140 Islam and Modernity
tradition but (also) squarely within it, and that there exists a large and sophis-
ticated corpus of learned texts dealing with this concept.^15 The doctor and the
saint (as Gellner named them in another article) do not necessarily represent
competing styles of Islam but have been part of a single complex for most of the
time. ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Islam, if those concepts have any value, cannot simply be
identifi ed with urban versus rural, and Salafi versus Sufi. Opposition to popular
saint cults and the loud festivals at shrines has not only come from anti-Sufi
scholars but has also been part of an ongoing debate within Sufi sm.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as we have seen, several new Sufi
orders emerged (notably the Tijaniyya and Sanusiyya), which in several respects
borrowed from the discourse of puritan reformists and opposed many ‘popular’
practices. The Tijaniyya expanded signifi cantly at the expense of some of the
older orders (in West Africa, the Qadiriyya). This development does seem to
make sense in terms of Gellner’s model of Muslim society: the disenchantment
of the world may take the form of a shift from the older Sufi orders to the new,
more puritan ones and from one type of Sufi master, the mediating, miracle-
working saint, to another, the teacher and spiritual director.^16 However, the
continuing, and apparently even increasing, popularity of saints’ day festivals,
also in urban settings (Abu Zahra 1997; Schielke 2006), calls into question the
assumption that modernisation would bring about their demise.
Sufi orders and the sociology of modernity
Neither Geertz nor Gellner paid special attention to Sufi orders, the organised
form of Sufi sm.^17 A more judicious and better-informed argument concerning
the apparent decline of Sufi sm that does focus on the Sufi orders is that offered
by Michael Gilsenan (1967), who in the 1960s studied an Egyptian urban Sufi
order. His explanation is based on the variety of secularisation theory that
focuses not on disenchantment of the world (as do Geertz and Gellner) but on
increasing functional differentiation as a core aspect of modernity. The various
social, economic and educational functions that the orders had served in the
past, Gilsenan argued, are presently better served by the specialised modern
institutions of trade unions, political associations, schools and so on. This is an
important and a priori convincing argument, which has the obvious corollary
that, when such modern institutions fail to offer their services to certain segments
of society, there is room for Sufi orders to resume some of their old functions
or even to adopt new ones. It also allows for the emergence of an autonomous
religious sphere, in which the orders may continue to perform strictly religious
functions.^18 The argument implies, in other words, that the Sufi orders will
change but not that they will disappear; it even leaves open the possibility that
certain orders may increase in importance.
This had in fact occurred in the case of the order on which Gilsenan focused