Sufi sm and ‘Popular’ Islam 141in his 1973 book, the Hamidiyya Shadhiliyya. Whereas most of the other orders
appeared to have experienced a decline, the Hamidiyya Shadhiliyya had not
only maintained its membership but had even expanded. Gilsenan attributed
this to a form of Weberian rationalisation: the Hamidiyya Shadhiliyya had
transformed itself into a formal organisation with an explicit, written system
of rules governing the members (and appropriately called Qanun, ‘the Laws’)
and with offi cers administering them. Gilsenan’s explanation was contested by
another student of Egyptian Sufi orders, Frederick de Jong (1974), who sug-
gested that the chief factor contributing to this particular order’s growth was
state patronage, not bureaucratisation. On the one hand, De Jong argued, all
orders had been subjected to a degree of formalisation since the promulgation
in 1895 of government regulations governing them and placing them under a
supreme shaykh; the incumbent supreme shaykh happened to be the head of
the Hamidiyya Shadhiliyya. On the other hand, many other orders had in fact
also expanded in membership, without having any additional formal structure
beyond that established by the government regulations.
Bureaucratisation and formalisation of the orders and state patronage are not
mutually exclusive explanations, and both deserve further exploration. Neither
may be an independent causal factor, however: bureaucratisation often takes
place under government pressure or in search of government patronage, and
governments have little reason to provide patronage to Sufi orders if these do
not already have signifi cant constituencies that can be mobilised. More recent
research in Egypt has shown that participation in Sufi orders and related activi-
ties have increased considerably since the 1960s, in ways that cannot easily be
attributed to government patronage or better organisation alone. The increase
appears to have been especially strong among the lower middle class, but sig-
nifi cant numbers of members of the educated middle classes have also taken an
interest in the Sufi path as an alternative to political Islam.^19
But it is undeniable that bureaucratisation and state patronage have been
part of the experience of Sufi orders in many parts of the world. Elsewhere I
have attempted to show this for the case of Indonesia, where Sufi orders have
signifi cantly gained in infl uence from the 1970s onwards. Enterprising Sufi
shaykhs established formal associations of Sufi teachers and followers, which
played a part in mobilising votes at times of general elections. Government
patronage allowed some shaykhs greatly to expand the number of their follow-
ers – but on at least one occasion the reverse happened and followers deserted
a shaykh who was perceived to be too close to the government (Bruinessen
2007). In West Africa, most notably perhaps in Senegal and Mali, the orders
are so much part and parcel of the texture of political life that their survival has
never been in question; patronage of a Sufi shaykh remains an important asset
for political contenders, even as the orders themselves are undergoing change
because of the increasing infl uence of puritan reformism (Villalón 2007).