Sufi sm and ‘Popular’ Islam 137A pendulum model of religious change
Some of the same elements return in Ernest Gellner’s well-known model of
Muslim society and its internal dynamics.^12 Central to this model is a pendulum
movement between ‘Sufi sm’ and ‘scripturalism’, the forms of religiosity that
Gellner associated with two major social milieus between which a permanent
struggle was waged, the tribes of the periphery and the urban civilisation of the
political centre. Gellner built this model on foundations laid by two formidable
predecessors, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume and
the fourteenth-century North African thinker Ibn Khaldun. In Hume’s work
on religion Gellner found, rather than the theory of unilinear evolution for
which he is frequently credited, a theory of oscillation or fl ux and refl ux, from
polytheism to theism and back, which Hume attributed to the workings of the
human mind. Men have, Hume writes, ‘a natural tendency to rise from idolatry
to theism, and to sink again from theism to idolatry’.^13 The advance towards
some form of monotheism is to do with one deity being singled out as more
powerful and more worthy of worship than the others and gradually becoming
a perfect, omnipotent, transcendental Creator. This supreme deity then has
become so awe-inspiring and distant that men, in approaching him, seek the
mediation of a class of spiritual intermediaries, demigods or middle beings, who
then themselves become objects of veneration. Thus much of the earlier idolatry
is restored, after which the process of purging begins again (Gellner 1981: 10).
To give this mentalistic theory a stronger sociological basis, Gellner combined
it with an adaptation of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the rise and fall of dynasties,
taking the same contrast of urban civilisation and tribal periphery as his point
of departure.
In Ibn Khaldun’s model, the hardy tribesmen living on the periphery,
beyond the control of the state and its army, constitute a perpetual threat, eager
to conquer the capital city and its riches. The tribes are potentially superior
because of their strong social cohesion and solidarity (‘asabiyya). The ruling
dynasty and urban elite may also have tribal origins, but the conditions of
urban life and its luxury inevitably weaken their ‘asabiyya and military prowess.
In due time, they become so decadent that a tribal raid may defeat their army
and conquer the city. The barbarian conquerors become the new rulers and
elite, and in turn undergo the same process of civilisation and decadence, while
another coalition of tribal groups is biding its time in the periphery. In Gellner’s
adaptation of this circular schema, Sufi sm in the form of ‘maraboutism’ (the
veneration of miracle-working holy men or marabout) is associated with the
unruly tribes of the periphery and the lower strata of urban society, whereas the
religious life of the city is characterised by ‘scripturalism’ based on the schol-
arly study of written religious texts as the source of moral norms. Gellner did
acknowledge that there also exist learned Sufi s who cater to the religious needs
of the more sophisticated urban ‘bourgeoisie’, but for the sake of simplicity he