Modernity has meant a considerable redefinition of the ways in which people come to see themselves and their place in the world. For many Muslims, like others, modernity has also meant a radical re-questioning of traditional world-views. One of the most significant developments in the Muslim world as a result, principally, of the challenges of modernity, has been the decline of popular Sufism, it being replaced either by a more orthodox understanding of Sufism in line with the Qur’an and the Prophetic Traditions or by a vision of Islam that has no place at all for Sufism as such.
Despite the challenges that Sufism has had to face from the eighteenth century onwards, little has been written on how it has sought to creatively respond to modernity. True, case studies of particular Sufi orders or great Sufi masters in the modern period do exist, but a cross-country study that explores the similarities, as well as differences, in Sufi responses to modernity has been sorely lacking. This book fills that gap in our understanding admirably. With insights gathered from cases as far afield as Mali and Senegal in Africa, the Caucusus in Central Asia and India in the East, Sirriyeh presents a macro-perspective of how Sufism has come to be rethought, modified or, in many cases, rejected in the modern world.
This book can be divided into three broad sections. The first deals with challenges to popular Sufism in the eighteenth century, before the advent of colonial rule in most of the Muslim world. The second section focuses on how European colonial rulers as well as Muslims influenced by European thought sought to relate to popular Sufism. The third section deals with Sufism in contemporary times.
Sirriyeh argues that there has always been a certain tension between popular Sufism, on the one hand, and the shari’ah-centred Islam of important sections of the ‘ulama, on the other hand, although the distinction between Sufis and ‘ulama has never been complete. The most well known instance of ‘ulama critique of popular Sufism is, of course, that of the noted Hanbali scholar, Ibn Taimiya, from whom modern-day opponents of Sufism draw their inspiration. Challenges to popular Sufism were, however, as Sirriyeh notes, first mounted from within the Sufi tradition itself, by such reformers as the eighteenth century Shah Waliullah Dehlvi of India and Shaikh Ahmad bin Idris of North Africa.
These Sufis, who were themselves leading ‘ulama, were particularly concerned with what they saw as the ‘unlawful innovations’ (bida’at) that had come to be associated with popular Sufism, and sought to reconcile Sufism with the shari’ah. Sirriyeh dwells at length on the reformist efforts of these two Sufis, as well as of some lesser-known ones in North Africa. She places particular focus on the work of the eighteenth century Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab of Najd, who, she shows, studied under a leading Naqshbandi Sufi of his time, but later went on to denounce Sufism as completely un-Islamic.
The challenges to popular Sufism from the eighteenth century onwards, the focus of the book’s second section, received a further impetus from European imperialism, as country after country in the Muslim world succumbed to the advancing forces of the British, the French, the Russians and the Dutch. Faced with the loss of Muslim political power and the mounting challenge of aggressive Christian mission, several leading Sufis of the time led mass jihad movements in various Muslim countries.
Such, for instance, were the jihad in Sudan under the self-proclaimed Mahdi, the jihad in North-West India led by Sayyed Ahmad Shahid and Ismail Shahid against the British and Shemyl’s jihad in the Caucusus against the Russians. Sirriyeh points out that besides seeking to challenge imperialist rule, these Sufi-led movements also sought to cleanse Muslim societies of what they saw as ‘un-Islamic’ superstitions and practices, which had no sanction in the shari’ah. In this way, the message of reformist Sufism began to receive a mass hearing.
The response of European colonial rulers to popular Sufism after the defeat of the jihad movements, Sirrieyh shows, was mixed and often ambiguous. On the one hand, the Sufis were characterized as ‘superstitious’, ‘wild’, ‘ecstatic’ or ‘primitive’, while in some cases imperialist powers sought to co-opt key Sufi leaders to maintain their rule. Such, for instance, was the case in large parts of India under the British or in Algeria under the French.
Exposure to western culture and the challenges of modernity seem also to have goaded several Muslims to re-question popular Sufism, seeing it as not only promoting superstition, helplessness and fatalism, but as un-Islamic in itself. Sirrieyh cites the instances of several noted Muslim scholars of the time who seriously sought to engage with the challenges of modernity, while also seeking to crusade against popular Sufism. Among the most prominent of these were the Salafis Mohammad Abduh and Rashid Rida of Egypt and Sayyed Ahmad Khan of India, all of whom were influenced, to some degree or the other, by Sufism in their youth, but who later came to either condemn it outright or to advocate a tasawwuf which was in keeping with the shari’ah.
Sufism in the twentieth century has had its defenders, reformers as well as its critics. The concluding section of this book deals with how Sufism has been challenged by numerous Islamic movements and by noted Muslim thinkers in the last century. Thus, for instance, the Turkish nationalist Ziia Gokalp and, to a greater extent the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Iqbal, while drawing from Sufism, among other sources, their inspiration for a redefined Muslim identity, bitterly critiqued popular Sufism for what they saw as its promoting of backwardness and servility.
Likewise in the case of the two major Islamist movements of our own times, the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world and the Jama’at-i-Islami in South Asia. As a result, Sufism and its practitioners have had to respond to these challenges, either by outright condemnation of the modernists and the Islamists as ‘un-Islamic’, as in the case of the Barelwis of India, or, more commonly, as by redefining their own understanding of Sufism to be more in accord with the shari’ah, as, for instance, in the case of the Tablighi Jama’at.
As a general survey of popular Sufism and how it has sought to be fashioned into a contested terrain in modern times this book excels. It is a pioneering effort to venture into a hitherto little-explored territory. It is also a timely contribution to the on-going debate on Muslim identity, suggesting that essentialised understandings of Islam and Muslims as homogenous, monolithic entities need to be interrogated, pointing to the multiplicity of often-conflicting perspectives on what it means to be a Muslim in our own times.
