Three cases of critical engagement of Sufis with modern Islamic trends

Abstract

This article focuses on the topic of Sufi intellectual resistance through some emblematic case studies of Sufi authors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. First, it analyses Fitna al-Wahhabiyya, a treatise that was written by Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān (1817–1886) in 1878, which proved to be a seminal work for later Sufi authors, and shows that some of the issues addressed in this text are recurrent ones in anti-Wahhabi polemics. Indeed, the cultural resistance of Sufism from the 19th century to the present day has been primarily directed against the doctrines of Wahhabism, the first current of Islamic thought to be structurally anti-Sufi. The fact that Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān was the Mufti of Mecca and a recognised scholar shows that these polemics were fully integrated into the scholarly religious debate of official Islam, in which Sufism and its doctrines occupied a prominent position. Furthermore, some Sufi masters set themselves the goal of refuting the theories of materialism and rationalism that were in vogue in the Islamic world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The work of the Egyptian Sufi master Sīdī Salāma ar-Rāḍī (1866-1939) entitled al-Insāniyya, published in 1938, is a polemical treatise against materialism, atheism and spiritualism that probably reflects the influence of René Guénon. The third case study examined is that of the Sudanese master Muḥammad ʿUṯmān ʿAbduhu al-Burhānī (1904-1983). The latter is an exemplary case of Sufi resistance in the second half of the 20th century, both in the face of censorship and in the face of the attempt to bring Sufi brotherhoods under government control.