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This chapter examines coverage of Iran and Iraq and shows how it has veered from underestimating the political force in Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s heterodox innovations to overestimating the political ambitions of Iraq’s Shi’ite leaders. It shows how ignorance about Shi’ite and Sunni beliefs and practices, including the role of Shi’ite shrines and Sufi brotherhoods, has led to misreporting major political divisions in Iraq, and even its day-to-day politics. In the process, the chapter gives an overview of current religious dynamics in both countries. It has become a commonplace that the American administration was insufficiently aware of the religious complexities of Iran and Iraq when it led the invasion of Iraq in 2003; it is less commonly noted that press coverage has suffered from the same problem.

The prophet Muhammad served as a model for those entering into marriage and celibacy is rejected as a human invention, although the Islamic tradition embodies exceptions with Sufism and its more negative attitudes toward the human body. Sufi groups used celibacy as a form of social protest. There is also a relation between forced celibacy and political power during the medieval period. In addition to certain Sufi groups, eunuchs represented another exception to the general negative Islamic attitude toward celibacy.

This concluding chapter recounts the overall arc of this book to show how colonial scholarship interpreted the precolonial, and then inflected particular strands of reformist Sufi self-critique into modernist discourse. The introduction of formalized techniques of Sufi learning was often tied to scholarly intolerance of popular variance that perhaps began as emulation of regal prerogatives. By the eighteenth century, increasingly intense connections between Asian courts and Middle Eastern centers of learning engendered appeals to the principle that normative legal practices should define the standard of Islam for most believers. Such appeals were accompanied by the embrace or rejection of foreigners and attempts to restrict Sufi knowledge to a learned elite who could sit in judgement over them.

There are numerous histories of Haider Shaikh, the fifteenth-century Sufi saint who founded the town. Comparing the various written and oral versions (published, unpublished, and interview accounts) of his life illustrates the rhetorical techniques through which various interlocutors memorialize the saint. Drawing on insights about the use of memory in the construction of history, this chapter explores how the saint’s life in its many versions generates a shared idiom of piety through which Malerkotla residents as well as pilgrims from outside the town are able to imagine and articulate Haider Shaikh’s legacy.

Islam in Senegal is at the threshold of political change, as a shift in power takes place among the Sufi brotherhoods (tariqa). Within the next decade, the growing Mouridiya brotherhood, founded by Amadou Bamba (1850–1927), is likely to overwhelm its rivals, such as the Tijaniya, an outgrowth of a Sufi mystical movement led by El Hajj Umar Tall, and later led by the Wolof cleric, Malik Sy (c.1855–1922). In the near term, the traditional symbiotic relationship between mosque and secular state is likely to continue as leaders on both sides act together and contain extremist Islamist tendencies and urban unrest. President Abdulaye Wade has adopted this balancing act policy in a country that is 94 % Muslim. Support of the Muslim community with its multiple interests is critical to Senegal's continued presence as a moderate, stable West African state. Issues facing the brotherhoods include unresolved succession questions affecting aging leaders, urbanization and growing population pressures, destructive agricultural practices, and social tensions, such as caste and class tensions.

This introductory chapter documents what is known of the process of Islamization across Indonesia and argues that the present knowledge is informed in large part by the acceptance of the retrospective framings and validations of seventeenth-century Sufi teachings that emphasized a mystical connection between the Prophet and a learned elite patronized by regal authorities. Numerous difficulties beset any attempt at plotting a straightforward history of the conversion and Islamization of Indonesia's many diverse peoples up to the middle of the eighteenth century. What does emerge is a sense that certain key courts took on the mantle of defenders of Islam and regularly sought validation from beyond their shores, most preferably from the person of the Prophet's lineal descendants in Mecca and the scholars associated with them. Regardless of how it was achieved or subsequently justified, Islamization brought the power of international connections that linked the Indian Ocean and China Sea ever more closely together.

This chapter examines how, in the eighteenth century, more formalized structures of learning were established in the archipelago as Southeast Asian scholars began to participate increasingly in Middle Eastern networks. It describes a subsequent eighteenth-century trend; namely a reaction to the popularity of the Medina-oriented muhaqqiqin that would lay the groundwork for what would become the standard Islamic curriculum of Southeast Asia. This was particularly clear in the wealthy port of Palembang, where the Sammaniyya order would play its part in developing Sufi scholarship and correctives. Yet again emphasis would be placed on restricting access to abstruse philosophical treatises to an elect and discouraging the dissemination of popular earlier texts and allied romances, which the Malays would nonetheless continue to support.

This chapter discusses the rise, largely in the nineteenth century, of a new form of populist authority that expanded the scope of Islamic activity beyond the reach of ever more marginalized courts. Indonesian Islam, supported in some instances by a growing native economy, moves away from court-mandated orthodoxy towards a closer connection with Mecca and the Middle East mediated by independent teachers. In some instances, these independent religious masters were able to prosper and to adapt to new modes of Sufi organization that saw the adoption of the tariqas in favor in the Ottoman Empire. By the century's end, the Naqshbandis in particular were exploring new ways of broadening their constituencies. These included somewhat controversial short-courses of instruction and the dissemination of printed materials that were increasingly available to a pesantren-schooled section of the public.

