“How can these two things that are in total conflict continue?” wonders a female member of the Afghani Gailani (Jilānī) Sufi order living in the diaspora (60). Her bewilderment comes in response to reports of the pre-2001 Taliban participating in Sufi devotional techniques of invoking God’s name (zikr; dhikr). These devotional techniques, Annika Schmeding’s interlocutor remarks, seem antithetical to the narrow interpretation of Islam preached by Taliban forces. With these few lines, Annika Schmeding captures the ambiguity, incongruity, and social strategies that center her foundational study of modern Sufi social spheres in Afghanistan entitled Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul and Herat, Afghanistan, and the Afghan diaspora in the U.S. and Europe from 2016 to 2021, including two years of consecutive fieldwork in Afghanistan from 2017 to 2019, Sufi Civilities charts what Schmeding terms the “navigational dexterity” of different Afghan Sufi communities in post-2001 Afghanistan.
The book takes a thematic approach to the study of post-2001 Afghan Sufi communities. Each chapter constitutes a distinct case study, exploring the historical patterns of state and Sufi relations in the 20th and early 21st centuries (chapter 1); how Sufi leaders may embody both juridical and spiritual roles (chapter 2); the use of poetry as a pedagogical and authoritative medium (chapter 3); women’s leadership in Sufi communities (chapter 4); and the generative role of dreams in navigating contestations around authority and spiritual inheritance (chapter 5). Throughout, Schmeding highlights the relationality of spiritual authority, particularly in moments of transition, and emphasizes how the authority of these Afghani Sufi communities rests on the interplay of inner, creative mediums with external, pragmatic concerns.
Schmeding’s attention to authority as multifaceted constitutes one of the book’s central interventions. Departing from a Weberian approach to authority as the routinization of charisma, the author builds on the work of Shahab Ahmed, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, and Ismail Alatas to think through the ways in which authority can be simultaneously prescriptive, imaginative, and recognizably contested (9, 17-18). Following Alatas, she views authority as a dialectical relationship that connects not only the leader and the follower but also relies on external recognition—whether from other Sufi orders, the Sufi council, NGOs, or even critics of Sufism (199). Her discussion of how the internal, imaginative faculty translates into a form of social authority is further influenced by Amira Mittermaier’s work on dreams and dream interpretation in modern Egypt (2011), as well as her interlocutors’ own engagements with the mystical philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240).
Curiously, unlike in other historical and even comparative modern Sufi contexts (such as in the Shādhilī and Tijānī communities in North Africa), Sufi Civilities observes how the inheritance of spiritual authority in these Afghan Sufi communities is not a simple question of genealogy (2, 19). Rather, as chapters 2 and 5 especially demonstrate, inheriting authority also rests on the followers’ expectations of the leader and their own understanding of the Sufi path. The question of kinship and its relation to authority is further complicated in chapter 4, which examines the role of women as spiritual leaders in the Faizani-Qadiri Sufi order. Although many female leaders in the order derived some authority as the daughter of a Sufi master (shaykh) or disciple (murid), their intent, charisma, knowledge, and mastery of ritual practices were more important (158; 160-1). This perspective toward spiritual leadership, the author notes, emerged from the community’s founder, Allama Faizani (fl. 1978), and his notion of an inner ungendered self (nafs) and spirit (ruh) (154-7). The author’s discussion of the Faizani-Qadiri order’s approach to an ungendered inner self and its implications in the social world represents an important insight into the different ways authority is gendered in Sufi communities today. It further contributes to nuancing the “women question” in Islam (146). However, the author’s argument could have been strengthened by considering how the notion of an “ungendered self before God” also shapes articulations of Sufi masculinities and the relation of masculinity to traditional forms of authority.
In addition to furthering understanding of how religious authority is constructed and functions, Sufi Civilities complicates simplistic, Euro-centric, and Islamophobic understandings of Afghanistan and modern Islam (13-14). While Schmeding specifically unpacks romantic notions of Sufism (198), her use of “little stories” and oral narratives in chapters 1 and 2 underlines the heterogenous religious practices that have defined Afghanistan historically and still today. For example, she notes how the reformist Sufi Deobandi movement influenced Taliban instruction and thought (61) as well as how members of the pre-2001 Taliban themselves reportedly practiced Sufi techniques (63). These insights unravel scholarly and popular understandings of fundamentalism and what orthodoxy means. Instead, as she observes when tracing debates over female spiritual leaders and the role of the newly formed Herat Sufi Council (188-200), Sufi practices themselves form a complex religious, linguistic, and cultural idiom that shape how religious orthodoxy has been understood.
Sufi Civilities represents both an important contribution to scholarship and an archive of a liminal time. The book is haunted by the ghost of the ethnographic present. As Schmeding was writing, the western-supported (and specifically American-backed) democratic state in Afghanistan collapsed in early fall 2022 following the withdrawal of American troops. The new Taliban forces soon reestablished control. The author herself expresses hesitancy, as well as concern, for the futures of her Sufi interlocutors and the Sufi community more broadly. However, as she remarks in the opening line of her concluding chapter: “If the deaths of these pirs (Sufi saints) have taught me anything, it is that there are no conclusions, only transitions” (197).
Schmeding’s study is a must-read for scholars of Sufism, modern Islam, Central Asia, and religious authority. Her rich ethnographic fieldwork is communicated in a clear and succinct writing style that allows for the author to deftly handle the book’s nuanced interventions in a manner suitable for undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars of the field.
Brittany Landorf is a PhD candidate at Emory University.
Brittany Marie Landorf
Date Of Review:
September 25, 2024
