Sanctity and Mysticism in Medieval Egypt: The Wafa' Sufi Order and the Legacy of Ibn 'Arabi.

• Author: Gardner, Vika
• Position: Book review

Sanctity and Mysticism in Medieval Egypt: The Wafa' Sufi Order and the Legacy of Ibn 'Arabi. By RICHARD J. A. MCGREGOR. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2004. Pp. xiii + 246. $55.

Of the many books that have come out recently about Sufism, the target audiences seem to fall into two distinct camps: those who are novices to the study of Sufism (and perhaps Islam as well), and those who are well trained in Islam generally and sometimes Sufism in particular. Thus one might happily anticipate a book that seems to proclaim its ability to walk between these two. Let us look at how successful this attempt has been.

The work presented here is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation at McGill University in 2001, "A Study of Sainthood in Medieval Islamic Egypt: Muhammad and 'Ali Wafa'." The text contains six chapters: 1, Tirmidhi, Ibn 'Arabi, and Others on Sanctity; 2, The Early Shadhiliyya and Sanctity; 3, The Wafa'iyya in Time and Space; 4, The Writings of the Wafa's; 5, Sanctity and Muhammad Wafa'; and 6, Sanctity according to 'Ali Wafa'. The first two chapters--the context--consume nearly a third of the book's length. Chapter three, a scant twenty-two pages, is based largely on eighteenth-century hagiographic sources, always difficult to use when trying to decode actual historical figures. The author is at pains to delimit his shaykhs from any constructions of "Shi'ite" Islam, going so far as to make trivial statements about silsilas, such as "The silsila represents a claim to a tradition of mystical knowledge, but here, as is usually the case in the [sic] Islamic mysticism, there is no tangible conncection [sic] between those at one end of the chain and those at the other. In other words, the tariqa Wafa'iyya has not actually inherited teachings, texts, or practices from the Shi'i Imams" (p. 51; unfortunately the number of typographic and small infelicities that ought to have been caught by a proofreader or copy editor are numerous). The simplistic presentation of some of the several-centuries-later hagiographers' images of the Wafa's trivializes, in my mind, the complexity of the picture, since surely these hagiographers were in control of the symbol set from which they were drawing to make these presentations. Chapter four, which presents the written works of the Wafa's, does the job about as well as could be expected in a prose rendering, although one might have wished, in an appendix perhaps, to have incipits of the rarest...