Ẕahīn Shāh Tājī’s (d. 1978) Signs of Beauty (Āyāt-i Jamāl)

Bābā Ẕahīn Shāh Tājī (d. 1978) is a well-known Sufi poet in Pakistan. He belonged to the Chishtī Sufi order and his mausoleum in Karachi is a center of pilgrimage known for its weekly Qawwali (devotional singing) gatherings. This article presents an overview of Tājī’s experience and articulation of the Sufi path through selected English translations from his collection of Urdu ghazals, Signs of Beauty (Āyāt-i jamāl), which are performed by Qawwals and ghazal singers both in India and in Pakistan to this day.

Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī and the Place of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt in Jazūlite Sufism

This article discusses the career of Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (d. 869/1465), his compilation of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, and the place of this work in Jazūlite Sufism. The teachings of the Jazūliyya Sufi order emphasized intense spiritual devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad as a means of access to the Divine. As a manual of prayers and invocations on behalf of the Prophet, Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt became one of the most popular works of Islamic devotional literature. This widespread popularity was partly due to the Jazūliyya’s doctrinal connections with the Qādiriyya and Shādhiliyya Sufi orders. In Jazūliyya Sufi practice, the recitation of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt and the prayers and litanies of the order were used to instill a “Muḥammadan” consciousness in the mind of the disciple. This higher consciousness was meant to serve as a compass of spiritual guidance for the “true seeker of God” (al-murīd al-ṣādiq), who aspired to the highest levels of Sufi knowledge.

Dissolving Gender Difference – Female Teachers, Male Allies and the Creation of Islamic Sufi Authority in Afghanistan

This article offers a case study of contemporary female Sufi leadership and teaching within a branch of the Qadirriyah Sufi order originating with pir Allama Faizani. Based on ethnographic participant observation and oral history interviews, it traces the development of female inclusion within spiritual practice, such as meditative zikr [lit. remembrance], and religious leadership in urban Afghanistan. Addressing the paucity of writing on Afghan women as Muslim actors, the article considers how the founding pir became a moral exemplar for gender inclusive conduct, facilitating women's participation and inspiring a community ethos of male allyship. The Faizanis legitimize women's participation through recourse to the spiritual psychophysiological organ of the heart, rendering divine connection a non-gendered endeavor that transcends social categories. In addition to the discursive erasure of gender, the community navigates restrictive environments and expectations through practical adaptations such as new cultural organizations. This article examines how women train to access, navigate and control inner states during zikr and documents how this process is interlinked with the relational establishment and creation of spiritual authority.

Enslaved Muslim Sufi Saints in the Nineteenth-Century Sahara: The Life of Bilal Ould Mahmoud

This article centers on the life of Bilal Ould Mahmoud, an enslaved man who became a spiritual authority in the nineteenth-century Sahara. It examines how Bilal's piety allowed him to rise to prominence in a hierarchical context that subjugated him to an inferior position. Yet what makes him so fascinating to study is his ability to achieve the highest station as a Sufi saint without being attached to a Sufi order. Using Bilal's case, this article makes two important contributions to the historiographies of Sufism and slavery. First, it brings fresh perspectives to the studies of Sufism outside of ṭarīqa (Sufi orders). Second, it contributes to the studies of Saharan slavery by exploring enslaved Muslims’ experiences beyond the practice of illicit magic, and also as part of how they exercised their saintly authority as empowered agents. In the process, it analyzes the interplay among Islam, race, and slavery in the nineteenth-century Sahara.

Islam, Modernity, and the Question of Religious Heterodoxy

This chapter undertakes a comparative and historical inquiry to address the role of sharia in shaping concrete state responses toward managing “heterodox” religious communities across time and space. The aim of this inquiry is, first, to undertake a critique of civilizational analyses that seek to capture supposedly essential features of Muslim societies, and second, to underscore the marginal role of sharia in adjudicating issues related to religious heterodoxy in both early modern empires and modern Muslim states. It analyzes, first, how Muslim rulers in two early modern Muslim empires, Safavid Iran and Mughal India, dealt with the same heterodox group, the Nuqtavi Sufi order. Next, it focuses on how two contemporary Muslim-majority states that emerged from these empires, Iran and Pakistan, have sought to regulate and discipline “heretical” groups in their midst—Baha’is in Iran and the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan. The analysis opens space for formulating alternative accounts of transitions to modernity that are not beholden to teleological Eurocentric notions that normalize notions of unredeemable and non-usable pasts and always-already open and progressive futures.

