inscription ‘Mercy to the worlds’ (a reference to the verse, ‘We have not sent you, save as a mercy unto all beings’ Quran, 21:107), these texts were very sought-after in Ottoman Turkey. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Turkish poet Khāqānī Efendi (d. around 1600) wrote a poem based on the Prophet’s Hilya, additionally devoting many words to the numerous benefits and apotropaic virtues conferred on the owner through reading or just possessing this text: not only would she or he be saved from the fires of the Last Judgement, but Satan would never enter her/his home; this explains why even today the Hilya is hung on the walls inside houses. It also provided protection against illness, and it brought rewards equivalent to those afforded by a pilgrimage to Mecca. Last but not least, it was a mark of love for the Prophet.21 Among the various physical descriptions of the Prophet transmitted by his wife ‘Aisha or his companions, the one most often cited is that of his cousin and sonin-law, ‘Alī Ibn Abī Tālib, who emphasised the beauty of the Prophet’s features, in which ‘his wide black eyes were shaded by long lashes and his face glowed like the full moon,’ and his body which was neither too big nor too small: ‘Those who saw him were stupefied (hayba) and those who spent time with him loved him. Those who described him said they had never seen his like, before or since.’ Shaykh al-Hifnī also fit this ideal of beauty as represented by the Prophet; like him he was of medium height, neither too tall nor too small, carrying himself well; his face possessed the beauty of the moon and the majesty of the sun, with prominent cheekbones, and eyebrows that formed two perfect arcs. His mouth was robust and vigorous, his beard dense, his neck strong and white; his belly was firm, his back straight and the palms of his hands were wide. Like the Prophet, he loved to wear good clothing, and had a preference for the colour green, representing inner purity. The author changes his style when he comes to describe al-Hifnī’s behaviour and manner with other people, adopting a lighter tone that is occasionally funny and anecdotal, in which biographical elements blend with the hagiographical style. Numerous anecdotes recounted by people who had spent

120  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints much time with the master describe his behaviour in various circumstances; for example, we know that, like all ulama, he was smitten with love for poetry, sending letters to his disciples containing his verses addressed to them. He found slander, hatred, brutality and violence repugnant; he was generous and detached from the world’s goods; he made a daily distribution of bread for the needy. He was affable, patient and full of kindness for his disciples, as demonstrated in a letter he sent to one of them: Your letters have arrived making known the preservation of your health and giving evidence of your sincerity and loyalty. We give you the following advice, as containing hidden virtues: always pay attention to the workings of the carnal soul in every outward action and breath, and this especially when you are approached for teaching and guidance. Since the concupiscent soul lies in wait, even for old men, one must never put away the sword of spiritual combat against it. If anyone approaches you with great devotion and sincerely turns his hopes toward you, turn your heart towards him and support him with instruction; but if anyone, following his own fancy, turns away from you, after having sealed the pact, leave him and do not worry yourself about him (. . .). If you want to rebuke anyone in order to discipline and guide him, do it privately, for this is more likely to help him. Do not rebuke with blows or scold when people are present, that is likely to harm the novice. Pay no attention to anyone who turns aside or to anyone who associates with you out of self-interest. You should be gentle to the brethren, especially your brother N. He who treats his friends well will be rewarded. Good manners and gentleness are praiseworthy; coarseness and harshness cause ruin. Avoid gossip. Pardon fully. The members of our path and I wish you and your disciples joy. May you rejoice if you do as I have told you, in every good thing, in great success, and in progress along the path.22 Here it is evident that accounts of the lives of founders of Sufi brotherhoods are also guides to the manner of educating disciples, and hagiographies tell us more than do handbooks of Sufi ādāb (such as those presented in Chapter 2 of this book) about the bonds established between master and disciple, and about life in the community. The physical beauty and moral qualities of Shaykh al-Hifnī, described over nearly a dozen pages, are merely a reflection of his ‘noble essence’ (in al-Mawāhib al-laduniyya – about 3,000 pages long – the description of the physical and moral qualities of the Prophet covers nearly 500 pages). Numerous descriptions relate to the theme of the light that emanates from his person and the reverent fear (hayba) that grips those who enter his presence. When, shortly after his arrival in Cairo, Hasan Shamma was brought to see Shaykh al-Hifnī by Muhammad Hadiyya al-Fuwwī, a man from his own village whom he had met at al-Azhar, he observed numerous visitors all pressing around al-Hifnī’s door. Having entered, he sought to catch a glimpse of the shaykh in the crowd, but was told he had not yet come down from his room. He waited a long time. Having become discouraged, he wanted

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  121 to leave, but his friend dissuaded him. ‘Suddenly,’ he writes, ‘a door opened and he appeared, wearing a long green robe and shining like the moon, his light illuminating the whole room. I  was dazzled and intimidated by his presence. The shaykh’s glance fell on me and he indicated that I should be seated by his side; he showed me affection and goodwill. Muhammad Hadiyya introduced us and meanwhile encouraged me to ask to seal a pact with him. I did so, weeping and with my heart beating fast, submerged by emotions, nearly in a stupor (dahsh). The shaykh initiated me into the first two Names, and then I travelled to the Hejaz. Upon my return to Cairo I was initiated into the rest of the divine Names.’23 The crowned saint Shamma offers an account of the dreamlike vision he had on the day his master was recognised as pole of his time (taqattaba) and supreme intercessor by a celestial assembly composed of the Prophet, Abū Bakr (the first Caliph) and other companions, Sayyid al-Bakrī and Shaykh ‘Abd Allāh al-Shubrāwī. The scene, worthy of a royal ceremony, took place in a great hall paved with polychrome marble and covered by silk rugs; agarwood and amber burned in censers before Shaykh al-Hifnī. He was seated facing the assembly. Abū Bakr al-Siddīq and Sayyid al-Bakrī approached him. Abū Bakr was holding a mantle made of white fur (farwa) and a green robe (hulla), which he put on the shaykh, as well as a golden crown (tāj) with four points (qurūn), which he placed on the shaykh’s head, saying, ‘This is the robe of siddīqiyya (the truthful faith) and this is the crown of the highest degree (of sainthood).’ The siddīqiyya, based on the name of Abū Bakr al-Siddīq, ‘the truthful one,’ was defined by the theologian al-Ghazalī as the highest spiritual degree accessible to mankind after that of prophecy, of which Muhammad is the seal (Ibn ‘Arabī defines one figure as being higher, that of the ‘station of proximity’ (maqām al-qurba)24; this is also what Shamma believes, holding that this status corresponds to that of supreme pole, the unique being who in each period exercises divine decree. The authority of the supreme pole is above that of the hierarchy of saints who govern this world, and the election of the pole is accompanied by a ceremony similar to those in which kings and emperors are crowned: ‘Then they seated my master before a window and people came from all sides to kiss his hand. I was standing in front of the shaykh and giving him air with a big fan, people were all around him as if he were a king, praying and requesting his intercession, as if we had reached the hour of judgement, when prayers are answered (sā‘at al-ijāba).’25 Present in Shamma’s vision were the two men to whom al-Hifnī succeeded: Shaykh al-Shubrāwī, in the position of Shaykh of al-Azhar in 1757, and Mustafā al-Bakrī, as khalīfa of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt. Al-Hifnī inherited his qutbiyya from the Prophet and the great saint al-Badawī, who was qutb nabawī (Muhammadan pole) before him and in all eternity, and therefore entitled to as high a rank as he. The presence of Ahmad al-Badawī standing by the Prophet’s side in most visions confirms the predominance of this figure of sainthood in Egyptian Islam from the sixteenth century onward. A simple waqf document benefiting the college

122  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints of Upper-Egyptian students at al-Azhar, established by amir ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhūda, demonstrates the superior status of this saint from Tantā. It stipulates that access to the students’ daily food ration, the jirāya, is restricted by conditions, among which is the absolute prohibition of any absence from classes, with two exceptions: if students are undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca, or if they are paying a visit (ziyāra) to the Muhammadan pole, Sayyidī Ahmad al-Badawī, in Tantā.26 In the hearts of Egyptians during that period and up to the present day, Al-Badawī, commonly called al-Sayyid (the Lord), had a special relation to the Prophet: he received from the messenger a part of his power of intercession with God, and a visit to his shrine foreshadows the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.27 Saving the companions from hellfire In the doctrine of sainthood, prophetic heritage and soteriological function are closely linked, based on the metahistorical role of Muhammad and the intercession (shafā‘a) which will be accorded to him at the end of time. The Muhammadan heir presents himself, or is described by his disciples, as an eschatological intercessor (shāfi’) in the hereafter, guarantor of salvation and eternal felicity for his community. Intercession became the central theme of hagiographical texts as early as the thirteenth century; this was a reflection of political and social upheavals that followed the Mongol invasion and the fall of the Caliphate of Baghdad (1258), events that were traumatic for Muslims everywhere. The shaykhs in their zāwiyas increasingly played an active role in town and village communities, comforting people, but also taking charge of their material needs. Nelly Amri has shown that in the Maghreb the quest for the eschatological intercession of the Prophet and the saints intensified from the fourteenth century; she even speaks of a change in sensibilities at this time, the effects of which would still be felt at least until the end of the eighteenth century. A new function for sainthood was progressively emerging, in a close relationship with the figure of the Prophet: that of the saint, messenger of eschatological hope in the context of a renewed fear of death (revived by the plague and a profound anxiety as to the destiny of the individual in the hereafter). The messianic figure in Islam, that of the mahdī, tends, during the Modern Period, to be incarnated as and identified with the walī, and more particularly with the pole, the recourse, who, as we have seen, occupies the summit of the hierarchy of the interceding saints. Shaykh al-Hifnī’s hagiography is swarming with tales of the dreamlike visions of his companions, in which the saint intercedes with the Prophet for his disciples on the Day of Judgement. As with the Prophet and the first three generations of Muslims, even those who did not know the shaykh, but merely knew his disciples, will enter paradise. In another vision, reported by ‘pious men of our community,’ the Prophet and his companions formed a procession led by the Muhammadan pole, Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawī; the latter was holding in his hand a long staff, like those used by Sufi singers (munshidīn) to keep time during dhikr sessions. ‘The procession moved towards the tent (khayma) of the Sayyid in Tantā. The Prophet and his companions settled themselves under the tent, while Sayyid al-Badawī

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  123 stood upright in front of it and asked the Prophet to honour Shaykh al-Hifnī with a karāma (divine favour). The Prophet had the secretary (kātib) make a written note to the effect that all the prayers and pious wishes of the companions of al-Hifnī would be granted. Then the Sayyid told the Prophet that this was not sufficient (hadha lā yakfī). The Prophet then enjoined the secretary to write that all those present at this mawlid would be saved from the fire. The Sayyid asked God’s messenger to do a little bit more. Finally, the Prophet asked his secretary to write that all those who had sealed a pact with Shaykh al-Hifnī would die in Islam, and be saved from the fire on the Day of Gathering thanks to the intercession of their master.’28 While he was travelling to Cairo, Hasan Shamma had another vision of his shaykh, who appeared to him at the top of a hill. As always, he was dressed in a long green robe and wearing a crown, symbol of his status as the supreme pole. Behind him was standing his shaykh, Mustafā al-Bakrī, with a group of other people. God was waiting for the intercession of Shaykh al-Hifnī: ‘I approach my master and kiss his hand, he asks me to get all of his disciples to move forward, along with the people of our time, and to put them in lines before him, and I do so. Struck by a stupor (hayba), I suddenly begin to weep. The shaykh takes me in his arms and wraps me in his green robe; next to him there is a door hidden by a red curtain, the entrance to hell, and a door behind a green curtain, that of paradise.’29 The Prophet appeared to another of the shaykh’s disciples, ‘Umar al-Bablī, during the mawlid of Ahmad al-Badawī: the disciples of Shaykh al-Hifnī formed circles (halqa) around the messenger, and the shaykh passed from circle to circle inscribing each one’s name on a list on which the Prophet put his seal. These lists were then sent into all the villages. In another vision, the same disciple saw Shaykh al-Hifnī, in the company of the Prophet, interceding at the Last Judgement: all the companions (atbā‘) of the master entered into paradise.30 Another disciple, ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Zayyāt, reported a vision confided in him by Shaykh Ahmad Bashīr before the latter’s death: he had seen that on the Day of Judgement the acts of the master were weighed with those of his disciples. Shamma himself had dreamed that he found himself with three of his companions before the chamber of the Prophet, and that he addressed the Prophet in tears: ‘Lord, O Messenger of God, we wish to escape from hell.’ ‘You will not go to hell,’ reassured the Prophet, ‘thanks to your intercessor (wāsita), Shaykh al-Hifnī.’ Shamma continues, ‘I went with my companions to the shaykh, finding him seated in his salon, drinking his coffee in the company of people from Medina whom I knew. I was relaying the Prophet’s message to him when this latter appeared to the shaykh, saying “free them from the fire.” The shaykh reached out his hand to his visitors and sealed the pact (bay’a) with them.’31 As in any hagiography of a Sufi brotherhood’s founder, the proselytising element is explicit here: this long sequence of accounts of the saint’s eschatological intercession on behalf of his disciples is included in his hagiography so that it may encourage men to offer him their allegiance in exchange for the promise of salvation. The hagiography perpetuates that which he has founded, and ensures that his work and accomplishments will survive him through his numerous successors.

