144 Islam and Modernity
Post-colonial migration and labour migration resulted in the second half of the
twentieth century in large Muslim diasporas in the West, and the presence of
Sufi orders among these new Muslim communities is increasingly conspicuous
(Geaves 2000; Westerlund (ed.) 2004; Malik and Hinnels 2006). In many cases
this concerns extensions of Sufi networks in the countries of origin, as is the case
of many (though not all) South Asian Sufi communities in Britain (e.g. Werbner
2003) and, most spectacularly, the Senegalese Muridiyya, whose transnational
trade networks are largely shaped by their Sufi allegiances (Diouf 2000). The
order provides migrants with an environment of trust, a spiritual refuge, a sub-
stitute family and a connection with the country of origin. In these cases, local
groups belonging to the order are ethnically homogeneous and may consist of
people originating from the same region or district.
Other orders have reached out across national and ethnic as well as state
boundaries and have found an ethnically mixed following, including Western
converts. The earliest Sufi order to fi nd a largely Western following (and to be
signifi cantly transformed in the process) was a branch of the Indian Chishtiyya
led by Hazrat Inayat Khan (d. 1927), which became known as the International
Sufi Movement. Inayat Khan personally established this order in North
America and Europe in the fi rst quarter of the twentieth century. Members were
not required to convert to Islam, which no doubt facilitated the spread of the
order in the West but also placed this order in a rather isolated position vis-à-vis
other Sufi orders (Genn 2007).
It took half a century before other Sufi orders made signifi cant inroads
among a Western public interested in Eastern spirituality. In some cases, these
‘Western’ branches were very much like just another New Age movement, with
little or no interest in orthodox Islamic doctrine and sharia, but gradually the
spiritual practices became embedded in more explicitly Islamic frameworks.
Some studies document how Westernised Muslims, after passing through New
Age movements and hybrid forms of Sufi sm, rediscovered and embraced a
more orthodox Muslim spiritual discipline (e.g. Haenni and Voix 2007).
Perhaps the most spectacularly successful example of a transnational Sufi
order is the Haqqaniyya branch of the Naqshbandiyya, led by Shaykh Nazim
al-Qubrusi and his son-in-law and US-based khalifa, Hisham Kabbani. Shaykh
Nazim, a Western-trained engineer of Turkish Cypriot origin, claims descent on
both sides from a long line of Sufi teachers and was initiated into a Daghestani
branch of the Naqshbandiyya Khalidiyya. Marrying the daughter of another
prominent member of the order, he settled near his master in Damascus in the
1950s, from where he built up a following among the Arabic- and Turkish-
speaking communities of the wider region. Following his master’s death, he
established a second centre in London, where he found a new following among
the local Cypriot community but also among British-born Muslims of other
ethnic backgrounds, as well as a ‘white’ British community of followers of the