in the 10 generations from 1065 to 1400, founded at a nearly regular beat one
generation after another.^19 These orders were spread out geographically from
one end of the Islamic world to the other, from India to the Maghrib (western
North Africa). In central Asia and the eastern frontiers these orders were part
of the missionary process that was spreading Islam. There was a spate of orders
in Anatolia as the Byzantine Empire collapsed in the 1100s and 1200s and
Islam moved into the religious vacuum with the conquering Turks. Most of
these frontier orders were not very significant intellectually, and their leaders
were unconnected to the philosophical networks. Their appeal was to layper-
sons rather than to those with full-time religious vocations. They developed
their distinctive varieties of rituals, dancing, chanting, music, meditation; they
varied from politically activist to quietist. Most of the orders were geographi-
cally localized and did not intersect with one another around significant figures
to form a network; the Sufi orders do not seem to have competed with one
another, which is one reason why their structures generated traditionalism
rather than philosophical innovation.
Sufism also was spreading in the intellectual core of Islam. In the generation
after al-Ghazali’s death, a leading figure at Baghdad was ÀAbdulqadir Gilani
(220), who became one of the most famous Sufi saints. He was a Hanbali in
theology but also a visionary; the order that was later founded in his name
around the worship of his tomb stressed techniques for inducing ecstatic
spiritual states. Gilani himself was rather unmetaphysical, and he attacked even
the moderate and pro-Sufi kalam of the Ghazali brothers. Gilani’s pupil Abu-
Hafs al-Suhrawardi (229) was appointed by the caliph as head of all Sufi
establishments in Baghdad; Sufism was getting government recognition and,
where the government was powerful enough, regulation. Abu-Hafs in turn was
one of the teachers of the great Sufi poet SaÀdi; another pupil, Najmuddin
Kubra, founded a famous Sufi order which turned from pious asceticism
toward visionary speculation. As the networks became denser, even among the
Sufis, intellectual constructions were created. Kubra’s pupils in turn were
connected to the philosophical mystic Ibn ÀArabi, as well as producing a
generation later the most famous Sufi poet. This was Rumi, active at the time
of the Mongol conquests, which destroyed Baghdad in 1258 and temporarily
left Islam without a center of doctrinal enforcement. Perhaps this was why
Rumi could get away with a radical pantheism without being accused of
heresy: “I am the mote in the sunbeam,” he declared; “I die a stone and become
a plant.”
The period from the mid-1100s to the mid-1200s was the apex of creativity
on the mystical side. Here are concentrated virtually all of the famous Sufi
poets: foreshadowed by SanaÀi (227) in Afghanistan, where the Sufi orders were
first forming; in the early 1200s, the great stars SaÀdi at Baghdad and Shiraz,
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^425