124  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints The miracles During his lifetime the saint’s followers called him ‘ārif, ‘he who knows by God (bi-Llāh),’ or Abū-l-ma‘ārif, he who has knowledge of hidden things, past, present and future. All of the science of the Sufis rested on an unveiling (kashf), the lifting of the veil that covers the phenomenal world, to give access to the spiritual realm and to the sciences of the divine mystery (‘ulūm al-ghayb). This inner knowledge is inspired by God in the form of allusive signs (ishārāt) that can only be interpreted by a saint. It is for this reason that the Sufi was also called sahīb al-kashf, dhū l-nafahāt wa l-ishārāt, sahīb al-karāmāt wa l-ishārat (he who is bestowed with divine revelations, gifts, signs and graces). In English we use the term ‘miracle’ where Sufis speak of ‘extraordinary events’ (khawāriq al-‘ādāt), when the supernatural suddenly manifests itself in the day-to-day world of human beings. Accounts of miracles aimed to provide proof that the saint was touched by divine grace. As in any hagiography, here their scriptural justification was recalled: ‘The miracles of the saints on earth and from the intermediary world (barzakh),’ writes Shamma, ‘are firmly established (thābita) by the Quran, the Sunna of the Prophet and the consensus of the scholars of our community (ijmā‘); those who deny them are hypocrites (munāfiqūn; in Islam, this designates a form of hidden unbelief).’ He adds that the saints receive these gifts without having sought them (tujrā ‘alā aydīhim min ghayr qasd lahā); they are a sign that prophecy continues through them until the day of the Last Judgement (ishāra ilā baqā’ al-nubuwwa ilā yawm al-qiyāma). Among the numerous gifts of Shaykh al-Hifnī was that of clairvoyance, which was first exercised in the education of his disciples. Hasan Shamma encountered this unsettling gift himself one day, when, at the end of a lesson, the shaykh asked Shamma to return home ahead of him. On his way, Shamma met some companions who invited him to join them in a visit to the shrine of al-Husayn; he hesitated, not wanting to be late and thus absent when his shaykh returned home, but he allowed himself to be tempted and did visit the shrine with his friends. Afterwards, he went to the shaykh’s home and was relieved to discover he had not yet returned, thanking God for this: ‘I sat down to await my shaykh. When he arrived, he asked me where I had been, and I replied, “Why, I’ve been here waiting for you, ya Sīdī.” He asked me the same question a second time, adding, “The truth is always preferable.” I then told him the whole story. He bade me never to lie to my shaykh, and asked me to enter his khalwa. The moment the door closed I felt the room becoming so small there was barely room for us therein, and then it grew to the size of a mountain – I had the feeling that the earth was about to swallow me up, and, fearful, I started crying. The shaykh then listed all of my bad actions, until then known only to me. I was shocked into silence.’32 The identification of Shaykh al-Hifnī with Badawī, whose function as pole of Egypt he had inherited, was substantiated by his power to liberate prisoners. This was one of the most important characteristics of the saint of Tantā, so much so that he carried the double nickname of ‘liberator of the captives’ and ‘the one who brings freedom’ (jāyib al-yusra, Abū Farrāj).33 Like Badawī, from afar, Shaykh

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  125 al-Hifnī freed Muslims who were the captives of Christians. His contemporary, the Yemeni shaykh, ‘Abd Allāh al-‘Aydarūs reported a miracle that occurred in Malta, in the land of the Christians: a Muslim prisoner passed before a mosque from which the sound of a dhikr could be heard. He asked who the master of this path was (tarīqat man hādhihi), and they replied that this dhikr was that of Shaykh al-Hifnī. He then vowed, “If by God I am freed from these chains, I shall become one of your disciples.” In his prison during the night he saw a rider in his sleep who ordered him to mount his horse and took him to the coast, where he boarded a boat. When he awoke, he found himself in Alexandria, and from there went to the shaykh’s home. When Badawī performed such miracles, the freed prisoner would come and offer him his broken chains as an ex-voto. In al-Hifnī’s case, the freed man came and pledged allegiance to him, putting himself at the shaykh’s service. Some miracles emphasised the role played by the shaykh as an intercessor against the iniquities of the tax-collectors (multazim), on behalf both of his disciples and the common people. In rural settings the multazim was the equivalent of a feudal lord, to whom the peasants were obliged to pay land-taxes. They were sometimes so heavily taxed and exploited that they were driven from their land, and their situation worsened in the second half of the eighteenth century. Shaykh al-Hifnī was informed by one of his close disciples, Shaykh Ghanīm, that some peasants from Upper Egypt had been imprisoned in Cairo by their multazim. Shaykh Ghanīm had pleaded their cause with his master – not aloud, but inwardly, with the voice of the heart. The next day, he went to see the shaykh, and was just sitting next to him on a bench when he saw the group of prisoners appearing before his master in order to salute him. Surprised, he asked who had freed them, to which they replied, ‘The baraka of the shaykh. When we were in our prison, with chains tight around our necks, the shaykh appeared to us and ordered us to stand up and follow him. Our chains were broken and we were free.’34 Another disciple told of his voyage in the Sinai, during which he escaped the cupidity of tax-collectors and the pillage of Bedouins thanks to Shaykh al-Hifnī’s baraka: ‘I was transporting merchandise that had been entrusted to me by our brethren (muhibbīn), in order that it might not fall into the hands of the taxcollectors. At the gates of Suez, I inwardly pictured my shaykh to myself, all the while reciting the Fātiha. Then I  prayed, “O my master (Ya Sīdī), blind these tyrants,” and I passed without being troubled. In the same way, when I was on the road to Tūr no one asked what we were transporting. A group of Turkish soldiers wanted to escort us, and were astonished by our refusal, arguing that they had arms that would protect us from the Bedouins. We replied that we had our own weapon, the baraka of our master al-Hifnī. They laughed at us, but whereas we finished our journey safe and sound, those Turks were attacked by Bedouins and a few of them lost their lives.’ There are pages and pages of such accounts, ranging from small miracles such as the finding of a lost shawl or pair of shoes, ‘thanks to the shaykh’s baraka,’ to his influence over the elements: raising the wind to advance ships, making the sun appear or disappear, starting or stopping rain . . . in short, all the topoï of hagiographical literature. It is, however, interesting to note that many of these

126  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints miracles took place during Ahmad al-Badawī’s mawlid, to the extent that Shamma attributes the increasing modern-period renown of the Tantā mawlid to Shaykh al-Hifnī, writing that ‘It was from the moment of the master’s appearance that these miracles multiplied.’ The key to the door of Sayyid al-Badawī The tomb of this saint was considered by his followers to be the space in which he was present and alive – and pilgrimage to this shrine represented a visit (ziyāra) to the saint’s house, undertaken with all the etiquette appropriate to a visit paid to a king. The Ottoman period was the high point of devotion to Badawī, which enjoyed political patronage, particularly from amir ‘Alī bey al-Kabīr (d. 1773). With the fortune that this latter had amassed by appropriating for himself the iltizām of his rivals, the amir established an enormous fund of waqfs, land and buildings, and built a mosque near the saint’s shrine that would become an important institution for religious learning; he also rebuilt the mausoleum with three domes and a magnificent brass fence (maqsūra) to protect the saint’s catafalque. Shaykh al-Hifnī held a key (miftāh bābihi) to this beautiful and holy place; any successful requests for the Sayyid’s intercession had to pass through him. It was during the mawlid of Badawī that al-Hifnī returned the capacity for speech to a person who had been mute for eighteen years, whose first words were the Muslim profession of faith, ‘there is no god but God’ (lā ilah illa Allāh). Sayyid Badawī was known not to be kind to those who failed to respect his mawlid; they risked severe punishment. Such a lack of respect almost cost one of al-Hifnī’s disciples his life, had it not been for his master’s intervention with the Sayyid. This miracle was reported by Muhammad al-Samanūdī in an account that mixes biographical and hagiographical elements. Shaykh al-Munīr (al-Samanūdī) was on his way to meet his master at the mawlid of Sayyid al-Badawī, and it was his habit, on reaching the village of Quhafa in the Tantā region, to dismount from his horse and continue along the road leading to the saint’s tomb on foot. Shaykh al-Hifnī told his disciple that he could not remain on foot while he (the shaykh) was on horseback: ‘Get back in your saddle and do not be afraid, the Sayyid will not be angry with you, I am the guarantor of this (adman laka ‘alā Sayyidī).’ So they continued on their way. At this time the brotherhood was at its early stages (kāna dhālika fī awā’il al-tarīq), and there was just a single Sufi singer (munshid) with them throughout the duration of the mawlid. Because he was working alone, this singer almost never slept, beating the rhythm for the dhikr all day and all night. Exhausted, he eventually fled and hid in a breadbasket. After a lengthy search, he was found in his village, gravely ill. One night, this munshid dreamed that the Sayyid came to him, accompanied by Sidī ‘Abd al-Muta‘āl, Badawī’s first disciple, and armed with a red-hot lance, about to strike him with it because he had mistreated the saint and his mawlid (takabbara ‘alaynā fī mawlidinā) by running off, and, even worse, by running off during the dhikr. Shaykh al-Hifnī then asked the Sayyid to forgive the munshid, and his request was granted on the condition that the Sufi singer never again neglect his service to the Sufis (khidmat al-fuqarā’) during his mawlid.

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  127 These services included the inshād but also the preparation of meals, etc. Thenceforth, Shaykh al-Munīr dropped his habit of going on foot during the final stage of his pilgrimage, for he had witnessed the efficacy of his master’s intercession with the Sayyid; after that, he felt free to ride by his master’s side as far as the tomb in Tantā without fear of reprisals from the saint.35 Finally, Badawī invited himself to the dhikr sessions organised during his mawlid by Shaykh al-Hifnī, blessing them. In their dreams pious men had seen Shaykh al-Hifnī recite the ‘Litany of the Protector,’ wird al-Sattār, one of the principal litanies of the Khalwatiyya Sufi path, after the dawn prayer, surrounded by a large audience. Sayyid al-Badawī was sitting on his tomb, listening to him, when a column of light that took in both men illuminated all their listeners. The light became more and more intense and shone until dawn, at which time the shaykh concluded his recitation. Muhammad al-Samanūdī also recounts that in famine years the companions of the shaykh never lacked for food during the mawlid of Badawī. It was during his own lifetime that Shaykh al-Hifnī accomplished these miracles that revealed his role as a protecting saint. The hagiography mentions neither the saint’s death nor any post-mortem miracles, since its author died while the saint was still alive. In Islam, there is an intrinsic unity between sainthood and authority – the two cannot be separated. This unity is contained within the very notion of walāya/wilāya, proximity to God and earthly patronage for mankind, and is expressed in the concept of the qutb, whose eschatological significance we have demonstrated. It was in exchange for this protection and this hope for salvation that men swore allegiance to Shaykh al-Hifnī, put themselves under his guidance and served him.

The saint as ‘patron’ During the entire Ottoman period, for reasons both pragmatic and religious, Sufis benefited from the patronage of the reigning elites: in return for fulfilling their role as protectors, spiritual advisors and mediators, they received many kinds of gifts from the powerful (iltizām, waqfs, rizqa ihbāsiyya or lands that were not subject to land-tax). These provided financial security for the recipients and in turn allowed the Sufis to provide for the greater and greater number of needy men and women who turned to them for help: Sufis offered food, healing and social stability thanks to their arbitration in disputes and conflicts. The social ascent of Shaykh al-Hifnī began at al-Azhar university, an institution that, for students from the countryside, represented one of the rare chances of advancement in a very stratified society. The institutionalisation of the ulama goes back to the Ayyubids (1174–1250), who formed alliances with men of religion as a way of gaining political legitimacy. The major phenomenon contributing to the reinforcement of political control over ulama and their submission to the ruling elites was the construction of madrasas and, for those who received their training in these institutions, the creation of a whole series of positions and official functions: in worship, education and the judiciary.36 The State paid the

128  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints salaries of men of religion, and attributed waqfs to mosques and religious schools. After the Ayyubids, first the Mamluks and then the Ottomans pursued the same policies. The great madrasas of Cairo declined after the end of the Mamluk era, but al-Azhar mosque maintained and reinforced its pre-eminent position, becoming the largest centre for religious learning in the country. When the Ottomans arrived in Egypt, a religious ‘establishment’ was already there: the country’s new masters added the official function of Shaykh of al-Azhar to those that already existed: supreme judge in the four juridical schools, and head representative of the descendants of the Prophet (naqīb al-ashrāf). They also offered numerous privileges to two sharifian Sufi families, the Bakrī and the Sādāt, thus recognising and enhancing the importance of Sufism in Egyptian society.37 The social ascent of the Bakrī and Sādāt families during the Ottoman period was so marked that in the eighteenth century works devoted to praising their merits appeared, composed by writers and scholars in their entourage. In these writings they were credited with an almost divine status. These two families constitute a very specific case, for in Egypt the importance of the ashrāf was not as great as in other parts of the Muslim world, especially the Maghreb and central Asia, although they did nevertheless enjoy certain privileges, and representation in the syndicate of the ashrāf (niqabat al-ashrāf), which defended their interests. As recognised descendants of the Prophet, members of the Bakrī and Sādāt families, bearing the title shaykh al-sajjāda, had high status and administered substantial waqf on the direct orders of the Ottoman Sultan, in addition to the large annual salaries they received from the Sublime Porte. The Bakrī administered the Sultan Qāyt Bāy waqf and the Sādāt those of Imam al-Shāfi‘ī, Imam al-Laythī and Shaykh Abū-l-Su‘ūd.38 They also controlled other, smaller waqf; the historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot has listed fifty-two managed by the Sādāt and forty-four by the Bakrī family. From the mid-eighteenth century these two families monopolised the function of naqīb al-ashrāf, which before then had been occupied by Turkish officials. The Bakrī and Sādāt families received donations from the Sultans of Morocco, Moulay ‘Abd Allāh (1729–1757) and his son Moulay Muhammad (1757–1790), who also tended to call on them rather than on the political elites when they wanted to see conditions improve for Moroccan pilgrims in Egypt. Allegiance to Shaykh al-Sādāt involved participation in a ritual called takniyya, which took place once a year during the Prophet’s mawlid, at a public ceremony in the courtyard of the family’s palace. On this occasion the master of the house conferred a nickname (kunya) on each person present. Jabartī received the nickname Abū ‘Azm from the shaykh al-sajjāda Shihāb al-dīn Ahmad Abū-l-Imdād al-Sādāt (d. 1768) in 1764  and Murtadā al-Zabīdī that of Abū-l-Fayd (after the name of Abū-l-Jūd) from Abū-l-Imdād’s successor, Muhammad Abū-l-Anwār (d. 1812).39 The social role of Shaykh al-Hifnī The social structure of the houses of the great ulama has not been studied closely in the way that Jane Hathaway studied military households. This American historian had the advantage of access to very rich sources relating to these groups on

