usually become organized into a monastic life, although there were later a few
approaches to it, such as the spiritual community which al-Ghazali formed in
Persia. In the early period, asceticism was widely displayed as a badge of
religious commitment by members of various positions, including some of the
famous MuÀtazilites. Later, when Sufism spread as a mass movement, it gen-
erally was organized as lay brotherhoods of persons who practiced ordinary
trades but who met periodically for religious initiations and activities.
Sufism never broke organizationally from the conventional structures of
Islamic society and religion; it provided supplementary communities in which
men from all walks of life (and in rare instances women) could participate.
The common theme of this rather inchoate Sufi movement was an emphasis
on personal religious experience, away from the collective public rituals such
as the five-times-daily prayers at the mosques and other public observances.
The more radical Sufis carried this to an anti-ritualistic, anti-conventional
extreme: the externals of the pilgrimage to Mecca were nothing, and one might
break even the most sacred rules to demonstrate one’s inner commitment to a
spiritual level transcending anything visible.
This tendency in Sufism took up the opposite side of the field from the
scripturalists of the juridical schools and especially the collectors of hadith. It
is not surprising to find the archconservative Ibn Hanbal polemicizing against
al-Muhasibi (65 in Figure 8.1), who helped to crystallize Sufism from pious
asceticism into full-blown mysticism. In the same generation (the mid-800s),
we find at Baghdad the even more radical Sufi al-Bistami; influenced by an
Indian teacher, he declared his identity with the Divine with the words: “Glory
to me, how great is my glory!” Such radical expressions could be gotten away
with, if just barely, during the period of upheaval in the struggle between
MuÀtazilites and their opponents, with the defeat of the Inquisition. Even with
such outrageousness, Sufism was becoming organized. As we see in Figure 8.1,
the major Sufis were connected in lineages and centered on the main places of
intellectual action, Basra and Baghdad; they were part of the division of the
intellectual attention space. The leading figure at the end of the 800s, al-Junayd,
drew on both Bistami and Muhasibi, and unified Sufism with an analytically
argued theosophy. His pupil in turn was the famous al-Hallaj, who studied
with all the Sufi networks, debated with the MuÀtazilites, and had personal
contacts with Rhazes, the heretical philosopher.
Radical Sufis, as enemies of scripturalists, were capable of making alliances
with all sorts of intellectual positions. Both a Neoplatonist like Ibn Sina and
an antagonist of philosophy like al-Ghazali could have Sufi teachers and
contacts; and we find Ibn Massara (1 in Figure 8.4), the first Muslim philoso-
pher in Spain, setting up a school for both MuÀtazilite theology and Sufism.
The fact is that Sufism had no hard kernel of doctrine one way or the other;
406 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths