Repositioning ‘Islamdom’

conversion (in most cases temporally disconnected), during the period when

Islamdom took the form of a simultaneously Mediterranean and Asian ecumene,

Sufism became ubiquitous thanks to a fresh wave of diffusion and institutionalization

of mystical paths as practised in the brotherhoods (turuq, sing. tariqa, meaning ‘the way’). The advantage of organized Sufism’s orientation to a practice of piety, compared to the scholarship of theologians and philosophers, consisted in the fact that Sufis relied on collective rituals that spurned intersubjective connectedness and facilitated ties of solidarity.

On the other hand, the organizational forms of Sufism responded to the continually resurfacing demand for charismatic mediation. During the Islamic middle periods, Muslim society was a society of networks more than states, although the idea of a governance to be legitimized in Islamic terms was as crucial as ever. In other words, governance and its legitimacy were to a large extent divorced from state power. The Sufi flexible and semi-formal model of organization and connectedness, of balancing competition, cooperation, and hierarchy suited the political characteristics of the era. The egalitarian potential of Irano- Semitic civilization reached its zenith during an epoch that saw the eclipse of the legitimacy of state sovereignty in Islamic terms, which Persianate court culture had long cultivated and instilled in different types of regime. This was also the high point of the social power of the ulama, of their autonomous culture providing cohesion to intricate yet well-ordered social arrangements, kept together by an articulate yet shared Islamic idiom.

Against the common perception of an unsolvable conflict between ulama institutions

and Sufi networks, one should recall that most ulama were also Sufis. More

than a conflict, there was a productive tension, which induced many ulama to

cultivate the Sufi disciplines of the tariqa alongside the disciplines of the college

(madrasa). The two subcultures shared a capacity to reproduce overlapping and

flexible organizational patterns that favoured the building of networks over long

distances. Even more consequentially than the new monastic movements of the

ecumenical renaissance within Latin Christendom, the consolidation of Sufism

took from the beginning the form of a socio-religious movement of the commoners.

This basic similarity is matched by clear differences from the European experience, most notably with regard to the organizational form of the movements, in terms of their understandings of the requisite disciplines (both individual and collective) and not least at the level of the overall institutional environment. The new monastic orders in Europe penetrated civic life from outside the urban communities, while the Sufi orders often overlapped with urban associations and especially the craftsmen guilds, by virtue of the ties of trust that were buttressed by the authority of the masters of the brotherhoods (Salvatore, 2007: 133–71).

The unsettling of the axial balance between the mundane and ultramundane

orders within Latin Christendom was in the final analysis the chief factor of divergence from the Islamic trajectory. In Western Europe, some radical movements

started in the High Middle Ages to reimagine the worldly realm of the saeculum

as God’s Kingdom, a potential paradise on earth. Most radically, Joachim of Fiore

depicted the temporal realm of the new era as the full accomplishment of the

1 0 8 European Journal of Social Theory 13(1)

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