Sufi communities have long been a vital part of life in Afghanistan and Muslim societies. This dissertation contextualizes the ways in which they have retained, renewed and recreated their place both in the past and present by resourcefully managing the threats and opportunities that have ensured their survival through periods of persecution. It focuses particularly on how Sufi communities have resolved questions of leadership, authority, and legitimacy over the past fifty years in an environment characterized by perpetual change and insecurity. The thesis is based on twenty-two months of participant observation ethnographic field research and interviews conducted in six urban Sufi communities in Kabul and Herat between 2016 and 2019. They represented all of the major Sufi orders in Afghanistan as well as several Sufi poetry teaching circles and new Sufi civil society organizations. Employing social navigation as an analytical framework, the thesis argues that Sufi communities in Afghanistan have weathered periods of instability by employing creative and context-specific strategies. Despite decades of war and civil unrest, Sufi groups survived and even thrived by instituting innovative changes in their organizational structures, finding allies within changing regimes, and projecting themselves and their teachings as an integral part of Afghanistan’s religious and literary heritage.
The dissertation uses case studies to document the contextual production of Sufi leadership during periods of succession, liminal periods of transition during which contestation over what constitutes legitimate authority, the means of selection, and whether an outcome will produce unity or schism, lay bare an organization’s usually hidden fault lines. It describes in detail how individuals and groups employ a variety of religio-cultural tools to legitimize their claims of authority, including Sufi poetry, publishing as service, investigation of the Self as an exploration of God and dream divination. It documents how these tools have been adapted to deal with both internal leadership contestations as well as a community’s interactions with the outside world that have included a communist government in the 1980s and a Taliban Islamist government in the 1990s, as well as ongoing disputes with Mujahidin and Salafist religious attacks of Sufi practices as un-Islamic. / 2028-02-29T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/42045 |
| Date | 12 February 2021 |
| Creators | Schmeding, Annika |
| Contributors | Barfield, Thomas J. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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