150 Islam and Modernity
greater salience. Among heterodox communities such as Turkey’s Alevis, which share
some features with the more ‘popular’ Sufi orders, there has also been a tendency
towards the scripturalisation of the belief system.
State policies towards the Sufi orders, which have ranged from patronage to
prohibition, have had an obvious impact on their social prominence, but more
remarkable have been the intricate adaptations to changing circumstances that
allowed certain orders to survive even under adverse conditions and to maintain their
social relevance. Several orders have grown spectacularly under conditions of
increased transnational communication and migration.
Questions
- Which factors contributed to the increased visibility and social salience of Sufi
orders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? - Why are Salafi sm and Sufi sm commonly considered as polar opposites? Has the
arrival of modernity entailed an enduring shift from one to the other? Does the
author consider them as incompatible, and why? - How are the oscillations or cyclical changes between two types of religiosity
explained in the theoretical models discussed in this chapter? Do the models
allow for an end to these cycles and, if so, owing to what factors? - On what grounds have modernisation theorists predicted the gradual
disappearance of ‘popular’ religion? Has the history of the twentieth century borne
out these predictions? - Is it correct or useful to subsume Sufi sm under the category of ‘popular’ religion?
What are the problematic aspects of the latter category? - What is meant by the term ‘Neo-Sufi sm’, and why is this a contested concept?
Are there modern expressions of Sufi sm to which the term Neo-Sufi sm would not
apply? - What aspects does Alevism have in common with Sufi orders? Are there also
aspects that sharply distinguish them from one another? - What impact has increased transnational communication had on the position of
Sufi sm in Muslim communities worldwide? Has it affected the beliefs and
practices, or the internal organisation and structure of authority, of certain Sufi
orders?
Notes
- The Wahhabis, named (by their opponents) after their leading scholar Muhammad
b. Abd al-Wahhab, considered all beliefs and practices that cannot be accounted
for in the Quran or ‘authentic’ hadith as reprehensible innovations (bida dalala)
and declared all Muslims who did not share their point of view unbelievers. The
Ahl-i Hadith were a similar though less militant puritan reform movement in India,
which aimed to restore pristine Islam through a strict rejection of customary
practices as well as classical scholarship and a return to the (authentic) hadith as
the sole criterion of correct Islamic belief and practice. The term ‘Salafi ’ refers to a
variety of movements that orient themselves towards the fi rst generations of
Muslims, al-salaf al-salih (the ‘pious predecessors’) and reject later ‘innovations’. It
is the preferred self-designation of Wahhabis and related puritans. - On the ‘littérature de surveillance’ and the study of Sufi orders, see O’Fahey and
Radtke (1993: 61–4), Bruinessen (1998) and Knysh (2002). The best-known, now