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