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  129 which to draw, both literary and archival. However, a close reading of the hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī shows us that it is possible to find extensive information relevant to social history in such documents. Even if it consists partly of legends, the account of the circumstances of the conversion of the young al-Mahdī casts a great deal of light on how the ‘household’ of Shaykh al-Hifnī functioned. His hagiographer informs us that on his return from Jerusalem al-Hifnī’s aura was so great that all wanted to pledge their allegiance to him, ‘poor people as much as rich people, Muslims as much as Christians, all of them converted at once after having heard his dhikr.’ The best-known of these conversions was that of Shaykh Muhammad al-Mahdī. Shaykh al-Hifnī had received numerous gifts of land (al-atyān wa-l-fadādīn), ‘because of the baraka of his master Mustafā al-Bakrī’; these permitted him to live well. He owned an orchard (janīna) that stretched from Bāb al-Khalq to Darb al-Janīna, after the street of the Muskī, along the Khalīj to Kom Shaykh Salama. The Coptic carpenter whose job it was to maintain the waterwheel in this garden brought his youngest son to work with him one day, a boy who had not yet reached the age of puberty; he was carrying his father’s plane wrapped in a cloth. Shaykh al-Hifnī saw the boy and asked his father to give him the child. ‘Take him, ya Sīdī,’ answered the man. The shaykh then turned to the boy and asked him whether he wanted to enter into Islam. After the boy had agreed, he pronounced the shahāda, asking the boy to repeat it. The shaykh sent the boy to the kuttāb, where he learned the Quran by heart, and then to al-Azhar mosque (nasabahu ilā-l-Azhar). What followed is narrated by Jabartī, who knew al-Mahdī well. The latter climbed the ladder of rank at the university, reaching the grade of professor in 1776; when Shaykh Muhammad al-Hilbāwī died in 1778, he inherited the chair thus vacated. He became astonishingly rich and entered into the Cairo Dīwān, instituted by Bonaparte, becoming the preferred interlocutor of the French during their expedition in Egypt. Shaykh al-Mahdī was seen by the French General Régnier thus: ‘one of the shaykhs who impressed us most, because of his wit, Shaykh El-Mohdi, who was secretary of the divan, is the son of a Coptic carpenter, taken as a child by a shaykh who made a Muslim of him; when he was still a young man he managed to become the chief of one of the most important mosques in Cairo.’40 Towards the end of his life, al-Mahdī bought the house in the al-Ka‘kiyyīn quarter that had belonged to his spiritual father and moved into it; on his death in 1815 he was buried by al-Hifnī’s side.41 In addition to its apologetic aspect, this story highlights the relationships of power and submission around Shaykh al-Hifnī; these are based on his social and economic status and his close ties with the political elite. At the time of the young al-Mahdī’s conversion, Muhammad al-Hifnī was a rich and well-respected man; as Shaykh of al-Azhar he was the most highly placed person in the country’s religious hierarchy. Although this function did not then have the importance it was to acquire in the nineteenth century, it was nevertheless very prestigious, conferring much influence on its holder, which is why there was such fierce competition among ulama to be named to this position. Like the amirs and rich merchants, al-Hifnī held a ‘salon’ (majlis) in his home, where nominated poets praised his virtues, charisma and generosity. He obtained the services of the celebrated poet

130  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints ‘Abd Allāh al-Idkāwī when his previous patron died (this was Shaykh ‘Abd Allāh al-Shubrāwī, who was also al-Hifnī’s predecessor at the head of al-Azhar): ‘When [Shaykh al-Shubrāwī] died, al-Idkāwī turned to the shaykh of the age, Shams (al-dīn) al-Hifnī, whom he accompanied in his journeys and in residence. He praised him in his finest qasīdas, and gained attention, assistance, and charity sufficient to cover his needs and to maintain him. . . . Al-Idkāwī continued his career until he had become a man unique in his time and unmatched in his age. However, when Shaykh al-Hifnī died, his situation took a turn for the worse and his affairs were thrown into disorder. He fell ill, and the meadows of his renown dried up. He declined and became sick for a time, then died. . . . Prayers for him were recited at al-Azhar, and he was buried in al-Mujāwirīn Cemetery, near the grave of Shaykh al-Hifnī.’42 According to Hasan Shamma, there were regularly forty, fifty or even sixty people seated around Shaykh al-Hifnī’s table, among them princes and Sultans some of whom had travelled long distances to meet him, and also poverty-stricken people, who received whatever they asked for, in this world or the next. The shaykh gave freely, keeping nothing for himself, ‘he was generous,’ writes Jabarti, ‘and gave away everything he had, for he considered the chattels of this world to be of little value.’ This redistribution was seen at once as a sign of prestige and a proof of sainthood. Shaykh al-Hifnī’s charitable acts were performed both openly and discreetly. His ‘household’ (bayt) served bread daily, made with one ardabb (approximately 184 litres at the end of the eighteenth century) of wheat, and his mill never stopped turning. Sweet drinks and coffee were always available to the flow of visitors, which was uninterrupted day and night. The majority of these visitors were students from al-Azhar coming to request alms from the shaykh, for living conditions at the university were very difficult. In response, al-Hifnī would put his hand under the edge of the rug and pull out dirhams to distribute among the students. In Sufism, the master-disciple relationship (suhba) is built on khidma (service) and wasāta/shafā‘a (mediation/intercession), polysemous concepts whose contents refer to social, political and religious relationships. The concept of khidma, the service offered to the shaykh, as contained in a hadīth that would become a common adage within Sufi circles, ‘Sayyid al-qawm khādimu-hum’ (The lord of a group is he who is at their service), is twofold: disciples are at the service of the shaykh and he is also at their service. The pact (‘ahd) sealed between master and disciple is a reciprocal engagement between two parties, and the mubāya’a, the Arabic root of which contains the idea of an agreement between a buyer and a seller, is conditional: the disciple submits to his shaykh and in return is directed by him on the path towards God, but the shaykh also takes on the role of protector and recourse; as the walī is protected by God so he, by extension, becomes the one who protects and takes responsibility for others.43 The fact that during the ceremony of allegiance both the master and the disciple kneel, facing each other and with their knees touching, the right hand of one in the other’s right hand, symbolises this reciprocity. The wālaya, proximity to God, thus implies some form of patronage, wilāya, as Michel Chodkiewicz has explained. This corresponds to the

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  131 Roman term, amicitia, developed by Peter Brown in his study on society and the sacred in Late Antiquity. Peter Brown writes that the holy man was the patronus, the protector, with whom it was desirable to establish a client relationship.44 There were similarities as well as differences between the authority figure of the Sufi saint in his community and the temporal power incarnated by the chiefs of the military households that made up the political structure of the country. The power of the amirs rested on the patronage of clientele groups that were dominant in political life from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. One of these households, the Qazdughlī, then became the sole power from the middle of the eighteenth century. The bayt functioned as a powerful nexus of solidarity, integration and social identity for heterogenous clientele groups composed of Anatolian soldiers, janissaries, Georgian Mamluks, etc. The vast households were maintained by a firm control of the country’s economic resources, in particular a great many iltizām; thus they could secure protection and a certain amount of social mobility for their clients.45 These forms of solidarity affected not only the military but also the entire elite of the country, including what historians have called ‘the religious aristocracy’ composed of the two families of ashrāf, Bakrī and Sādāt, as well as the great ulama of al-Azhar. Certain elements of the hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī provide clues to the social structures that applied to his own clientele, in which were blended ties of identity, Sufi brotherhood and corporation, that is, belonging to the azharī institution; this network was formed primarily of students and professors at al-Azhar. The protection of the shaykh, which was passed on through affiliation to his Sufi path, the Khalwatiyya, also provided, for students arriving from their native villages, a powerful source of solidarity and integration into life in the capital and the university. In return, these students became the real propagators of his path throughout the country. In our first chapter we have seen how the Khalwatiyya spread across Upper Egypt after the initiation of a student from the region, Ahmad al-Dardīr, who, with support from his masters, became Shaykh of the college of Upper-Egyptian students and Maliki mufti at al-Azhar. The bonds between the shaykh and his protégés/disciples were personal bonds of confidence, friendship and loyalty: the ‘ahd, pact of allegiance, contains the idea of an unbreakable undertaking because one does not leave one’s shaykh once the commitment to be initiated by him has been made. Al-Mahdī was a very young boy when he was ‘entrusted’ by his father to Shaykh al-Hifnī, who took charge of his education until, like his master, he became a great ālim with an important position at al-Azhar. There is a parallel here with the military households, in which young Christian boys purchased as slaves were raised in the palaces of amirs and Sultans, whose retainers they became; some of them later acceded, like their masters, to the rank of amir. In fact, Jabartī uses the terms tābi‘ and muntamīn (clients, protégés) of those people who spent a lot of time in Shaykh al-Hifnī’s house: ‘He supported the families of his protégés (Kāna yasrifu ‘alā buyūt atbā‘ihi wa-lmuntamīn ilayhi).’46 We do not have details of the extent or contents of al-Hifnī’s fortune, except that ‘he had received gifts of land from the amirs and governors.’ He maintained

132  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints contact with the powerful Shaykh Hummām, chief of the Hawwāra, a Bedouin tribe of Berber origin that had been settled in Egypt since the fourteenth century.47 At the time of the Ottoman conquest the Hawwāra made a pledge of loyalty to Sultan Selim, and as a reward were recognised as having direct authority, which at the beginning at least was not shared, over Upper Egypt. Later, the Hawwāra got their hands on the iltizām that were developing in Upper Egypt during the first quarter of the seventeenth century and thus increased their wealth in the shadows of the beys who had retaken political control of the region.48 During the eighteenth century the Ottomans recognised the power of the Hawwāra by granting the Shaykh al-‘Arab Hummām practically autonomous control of the province (although the shaykh did continue to pay the annual land-tax tribute to the Porte). The Hawwāra carried a lot of weight in Cairene political conflicts, supporting one or the other among the power-seeking factions that were tearing one another apart. Hummām was at the head of his own household, composed of his family and exiled members of the Qāsimiya faction who had become integrated into local life. A patron of scholars, he invited Murtadā al-Zabīdī to his fiefdom three times, and asked Shaykh al-Hifnī, in whom he had great faith, to send one of his disciples to propagate the Khalwatiyya path in Upper Egypt. Upon his arrival there, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Zayyāt (d. 1768) received from Shaykh Hummām a spacious house, land, a retinue and slaves.49 Whatever the forms taken by material enrichment, for Hasan Shamma and al-Hifnī’s disciples the shaykh’s real capital was not material but symbolic riches. To use a term from weberian sociology, his charisma was his true wealth. Al-Hifnī was rich because he partook of walāya, divine protection, and benefited from baraka, God’s goodwill towards him. ‘His subsistence,’ writes Jabartī, ‘is a gift from God.’ And it was because of this charisma that elites and common people alike turned to him to resolve their conflicts. Al-Hifnī’s relationship with power The public role of ulama in Ottoman Egypt has been analysed by historians in terms of a Golden Age followed by decline, of competing interests, manipulation and submission to power.50 Such analyses attribute a quasi-official political role to men of religion; A. Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot even speaks of their political ‘function’51; she studied the social ascent of the great ulama who enriched themselves through the iltizām and the administration of important waqf. Her examination of sources from the period  – chronicles, biographical dictionaries and archives from the religious courts – has cast light on the political alliances that allowed such people as the al-Bakrī and Sādāt families, the Shaykh of al-Azhar, ‘Abd Allah al-Sharqāwī or Shaykh Muhammad al-Mahdī to acquire such great wealth and influence. The intervention of ulama in public life reached its peak during the eighteenth century because of the increased decentralisation of the Ottoman State. From the seventeenth century, local powers (beys or amirs) exercised greater control over the economic resources of the country and contributed to the development of religious culture by investing part of their revenues in pious foundations:

