There is more to Sufism than the mulid and the zikr. In the third instalment of her Ramadan series, Fayza Hassan traces attempts to regulate a very private spiritualism Mawlawi Shiekhs photo: From An Egyptian Panorama, Ed. Nicholas Warner, Zeitouna, 1994 PERFECT FATHERS: My colleague watched ironically as I pored over pictures of mawalid. "Why do you trouble yourself with the Sufis?" he asked curiously. "They are the hangers-on of the sultan, never did an honest day's work in their lives." He is not the only one who sees Sufis as recluses or whirling and howling dervishes who are generally an embarrassment to the image of modernity that befits Egypt. Later, as I related my colleague's comments to professor of calligraphy Ahmed Sultan, who has a vast knowledge of Sufism, he did not show any surprise. "Sufism is often misunderstood by city people whose parents did not belong to a tariqa, which would have infused them with a sense of respect for the Sufis' customs of worship, but popular Sufism has sustained the Egyptian people for centuries," he commented, "giving them a sense of identity, of belonging to a brotherhood and of being under the protection of an approachable leader who kept their faith alive. Let us not forget that in the centuries during which Sufism began to flourish, people in the countryside were cut off from the rulers. They needed an authority that would keep them focused. The Ottomans understood this and sent Sufi sheikhs to the four corners of their empire to preach to the populace. The Sufi sheikh was a perfect emissary. He was near, yet high above ordinary men; he was infinitely superior, yet understanding and forgiving. He was the perfect father to unruly children, accepting them with their shortcomings while helping them to improve their ways. Abuses have been committed, undoubtedly; the popular zikr, for instance, has often been seen as akin to a sort of mass hysteria. On the other hand, many beggars in the olden days pretended to be Sufis to incite the generosity of alms givers. That does not mean that all Sufis behave irrationally or live on charity." Sultan continued: "Furthermore, many people are not aware of the more spiritual, intellectual form of Sufism, purified of indigenous practices such as stupor-inducing zikrs and noisy mawalid, which has attracted, and still attracts, a great number of serious religious thinkers all over the Arab world." Sultan also maintains that there is a great deal of confusion around the vocabulary used when referring to Sufism, which is often conflated erroneously with Islamic mysticism; the same is true of the concept of tariqa, which signifies the path toward God, and only by extension has come to designate a group of Sufis belonging to the same order. "Many Muslim mystics are not Sufis, and many Sufis do not belong to a particular school," he says. "The fact that there are so many new turuq confuses the issue further, since they all preach the same message of love." Insofar as a Sufi order is based on voluntary affiliation, members are free to come and go, belong to several orders at the same time, or, finding a particularly inspiring sheikh, congregate around him and eventually found a new tariqa, says Sultan, who stresses that the charismatic qualities of the sheikh are of the essence in attracting adepts. Among the great thinkers who adhered to Sufism, one should certainly include the great mediaeval voyager Ibn Battuta (b.1303 in Tangier), who walked the line between Sufi mysticism and Sunni orthodoxy with consummate ease. "A paid practitioner of Muslim law, he was also a devotee of several Sufi orders, without apology to either side. Again and again in North Africa, approaching a Sufi hermitage or lodge, he would leave the road... sometimes riding all day to visit some legendary sage or teacher (in One Thousand Roads to Mecca. Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage, ed. Michael Wolfe, Grove Press, 1997). SUFI ORDERS: According to Pierre-Jean Luizard (Le soufisme égyptien contemporain; in Egypte/Monde arabe, CEDEJ, 1990), most of the Sufi turuq as we know them today developed their discrete identities during the second half of the 19th century, springing from the six principal orders that share the world of Sufism. Among the most illustrious are those founded by Al-Aqtab (sing. qutb) Al-Arba'a, the four axes or poles (the term qutb is used by Sufis to designate the overall spiritual master of the age. It is along these "axes" that the grace -- baraka -- of the Prophet is transmitted). They are the Ahmadiya, the Burhamiya, the Rifa'iya and the Qadiriya, which can all be retraced to the Mameluke era. To those, the fast-growing Shadhiliya and the Khalwatiya should be added, as well as