>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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>> Jason Steinhauer: Good afternoon. My name is Jason Steinhauer and I'm a program specialist at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Before we begin today's program, please take a moment to check your cell phones and other devices and please set them to silent. Thank you.
I'll also make you aware that this afternoon's program is being filmed for placement on the Kluge Center website as well as our YouTube and iTunes channels. I encourage you to visit our website loc.gov/kluge to view other lectures delivered by current and past Kluge scholars, including several on the history of Egypt, the Middle East and its relationship with the United States. 
Today's lecture is presented by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Kluge Center is a vibrant scholar center on Capitol Hill that brings together scholars and researchers from around the world to stimulate and energize one another. To distill wisdom from the library's rich resources. And to interact with policy makers and the public. The Center offers opportunities for senior scholars to conduct research in the Library of Congress collections, as well as post-doctoral fellowships and fellowships for doctoral candidates.
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Today's lecture is titled The Popularization of Islamic Mysticism in Medieval Egypt. Our speaker is Nathan Hofer, now concluding his tenure as a Kluge fellow here at the Kluge center. Nathan's research investigates the massive popularization of Sufism or Islamic mysticism in medieval Egypt. 
Sufism came to extraordinary prominence in Egypt after the 12th century. By the middle of the 14th century, Sufism had become massively popular. How and why did this popularization happen? Well, Nate's book is the first to address this issue directly.
Surveying the social formation and histories of several different sufic collectives from this period. His research has been aided by the collections of the African and Middle Eastern divisions here at the Library of Congress. And the African Middle Eastern division is generously cosponsoring this afternoon's talk. Covering 77 countries from Morocco to southern Africa to the central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, the division offers in-depth reference assistance, provides substitute briefings on a wide range of subjects relating to these languages and cultures.
Produces guides from the library's vast resources and helps to preserve the division's unparalleled collections. And they are indeed unparalleled, and Nate will show you some examples of those collections today.
Nathan Hofer is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Missouri. He received his Ph. D and MA from Emory University and has been a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Damascus as well as received several additional fellowships and grants for his research.
In addition to his research on Sufism, he is also a scholar of the social and religious history of the Jews of medieval Islamic world. And in addition to the book project he is working on here at the Kluge Center, he is also working on projects on the Jewish Sufis of medieval Egypt, the development of the genre of Sufi monographic geography in Arabic, and the history of Sufism in Egypt during the Fatimid Caliphate.
He teaches courses on Judaism, the Old Testament, Islam and the history of Sufism at the University of Missouri. And it has been a great pleasure and privilege for us to have him here at the Kluge Center. So please join me in welcoming Nathan Hofer.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Nathan Hofer: Thank you very much. Thank you everybody for coming and thanks to Jason for organizing this. Thanks to the Kluge Center for hosting me for the past five months. It's been really fantastic. The African and Middle Eastern division has bene really great and I really have to give a special thanks to Ted Ustowzy [assumed spelling] who I don't think is here right now.
But he welcomed me when I got here and kind of showed me the ropes of how to use the collection up there and so on and so forth. So thanks.
I'm going to try to speak really loudly because I think there are several different forms of microphones happening right now and not all of them are at the same level or something. So if I need to shout louder, they'll signal to me.
What I'm going to try to do is give an overview of my forthcoming book. I just got the cover proofs recently, so there you go. It could have been red or green and I chose green. The picture will make sense at the end of the lecture.
But this is the first time that I've tried to synthesize this for a general audience. So I may or may not be successful. And I look forward to some feedback at the end to let me know whether or not it worked. There are a few Islamacists here who I think will keep me honest. But mostly I'm trying to gear this towards a more general audience of scholars, my fellow Kluge's and pre-docs and post-docs and senior scholars.
Okay, so before I get into the meat of it, I want to give a very brief overview of the political history that is relevant to the project, for those of you who don't know a lot about Islamic history. So in the year 750 a revolutionary movement from Iraq and Khorasan which is in northeastern Iran overthrew the reigning Islamic dynasty that was in Damascus and the founded a new dynasty that we call the Abbasid Caliphate in 750. And their capitol was in Baghdad.
