The prominence of Sufism and Sufi brotherhoods as socio-cultural phenomena in urban and rural spheres of early modern community life in Anatolia, Iran, and North Africa is being investigated today from several perspectives. The period beginning with the 1453 Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople and the Safavid Shah Ismail’s rise to power in ca. 1500s witnessed escalating regional rivalries for political supremacy among competing Muslim polities—Ottomans, Akkoyunlu, the Safavids, and the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria. In this politically charged environment, rife with millennial expectations, Safavid Shah Isma’il’s model of charismatic and divine rulership, based on the idea of uncontested spiritual authority as an effective medium to legitimate sovereign power, found receptive audiences and inspired many with political ambitions. As mystical orders became visible models of social and religious organization, affiliation with mystical piety came to designate the politically powerful. Charismatic Sufis began to gain prominence not solely as sources of spiritual guidance but also for their legitimation of politically active figures. At times, they began to vie for political recognition. I argue that the formation of this phenomenon is better understood with a closer look at how individuals with Sufi affiliations appropriated the available sources of literary inspirations and spiritual heritage to fit into their ‘worldly’ agendas to create distinctive forms of piety. The life and career of ?brahim-i Gül?eni (d. 1534 C.E.), known in modern scholarship as the renowed?Acem?-Halveti Sufi, the founder of the Gül?eniye order of dervishes, is a case in point. The mystical literature of the Gül?eniye order, the majority of which is attributed to Gül?eni, helped inspire an expanding follower base in Anatolia and Egypt—which was the final destination for permanent settlement ca. 1510. The poetry produced by the Gül?eniye dervishes—which remains largely unexplored in its historical context—gives evidence of visible shifts from themes of pure mystical love to one promoting a decisively urbanized agenda, emphasizing the order’s inclusivity and the spiritual qualities of its founder. By examining the roots of Gül?eni’s inspirations and heritage, I wish to contribute to our understanding of the fluid nature of mystical piety and the experimental tone of discourse. My aim is to show how mystical discourse was utilized, adapted, and transformed by Gül?eniye dervishes to legitimate social renown for the order, to promote its founder’s saintly status and exert political influence in 16th and 17th century Egypt

In his highly intertextual, experimental novel Haddatha Abu Hurayra Qaal, Tunisian writer Mahmud al-Mas’adi engages a complex range of literary, religious and philosophical discourses. A monumental literary and political figure in Tunisia, al-Mas’ady’s mission was to re-invigorate arabophone Tunisian cultural production in the wake of its domination and repression by the French. His writing reveals his profound influence by Islamic modernist reformers such as Muhammed Abduh and Muhammed Iqbal, as well as his active appropriation of European modernist philosophy and literature, always in service to a Tunisian cultural fulcrum that reversed the “center/margin” model of European power. In Haddatha, al-Mas’adi mobilizes both the authoritative stature of the Hadith literature and the more subversive and elusive domain of Sufism. Haddatha both evokes and subverts the authoritativeness of its main character, an eponym of the revered yet controversial figure in Islamic history identified as the most prolific source of Hadith. Al-Mas’adi’s “Abu Hurayra” bears little resemblance to the historical figure, yet his use of the name is evocative of his role at the center of a number of critical debates on the authority of the Hadith literature. Throught the text, Al-Masa’dy’s reader is called upon to discern the reliability of suspect narratives with little or no context, and extract meaning from often obscure or highly poetic language. The text thus requires a rigorous intellectual work from his readers, a kind of secular ijtih?d or act of “exertion” and reasoning judgment that they must apply to negotiate their way through its disorienting terrain. I would argue that in al-Mas?ad? this exertion is also mystical in nature. In this way, al-Masa’dy would seem to call for a balance between reason and the need to recognize its limits – invoking an active Sufism as a mode of human development and a challenge to blind orthodoxy. The text thus both models an active Muslim subjectivity in its main character, and demands this exertion of its readers. It is to this modeling that I’d like to turn my attention in this paper. By examining the role of the Hadith, Sufism and modernism in Haddatha Abu Hurayra qaal, I argue that al-Mas’ady’s work invokes Sufism as a simultaneous challenge to European secularist, rationalist models that deny the role of faith, and to what he identifies as an unquestioning, ossified model of Islam whereby dogma has replaced the historic dynamism of debate and rigorous inquiry.

This study highlights a hitherto neglected trope of Muslim apocalyptic literature—namely, that in a region known as al-Talaqan there awaits the future Mahdi a great treasure that will gain him a mighty army to successfully fight the final battle against evil. Tracing the trope’s origin in Zoroastrian apoclaypticism and its subsequent dissemination in a wide array of Muslim apocalyptic traditions, this paper argues that this apocalyptic trope ultimately entered into Muslim apocalypticism, in particular Shi‘i apocalypticism, during the Zaydi revolt against the ‘Abbasids led by the Hasanid Yahya b. ‘Abdallah in the year 176/792. The paper then explores how the revolt of Yahya b. ‘Abdallah shaped how the ‘treasures of al-Talaqan’ functioned in Muslim apocalypticism and how Yahya’s personality and the revolt he inspired continued to leave an indelible imprint on Imami apocalypticism thereafter.