God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period 1200-1550.

AuthorAlgar, Hamid

This is a felicitously conceived interpretive essay on groups of antinomian dervishes that flourished, principally in Ottoman Turkey, on the margins both of organized Sufism and of society in general, between the thirteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries C.E. It is to be welcomed as a pioneering work of synthesis. The only comparable book is Ahmed Yasar Ocak's Osmanli Imparatorlugunda Marjinal Sufilik: Kalenderiler (XIV-XVII. Yuzyillar) (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1992) which, despite the geographical limitations implied in the title, does deal with the Iranian antecedents of the Anatolian kalenders and is infinitely richer in factual detail than Karamustafa's essay. However, it lacks the comparative perspective and analytical ambition that inform the latter study.

Karamustafa rightly criticizes the conventional equation of what he calls "deviant dervishes" with "popular religion," a diffuse and unexamined category which is often used to cover both the millennarian movements of post-Mongol Anatolia and Iran and the anarchic individualists with whom he is concerned (p. 5). Likewise, the two-tiered theory of religion which gives rise to this category ("High" and "Low" traditions, a dichotomy derived more from anthropological theorizing than from careful historical analysis or contemporary observation) fails to account for the ability of the deviants to recruit from the cultural elite (pp. 10, 92) or for the sympathy with which they were sometimes regarded by the established Sufi orders (p. 95). It might, in addition, be remarked that there is no reason to assume that the practices and tenets of the deviants were accepted by the broad masses of the population, even in the rural areas that are assumed to have been the breeding ground of popular religion. Inadequate, too, is what Karamustafa calls the "survival theory," i.e., the notion that these groups represented a static presence of unabsorbed pre-Islamic or contemporary non-Islamic influences in an Islamic social and cultural setting (p. 11). He proposes instead that the phenomenon be situated on the trajectory of the overall development of Sufism as the product of specific historical circumstances.

Broadly speaking, his theory is that the Quranic revelation allows for both "world-acceptance" and "world-rejection," thereby giving rise to a dichotomy between the communal and the personal which was experienced by the early Sufis as a contradiction. This contradiction was resolved by the "firm...

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