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  133 ‘The economic prosperity of the most influential among the ‘ulamā depended too much on the influence of those who governed – and opened a path for them to the most fruitful benefits and the most important functions – for them not to wish to remain in the good graces of these men. The acceptance by the ‘ulamā of the established order, and their attachment to the power whose favours brought them benefits – and which may thus have manipulated them – was therefore a constant phenomenon.’52 The historical approach underlines all the ambiguities inherent in the intermediary status attributed to ulama by political power, starting in medieval times. As interpreters of religious law, the great ulama agreed to sit in the dīwāns of political leaders, whose counsellors and sometime censors they were. But they were reluctant to stand in for political elites: ‘Caught between two pressures, that of power and that of the street, until the end of the nineteenth century they performed the role of intermediary between these when they were pushed by one side or the other to do so. Their function was more that of arbitrators than of fully fledged actors.’53 But the ulama of al-Azhar were also in many cases Sufis whose piousness was highly regarded. If they did act as intermediaries between the political elite and the people, they were certainly also intermediaries between God and mankind, to whom they delivered messages of hope. Relations between Sufis and power should be understood in the light of the religious context of the time: belief in saints’ intercessionary powers in this world here below from an invisible intermediary world was a defining fact in pre-modern Muslim societies, which cannot be ignored. This belief was not restricted to the common people, the ‘āmma; it was also held by the elite, the khassa: remember the Ottoman Sultans who surrounded themselves with not one but many spiritual masters, acting as counsellors, intercessors with the divine and oracles.54 Immediately upon his arrival in Egypt in 1517, Sultan Selim visited a number of Sufis, including the Khalwatī Muhammad al-Demirdāsh. The hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī concentrates on his miracles and mentions no intervention by the master in the political life of the country; it is thanks to the events reported by Jabartī in his chronicle that we can measure the extent and the limits of his influence. During the eighteenth century the house of the Qazdughlī dominated political life in Egypt: the Ottoman governor no longer exercised any authority in the country. The power of the Qazdughlī was at its height under ‘Alī bey al-Kabīr (1760–1772). He eliminated all his rivals, including the Shaykh al‘Arab Hummām, the powerful tribal leader of the Hawwāra. Yet when the amirs decided to show ‘Alī bey a united front, planning to send an army against him and Sālih bey in their Upper-Egyptian exile, they felt obliged to consult the Shaykh of al-Azhar with the aim of getting his permission and blessing before doing so. Shaykh al-Hifnī refused them and admonished them severely: ‘You have brought ruin on the country. What is the aim of all these battles and quarrels, of this expedition? This ‘Alī bey is your brother and your khushdāsh (companion in arms). What would happen if he were to return to live in his home and you all made peace with each other, relieving the people and yourselves of all these troubles?’ The shaykh assured them that no good would come of it if they did send an armed

134  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints contingent against ‘Alī bey. Then the amirs complained to the shaykh of the absolutist ambitions of ‘Alī bey, saying that if they did not march against him, he would march against them. The shaykh promised that he would write to ‘Alī bey, asking them to make no move until after the reply had arrived. In the letter he sent the amir was severely reprimanded in his turn. But a few days after this meeting Shaykh al-Hifnī fell ill, coughing and spitting blood; he died on the morning of 27 rabi‘ I 1181/ 23 August 1767. Jabartī gave his version of the shaykh’s death: as nothing could be undertaken in the country without the holy man’s permission, the amirs realised that they could do nothing without going against the shaykh, so decided to rid themselves of him with poison before setting out to make war against ‘Alī bey. Obviously, this campaign ended in their crushing defeat.55 On his return to Cairo ‘Alī bey assumed full powers as Shaykh al-Balad and broke his ties with the Porte by refusing to send the annual tribute. He then began his conquest of the Hejaz and of Bilad al-Sham (1770–71); eventually, he was defeated by Ottoman troops. After his death in 1773, the rivalries between amirs and the protest movements among the segments of the populace who had suffered the most in the economic crisis increased in intensity. Al-Hifnī’s successor, Ahmad al-Dardīr, several times took the side of the people, defending their interests.56 Jabartī’s chronicle was written some time after the events it depicted, since he was only 13  years old when Shaykh al-Hifnī died. Whatever bias may be present in the way facts were interpreted, for the historian as for his contemporaries al-Hifnī’s interventions in public life were not motivated by social or political competition, economic interests, or a desire to strike a balance between opposed powers, where one side drew its legitimacy from the use of coercive force, while that of the other was based on its religious prestige and authority. On the contrary, al-Hifnī’s interventions were divinely inspired, the work of the invisible forces that intervene in the visible and temporal world. Shaykh al-Hifnī was the pole, presiding over the hidden hierarchy of intercessor saints, whose permanent intercession was the only reason for the continued existence of the world. His death was described by Jabartī as a catastrophe for the country: ‘It was a very solemn occasion. Thirteen days separated his death from that of Shaykh al-Mallawī. From then on, affliction began to descend on Egypt and conditions began to deteriorate.’ Jabartī had heard one of his masters say that this Shaykh al-Mallāwī, who was a Shafi‘i professor at al-Azhar, had assumed the role of mystical pole for the year preceding al-Hifnī’s death. The fact that both poles had died was one reason for Jabartī’s apocalyptic tone, because for him the order of the world was shattered. As of that time, ‘Alī bey had full power over the country; he could no longer find anyone to argue with him. Sufis’ authority probably reached its peak during Ottoman times, but this does not mean that everyone recognised and accepted it. In Anatolia, Birgilī Mehmed Efendī (d. 1573), had a different understanding of the prophetic heritage: he also claimed to follow the Muhammadan path, in his work entitled al-Tarīqa alMuhammadiyya, but his puritanical and moralistic interpretation of the path was closer to the positions of Ibn Taymiyya than to those of his Sufi contemporaries.57 During the seventeenth century his text became the credo of a new sort of

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  135 anti-Sufi movement, members of which physically attacked Sufis and their tekkes in Istanbul itself, capital of the Empire. The conflict between Sufis and anti-Sufis reached the heart of the Arab provinces in the middle of the eighteenth century; there, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792) went still further in his critique of the Sufis by pronouncing anathema on the Islam of his time and more particularly on the excessive veneration of the Prophet and the cult of saints, which had been so encouraged by Sufis with the support and patronage of the Ottoman Sultans. He laid the foundations of a fundamentalist ideology, Wahhabism, that would bring about a deep fracture in the umma, the community of Muslims.

Who are the true heirs of the Prophet? In al-Tarīqa al-Muhammadiyya wa-l-sīra al-nabawiyya al-ahmadiyya (The Muhammadan path and the Life of the Much Praised Prophet) Birgilī exhorts the reader to reject the innovations (bid‘a) introduced by the Sufi brotherhoods, and above all to reject the cult of saints and any idea of an intermediary or substitute replacing the Prophet (khalīfa) as intercessor between the believer and God; he also rejects Sufi practices such as listening to music and Sufi poetry (samā’), and the mystical dance (raqs) that follows the ecstasy provoked by listening to singing and music. He enjoined a return to a strict application of the Prophet’s Sunna; in other words, to sweep away the entire Sufi tradition and the notion of an invisible world. Following in a long tradition of anti-Sufi writings, he placed the scriptural authority of the sacred texts in opposition to the charismatic authority of men of God, whereas Sufis allowed both respect for the Prophet’s Sunna as transmitted in the hadīth and mystical identification with his person to co-exist. Birgilī’s book spread rapidly. During the 200 years following the death of its author, this much-copied treatise (written in Arabic), subject of many commentaries, was the basis for a new genre that, from the eighteenth century, would be adopted by Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhāb and his followers: treatises (risāla) with no real doctrinal content, written in a simple or even simplistic style with the aim of mobilising people’s consciences.58 Al-Tarīqa al-Muhammadiyya inspired the puritanical reform movement of the Qādizādelī that shook the centre of the Ottoman Empire, especially its capital, Istanbul, between the end of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century. This movement took its name from its founder, Qādīzāde Mehmed Efendī (d. 1635); he and his successors  Ustuvānī Mehmed Efendī (d. 1661) and Vānī Mehmed Efendī (d. 1684), received the personal support of Ottoman Sultans from Murad IV (r. 1623–1640) to Mehmed IV (r. 1648–1687) for some of their reformist ideas. With the populace and the powerful behind them, the Qādīzādelīs launched a violent campaign of social moralisation from below, which was aimed at Sufis, but also served as a vehicle for their wider social and political contestation. They did not hesitate to provoke direct confrontations with the Sufi brotherhoods, especially the two that had become settled in the upper echelons of religious and political hierarchies: the Khalwatiyya and the Mawlawiyya (Mevleviye), which had also put dance and the samā’ at the heart of their spiritual practice. The Qādīzādelīs provoked what would be a

136  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints lasting crisis in the capital of the Empire, one that reached its peak in the year 1666, annus horribilis for the Mevlevīs with the banning of the samā’ (this ban was lifted the following year).59 The Qādīzādelī movement was dissolved during the 1680s after the failure of the Austrian campaign (1683). In Cairo in 1711, Turkish students, influenced by the writings of Birgilī and the actions of the Qādīzādelīs, and with the help of a group of Turkish soldiers, beat up some Sufis in the Bāb Zuwayla district. They demanded the closure of the Gulshenī, Mevlevī and Bektashī Turkish tekkes and their conversion into madrasas, along with the banning of the practice of the dhikr in the shrines of Imam al-Shāfi’ī and other scholars on Friday nights, and in Bāb Zuwayla during Ramadān nights. Their movement rejected belief in the intercession of saints, or in post-mortem miracles such as those reported by Sha‘rānī in his Tabaqāt al-kubrā, which was decried as a tissue of lies and superstition. The veneration of tombs, the kissing of a cenotaph or its maqsūra, the lighting of candles or lamps in the shrine – all these actions were identified with impiety (kufr). It was claimed that every form of construction over a tomb had to be destroyed. However, this trouble, described as fitna (sedition) faded away almost as soon as it had begun.60 Studies have underlined the socio-political character of this movement, with its critique of the religious establishment by low-ranking ulama, even leading to the physical destruction of tekkes.61 In Cairo as in Istanbul, Turkish students attacked the well-established brotherhoods who had close ties with Ottoman power in the city (and in the case of the Gulshenis and the Bektashīs, with the Janissaries in particular). Michael Cook saw a new phenomenon, never observed for the preceding periods of the Ottoman Empire, in the Qādīzādelīs’ systematic recourse to the Quranic precept of ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ (al-amr bi-l-ma‘rūf wa-l-nahī ‘an al-munkar), on which they based an entire lifestyle62; these were important early indicators of the Wahhabism that would appear in central Arabia (Najd) in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Wahhabi fracture, or the anathemising of Ottoman Islam Even if the effects of Wahhabism did not immediately make themselves felt in Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman Empire, it is important to examine this fundamentalist religious movement that constructed itself as a reaction to Ottoman Islam, which, as we have seen, had been very influenced by Sufism, and particularly by the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabī; this Islam would eventually be definitively fractured as a result. Wahhabism was one reformist doctrine among many that developed during the eighteenth century in the context of the decline of the great Ottoman and Moghol Empires; here and there across the Muslim world – in Arabia, India, Russia – religious scholars were searching within Islam for the means of resisting European imperialism. Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb furnished a particularly violent and radical response to these challenges because he believed that most Muslims had fallen back into the darkness of the Pre-Islamic age of ignorance (jāhiliyya), and he therefore pushed for a return to a supposedly original Islam, purified of its innovations: for him, it was necessary for Muslim societies to

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  137 revert to the model of the first community in Medina (as he imagined it), in order truly to live in conformity with the principles of Islam and the sharī‘a. He adopted an intransigent attitude and did not hesitate to pronounce anathema (takfīr) on all those who did not adhere to his dogma. In Islam, takfīr – the accusation of kufr (impiety or unbelief) – brings with it exclusion from the community and from salvation, as well as capital punishment. It has been and continues to be used by Muslims against other Muslims with the aim of imposing a particular vision of dogma and the law. Politico-religious motives have conditioned the use of takfīr, with dogmatic justification that arrived post-hoc. Exclusion in Islam is linked to a conflict over religious authority that has been permanent since the death of the prophet Muhammad. After centuries of confrontation and violence, Sunni exegesis expressed the very ardent sentiment among Muslims that unity existed among all those who shared the same faith – the umma, a term that appears several times in the Quran. The umma is the people of Muhammad, for whom he intercedes, and there is a duty of solidarity that is inseparable from the original divine covenant with God through his Prophet, resting on respect for the commandments of God as prescribed in the Quran and transmitted by His messenger. This intensified expression within Islam of the importance of spiritual and temporal cohesion within the community explains why, where there is transgression of the strict observance of Quranic laws, the sinner is also transgressing against that which makes balance within the community possible. Any voluntary abandonment of the community is thus a capital crime in this world and an irremediable sin in the hereafter.63 But, on the principle that only God has access to the secrets of human conscience, jurists decided that as long as the written or spoken impious action was not made public, then one should abstain from judging or excluding: they were very prudent about the use of takfīr, and strict requirements for evidence have severely limited the application of hudūd (punishment fixed in the Quran for crimes considered to be against the rights of God) penalties. In the rare cases where the accusation went as far as trial and execution, it was because the ruler had let himself be convinced of a threat to his country’s political stability.64 The radical questioning of this consensus by Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb represented a serious rupture. And yet, he was merely bringing together, adapting and simplifying the thoughts of medieval Hanbali theologians and jurists, especially those of the Damascene Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), who integrated the precept of the ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ into normative jurisprudence. Ibn Taymiyya launched a jihād against the foreign Mongol powers that had put an end to the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, and also against the Shi‘a communities, as well as pronouncing anathema on Ibn ‘Arabī because he was presenting himself as ‘Seal of the saints,’ the equivalent of the Prophet in the order of sainthood. Ibn Taymiyya saw the Andalusian Sufi as the Imam of the Shi‘a, and the belief that the mystical pole could intercede for people and grant their prayers was, for him, linked with the worst possible sin in Islam, that of associating God with another divinity (shirk). Therefore, this Sufi had to be excluded from the community, for he was leading Muslims astray. Ibn Taymiyya was heavily criticised by the jurists of his time because he threatened

