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This dissertation provides an ethnohistorical examination of the history, discourses, and practices of the Rifai Sufi order in Turkey. The Rifai order is an upper-middle class Sufi order that is currently under the leadership of an unveiled female shaykha, Cemalnur Sargut (b. 1952). The Rifais imagine Islam as a dynamic “tradition” that can adjust to new spatial and temporal arrangements. They concentrate on the inner meanings of Islam, as expressed in ethical self-formation through the cultivation of love and mindfulness of God. Rifais reconfigure mainstream Muslim gender discourses by discarding the practices of veiling and gender segregation, and extending women’s public participation to the level of community and spiritual leadership. The Rifai sheikhs reformulated the tradition by situating it within ongoing projects of sociocultural, political, and economic change over the past century in Turkish society. During Turkey’s transition from an empire into a nation-state in the 1920s, Kenan Rifai emphasized the compatibility of Sufi tradition with the processes of modernization, secularization, and Republican reform. During the Cold War Era, Samiha Ayverdi entwined the precepts of the Rifaiyye with the politics of anti-communist conservatism, with her nationalist commitment to the preservation of Turkey’s Islamic heritage in literature, music, fine arts, and architecture. Since the early 2000s, Cemalnur Sargut has reinterpreted the Rifai way of life in a manner that ethically engages the lifestyles, sensibilities, and tastes of Turkey’s diverse middle-class. Sargut has also contributed to the global revitalization of Sufism by building global Sufi networks through a series of academic initiatives, including establishing endowed professorial chairs and Sufi research institutes around the world. This study contextualizes the revival of alternative piety movements like Rifaiyye within the broader changes taking place in Turkey. The changes highlighted include the expansion of a culturally hybrid middle class, growing disillusionment with social and economic neoliberalism, increased public interest in Islamic religiosity, and the global revitalization of Sufism. The study also challenges the portrayal of Islam as a homogeneous, immutable, and ahistorical religion grounded in totalizing and essentialist readings of the sacred texts, highlighting the varieties of Islamic traditions and pious subjectivities in contemporary Turkish society. / 2027-11-30T00:00:00Z

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The resurgence of Sufism in the contemporary world has necessitated reexamining the nature and role of Sufism in contemporary contexts. A series of the reexaminations reveal that contemporary Sufism cannot be fully explained by traditional theories; instead it must be understood in accordance with changing contexts. On this basis, this dissertation directs itself to an investigation of the contemporary manifestations of Sufism. It specifically examines Sufism in the life, thought and teachings of Fethullah Gülen (b. 1941), as its case study. Gülen is known to be one of the most influential contemporary Muslim leaders, and has led a fast-growing movement expanded to global proportions. Much of the research that has consequently followed the inception of the growth of the movement presents Gülen as one of the major figures in defining the contemporary global Islamic experience, and suggests that the studies of Gülen contribute to a better understanding of contemporary issues in Islamic studies including the resurgence and transformation of Sufism. Remarkably, almost all of the studies on Gülen and the Gülen movement underline the importance of further research on Gülen's approach to Sufism. Terms like 'quasi-Sufism' and 'neo-Sufism' are assigned to his thought, while such phrases as 'a Sufi order,' 'a Sufi-oriented movement' and 'a Nurcu branch in the Naqshbandiyya' are circulated to characterize his movement. However, this terminology has not been adequately examined by any extensive research to warrant its justification. This dissertation examines Gülen's view on Sufism in order to understand how Sufism manifests itself in contemporary contexts, addressing what Sufism means in the contemporary world. Viewing Sufism as a dynamic discipline interacting with given contextual conditions, I primarily argue that there are distinctive characteristics of Sufism that appeal to the contemporary world enough to allow Sufism to resurface; it is necessary to identify those characteristics to understand the nature and role of Sufism in contemporary Islam. Gülen's Sufism, as an outcome of its interaction with a contemporary context, provides a better understanding of the characteristics in a way that it represents one of the contemporary manifestations of Sufism. / Religion

