Most late medieval and modern scholars consider the North African Sufi Abu l-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 656/1258) to be the eponymous “founder” of the Sufi brotherhood known as the Shadhiliya. In such a model, al-Shadhili deliberately created a new social order organized around his own teachings and personality. However, very few of his contemporaries took note of al-Shadhili during his lifetime, nor do they refer to his followers in any way that might indicate corporate organization. It is actually not until the middle of the fourteenth century CE at the earliest that biographical and historical writings in Arabic refer to groups in Egypt and North Africa that we might identify as the Shadhili order (al-ta'ifa al-shadhiliya). While it is clear that al-Sh?dhil? was a charismatic teacher who had many followers and was known for his particular method (tariqa) during his lifetime, how did a posthumous tariqa-lineage and concomitant social order associated with his name come to exist in Egypt? In this paper I describe and theorize what happened between the death of Abu l-Hasan al-Shadhili and the emergence of an identifiable social entity linked to him eponymously. The integral stage in this development is what I call the institutionalization of Sufi identity. In short, such institutionalization is a process whereby a discrete set of doctrines and practices are metonymically mapped onto the personality of an individual by means of hagiography and/or silsila constructions. Importantly, it is this institutionalized identity that constitutes the necessary conditions for the production and reproduction of emergent social formations by integrating social bodies via ideal models of both praxis and doctrine. In this paper I focus on the institutionalization of Shadhili identity created by the hagiography of al-Shadhili written by Ibn 'Ata Allah al-Iskandari (d. 709/1309), Lata'if al-minan (The Subtle Blessings). In Lata'if al-minan, al-Iskandari maps out in narrative form the ideal doctrines, practices, and notion of authority that provided the nascent order with such an institutionalized identity. I argue that the telling and re-telling of the narratives, coupled with the practices associated with those narratives and the recitation of al-Shadhili's litanies and prayers performatively created a social group that could trace its genesis back to his personality. I also note the ways in which, following the work of Anthony Giddens, such institutionalized identity is often recursively constituted to account for changing social conditions and the emergence of new groups associated with al-Shadhili's name.

While it has long been recognized that by the beginning of the eighth/fourteenth century the constellation of social crises precipitated by the Turco-Mongol irruptions of the mid-seventh/thirteenth century had come to frame new conceptualizations of group and self in the urban landscapes of the central and eastern Islamic lands, certain vectors of religious change in the period have yet to be adequately analyzed. A desideratum in this regard relates to the emergence of the major tariqa-lineages, or “Sufi orders,” in this period, a phenomenon whose meaning and import cannot be adequately understood through the compartmentalizing evolutionary models which have heretofore framed much of the scholarly discussion of the subject. Recognizing both the historiographical and analytical utility of approaching the issue with attention to the discursive and performative interplay between the legacy of the eponym of a tariqa-lineage and that of the generations which followed, this paper looks to probe a telling doxological moment in the history of one such tariqa-lineage, the Rifa'iyya, a tariqa-lineage associated with the charismatic Sufi teacher of southern Iraq, Ahmad al-Rifa'i (d. 578/1182). Bringing under consideration the relevant synchronic and diachronic processes attendant to the construction of a definable Rifa'i identity in the first part of the eighth/fourteenth century, the paper looks to provide an analytic model for understanding a key element related to the emergence of the major tariqa-lineages more generally: the khirqa, or “Sufi frock,” as a central organizing concept therein. This model will be presented through an examination of an important, yet heretofore not well treated, Rif??i man?qib composed by the Rifa'i scholar Taqi al-Din al-Wasiti (d. 744/1343), the Tiryaq al-muhibbin (“The Lovers’ Cure-All”). Much more than a hagiographic exaltation of A?mad al-Rifa'i, the Tiryaq al-muhibbin looks to programmatically map him and, by extension, the Rifa'iyya within a much wider network linking past to present. Using the symbolically powerful institution of investiture with the khirqa as an organizing concept, in linking an imagined past to a living present in such a way so as to position the lineage as relevant to the context of social life in late-medieval urban communities, Wasiti’s text discloses important dynamics related to the emerge of self-reflexive tariqa-lineages in the central Islamic lands in the eighth/fourteenth century, dynamics in which the organizing concept of the khirqa played a prominent role.