138  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints their work; for this he was imprisoned. However, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb went much further than Ibn Taymiyya: unlike the Hanbali jurist, who was affiliated to the Qādiriyya, he broke definitively with Sufism; he also rejected the authority of the jurists and theologians who were, in his eyes, responsible alongside the Sufis for having led the umma astray; his aim was the complete root and branch reorientation of Islam in his time.65 ‘Abd al-Wahhāb’s essential doctrine is contained in his ‘Book of Divine Unity’ (Kitāb al-tawhīd); as the title indicates, he develops therein his own concept of the dogma of unity and the absolute uniqueness of God as Creator and Sustainer of the universe, with its different components (tawhīd al-rubūbiyya, the affirmation of God’s omnipotence; tawhīd al-uluhiyya, the fact of adoring only God). He exhorts the reader to return to a pure monotheism and to ‘devote [himself] to an exclusive worship of God Alone without any associate.’ This therefore excludes the veneration of any being or thing other than God: here the idea of the intercession of the Prophet (and a fortiori that of the saints) is the opposite of the tawhīd al-uluhiyya, and constitutes a form of idolatry (shirk) and of impiety (kufr). In his biography of the Prophet Muhammad, entitled Mukhtasar sīrat al-rasūl (his own abridged version of the life of the Prophet), ‘Abd al-Wahhāb erases all the episodes that demonstrate the suprahuman nature of the Prophet from what is the most commonly accepted version of the Prophet’s life, the Sīra by Ibn Hishām. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb retains only the parts of the biography that show the Prophet as an ordinary, sometimes fallible, human being, like all men (mentioning the notorious Satanic Verses), asserting that it is only in this sense that the Prophet may be, and must be, imitated. He also passes over without mention all the miraculous events announcing the Prophet’s arrival, his gestation and his birth, thus undermining any doctrine of the light of the Prophet as principle of creation, a doctrine that figures in all the mawlid accounts that were so popular in ‘Abd al-Wahhāb’s time. He passes very quickly over the event in the Prophet’s life that the traditional sīras consider most important, his celestial ascension (mi‘rāj). As for the characteristics that were supposed to distinguish Muhammad from other prophets and the umma, for ‘Abd al-Wahhāb these also contrasted with those presented in works of Dalā’il and of Khasā’is al-nabawiyya (‘the proofs of the prophecy’ and ‘the characteristics of the Prophet) from the Mamluk period, when this literature progressively evolved to give more emphasis to miracles and the sacred person of the Prophet. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb considered the Prophet’s characteristics to be limited to his military prowess and bravery on the battlefield, seeing as the most important event in the Prophet’s life – and its culmination – the destruction of the idols of the Ka’aba after his conquest of Mecca. In this way the Prophet’s mission (apart from the revelation) was reduced to the eradication of impiety and idolatry, and Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb presented himself as the continuer of the Prophet’s actions, thus legitimising the war that he, ‘Abd al-Wahhāb, was leading against ‘the polytheists.’66 And in fact, he and his disciples also used the term tarīqa muhammadiyya, among others, to name their own doctrine.67 The love and profound devotion that Egyptians felt for the Prophet and his family, the Ahl al-bayt, who are said to have been buried in Cairo, are still strong

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  139 even today; it is therefore not surprising that one of the first refutations (in 1743) of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb’s preaching, which was only just beginning to reach Mecca, was the work of a Meccan resident from the Egyptian holy town of Tantā, affiliated to the Ahmadiyya and educated at al-Azhar, by the name of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb b. Ahmad Barakāt al-Shāfi’ī al-Azharī al-Tandatāwī. His refutation was written in response to information he had been given orally and received in letters sent from Najd, especially some that spoke of the destruction of the tomb of the Prophet’s companion Zayd b. al-Khattāb  – something that shocked people profoundly  – and of the stoning to death of a woman taken in adultery, a sentence that until then had rarely been passed in Islam. This refutation was approved by the muftis of the four juridical schools and by Meccan scholars who praised its contents and placed their imprimatur (taqrīzāt) on it before it was diffused. Tandatāwī insisted on the permissibilty of visits to the tombs of the prophets with the aim of asking for their intercession, and alerted his readers to the fact that the Egyptian poet al-Busīrī, author of the famous ode of praise for the Prophet, al-Burda, had been denounced by ‘Abd al-Wahhāb as an impious man; this accusation does indeed appear in the Kitāb al-tawhīd, alongside denunciations of the great saints, among them the most celebrated in Islam, ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, as infidels. For Tandatāwī this was a clear sign that ‘Abd al-Wahhāb himself had departed from Islam, since there was consensus in the umma on the high degree of piety and holiness of these mystics.68 Like those of the Qādīzādelīs, the actions of the Wahhabis were violent and brought about severe trauma: in their desire to desacralise public space they went so far as to destroy places that had been venerated by Muslims for centuries, such as the tombs of the companions of the Prophet, and thus erased entire chapters from the history of Islam. However, in the short term the Qādīzādelī crisis was revealing in another way: it demonstrated the increasing control exercised by the State, which began to intervene in religious debates. Did an Egyptian exception exist? The Qādīzādelī crisis and the role played in it by the Ottoman State were more strongly felt in Syria, which was politically and intellectually more closely tied to Istanbul than was Egypt, and is therefore not surprising that the most lively criticism of this intrusion by the State in religious affairs, through the religious authorities, came from a Damascene scholar, ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī. In his writings, Nābulusī affirmed his role as an independent mufti, in opposition to the religious functionaries of Damascus and to the decisions by sultanian power to ban certain religious practices because they wanted to apply the restrictive interpretations of the sharī‘a as propounded by the Qādīzādelīs. To preserve and exercise his independence as a man of religion, anchored in his local environment, he defended his community in the face of what he considered to be abuses by the government.69 The debates and polemics on social and devotional practices (tobacco, samā’, ziyāra) at this time were certainly debates on liberty, Sunni identity and the very definition of Islam: they cast light on ancient conflicts between the puritan

140  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints movements’ restrictive interpretation of texts and mystical interpretations that, during the Ottoman period, were deeply impregnated with akbarian ideas. As Samuela Pagani has demonstrated, Nābulusī put into practice the doctrine of walāya that was developed by his intellectual and spiritual master Ibn ‘Arabī, who had explained and clarified the question of the saint and his community, insisting on the idea of a divine authority (idhn) that allowed the Prophet’s heir to express himself publicly. For this purpose, he chose the mosque that, during the Ottoman period, brought together all the forms of religious activity, from ritual prayers to Sufi practices. Barbara Von Schlegell has noted, perceptively, that the Qādīzādelīs attacked the dhikr and the samā’ precisely because they had been established in mosques for so long.70 As a teacher at the Omeyyads’ mosque and later at the Salīmiyya madrasa, Nābulusī had access to a larger audience, to which he had to adapt: he brought the work of Ibn ‘Arabī ‘to the elite and the common folk so that believing hearts and minds could understand it.’71 But, like Michael Cook, both Samuela Pagani and Barbara Von Schlegell see in Nābulusī’s passionate defence of Sufism an indication that new and difficult times were coming for Sufis; the Qādīzādelīs represented a new argument, a phenomenon capable of unsettling Sufism in all parts of society and even of resorting to violent action and destruction. For Nābulusī, Sufism was part of Sunni tradition and Islam was inconceivable without its spiritual dimension, without the possibility of recourse to the intercession of saints, and without the dhikr and the samā’. His defence of Sufism was also essentially a defence of Sunni identity; it was a defence of the independence of men of religion in the face of coercive State power. 72 According to sources from the period, the Qādīzādelī movement had few direct repercussions in Egypt, where it remained limited to Turkish circles in the capital. Historians often explain this by referring to the existence in Cairo of a religious establishment dominated by Shafi’is, stronger and more independent than religious circles in Damascus where important positions were given to people from the Hanafi milieu linked to the Ottoman State.73 Unlike the ‘Ilmiyye system that operated in Istanbul, or the religious institutions of Syria that were characterised by the domination of a few important families who had links to power, historians emphasise that the azharī institution maintained a certain degree of independence during the entire Ottoman period, describing the informal atmosphere of its hierarchy, in which each shaykh’s personality and charisma played a big part. This continued until the arrival in power of Muhammad ‘Alī, who transformed al-Azhar by gradually institutionalising it and turning its rector into a high functionary put in place by the State. This does not mean that there was consensus in Egypt on Sufi practices; in the National Library in Cairo, Dār al-kutub, there are several texts, written between the end of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries, which speak of the miracles of saints and the quest for their intercession; the very apologetic contents of these writings allude to people who denied these miracles while saints were alive and attacked practices relating to visits to shrines.74 Ibn Taymiyya had caused a less serious fracture in Egypt than in Syria, his country of origin, but this systematic defence of the miracles of saints clearly indicates that even in an Egyptian milieu that was deeply impregnated with Sufism an opposing

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  141 tendency was coming into existence; this would be echoed by Wahhabism in the eighteenth century. For Egypt, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the first refutations of the doctrine of ‘Abd al-Wahhāb appeared.75 In her studies covering the law, a completely different domain within the religious sciences, Reem Meshal rejects the idea of an independence of the Egyptian judiciary sphere, which, strengthened by its ancient status and lineage, might have been said to have preserved its autonomy and escaped from Ottoman control.76 Rather than speaking of an Egyptian exception in the sixteenth century’s administration of justice, she refers to a situation of antagonism and rivalry between, on the one hand, an Ottoman State that wanted to impose its idea of orthodoxy (universalism, homogenisation and codification of the law) and, on the other hand, judges from the Arab provinces who had traditionally been trained according to a legal model shaped by orthopraxy. In Egypt after the creation of the religious institutions such as the madrasas in the eleventh century, the State’s interference in the religious sphere in order to legitimise its exercise of power is evident; on their side, men of religion sought to preserve their independence of thought and action within institutional situations that were becoming increasingly restrictive for them. The State’s will to manipulate the religious sphere – whether in the ideological or the institutional sense – was most powerful in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, but it also touched other regions to varying degrees; the state manipulated the religious sphere for political purposes and as a consequence it opened itself up to challenges from various religious actors who debated and often contested its projects of reform. In the domain of Sufism, the predominant role in the supervision of the most sacred places in the country and the organisation of the Prophet’s mawlid offered by the Ottoman State to two sharifian families, the Bakrī and the Sādāt, was a recognition of the importance of Sufism in Egyptian society, as well as indicating a will to create an institutionalised Sufi religious hierarchy in order to control its activities. This policy would be fully realised by the Pasha of Egypt and his Khedive successors with the creation, in the nineteenth century, of the official position of Supreme Shaykh of Sufi brotherhoods (mashyakhat mashāyikh al-turuq al-sūfiyya), occupied by the Bakrī family.77 But for Sufis the legitimacy of the shaykh was (and still is) based only on his charisma: his followers were tied to him by mutual bonds of love, trust and loyalty that could be the result either of personal initiative or of kinship relations (whereby one was attached to a particular master as was one’s father, uncle, entire village or neighbourhood). When the master died, his son or close disciple might succeed him, but even initiatic transmission was not sufficient in itself to ensure the new shaykh an authority equal to that of his predecessor. The Sufi path shifted and fluctuated because it did not respond to contractual obligations, nor did it produce any official text or archive; only writings such as the hagiography of Shaykh al-Hifnī allow one to reach an understanding of how Sufism was lived by its affiliates. For his community, a saint was not a ‘patron’ as others were; amirs and Sufis were not competing, for they acted in two distinct territories or spheres; the authority of the saint was of a divine and eternal nature while that of the amirs

142  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints was temporal; the decline and disappearance of the amirs at the beginning of the nineteenth century corresponded to an expansion of the Khalwatiyya in Egypt that continued well into the twentieth century. For Shamma, who chose not to dwell on the role of Shaykh al-Hifnī in the country’s political life, the real miracle that provided a visible mark of his master’s superior status, far beyond the respect accorded to him by the people and by amirs and other powerful men, was that which his master had founded: the many disciples across the country who all recited his dhikr. Even today the houses of Sufi shayks, in villages and in cities, receive numerous visitors; one must imagine a much more intense version of this activity in former times, with a milling crowd of disciples, students, foreign visitors and simple believers come to make a request: the kitchen fires never went out.

Notes 1 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 304. 2 Chodkiewicz, M., Le Sceau des saints; Brown, P., Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981. 3 Amri, N., ‘Walī et awliyā’ dans l’Ifrīqīya ‘médiévale’. De l’activité originelle d’une notion aux modalités historiques de son activation’, Studia Islamica 90 (2000), p. 30. 4 Amri, N., ‘Le pouvoir du saint en Ifrīqiyya aux VIIIe-IXe/XVIe-XVe siècles: le “très visible” gouvernement du monde’, in Besc, H., Dagher, G. and Veauvy, C. (eds.), Politique et religion en Méditerranée, moyen âge et époque contemporaine, Paris, Éditions Bouchène, 2008, pp. 165–196; Geoffroy, É., Le soufisme en Égypte et en Syrie, pp. 111–112; Terzioğlu, D., ‘Sunna-Minded Sufi Preachers in Service of the Ottoman State: The Nasīhatnāme of Hasan Addressed to Murad IV’, Archivum Ottomanicum 27 (2010). 5 Mayeur-Jaouen, C., ‘La vision du monde par une hagiographie an-historique de l’Égypte ottomane’, in Chih, R., Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (ed.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, pp. 129–150. 6 Amri, N., Les saints en islam, les messagers de l’espérance. Sainteté et eschatologie au Maghreb aux XIVe et XVe siècles, Paris, éditions du Cerf, 2008. 7 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt fī ba‘d mā li-shaykhinā min al-manāqib wa-l-karāmāt, Cairo, Dār al-kutub, tārīkh 1008, 69 un-numbered fos; al-Azhar Library, Saqqā 3666. 8 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 261. 9 Kitāb manāqib wa karāmāt al-shaykh Muhammad al-Hifnī, Cairo, Matab‘a Sidq alkhayriyya, 1374h. 10 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 7. 11 Abul-‘Amayem, M., ‘Mintaqa masjid Jāhīn al-Khalwatī: mintaqa tasawwuf qadīma’, in McGregor, R. and Sabra, A. (eds.), Le développement du soufisme en Égypte à l‘époque mamelouke, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2006, pp. 1–31. 12 On Shāhīn al-Khalwatī see the first chapter, Circulation and networks: The role of Cairo and al-Azhar. 13 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, pp. 7–8. 14 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 295. 15 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 51. 16 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p.  60; Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 300. 17 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 60. 18 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p.  60; Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 301.

