Sufi sm and ‘Popular’ Islam 135perform them more effi ciently. In this latter observation, Trimingham echoes
the sociological explanations offered for the (alleged) decline of the orders that
will be discussed in the next section.
Theses of the inevitable decline of Sufi sm in modernising societies had a
certain a priori plausibility, at least until the 1970s. However, the developments
of the last quarter of the twentieth century called these theses into question –
just like the secularisation thesis had to be rejected or drastically reformulated
in order to be retainable. The Islamic resurgence has not only brought a wide
range of Islamist and neo-fundamentalist movements into the public sphere but
also appears to have occasioned a revival of Sufi orders and related devotional
movements. From Morocco and Turkey to Indonesia, Sufi orders have become
more visibly present and politically signifi cant; in West and East Africa, where
their decline had never been considered imminent, they show renewed vigour.
Sufi orders have, moreover, found fertile soil in the West, among both Muslim
immigrant populations and Western converts (or even unconverted Westerners).
In a related development, rural heterodox communities such as Turkey’s Alevis
have not disappeared because of urbanisation and the twin forces of secu-
larisation and Islamisation, but rather claim recognition as a distinct religious
formation besides orthodox Islam.
Sufi sm and the sociology of Muslim societies
From saint-worship and illuminationism to scripturalism
The view of the inevitable decline of Sufi sm became especially widespread
because of the infl uential writings of Clifford Geertz and Ernest Gellner.
Comparing, in his delicately crafted essay Islam Observed, religious change in
Indonesia and Morocco, Geertz (1968) examined the shift from the ‘classical
styles’ of Islam, centred around rural miracle-working saints and mystics, to
the dry and legalistic ‘scripturalism’ of urban reformists. His evocation of the
Indonesian and Moroccan ‘classical religious styles’ (which, he claims, remained
‘in some general, overall, vaguely persuasive way’ the basic religious orienta-
tions in their respective countries, although they had lost hegemony) emphasises
their non-scriptural character. The mythical Javanese saint chosen to exemplify
the Indonesian version, Sunan Kalijaga, was a converted highway robber who
gained his perfect knowledge of Islam through years of immobile meditation in
a forest – Geertz considers such ‘illuminationism’ the pervasive orientation of
pre-modern Indonesian Islam. The Moroccan exemplar Sidi Lahcen Lyusi was
a historical person but also became the object of a marabout (saint) cult centred
around his grave. Legend makes him a sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet, who
by his genealogy was himself, in a sense, Islam embodied, and who further per-
fected himself through decades spent in the presence of other marabout, living
and dead, absorbing their supernatural power (baraka). He stands, in Geertz’s