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Title: Antinomians and Nonconformists
Author: Ahmet Karamustafa
Date: 2007
Language: en
Topics: Islam, history, proto-anarchism
Source: Retrieved on 18th May 2021 from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1s4744s
Notes: Excerpt from Chapter 6 of Sufism: The Formative Period, which discusses the anarchist tendencies of certain Sufis in 9th century Iraq.

Ahmet Karamustafa

Antinomians and Nonconformists

The early Sufis of the third/ninth century occupied a peculiar place in

the social and mental world of Islamic Iraq. Unlike many itinerant

renunciants who roamed the countryside, the Sufis firmly implanted

themselves into the major urban centres of Baghdad and Basra, yet they

were not altogether ‘mainstream’ and harboured anti-social and

antinomian tendencies side by side with socially and legally-conformist

ones. Socially, their nonconformist strains included distinct strands of

celibacy, vegetarianism, avoidance of gainful employment, withdrawal and

seclusion, as well as a certain proclivity for outlandish even

outrageous behaviour (Nuri and Shibli stand out in this regard), though

these were not universally accepted or practised by all or even most

Sufis. Other characteristic Sufi practices and beliefs, notably sama –

which tended to be a peculiar blend of music, poetry and dance – and

discourses of closeness to God, did not necessarily deviate from the

social mainstream and may have even been popular, yet they could be

legally and theologically suspect. In this sense, the Sufis of Iraq, who

can be said to have harboured anarchist tendencies, were among the

social and intellectual avant-garde of early Islam.

As an inward-orientated form of piety, Sufism contained an intensely

self-critical strain from its very beginnings, and astute Sufi observers

who surveyed the Sufi scene tackled the task of disentangling the

‘questionable and undesirable’ elements of their heritage from its

‘genuine’ solid core. On this front, Sarraj and Hujwiri stand out as

forthright and honest surveyors of the whole canvas of Sufism who

documented and discussed critically the contentious aspects of their

tradition without making any undue compromises from what they considered

to be its core (which, for them, definitely included sama – but not

dance – and discourses of proximity and special access to God). The

oeuvre of Ansari and Sulami, both inclusive and expansive, are also

revealing in this regard. Kalabadhi and Qushayri, however, were more

circumspect; they had a somewhat less inclusive and ‘sanitised’ picture

of Sufism, one that was so closely aligned with their scholarly

predilections that there was little room left for unruly elements.

Naturally, Sufis were not the only ones to write critically on Sufi

subjects. As Sufism became socially more prominent, it caught the

attention of ‘outsiders’ who recorded their reactions to this form of

pious living in their works, mostly in the form of brief incidental

comments. Since Sufism of Iraq first emerged as a synthesis of

pre-existing strands of piety, it is not surprising that some of the

themes sounded by its outsider critics had precedents in earlier

‘heresiographical’ literature. A revealing example is the following

passage on heretics called ‘pneumatics’ (ru˙aniyya) from Abu ‘asim

Khushaysh ibn Asram al-Nasa’i’s (d. 253/867) Kitab al-istiqama fi

’l-sunna wa al-radd ‘ala ahl al-ahwa (The Book of Sound Tradition and

Refutation of Dissenters):

They are so called because they believe that their spirits see the

malakut [‘the divine dominion’] of the heavens, that they see the

pasture of paradise, and further, that they have sexual intercourse with

the houris. Furthermore, they believe that they wander with their

spirits in paradise. They are also called fi kriyya [‘meditationists’]

because they meditate and believe that in their meditation they can

reach God in reality. Thus they make their meditation the object of

their devotions and of their striving towards God. In their meditation

they see this goal by means of their spirit, through God speaking to

them directly, passing his hand gently over them, and – as they believe

– looking upon them directly, while they have intercourse with the

houris and dally with them as they lay upon their couches, and while

eternally young boys bring them food and drink and exquisite fruit.[1]

Khushaysh proceeded to report on other groups of mystics.

Other mystics teach that when love of God has supplanted all other

attachments in the heart (khulla), legal bans are no longer valid

(rukhas). And some teach a method of ascetic training (especially of the

diet) that so mortifies yearnings for the flesh that when the training

is finished the ‘ascetic’ gains licence to everything (iba˙a). Another

group maintains that the heart is distracted when mortification becomes

too vigorous; it is better to yield immediately to one’s inclinations;

the heart, having experienced vanity, can then detach itself from vain

things without regret. One last group affirms that renunciation (zuhd)

is applicable only to things forbidden by religious law, that enjoying

permitted wealth is good and riches are superior to poverty.[2]

