The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173–1325 By Nathan Hofer

Abstract

Both Western and Muslim scholars of Islam have often portrayed Sufism as popular religion. This category, as Nathan Hofer rightly notes, is notoriously difficult to define and has often been imbued with a Romantic sense of legitimacy as the ‘authentic’ religious expression of the people. More recently, social historians of the Middle East and Islamic world have studied Sufism as a way of reconstructing the religious ideas and practices of the vast majority of pre-modern Muslims who had limited access to the written traditions of Islamic scholarship. Where colonial scholars saw an opportunity to exploit popular Sufism against anti-imperialist activist Islam, and where Muslim modernists condemned the ‘innovations’ of the non-educated populace that undermined religious orthodoxy, social historians have gone in search of a subaltern worldview. This understanding of Sufism as popular religion was undermined by Vincent J. Cornell in a now classic history of Sufism in medieval Morocco (Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism, University of Texas Press, 1998). Cornell argued that Moroccan Sufis were the bearers of a cosmopolitan, literate version of Islam. Far from being the representatives of local religious cults, these Sufis spread their version of cosmopolitan Islam in rural Morocco. Recent scholarship, such as Megan H. Reid’s study of Mamluk Damascus (in Law and Piety in Medieval Islam, Cambridge University Press, 2013), has also raised the question of whether it is appropriate to apply the term ‘Sufism’ to a variety of forms of religious expression in the medieval Islamic world. In particular, Reid has shown that there were pietistic movements which did not consider themselves Sufi. Modern scholarship has often assumed that a variety of religious practices such as the cult of the saints are Sufi, simply because Sufis were among those who participated in them.