the Naqshbandiya -- to a lesser degree. Only the Ahmadiya and Burhamiya can claim Egyptian roots: born in the Delta and originally rural, they developed and spread at an unusual pace, reaching out to the four corners of the country. An attempt at counting Sufi organisations and sub-organisations at the time of Luizard's study yielded 73 official Sufi companionhoods, of which half were founded during the 19th century and approximately 15 during the 20th. They are divided as follows: 19 Khalwatiya; 18 Ahmadiya; 18 Shadhilyia; six Burhamiya, two Qadiriya; two Rifaiya; one Naqshbandiya and one Mirghaniya Qatamiya. The rest are unofficial groups attached more or less loosely to recognised orders. There could be up to 120 Sufi groupings with over six million members all over the country, both in cities and the countryside. Conditions vary, however: some groups have not had a sheikh for a long time, while others have a sheikh, but have discontinued their Sufi activities. Some have a sheikh and Sufi activities but have not been recognised officially. The number of members of such groups can vary from a few hundred to several thousands. "The [Sufi] brotherhoods," writes Luizard, "are by nature subject to fluctuations due to the charismatic character of their leadership. The decline of important old brotherhoods and the emergence of new organisations seems to be a common phenomenon." POLES OF ATTRACTION: In Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians (East West Publications, 1989), E W Lane wrote that he was told that the "welees" (awliya', sing. wali) were "'persons wholly devoted to God, and possessed of extraordinary faith; and according to their degree of faith, endowed with the power of performing miracles.' The most holy of the welees is termed the Kutb; or according to some persons, there are two who have this title; and again, according to others four... the opinion that there are four kutbs, I am told, is a vulgar error, originating from the frequent mention of 'the four kutbs,' by which expression are meant the founders of the most celebrated orders of darweeshes (the Rifa'eeyeh, Kadireeyeh, Ahmeddeeyeh and Barahimeh) each of whom is believed to have been the kutb of his time. I have also generally been told that the opinion of there being two kutbs is a vulgar error, founded upon two names, 'Kutb el-Hakeekah' (or Kutb of Truth) and 'Kutb el-Ghos' (or Kutb of Invocation for help) which properly belong to but one person." According to Lane, the Qutb, who exercises a superintendence over all other awliya', is called Al-Qutb Al-Mutwalli and has under his authority awliya' of different ranks who perform different offices and "are known only to each other and perhaps to the rest of the welees as holding such offices." Lane also added that according to the information he was able to elicit from several persons conversant with Sufi ways, "the Kutb... is often seen, but not known as such; and the same is said of all who hold authority under him. He always has a humble demeanour and mean dress; and mildly reproves those whom he finds acting impiously, particularly such as have a false reputation of sanctity. Though he is unknown to the world, his favourite stations are well known; yet at these places he is seldom visible. It is asserted that he is almost constantly seated at Mekkeh, on the roof of the Kaaba; and though never seen there is always heard at midnight to call twice 'O thou most merciful of those who show mercy!'... But a respectable pilgrim whom I have just questioned upon this matter, has confessed to me that he himself has witnessed that this cry is made by a regular minister of the mosque... Another favourite station of this revered and unknown person is the gate of Cairo called Bab Zuweyleh... [F]rom its being a supposed station of this mysterious being, the Bab Zuweyleh is commonly called 'El-Mutawellee'. One leaf of its great wooden door (which is never shut) turned back against the eastern side of the interior of the gateway, conceals a small vacant space which is said to be the place of the Kutb. Many persons on passing by it recite the Fat'hah; and some give alms to a beggar who is generally seated there, and who is regarded by the vulgar as one of the servants of the Kutb. Number of persons afflicted with headaches drive a nail into the door to charm away the pain..." A FALL FROM POWER: Such practices and beliefs, as well as excesses observed during the mawalid and visits to the saints' tombs, have become associated with Sufism in stereotypical accounts, overshadowing many of its other, purely religious aspects. According to Valerie Hoffman (Sufism, Mystics and Saints in Modern Egypt, University of South Carolina Press, 1995), apart from