Last updated 27/06/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
The image of the Ayatollah Khomeini is inextricably bound up with the popular conception of Islam today. This view of Islam as a religion of fanaticism and violence ignores the existence of a powerful mystical strand in the form of Sufism in which a philosophy of love is central. Between 1980 and 1981, as part of my doctoral research, I spent six months in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, living with the pupils of a Sufi sheik. This group had millenarian beliefs which acted, not as a means of violent insurrection, but rather as a means of reconciling the contradictory and often violent forces to which they were subjected.
(1) The ulema (‘ulamā’) are the doctors of religious law in Islam.
(2) These are examined by Gellner, E., in ‘A pendulum swing theory of Islam’ in Muslim Society (London 1981).Google Scholar
(3) Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1949).Google Scholar
(4) Gellner, E., Saints of the Atlas (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969).Google Scholar
(5) Birge, J. K., The Bektashi Order of Dervishes (London, Luzak and Co., 1937).Google Scholar
(6) Abun-Nasr, J., The Tijaniyya: a Sufi Order in the modern world (London, Oxford University Press, 1965).Google Scholar
(7) De Jong, F., Turuq and Turuq-Linked Institutions in 19th Century Egypt (Leiden, Brill, 1978).Google Scholar
(8) Cruise O'Brien, B., The Mourids of Senegal (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971)Google Scholar and Saints and Politicians (London, Cambridge University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Behrman, L. C., Muslim Brotherhoods and Politics in Senegal (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paden, J., Religion and Political Culture in Kano (California, Berkeley, 1973).Google Scholar
(9) Abun-Nasr, J., op. cit.; Bennigsen, in Azrael, J. (ed.), Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (1978).Google Scholar
(10) Gellner, E. (1981), op. cit. p. 165.
(11) Hourani, A., Rashid Rida and the Sufi Orders: a footnote to Laoust, Bulletin d'Études orientales, XXIX (1977)Google Scholar: Mélanges offerts à Henri Laoust, Vol. 1, p. 241. Gilsenan, M., Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt (London, Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar provides an account of a contemporary Order in Egypt.
(12) Durnaqa, M. A., The Sufi Orders in Tripoli, Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of St. Joseph (Beirut 1980).Google Scholar
(13) Ibid.
(14) Gulick, J., Tripoli: a modern Arab city (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(15) The Europe World Year Book, Vol. II (London, Europa Publications Ltd, 1989).Google Scholar
(16) Hadith are the reports of the speech and behaviour of the Prophet Muhammad which were kept as a verbal tradition until two centuries after his death when Muslims began to make written collections of them.
(17) In the two most authoritative hadith collections of Muslim and Bukhari only a ‘Caliph of Allah’ is mentioned, but in other hadith collections, such as those of Abu Da'ud and Tirmidhi, he is referred to as ‘the Mahdi’.
(18) Macdonald, D. B., The Mahdi, in Houtsma, M. T. et al. (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, E. J. Brill and London, Luzac, 1913–1918), pp. 111–115.Google Scholar
(19) Khaldun, Ibn, The Muqaddimah, transl. Rosenthal, F., 3 vols (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), Vol. II, p. 196.Google Scholar
(20) Macdonald, D. B., op. cit. p. 113.
(21) Hurgronje, C. S., Der Mahdi. Revue Coloniale Internationale [Amsterdam], I (1886), p. 23.Google Scholar
(22) This is the argument contained in Worsley, P., The Trumpet Shall Sound (London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1957)Google Scholar; Cohn, N., The Pursuit of the Millennium (London, Secker and Warburg, 1957)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E., Primitive Rebels (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1959).Google Scholar
(23) Trimingham, J. S., Islam in the Sudan (London 1966), p. 78.Google Scholar
(24) Paden, J., op. cit. p. 171.
(25) Ibid, p. 138.
(26) Sheik Nazim is the head of his branch of the Naqshbandi Order.
(27) The area between Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
(28) Hadith vary as to the exact location of his appearance.
(29) In the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim only Mecca and Medina are afforded protection.