Siwa Oasis

The Siwa Oasis is located in Egypt’s Western Desert and lies about 50 kilometers east of the Libyan border and 300 kilometers south of the Mediterranean coast. The oasis has been renowned since ancient times for the presence of a temple, built during the Twenty-Sixth Pharaonic Dynasty (664–525 BCE), which hosted the oracle of the god Ammon and allegedly attracted the visit of Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. Apart from scattered descriptions, little is known about the history of Siwa in the Middle Ages. Archaeological and linguistic research has, however, yielded useful insights on the history of the oasis, on the movements of its inhabitants, and on their contacts with the wider world, while information about life in the oasis between the 18th and the 20th centuries can be found in numerous travel accounts composed mainly by European officials, geographers, and travelers and in a few anthropological studies. Siwa was formally brought under Egyptian control in 1820 by Muhammad Ali, but it remained strongly attached to Benghazi. During the 19th century, the Sanussiyya, an Islamic sufi order with headquarters in the neighboring oasis of Al-Jaghbub, acquired considerable political power, and it played an important role in the effective incorporation of Siwa into Egypt during the 19th and the 20th centuries. Today, Siwa and the smaller oasis of El-Gara, which lies about 100 km to the northeast, form a municipality within the Governorate of Marsa Matruh, with over 31,000 inhabitants (2019 official census by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics). The municipality hosts the easternmost Berber-speaking community, whose language, called Siwi, shares many linguistic features with the languages of Sokna and El Fogaha in Libya, partially also with the Zenati group, and which has been heavily influenced by Arabic. While the majority of the population of Siwa is Berber, the oasis is also home to a Bedouin community related to the Awlad Ali, the Shahibaat, as well as to a growing number of other Egyptian settlers. Currently the entire population of the oasis speaks Arabic as either a first or a second language. For centuries, the economy of the oasis relied almost exclusively on its natural and agricultural resources, specifically on its abundant spring water and date palms as well as the fine fruits from the latter, which are central to the life of the community. More recently, however, tourism and its corollary activities have gained considerable importance in Siwa’s economy, and they have contributed to redistributing wealth within the community and reshaping the landscape of the oasis. We would like to thank Sergio Volpi, the founder of the association Le Royaumes des Deux Déserts and the Black Lions Library in Siwa for sharing with us the copies of some works not available otherwise. We also thank the anonymous reviewer for suggesting works that we had initially overlooked and for other valuable comments and remarks.

Suluk as Social Piety: Phenomenological Studies at the Naqsabandiyah Khalidiyah Sufi Order In Sokaraja Banyumas

Suluk is the most important ritual in the Sufi order by zikr and getting closer to the Creator, usually by leaving the activities public. However, there are data and facts that prove that Suluk actually encourages active efforts to improve the community's social life. The Naqshabandiyah Khalidiyah Sokaraja Banyumas Order is one of the Sufi order that pays attention to suluk, which is carried out in peguron by a spiritual guide for ten to forty days. Consistency in carrying out the practice and discipline will make a pious person mentally-spiritually so that he becomes an example in the social life of the community. Sometimes it creates a negative stigma against Sufi order, but Suluk gives birth the benefits of improving spiritual and social qualities. Suluk is not isolating from social life just for worship absolutely without limits, but becoming a medium of self-purification to become a Muslim who has mental and spiritual readiness to live a better in the midst of social life with social piety.

Embodied Religious Belief: The Experience of Syahadatain Sufi Order in Indonesia

Several types of research on religion in Indonesia emphasise more on religious knowledge and belief and less on other approaches such as material aspects. Religion is always related to material aspects such as mosque buildings, veils or robes for prayer, or holy water obtained from grave visitors. This study uses embodiment approach and material theory of religion to the imposition of special fashion in prayer that gives consequences on awareness and attitude of a new morality in-group cohesion. This study is a case study through participatory observations and interviews of new members of Syahadatain congregation, Cirebon, Indonesia for three years. The result of the study shows two significant findings namely first, the establishment of rituals through special fashions exerts an influence on discursive awareness and moral behaviour; and second, the driving factor of the emergence of new moral behaviour from the practice is the social gaze. This study recommends the need for the study of material artifacts such as clothing can be an alternative to the study of religion in Indonesia using the embodiment approach.