Abstract
Based fieldwork in Aleppo between 1999 and 2010, this article analyzes how secrecy and revelation, two forms of codification, maintenance and transmission of religious knowledge central to the mystical tradition of Sufism in contemporary Syria were constructed and enacted in the process of initiation (tarbiyya) into the mystical path in two Sufi zawiyas (ritual lodges) in pre-war Aleppo. Access to the unseen spheres of divine reality through initiation created both structures of charismatic power in the Sufi communities and religious subjectivities that empowered its holders as moral agents in the pre-civil war Syrian public sphere. I argue that Sufi practices of initiation that gradually revealed the divine reality to students while simultaneously also enhanced the mystery of this reality enabled Sufi practitioners to cope with the opacity of power and contradictions of everyday life of late-Ba‘thist modernity in Syria.
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Notes
The arabic word haqiqa means both “truth” and “reality” and it was used in Sufi contexts in pre-war Aleppo to express the fact that the ultimate and, actually, only reality and, truth was God. For them all the sensible and material world and the knowledge and certainties that it generated constituted lesser and incomplete forms of existence that both reflected and hid the haqiqa.
My fieldwork was exclusively with the male disciples and followers of the Sufi shaykhs in pre-war Aleppo, for I had no access to the universe of female Sufis.
The Arabic word tariqa, which is usually translated as “Sufi order”, refers to three distinct, albeit complementary, realities: the mystical path toward the divine reality (haqiqa); the set of doctrines, rituals and practices that constitute the mystical path; the institutionalized forms of religious organization of a particular Sufi tradition.
The ethnographic data analyzed here were collected during a period of 18 months of fieldwork in Aleppo from 1999 to 2001, and in shorter yearly fieldwork periods from 2002 to 2010. After some months of my first period of fieldwork I was accepted by some shaykhs into the practices of initiation of their disciples into the Sufi path.
Talal Asad pointed to discipline as “the multiple ways in which religious discourses regulate, inform and construct religious selves” (Asad 1993: 125).
The two recent occupants of the office of Mufti of Syria, who is the leader of the official religious establishment of Sunni Islam in the country, shaykh Ahmad Kuftaru (1964–2004) and shaykh Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassun (since 2005), were Sufi shaykhs linked to the tariqa Naqshbandiyya. Their Sufi affiliations, which were shared by many other members of the religious elite, were not officially recognized by the state. However, they show the importance of Sufism in the constitution of the authority of the religious specialists in pre-war Syria.
The Ministry of Awqaf was created in 1961 as the result of the process of taking over of the Islamic pious endowments (waqf; pl. awqaf) by the state, which started in 1949 aiming to establish a bureaucratic control over the Sunni religious establishment (Bottcher 1997: 18–19).
Since 2011 the pictorial and discursive signs of allegiance or submission to the president’s power have been systematically destroyed in the regions controlled by the various groups that compose the opposition to the Ba‘thist regime.
On the disruptive effect of suspicion on the discourse of transparency and practices of power of modernizing and globalizing institutions see Sanders and West 2003: 11–12.
For a full account of the processes of religious codification of the Qadiri tradition in Aleppo and its appropriation and reconfiguration by the current shaykh Badinjki, see Pinto 2009.
I use the word “follower” to define those who recognize a Sufi shaykh as their religious guide or leader and attend the public rituals in his zawiya, being members of his religious community; and I reserve the word “disciple” (murid; pl.muridun) to those who are in the process of being initiated by the shaykh into the Sufi path.
Tarbiyya means education in Arabic, and the processes of acquisition of esoteric knowledge in the Sufi path is also referred as tarbiyyat al-nafs (education of the self), tarbiyyat al-ruhiyya (spiritual education). However in the Sufi contexts of pre-war Aleppo tarbiyya had meanings that went beyond those conveyed by the word education, which made me choose the word initiation to translate it. Tarbiyya referred to the introduction of the disciple to secret knowledge as well as unseen realities. Also, the discontinuous nature of the Sufi esoteric knowledge made the disciple always a beginner in the unseen aspects of the divine reality, irrespective of his advance into the Sufi path. Thus the word initiation conveys better the meanings of tarbiyya in the contexts described here and will be used for translating it into English.
Fredrik Barth pointed that among the Baktaman of New Guinea “the value of information seemed to be regarded as inversely proportional to how many share it” (Barth 1975: 217), and that “instead of developing a ‘theory’ of growth and health and fertility the Baktaman develop a ‘mystery’ of these themes. Secrecy is an essential precondition of this mystery.” (Barth 1975: 221).
While wird means just “prayer”, in this context it meant a prayer that aimed to induce mystical states in those who recited it.
Georg Simmel pointed to the connection between the acquisition of secret knowledge and individuation (Simmel 1950 [1908]: 334–338).
The concept of body techniques was coined by Marcel Mauss in order to reflect upon all forms of practical knowledge that use the body as a tool in order to produce phenomena endowed with physical and social effectiveness (Mauss 1995 [1934]: 370–272).
Dhikr al-qalb (remembrance of the heart) was considered to be the highest form of dhikr in the Sufi traditions analyzed here. When it happens the evocation of God’s names and presence would be done by the heartbeat instead of words, as it happens in the vocal dhikr, which is known as dhikr al-lisan (remembrance of the tongue).
Thomas Csordas (1997:5) pointed that the self should be understood as “an indeterminate capacity to engage or become oriented in the world, characterized by effort and reflexivity” in the mobilization of embodied dispositions.
Two other disciples who owned shops nearby also had taken the same decision. After shaykh Nadim gave his approval to their decision they started to meet and help each other.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Nils Bubandt, Mikkel Rytter and Christian Suhr for their comments and suggestions to this article. My thanks also go to the Sufi shaykhs and their disciples in Aleppo who allowed me to be part of their path towards the unseen reality. Finally I thank CNPq and Faperj for the grants that made this research possible.
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Pinto, P.G. Metaphors and paradoxes: secrecy, power and subjectification in Sufi initiation in Aleppo, Syria. Cont Islam 13, 67–83 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0401-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0401-y