This paper is about a thoroughly discredited but tenacious categorical error within the contemporary study of Islamic history. Namely, there is something fundamentally incompatible about Sufism and Islam. This idea developed from and endures through a specific set of post-Enlightenment associations that link Islam with rational legal discourse, and Sufism with non-rational spirituality or mysticism. Historians have worked to correct this mistake by historicizing the basic categories and the contingency of their association. Nevertheless, the idea persists, implicitly and stealthily, because we cannot escape the conceptual pull of the primary categories defining the modern study of Islam. That enterprise was founded upon the categorical distinction that divides Islamic history into rational and non-rational elements. Attempts to stitch these pieces back together have produced hybrid categories (practical, juridical, or philosophical Sufism, e.g.) that, while useful, still depend upon and reproduce the division in new form. To quote Spivak, “What taxonomy can fix this space?” In response, I propose the artificial taxon “bureaucratic Sufism” – not as a means to fix this space but to describe and analyze it more precisely. I derive the characteristics of bureaucratic Sufism from documents produced by the Ayyubid and Mamluk bureaucracies: endowment deeds for Sufi hospices and documents of investiture for the stipendiary posts therein. I then turn to contemporaneous literary texts that describe or critique those Sufis who lived in the hospices and competed for the posts. Citing brief examples from these texts, I argue that the fundamental debate about Sufism in this period was not its legitimacy but rather its character. More specifically, it was about the limits of Sufi identity and who had the power to make that determination. The various arguments on this subject were driven by specific material and social conditions: the proliferation of endowed hospices and stipendiary posts after the 12th century. Finally, I argue that early historians of Sufism and Islam doubly misidentified the nature of this debate as an ideological rupture between rational and non-rational epistemologies.

This paper analyzes the relationship between Sufism and Islamic law in eighth/fourteenth century Cairo through the biographical dictionary of Jamal al-Din al-Asnawi (d. 772/1370). Al-Asnawi was born in the town of Esna in Upper Egypt and eventually became the chief of the Shafi’i jurists in Cairo. Al-Asnawi came from a family of scholars, many of whom were Sufis and jurists. Al- Asnawi’s family ties to Sufism and his institutional ties to the Shafi’i legal school make him a compelling window into the relationship between Sufism and Islamic law. Through an analysis of his biographical dictionary, this paper demonstrates the ways in which al-Asnawi integrated Sufis and Sufi thought into the history of the Shafi’i school. In particular, al-Asnawi emphasizes the role of early Sufi masters such as al-Junayd (d. 298/910) and al-Qushayri (d. 468/1074) while underemphasizing other Sufis. Early Sufi masters are, in al-Asnawi’s history, relevant for both their Sufi and legal accomplishments. The role of later Sufis is reduced to legists and their Sufism is either overlooked, i.e. Abu Hafs al-Taliqini (d. 590/1193) and al-Khatib al-Kushmayhani (d. 548/1153-54) or greatly underemphasized, i.e. Hujjat al-Islam al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) and Ahmad al-Ghazali (d. ca 520/1126). Overall, al-Asnawi’s history gives the impression that the early history of the Shafi’i school is greatly indebted to Sufi masters and that this close connection had gradually faded over time. His portrayal of Sufis in his biographical history is somewhat similar to that of Taj al-Din ibn al-Subki (d. 771/1370), and much more embracing of Sufism than that of Ibn Qadi Shuhba (d. 851/1448), two other prominent Shafi’i historians from the Mamluk era.

Between the years 1372 and 1374, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was living a life of high status, teaching and and pursuing knowledge in Fez. He set about writing his treatise, Shifa’ al-sa'il fi tahdhib al-masa'il, in response to a debate current at that time. The great Granadan jurist of the Maliki school, Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi (d. 1388) had been asked to weigh in on the proper approach of the adept along the Sufi Path. Was it necessary to have the guidance of a Sufi master, or could one take advantage of the large body of literature in circulation on the subject, and content oneself with the written wisdom of the fields’ luminaries? In a letter to the scholars of Fez, al-Shatibi had detailed the ongoing disputes on the matter, and asked his peers for their opinions. Whether invited or not, Ibn Khaldun undertook to enter the fray and to write a treatment of the issue, bringing to bear his expansive knowledge, not only of Islamic law but also of Sufism itself. Ibn Khaldun was in a unique position to do this. As a tribal negotiator, he had worked tirelessly to build bridges between disparate communities. He would therefore have been keenly aware of the hold of the Sufis over the Moroccan countryside and the practical realities of Sufism’s role in peoples’ lives. In the Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun refers to Sufism as one of the Islamic religious sciences—after speculative theology (‘ilm al-kalam) and before dream interpretation (‘ilm al-ru’ya). This paper will address how the Shifa’ fits into the corpus of Ibn Khaldun’s work as well as how the contents shed light on Sufism in the 14th century Maghreb.