This kind of is the cradle of the Islamic civilization as we know it. This is where a lot of Islam as we're familiar with it came together and was formalized. This includes Sufism, which emerged in ninth and tenth-century Baghdad roughly. And for simplicity's sake let me define Sufism for anybody that's not familiar with it.
It's a kind of social religious movement that came together to theorize a practice for the stripping away of veils that separate humans from God. So for example, the ego of a human will separate the human from God and there are practices designed to subdue and train and kind of calm that ego down.
But there is also a very important social component in that you can't just be a Sufi and decide it. You can't just say, "I'm a Sufi now." You have to have a teacher and that teacher had to have a teacher and so on and so forth. So this will become important as we go on.
The Abbasids did not kind of hold ultimate power forever and in the 10th century an Ismaelite Shiite movement emerged, first in Syria. Then they had their capitol in the west, in North Africa. But in 969 they established a new capitol in Egypt in Cairo. And they had quite a large empire.
This is kind of not a precise map. They never controlled all this territory really at the same time. You get the idea. They're the people that actually founded the city of Cairo. You can see here that the earliest Islamic settlement of Fustat down there in the south was founded on the old Roman city of Babylon, or near it.
And when the Fatimites came to Egypt and took control, they built the city of Cairo as a kind of ideological statement. The whole city was designed to be ideologically powerful too fast. Did I want to say anything else about that? I don't think so.
All right, so while the Fatimites have control of Egypt, simultaneously as many of you know, this is when the crusaders are having their adventures in the Levant. And they founded the so-called crusader states in the 12th century. You can see some examples.
All right, so I mentioned this will all become clear in a moment, because the presence of these Christian crusaders in the Levant among other things catalyzed the emergence of a new Suri counter crusade movement shall we say, and it's not the only thing, but it's part of it. Most famously in the person of Saladin, who took Jerusalem back from the crusaders.
All right, so Saladin was asked actually by the Fatimites to help them fight against the crusaders and it was a mistake because after he helped them he got rid of them.
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And this happens like all the time in Islamic history, that they ask someone for help, and the helpers help and then get rid of the people that they're helping. So he's now this new dynasty, a true dynasty, right? The Ayuban rulers are all of Saladin's family. And they rule roughly until 1250 when the Turkish slave soldiers who they had brought in to help them, help them and then get rid of them. 
And these are the Mongluts. Mongluts literally means slave. So these are Turkish slave soldiers who get rid of the Ayubas in 1250 and start their own dynasty. And kind of what they're famous for, among other things, is that they finally finish getting rid of all the crusader states, and they stopped the advance of the Mongols at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. 
So the Mongols had been pressing ever, ever, ever westward and the Mongluts stopped them in 1260. Okay, so what does all this have to do with Sufism? Let me read you a really short snippet of a lovely description of Cairo in the 13th century. This is written by a man named Eben Sayid Amugrabi. A historian, a geographer and a litterateur. He did everything. So here's what he says:
"The wander Sufi feels at ease in Cairo because of the large quantity of cheap bread, the prevalence of musical sessions and pleasures both inside and outside the city. There is little objection to what he does and he is in charge of his own self. Whether he wants to dance in the middle of the marketplace, wander around alone, get high on hashish or even take up with beardless youths and other things like that."
So this is probably a slight exaggeration. He was very fond of exaggerating the decadence of Cairo because he was from the west and he wanted to make the west look much more pious. So he says things like, "Wine is flowing through the streets of Cairo and there are naked women everywhere you turn." It's really a good read.
But his description is really revealing because while there were almost no Sufis in Egypt before the Ayuba period. During the Fatima period we have scattered references to Sufis, but they're very few and far between. By the time of Eben Sayid Amugrabi in the 13th century, he's mentioning how many Sufis there are in Cairo. And by the 14th century, they're everywhere in the literature.
In biographical dictionaries, in the annalistic history, in treatises. There are Sufis all over. There are Sufis writing things. In Egypt they're just everywhere. And it's everybody. It's not the poor and it's not the rich. It's both.
It's not the rulers or the ruled. It's both. Even Jews are embracing Sufism at this time. I'm not going to talk about that here, but I could talk about it later if anybody wants to. So my question is, where did all of these Sufis coming from? Why are they coming into Egypt? What does it even mean to say that Sufism is popular? How does a popular movement come about like this? Seemingly out of nowhere?
So nobody has really tried systematically to answer this question in a very kind of rigorous way. So this is what I set out to do. Although there are and have been a few kind of hat tips, shall we say, to this question, in which authors, historians, scholars will say, "And Sufism was becoming popular probably because of X, Y or Z."
So there are three kind of main explanations that you'll find in most literature. Number one, the political explanation. That with the disintegration of a basset authority and especially when Baghdad is destroyed by the Mongols in 1258, there is no more caliph and there is no more authoritative spokesperson for the prophetic family. So Sufis.
Number two, the disaster explanation. After the Spanish Reconquista, the establishment of the crusader states, the Mongol victories of the 13th century, famine and plague in the 14th and 15th centuries, Muslims were completely demoralized. Sufism.
Number three, the spiritual explanation. The spokespersons for normative Islam outside of the caliph are the legal scholars, the jurists who spend their days writing rules and coming up with punishments for things I suppose.
And a number of scholars, and I am not exaggerating about this, have written that the cool, soothing, mystical spirituality of the Sufis offered an enticing Salve for the dry, abrasive, rigid Islam of the jurists. Sufism, right? 
Sufism fills this void that people naturally have. So there's some truth to all of these explanations I think, especially the idea that political and social context matters. But I have serious reservations about all of them, not least of which is the idea in the spiritual explanation that adopts a very clearly anticlerical, protestant idea about religion.
That people kind of naturally rebel against wrote ritual and rules and what they really want is a personal, spiritual relationship with God and only Sufism could offer this. But my kind of really fundamental problem with these explanations are twofold. One is that they're reactionary. That they explain the popularity of Sufism completely as a reaction to external events. 
That all of these things happen and Sufism fills the void in some way. Second, they assume that Sufism is monolithic, basically offering the same thing to all people at all times in all places. In particular, this monolithic Sufism is considered to be the popular culture of medieval Islam. The things that Sufi's do that Eben Sayid mentions, smoking hashish. Not smoking hashish. They're eating hashish. They're not smoking it yet.
Dancing, singing, gazing at beardless boys. All of these things, these are the popular cultural expressions of Islam. But there is a big problem in all this, and that is that they assume that it's completely opposed to or different from the elite culture of the jurists.
The bottom right is that there's no reason that you can't be a Sufi and a jurist at the same time, and in fact it was very, very common for jurists to be Sufis and vice versa. All right, so in the book I have decided to kind of completely dismantle this whole structure of ad hoc not really well thought out explanations and try to come up with a better, more rigorous explanation.
So here's what I've come up with. Three points. Number one, there are so many lists. When I was writing my book I realized I'm like obsessed with creating lists.
Number one, I adopt the not so radical notion that Sufis are actors in their own right. If Sufism is popular, the Sufis had to have played some role in their popularity. It doesn't just happen. So let's make them actors or agents.
Number two is I re-theorized the concept of medieval popular culture and how that culture was mass produced in Egypt. 
And number three, I then reexamine the data from the period, in particular looking at the sheer variety of Sufis. The Sufis are not all the same. There are many different kinds, many different groups in many different places. And let's bring these other ideas to bear on the fact that Sufism is not monolithic.
So I won't bore you with all the details, but I will mention a few things about popular culture and that is in the study of medieval Islam, the primary influence is Peter Burks's really great book on popular culture in early modern Europe. In which he kind of path-breakingly posits that if we want to look at popular culture in the premodern medieval world, we need to look at the things that non-elite people were doing.
