Evaluation on the Importance of Sufism

For them, "Muhammad and the Koran, non reason, were the central experiences of Islam" (Lapidus 107). Begun in the 7th cytosine in Arabia, Sufism had become by the too soon tenth atomic number 6 a collective and mainstream sacred movement. Although Sufism came "to triumph the whole inner life of [Sunni] Islam," many of its early prophets were regarded as disruptive influences and some were martyred (Hodgson Vol.I 266 and 394).

The central tenet of Sufism was renunciation of profane things "in the quest for an ecstatic self-realization [purification of the soul] through the straight visionary experience of God's being" (Lapidus 195). The religious leaders much closely aligned with the interests of the state, the ulama, "taught the Shar'iah, the 'way' of daily life, the Sufis taught the tariqah, the 'way' of mystical life" (Hodgson Vol. 2 219). Initially "not highly organized", Sufi brotherhoods were base on the relationship amid Sufi masters (learned scholars or shaykhs) and their disciples (Hourani 153). The ulama taught in the law schools and the mosques. The Sufis preached in private homes and federation houses and in rural areas and outlying provinces through wandering holy men, who used visions and magic tricks to communicate with the common man. The movement was take apart up among various orders, such as the Rifaiyya which dated put up to Iraq in the 12th century, the Suhrawardiyya to the 13th century, the Qadiriyya, followers of an 11th century Baghdad scholar, the Shadh

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The stake of Islam Volumes 1 and 2. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1974.

Because of their supra-national spiritual appeal, organisational strength and charismatic leadership at local levels and in outlying areas, the Sufis were a potent political force. A impulsive tension existed between them and the regimes under which they functioned. In times of outstanding instability or in areas where the Muslim states' writ did not run very far, they at times assumed a dominant or catalytic political role. Lapidus says that "Sufi leadership could . . . be the basis of organized political action, tribal conquests and the composition of state regimes" (263).

The Sufis played important stabilizing and integrative roles during the periods of snake pit in Western Asia which followed the fragmentation of the Arab empire in the 10th through the 14th centuries under external pressures from the Seljuk Turks, the Crusaders in Syria and Palestine, the Mongols who conquered most of the northern Middle eastbound after 1240 and Tamerlane (1380-1402). As the Abbasid Caliphate declined before it was finally abolished by the Mongols in 1258, conquering rambling tribes adopted the Islamic religion and used Arabic for the conduct of their governmental, legal and religious affairs. Lapidus says that "a gulf had opened between the state and religious communities . . . [and] the . . . ulama and the Sufis defined Islamic religious beliefs" (125). Hourani says that "by the eleventh century, Islam was the religion of the rulers, the dominant groups, a maturement proportion of the population, but it is not certain that it was the religion of a majority anywhere outside the Arabian peninsula" (96).

iliyya, which was founded by a Moroccan Sufi, al-Shadilli, which took root in Egypt in the 13th century and others. Lapidus says the movement developed slowly but "by the rarity of the fourteenth century the Sufi tariqat was well-established throughout the Middle East" (171). Sufi masters were ve
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