Visionaries of Silence: The Reformist Sufi Order of the Demirdashiya al-Khalwatiya in Cairo

Visionaries

of Silence

Visionaries

of Silence

The Reformist Sufi Order of the

Demirdashiya al-Khalwatiya in Cairo

Earle H. Waugh

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo      New York

First published in 2008 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2008 by Earle H. Waugh

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Dar el Kutub No. 3053/07

ISBN 978 977 416 089 9

Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Waugh, Earle H.

Visionaries of Silence: The Reformist Sufi Order of the Demirdashiya al-Khalwatiya in Cairo / Earle H. Waugh.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007

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Designed by Andrea El-Akshar/AUC Press Design Center

To all those who teach,

and especially those great teachers

who shaped me in unique, uncounted ways:

Alice Brock, John Thomas, Mircea Eliade

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1.    Historical and Religious Background of the Demirdashiya

2.    The Khalwatiya and Social and Political Institutions

3.    Reform through the Liturgical and Religious Life of the Tariqa

4.    A Demirdash Reformist Writer: Qut al-Qulub in Cairo and Europe

5.    Constructing a Place for Silence: Architecture and the Khalwatiya Sense of Religious Space

6.    Amid the Storm: The Return of Shaikh Ahmad al-Demirdash and the Reformist Evolution

Glossary

Notes

Appendix 1: Demirdash Mosque Vicinity Map

Appendix 2: Lower Floor Plan

Appendix 3: Upper Floor Plan

Appendix 4: The Ninety-Nine Names of God

Bibliography

Index

A man in whom the people had confidence sought a vision and in the vision was instructed in the forms and ceremonies for establishing an association, and what the duties of such an association were. He would instruct others in these matters . . . in compliance with his vision.

—John R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual

Preface

All that, alas, is only a memory. . . . Where are the faqirs of yesteryear

—Emile Dermenghem¹

This book has been a labor of love. First promised because of the immense assistance I received from Shaikh Ahmad al-Demirdash and Naqib Yahya al-Zeiny (now deceased) in the early 1980s when I began work on The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song, it has now come to fruition more than twenty years later. In the intervening years, the Demirdashiya have welcomed me whenever I was in Cairo and some of them have contributed to the research I was carrying out.

I was always aware that this book would be written, since I often talked to members of the Demirdash or photographed Demirdash events with the intention of completing it. Administrative responsibilities and other commitments crowded the calendar, however, so it was with some haste that I returned to Cairo after I learned that the current, then seventy-five-year-old shaikh, Ahmad al-Demirdash, had been in hospital and asked about the book. It is my hope that Visionaries of Silence will be welcomed by the Demirdash order as a small study of their tradition.

Predictions of the decay and destruction of Sufism over the last two or three centuries have been many. That this has not occurred is testimony to the ineffectual methods of some kinds of western scholarship, as well as blind spots in some Muslim analyses. The Demirdash order is indicative of the fact that effectively run orders, regardless of their size, have something to offer a rich Islamic milieu—they survive and even thrive. They are also subject to periods of strength and weakness depending upon internal and external factors. I have tried to point out the most important of these factors for the Demirdash in this book, but two can be cited here: economic resources and a skilled dedication on the part of an order’s leadership.

A book like this has such a long pedigree that acknowledging the assistance of everyone who had a part in it is almost impossible. I appreciate all those who have helped me and this book reflects their input as much as it does mine. The following outstanding individuals and organizations have stood solidly behind me: Shaikh Ahmad al-Demirdash al-Mukhtar who not only assisted me with information, but also invited me to stay in his home while I completed the research for this book; the nuqabat, the late Yahya al-Zeiny, and his son Mahmud who, in addition to being a helpful naqib, contributed his photography. Muhammad al-Sayyad assisted me greatly in understanding specifics about the order’s history. The University of Alberta provided me and my department with financial assistance. While in Cairo, the Institute Français d’Archéologie Orientale generously opened its wonderful library to me and my friend Richard McGregor, a resident researcher there, kindly shared his knowledge. I am grateful to Ahmad Hasaneen, whose father, a member of the Demirdashiya, initiated the e-mail contact that led to my return to Cairo, and to Soraya Hafez, who graciously assisted me at several points in my research on the Demirdash, including providing translations during interviews. Finally, my wife Mary-Ellen and daughter Rhiannon managed affairs at home while I was in Cairo and encouraged me in myriad ways. To them, a warm and special thanks.

These people have been the backbone of this work and I acknowledge their support and insights. Without them this study would not have been complete.

Introduction

History, genealogically directed, does not have as its ultimate purpose the rediscovery of the roots of our identity, but, on the contrary, its unrelenting dispersion.

—Michel Foucault

The Sufi tradition, the mystical wing of Islam, is one of the richest and most elaborate in the religious world, and its study has attracted fine minds, both in the east and in the west. Equally complex are the social and communal forms the movement takes. However, despite the existence of a western fascination with Sufism and many competent studies on the history of mystical ideas, we have few analyses on individual orders (sing. tariqa, pl. turuq), like Vincent Crepazano’s on the Hamdasha,¹ to give us insights into the inner workings of an order or to lay out the most important aspects of its religious and communal life. This study is a modest attempt to do just that, by employing a diverse methodology of textual evaluation, interviews, and cultural analysis.

It will immediately become clear that even for a Sufi order as amenable to outside scrutiny as the Demirdashiya, this study is incomplete. There is, for example, no readily available analysis of financial and economic fluctuations throughout its history, a factor of immense importance for the survival of a tariqa. Popular legend has it that it is immensely rich, although there appear to have been very few funds available for upgrading and restoring the order’s institutional structure, and political change in Egypt has eradicated most traditional sources of revenue. If maintaining the order’s physical infrastructure is a criterion of wealth, then certainly the order’s financial affairs have deteriorated markedly since I first encountered it over twenty years ago. This would lead one to believe that the tariqa’s physical buildings cannot survive without its own endowment to invest in its architectural wealth. Yet such a thing appears to be legally impossible in Egypt. All this indicates that we have few concrete details of tariqa economics.

Moreover, no attempt has been made to determine how widespread is the influence of the Demirdash tariqa within other orders—that is, to gauge what role it plays in defining piety beyond its own borders. While such a study would have to deal with data of a highly variable nature, nevertheless a poll could be made of other turuq to see if they have had dealings with, or members connected to, this branch of the Khalwatiya order. Additionally, one might study how many members of other orders have been members of the Demirdashiya at some time or how many shaikhs and other religious specialists in the orders have found spiritual sustenance within the fold of the Demirdashiya. This study has not been able to pursue such lines of enquiry.

Perhaps, and more pressingly, it has not been able to examine the relationship of the Demirdashiya to other Khalwatiya orders to determine how these rivals within the spiritual universe relate to each other. On the surface there does not appear to be much cross-fertilization, but we have no proof of that. Clearly the Khalwatiya are holding their own within the complex web of Sufi organizations in Egypt, but for sheer influence of one upon the other, it would be important to know how this order relates to other Khalwatiya orders and whether there is much interaction between them.

Despite these lacunae, this study represents the fruit of over twenty years of research and the insights gained from a career of studying Islam. It focuses upon the Demirdash purely because of my long acquaintance with the members of the order, my familiarity with their religious life—one that dates back to 1981—and a policy of openness to western scholarship by Egypt’s religious authorities. Indeed, after having worked in both Egypt and Morocco, there is no doubt that the Egyptian orders, generally speaking, are far more accepting of western academics than Morocco’s, and from my own experience the Demirdash heads the list for degree of openness. Even though secrecy is built into the religious life of the Demirdashiya, they have demonstrated a willingness to be frank about their practices and what they are about. Indeed, one reason why few western studies have been carried out on individual Sufi orders is the problem scholars face of being sufficiently accepted by an order to conduct research with any degree of confidence. I have no misgivings about the validity of what has been told to me and what I have witnessed—subject, of course, to the relativity of all discourse. One always has some reservations about interpretation, but that is the nature of this kind of work, and I leave it to the reader to judge the veracity of my account.

Some reference to methodological issues has already been made, but I might elaborate somewhat. It has been my conviction for some time that the western propensity to apply some kinds of analytic criteria to understanding Islam has skewed the results significantly. Apart from the legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism, my real concern is that studies of Islam have almost always been of an ideological nature, with ‘ideas’ and ‘conceptual trends’ being the favored entrée into Islam. This focus is, I hold, severely flawed. On the one hand Muslims often refer to their tradition as a way of life, as if to shift the lens away from ideology entirely. On the other hand, no one in any religion ‘lives’ an ideology: there are wedding gifts to buy, dishes to wash, children to educate, and duties to attend to that are not subject to sustained ideological evaluation. I remember sitting with a group of Christians who were pondering how to handle the issue of abortion, and when much of the conversation became esoteric and philosophic, an elderly participant would say, Here’s what my wife and I said to so-and-so when they had to deal with this. In other words, forget the theorizing, look at what people do or say when faced with the problem. Others, insistent on developing some ‘systematic’ thought on the topic, kept dismissing his comments. For his part, he could not comprehend what they were talking about. It was not through want of intellectual acumen. He merely held that people do things without consciously embodying some well thought-out ideology. The same applies to understanding Islam—best to set aside the ideological preference and hear people’s own piety being expressed. It is expressed every time prayer arises or during a moment’s leisure to recall God’s Names. An instant’s murmuring of Allah is the refocusing of the day; the move toward the Ultimate is the move into a liturgical structuring of life.

It seems to me that a liturgical approach to comprehending Islam is much more appropriate. To argue this, I point out the relevant comparative roots. Consider Catholicism, which is inconceivable without the Mass. Theologians may devour forests of trees publishing books to describe what it means, but the fact is that people have an instant connection with divinity through the time-worn formulas of the Mass. Much of what theologians say about what the Mass means may not be believed by the faithful, and no doubt countless Mass-goers could not articulate just what it is that attracts them to the form. True, they may use the discourse learned from youth or even the most recent theological dictum as an explanatory medium. Regardless, the Mass is a sacred zone that delivers inarticulate but powerful meaning.

In Islam, prayer is the equivalent of the Mass. For Sufis, to pray, to remember God, and to engage in the liturgy of encounter with God is the touchstone of being a Muslim. Setting aside for a moment the debates on the precise meaning of the Qur’an on various issues, for ordinary believers the Qur’an is a glorious document they could never hope to have the training to understand. In that sense, the Qur’an cannot provide the answer to why Muslims are Muslims. Perhaps it is better to shift the answer to: because they sense themselves to be people of prayer, of remembrance, of liturgical encounter with God. It might be because Muslims have made much of the fact that they do not have priests that the search for understanding has shifted away from liturgy. Whatever may be the reasons, in this study I will argue that the liturgical is the religion, for the simple reason that it makes all the rest valid. Muslims do encounter God in prayer; they do encounter God in dhikr (remembrance). This is the touchstone of the faith.

It has been commonplace among critics of Sufism to point to the noisy, often boisterous, nature of some Sufi groups, the implication being that God cannot possibly take these groups seriously. Such an assumption suggests that the deity prefers quietude. If this is the case, then the Demirdashiya must be much favored by both the deity and Sufi critics. They concentrate their energies on quiet meditation and silence. This is an order that uses inner peace and awareness as a vehicle for personal spiritual growth. For the Demirdashiya, silence is indeed golden. Yet the late naqib of the order, Yahya al-Zeiny, was also an official in the Rifa‘iya, one of the more voluble of Egypt’s Sufi groups, and he was perfectly at home in both. This teaches us that the pathways to God are many and that we should be chary of holding one form of approach to reality as normative.

