Sufi sm and ‘Popular’ Islam 145teachings of Gurdjieff, an early twentieth-century populariser of Eastern spiritu-
ality. Hisham Kabbani, who belongs to a Lebanese family with strong Islamic
credentials, settled in the United States in the early 1990s and established a
network of Sufi centres, reaching out to American-born Muslims as well as
to recent converts from various New Age movements (Damrel 2006). More
recently, Kabbani has made successful tours of South East Asia, established
rapidly expanding local branches of the order and brought a number of existing
Sufi networks in the region under his umbrella.
The Naqshbandiyya Haqqaniyya is what Hermansen (1997) has termed a
‘hybrid’ order. It has an inner core of devoted disciples who practise the devo-
tions of the order in a ‘traditional’ way and, especially in Europe and North
America, various affi liated cult groups that combine Naqshbandi spiritual
exercises with forms of meditation and doctrines of other origins. Branches
of different ethnic composition have little contact with one another, but are
held together through common loyalty to the charismatic shaykhs Nazim and
Hisham. The order is hybrid in yet another sense: some branches combine
the methods of the Naqshbandiyya with those of other Sufi orders, notably
the Qadiriyya and the Mevleviyye, with which Shaykh Nazim claims a family
connection.^24
‘Popular’ Islam, Sufi orders and heterodox communities
Sufi sm has always been relatively tolerant of, and adaptable to, local customs
and traditions, and Sufi orders have incorporated what, for lack of a better term,
are commonly called ‘popular’ beliefs and practices (Gellner’s ‘Low Islam’).
One problem with the concept of ‘popular Islam’ is that it is implicitly defi ned
in contrast to a ‘high’ Islam, echoing Redfi eld’s ‘little tradition’ existing in the
shadow of a ‘great tradition’ and similar dichotomies. ‘High Islam’, however,
may be conceived in a variety of ways: as ‘offi cial’ or state Islam, as the religion
of the (traditional) ulama or of puritan reformists, or as that of the urban middle
classes. These are by no means the same, and the boundary between ‘popular’
Islam and any of these conceptions of ‘high’ Islam is not at all easy to establish,
nor does the attempt to do so appear very helpful to a discussion of Sufi sm.
Some Sufi orders are called ‘popular’ because they attract the poor and
uneducated masses and have loud and ecstatic rituals, while other orders, or dif-
ferent branches of the same orders, may cater to an elite and have more austere
devotions. Magic and healing are frequently associated with such ‘popular’
orders, but certain forms of magic, notably those using verses of the Quran
for protection or to produce another desired effect, were practised not only
by ‘popular’ magicians but by orthodox ulama as well. The belief in miracles
performed by saints is not a monopoly of the uneducated masses either. The
visiting of saints’ tombs and the celebration of saints’ days, with all the attending