Narrating the Life of a Man Known as a Sufi: An Anthropological Reflection on Narratives on al-Ḥājj 'Alī al-Darqāwī by His Son al-Mukhtār al-Sūsī and Others

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The theme of our papers, Narrating the Narratives of Sufis, seems to convey some awareness of the issues that anthropologists have faced since the 1980s, through reflecting on the immanent problems of writing ethnographies. In anthropology, the problems have taken shape in the form of questioning the ways of “describing,” not necessarily those of “narrating.” Although these two notions (“describing” and “narrating”) are different, I would like to consider “description” (or describing) and “narratives” (or narrating) as concepts sharing some common traits, in that both imply acts conducted to express something about someone (else). In this sense, problems of how to “describe” the “others” in an ethnography and the theme of our papers, ‘how to make a “narration” about a Sufi’, stand on the same ground. Incidentally, in the long tradition of the Sufi hagiography, many writings on Sufi masters seem to have been compiled by their disciples. At the same time, however, there are some hagiographies written by those who are not disciples, or who are trying to establish some distance from the Sufi tradition. In this essay, I take up the case of al-Mukhtār al-Sūsī (1900–1963), one of the most prominent Moroccan religious scholars of the twentieth century, who is entangled in an ambivalent situation because of his familiarity with Sufism and his deliberate avoidance of it, to explain how he tried to write/narrate the life of a Sufi master as an “other.” His ambivalent positionality is suited for exploring our subject, Narrating the Narratives of Sufis. In the following sections, I begin by outlining how the problems concerning “narratives” are treated in ethnographic writings. Then, I will elucidate the characteristics of the works of al-Mukhtār al-Sūsī on al-Ḥājj ‘Alī. Next, I will explain briefly the general situation of the evaluations of the works of al-Mukhtār al-Sūsī among contemporary Moroccan scholars and others, to deepen our comprehension of the current reception of his writings/narratives in the society. After that, I will shed light on a work that refers to al-Mukhtār al-Sūsī’s writings to elaborate a theoretical model concerning the Sufi master–disciple relationship. I will take up a model by Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi as a case. Hammoudi combined the data on a Sufi shaykh abstracted from the works of al-Mukhtār al-Sūsī, with a theoretical framework on “discipline” advocated by Michel Foucault, to refine his theoretical model on the master–disciple relationship. I will compare his model with the works of al-Mukhtār イスラーム世界研究 第 6巻(2013 年 3 月)4‒20 頁 Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies, 6 (March 2013), pp. 4–20