Sufi sm and ‘Popular’ Islam 131Its teachers espoused the metaphysical doctrines of the Unity of Being (wahdat
al-wujud) that were considered heterodox by many other ulama, and a concept
of sainthood that envisaged the spirit of Shaykh Samman capable of coming
to his followers’ assistance. Devotees were convinced that the loud recitations
made them invulnerable because of the saint’s intercession. (The same was
true of the Qadiriyya wa-Naqshbandiyya, whose patron saint Abd al-Qadir
Jilani had an even greater reputation as a supernatural protector.) This was no
doubt one factor that gave these orders a role in uprisings; another factor was
the form of organisation of the orders that facilitated the coordination of action.
Nonetheless, anti-colonial activism cannot be the sole reason of these orders’
rapid dissemination: they were already well established when the fi rst confronta-
tions took place. They appear to be part of a broader movement of revitalisation
of religious attitudes in this period.
In a rightly famous study, the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard (1949) showed
how the Sanusiyya order provided the segmentary Bedouin tribes of Cyrenaica
with an integrating structure that made collective action possible. The
Sanusiyya was another new order, named after its founder, the Algerian scholar
Muhammad b. Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1859), who combined the reputation of wan-
dering holy man with a puritan reformist attitude. After a long stay in Mecca, he
fi nally settled in Cyrenaica and built a lodge near the intersection of the major
east–west and north–south routes. Secondary Sufi lodges (zawiya), often strate-
gically located at the boundary of two tribal territories, were connected to the
central lodge in a hierarchical structure. Not being part of the tribal structure
themselves and enjoying religious prestige among the tribes, the Sanusi lodges
could mediate in tribal confl icts and coordinate joint action. The Sanusi resist-
ance against the Italian occupation (1911–43) became the most successful case
of anti-colonial tariqa activity. Libya fi nally attained independence as a kingdom,
with the incumbent head of the Sanusiyya, Shaykh Idris, as the king.
Two other segmentary tribal societies in which a Sufi order succeeded
in politically uniting tribal groups were those of the northern Caucasus and
Kurdistan. The resistance of the Muslim peoples of Daghestan and Chechnya
to Russian southward expansion had begun in the eighteenth century and
reached its zenith in the mid-nineteenth, under three imams (politico-military
leaders) with strong Naqshbandi connections,^5 who led a jihad and for decades
established sharia rule in the region until the ultimate defeat of the third imam,
Shamil, in 1859 (Gammer 1994; Kemper 2005). Among the Kurds of the
Ottoman Empire and its successor states, several Sufi shaykhs became them-
selves the political and military leaders of a series of uprisings, between 1880 and
1925, that heralded the emergence of Kurdish nationalism. In both regions, this
concerned the same order, a dynamic branch of the Naqshbandiyya that came
to be named Khalidiyya after its founder, the Kurdish shaykh Mawlana Khalid
al-Shahrazuri (d. 1827).