A small storm has erupted among academics over whether or not the Khalwatiya incursion into Cairo constituted a genuine reform. Joseph Fletcher has argued that the Khalwatiya orders are part of a larger movement of a reformist nature whose roots go back much farther than the contemporary interest in Islamists and radical Muslims. He sees them as a trajectory of tajdid (religious renewal) within Islam.² Earlier, Frederick de Jong questioned whether or not Mustafa ibn Kamal al-Bakri al-Siddiqi (1687–1740) could be said to have reformed and revived the Khalwatiya in Egypt, as was commonly assumed.³ His concern seemed to be the use of the word reform when the local sociopolitical context is not challenged. For him, what the Islamist movement is doing is precisely tajdid. The many groups who quietly form to bring about religious change are not expressing tajdid. This interpretation has unacceptable limitations. It is my conviction that the problem lies in western categorization tendencies. I argue that tajdid should be used to refer to any sociopolitical movements aimed at rejuvenating Islamic society, even when they do not take an overt political form. Admittedly my own stance on this issue is influenced by a lack of enthusiasm for categories generated by perceptions imposed from the outside on Islam. While it is true that Islam has long held that renewers and renovators will be sent by Allah every century and that significant leaders within this tradition of renewal and renovation within Islam will take an activist stance toward society, the term tajdid in ordinary discourse gets applied to a range of different types of activism. To limit our use of the term reformist to those whose agenda is overt political renewal of the entire ummah (Muslim community) seems unnecessarily restrictive. Moreover, were we to examine the life of each one of the reformers, we would find they have little in common save the narrative arising out of an Islamic tajdid discourse.

To cut a long story short, there were reformist trends in the Khalwatiya incursion into Egypt, and into North Africa for that matter, but the Khalwatiya was not reformist in the way that the Wahhabi movement was reformist, nor was it reformist in the way that the Muslim Brotherhood or Islamists of the last century were reformist. Certainly, political reform played a part, but that does not privilege politics over religious expression. Little is to be gained by trying to link all such reformist tendencies into one definite political-historical trajectory, since they all are connected to other aspects of Islamic society and culture. These tendencies will also vary with the emphasis given by the person analyzing them.

Hence I have used the term ‘reformist’ under advisement. I take reform to mean change to the cultural context within which Islam rests. I use it to mean religious betterment of the ummah within its entire cultural frame. It need not be major reforming change, which sets its goals on the political and religious reform of Islam in its entirety. Rather, reform may be based on a desire to open up a more effective relationship between religious and political institutions, to provide a more expansive system for religion to operate within a given culture. The goal may be to change the moral and intellectual mindset of the existing social context so that a vigorous spiritual institution can flourish.

One kind of reformism I wish to signal is da‘wa-oriented—that is, it is ‘evangelistic’ or presentation-oriented. As we shall shortly see, the Khalwatiya came to Egypt with an evangelistic purpose: to establish a better mystical branch in Egypt. They hoped to overcome the decay perceived in the Sufi tradition in that country and to undercut antagonisms toward Sufi doctrine in the social and political environment of the time. They used their influence with government to create a more accepting milieu for their religious aspirations and to shape a disciplined Sufism. This was a tajdid of a cultural kind. Subsequently, chroniclers referred to the several initiatives of the Khalwatiya at this time in Egypt’s history as reform. This seems quite legitimate as a consistent use of tajdid in Arabic. I see the heritage of the Demirdashiya to be this kind of da‘wa-oriented, culture-modifying reform.

In the literature, reform is used in another, more limited sense: as the institutional modification of specific religious entities. This kind of reform could be related to al-Bakri and the changes he and his associate Muhammad al-Hifni (AH 1110–1181 / AD 1688–1767) instituted. These reforms were directed at the Sufi establishment, that is, at the Khalwatiya and not at the population at large. It was a form of tajdid because of the context within which the Sufi institution operated (that is, as part of broader Muslim institutions). These reforms are forms of tajdid because they propose a renewal of Islam through the change of key institutions. So long as reform has as its goal the reshaping of a crucial part of Islam for society’s betterment, the term should be applied. This is not, however, the conception of tajdid as developed by the early leadership of the Demirdashiya.

One further point might be made: the controversy among western students of Islam likely arises out of current jihad discourse, with its emphasis on the political and militant modification of people’s beliefs and institutions. Contemporary jihad-type reformers all seem to have had the same overall political-religious goal: to revolutionize general Muslim attitudes toward Islamic beliefs while challenging the western political establishment. It would appear that this interpretation of reform is dominant only because of the contemporary situation and that such a narrow definition of tajdid is generated by ideological concerns, not traditional Muslim understandings. My perception is that tajdid arises out of the dynamic introduced by