(30) Sheik Nazim's description of the appearance of ' Isa is a combination of two hadith found in Muslim, , Sahih Muslim, Transl. Siddiqi, Abdul Hamid. 4 vols (Lahore, Sheik Muhammad Ashraf, 1976), pp. 94, 1517–8.Google Scholar
(31) Sheik ' Abdullah Daghestani was a native of Daghestan in the Caucasus in what is now the USSR, and spoke a Turkish dialect. His knowledge of Arabic was very limited.
(32) This prophecy is contained in Muslim, op. cit. p. 1510.
(33) Ibid. p. 1506.
(34) Ibid. p. 1527 and p. 1520–1.
(35) This point is disputed by Hamid Algar who says that Sheik 'Abdullah Daghestani's fervent belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi was emphasized by him to a far greater extent than by his teachers and that it led to his separation from them (verbal communication).
(36) Talmon, Y., Millenarian Movements, Archives européennes de sociologie, VII (1966), p. 166.Google Scholar
(37) Worsley, P., op. cit.
(38) Cohn, N., op. cit.
(39) Engels, , The Peasant War in Germany (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969).Google Scholar
(40) Hobsbawm, E., op. cit.
(41) Unless otherwise indicated, all reported speech of informants, including that of Sheik Nazim, was recorded during the period of research between 1980 and 1981 in London, Tripoli and Damascus.
(42) Worsley, P., op. cit. pp. 221–256.
(43) Adil, M. N., Mercy Oceans, Vol. I (1980), p. 71.Google Scholar This is a privately published collection of Sheik Nazim's talks.
(44) In shā' Allah means ‘If Allah wills it to be so’. Devout Muslims preface any statement about future activity with this phrase. It indicates that the speaker recognizes the ultimate subjection of his or her will to that of Allah's. Therefore a Muslim using this phrase is expressing a hope and an intention, rather than a certainty, that the event referred to will occur.
(45) Talmon, Y., op. cit. p. 182.
(46) Koury, E. M., The Crisis in the Lebanese System (Washington, American Enterprise for Public Policy Research, 1976), pp. 31–35.Google Scholar
(47) The period of research was one of relative peace in Tripoli. Events since that time, including the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon the Palestinian intifada in the West Bank, and the renewed civil war have resulted in fresh turmoil. For obvious reasons, I have been unable to observe what effect these have had on Sheik Nazim's following in Tripoli.
(48) Trimingham, J. S., The Sufi Orders in Islam (London, Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 176Google Scholar; Lings, M., What is Sufism? (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1975), p. 28.Google Scholar
(49) Mitchell, R., The Muslim Brotherhood (London, Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. In Recognising Islam (London, Croom Helm, 1982, p. 248)Google ScholarPubMed Gilsenan examines the role of the petite bourgeoisie in contemporary Muslim religious movements.
(50) GuliCK, J., op. cit. p. 30.
(51) Koury, E. M., op. cit. p. 58.
(52) Ibid. p. 31.
(53) ‘When Allah's succour and the triumph cometh
And thou sees't mankind entering the religion of Allah in troops.
Then hymn the praises of thy Lord and seek forgiveness of Him.
Lo! He is ever ready to show Mercy' (‘The Light’, XXIV, 55. Transl. M. Pickthall).
(54) Only two of the twenty-six murids had been involved in active prolonged political participation. Most had little or no interest in politics and a number regarded active political involvements as anathema.
(55) Worsley, P., op. cit. p. 248.
(56) Adil, M. N., op. cit. p. 37–8.
(57) Transl. M. Pickthall.
(58) There was, in fact, some confusion amongst the murids as to whether it was Jesus or the Mahdi who killed Dajjal. In the hadith it is Jesus.
(59) For example, see Faruqi, B. A., The Mujaddid's Conception of Tawhid (Lahore, Sheik Muhammad Ashraf, 1970).Google Scholar
(60) For example, see Corbin, H., Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar. Originale title: Corps spirituel et terre céleste (Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 1960 & 1979).Google Scholar
