God's Unruly Friends

The classical expression of the Islamic tradition took approximately 500 years to be worked out and articulated. The Summa Theologica et Practica of this development is Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali's encyclopedic Ihya 'Ulum ad-Din (c. 1100 CE). Ghazali's work did not create the classical expression of the Islamic tradition; rather, it was emblematic of a consensus that had been building throughout Islamdom since at least the 9th century.

In the middle of the 13th century, disaster struck in the form of the Mongol invasions. Muslim majority societies, heretofore prosperous and confident, received a shock for which no one could have prepared them: the brutality of the Mongols, their contempt for the settled ways of the inhabitants of the territories they invaded, was unprecedented. By the same token, however, the rustic and militaristic Mongols were unprepared to govern populations as multifarious and urbane as those of Islamdom. To put it bluntly, they had little idea what they were getting themselves into when, in 1258, they took Baghdad by storm and summarily executed the last 'Abbasid caliph.

At the same time, however, Mongol society had a vigor and vitality that, while often violent and unsettling, endowed Muslim majority societies with a new kind of nervous energy. Some of this nervous energy found expression in the projects of re-construction that followed, of necessity, the "scorched earth" policies of the Mongol war lords. On the other hand, some of this nervous energy was put to other, less conventional, uses.

Even before the Mongols arrived on the scene, there had been Muslims who dissented from the emerging shape of classical Islamic civilization on a wide variety of grounds--many of them pietistic in nature. For just as Kierkegaard would complain in the 19th century that the establishment of a Christian Europe spelled the practical demise of Christianity among Europeans ("The Christianity of the New Testament rests upon the assumption that the Christian is in a relationship of opposition" to the established ways of the world, he wrote) so Muslims, nearly 1,000 years earlier, had ranged themselves in opposition to the established ways of Afro-Eurasian Islam. [See, S. Kierkegaard, Attack Upon "Christendom", tr. Walter Lowrie, PUP, 149]. Among these Muslim dissenters were some that Professor Ahmet T. Karamustafa would term "socially deviant renunciants" or, more memorably, "God's unruly friends." [See Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period 1200-1550, Oneworld, 2006].

Prior to Karamustafa's study, it was often assumed that Muslim pietists of this persuasion were disgruntled members of the underclass, but Karamustafa offers compelling evidence to support his claim that "these movements frequently recruited from the middle and high social strata...Most telling in this connection is the fact that the cultural elite that consisted of the literati in the widest sense of the term lost some of its members, either temporarily or permanently, to the dervish cause. To judge by the presence of poets, scholars, and writers of a certain proficiency among their numbers, the anarchist dervishes were not always the illiterate crowd their detractors reported them to be. [Ed. note: They seldom are]. Instead, socially deviant renunciation exercised a strong attraction on the hearts and minds of many Muslim intellectuals." [GUF, 10].

It is not my intention to suggest that the deep anxieties that the Mongol invasions induced in Muslim majority societies were the proximate cause of "socially deviant renunciation" among Middle Period Muslims. I wish to suggest, instead, that the political, social, and cultural upheavals that followed in the wake of the Mongol catastrophe gave fresh impetus to tendencies that were already present in Islamdom when the Mongols arrived--just as they are always already present in every civilization [see, e.g., S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents].

The phenomenon that Max Weber named the "routinization of charisma" is inherently unstable and therefore predictably produces social reactions such as those of the dervishes and other social and cultural critics. If it failed to do so, charisma would not be charisma and routine would not be routine.