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  143 19 Qādī ‘Iyād himself draws on Tirmidhī’s book, Kitāb shamā’il al-muhammadiyya. Cf. Vimercati Sanseverino, R., ‘Les “droits du Prophète”: la sacralité de la personne prophétique dans l’islam d’après le Kitāb al-Shifā du Qādī ‘Iyād (m. 544/1149)’, Carnets de l’IREMAM, iremam.hypotheses.org/404. 20 Schimmel, A. M., And Muhammad, p. 33. 21 Schimmel, A. M., And Muhammad, pp. 36–39. 22 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 294. 23 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 74. 24 Chodkiewicz, M., Le Sceau des saints, p. 77. 25 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 37. 26 Ministry of Awqāf, waqfiyya ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhudā al-muta‘alliqa bi-l-mujāwirīn al-sa‘ā’īda, 12 rabī’ I, 1175h, document 381. 27 Mayeur-Jaouen, C., ‘L’intercession des saints en islam égyptien: autour du Sayyid al-Badawī’, Annales Islamologiques 25 (1991), pp. 363–388. 28 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 35. 29 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 33. 30 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 35. 31 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 36. 32 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 39. 33 Mayeur-Jaouen, C., Al-Sayyid al-Badawī. Un grand saint de l’islam égyptien, Cairo, Institut français d’archéologie orientale, p. 305. 34 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 40. 35 Shamma al-Fuwwī al-Makkī, Hasan b. ‘Alī, Muntahā al-‘ibārāt, p. 45. 36 Leiser, G., ‘The Madrasa and the Islamization of the Middle East, the Case of Egypt’, JARCE XXII (1985), 29–47; ‘Notes on the Madrasa in Medieval Islamic Society’, The Muslim World, LXXVI (1986), pp. 18–19; Berkey, J., The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. 37 In the articles of A. Lutfī al-Sayyid Marsot, as well as in McGregor, R., ‘Is This the End of Medieval Sufism? Strategies of Transversal Affiliation in Ottoman Egypt’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, pp. 83–100; Sabra, A., ‘Household Sufism in Sixteenth Century Egypt. The Rise of al-Sāda alBakriyya’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, pp. 101–128. 38 Behrens-Abouseif, D., Egypt’s Adjustment to Ottoman Rule: Institutions, Waqf and Architecture (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries), Leiden, Brill, 1994, p. 152. 39 McGregor, R., ‘Is This the End of Medieval Sufism?’, p. 88; Reichmuth, S., The World of Murtadā al-Zabīdī, p. 55. 40 In a text attributed to Shaykh al-Mahdī, translated by his friend and contemporary Jean-Jérôme Marcel (the Arabic version has never been found) as Contes du Cheykh el-Mohdy, a completely different lifestory is recounted for the Shaykh. Here his father, Abifanyūs Fadlallāh, was a financial administrator in the house of Sulaymān al-Kāshif. This latter noticed the young man and befriended him, wanting to ‘include him among the Mamluks attached to his house.’ However, he sent him to al-Azhar instead, for the boy preferred studying to arms. In this version the fortune of Shaykh al-Mahdī was linked to the increasing power of the house of ‘Alī bey al-Kabīr, to which Sulaymān al-Kashīf belonged: it was ‘Alī bey who got al-Mahdī into the Diwān. Jean-Jérôme Marcel, Contes du Cheykh el-Mohdy, translated into French from Arabic according to the original manuscript, Paris, 1835, 3 volumes. The ‘Notice biographique du Cheykh el-Mohdy’ is in the second volume, pp. 7–122; al-Ahnaf, M., ‘Cheikh al-Mahdī (1737– 1815), uléma, médiateur et businessman’, Égypte-monde arabe 1 (1999), pp. 115–150. 41 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, IV, 233–237. 42 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 352. 43 Gril, D., ‘La Voie’, in Popovic, A. and Veinstein, G. (eds.), Les voies d’Allāh, p. 92.

144  Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints 44 Brown, P., Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, p. 85. 45 Hathaway, J., The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt, op. cit. 46 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 290; ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak, Al-Khitat al-tawfīqiyya, X, pp. 168–170. 47 ‘Abd al-Latīf, L., Al-Sa‘īd fī ‘ahd shaykh al-‘arab Hummām, Cairo, al-Hay’at al-misriyya al-‘āmma li-l-kitāb, 1987, p. 10. 48 ‘Abd al-Latīf, L., Al-Sa‘īd fī ‘ahd shaykh al-‘arab Hummām, pp. 109–110. 49 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 286. 50 Crecelius, D., ‘Non-ideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization’, Keddie, N. R. (ed.), Scholars, Saints, and Sufis, pp. 167–209. 51 Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, A., ‘The Political and Economic Functions of the “Ulamā” in the 18th Century’, pp. 130–154. 52 Raymond, A., Grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane, p. 82. 53 Zeghal, M., Gardiens de l’Islam. Les oulémas d’al-Azhar dans l’Égypte contemporaine, Paris, Presses de sciences Po, 1996, p. 67. 54 İnalcık, Halil, ‘Dervish and Sultan: An Analysis of the Otman Baba Vilāyetnāmesi’, in The Middle East and the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire: Essays on Economy and Society, Bloomington, Indiana University Turkish studies, 1993, pp. 19–36. 55 Al-Jabartī, ‘Abd al-Rahmān, Ajā’ib al-āthār fī-l-tarājim wa-l-akhbār, I, 204. 56 Raymond, A., ‘Quartiers et mouvements populaires au Caire au XVIIIe siècle’, in Holt, P. (ed.), Political and social change in modern Egypt, London, Oxford University Press, 1968, pp.  104–116; Chih, R., ‘Autorité religieuse et rôle public d’un ouléma d’al-Azhar au XVIIIe siècle: vie et carrière du cheikh Ahmad al-Dardīr (1715–1786)’, in Clayer, N., Papas, A. and Fliche, B. (eds.), L’autorité religieuse et ses limites en terres d’islam, Leiden, Brill, 2013, pp. 33–54. 57 Mehmed Efendī Birgilī, Al-tarīqa al-muhammadiyya wa-l-sīra al-nabawiyya alahmadiyya, Cairo, [publisher not identified], 1356h/1937. 58 Hagen, G. and Seidensticker, T., ‘Reinhard Schulzes Hypothese einer islamischen Aufklärung’, ZDMG 148, 1 (1998), note 14, p. 95. 59 On the history of the movement cf; Öztürk, N., Islamic Orthodoxy Among the Ottomans in the Seventeenth Century with Special Reference to the Qādī-Zāde Movement, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1981; Zilfi, M., The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulama in the Postclassical Age (1600–1800), Minneapolis, Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988; Çavuşoğlu, S., The Kādīzādeli Movement: An Attempt of şeri’at-minded Reform in the Ottoman Empire, Princeton, Princeton University, 1990; Ambrosio, A. F., ‘Écrire et décrire la confrérie Mevleviyye entre le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, p. 277. 60 Flemming, B., ‘Die Vorwahhabitische Fitna im osmanischen Kairo, 1711’, in Hakki, I. (ed.), Uzunçasili'ya Armagan, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu Publications, 1976, pp. 55–65; Peters, R., ‘The Battered Dervishes of Bab Zuwayla: A Religious Riot in Eighteenth Century Cairo’, in Levtzion, N. and Voll, J. (eds.), Eighteenth Century Revival and Reform in Islam, pp. 93–116. 61 Zilfi, M., The Politics of Piety; Zilfi, M., ‘The Ottoman ulama’, Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 207–225. 62 Cook, M., Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 328. 63 Articles ‘Communauté’, ‘Éxagération’, ‘Foi’, ‘Hypocrites’, in Dictionnaire du Coran, edited by Ali Amir-Moezzi, Mohammad, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2007; Adang, C. ‘Belief and Unbelief’, Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, I, Leiden, Brill, pp. 218–226. 64 Fierro, M., ‘Religious Dissension in al-Andalus: Ways of Exclusion and Inclusion’, Al-Qantara, XXII (2001), pp. 463–487. 65 Peskes, E., ‘The Wahhābiyya and Sufism in the Eighteenth Century’, in De Jong, F. and Radtke, B. (eds.), Islamic Mysticism Contested, pp. 141–161.

Prophetic heritage, authority, and saints  145 66 Riexinger, M., ‘Rendering Muhammad Human Again: The Prophetology of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792)’, Numen 60, 1 (2015), pp. 103–118. 67 Mouline, N., Les Clercs de l’islam: Autorité religieuse et pouvoir politique en Arabie Saoudite (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles), Paris, PUF, 2011. 68 Traboulsi, S., ‘An Early Refutation of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's Reformist Views’, Die Welt des Islams 42, 3 (2002), pp. 373–415. 69 Pagani, S., ‘Défendre le soufisme par des temps difficiles. ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, polémiste anti-puritain’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (eds.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, p. 326. 70 Von Schlegell, B., Sufism in the Ottoman Arab World: Shaykh ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143 /1731), PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1997. 71 Von Schlegell, B., Sufism in the Ottoman Arab World, p. 49. 72 Von Schlegell, B., Sufism in the Ottoman Arab World, p. 78; Pagani, S., ‘Défendre le soufisme par des temps difficiles’, p. 310. 73 Von Schlegell, B., Sufism in the Ottoman Arab World, p. 102. 74 Gril, D., ‘Sources manuscrites de l’histoire du soufīsme à Dār al-Kutub’, p. 104. 75 Chih, R., ‘Un soufi réformiste, le shaykh Muhammad Hasanayn Makhlūf (1861– 1936)’, REMMM 95–98 (2002), p. 189. 76 Meshal, R., ‘Antagonistic Sharī’a-s and the Construction of Orthodoxy’, Journal of Islamic Studies 21, 2 (2010), pp. 133–212. 77 De Jong, F., Turuq and Turuq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Historical Study in Organizational Dimensions of Islamic Mysticism, Leiden, Brill, 1978.

Conclusion

This study does not aim to present all of pre-modern Egyptian Sufism, for such a synthesis would hardly be possible given the current state of research on the subject. However, we hope to have succeeded in demonstrating, through the Khalwatiyya, the truth of our initial postulation: a Sufi world existed, influenced by diverse spiritual traditions that spread across the country thanks to the new circulations of men and increasing economic and cultural exchanges within the framework of the great Muslim empires. Egyptian Sufis were subject to many influences, but their ideas also spread outward from Cairo, the intellectual, spiritual and commercial crossroads between the Muslim east and west, and influenced Muslims elsewhere. In Egypt, but equally in Medina, Mecca or Istanbul, the chronicles and accounts of travellers describe the milieux of Sufi scholars who were in contact with one another: despite geographical distances and differences in ethnicity, country of origin or school of Islamic jurisprudence, these men engaged in debates, discussions and scholarly exchanges. They often knew one another even before having met because they had read (and written) the texts that were circulating in ever-increasing numbers in Cairo. There are important issues on which this book has not touched; they would require the author to be qualified in all domains of Islamic sciences, or else they merit entire works to themselves, particularly the prophetic tradition (hadīth), Islamic law (fiqh) and theology (tawhīd). The ties between Sufism and hadīth, which were already close in early Islam and were renewed in the fifteenth century, were not, as proponents of neosufism have believed, a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, an overall study of this subject is necessary in order to discover whether this tendency was indeed stronger during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In biographies of Egyptian scholars of the period one can observe that the teaching of the Sahīh, the great collection of hadīth by Bukhārī, was predominant; this is confirmed by the registers of rizqa (waqf lands), which, as early as the fifteenth century, show a succession of foundations supporting readers of the traditions of Bukhārī. This enthusiasm for hadīth should certainly be examined in the light of the new expansion of a Sufism that put veneration for the Prophet at the heart of its spirituality and contributed by its writings and practices to the implantation of prophetic piety across society.