My research examines the social and material life of gnosis for the contemporary Sufi community in post-revolutionary Iran. In contrast to literatures which confine Sufism to the literary and poetic realms, I investigate the ways in which gnosis (mystical epistemology) is re-configured as a series of techniques for navigating the realm of the everyday. In particular, I focus on the ways in which mystical knowledge (ma'arifat-e 'erfani) is utilized by the Sufis to position themselves as outside of the socio-political areana, a move that, within the context of the Islamic Republic, in and of itself possesses vast political and social repercussions. I approach gnosis in two ways: both as object of study but also as critical lens, utilizing the Sufis' own mystical epistemology to guide me in understanding and interpreting my ethnographic case studies. In my dissertation, I address the following questions: What is the role of the Sufis, a group positioned on neither side of the orthodoxy-secular divide, within post-revolutionary Iran? How does a religious group attempt to create and maintain a disavowal of the political realm in a theocracy? More broadly, what is the role of mysticism within late modernity, and how might such a question be answered anthropologically? At the heart of my dissertation is the analysis of four ethnographic case studies. In each instance, I illustrate the way that the Sufis' own concept of mystical knowledge may be used to interpret topics as varied as the relationship between commemorative (dhikr) rituals and national identity to the negotiation of state interference to the practice of youth-organized poetry readings to the spatial organization of meeting places. I trace the affective and sensory dimensions of gnosis as it influences the mystics' understanding of the body, memory, place, language, and their socio-theological position within Iranian modernity more broadly. By analyzing the question of the "apolitical," my dissertation intervenes into the presumed distinction between the aesthetico-epistemological and the political divide, tracking a group that favors not direct resistance or outright evasion, but a more elusive engagement. My dissertation may be utilized by those interested in questions of knowledge production, aesthetics and affect, and alternatives to the religious-secular divide.

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This thesis seeks to study in depth the contribution to Sufism made by the little-known 4th/10th century figure Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī. The first chapter deals with an analysis of the life and works of al-Makkī against the background of the religious milieu of his time. A major section of the thesis (the second and third chapters) provides for the first time in English a translation of the Kitāb al-tawba of al-Makkī. The fourth chapter assesses the originality of al-Makkī's Kitāb al-tawba and compares it with similar Ṣūfī works of the period. The fifth chapter attempts to compare and contrast al-Makkī and al-Ghazālī's approach to Sufism through an analysis of their respective Kitāb al-tawba. It has long been known that in his work on Sufism, al-Ghazālī depended very heavily upon al-Makkī. This thesis conclusively proves this dependence whilst pointing to the more sophisticated presentation of al-Ghazālī. Al-Makkī is shown to have been one of the early Ṣūfī figures who tried to harmonise the views of the Baṣran and Baghdād Ṣūfī groups and to effect a synthesis between moderate Sufism and the Sharī'a.

Thesis advisor: Régine Jean-Charles / Taking Fatna Ait Sabbah’s two editions of La Femme dans l'inconscient musulman (1982 & 2010) as my point of departure, I analyze the image of the woman in several contemporary French and Arabic texts. Sabbah argues that buried in early Muslim pornographic texts lies an image of woman that reflects the unconscious view of her in the masculine imagination. In this image woman is positioned in opposition to the Muslim ethical system largely due to her subversive sexual desire. Sabbah’s texts raise key questions: Where a transformation of the feminine condition takes place, is it accompanied by a corresponding change in the image of the woman in the Muslim unconscious? How does the collective unconscious change? Is the unconscious always a reactionary force? Does contemporary literature reinforce Sabbah’s conception or depart from it? The novelists I have selected combine two pertinent attributes: they critique their own society and they examine female subjectivity, or in other words how a woman perceives her role, her identity and her consciousness. Through an analysis of heterodox texts, I focus particularly on how the Arab world sees itself. My first chapter compares Sabbah’s two editions, including her shift in tone and agenda, and the lacunae in her texts. In my second chapter I study Moroccan novelist Rajae Benchemsi’s Marrakech, lumière d'exil (2002) and Nawal el Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (1975) in terms of how the erotic and space function in both texts. I explore the women characters’ compliance with or resistance to Maghrebian notions of feminine and masculine space. I argue that the individual choices regarding space help define the characters’ identity. In my third chapter I examine the Sufi view of woman as included in Rajae Benchemsi’s La Controverse des temps (2006) and Ahmed Toufiq’s Abu Musa's Women Neighbors (2006). I point out that the Sufi view presents a counter-discourse to Sabbah’s description of the image of the woman in the Muslim unconscious. If Fatna Sabbah sees woman in early erotic and orthodox texts as reduced to an exclusively sexual essence, these texts present a spiritual dimension to woman’s identity, a dimension which in the context of Sabbah’s work, I argue, has a transgressive aspect. In my fourth chapter I analyze the mother figure in two novels by the Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal: Harraga (2005) and Rue Darwin (2011). I describe the distance between the representation of the mother in Sansal’s work and the image of the woman in the Muslim unconscious as described by Sabbah. I conclude that while the image of the woman as described by Sabbah continues to be present in contemporary texts, other images, remarkable for their diversity, have emerged. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