And this was a really great project. The problem from my perspective is it gets taken up and reified excessively. That is that popular culture becomes defined as whatever it is that non-elites do. And elites don't really participate in popular culture. They only produce elite culture.
So instead of assuming that Sufism is that which separates the populace, I want to think of Sufism as a truly popular culture, something that unites the populace.
Think of the Kardashians. Whether you hate them or you love them, everybody knows who they are. And we all participate in hating them, producing this sort of popular culture. So this is my idea, whether they loved or hated Sufism, they were all participating in this culture.
So I propose that we think about medieval popular culture as the culture that unites everybody, but we define it not by who consumes, but by how many consume. And in the case of Sufism it's everybody. Everybody is consuming Sufism in some way.
So this question of the popularization of Sufism is something that unites the socioeconomic spectrum to produce this very interesting culture. All right, here's my frame work. More lists.
First, the popularization of Sufism is fundamentally linked to the social and cultural production of Sufism on a wide scale. By production I mean the discursive and practical effects of people who call themselves Sufis doing Sufi things. By popularization I mean the reception and the consumption of those products.
Second, I take a kind of quasi-Marxist tack here and insist that the production of Sufism necessarily precedes popularization. So this is a reversal of the reactionary paradigm.
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You can't popularize something that has not been produced yet. Third, the production involves the interplay of multiple strata of society and can't be represented as elite or non-elite. All right, so that's in a nutshell. There's a lot more to it in the book, and there's also a lot of boring stuff about institutions and organizations and how all this works. But I'm going to keep going.
I bring all of this to bear on a number of case studies. And the idea here is that it is the institutions of Sufism that provided the social capital with which Sufis produced the conditions of their own reproduction, their own cultural reproduction. So you can tell I was reading a lot of Altisair and Bourdieu when I was writing this. And the idea that if these are really popular, how are they self-perpetuating? And it's through these institutions of Sufism developed in Baghdad in the 9th and 10th century.
All right, so I bring all this to bear on a couple of case studies and I organize them according to a heuristic about the relationship to the state, for reasons that will become clear I hope in a moment. So if we return to Saladin, one of the really brilliant things that Saladin did was when he came to Cairo and he overthrew the Fatimites, he reinvested all of the ideological structures of the Fatimite city with new Sunni ideological valences. So things that he did was he took a Fatimate prison and he turned the prison into a law college.
And the medieval sources are very clear about this. They say, "He took the site of oppression and turned it into a site of Sunni triumphalism." He built the citadel that overlooks the city of Cairo. He repaired the walls. The mosque on the top there is not Saladin's. It was built by an Ottoman governor.
But he did build the rest of it that you see there, the buttresses and everything. One of the other things that he did in addition to founding and building the city up is he--oh, let me come back to that. He took an old palace that belonged to a eunuch that had the nickname [foreign name] which means happiest of the happy. And I don't know why the eunuch had that name, but it's perfect.
He took that palace and he turned it into a hospice for Sufis. He paid them. They got a monthly stipend and they got food and sweets. And in exchange they were supposed to parade through the streets and bless him. They were supposed to pray every day for him.
They would process from the Hanka, that's the name of this hospice, from the Hanka to a mosque and publically kind of proclaim how great Saladin is. So as just a very interesting aside, one of the Sufis who lived at the Hanka is famous for he is the person supposedly who broke the nose off of the sphinx. And unless you think that is kind of a sign of the ever present iconoclasm of Islam, no.
The people who were around who saw him supposedly were so angry at him for doing this, they immediately killed him and they buried him disrespectfully at the base of the sphinx. So there's some trivia for you.
So the Hanka does not really exist anymore. Part of it exists. Here's a view from the street. Here's a part of the inside. A lot of it is now inside of apartments in Cairo now. But here is the procession that I was mentioning. So one of the things they would do is you'll see in the middle there this region known as the banal constrain, which is the heart of the Fatimite, kind of ideological city.
