26 | The Giving Divide
and on most occasions, the expression refers to recipients of the charity provided
by the endowments in passages that may or may not refer to dervishes. The word
masâkîn (or its singular form, miskin) does not seem to appear by itself in the
sources discussed here, but in a handful of cases the formulation specifically
points out that the recipients of charity should be “Muslim fuqarâɆ.” Dervishes,
of course, could only be Muslim, and the specification that these fuqarâɆ must
be Muslim makes much more sense if we assume that, at least in these cases, the
word fuqarâɆ strictly refers to the economic poor.
The sample of sources is too small to try and establish the extent to which
the term fuqarâɆ meant the same thing for everyone. But this (at least partial)
semantic overlap between dervishes and the economic poor seems to be more
than a coincidence, as it is clear that the two categories overlapped in the eyes of
the population as well. This is best exemplified in this anecdote related to Shams
Tabrîzî, the spiritual advisor of famous Sufi poet Rumi:
It is reported that, once, [Shams] lived in Damascus for a few years. More or
less once a week, he would get out of his retreat and go to the shop of a sheep-
head seller. Having given two copper coins, he would buy some head juice
without fat and consume it. He would content himself with it for a week. He
did this for a year. When the cook saw him acting this way for a while, he knew
that [Shams] was among the people of piety and that he had taken up this
burden by choice. The next time [Shams] came, [the cook] filled a bowl full of
tharîd [a meat stew with crumbled bread] and its fat and presented him with
two loaves of quality bread. [Shams] realized that the cook had become aware
of his [spiritual] works. He immediately put down the bowl and, claiming,
“I need to wash my hands,” he went out and immediately left the city.The best sources for the period being hagiographies, their religious perspec-
tive creates some obstacles in our understanding of the facts on the ground. For
example, the authors of the hagiographies most likely ignore the material con-
cerns of individuals who chose to become dervishes out of a lack of economic
opportunity, if such people existed. After all, they would not have wanted to
trivialize the lifestyle of the dervishes by suggesting that some of them were mere
unemployed bums. Yet the overlap in vocabulary can hardly be dismissed off-
hand and does raise the possibility that, as forms of identity, dervishes and the
secular destitute indeed shared some degree of conceptual kinship in popular
imagination.
These observations make it difficult to believe that the religious profession-
als formed a single, coherent unit of social identity in the first place. It is indeed
significant that the sources do not use any word that could at once refer to legal
scholars at the imperial court and to the disciples of saintly figures such as Rumi
or Hacı Betkaş. From the tone of the sources, it rather seems that a high-ranking