instances where "genuine spiritual depth is occasionally ascribed to individual Sufi shaykhs, the general verdict on Sufism in modern Egypt, among both Western scholars and many Egyptians, is that its spirituality is decadent and its popularity in decline. There can be no doubt that organised Sufism... has suffered a considerable decline in its political power and social role in the modern period. Sufism," she adds, "was perhaps the most important aspect of Muslim spirituality throughout the medieval period. Through the Sufi Orders, beginning in the twelfth century, Sufism became a mass movement, with its distinct rituals and devotion to spiritual masters (shaykhs) and deceased saints. The Sufi Orders came to dominate the popular religious life. In the cities, each trade guild had its patron saint and sponsoring Sufi Order. Sufi shaykhs were the most effective religious teachers of the masses and also functioned as healers, counselors, and writers of amulets for protection against evil spirits. In rural areas, entire villages and tribes became associated with particular saints and Orders. Many important Muslim politico-religious movements had their roots in Sufi Orders. For example, the Sanusiyya of Libya, a modern reformed Sufi Order, formed the backbone of resistance to French annexation of Chad and the Italian seizure of Libya and provided Libya with its first ruler King Idris, in the post independence period. The Mahdist movement of Sudan in the late 19th century likewise had its roots in one of the dominant Sufi Orders of that country. Sufism undergirded Muslim literature, ethics, popular religion and intellectual life." Even more importantly: "Combining intense personal relationships with ecstatic ritual, the Sufi Orders allowed ordinary, even illiterate Muslims access to a spiritual power and communal experience that granted new meaning to everyday Islamic ritual acts, and embraced participants in a circle of holy love and loyal obedience to a Sufi shaykh. The shaykh counselled his followers on matters both spiritual and mundane and was a carrier of baraka, a spiritual power that he derived from his spiritual teacher, and that teacher from another, and so on and in an unbroken chain that went back to the Prophet Muhammad himself." Agreeing with Hoffman's analysis, Sultan comments that Sufism's decline should be ascribed to increased literacy, the advent of the radio, television and the Internet, rather than to any governmental intervention. People in the countryside are no longer isolated and helpless. They have access to schools and universities, clinics that provide medical care, and advice on spiritual and worldly matters via radio and television. The young generation is too busy acquainting itself with the Internet to have time for mawalid. They would rather go to the movies or the mall. The modern age has no place for popular Sufism as it used to be practiced, except maybe as an exotic phenomenon. "Look at the Tannura performers," he exclaims. "They certainly do not belong to the Mawlawiya order, and may not even be Sufis, but they are a smashing tourist attraction." ATTEMPTS AT REFORM: Gamaleddin Al-Afghani was by no means the first to express reformist thoughts in the history of Islam. Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328) and Mohamed Ibn Abdel-Wahab (d. 1791) had long before him felt the urge to restore Islam to its original vigour and purity. "Al-Afghani was perhaps the first and best known specifically reformist writer in the modern history of Egypt," writes Julian Johansen in Sufism and Islamic Reform in Egypt (Oxford, 1997). His ideas also remained the subject of heated controversy well into the 20th century. His importance in the present context is related to his great influence on the thought of Sheikh Mohamed Abduh (b.1840), his best-known disciple. An earlier, very important influence that shaped Abduh's religious beliefs was that of his uncle, the Shadhli Sheikh Darwish, who kindled his interest in Sufism, it is said, by giving him a book of essays by the Moroccan Sufi Mohamed Al-Madani. According to Johansen, "[h]is acknowledged debt to the guidance of Darwish and Al-Afghani is demonstrated by his life-long, albeit covert, interest in esoterism, while his early dissatisfaction with Al-Azhar [born while he was a student] provided him with the motivation to bring about its curricular reform in 1895 and 1896." Abduh, who became sheikh of Al-Azhar in later life, was always cautious about making his mystic inclinations public, according to Johansen. His first work, Risalat Al-Waridat (Mystical Intuitions) was said to be inspired by Ibn Al-Arabi's Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyya, hailed by Sufis as a