This is where the Fatimites did a lot of their processing and everything. And Saladin turned this into not a Shiite place, but now a Sunni place. So he would process there. And the Hanka you can see on the map here, and the Al Hakan mosque at the top. He mandated every Friday they march from the Hanka to the mosque and publically bless him.
And the sources tell us that people used to come out in droves to watch the Sufis process. And he is bringing in Sufis from all over the world. You couldn't be a Sufi in Cairo, but there really weren't that many. So he's bringing them in from Iraq, from Syria, from Iran and having them process. And the people would come out to watch them in droves.
And the sources tell us that they would watch the Sufis with delight and that they would come to glean Baraka from them. Baraka is this great Arabic word that means blessedness, but let's call it charisma like this.
So they would come and they would kind of collect charisma from the Sufis and bless themselves. So my question is, here we have this huge group of 300 Sufis doing this every week and sometimes every day. Where is this Baraka coming from?
Where is this charisma coming from? Who is producing it? Who is consuming it? It requires everybody's participation. The rulers who fund it, the Sufis who do it, and the people who collect it. None of them are just inventing this Baraka out of thin air. The production of this culture of Sufism requires the participation of all three levels of society: the elite rulers, the kind of educated jurists and Sufis, and the masses of people in Cairo.
Does that make sense? I hope so. All right, so that's one way that Sufis are mass producing cultures of Sufism in Cairo. That's just one group. So there's another group that I will call state-sanctioned Sufism. This example is about a group of Sufis that would eventually become a Sufi brotherhood, the Ashavoli Brotherhood. And Sufi brotherhoods are one of the most interesting and difficult phenomena to study in medieval Islam.
Because most of what we know about them post-date their emergence by quite a lot. The brotherhoods are kind of in their classical form hierarchically organized social groups who trace their authority to one particular eponymous Sufi master.
So in the case of the Ashavoli Brotherhood, they trace their authority to Abul-Hasan Ashavoli who died in 1258. Abul-Hasan Ashavoli was from Morocco originally. He went to Tunisia. There's a lot more about his background that I won't get into. But he was in Tunisia. 
He was accused of the Tunisian authorities of being a crypto-Shiite and a Fatimite sympathizer. Whether or not that's true, I will not weigh in on. But they kicked him out of Tunisia. And the rulers, the Ayubad rulers in Egypt welcomed him. They interviewed him after these accusations and they found him non-problematic and said, "Why don't you come and live in Alexandria?"
And they actually gave him a building in Alexandria to live in. He dies in 1258. Before he dies, oh here's a nice picture of his tomb in the desert near the Red Sea in Upper Egypt. And I show you this picture to contrast it with. It's a pretty recent development. This picture that I found with the Arabic captions says that it's the tomb of the master Abul-Hasan Ashavoli, April 1925.
So this is what it looked like in 1925. This is a more recent picture. So it's developed quite a lot. Anyway, he died and he supposedly deputized his favorite student [foreign name] and as his name indicates he was from Murcia, Spain. This is his tomb in Alexandria. It's a much more recent mosque obviously than 1286.
When he died, he deputized his favorite student, the very famous [foreign name], and this is his tomb in Cairo. He died in Cairo so his tomb is there. And the idea of a Sufi brotherhood is very teleological. Once they exist, they trace their authority back very linearly to an authoritative source.
So here is a very nice pictorial representation. And it's probably too small for anyone who reads Arabic to read, but I've pointed out the main points here. This is a genealogical tree, a spiritual genealogy we'll call it. With Muhammed at the top and then branches coming down and connecting ultimately with Abul-Hasan Shavoli and then the next leap after him is al-Murcia and then [foreign name].
Which makes a very neat, clear linear progression and makes it non-problematic. It definitely did not happen this way. If you examine the sources from the time, it's very clear that they were fighting and contesting about who would be who and which person would get to lead. I go into it in a lot of detail in the book.
