God's Unruly Friends

With Pater's flexible definition of Romanticism, one can ask whether it makes sense to consider Dervish groups in the Islamic Middle Period (1200-1550) as Muslim Romantics. In his book, God's Unruly Friends, Ahmet Karamustafa compares these Dervish groups to "hippies" (though I think perhaps "proto-punks" might provide a more accurate analogy). In either case, what we are dealing with is a form of social and cultural protest that emerges when certain ideals (political and religious) are compromised and/or sacrificed for the sake of institutional exigencies and expedience.

Karamustafa points to the "normalization" or "mainstreaming" (not his terms) of Sufism during the period in question. He writes that Sufism (originally a protest movement against the rise of Muslim kingship after the death of 'Ali Ibn Abu Talib, the last Caliph who had been a member of the Prophet Muhammad's inner circle) and Sunnism entered into "close if not untroubled alliance" and, consequently, "became the major constituents of the new Islamic social order that emerged after the disintegration of the universalist 'Abbasid dispensation" (Karamustafa, p. 98).

Put simply, there were those in the Islamic community who regarded this new alliance as a form of "selling out." Whereas previously, Sufi identification had been a sign of political disaffection and, consequently, a little dangerous, it was now no longer considered as such. "The entrenchment of Sufism in society in the form of ubiquitous social institutions refranchised the dormant other-worldly trends of renunciation and anarchist individualism within Sufism" with the result that "deviant renunciation ... reclaimed its place on the agenda of Islamic religiosity as the active negation of institutional Sufism" (ibid, 99).

In Pater's terms, Sufism had traded its Romantic strangeness in order to become a more or less "known quantity" in the ordinary Muslim religious imagination. Thus domesticated, it could be accepted as "classically" Islamic. This new status provoked the Dervish reactions of "deviant renunciation" and "anarchist individualism"--a re-assertion of Sufi piety in its renegade incarnation.

Karamustafa wonders "aloud" if "the same forces that generated the movements of deviant renunciation from within institutional Sufism were not also at work in other aspects of Islamic religiosity during the same period" (ibid, 100). My reading of Marshall Hodgson's Venture of Islam and L. Carl Brown's Religion and State suggest that the answer to this query is an emphatic yes. With the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 (followed by subsequent waves of nomadic conquerors), the "separation of powers" that had naturally evolved in Islamdom during the period of Muslim kingship was fatally compromised. The cultural institutions of Muslim civil society (e.g., mosques, schools, public baths, etc.) that had been privately endowed and administered independent of the palace were increasingly drawn into its orbit and oversight. This change occurred as the Mongol's imposed their own "top-down" or vertical and militarized social structure upon all of Islamdom. Developed in the conditions of nomadism, the Mongol form of social organization entailed a command structure that was very successful in terms of efficiency, and promoted continual expansionism that translated, over time, into the rise of the three great "gunpowder empires" of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran, and Timurid India. What was lost in the process, however, was the independence of the scholar-class from state co-optation.

Karamustafa points to the disaffection of figures such as Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328) from the "mainstream" 'ulema as evidence for a broader social and cultural reaction than that found among Dervish groups (although it must be remembered that Ibn Taymiya himself had Sufi affiliations). I would suggest that the roots of Dervish disaffection ran deeper and broader than discontent with the increasing social acceptability of the Sufi tariqas. Their protest was that of the Romantic consciousness which bridles whenever and wherever it feels that liberties it considers innate are betrayed and curtailed by human interference with divine legislation.