Volume 82, Issue 2

In his famous study “Ueber die Entwickelung des Ḥadīth” I. Goldziher  argued that the Islamic tradition ( ḥadīṯ  ) could not be used as a historical source for the time of the Prophet and the Companions, but was only the result of theological, social and political tendencies of later times in which (as Goldziher  assumed) these materials originated. This position laid the ground to a sceptical view which was further developed in Western Islamic Studies after Goldziher  and which until today is still alive.

History is largely about rooting out anachronisms. One that bedevils the history of Sufism is an unsurprising tendency to project later forms backward. Our idea of who was a Sufi in the ninth century tends to come from the Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfīya  of the Naysābūran al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021) and a few other books, some dependent on his. Sulamī begins his first generation with notices of al-Fuḍayl ibn ʿIyāḍ (d. Mecca, 187/803), Ibrāhīm ibn Adham (d. al-Ǧazīra, 163/779–80?), Ḏū l-Nūn (d. Ǧīza, 246/ 861?), Bišr al-Ḥāfī (d. Baghdad, 227/841?), Sarī al-Saqaṭī (d. Baghdad, 253/867?), and al-Muḥāsibī (d. Baghdad?, 243/857–58) – the usual big names for the late eighth century and, mainly, early ninth. Massignon  ’s lineage of Sufism (leading up to al-Ḥallāǧ) stays almost entirely within this line, and indeed I have no serious quarrel with it as a lineage of classical Ǧunaydī Sufism.

The great turn-of-the-century Hungarian orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher , found two related aspects of the religion he spent his life studying especially disagreeable: (1) “the soul-destroying pedantry of the jurists of Islam” whose “quibbling discriminations” and “dreary exegetical trifling” proved “detrimental to the inwardness of religion”; and (2) the inclination among those same “perverters of the law” to “think up contingencies that will never arise” and entertain “far-fetched legal cases, casuistic constructs quite independent of the real world” as they indulge in “the boldest and most reckless flights of fantasy.” Goldziher objected, in short, to what he saw as the dual plague of hair-splitting and theoretical sophistry afflicting the classical works of Islamic jurisprudence.

The view of Sunnī scholars about minorities and sects in the medieval Muslim world has a crucial influence on their actual image in the Middle East. While Šīʿīsm is considered a fifth school ( maḏhab ) in Islam today, Sunni authorities have never accepted such sects as Bahāʾīs, Druzes and Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs as part of Islam. This rejection of what Sunnīs consider as heretical sects contributed to their persecution and isolation, which lasted until the twentieth century.

Lawrence I. Conrad, ʿArāʾis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ or “Lives of the Prophets”, as recounted by Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʿlabī, translated and annotated by William M. Brinner . Studies in Arabic Literature, 24. Leiden, Boston, Köln, 2002: Koninklijke Brill. S. xxxiv, 774. ISBN 90-04-12589-2. € 190,–.   Bernd Radtke, Binyamin Abrahamov: Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism. The Teaching of Al- Ghāzalī and Al-Dabbāgh. Routledge Curzon Sufi Series. London–New York 2003, XII, 190 s.   Lawrence I. Conrad, Abū Bakr Ibn Ṯufail , Der Philosoph als Autodidakt. Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, ein philosophischer Inselroman , übersetzt, mit einer Einleitung und Anmerkungen herausgegeben von Patric O. Schaerer . Hamburg 2004: Felix Meiner Verlag. lxxxviii, 152 S. ISBN 3-7873-1680-9. € 32,–.   Lawrence I. Conrad, Hellmut Ritter , The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World and God in the Stories of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār. Translated by John O’Kane with Editorial Assistance of Bernd Radtke . Leiden and Boston, 2003: Brill. Handbuch der Orientalistik, I.69. xxvi + 838 pp. ISBN 90-04-12068-8. $ 190.00.   Bernd Radtke, Antonina Zhelyazkova und Jorgen Nielsen (hrsg.): Ethnology of Sufi Orders: Theory and Practise (Etnologiya na sufistkite ordeni – teoriya i praktika). Proceedings of the British-Bulgarian Workshop on Sufi Orders. 19–23 May 2000, Sofia, Bulgaria. Sofia 2001. 628 s.   Bernd Radtke, Elizabeth Sirriyeh: Sufis and Anti-Sufis. The Defense, Rethinking and Rejection of Sufism in the Modern World. Curzom Sufi Series. Surrey 1999. XIII, 188 s.   Abbas Poya, Katajun Amirpur: Die Entpolitisierung des Islam. ʿAbdolkarîm Sorûšs Denken und Wirkung in der Islamischen Republik Iran. Würzburg 2003: Ergon Verlag.