The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

158 r Ronald C. Kiener

passed down to him, and that the classical texts of Judaism are encoded
with an esoteric set of secrets which signal this pietist turn. What is strik-
ing to any student of Sufism in the suluk of Abraham is that he makes the
regular calls for zuhd, “asceticism” in the religious life of his people, and
in doing so he specifically praises the practices of the now widely known
urban Cairene Sufis. He in fact bemoans the present-day loss of numer-
ous ascetic practices, which he attributed to the ancient biblical prophets,
and bewails the fact that in his day, these pious rituals are practiced by the
Sufis of Islam and not by the true inheritors of the Prophets, the Jews.
For example, concerning the practice of donning ragged cloaks during
initiation into the pietist group, a practice not common amongst the Jew-
ish masses then or now, Abraham writes:

You know that there is to be found amongst these Sufis of Islam

(al-mutasawwifun min al-islam)—because of the sins of Israel—the

ways of the ancient holy Israelites, which is not to be found or is little

found amongst our present-day community.^32

This lachrymose theme is repeated with a variety of specific Sufi-like prac-
tices praised by Abraham, including nocturnal prayer vigils, the need for
isolation and tears in prayer, and subsistence on alms.
Unfortunately, since the portion of Abraham’s treatise dealing with
wusul, the theology and doctrine, is no longer extant, it is impossible to
more precisely place Abraham into a particular Sufi system. We know he
admired the Sufis and thought many of their practices were worthy of
emulation, and we further know from the work of Paul Fenton that his
pietist prescription survived for a few generations in upper-class Egyptian
Jewry, creating a short-lived elitist movement that may have drawn from
refugees or the descendants of refugees from the Almohad persecutions
of Spain.^33 Ultimately, Abraham’s way failed, and his reforms and the pi-
etist movement he championed did not survive much past the early fif-
teenth century, if we are to accept Fenton’s assertion that David b. Joshua
b. Abraham (who died c. 1415) represents the last link in this Maimoni-
dean pietist circle.^34 It was during David b. Joshua’s reign as Nagid that he
was presented with a plaintive request by the wife of Basir, the bellmaker,
to go after her wayward husband, now infatuated with the mystical fra-
ternity of the Sufi master Yusuf al-Kurani, a thirteenth-century preacher
of the tariqah of al-Junayd. This touching letter indicates the allure that
Sufism held for Jews in fourteenth-century Cairo: