CHAPTER 5
Sufi sm, ‘Popular’ Islam and the Encounter with
Modernity
Martin van Bruinessen
Muslim reformers and Sufi sm
The various reform movements that have swept across the Muslim world since
the late eighteenth century have had ambivalent attitudes towards Sufi sm, if
they were not downright hostile to it. Most radical in their rejection of Sufi
practices and beliefs were the original Wahhabi movement and India’s Ahl-i
Hadith movement, as well as later Salafi movements that derived from the
same puritanical inspiration.^1 After the fi rst Wahhabi conquest of Mecca and
Medina, in 1803, all tombs in and around the cities were destroyed and practis-
ing Sufi s were persecuted. (The Wahhabis did not target only Sufi s, though; the
rich Shii shrines in southern Iraq were looted and then also destroyed.) Less
radical Islamic reformers, such as the Indian Deoband movement, the Egyptian
reformists around Muhammad Abduh and Indonesia’s Muhammadiyah also
strongly opposed at least certain Sufi practices and were very critical of Sufi sm
in its organised form, the Sufi orders (tariqa, pl. turuq). Secular-minded national-
ist reformers, most notably Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and his circle,
considered the Sufi orders as impediments to progress that kept the masses
imprisoned in a state of ignorance and superstition. Turkey was the only Muslim
country to ban all orders and close the tombs and shrines that were objects
of popular veneration, but most other states have also attempted to bring the
orders under some degree of control and curtail ‘excesses’.
The Sufi practices that reformers objected to have differed from place to
place and from one historical context to another – Sufi orders have usually
been favourably inclined to the adoption of local cultural forms – but a few
stand out in most debates. These include visits to the tombs of saints, especially
when their purpose is to demand intercession or help; the use of music, dance
or drugs to produce a state of ecstasy or changed awareness; the invocation
of spirits of saints living or dead through the recitation of special prayers and
litanies; the attribution of miraculous powers to Sufi shaykhs and the traffi c in
magical objects such as amulets; and the unconditional surrender of the indi-
vidual devotee to a Sufi master. These practices were condemned as bida dalala,
reprehensible innovations alien to pristine Islam, and explained as borrowings
from other religious traditions or as corrupt deformations of authentic Islamic
practices.