134 Islam and Modernity
Weismann’s work (2000) on reform in nineteenth-century Syria has drawn
attention to the considerable overlap between Sufi and Salafi currents there, and
he has more recently followed this up with a study of the infl uence of Sufi ideas
in the thought of infl uential thinkers and activists of the Muslim Brotherhood
(Weismann 2005, 2007). On closer inspection, many reformist critics of Sufi sm
appear to be opposed not to Sufi sm as such, and in many cases not even to the
Sufi orders, but to what they consider as decadent teachers who have corrupted
the practices of the orders (Bruinessen 1999 and several other contributions in
De Jong and Radtke (eds) 1999; Sirriyeh 1999).
We tend to associate devotional practices such as dhikr, nightly prayers, medi-
tation on death and weeping with Sufi sm, because many Sufi orders engage in
them and consider them as central to their disciplining of the soul. However,
many Salafi s engage in the same practices and believe these have their origin
in the Quran and the practice of the Prophet. Anything smacking of media-
tion, however, is resolutely rejected – although, even in this sphere, the Salafi
authorities of Saudi Arabia have had to make concessions and allow visits to the
Prophet’s grave. Salafi s, then, appear capable of accommodating the devotional
aspects of Sufi sm but not the mediational ones. Within Sufi sm, on the other
hand, various new currents have emerged that to some extent incorporate the
puritan spirit of Salafi sm and reject saint worship.
Decline of Sufi sm in the twentieth century?
While there still is a consensus among scholars that the Sufi orders were in the
ascendancy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the middle
of the twentieth century scholarly observers gave a more negative verdict on the
present state of Sufi sm. In his authoritative overview of the subject, A. J. Arberry
deplored that there were no contemporary Sufi s comparable to the great names
of the classical period. The last author of a Sufi compendium worth mention-
ing, Muhammad Amin al-Kurdi, had died in 1914.^10 In many places, it is true,
the Sufi orders continued to attract the ‘ignorant masses, but no man of educa-
tion would care to speak in their favour’ (Arberry 1950: 122). And J. Spencer
Trimingham (1971: 250) concluded his survey of the history and sociology of
Sufi orders with the observation that the orders were everywhere in decline,
‘opposed by the ulama, by the salafi -type of fundamentalist reformers, and by
the secularized new men, and primarily undermined by changes taking place in
the whole social and religious climate’. The decline came about, he added, ‘less
by defection, than because the young have not been joining’. When shaykhs
die, ‘there is no one to succeed; their sons, in their intellectual outlook and
dominant interests, no longer belong to their fathers’ world’. New types of asso-
ciations have emerged, either secular in nature or Islamist, such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, that have taken over many of the functions of the Sufi orders and