Such criticisms, when directed against mystics, normally gravitated

toward the major generic accusations of iba˙a, ‘permissivism and

antinomianism’, and ˙ulul, ‘incarnationism or inherence of the Divine in

the material world, especially in human form’. To these was added,

especially by the Mu’tazila and Shi’a, the charges of obscurantist

anti-rationalism, making ‘false claims’ to work miracles as well as rash

dismissal of discursive learning. It was against the backdrop of these

general accusations that specific Sufi practices such as sama’, tearing

the cloak in ecstasy, and searching for manifestations of God in the

creation – most notoriously in the form of ‘gazing at beardless youths’

– came under fire from critics of Sufism. Such frontal attacks against

Sufism began to appear from very early on, with the Mu’tazila and the

Twelver Shi’a explicitly attacking Sufis already during the fourth/tenth

century, but they crescendoed only in the sixth/twelfth century with two

critical chapters in the Tabsirat al-‘awamm fi ma’rifat maqalat al-anam

(Instructions for the Common People concerning the Knowledge of Human

Discourses) of the Twelver Shi’i Jamal al-Din al-Murtada al-Razi(lived

first half of sixth/twelfth century) and a long chapter contained in the

famous Óanbali preacher and writer ‘Abd al-Ra˙man ibn ‘Ali Ibn

al-Jawzi’s (510–97/1126–1200) polemical work Talbis Iblis (The Devil’s

Delusion).

Jamal al-Din al-Murtada divided the Sufis into six sects: (1) those who

believed in unifi cation with God (itti˙ad); here, he specifically named

Óallaj, Bastami and Shibli; (2) lovers (‘ushshaq); these thought that

only God was worthy of love; (3) Nuriyya (the ‘Light Sect’) who believed

that two kinds of veils existed between humanity and God, one of light,

and the other of fi re; those who were veiled by light were to be

condemned because they falsely belittled Paradise and Hell, while those

who were veiled by fi re were positively followers of Satan, who was

himself made of fi re; (4) Wasiliyya (the ‘Attainers’), who attained

union with God and thus saw no need to observe religious duties; (5)

those who were against books and learning; and (6) those who cared only

for sensual pleasures such as eating, dancing, and wearing nice clothes.

In a separate chapter, al-Razi scrutinised the work of Qushayri’ and

took the Sufis to task for sanctioning sama’, believing in incarnation,

misunderstanding walaya (which he thought was reserved only for the

Shi’i imam s), and falsely claiming to perform miracles, while they only

engaged in sorcery (si˙r).[3]

Compared to al-Razi’s criticism of the Sufi s, Ibn al-Jawzi’s

denunciation of Sufism was at once more substantive and better informed.

In The Devil’s Delusion, Ibn al-Jawzi set out to document and expose the

delusions that the Devil worked on different social groups, including

philosophers, theologians, jurists, ˙adith experts and rulers, but he

reserved his longest chapter to cataloguing the errors of the Sufis.[4]

The beginning of this chapter is revealing about how Ibn al-Jawzi

classifi ed Sufis:

The Sufis belong to the renunciants. We already described the delusions

the devil works on the renunciants [in the chapter that precedes this

one], but the Sufis are distinguished from them by certain qualities and

states and are marked by [special] characteristics, and we need to

discuss them separately. Sufism started out as a path of renunciation,

but later its adherents allowed themselves sama’ and dance. Those who

seek the next world from among the common people began to view them

favourably on account of their renunciation, and those who seek after

this world looked upon them with favour when they saw how they [the Sufi

s] enjoyed comfort and amusement.[5]

Clearly, in Ibn al-Jawzi’s eyes the Sufis were a special branch of

renunciants. They were distinguished from the renunciants by their

distinctive practices and beliefs. These, which Ibn al-Jawzi proceeded

to discuss in separate sections, included the following practices:

sama’; ecstasy; dance and hand-clapping; gazing at beardless youths; an

excessive concern for cleanliness and ritual purity; dwelling in lodges;

celibacy; giving up property; wearing fuwat, ‘aprons’, and muraqqa’a,

‘patched cloak’; investiture with the cloak; refraining from eating

meat; rejection of trade and employment; withdrawal from society through

solitude and seclusion; abandoning marriage and desire of children;

travelling without provisions with no particular destination, sometimes

in solitude and walking at night; avoiding medical treatment; refusal to

mourn the death of close companions; abandoning scholarship.They also

included the following beliefs: distinction between ‘ilm al-batin ‘inner

knowledge’, and ‘ilm al-Ωahir, ‘outer knowledge’, this latter equated

with ‘ilm al-shari’a ‘knowledge of the shari’a; ‘loving God

passionately’ (‘ishq); visions of angels, jinns, demons, and even God in

this world.