Anyway, this is a back projection. My question is how did this brotherhood emerge? And how did it become so popular? There are Ashavoli Sufis today all over North Africa, Egypt and Syria. It's a very popular brotherhood. So what was the secret of their success, let's say.
So one of the big things is that Al-Iskandari wrote this brilliant hagiography called [foreign term], the Subtle Blessings. I only chose this picture because it's a manuscript from the United States. So there you go.
Jason said I would show you pictures of the collection here. That's not true. I don't have any pictures. But there is a lot of stuff here that I used, so trust me. What Al-Iskandari does in this book that's so brilliant is he crafts an idealized image of Abul-Hasan Ashavoli that both kind of idealizes a compartment and a behavior, while at the same time crafting him as the idealized image of the group from Al-Iskandari's time.
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There's a kind of a social dialectic that happens between the hagiography and the emergence of the brotherhood, I argue, in which the mapping out of this personality structures the practice of an early group. Once that practice is institutionalized over time, this takes several generations of disciples shall we say.
But once it's institutionalized, that structure is autonomously mapped back onto or even matonomously to the founding figure. So the founding figure stands in for the contemporaneous group, right? Al-Iskandari never met Ashavoli, but h writes this hagiography about Ashavoli and al-Murci in which Ashavoli kind of stands in for the later group.
So this is one way that they mass produced Sufism, was that Al-Iskandari brilliantly crafts this idealized image. Another way that they did this, and this was kind of a more practical way is they were all three of them, Ishavoli, Al-Murci, Al-Iskandari, shameless self-promoters. They travelled all over Egypt with the sanction of the state, from Alexandria to Aswan. The entire region travelling up and down the Nile, preaching their message and kind of bringing people into their group.
At first it's all informal, but once Al-Iskandari writes his hagiography and formalizes the practice and formalizes an identity, it quickly evolves into a very hierarchically kind of coherent organization.
So this is one of the very famous places where Ashavoli and El-Murci used to preach, the Atarin mosque in Alexandria, which is still there. This is an old picture because I like it, but it's still there. All right, my third example, and I'm kind of going quickly because I want to have time for if people have any questions.
This is my third and final example, is unruly Sufism, is what I call it. This portion of the book is about--I've been to Alexandria now and I've been to Cairo. Let's go to Upper Egypt. And Upper Egypt is basically the region--it depends on how you define it--but let's go with this map. From Asyut to Aswan.
Sufis really only started coming to Upper Egypt and they started originally coming to the city of Thena. You can see Thena there--I don't know if this works, no. You can see Thena on there where the Nile kind of has a crook.
They started settling in Thena because it had been abandoned much earlier. And Sufis coming from Morocco really started coming in the 12th century. Mostly fleeing instability in North Africa. And they created this really amazing kind of vibrant Sufi culture there that was unlike anything else in Egypt. I'll come back to those.
But first I want to say that almost this entire section of the book is based on an unpublished work that is truly phenomenal. If I ever have the power I will publish this. And it's worth saying that there are a couple copies of this manuscript in the world. And in 2010 I had seen and looked at the copy in Paris, which is the oldest one.
The copy in Paris is from 1480. So this copy I actually found, the other person who works on this is a French scholar. He was not aware of it. I was in Cairo in the summer of 2010 doing work at Al Estar in Cairo and I was in a taxi from my hotel going to Al Estar. And as we were driving by the [foreign name] mosque, I noticed the sign that in English says Central Library for Islamic Manuscripts.
And I said, "Hey, just let me out there. I want to go see what this is." So he let me out in the middle of the road and I ran over to the mosque and I went in and they were closing in 45 minutes and I was leaving the next day. So I said, "Let me look at your catalog for 45 minutes."
I look at the catalog and lo and behold, here is this manuscript. They have a very whole, complete copy of the manuscript and not only is it there, not only is it available, but they will sell me a CD with the whole thing on it for like $10. 
As opposed to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris which is like $7,000 to get a copy of a manuscript. And not only that, but it's about 300 folios or so. Here's the very last page. And in the colophon we have the date that it was copied, which turns out to be the second oldest copy of the manuscript. So I was overjoyed.
