24 Islam and Modernity
one key factor in Islam’s confrontation with modernity. Sufi s regarded sharia
as a suitable framework for governing the ego–alter–God relationship in routine,
daily situations and common practice. Alongside, it was felt that a deepening of
piety required a commitment to the inner truth of Islam or haqiqa. The compe-
tition between Sufi sm and jurisprudence not only helped redefi ning the place
of sharia within the Sunni consensus, but also highlighted the ongoing tension
between the spiritual dimension of speculation and doctrine, on the one hand,
and its practical and juridical implications, on the other. Unlike the philoso-
phers, the Sufi s did not raise the banner of rational speculation in the fi rst place.
They appropriated and sedated the tension between the spiritual and the practi-
cal levels of faith through distinctive practices and the construction of suitable
associational forms. The Sufi challenge became particularly powerful in the last
phase of the ecumenical renaissance, during the twelfth and thirteenth centu-
ries, corresponding to the last phase of what Hodgson called the ‘Early Middle
Period’ of Islamic history, which witnessed a deepening of Islam’s cosmopolitan
orientation and cultural expansiveness, a period terminated by the Mongol
conquest.
The advantage of the orientation to piety of organised Sufi sm, compared to
the scholarship of theologians and philosophers, consisted in the fact that Sufi s
anchored their spiritual claims within ritualised collective practices that facili-
tated building intersubjective connectedness by integrating the triadic matrix
of the social bond (ego–alter–Alter) into cohesive groups, so avoiding both a dog-
matist impasse and an elitist backlash. Starting from a fi rst nucleus of Medinese
piety and asceticism based on the Quranic notion of faithful trust in God
(tawakkul) and of love for God – which was neither confl icting with, nor inte-
grated into, the Medinese proto-state nourished by the charisma of the prophet
Muhammad – the Sufi path fi rst thrived because of the widespread sentiment
that the process of canonisation of the law led by the jurists could not exhaust
the truth of Islam, and that therefore a parallel tradition of piety immune from
formalistic fi xings was needed (Rahman [1966] 1979: 130). This approach was
favoured by the fact that the absence of priesthood in Sunni Islam facilitated
from the beginning an equation between the sincere faithful, the practitioner
and the commoner (Hoexter and Levtzion 2002: 12). The enduring strength
of Sufi sm is due to the fact that its remote roots are as old as the translation of
Muhammad’s message into pious practice by his companions, yet it is also par-
ticularly capable of adapting to changed socio-political circumstances, like the
increasingly important role of non-Arab populations in the expansion of Islam
during the ecumenical renaissance. Moreover the organised Sufi sm of the turuq
responded to the resurfacing need for charismatic mediation that the absence of
priesthood could not erase for ever.
The path of Sufi sm was quite innovative in that it formulated a solution to
the problem of the relationship between rational speculation, on the one hand,