These practices and beliefs were indeed associated with Sufism, even

though no single Sufi necessarily accepted all of them. Ibn al-Jawzi,

for his part, rejected them as reprehensible innovations (bid’a, pl.

bida’) and attempted to prove his case with the help of reliable

˙adith.[6] He was most unhappy with how the Sufis, in his eyes,

undermined the supremacy of the shari’a by their claim to possess an

‘inner knowledge’. The distinction that the Sufis drew between shari’a

and ˙aqiqa, ‘reality’, he argued, was patently wrong since the two were

completely identical, and, contrary to Sufi views, inspiration (ilham)

was not a separate means of communication with God but was simply the

result of genuine knowledge (‘ilm). It was clear to Ibn al-Jawzi that

the Devil had succeeded in deluding the Sufis mainly by diverting them

from discursive knowledge.

Interestingly, Ibn al-Jawzi’s criticism of the Sufis sounded like the

self-critical remarks of Sarraj, Hujwiri and Abu Óamid Ghazali. In his

discussion of dress, for instance, Ibn al-Jawzi lashed out against

formalism and, criticising the Sufi fascination with patched cloaks, he

was moved to state, ‘Sufism is a concept not a form!’[7] Particularly

telling in this regard is his account of ‘libertines’ who discredited

the Sufis.[8] According to Ibn al-Jawzi, certain antinomians and

libertines had infiltrated Sufism and assumed Sufi identities in order

to protect themselves by masking their true identities. These fell into

three classes: (1) outright infidels; (2) those who professed Islam but

followed their shaykhs without asking for any evidence or even ‘specious

arguments’ (shubha) about the legal-theological status of the acts they

were asked to perform [this is clearly a reflection of the elevation of

the training master’s authority to new heights during the lifetime of

Ibn al-Jawzi]; and (3) those who did produce ‘specious arguments’ for

their actions but were deluded by the devil into thinking that their

false arguments were sound. Ibn al-Jawzi reviewed and rejected six such

‘specious arguments’, all quasi-theological props for libertinism and

abolition of the shari’a, some of which recall the heresiographical

observations by Khushaysh quoted above. According to him, some justifi

ed their hedonism through predestinarian arguments; some argued that God

did not need our worship; some took refuge in God’s infinite mercy;

others gave up the effort to discipline the lower self as an

unattainable goal; and still others claimed to have transcended the law

by having successfully tamed their lower selves or by having experienced

clear signs of God’s approval of their behaviour in the form of

miraculous occurrences or visions and dreams.

In his decision to exclude libertines from the body of Sufism, Ibn

al-Jawzi was in agreement with most Sufi observers of the Sufi

landscape, who also sought to domesticate or eliminate the antinomian

trends interwoven into their tradition of piety. It is noteworthy that

the scope of Sufism as it was viewed by its most powerful critic largely

coincided with its scope as it was understood by its most astute

‘insider’ observers from Sarraj to Hujwiri. Ibn al-Jawzi rejected the

practices and beliefs that he associated with Sufism, while the Sufi

authorities evaluated them critically, endorsing many and ruling out

others, but outsider critics and insider ‘experts’ alike agreed on the

boundaries of the form of piety that they picked out for review. Ibn

al-Jawzi’s assault, in other words, was certainly directed at the right

target. The frontal nature of this attack was most obvious in Ibn

al-Jawzi’s account of various reprehensible actions of Sufi s, where the

author focused on the more notorious aspects of the lives of especially

Shibli and Nuri and related flagrantly-unconventional and shocking

anecdotes about them, with extreme disapproval.[9] In brief, Ibn

al-Jawzi found practically nothing to approve in Sufism, even though he

did not refrain from using statements of Sufis with approval if these

neatly fit into his arguments.

Remarkably, in his attempt to refute the whole of Sufism as

antinomianism plain and simple, Ibn al-Jawzi relied directly on the

views of the eminent scholar-Sufi Abu Óamid Ghazali. In his discussion

of libertines in particular, Ibn al-Jawzi reproduced materials that can

be traced back to the works of the ‘Proof of Islam’.

Indeed, since all six of the specious arguments and their correct

answers given by Ibn al-Jawzi in his Delusions appear in a Persian

treatise of Ghazali entitled The Idiocy of Antinomians (Óamaqat-i ahl-i

iba˙at), it is certain that Ibn al-Jawzi had access to an Arabic version

of Ghazali’s treatise or to another Arabic text that reproduced this

latter’s content.[10] For his part, Ghazali naturally did not write the

Idiocy of Antinomians as a refutation of Sufism, but he meant it instead

as an attack against antinomians who masqueraded as Sufi s. While

Ghazali debunked such ‘false’ Sufis and expostulated in several of his

other works the necessity of obeying the shari’a, the Idiocy was his

most extensive and vehement criticism of ‘permissivists’ (iba˙i s).[11]

In this treatise, Ghazali decried antinomians as the worst of all

people. Misled by lust and laziness, they had dropped all prescribed

ritual observances and embraced total sexual promiscuity. In so doing,

they had allowed themselves to become mere toys in the hands of Satan,

who used them to misguide others. Deprived of any critical faculty, they

had accepted Satan’s insinuation that scholarship was but a veil for

true seers such as themselves and had turned into venomous critics of

scholars. While admittedly not all such antinomians were

‘Sufi-pretenders’ (sufi-numa), Ghazali focused on these latter, for whom

he reserved his most ascerbic tone. Like the Sufis, these impostors

dressed in blue gowns or wore the patched cloak, shaved their

moustaches, and carried prayer-rugs and tooth-brushes but, unlike the

Sufis, they freely consumed wine, used illicit funds without shame and

availed themselves of all bodily pleasures. Ghazali discussed in some

detail eight ‘specious arguments’ (shubhat) that the Sufi -pretenders

produced, and he refuted them one by one (the two that were not directly

reproduced by Ibn al-Jawzi were the denial of after-life and the

argument that the true poverty meant the absence of all knowledge,

including knowledge of good and bad deeds or of paradise and hell!).

Irked beyond measure by these would-be Sufi libertines and their hostile

attitude towards scholarship, Ghazali the scholar-Sufi declared them

beyond the pale of Islam in no uncertain terms and advised political

rulers to exterminate ruthlessly these incorrigible sinners.

Who exactly were the libertines and antinomians associated with Sufism

that were universally rejected by Sufis and non-Sufi observers? It is

difficult to trace these shady characters, but Sarraj gave a full

listing of them in the ‘Book of Errors’ of his Light Flashes, under the

heading ‘On those who erred in fundamentals and were led to

misbelief’.[12] These included the following: (1) those who thought that

once mystics reached God they should be called ‘free’ instead of

‘Godservants’; (2) a group of Iraqis who thought that the Godservant

could not achieve true sincerity unless he ceased to pay attention to

how others viewed him and who thus proceeded to ignore social norms in

his actions, whether these were right or wrong; (3) those who placed

sainthood above prophecy on account of their baseless interpretation of

the Qur’anic story of Moses and Khidr (Qur’an, 18 [Kahf]: 60–82,

summarised in Chapter 4 above); (4) those who argued that all things

were permitted and that prohibition applied only to excessive licence

taken with others’ property; (5) those who believed in divine inherence

in a person; (6) those who understood discourse of ‘passing away’

(fana’) as the passing away of human nature; (7) a group in Syria and a

group in Basra (‘Abd al-Wa˙id ibn Zayd is named) who believed in vision

of God with the heart in this world; (8) those who believed that they

were permanently and perfectly pure; (9) those who believed that their

hearts contained divine lights that were uncreated; (10) those who

sought to avert blame from themselves when they incurred the punishments

laid down by the Qur’an and violated the custom of the Prophet by

arguing that they were compelled by God in all their actions; (11) those

who surmised that their closeness to God exempted them from observing

the same etiquette that they followed prior to achieving proximity to

the Divine; (12) a group in Baghdad who thought that in passing away

from their own qualities they had entered God’s qualities; (13) a group

in Iraq who claimed to lose all their senses in ecstasy and thus to

transcend sensory phenomena; (14) those who erred in their beliefs

concerning the spirit (ru˙), with many versions of this error listed,

most notably the belief in the uncreatedness of the spirit and the

belief in transmigration of spirits.

Sarraj did not claim to have personally seen all these groups, but there

is little doubt that they existed (although their detractors no doubt

exercised their imagination in their descriptions of them) and that they

were generally linked with Sufism. A contemporary of Sarraj, al-Mutahhar

ibn Êahir al-Maqdisi, who composed an historical work called Kitab

al-bad’ wa’l-ta’rikh around 355/966, gave the names of four Sufi groups

he came across as Óusniyya (˙usn means ‘beauty’), Malamatiyya,

Suqiyya/Sawqiyya – which should most likely be amended to Shawqiyya

(shawq ‘longing’) – and Ma’dhuriyya (ma’dhur ‘excused’). He made the

following observation about them:

These are characterised by the lack of any consistent system or clear

principles of faith. They make judgments according to their speculations

and imagination, and they constantly change their opinions. Some of them

believe in incarnationism (hulul), as I have heard one of them claim

that His habitation is in the cheeks of the beardless youth (murd). Some

of them believe in permissiveness (ibaha) and neglect the religious law,

and they do not heed those who blame them.[13]

Although it is possible to match these groups with those discussed by

Sarraj (for instance, Ma’dhuriyya possibly to be associated with numbers

4, 10, or 11; Husniyya with 7; Malamatiyya with 2 and 10; and Shawqiyya

with 13), it would be hazardous to attempt a one-to-one correspondence

on the basis of such meagre evidence. Noteworthy, however, is Maqdisi’s

use of the name ‘Malamati’ for those who neglected the law and were not

concerned with public blame. This is a different reading of the term

Malamati than in the case of the ‘Path of Blame’ in Nishapur. The

followers of this latter movement understood ‘blame’ primarily to mean

‘self-censure’, not ‘public censure’, and certainly did not neglect the

law. Nor is there strong evidence that they sought to discipline the

lower self by subjecting it to public blame through commission of

deliberate and conspicuous acts that violated social norms.[14] After

all, attracting public blame would have been contrary to their goal of

attaining complete public anonymity in an effort to conceal their true

spiritual state from all others and thus deny the nafs the opportunity

to gloat in public attention of any kind. It appears, however, that

sometime during the ascendancy of Iraq-orientated Sufism in Khurasan

during the fourth/tenth century, the term Malamati came to be applied

increasingly to real or imaginary libertines, who justified their social

and legal transgressions, genuinely or in dissimulation, either as

‘indifference to public blame occasioned by true sincerity’ (number 2 in

Sarraj’s list of errors above) or as ‘disciplining the lower self by

abasing it through public blame’. Maqdisi’s usage certainly reflects

this different use of the term outside Nishapur, and other independent

evidence corroborates his observation. In a work written by the Caspian

Zaydi Imam A˙mad ibn al-Óusayn al-Mu’ayyad bi’llah (d. 411/1021) that

apparently is ‘the earliest extant Zaydi literary reaction to Sufism’,

the author referred to some Sufis who called themselves ‘the people of

blame’ (ahl al-malama) and stated, ‘They claim that by involving

themselves in evil situations and committing reprehensible acts they

abase their ego, yet in reality they fall from the state of repentance

and may well revert to being offenders (fussaq)’.[15]

Sulami, who was a contemporary of al-Mu’ayyad bi’llah, seems oblivious

to this use of the term Malamati to designate libertines and portrays

the members of the Path of Blame as law-abiding mystics, but in spite of

his attempts at preserving the good name of his spiritual ancestors, the

name Malamati continues to be used during the fifth/eleventh century to

refer to antinomians who are indifferent to the shari’a. Not

surprisingly, Qushayri, whose conception of Sufism was carefully

circumscribed, mentioned the Malamatis of Nishapur only in passing in

three entries in the biographical section of his Treatise, possibly

because the term Malamati was already tainted with antinomianism in his

eyes, but Hujwiri devoted a whole chapter to the question of ‘blame’,

which is packed with interesting information.[16] Referring to the

Qur’anic locus of the concept of blame – Qur’an 5 [al-Ma’ida]: 54 that

refers to the Prophet and his companions, ‘they struggle in the path of

God and do not fear the blame of any blamer’ – Hujwiri reminded his

readers that ‘God’s elect [that is, prophets and saints] are

distinguished from the rest by public blame’ and that ‘public blame is

the sustenance of God’s friends’.[17] He then proceeded to differentiate

the different meanings of the concept with admirable clarity:

Blame is of three kinds: (1) [blame attached] to following the right

path, (2) blame [incurred] intentionally, (3) [blame attached] to

abandoning [the law]. Blame is attached to following the right path when

one who minds his own business, practises religion and abides by the

rules of social interaction, is blamed by the people; this is the way

people behave towards him but he is indifferent to all that. Intentional

blame is when one attracts great public esteem and becomes a centre of

attention, and his heart inclines towards that esteem and grows attached

to it, yet he wants to rid himself of the people and devote himself to

God, he incurs public blame by dissimulating a [blameworthy] act that is

not against the law so that people would turn away from him. Blame is

attached to abandoning the law when one is gripped in his nature by

infidelity and misbelief so that people say that he abandoned the law

and prophetic custom, while he thinks that he is walking the path of

blame.[18]

Hujwiri explained and endorsed the first two kinds, citing examples for

them, and rejected the third, decrying it as a ploy to win fame and

popularity. The proponents of this last kind often justified their

actions as a deliberate attempt on their part to abase the lower self,

and while Hujwiri thought that public blame could certainly have that

therapeutic effect – he proffered an example from his personal

experience about how being pelted with melon skins by formalist Sufis

saved him from a spiritual snare that had seized him – he could not

countenance such flagrant violation of the religious law.[19]

Hujwiri’s attitude toward blame was shared by other fifth/eleventh

century-and, later, sixth/twelfth-century figures who discussed the

concept. Both Ansari and Abu Óamid Ghazali, like Hujwiri, objected to

those who contravened the law in the name of malama, but accepted

shocking though licit acts in order to repel public attention and along

with it the desire for fame or good name (jah); Ghazali cited an unnamed

renunciant who began to eat voraciously when he was visited by the

political ruler in order to avert this latter’s attention from

himself.[20] The Zahiri traditionist and Sufi Mu˙ammad ibn Êahir

al-Maqdisi ‘Ibn al-Qaysarani’ (448–507/1058–1113) criticised Malamatis

of his time as antinomians.[21] Mu˙ammad ibn Munavvar, the biographer of

Abu Sa’id-i Abu’l-Khayr who wrote towards the end of the sixth/twelfth

century, quoted Abu Sa’id as having said, ‘The Malamati is he who, out

of love of God, does not fear whatever happens to him and does not care

about blame’.[22] At around the same time as Ibn Munavvar, Ibn al-Jawzi

decried Malamatis in much the same way as Hujwiri and Ghazali, though in

more caustic terms:

Certain Sufis, who are called the Malamatiyya, plunged into sins and

then said, ‘Our goal was to demote ourselves in the public eye in order

to be safe from the disaster of good name and hypocrisy.’ They are like

a man who fornicated with a woman and impregnated her, and when he was

asked, ‘Why didn’t you practise coitus interruptus (‘azl?)’ he replied,

‘I had heard that ‘azl is reprehensible.’ Then they told him, ‘And you

had not heard that fornication is prohibited?’ These ignorant people

have lost their standing with God and have forgotten that Muslims are

the witnesses of God on earth.[23]

Ibn al-Jawzi was in principle against intentional blame, and he stated

unequivocably, ‘it is no religious act for a man to humiliate himself in

public’.[24] He narrated with disapproval what he considered clear

examples of outrageous behaviour about, especially, Nuri and Shibli,

though he was mostly silent about similar behaviour of Sufis closer to

his own time. Like Hujwiri and Ghazali, however, he had no qualms about

pious exemplars repelling public attention for the right reasons, and he

repeated with approbation the anedote about the renunciant who pretended

to be a glutton in front of the political ruler.[25]

Were there really many libertines around who claimed to be Malamatis

during the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries? This question is

rendered more complex by the emergence, at this period, of other terms

that in time came to represent libertinism, notably darvish (Persian

‘pauper, beggar’) and qalandar (Persian, ‘uncouth’). Although the

linguistic origins of these terms, as well as the history of the social

types they designate, are obscure, it is likely that they were

originally used equally for regular beggars as well as for itinerant

renunciants who practised extreme tawakkul (‘trust in God’). Some of

these latter accepted charitable offerings without, however, actively

seeking charity, while others no doubt survived through active begging

or, at least, were commonly perceived as beggars. It is, therefore,

reasonable to see a confluence of voluntary and involuntary poverty, of

wandering renunciants and the destitute, in the origin of darvishs and

qalandars, even though the etymologies of the two terms remain

uncertain.[26]

During the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries, darvish seems to

have mostly retained its primary meaning of ‘poor, beggar’, but the term

must have already started to assume the added connotation of a

particular kind of piety characterised by itinerant mendicancy in this

period, since the use of the term in this sense and the image of a

wandering dervish – complete with his hallmark accoutrements of a

begging bowl (kashkul), a trumpet made from the horn of a ram or deer

(nafir or buq), a hat of felt (taj), a short axe or hatchet (tabarzin),

a patched bag (chanta), a gnarled staff (‘asa), an animal skin (pust),

and a rosary (tasbi˙) – is well attested from the late fifth/eleventh

century onwards.[27] The term qalandar may have had similar origins, but

unlike darvish, it came to be associated very early on with libertinism,

primarily because of the emergence of the qalandar as a peculiar

literary type in Persian poetry during the late fifth/eleventh and early

sixth/twelfth centuries, significantly, at the same time as the

appearance of the ghazal as a new poetic form. More properly, one should

talk of the emergence of a cluster of images organised around the

central character qalandar. This cluster, which finds its first

full-fledged expression in the poetry of Majdud ibn adam Sana’i (d.

525/1131), sometimes gelled into a separate genre called qalandariyyat,

but more commonly it existed as a free-floating bundle of imagery found

most conspicuously in lyric poetry but also in other poetic genres.

It was composed of several sets of images connected, most notably, to

the central themes of wine-drinking, sexual promiscuity, gambling and

playing games of backgammon and chess, and entering into non-Islamic,

especially Zoroastrian and Christian, cults, all located at the

kharabat, meaning literally ‘ruins’ but with the very real connotation

of ‘tavern’ and ‘brothel’. Through the use of this provocative cluster

woven around the figure of an unruly libertine, a highly-positive spin

was given to the qalandar’s way of life as the epitome of true piety

cleansed of all dissimulation and hypocrisy, and the qalandar (along

with his ‘look-alikes’, rind (‘heavy drinker’) and qallash (‘rascal’))

was portrayed as the truly sincere devotee of God unconcerned with ‘the

blame of blamers’, in other words, as the real Malamati.[28] In this

way, the term qalandar was brought within the orbit of the term

Malamati.

Did this intriguing poetic development reflect an actual social

phenomenon? In the absence of non-literary evidence about the qalandars

as social types before the seventh/thirteenth century when they are

attested as mendicant renunciants, it is impossible to answer this

question. As in the case of the darvish, the literary figure probably

did have some real counterpart already during the sixth/twelfth century,

possibly as a continuation of the earlier antinomians discussed above,

but this cannot be ascertained.[29] Apart from the issue of whether the

literary qalandar corresponded to some real libertines in

Persian-speaking Muslim communities, however, the flowering of the

kharabat cluster gives rise to another significant question: could this

new and potent poetic imagery be read as a literary commentary on the

state of Sufism during the time period under consideration? More

specifically, did the web of images spun around the figure of the

qalandar consitute a criticism of the new Sufi communities that had

taken shape under the leadership of powerful training masters? Indeed,

the emergence of the kharabat imagery in Persian poetry was most likely

the literary counterpart of Qushayri and Hujwiri’s theoretical critique

of the formalism that was so evident in the new Sufi social enterprises

built around increasingly more authoritarian training shaykhs resident

in their lodges. Whether it had an actual social base or not, the

kharabat complex was the poetic response to the khanaqah, and the

qalandars emerged as the authentic Sufis who were willing to sacrifice

absolutely everything for the sake of God, while those

khanaqah-residents actually called ‘Sufis’ were transformed in poetry to

mere ‘exoterists’ who had abandoned the search for God in their greed

for this world and thus had turned Sufism into a profitable social

profession. In this sense, the so-called Sufis of the lodge communities

were indistinguishable from all the other social types, such as the

˙adith-experts or the jurists of the madrasa s, that for most mystics

exemplified compromise, even corruption, of true piety because of their

willingness to translate their expertise in religion to social, economic

and political power.

It was for this reason that in the ‘strange looking glass’ of the

kharabat complex, ‘the norms and values of Sufi piety [were] all

reversed’, and the qalandar was elevated to the role of the genuine

mystic.[30] This complete role-reversal suggests that whether real or

imaginary, the antinomian, nonconformist edge of Sufism always

functioned as an indispensable mirror in which Sufis could look to see a

critical reflection of their true place in society and on the spiritual

path.

[1] Bernd Radtke, ‘Mystical union’, 189, translating from Abu’l-Óusayn

al-Malati, al-Tanbih wa al-radd ‘ala ahl al-ahwa’ wa al-bida’, ed. Sven

Dedering (Leipzig: Biblioteca Islamica, 1936), 73ff (the passage from

Khushaysh is on the margins).

[2] Massignon, Essay, 80, paraphrasing from Abu’l-Óusayn al-Malati,

al-Tanbih wa al-radd ‘ala ahl al-ahwa’ wa al-bida’, fols 160–7 (I

omitted personal names); German translation of relevant passages are

given in Bernd Radtke, Kritische Gänge, 261–2.

On Khushaysh, see Sezgin, Geschichte, 1: 600.

[3] Al-Razi’s attack against Sufis is summarised in Nasr Allah

Purjavadi, ‘Opposition to Sufism in Twelver Shiism’, in Islamic

Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics,

ed. F. de Jong and Bernd Radtke (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 615–19, on the

basis of chs 16 and 17 of his Tabsirat, ed. ‘Abbas Iqbal (Tehran,

1313/1934).

[4] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 211–487 (ch. 10); the last pages of this

chapter, 487–96, contain passages from an unidentifi ed work of Ibn

‘Aqil (431/1040–513/1119). Chapters 9 and 11 also contain material

relevant to Sufi s. An English translation by D. S. Margoliouth appeared

serially in Islamic Culture 9 (1935) to 12 (1938) and 19 (1945) to 22

(1948); I have used this in making my own translations. On Ibn al-Jawzi,

see ‘Ibn al-Djawzi, ‘Abd al-Ra˙man ibn ‘Ali’ EI 3: 751a–752a (H.

Laoust); his attitude toward Sufism is discussed in Makdisi, ‘Hanbali

school’, 69–71.

[5] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 211.

