The Problem of Sufism By Richard McGregor

Anyone visiting the modern city of Cairo will surely be struck with the impression that medieval Egypt, and particularly the capital city of the Mamluk empire, remains close at hand. In fact, it remains literally at arm’s length through its monumental architecture, its ordering of the cityscape, and even its design aesthetic that in the twentieth century has been reborn as the “classical” style of Islamic Egypt. This neo-Mamluk design phenomenon may rightly be interrogated, among other things, for some of the easy assumptions it makes about “high” culture and our urge, even in the modern age, to streamline the past and oversimplify our historiography.

An even greater challenge to us as historians are the various phenomena that together constituted Sufism in the Mamluk period. I point to this as a problem because it appears that within our field there has recently been a significant increase in research relating to Sufism, and yet, as the following pages will show, in many instances we continue to labor under a methodology that is far from perfect and at times even misleading. By identifying the problem of Sufism as my object of study, I seek to bring to light the challenge Sufism continues to represent to our historiographical methods. I will briefly survey some of the more promising recent research in this area, and follow with an inquiry into one area of particular importance to the study of Sufism. Specifically, my aim will be to show that contemporary historians’ use of terminology relating to the concept of “orthodoxy” in discussions of Mamluk Sufism has failed in its account of the particular historical examples it confronts and has steered us away from confronting the deeper methodological challenge that the phenomenon of Sufism represents for historians.