Anyway, this whole section is based on this very extensive manuscript, which is solely devoted to the Sufis of Upper Egypt and is just an amazing text. All right, so back to our Sufis. During this period, Upper Egypt was a very interesting, very unique place for several reasons. 
Number one, there were constant rebellions against the state. The Arab tribesmen of the region were constantly revolting against the rulers and cutting off the roads and stopping the collection of taxes and collecting the taxes for themselves.
They were almost setting up quasi-states of their own in the south. So there's one thing. Number two--lists--when Saladin ousted the Fatimites, all the Shiites that were in Cairo fled to Upper Egypt to hide out. And all the sympathizers with the Fatimites fled to Upper Egypt to hide out. So there were a lot of Shiites in Upper Egypt during this period.
Number three, there were a lot of Christians in Upper Egypt at this period. There are still a lot of Christians in Upper Egypt, but this period it was the vast majority of the population probably still, up through at least the 14th century.
Number four is that the state could not exercise proper control over Upper Egypt, as evidenced by the revolts. But also they just were not able. It was too unruly, too wild. It was like the wild west down there. And in the text people complain that there's no law, it's totally out of order and all of these kinds of things.
And number five, and this is why I put this map back up again, the crusader states had made Upper Egypt into a very popular destination for the following reason. All right, so if you look here you'll see that the kingdom of Jerusalem during the Fatimite period butts right up agains the Fatimite caliphate down there at the bottom. 
Here's kind of a more pulled-out map. You can see that by land if you want to go through there you have to travel through Christian territory. So for about 200 years, and even after Saladin had pushed back the boundaries, it was still very dangerous to travel through this region.
So in the past, before this period, if you wanted to go to Mecca or to India or anywhere else in the east and you were coming from Andalusia, Spain or North Africa, you would travel east to Alexandria. You would disembark at Alexandria. Then you would sail up the Nile to Cairo, disembark in Cairo and go overland over the Sini and then down south into Arabia to Mecca or wherever you were going.
When the crusaders made this impossible, and then the Mongols also caused some problems a little bit in this respect as well, Upper Egypt became the alternative route. So now instead of disembarking in Cairo, you stayed on the Nile and you would sail all the way to the city of Kush, which is not on this map, but it's right next to Thena.
And you would disembark at Kush and then you would travel across the desert to the Red Sea and then sail to Jutda down there at the bottom of the map. And then from Jutda you can travel overland to Mecca or wherever else you wanted to go. 
So for about 200 years Upper Egypt was infused with people from all over the world. Merchants, pilgrims, scholars. It was infused with money. These people are bringing money and it's infused with new ideas, particularly Sufism. So this kernel of Sufis that are in Thena at the 12th century are bolstered by all of this activity over these 200 years.
So this unique situation produces a kind of Sufism that's totally interesting and amazing. Number one, they refused any support or sanction from the state. They were actively irritated by the state. They weren't fighting them militarily, but they were very unhappy with the state and they did everything in their power to not have anything to do with them. Number two, they were committed, because the state couldn't do it, to promoting Sunni Islam. Saladin for example had founded five madrasas up in the north. But he did nothing in the south. The Mongluts founded madrasas all over Cairo and Alexandria. They did nothing in the south. So the Sufis took it upon themselves to promote their idea of what Sunni Islam should look like, a normative Sunni Islam.
One way they did this was they founded madrasas.
They also combated Shiites actively, not violently, but disputations with them and teaching them and finding them and getting them to see the error of their ways, so to speak. Number four, they regulated the moral economy of the entire region. So anytime they heard of somebody doing something they didn't like.
So there's a very famous example from my manuscript here that the Sufis hear that there is a wine party in the city of Luxor. So all the Sufis get together and en mass go to the wine party and they knock on the door and the people inside are hiding and won't open the door. So the Sufis break down the door and destroy the wine barrels and beat the people and it's a scene.