Scholarship on the relationship between Sufis and Muslim jurists has traditionally focused on the disagreement between members of the two groups, and the disparity in their methods of knowledge acquisition. Where studies of the symbiotic textual relationship between Sufis and legalists in the pre-modern period do exist, they have argued that Sufi frameworks and concepts have historically been subordinated to their legal counterparts. This paper proposes a revision of this paradigm through a close textual study of a fourteenth-century fatwa of Ibn ‘Abbad of Ronda (710-81/1310-79), a scholar of Sufism and Islamic jurisprudence and the chief preacher (imam khatib) of the Qarawiyyin congregational mosque in Fes. In addressing a question about the proper celebration of the Prophetic birthday (mawlid al-nabi), Ibn ‘Abbad’s fatwa cites a treatise by Tlemcen Sufi scholar Ibn Marzuq on the preeminence of the Night of Prophetic Birth (laylat al-mawld al-nabawi) over the Night of Power (laylat al-qadr). The fatwa was subsequently included in the twelve-volume fatwa collection of Maliki jurist Ahmad b. Yahya al-Wansharisi (834/1431 – 914/1508), the Mi‘yar al-mu‘rib, which by the 16th century would become a key part of the curriculum in Maghrebi institutions of Islamic learning. I argue that Ibn ‘Abb?d’s fatwa is an example of what I call a “Sufi-legal discourse”: an integration of Sufi concepts into the legal arguments, in which the two intellectual approaches complement each other. Ibn ‘Abb?d’s fatwa, and Ibn Marz?q’s work which it is based on, indicate a substantial conceptual symbiosis between Sufi and legal discourse that directly challenges prevailing notions of an antagonistic Sufi-juridical relationship.

What can a popular fatwa collection teach us about the practice and beliefs of Sufis in Mecca and Medina in the tenth/sixteenth century? With the aim of answering this question, this paper analyzes a portion of the fatwa collection of the Egyptian legist Ibn Hajar al-Haytami (d. 974/1567), “the mufti of the Hijaz,” who until today remains one of the two most authoritative scholars within the later Shafi'i madhhab. Specifically, this paper examines al-Haytami’s fatwas on Sufism in order to paint a picture of Hijazi Sufism as it existed during the second half of the author’s life when he lived and taught in Mecca. Al-Haytami’s well-known fatwa collection was arranged by a student who may have been acting on the orders of the author. In any case, al-Haytami appears to have been well aware of the collection process that was taking place, though the final arrangement of the collection may have postdated his death. The collection itself comprises a large assortment of legal fatwas in addition to a separate volume of miscellanea that carries the independent title al-Fatawa al-hadithiyya (“hadith fatwas”), which the arranger describes as “a concluding section (khatima) of miscellaneous matters that have no connection to the preceding chapters.” It is in this latter volume that we find, among other things, al-Haytami’s numerous fatwas on Sufism, which prove the author to be far more outspoken in his sympathies for the Sufis than any of his Egyptian teachers. Through an analysis of the published edition of al-Fatawa al-hadithiyya, this paper aims to identify the controversies and debates that defined Sufism during al-Haytami’s lifetime. What aspects of Sufi belief and practice were the detractors of Sufism criticizing? What elements of popular Sufism demanded the interventions of a mufti like Ibn Hajar? What were the essential elements of Sufism that people had grown ignorant of in the eyes of Ibn Hajar? Moreover, what aspects of Sufi belief and practice lent themselves most readily to the legal discourse as it appeared in the fatwa literature. In the final analysis, this paper also aims to shed light on the historiographical value of fatwa texts and assesses their capacity to aid contemporary historians in reconstructing both intellectual AND social history.