Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

248 t CHAPTER TEN
theology, as they might be called in Christianity, but for most Muslims
the reality of Islamic spirituality was the tariqa, or brotherhood,
into which Sufis began to assemble themselves. As in Christianity,
the earlier eccentric “hermit” saints of Islam came to
Sufism as a social enterprise, which took shape within the various
community houses that were the counterparts of the Christian
monastery. In Christianity, the cenobitic life may have been more
sustainable in the depths of the wastelands than the eremitic, but
the koinobion, or convent, soon developed its own moral character
with obedience to a superior, and later to a rule, as its most
highly prized virtue. In Islam, Sufis seem originally to have come
together under one roof by reason of the attraction of a single
master, with the master and his circle often moving from place to
place. In the end, these circles became more stationary, with a fixed
abode variously called a khanqah, ribat, or zawiya, a tekke among
the Turks, and a dargah in the Persianized Sufi circles of India.
There is ample evidence that there were Sufi convents for both
men and women in medieval times. The females may have been
older women, many of them widows and poorer than their male
counterparts. Though socially somewhat different, the women
practiced the same dhikr exercises as the men, had a religious
guide of their own, a shaykha, and even had their own prayer
leaders and preachers. But there were inevitably differences. Circles
of female Sufis tended to be local in nature, centered around
the tomb of a local (male) saint, whereas the men belonged to
associated circles that spread, many of them, across the entire
Abode of Islam. When the men adjoined to the Friday mosque to
join the entire body of Muslims in the weekly communal prayer
service, women were unlikely to join them there; rather, they returned
once again to the local tomb shrine.
The point of Sufi associations, like their counterparts in Christianity
and Judaism, was essentially the imitation of and instruction
by a recognized holy man. In the tenth century communal
Sufism was a vocation for the few and the elite. There was no
question at first of rules or a formal way of life. Tasawwuf was
everywhere different, everywhere centered on a recognized master
whose task was to show forth the Sufi’s intimate union with God