Practice and Proselytisation

In the previous two chapters I characterised the early Shādhilī collectivity as a textual community that traced its unique Sufi identity to the tarīqa of Abū l-Oasan al-Shādhilī. After the deaths of al-Shādhilī and Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Mursī this tarīqa was disseminated in Egypt primarily through Ibn ʿAtāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī's discursive construction across several different texts, especially Latāʾif al-minan, and through his public preaching. It was the subsequent repetition and collective performance of that tarīqa that institutionalised the eponymous identity of al-Shādhilī and constituted the institutionalised social field from which the Shādhilī tāʾifa developed. In Chapter 3 I argued that it was largely the efforts of the state– the rulers and the Sufis of the khānqāh– which brought their form of Sufism to the urban populace of Cairo. It was principally in public spaces that they collectively produced and popularised a culture of Sufism accessible across multiple strata of society. Key to my understanding of the processes of popularisation is this notion of mass or large-scale cultural production, which is necessarily collective and happens at multiple social sites. Therefore, given the widespread popularity of the Shādhilī tarīqa and subsequent tāʾifa, we must ask a similar question. How did the Shādhilīya collectively produce this particular culture of state-sanctioned tarīqa-based Sufism across the socio-economic spectrum? At what social sites did individuals come together to negotiate and contest the meanings of Shādhilī Sufism? What social and political conditions lent themselves to such production?

Since the early Shādhilī masters were only tacitly sanctioned by the state and its Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers, they could not and did not perform Sufism in the way that Sufis of the Saʿīd al-Su ʿadāʾ did, at least not in the beginning. Later Shādhilī-affiliated Sufis like the Wafāʾīya did parade publicly in ways similar to those who lived at the khānqāh, but not in these early years.1 And while the Sufis of the khānqāh were obliged to perform their state sponsorship in quite specific ways, the early Shādhilīya were free to promote their tarīqa in multiple ways as they saw fit. Likewise, the Shādhilī masters’ formulation of their authority was quite different from other groups. Al-Iskandarī predicated al-Shādhilī's authority on his sui generis sanctity and not on his learning, traditional silsila, initiatic investiture or genealogical descent.