Sufi sm and ‘Popular’ Islam 139in) the existence of charismatic persons capable of mediating between human
and God and of performing miracles. Salafi movements attempt to restore the
spirit and practice of the time of the Prophet and his immediate followers, the
‘pious predecessors’ (al-salaf al-salih). Saint-worship and miracle-working rank
high among the ‘deviations’ with which Salafi s take issue most strongly, and it
is tempting to think of Sufi sm and Salafi sm as irredeemably opposed. In actual
practice, the relationship between Salafi sm and Sufi sm is a more complicated
one, as indicated above.
As Islam spread to Asia, and later to Africa, monistic varieties of Sufi sm (in their
most sophisticated version the doctrine of the Unity of Being, wahdat al-wujud, asso-
ciated with Ibn Arabi) were most compatible with the local conceptions of imma-
nent godhead, and easily merged with older local beliefs and practices. It was,
however, not anti-Sufi puritans who carried out the struggle for reform of these
beliefs; most of the early reformers were sharia-oriented Sufi s themselves (Azra
2004). A struggle between immanentist and transcendentalist interpretations took
place even within wahdat al-wujud Sufi sm. In the Malay-speaking world, the latter
was politically victorious by the seventeenth century (al-Attas 1986), although the
former remained present as a strong undercurrent throughout South East Asia
and repeatedly re-emerged in ‘popular’ syncretistic movements.
Modernity and the disenchantment of the world
In Gellner’s pendulum model, there is one new element that breaks through the
circular time of Hume’s and Ibn Khaldun’s models. The advent of modernity
brings irreversible changes – political centralisation, urbanisation, education
- that marginalise the tribal periphery and thereby erode the social founda-
tions of popular Sufi sm. The fi nal swing of the pendulum towards scripturalist
rigorism or fundamentalism is defi nitive this time, and there is no turning back.
‘Low Islam’ is doomed to fade away, and the dominant mode of expression
will be either secularist populism or, more likely, puritan Islamic scriptural-
ism. Gellner’s ‘scripturalism’ is a broader category than Geertz’s and refers to
the learned tradition of Islam, which existed besides and in opposition to the
‘Sufi sm’ of rural miracle-workers and saints. The type of scripturalism that he
sees as victorious in modernity, however, is that not of traditional ulama but
of the puritan reformists, who look back for inspiration to the earliest period
of Islam and reject most of the classical learned tradition. Islam, in Gellner’s
analysis, is immune to secularisation because this Muslim puritanism constitutes
a functional equivalent of secularisation in Christian Europe (Gellner 1992).
Almost every aspect of Gellner’s model has been seriously criticised, notably
for its essentialism and the extrapolation of Moroccan peculiarities to the entire
world of Islam. For our purposes, the most important fl aw is the identifi cation of
Sufi sm with the popular cult of saints and ecstatic rituals, and Gellner’s failure
to recognise that sainthood stands not outside and in opposition to the learned