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, South Asia saw one of its most significant social and historical developments with the emergence of the Delhi Sultanate. Arriving at the scene at the same time were the “founders,” Mu'in al-Din Chishti (536–633/1141–1236) and Baha' al-Din Zakariya' (578–661/1182 or 83–1262), of what would become two of the most important Sufi polities of South Asia, the Chishtiyya and Suhravardiyya. It is no coincidence that Islamic political power was accompanied by the establishment of religious authority. Royal courts played a major role in the institutionalization of Sufi communities through patronage, and conversely, Sufi shaykhs reciprocated power by conferring legitimacy on the authority of sultans. At the same time that Islamic religious centers and Muslim royal courts were being established in the fresh context of South Asia, new Islamic literatures were being created in order to shape perspectives on the expansion and growth of Islamic empire. One was the birth of an Indo-Persian historiographical tradition (tarikh) which established the legitimacy of the sultans of Delhi, and the other was the creation of a novel religious biographical literature (malfuzat/majalis) which formulated the contours of sacred authority. This paper reexamines ideas about the origins of the Chishtiyya and Suhravardiyya Sufi movements in 13th and 14th century South Asia through revisiting the religious biographical literature of the period. The primary texts that serve as the focus of this study are the Fava'id al-fu'ad of Amir Hasan Sijzi (655–737/1257–1336), the Khayr al-majalis of Hamid Qalandar (fl. 754/1353), and the Siyar al-awliya of Amir Khvurd (fl. 752–90/1351–82). Through these texts I explore a series of core conceptual questions related to the social, political, and cultural impact of Sufi communities. What does it mean to refer to the “institutionalization” and “establishment” of Sufism during this period? Does it refer to the charismatic authority emanating from a single spiritual leader or the development of institutional structures over time? What role did Sufi shaykhs play in establishing Islamic hegemony? How did Muslim rulers contribute to the institutionalization of Sufi orders? In attempting to answer these questions this paper offers new methods in the interpretation of literary genres that aid in examining the complex relationships between religious and political power as they developed over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The hagiographical writings and spiritual genealogies (silsilat) of Sufi orders have attracted increasing levels of scholarly attention over the past two decades in the field of Islamic Studies. This body of work has established a solid foundation from which these literary and structural units can be critiqued and utilized as historical sources. This paper will intersect the discussion of these sources with an otherwise neglected element in the study of Sufi orders by examining how both their other genres of literary production, and the types of books that they collected, helped to shape their identities and personalities. The recent digitization of large numbers of manuscripts from smaller libraries in Turkey has opened up new opportunities to examine the full body of work tied to a Sufi order’s leadership. In this case, the library of the Nasuhi branch of the Halveti Sufi order, based in the Istanbul suburb of Uskudar, Turkey, has now been made available. Consisting of 301 works, along with at least a dozen others that have been scattered off into other collections around Istanbul, the library leaves us a unique source base through which we can learn about the intellectual evolution of the order as a whole from a period dating from the seventeenth century up to the advent of the modern Turkish Republic. After a full examination of all the known manuscripts in the library, several conclusions emerge. First, marginal notes by members of the order and their supporters in various unrelated works that are part of the order’s collection often help to corroborate or embellish critical hagiographical narratives in the order’s history. Second, after a thorough examination of written production by the order’s shaykhs, both before and after their accession to leadership in the order, we gain critical insights about how Sufi leaders developed the intellectual and educational background necessary to develop and serve the needs of the order’s members. Finally, the collection as a whole offers suggestive clues about how books and manuscripts played a critical role as historical characters in their own right in linking the Nasuhi shaykhs and their followers to a wider Ottoman world.