Search Results (4)

This essay addresses the intersection between the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok and Pinterest social media platforms and a contemporary religious leader/teacher who exploited them to rise from subalternity to the status of a deified celebrity. It examines his underprivileged disciples and followers and rival formal and informal levels, within Indian Sufi circles. Employing a combined perspective of ethnography, media studies and textual analysis, I discuss the transformations engendered by this social media celebrity and the impact of neo-liberalism on religious teacher–disciple (peeri–mureedi) relations. I show that this transformation involved a commodification of peeri–mureedi relations, leading to a neoliberal morphing of religious practices into marketable products. In so doing, I provide a critical reading of Mazzarella’s social media as “re-enlightened” or “inclusive capitalism” that gives voice, agency and new economic possibilities to capitalism’s most marginal subjects, who aspire to break the grip of what I term the “economies of despair”. Full article

This article focuses on Moikom Zeqo’s (1949–2020) work Syri i Tretë (“The Third Eye”, 2001) as a New Age reworking of Albanian Bektashism. The success of this book, and the recognition that Bektashi authorities themselves accorded it, make it highly representative of Bektashi neo-intellectualism and beyond: it is a cross-section that enables us to investigate the complex reworking of Sufi knowledge in a post-secular environment, such as Albania. This article examines this specific work while outlining a history of the Bektashiyya from the Ottoman era to the post-socialist Albanian period and highlighting its doctrinal and practical developments. Syri i Tretë is the expression of a secularist engulfment of post-socialist or even post-secular religion, which Bektashism embodies. Thus, Zeqo’s work expresses a common trend in Albanian society that is beyond the members of the Bektashi community. Full article

The transfer of Sufism as a lived tradition to the Euro-American sphere, which first began in the early twentieth century, is a notable modern development that has been the subject of increasing academic interest in recent decades. Yet much of the literature on this topic to date has focused more on what has changed during the process of transfer, rather than on what has remained the same. It has also tended to prioritize context over mysticism. However, examining the main mystical doctrines and practices of the case study lineage of the Indian shaykh Azad Rasool (d. 2006), who from 1976 sought to introduce his teachings to Westerners arriving in India in search of spiritual fulfillment, in fact reveals substantial continuity with the early and pre-modern past. Such examination involved textual analysis of the primary sources of this lineage combined with multi-sited ethnography, comprised of participant observation as well as interviews, conducted primarily in Germany and the US, along with an excursion to India, among members of the two branches of this lineage between 2015 and 2020. It thus seems that shifting focus from context to mysticism itself, at least in some traditions, has the potential to also reveal much continuity in spite of changing contextual factors. Full article

Around the middle of the Ming Dynasty, with the Chinese language becoming the mother tongue of Muslims in mainland China, the religious education of Chinese Muslims faced a dilemma. Meanwhile, a rejuvenated educational system was established by Hu Dengzhou (胡登洲) in Shaanxi during the Wanli (萬歷) period. This system, which was called Jingtang education (經堂教育) after a long time, has epoch-making significance in the history of Chinese Islamic thought. Through Hu Dengzhou’s disciples, this educational system gradually spread to North China and Jiangnan, where Shandong School and Jinling School were formed. Sufism played an important role in the two early schools’ teaching arrangements and academic activities. In the middle and late Qing periods, Shaanxi School and Yunnan School emerged one after another. Scholars of these two schools paid more attention to rational sciences represented by philosophical theology and attempted to use theological theories to explain Sufi texts. Overall, the establishment of Jingtang education was not only an urgent requirement for Muslims in mainland China to explain Islamic classics in Chinese, but also a fruitful attempt to replace official schools with private schools. The early Shandong School and Jinling School attached great importance to Sufism for two reasons: (1) Sufism became a prominent study after the 12th century, and most of the teachers of early Jingtang education had a close relationship with the Sufis. (2) These scholars live in a Chinese cultural background with Neo-Confucianism as the mainstream, and there are many commonalities between Sufism and Confucianism, which helps Muslim scholars to use Confucian terms to explain Islamic teaching. In the later period, Shaanxi School and Yunnan School turned to pay more attention to philosophical theology for two reasons: (1) In order to deal with the emergence and ideological differences of Chinese Islamic sects in the mid-Qing era. (2) This change was not unrelated to the influence of the Shixue (實學) thought trends in China, especially the Qianjia School. Full article