The Sacred Patrimony of Sufism: Architecture, Objects and Symbols from Maghreb to China

Islamic mysticism expresses itself not only by writings, speeches, and body gestures, but also by means of material elements. Among them, the most evident are specific buildings, such as the dance room, and distinctive clothes, such as the cloak. Many other elements could be mentioned, especially what is called “dervish paraphernalia”, i.e. the staff, the begging bowl, the animal skin, etc., which compose the material culture of Sufism. Neglected in Islamic studies or regarded as exotic curiosa by the majority of scholars in the field, except, perhaps, experts of Islamic art, the architecture and objects peculiar to Sufis have a lot to say about the practice as well as the theory of the ascetic-mystical stream of Islam. Despite the lack of interest in it on the part of Islamologies, as well as Sufis themselves, material culture deserves the attention of scholars from different disciplines in so far as it opens fresh perspectives on classical topics. For example, as is well known, the cloak (khirqa in Arabic) manifests materially the initiation of the disciple, similarly to other spiritual traditions, and has been theorized according to the normative distinction between the “cloak of aspiration” (khirqat al-irāda), which marks the inner commitment of the true aspirant, and the “cloak of benediction” (khirqat al-tabarruk), which symbolized only the benediction of a Sufi master. But there is more. Questions arise about the colours, the types of fabric and the sewing methods, about the symbolic meaning attached to them, about the myths of the origin of the habit, etc.

The goal of the editors is three fold. First, we hope to examine in the most comprehensive manner possible the items of the material patrimony of Sufism. While a few prior studies have dealt with this or that element individually, there is simply no publication that would bring them together under the same cover. Second, in order to avoid both prescriptive and reductionist approaches, which tend to consider Sufi material culture as a superficial if not charlatan aspect of “the authentic” Sufism, we will strive to understand the materiality of spirituality and the spirituality of materiality, that is, correspondences between the outer and inner dimensions of Islamic mystical traditions. Lastly, we wish to start a dialogue between two research domains, namely material and symbolic history, on the one hand, and the Islamic art history, on the other. In a sense, our proposed volume will serve as a continuation of the seminal, though now seriously out-dated, study of the Ottoman dervish culture published by John P. Brown in 1868 under the title The Dervishes, or Oriental Spiritualism, as well as of the more recent pioneering works by Juergen Frembgen, Kleidung und Ausrüstung islamischer Gottsucher. Ein Beitrag zur materiellen Kultur der Derwischwesens (Wiesbaden, 2000), and Ekrem Işın’s Hoş gör yâ hû. Osmanlı kültüründe mistik semboller nesneler (Istanbul, 1999).