work of great importance in its time. Abduh, however, "saw a moral danger in the dissemination of technical mystical vocabulary," and refused to allow the publication of Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyya, wrote historian Albert Hourani in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge University, 1989). According to Abduh's disciple, the chronicler Rashid Reda, however, Abduh once told him that "if I were to despair of reforming Al-Azhar, I should choose ten students and install them in my house at Ain Shams, in order to give them a Sufi education whilst completing their studies..." Reda was fresh out of an unsatisfactory association with the Naqshbandi order. On attending a meeting of the Mawlawis in their monastery, he had been so shocked by their ritual prayer -- which involved "dancing to the moving sound of the reed pipe" -- that he stormed out, shouting that the darawish were performing forbidden acts, and "to those who committed them God's words applied: 'They have made their religion a joke and a plaything'." He admired and condoned his mentor's mystical inclinations nevertheless. Ironically, Abduh's problems stemmed not from his Sufi affiliations and hidden desire to introduce reforms to orthodox Islam -- since he was careful to walk the middle ground at a time when the public was beginning to object to what it regarded as the Sufis' public excesses -- but from his political stand against Khedive Tawfiq and the British. Although "his teaching was in the end to be rejected by many of those to whom he addressed himself, [it] remained working beneath the surface, the unacknowledged basis of the religious ideas of the ordinary educated Muslim," commented Hourani. AN IMPORTANT FAMILY: The Bakri family's reputation goes back to the 15th century. From the 16th century on, it existed as an independent Sufi order (Al-Bakriya) and was given authority over all the other orders by Mohamed Ali in 1812. Until the end of the 17th century, the function of Naqib Al-Ashraf (the acknowledged representative of the descendants of the Prophet) was dependent on decisions from Istanbul, but after this period, it became the prerogative of either a member of the Bakri clan or that of Al-Sadat, the family at the head of the Wafa'iya order. Both sheikhs, whose orders were not among the most prominent, also shared successively the title of Sheikh Mashayikh Al-Turuq Al-Sufiya (or Supreme Guide of the Council of Sufi Orders), a double rank which gave them the privilege not only of heading their own order, but also of naming the heads of all the others, as well as regulating all Sufi manifestations. Furthermore, both sheikhs commanded a significant power in the choice of the Sheikh Al-Azhar. El-Bakri and El-Sadat, who both had the title of Sheikh Al-Siggada, were undoubtedly the richest and most powerful ulama in the land. The mulid of the Prophet, the most important religious feast in Egypt, was celebrated by Sheikh El-Bakri, while that of Al-Hussein, the second most important event, was celebrated by Sheikh El-Sadat. It is only in the first years of the 19th century, following Mohamed Ali's decision, that the Bakris managed to combine all these functions. "The family has thus come to represent the Sufi Orders in and as part of the religious Establishment and continued to wield some influence until the early years of this century," according to Johansen. In 1872, Sheikh El-Bakri banned private ritual gatherings -- a bid to gain direct control over the activities of both the orders recognised by the council (i.e. by himself, as the government's representative), and those that were not otherwise acknowledged. The hegemony of Sheikh El-Bakri thus reached its zenith; furthermore, all the representatives of Sufi orders passed under his direct control, reinforcing further the authority Mohamed Ali had already granted to his family over the tikiyas, zawiyas and tombs of saints. REGULATING SUFISM: After the demise of the Mamelukes, the Sufism that had woven its threads around such a large and varied portion of the population was the object of many attempts at control by the governing powers. By creating the position of Sheikh Al-Turuq as the supreme leader of the orders, the Ottomans had hoped to centralise Sufism. To a certain extent, they succeeded. Mohamed Ali seems to have heeded the lesson, and built on it in his turn. It is the common belief in Egypt, writes Luizard, that Salaheddin was responsible for creating the function of head of the Council of Sufi Orders. In fact, Luizard argues, it only dates to the era of Mohamed Ali, who was keen on applying the Turkish model as a safeguard against the Sufi orders' independent mind-set. The first attempts to reform the