[6] The standard Sufi responses to the charge of bid’a was (1) to deny

the accusation and to prove that the practice in question was instead

‘recommended’ (sunna); this, for instance, was the strategy adopted by

most Sufi authors who discussed the question of sama’ though they

carefully circumscribed the practice with qualifi cations; for brief

overviews, see ‘Sama’, 1. In Music and Mysticism’, EI 8: 1018a–1019b (J.

During) as well as Arthur Gribetz, ‘The Sama’ controversy: Sufi vs.

legalist’, Studia Islamica 74 (1991): 43–62; and (2) to accept that the

practice under discussion was an innovation but to cast it as an

‘acceptable innovation’ and not a reprehensible one; this option was

adopted especially in the cases of wearing patched frocks, building

khanaqah s, and extended seclusion; see Meier, ‘Book of etiquette’,

52–3.

[7] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 244.

[8] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 479ff.

[9] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 460ff. Among other authories, Ibn al-Jawzi

relied on Sarraj in this section.

[10] An excellent recent edition of the Óamaqat is in Purjavadi, Du

mujaddid, 153–209; this now replaces the earlier published edition in

Otto Pretzl, Die Streitschrift. des Gazali gegen die Iba˙ija (Munich:

Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1933), 63–118. The overlap

between this work and Ibn al-Jawzi’s Delusions is also pointed out by

Hamid Algar in ‘Ebahiya’, EIr 7: 653–4.

[11] See, for instance, his Persian letter on the same subject in

Purjavadi, Du mujaddid, 139–45; Purjavadi discussess the contents of the

letter on pp. 126–38.

[12] Sarraj, Luma’, 410–35 / Schlaglichter, 584–602 (144–57).

[13] Sviri, ‘Óakim Tirmidhi’, 591, translating from Kitab al-bad’

wa’l-ta’rikh (Paris 1899), 5: 147. Sviri gives the reading ‘Óasaniyya’

and translates iba˙a as ‘promiscuity’.

[14] In Sulami’s treatise on them, the following statement of Abu Óafs

Óaddad is one of the rare statements that addresses the issue of public

blame: ‘They [the Malamatis] show to people their shameful deeds and

conceal from them their good qualities. And the people blame them for

their outer [behaviour] while they blame themselves for they know about

their inner [state]’, Sulami, Malamatiyya, 89. This is best understood

not as active commission of blameworthy acts but as non-concealment of

such acts that naturally occur. The Malamatis of Nishapur were more

concerned with avoiding praiseworthy acts than seeking to attract public

blame, cf. Sviri, ‘Óakim Tirmidhi’, 607.

[15]

W. Madelung, ‘Zaydi attitudes to Sufism’, in Islamic Mysticism

Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, ed. F.

de Jong and Bernd Radtke (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 126.

[16] Hujwiri, Kashf, 68–78 / Revelation, 62–9.

[17] Hujwiri, Kashf, 69–70 / Revelation, 62–3.

[18] Hujwiri, Kashf, 70–1 / cf. Revelation, 63–4.

[19] Hujwiri, Kashf, 77–8 / Revelation, 69.

[20] Ghazali, Kimiya, 2: 199; Ghazali, I˙ya’, 3: 304–5; Meier, Abu

Sa’id, 497.

[21] Purjavadi, Du mujaddid, 147, reporting from Ibn al-Qaysarani’s

Íafwat al-tasawwuf (Beirut, 1416/1995), 473. On this fi gure, see ‘Ibn

al- .Kaysarani’, EI 3: 821a (Joseph Schacht).

[22] Mu˙ammad ibn Munavvar, Asrar, 1: 288 / Secrets, 436; I have

corrected O’Kane’s ‘does not think of it as reproach’ to ‘does not care

about blame’. Graham, ‘Abu Sa’id’, 128 gives the right translation.

[23] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 468; see also 478.

[24] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 468.

[25] Ibn al-Jawzi, Talbis, 201–2.

[26] Cf. ‘Begging, ii. In Sufi Literature and Practice’, EIr 3: 81–2

(Algar).

[27] ‘Darviš, ii. In the Islamic Period’, EIr 7: 73–6 (H. Algar);

‘Darvish’, s.v. Lughatnama. Two early attestations of mendicant

dervishes are Hujwiri, Kashf, 432–79, esp. 449–53 / Revelation, 334–66,

esp. 345–7; and ‘Unsur al-Ma’ali, Qabusnama, 253; this book of counsel

was written in 475/1082–3.

[28]

J. T. P. de Bruijn, ‘The Qalandariyyat in Persian mystical poetry,

from Sana’i onwards’, in The Legacy of Medieval Persian

Sufism, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi

Publications, 1992), 75–86; Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry,

71–6.

[29] See Meier, Abu Sa’id, 494–516, and Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s

Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period,

1200–1550 (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1994), 31–8 for

more extended discussions.

[30] The quotes are from Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry, 76.