Abstract of Ashira Muhammadiyah as an Early Revolutionary, Reformist Sufi Model Although it is widely argued that Sufism over the 20th century faded in Egypt because of the challenges of modernity, nationalism, the proliferation of Salafism and other factors, Sufism is still relevant and works in all walks of Egypt providing its followers with strength, spirituality, and hope. Ashira Muhammadiyah is an Egyptian Sufi NGO emanated from the Muhammadiyah Sufi sect which was established by the 20th-century Sufi saint Sheikh Muhammad Zaki Ibrahim during the first half of the last century. It produces a role model for the Sufi sects in how to work as a civic organization serving the society contributing to the religious, social and educational arenas. Ashira initiated the calling for the unity of all Sufi orders and putting aside all differences and working together under a unified Sufi umbrella. The final goal of the Ashira is to take part in the Sufi reform and erase the myths added to it. This paper is an empirical study based on my visit to Egypt in July through September 2018 through which I visited the headquarters of the order, mosques and spoke with scholars who lead the educational activities conducted by the Ashira. I conclude that the Ashira Muhammadiyah chose to revolutionize the traditional Sufi track and provides reformist corrective ideas and thoughts as well as produces a modern model of Islamic Sufism coping with post-modernism intellectuality and scholarships.

This article explores the miraculous discourse of the contemporary Sufi manual Sea Without Shore (2011), written by Nuh Ha Mim Keller, an American convert to Islam and a shaykh of the Shadhili tariqa living in Jordan (b. 1954). Sea Without Shore is an attempt to provide spiritual guidance to modern Muslims both within Keller’s fraternity and beyond, as the book is well-known and available worldwide on Amazon.com, as well as on various Islamic online bookstores. The academic scholarship on contemporary Muslim intellectual trends locates Keller within the Neo-Traditionalist camp: a network of Muslim preachers whose discourse is characterized by theological commitments to fiqh-aq?da-Sufism, an emphasis on the decline of metaphysics as a result of secularization, the promotion of traditional Muslim pedagogy and the rejection of Salafism and Modernism on the epistemological level. (Newlon 2017, Bano 2018, al-Azemi 2019, Quisay 2020, Sedgwick 2020) The Neo-traditionalists’ emphasis on Sufism as mystical, metaphysical and spiritual dimension of Islam led scholars to describe the trend’s message as the “re-enchantment”. (Quisay 2020) Despite the various attempts to analyze the political ideas, identify networks, and establish appropriate frameworks for examining this trend, there is still little understanding of how Neo-Traditionalists interpret Sufi concepts in modernity. By focusing on the concept of saintly miracles (kar?m?t al-awliy??), this paper attempts to analyze how does the project of “re-enchantment” manifest in Keller’s Sufi manual? How the traditional Sufi concept of kar?m?t al-awliy?? is re-interpreted in the textual source? And, how does Keller’s articulation of miracles complicate the idea that Neo-Traditionalists reject Modernism? Through textual analysis of Sea Without Shore, this paper demonstrates that the articulation of miracles in the manual represents the ‘ethical turn’ of Neo-Traditionalism. It will be argued that traditional pedagogy and linkage to the ‘tradition’ as opposed to ‘modernist’ and reformist interpretations of Islam do not secure ‘tradition’ from changes and transformations. The case of kar?m?t al-awliy? reveals that the ‘type of enchantment’ endorsed in Keller’s book accentuates rather ethical dimension of miracles than metaphysical or mystical and therefore does not challenge modern ‘rational’ sensitivities.

Mawlids (festivals celebrating a prophet or saint) and ziyaras, (tomb visitations) are both religious practices closely tied to and associated with tasawwuf (Sufism). In Cairo, saints (awliya') were widely celebrated publicly in the 19th century. However, this is not clear from the secondary literature on Islam in 19th century Cairo, as it generally emphasizes the appearance of Islamic modernism and Islamic reform movements, which it is argued eschewed tasawwuf. Since tasawwuf did not disappear from the public arena in the 19th century, but rather, continued to flourish (DeJong 1978, Delanoue 1982, Chih 2019, Mayeur-Jaouen 2019) I argue that understanding tasawwuf as it was practiced is necessary to understand the manifestations of modernity in Cairo. Further, I argue that it is crucial to understand the role tasawwuf played in the cityscape of Cairo, including its visual and auditory manifestations to properly understand what life in Cairo was like. The constant presence of rituals and festivities associated with tasawwuf in 19th century Cairo is vividly described in a wide range of primary sources. I thus based my research on travelogues in English, French, and Arabic, ziyara manuals, hagiographical writings, and compilations of biographies and events, the most famous being by the Egyptian historian ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (d. 1825). Another major source for my work is a volume in Ali Pasha Mubarak’s (d. 1893) “city plans” (20 vols) dedicated almost exclusively to mosques, madrasas, and zawiyas where Sufi practices took place in the 19th century. From these sources it is evident that mawlids, ziyaras, and other rituals associated with tasawwuf were woven into the lives of Cairenes throughout the 19th century. As big public celebrations, the mawlids were sites for the “ordinary resident” and the elites alike. These mawlids were spread throughout the year and throughout the city, and it was thus not possible for the Cairene to not witness, and at least indirectly partake in the celebrations. The practice of ziyara brought people of differing social and economic backgrounds to the mosques and zawiyas both inside the city walls and into the Qarafa, the large graveyard at the bottom of the Moqattam hills in Cairo, to visit the graves of the saints. Thus, in this paper, I show how daily and annual devotional rituals and celebrations related to tasawwuf shaped the city of Cairo in the nineteenth century.

The Prose Introduction of Book Five of Rumi’s Masnavi: The Exception that Proves the Rule? The most frequently quoted and analyzed part of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s (d. 1273) poem The Masnavi is “the Song of the Reed,” which serves as an introduction in verse to Book One and has similar counterparts in all the other five books. These verse introductions clearly are related to the content in their respective books, as one would expect. Very little attention has been paid to the prose introductions that precede these verse introductions in each book. In contrast, the former are diverse (alternating between Arabic and Persian) and do not appear to be particularly related to the content of the specific books of the poem that they introduce. They are arguably therefore more intriguing, raising more questions that have the potential to enrich our understanding of the historical context in which this poem was compiled. In recent years, Carl Ernst has looked at the prose introductions of the first four books of this poem of six books, unearthing general consistencies in them, despite their more obvious discrepancies. However, the most unusual of all of the prose introductions is that of Book Five, which he has not included, and this one clearly does not correspond to the few consistencies in the first four that Ernst manages to highlight. This prose introduction also happens to be entirely devoted to a single topic, the thorny topic of the relationship between the shariah and the Sufi path (tariqa) and their relationship to the mystic’s goal of the Truth (haqiqa). In this paper I will explore why this prose introduction does not share the common characteristics of the others and how this relates to the specific topic that it expounds. This will involve analyzing the prose introduction of Book Six as well, to see if Ernst’s observations of consistent patterns are evident there, leaving Book Five as the exception. The relationship between discussions of the shariah in relation to the Sufi path elsewhere in Rumi’s Masnavi will also be highlighted. The aim is to identify the functions of these prose introductions in the poem and the value of Ernst’s observation of consistencies, while also explaining why this contentious topic should make up the content of the prose introduction that seems at first to be “the exception that proves the rule.”