Conclusion  147 The boundaries between fiqh and hadīth are fluid, since jurisprudence originated from the hadīth. The Egyptian Sufi jurist Ibn Hajar al-Haythamī, a disciple of Suyūtī, went even further than his master in the use of Sufism in legal judgements (fatwa)1; in the same way as did Sha‘rānī, who, at the beginning of the Ottoman period, demonstrated originality in this field with his theory, developed within the framework of Sufism, of the equality of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Let us recall that Sha‘rānī had attacked the very concept of taqlīd (imitation), as well as questioning the infallibility of the four founding authorities of jurisprudence when he insisted on the plurality of legal opinion and the necessity of being open to differences. Sufis, many from the Maghreb, would take up this viewpoint again at the beginning of the eighteenth century.2 The vitality of the ancient science of dogmatic theology (tawhīd) in the Ottoman era must also be linked to that of Sufism. In his study of ‘aqīda (creed – a branch of Islamic studies describing the tenets of faith in Islam) that were taught at al-Azhar during the eighteenth century and at the start of the nineteenth, Jacques Jomier has observed that many of the authors of glosses on creeds were Sufis to whom miracles had been attributed. At the end of these glosses, one may find advice on spiritual life, which is a ‘proof of the greater influence of Sufism in Cairo during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’3 This influence did not decrease in the nineteenth century. Sufism also impregnated Quranic exegesis, since it was at this period that Ismā‘īl Haqqī (d. 1725) composed his great mystical tafsīr, the Rūh al-Bayān (the Spirit of Elucidation). Sufis say that their science encompasses all the other sciences of Islam – it is clear that this is not a separate science, and that it must be studied together with the other sciences of Islam in order that its impact on society may fully be measured. As for the place of Sufism in poetry, religious tales, praise-songs (madīh) to God, the Prophet and the saints, the Mawlidiyyāt (poems celebrating the birth of the Prophet that were recited during the Mawlid festivities), and everything else that formed the oral culture of the period, which travellers’ accounts confirmed was flourishing, all this vast terrain mostly remains to be explored. Finally, as far as the history of Sufism, its continuity and its evolution, is concerned, the present study has aimed to provide a new demonstration, centred on Egypt, that the concept of neosufism must be dispensed with, that the Ottoman period in no way constituted a time of decline for religious culture, and nor was it the beginning of a normative and fundamentalist Islam that is said to have swept the Muslim world in the nineteenth century. The Sufis of whom this work speaks were scholarly men attached to mosques; this did not prevent them from nourishing, through an entire literature of devotion to the Prophet and to the saints, a popular Sufi culture that was often also transmitted orally. Therefore, we can no longer speak of a two-tier model here either, in which scholarly Sufism is divided from popular and brotherhood Sufism. Although Sufism in Egypt during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not break with its medieval roots, some shifts, because of changing contexts, are nevertheless observable, primarily in the way masters of the expanding Sufi paths took care to adapt their teachings to their greater numbers of followers while

148  Conclusion still preserving the heritage of the past. Sufis of this period saw their mission as one of transmission and education; this is the reason for the huge increase in the number of Sufi handbooks aimed at novices, in which initiatic progression and the proper behaviour expected within society were conveyed and inextricably linked together. Sufism is a science but it is also, and perhaps above all, a way of life, an ethical comportment whose rules (ādāb and ūsūl), based on the Prophet’s Sunna, should, in the eyes of Sufis, be followed by all Muslims. The study of Sufi handbooks and the hagiographies of the founders of brotherhoods allows us to understand the daily lives that Sufis, with their masters and companions, lived to the rhythm of dhikr sessions and visits to the tombs of saints (ziyārāt). This period also saw the birth of many Sufi masters with powerful personalities, in the image of Mustafā al-Bakrī and his disciple, Muhammad al-Hifnī, who contributed to the remodelling and renewal of the Khalwatiyya, which then became even more successful in the nineteenth century. An understanding of Sufism in the long nineteenth century is in fact impossible without knowledge of what had happened in the preceding periods. Far from having expelled Sufism, the industrialisation and modernisation of Egypt and the introduction of printing actually provided it with a new impetus, because it was essentially the collections of prayers on the Prophet, stories of his birth and vocation (mawlid), adab handbooks, and lives of the saints, which had already been circulating in large numbers in manuscript form during the eighteenth century, that were being produced by printing presses in the Arab world’s most important centre for publishing: Cairo (and also in Fez, Bombay and other cities). These printing houses were responding to a demand from readers who loved this devotional literature. It was not until well into the twentieth century, when various fundamentalist religious associations such as the Jam’iyya shar’iyya, the Ansār al-Sunna and the Muslim Brotherhood were created, that a genuine power capable of contesting and shaking the foundations of Sufism and Sufis in Egypt emerged.

Notes 1 Geoffroy, É., ‘Le soufisme au verdict de la fatwā, selon les Fatāwā hadīthiyya d’Ibn Hajar al-Haytamī’, in Chih, R. and Mayeur-Jaouen, C. (ed.), Le soufisme à l’époque ottomane, pp. 118–128. 2 Winter, M., Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt, p. 236. 3 Jomier, J., ‘Un aspect de l’activité d’al-Azhar du XVIIe aux débuts du XIXe siècle: les ‘aqā’id ou professions de foi’, p. 251.

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Index

‘Abd Allāh al-Ghazwānī 79, 89 ‘Abd Allāh al-Idkāwī 26, 130 ‘Abd Allāh al-Shubrāwī 26, 121, 130 ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Dabbāgh 89 ‘Abd al-Haqq al-Dihlawī 85 ‘Abd al-Jawād al-Ansārī 42 – 43 ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī 93 ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Zayyāt 123, 132 ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Khayyāt 27, 42 – 43 ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-‘Aydarūs 19, 23 – 25, 32, 69, 86, 91 ‘Abd al-Rahmān Katkhudā 25, 31, 36, 122 ‘Abd al-Rahmān b. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Khayyāt 42 ‘Abd al-Rahīm al-Qinā’ī (patron saint of Qinā) 20 ‘Abd al-Salām b. Mashīsh 20, 44, 77 ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Tāzī 22 Abū l-‘Abbās al-Mursī 20, 25 Abū ‘Amra (patron saint of Jirjā) 20, 43 Abū Bakr (companion and successor of the Prophet) 121 Abū-l-Hajjāj al-Uqsūrī (patron saint of Luxor) 20 Abū Madyān 20 Aceh (Sultanate) 24 adab, ādāb (proper behaviour, good manners) 52 – 53, 58 – 60, 63 – 69, 71, 73, 116, 120, 148 affiliation, multiple 12, 25, 28 Africa 19, 20, 22, 28, 31, 36, 53, 80, 83, 92, 95, 100, 102 ‘ahd (pact) 28, 130 – 131 Ahl al-bayt (family of the Prophet) 19, 23, 25, 138 ahl al-tahqīq/ahl al-qawm (the people of spiritual realisation) 57, 64

Ahmad Abū-l-Imdād al-Sadāt 128 Ahmad al-Dardīr 25, 30, 35, 37 – 39, 44, 52 – 53, 58, 68, 96 – 97, 99 – 102, 114, 131, 134 Ahmad Ibn Idrīs 88, 92, 95 Ahmad al-Malāwī 38 Ahmad b. Nāsir 21, 23 Ahmad al- Qastallānī 119 Ahmad al-Qushshāshī 90 – 91, 94, 96 Ahmad al-Sāwī 25, 38, 70 – 71, 94 Ahmad al-Shādhilī 22, 115 – 116 Ahmad al-Shinnāwī 90 Ahmad al-Saqallī 22, 35 Ahmad al-Zawāwī 89, 91, 93 Ahmadiyya (Sufi path) 11, 19, 32, 34, 44, 60, 112, 139 akhlāq (ethics) 57 – 58, 68, 111 Al-Azmeh, A. 84 Aleppo 19, 30 – 31, 52, 54 Alexandria 4, 17, 19 – 20, 24 Algeria 8, 20, 22, 83 – 84, 92, 95 ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Hāfiz 52 ‘Alī bey (amir of Jirjā) 40 – 42, 99 ‘Alī bey al-Kabīr 18, 25, 110 – 111, 126, 133 – 134 ‘Alī Pasha Mubārak 37, 39 – 40 ‘Alī Qarābāsh; Qarābāshiyya (Sufi path) 30 – 31, 89 ‘Alī al-Sa‘īdī 27, 37 – 38 allegiance 28, 32, 60 – 61, 115 – 116, 125, 127 – 131 ‘āmma (common people, opposed to the spiritual elite, khassa) 96, 111, 133 Anatolia 9, 12, 18, 26, 28 – 30, 131, 134 Andalusia 7, 20, 72, 118 – 119, 137 Arabia 8, 20, 35, 36, 95, 136 ashrāf (the descendants of the Prophet) 6, 21 – 22, 31, 128, 131

Index  167 Asia 2, 30; central Asia 8, 24 – 25, 30, 55, 90, 99, 128; southeast Asia 23, 84, 99 Asmā’ Allāh al-Husnā (God’s beautiful Names) 70 asrār see secrets Asyūt 31, 37, 40, 44 Aswan 37, 39, 95 authorisation (idhn) 22, 35, 54, 72 awrād, ahzāb see litanies ‘Aydhāb 20 Al-‘Ayyāshī (Abū Sālim ‘Abd Allāh) 21, 54, 79, 91, 99 Azerbaijan 28 – 29, 35 Al-Azhar 19 – 22, 25, 31 – 32, 36 – 40, 43 – 44, 52 – 54, 60, 68, 89, 91, 113 – 115, 118, 127 – 134, 139 – 140; Al-Azhar colleges 8, 19, 21, 31 – 32, 35 – 37, 52, 54, 121, 131; Shaykh of al-Azhar 1, 7, 25 – 26, 34, 86, 101, 110, 121 – 122, 128 – 132 Azra, A. 84 Bāb Zuwayla 29, 136 Badawī (Ahmad al-) (patron saint of Tantā) 2, 5, 11, 19, 24 – 25, 34, 44, 60, 93, 97, 112 – 113, 121 – 127 Balkans 30 Banī ‘Adī 31, 35, 37 – 38 baraka (divine influx) 2, 7, 11, 52, 64, 96, 99, 101, 111, 125, 129, 132 barzakh (the intermediate world) 113, 124 Barzanjī (Ja‘far al-) 9, 77, 96, 100 – 103 bay‘a (oath of allegiance) 60 bayt see household Bedouins 6, 117, 125 bid‘a see religious innovation Bilād al-Shām 134 biographical dictionaries 10 – 11, 34, 132 biography of the Prophet (Sīra) 101, 113, 135, 138 Birgilī (or Birgivī) (Mehmed Efendī) 134 – 136 Birkat al-Hajj 29, 114 birth of the Prophet see mawlid Brown, P. 111, 131 Burhāmiyya (Sufi path) 11, 19, 112 – 113 Būsīrī (Muhammad al-) 100, 114, 119, 139 Caucasus 29, 30 celestial ascension of the Prophet (mi‘rāj) 43, 90, 96, 102 – 104, 138 Chelebi Khalīfa 29

Chodkiewicz, M. 111, 130 Christian 6, 8, 20, 78, 83, 88, 104, 115, 118, 125, 129, 131 client, clientelism, 17, 32, 131 commentary (sharh) 9, 26, 30, 38, 70, 71, 88, 90, 97, 100, 102, 113 – 115, 119 commerce 3, 8, 18, 20 companionship (suhba) 51, 53, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65 – 66, 148 companions of the Prophet (ashāb) 51, 63, 66 conquest 29 – 30, 78, 103, 134, 138; of Egypt 3, 29, 132 Cook, M. 136, 140 Coppolani, X. 83, 95 Cornell, V. 89 Dalā’il al-Khayrāt 9, 77 – 78, 86, 89, 119 Damascus 89, 139 – 140 Damietta 4, 17, 26 dance (raqs) 135 Delhi 91 Delta (Nile) 2, 5, 11, 18, 24 – 25, 27, 31, 34 – 35, 112 – 114 Demirdashiyya (Sufi path) 54 Depont, O. 83, 95 dhikr (remembrance of God) 22, 25, 27, 52 – 53, 56, 58 – 59, 91, 94 – 95, 97, 115 – 116, 136, 140; ādāb al-dhikr 68 – 72, 77; majlis al-dhikr (dhikr session) 32, 35, 39, 54, 59, 65, 67 – 68, 95, 122, 126 – 127; transmission of the dhikr (talqīn al-dhikr) 28, 54, 61 – 62 Disūqī (Ibrāhīm al-) (patron saint of Disūq) 2, 11, 19, 24, 112 – 113 dīwān (council) 129, 133 Farshūt (in Upper-Egypt) 27, 39 fath see spiritual opening Fez 19, 20, 22, 52, 94, 148 fitna (sedition) 136 fuqahā’ (jurists) 89 fuqarā’ (the poor in relation to God, the Sufis) 72, 126 gawth (succour, recourse) 6, 110 ghayb (unseen) 124 Ghazālī (Abū Hāmid Muhammad al-) 9, 26, 66, 68, 81, 121 Gibb, H. A. 7, 82 – 83 gloss (hāshiya) 9 Gohaider, A. 21, 23 Gran, P. 84 – 85

168  Index guide (murshid) 56 – 57, 59 – 60, 65 – 66, 82 Gujarat 23 – 24, 90, 103 hadīth (prophetic tradition) 22, 38, 53 – 56, 58, 72, 78, 80, 84, 86, 89 hagiography (manāqib) 112 hajj see pilgrimage halqa (study circle) 21, 123 Hamidoune, A. 96, 99 Hanafi 36, 42, 54, 140 haqīqa muhammadiyya see Muhammadan reality Hasan al-‘Ujaymī 79, 89, 91 hāshiya see gloss Hawwāra 18, 24, 27, 39, 41, 132 – 133 heart (qalb) 55, 56, 58 Heyworth-Dunne, J. 36 himma see spiritual energy Holy Cities 8, 12, 20, 23 – 24, 31, 78, 91 household 17 – 18, 25, 41, 128 – 132 Hummām (Shaykh al-‘Arab) 2, 18, 27, 39, 41, 132 – 133 hurma see sacred, sacredness Husayn 21, 25, 31, 114, 117, 124 Ibn ‘Arabī 7 – 8, 10, 23, 28, 30, 73, 77, 80 – 82, 84 – 88, 90, 92, 94, 97, 103, 113, 121, 136 – 137, 140 Ibn ‘Atā’ Allāh 21, 58 Ibn Hajar al-Haytamī 147 Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalānī 119 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīyya 81 Ibn Sūda (Qadi of Fez) 22 Ibn Taymiyya 78, 81, 84, 137 – 138, 140 Ibn Tulūn (mosque) 21, 31 Ibrāhīm al-Gulshānī (Gulsheni) 29 idhn see authorisation ijāza (diploma, licence) 22, 25, 27, 32 – 33, 38 – 39, 61, 96 ijtihād (independent reasoning) 80 ‘ilm 57 – 59, 71; see also science iltizām (tax farms) 18, 39, 41, 112, 126 – 127, 131 – 132 imitation of the Prophet (ittibā‘al-nabī) 12, 93 India 8 – 10, 19, 23 – 26, 35, 79 – 92, 103, 136 Indonesia 36, 84, 91, 99 – 100, 102 initiation 32, 38, 61, 64, 72, 114 – 115; initiatic chain (silsila) 51; initiatic investiture (khirqa) 27 – 28, 32, 90 – 91, 117 inspiration 68, 88 intercession, intercessor (shāfi‘) 96, 104, 122, 130