controversial practices of the Sufis were launched in 1880, triggered, according to Johansen, by an article appearing in an Alexandrian newspaper, Al-Mahrusa, which objected to some Sufis' practice of piercing themselves with sharp instruments (without apparent harm) at mulid celebrations. Not long after, the famous writer and journalist Abdallah El-Nadim wrote an article in which he warned that foreigners regarded these practices with a critical eye: "Is it not time that these innovations perished and those ignorant people ceased [indulging in them], and realised that they are amongst nations which observe their actions, criticise their bearing and write about them as one would write about savages and desert-dwellers?" The following year witnessed the banning of the dawsa (the ceremony during which the sheikhs of the Sa'diya order rode on horseback over the bodies of their followers, who lay face down on the ground). El-Bakri had set the scene for a reform programme that included severe restrictions on the more spectacular Sufi practices. Most historians, however, believe that most of these practices, difficult to police by their nature, simply went underground. Spanning the period between 1892, when Sheikh Mohamed Tawfiq Al-Bakri was officially placed at the head of the Supreme Council of Sufi Orders, and 1946, when Ahmed Murad El-Bakri, the last member of the family to hold the position, was relieved of his duties by King Farouk (for his role in the anti-British movement in the Sudan), a series of decrees were promulgated allowing the Bakris to exercise almost absolute control over the Sufi orders, a control that, through them, was handed to the government. Having outlived their usefulness, the Bakris were divested of all their privileges. With the 1952 Revolution, more restrictions and regulations, among them the abolition of the awqaf ahliya (family endowments), further diminished the powers of the Sufi sheikhs until, in 1955, the regime sought them out as a deterrent against the mounting influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The result was a proliferation of schismatic orders whose agendas indicated that, while ready to defend the country against external aggression, the sheikhs were on the whole reluctant to become involved in internal politics. In 1976 and 1978, new legislation was promulgated, giving largely increased powers to the Supreme Council of Sufi Orders, in which all legislative, judiciary and executive powers were, and still are, vested. In accordance with the 1976 law, the council has exclusive authority to approve all Sufi activities, whether private or public. A presidential decree completed the law of 1976, the first article of which stipulates that the Supreme Council of Sufi Orders "is an organisation endowed with an independent moral personality, whose objectives are religious, spiritual, social, cultural and nationalistic and that is bound in all its activities by the teaching of the Qur'an and the Sunna of the Prophet." The law of 1976, followed by the decree of 1978, illustrate the efforts of the state since the first years of the Nasser regime to integrate the orders within a legal structure endowed with extensive powers in order to exercise more effective control, comments Luizard. The sheikhs' autonomy has been severely curtailed; an Azharite education is now a condition they must fulfil. Many sheikhs today are drawn from academia, with a large number of Azhar-graduated engineers, lawyers and physicians heading the main orders. At this point in time, concludes Luizard, the Supreme Council of Sufi Orders is elected by the general assembly of sheikhs of Sufi orders. The election takes place at the seat of the Cairo governorate, in Abdin, every three years. The council is comprised of 15 members, among them the supreme sheikh of the Sufis orders; they must be chosen among the Sufi sheikhs who already belong to the Supreme Council, as well as 10 members of Sufi orders elected by secret ballot, a representative of Al-Azhar, chosen by the sheikh of Al-Azhar, representatives of the ministries of endowment, interior and culture, as well as a representative of the local authority, namely the Cairo governorate. The choice of the head of the orders must be ratified by the president of the Republic. By imposing on all Sufi manifestations the need to obtain the seal of governmental approval, Egypt has become the only Arab country where mysticism has a solid legal basis, transforming it into a state-regulated activity. Related stories: The people of the cave 7 -13 December 2000 Searching for the path 30 Nov. - 6 Dec. 2000 The blessed of the earth 25 February - 3 March 1999 A night of feasting and devotion 19 - 25 August 1999