This chapter shows that a parallel framing of the Indies as a missionary field was crucial in informing, and sometimes challenging the colonial enterprises. In many instances, Dutch missionaries saw a chance for Christianizing the natives given what appeared to them as the natives' weak understanding and practice of Islam, arguing that the Javanese could not be considered Muslims for their “Islam” fell far short of the Islam they knew from the texts edited by their teachers in Delft. More crucially, however, one can see in their writings tangential and certainly unintended evidence of an active engagement with new modes of thinking, with printing, and with Sufi practices imported from the Middle East—practices that were leading some Javanese to label their neighbors ruddy abangan (red ones) while they themselves identified as spotless putihan (white ones). If anything was clear by 1888, it was that Dutch knowledge of Islam was outdated and far too oriented towards texts above contexts.

This chapter discusses the position of those who opposed Snouck's authority, seeing his “ethical” policies for the modernization of the Muslim Indies as a part of a longer-term project of Christianization. In his role as unofficial mufti of the undeniably Muslim Netherlands Indies, Snouck was perceived as servant to state and Islam alike. Such services would irritate the missionaries who had originally provided the scholar with his ethnographic data and a warm welcome. They also angered those Muslims who were not the direct beneficiaries of his policies, most especially those with an interest in connecting with the Ottoman Empire and its periodicals. To that end, it is ironic that their globally oriented attacks on the Dutchman were framed in terms of policing the boundaries of Sufi practice supposedly transgressed by Hasan Mustafa. Moreover, while the missionaries thought Snouck was Islamizing Java, some Arabs feared that his projects were geared to easing a path for Christianity.

This chapter expands on the book’s interpretive framework by examining two travel accounts written by nondiplomats—a dervish and a merchant—near the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter argues that the diversification of travelers’ accounts and their distance from the official discourse of the Qajar state allowed for the appearance in the European travelogues of both criticisms of Iran and Iranians, and also of Europe. Travel accounts began to reflect an emerging oppositional discourse of self-deficiency and/or fear over the loss of authenticity, which eventually intersected with the constitutionalists’ call for the reform of the dynasty and the eventual creation of a constitutional monarchy.

The chapter offers a critique of the continuing influence of Lajwanti Rama Krishna’s pioneering English-language monograph Panjabi Sufi Poets (1938). It is argued that consequent misunderstandings of both pre-modern Punjabi literary history and of the Islamic character of early Punjabi Sufi poetry may be corrected by taking account of comparative evidence, including the better preserved later textual and hagiographic materials which are available for the major Sufi poets of the nineteenth century. The comparison with early Sindhi literature is used to illuminate the character of the first Punjabi Sufi poetry by Farid. It is then argued that the major poets of the Mughal period (Shah Husain, Sultan Bahu, and Bullhe Shah) are each to be understood in their own terms, as Sufis rather than as exponents of some universalized Indian spiritual understanding.

This chapter explores the devotional world of the Gulabdasi panth, a nineteenth century sect of Punjab, through varied interpretations of Gulabdas’ life, and by reading the writings of one of his followers, Piro. Piro, a Muslim prostitute of Lahore who came to live in the Gulabdasi establishment, portrayed her story as embedded in Hindu-Muslim dissension. At the same time the theology, cultural expression and social practice of the Gulabdasis indicated a plethora of influences on them: monism of Vedanta via Sikh ascetic sects; bhakti literary and devotional practices; Sufi emotional states and philosophical ideas. The chapter examines the significance of deploying a term like syncretism to understand the theological equivalences and cultural conversations between different religious traditions of Punjab. They suggests that religious conflict, as highlighted by Piro in her personal tale, did not negate pluralistic attitudes, and could even reveal shared ethics and cultural values.

Punjab is often treated in both media and scholarship as a perennially conflicted region, but this is only a fraction of a more complex story of coexistence between multiple religious groups. Among the stages upon which interreligious interaction takes place are the myriad shared sacred sites that proliferate from Multan to Malerkotla. This chapter is an examination of effective interactive choreography at three shared sites, illuminating modes, systems, and strategies of exchange that substantively contribute to, or detract from, the production and perpetuation of peace. It focuses on the ritual, narrative, and administrative arenas of exchange that are produced and grounded in shared sacred sites. All three sites are in Punjab with clientele and custodians who are from various religious backgrounds: one is a dargah (tomb shrine of a Sufi saint), another is a shrine memorializing a Sufi saint's presence in the region, and the last is a maseet (mosque).

This chapter introduces Ibrahim Niasse on the basis of hagiographical sources, offering insights into both scholarly and popular representations of Niasse's career. It focuses on the first three decades of his life, using accounts of his childhood and training to highlight the milieu in which he grew up. It then discusses the “emergence of the flood (fayda),” the pivotal moment that triggered Niasse's movement. An exposition of Sufi cosmology, particularly the notion of fayd (“emanation”) as represented in the thought of Ibn al-Arabi and Ahmad al-Tijani, is followed by an analysis of Niasse's magnum opus Kashif al-ilbas. Niasse wrote this book to justify his claim to be “the bringer of the flood,” who would lead a massive expansion of the Tijaniyya by opening up ways to deeper mystical experiences. The chapter also highlights the reception of the fayda motive as reflected in popular hagiographical literature and poetry.