Gracious Traditions : Contemporary Transnational Egyptian Post-Tariqa Sufism

Abstract: An overarching aim of this study is to contribute to the developing body of studies of non-organized and thereby “invisible” Muslims in the West. The thesis probes into the question of what Sufism means in the individual lives of seven Muslims in the US and Sweden who share a relatively privileged Egyptian socio-economic background. The questions addressed have concerned how they relate to local, national and transnational Islamic traditions, beliefs and practices. A foundational idea of the thesis has been to get a close read of Sufism as a personal relation to the Muslim identity of the interviewees. Through positioning personal stories in larger frameworks, the study highlights how Sufism is a situational matter. Sufism is interpreted differently in different contexts and influences approaches to politics, civil society and family dynamics. The empirical material is produced through semi-structured interviews where the data collection on “Sufism” hermeneutically leads to interconnected themes such as nationalism, history, sainthood, religion, institutions and social class. The thesis is driven by a predominant interest in post-tariqa Sufism outside of institutionalized forms and focuses on (1) how the informants relate to Sufism and the shape this relation takes when positioned adjacent to or across other belief; and in particular (2) when it matters to them. Further, it poses the question of (3) what role cultural backgrounds play in interacting with new social environments outside of Egypt. The thesis uses the results of those questions to critically discuss the field of invisible Muslim minorities in the West.The empirical material shows that the informants are aware of being part of a larger and diverse Islamic context. They regard themselves to be ordinary Sunni Muslims, sharing common beliefs with other non-Sufi Muslims. They simultaneously stress their own contexts in the realization of such beliefs. “Universal” tokens of Islam, such as fasting the month of Ramadan, the mosque as the primary place of worship, or Mecca as the centrifugal geography of Islam is sometimes bracketed, but not rejected. What the study points out, is how the informants have a tepid relationship to local American or Swedish Islamic institutions for the benefit of personalized bonds to their own Egyptian Islamic context. Sufism is commonly associated with Egypt and Egyptian Islamic culture, which means that it also is a position in intra-Muslim theological debates. The perception of Sufism as an innately Egyptian Islam means that Salafism and Islamism can be regarded as foreign traditions, which also resonates with an established state narrative. Sufism in this sense is functionally and realistically perceived as a middle or balanced position, stabilizing the informants between two perceived opposite extremes, being neither fully secular nor religiously fundamentalist. Sufi practices and attitudes are seen as having historical continuity and the benchmark for Islam in Egypt, which the informants find in for instance popular culture and history as well as in some formal theologians.Finally, the study adds to previous studies of post-tariqa Sufism by re-introducing a social class perspective. There is no remarkable difference in the beliefs of the informants and Sufis from other social backgrounds in Egypt. What seems to be a variance is rather the creative space that Sufism carves out for them. The informants confer with an intermediate realm, barzakh, where they in individually different ways are able to interact with an unseen world and saints, mainly through dreams, but also in ways that they can perceive in the material world.