Notre étude tente à partir de la Ḥilyat al-awliyā’ wa-ṭabaqāt al-aṣfiyā’ de Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī (m. 430/1038) de mieux préciser les contours de la notion de sainteté sunnite dans les trois premiers siècles de l’Islam, telle qu’elle fut construite dans la tradition hagiographique à partir de la fin du 4e/Xe siècle. La walāya (sainteté) apparaît dans la Ḥilya comme la notion centrale dans laquelle se rejoignent deux formes de piété pourtant divergentes en islamologie : la piété ascétique (zuhd) des premières générations qui exprimerait avec emphase l’obéissance à un Dieu transcendant et la piété mystique (taṣawwuf) des générations ultérieures à partir de la fin du 3e/IXe siècle qui concernerait par contraste la communion avec un Dieu immanent et révélé. Pour mieux comprendre comment Abū Nu’aym les réconcilie, nous avons cherché à déconstruire son projet de légitimation consistant à rattacher le taṣawwuf aux premiers modèles intègres de piété ascétique. Nous nous sommes efforcée particulièrement à analyser les pratiques langagières et spirituelles des premiers ascètes, pour les mettre en parallèle avec celles des mystiques des 3e/IXe et 4e/Xe siècles, et ceci, au travers de trois supports d’herméneutique : les traditions judaïsantes (isrā’iliyyāt), les exégèses coraniques et enfin la Sunna et la figure du Prophète. Il en ressort que c’est précisément dans l’expérience eschatologique que les premières générations de dévots et d’ascètes et les générations suivantes de soufis accèdent au statut de saints (awliyā’), leur attribuant la juste compréhension de la Révélation et la charge de sa transmission. / This study, based on Abū Nuʿaym’s Ḥilyat al-awliyā’ wa-ṭabaqāt al-aṣfiyā’, aims to define the contours of Islamic sainthood (walāya) during the first three centuries of Islam, as progressively defined in the hagiography from the 4th/10th century. In the Ḥilya the walāya is the central notion in which ascetic piety (zuhd) and mystic piety (taṣawwuf) meet. Current research insists on their fundamental difference, the former being characterised by the obedience to a transcendental God and the latter expressing, in contrast, the experience of communion with an immanent and revealed God. To better understand how Abu Nu’aym reconciles both notions, the study revisits and specifies his goal of legitimising taṣawwuf by linking it with the paragons of ascetic piety. The study especially strives to analyse the language and spiritual practices of the early ascetics in light of those of the mystics in the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries. We have used three hermeneutic criteria : the ‘Judaising’ traditions (isrā’iliyyāt), the quranic exegesis and, lastly, the Sunna and figure of the Prophet. It emerges that the first generations of devotees and ascetics and the following generations of sufis attained, in the eschatological experience, the status of saints (awliyā’) enabling them to adequately understand and transmit the Revelation.