Introduction

After Saladin opened the Saʿīd al-Su ʿadāʾ Cairo was infused with many hundreds of juridical Sufis from the East. This immigration had a profound impact on the social and religious fabric of the city. Upon their arrival these individuals lived and worked in the very heart of urban Cairo, the bayn al-qa‚ rayn district. While the Sufis were obliged to spend portions of their day engaged in devotions within the walls of the khānqāh, they were not required to sequester themselves. They performed public rituals every evening, they paraded through the streets of Cairo every Friday, and they frequented the city's many madrasas, mosques and teaching circles. Locals also came to the khānqāh to study with them on site. All these practices contributed to the popularisation of Sufism on a large scale in Cairo. But what exactly where these Sufis popularising? As I noted in the previous chapter, they were not representatives of any specific initiatic lineage or †arīqa. Nor were they known for being miracle workers. Rather, if these Sufis promoted a particular type of Sufism it was a non-initiatic juridical Sufism that was explicitly oriented to a Shāfiʿī (and to a lesser extent Mālikī) and Ashʿarī worldview and epistemology. Their primary idiom of authority was that of scholarship and jurisprudence, with which they articulated their place in the world, their relationship to the state and their connection to Sufism. In order to understand how the Sufis of the Saʿīd al-Su ʿadāʾ contributed to the popularisation of Sufism in Egypt, then, we must not only focus on the specific practical forms and modes of cultural production that characterised their performances. We must also be attendant to how these were authorised by and contributed to the organisational aims of the politicised space of the khānqāh.

In the Introduction I argued that a theoretically useful exploration of the question of popularisation will dissolve categorical divisions of elite/popular, high/low, jurist/Sufi, and focus instead on the modes of production of a truly popular culture in which multiple members of society participated.