‘Īsā Aghā (amir) 41 ishāra see signs isnad (chain of transmitters) 22, 27 – 28, 51, 79 Istanbul 17 – 18, 78, 135 – 136, 139 – 140, 146 janissaries 31, 42, 131, 136 Jerusalem 32, 61, 69, 103, 115 – 118, 129 Jīlānī (‘Abd al-Qādir al-) 11, 19, 24, 97, 112, 139 jirāya (food ration) 36, 37, 122 Jirjā (in Upper Egypt) 4, 14, 18, 20, 27, 31, 37 – 44, 99, 102 Kafr Khamīs (in the Delta) 27 karāmāt see miracles kashf (divine unveiling) 124 Khadīr (Khidr) 70, 93 khalīfa (lieutenant, successor) 2, 31 – 32, 63, 91, 118, 135 khalwa see spiritual retreat Khalwatiyya Sha‘bāniyya (Sufi path) 31 khawāriq al-‘ādāt (extraordinary events) 124 khidma see service Kurdistan 35, 60, 90 Laoust, H. 83 latīfa (pl. latā’if) see subtle organs Levtzion, N. 35, 84 – 85 light (primordial light, light of Muhammad) 73, 77, 86 – 87, 98 – 103, 113, 117, 138 litanies 29, 52, 69, 70 – 71, 95, 97, 113, 127 MacDougall, J. 84 madhhab see school of legal thought madrasa (school or college for higher Islamic education) 31, 36, 40 – 41, 44, 51, 54, 127 – 128, 136, 140 – 141; mudarris (teacher, professor) 37 Maghreb 2, 12, 20, 23 – 24, 26, 36, 40, 44, 80, 89, 91, 111 – 112, 122, 128, 147; Maghrebi 19 – 23, 31, 36 – 37, 40, 72 Mahmūd al-Kurdī 1, 22, 31, 35, 60 – 61, 86, 92, 95 malāmatī 30, 91, 115 Malik, J. 84 – 85 Mālik (imām) 38, 115; Maliki 21 – 22, 37 – 38, 43, 44, 54, 131; Malikism 11 Mamluk 4 – 5, 8, 11, 17 – 21, 29, 31, 36, 39, 40 – 43, 51, 128, 131, 138

Index  169 manāqib see hagiography manuscript 9, 23, 26, 73, 82, 97, 114 – 115, 148 maqām see spiritual station, stage Maqrīzī (Taqī al-dīn Ahmad al-) 21, 36 Mawlawiyya (Mevleviyye) 135 mawlid (birthday of the Prophet or of a saint) 2, 20, 44, 78, 123, 126 – 128, 141; Mawlidiyyāt (poems celebrating the birth of the Prophet) 147; Mawlid narratives 44, 77, 96, 99, 100 – 102, 104, 114, 138 Mecca 8, 17, 20 – 24, 30, 32, 36, 38, 61, 84 – 85, 90, 92, 99, 103, 114, 116, 118 – 119, 122, 139, 146 Medina 8, 23 – 24, 36, 79, 84 – 85, 90 – 92, 94, 99 – 100, 122 – 123, 137, 146 Mehmed IV 135 Meier, F. 96 merchants 3, 17, 20, 26, 36 – 37, 129 Minyā (Upper Egypt) 39 miracles (karāmāt) 113, 123 – 124 mi‘rāj 43, 90, 96, 102 – 104, 138; see also celestial ascension of the Prophet Mirghāniyya/Khatmiyya (Sufi path) 80, 136 Moghol 80 Morocco 19, 21 – 23, 26, 35, 38, 78 – 79, 90, 103, 126 Moses 70 Muhammad b. ‘Abdallāh (Sultan of Morocco) 26 Muhammad ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Sammān 31, 92, 94 – 95 Muhammad ‘Abd al-Rahmān al-Azharī 22, 92, 95 Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salām b. Nāsir 21, 32 Muhammad Abū-l-Anwār al-Sādāt 128 Muhammad Abū Dhahab 18, 26, 31, 41 Muhammad ‘Alī (Pasha of Egypt) 3, 140 Muhammad al-Amīr 22, 25, 44 Muhammad al-Demirdāsh 29 – 30, 133 Muhammad Gawth 90, 103 Muhammad al-Ghaythī 96, 102 Muhammad Iqbāl 82 Muhammad al-Jazūlī 9, 77, 79, 89, 99 Muhammad Kamāl al-dīn al-Harīrī 27 Muhammad al-Mahdī 118, 129, 132 Muhammad Majdhūb 53 Muhammad al-Manzalāwī 91, 93 Muhammad al-Mirghānī 80, 85 Muhammad Mujāhid 32, 60 Muhammad al-Munīr al-Samanūdī 22, 52

Muhammad al-Sanūsī 27 – 28, 53, 69, 79, 80, 85, 91 Muhammad b. Tayyib al-Qādirī 22, 72 muhammadan reality (haqīqa muhammadiyya) 71, 73, 77, 86, 90, 113 mujaddid see renewer mujāwirīn (students in Mecca, at al-Azhar) 24, 36 munshid see Sufi singer Muqattam 29, 115 Murād III 31, 63 Murād IV 135 murīd (aspirant, novice) 62, 66 murshid see guide mystical union 53, 55, 71, 92 Nābulusī (‘Abd al-Ghanī al-) 85, 87, 139 – 140 nafs (lower soul, the ego) 29, 54 – 59 naqīb (pl. nuqabā’) 36, 66, 68, 71; naqīb al-ashrāf (leader, representative of the ashrāf) 128 Naqshbandiyya (Sufi path) 25, 32, 80, 84, 86 – 87 Nāsiriyya (Sufi path) 21 – 22, 32 neosufism 1, 7, 12, 79 – 85, 146 – 147 Nubuwwa see prophecy Nūr al-dīn Rānīrī 24 Nūr al-dīn al-Shūnī 89, 91, 93 nūr muhammadī see light O’Fahey, R. S. 84 – 85 orientalism, orientalist 5, 7, 81 – 85 Palestine 26, 90 panegyric 26, 72, 77, 100, 103 Pasha of Egypt 1, 17, 141 Persian 9, 28, 30, 32, 90, 100 pilgrimage (hajj) 8, 17, 90, 92, 99, 114, 116, 122; pilgrimage narratives (rihla hijāziyya) 21; saints pilgrimage 5, 88, 126 poet, poetry 25 – 26, 30, 71 – 72, 100 – 101, 116, 119 – 120, 129, 135, 139, 147 pole (qutb, gawth) 1 – 2, 86, 95, 110, 121, 127; the four poles (al-aqtāb ‘al-arba‘a) 19, 95, 112 prayer on the Prophet (tasliya, salāt ‘ala al-nabī) 70 – 71, 79, 89, 92, 96 – 97, 99 printing 23, 52, 148 prophecy (nubuwwa) 111, 124; characteristics of the Prophet (khasā’is

170  Index al-nubuwwa) 77, 138; proofs of the prophecy (Dalā’il al-nubuwwa) 77, 100 protection 6 – 7, 20, 26, 29, 70, 111, 119, 127, 131 – 132; protégé 17, 131 Qādī ‘Iyād 118 – 119 Qādiriyya (Sufi path) 11, 19, 25, 54, 112, 138 Qādīzāde Mehmed 135 Qādīzādelī 135 – 136, 139 – 140 Qāyt Bāy 21, 29, 128 Qāzdughlī (bayt) 18, 131, 133; Ibrāhīm Katkhudā Qāzdughlī 25, 31, 36, 42; ‘Uthmān Qāzdughlī 42 Qinā 20, 35, 37 Quran exegesis 10, 44, 137, 147 Quranic readers 54 Qushayrī (Abū-l-Qāsim al-) 51, 68 qutb see pole Radtke, B. 51, 85, 92 Raghīb Pasha 1 – 2 Rahman, F. 7, 12, 79, 82, 86 Rahmāniyya (Sufi path) 22, 95 raqs see dance reform 7, 80; reformist 3, 5, 7, 81 – 82, 84 – 86, 95, 135 – 136 registers (sijillāt, dafātir) 37, 40, 102, 146 Reichmuth, S. 9, 26 – 27, 35 religious innovation (bid‘a) 86, 135 – 136 renewal (tajdīd), renewer (mujaddid) 86 – 87 revelation 87, 91 – 92, 104, 114 – 116, 124, 138 Ridwān al-Jalfī 25 Rifā‘iyya (Sufi path) 11, 112 riwāq see al-Azhar colleges Rosetta/Rashīd 17, 26, 31, 35 rūh (spirit, soul) 55 – 56, 58, 92; rūhāniyya (spiritual entity) 91, 94 sabīl-maktab (public fountain/elementary Quran school) 41 – 42 sacred, sacredness (hurma) 63, 65 Sādāt al-Wafā’iyya 21, 24, 128, 131 – 132, 141 Safavid 3, 29 Sahīh al-Bukhārī 22, 44, 119, 146 salāt ‘ala al-Nabī see prayer on the Prophet salāwāt (prayers) 70 – 71, 99 salon (majlis) 19, 25, 26, 129 samā‘ (spiritual audition) 22, 72, 135 – 136, 139 – 140 Sanūsiyya 53, 80, 83 Seal of the Prophets 86, 94 – 95, 104, 111, 121

school of legal thought (madhhab) 11, 35, 38, 88 Schulze, R. 85 secrets 55 – 57, 61, 97 – 98, 117, 137 sedition (fitna) 136 Selim (Ottoman sultan) 17, 78, 132 – 133 service (khidma) 126, 130 Shādhilī (Abū l-Hasan al-) 19 – 20, 73, 90; Shādhiliyya 4, 11, 19 – 22, 32, 44, 90, 113, 115 shafā‘a, shāfi‘ see intercession, intercessor Shāfi‘ī (imām al-) 21, 128; Shafi‘i 1, 36, 38, 100, 134, 136, 140; Shafi’ism 11 Shāh Ismā‘īl 29 Shāh Walī Allāh 80, 82, 84, 86 – 88, 91 Shāhīn al-Khalwatī 29 – 30, 115 Sha‘rānī (‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-) 5 – 6, 8, 29, 51 – 53, 68, 73, 88 – 91, 136, 147 Shi’i 30 Shrine 11, 19, 21, 23 – 24, 99, 136, 140 Sibghat Allāh 90 – 91 sign (ishāra) 57, 61, 114, 124 silsila see initiatic chain Sirhindī (Ahmad) 80, 82, 85 – 87 soul see nafs spiritual: energy (himma) 59, 64; opening (fath) 89, 103; retreat (khalwa) 30, 55 – 56, 71, 115, 117; stage, station (maqām) 55, 62, 79, 121; states (ahwāl) 55, 57, 114; training (riyāda) 57 – 59; wayfaring (sulūk) 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 64, 93, 103 subtle organs (latā’if) 55 Sudan 26, 80, 91, 100 Suez 17, 125 Sufi singer (munshid) 71, 122, 126 suhba see companionship Suhrawardī (Abū Hafs ‘Umar al-) 23, 51, 66, 90; Suhrawardiyya (Sufi path) 90 Sulamī (‘Abd al-Rahmān al-) 59 sulūk see spiritual wayfaring Suyūtī (Jalāl al-dīn al-) 77, 90, 147 Syria 12, 17 – 18, 30, 35, 44, 54 – 55, 110, 139, 140 ta‘alluq (attachment to the Prophet) 92 tābi‘ (pl. atbā‘, client, protégé) 17, 131 tahqīq (realisation) 57, 59 tajallī, tajalliyyāt (theophany) 55, 58, 90 talisman 99, 119 Tamgroute 21, 23 Tantā 5, 24 – 25, 31, 35, 60, 122, 124, 126 – 127, 139 Tarim 23 – 24 tasliya see prayer on the Prophet

Index  171 Tawīl, T. 5, 7 tekke 11, 29, 42, 135 – 136 theology 10, 37 – 38, 68, 80 – 81, 115, 146 Tijānī (Ahmad al-) 22, 80, 86, 92, 94 – 95; Tijāniyya (Sufi path) 94 travellers 19, 36 – 37, 40, 72, 146 – 147 Triaud, J-L. 83 Trimingham, J. S. 7, 84, 95 Tripolitania 21 Tunisia 20 Turks 5, 20 – 21, 36, 125 ‘Umar Rūshanī 28, 30 unicity of being (wahdat al-wujūd) 25, 30, 61, 81, 86 ‘Uthmān bey (amir of Jirjā) 40 Vānī Mehmed Efendī 135 Voll, J. 24, 35, 84 – 85 Von Grunebaum, G. 82 – 83 Von Schlegell, B. 140

wahdat al-wujūd see unicity of being Wahhabism 35, 135 – 136, 141 Wahhabite 83, 100, 139 Wajīh al-dīn al-‘Alawī al-Gujaratī 90 walāya (proximity to God, sainthood) 73, 86, 103, 111, 127, 130, 132, 140 walī 111, 122, 130; awliyā’ (‘friends of God’, saints) 2, 104, 111 waqf (inalienable foundation) 18, 24, 36 – 37, 40 – 43, 99, 102, 121, 126 – 128, 132, 146 wilāya (province) 12, 41 Yahyā al-Bākūwī 35, 54, 69 Yemen 8, 23 – 24, 26, 35 – 36, 90 Zabīdī (Murtadā al-) 19, 23, 25 – 27, 39 Zakariyyā al-Ansārī 8, 90, 114 zāwiya 39 – 43 ziyāra (pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine) 64, 113, 116, 126, 139, 148