^M00:40:05
They are also actively fighting against Christians too. They very famously in the year 1307 had a riot in the city of Kush and the Sufis went out and in a kind of fit of zealous anger at the Christians--there are very complicated reasons for this--they destroyed a bunch of Christian churches in the city of Kush in 1307.
And then finally they articulated their authority almost completely in terms of the miraculous. They are far more miraculous than any other Sufi from this period. They are bringing dead animals to life. Not just little animals like birds, but big animals like donkeys. They can fly. They walk on the Nile like it's a road. They can be in two places at the same time. They can think of a person and bring that person bodily to them. It goes on and on and on. They're far more miraculous than anybody else.
The problem with this is it's double-edged. This is really great. It's extraordinarily popular. Their miraculous reputations were such that people would come out in droves to meet them. So there are these famous stories. So for one example, [foreign name] was one of these Sufis who was really miraculous, who could bring things to life and fly and walk on the Nile. 
And when he sailed to Cairo on one trip up the Nile, the people from Upper Egypt came out in thousands and thousands and lined the Nile all the way to try to catch a glimpse of him or maybe touch him. When he was in Cairo the crowds around him were so intense that the sources describe him as if he is the black stone in the Kaaba and the pilgrims are all trying to touch it as they walk past him. Which may not make sense to some of you, but to others it will.
All right, but this is a double-edged sword. Because while it is extraordinarily popular, and again the production of this charismatic authority is done through the kind of interesting configuration of the state, the Sufis and the masses, as we've seen in all of our examples. But you cannot reproduce the conditions of your own production with miraculous authority, right?
So let me back up and explain this. The Sufis at the Hanka, as long as someone was paying their bills, this could keep going. As soon as they stopped getting paid, the Hanka fell into disuse because Sufis went away and no more charismatic processions.
Abul-Hasan Ashavoli and the Ashavoli Sufis, Al-Iskandari, it's a charismatic authority that Ashavoli had, but Al-Iskandari makes a way to reproduce that socially. He makes a way that everybody can be a Sufi, by telling them that you can dress normally. You can have a job. You can have a family. You can do all the things that you would normally do and be a Sufi by imitating these certain aspects of Ashavoli's personality.
However, if your sole kind of claim to authority is bringing dead things to life or flying through the air, it's very difficult to reproduce that socially, right? The reputations typically died with each master, right? It's not like each student would then go on to do the same miracles. It just doesn't work.
So what's interesting is that there are no Sufi brotherhoods that emerge in Upper Egypt, and this is a place where there are at least a dozen, if not dozens of really powerful Sufi masters in the Ayubed and Monglut period. Much more kind of popular, powerful masters than even Ashavoli and some of the juridical Sufis in the north. These are some really popular people.
But no brotherhoods emerge. And it's because their entire outlook is articulated miraculously. All right, so what happens? When they die, their charisma is routinized at the site of their body. And this is typical. Many Sufis when they die their tomb becomes an object of visitation and veneration. But the Upper Egyptian Sufis' tombs become immediately valorized in this way and really popular.
Even already in the 14th century there are these very detailed descriptions about how many people are going to the tombs of these masters in Thena, in Luxor, in Kush, in Aswan, in Asyut, all over the place. And it's because they were so miraculous that the charisma has to go somewhere. And it's routinized at the physical site of their body.
So I show you this picture. This is a really fantastic one. This is one of the most famous of these Sufis, Abul-Agad Al-Luxori from the city of Luxor. And this is his tomb, which is built right in the middle of an ancient Egyptian temple, right? The old temple of Luxor. And people look at this and say, "I can't believe that they're so disrespectful that they built it right on top of the temple."
But it's not quite as simple as that. When they built it, it was almost all covered in earth. The temple was only excavated in the 20th century. So the mosque was just on a hill. And then they started excavating and it turned out it was built in the middle of this temple. The only parts, you can tell that the walls on there were poking up, but that's about it.
All right, so in sum, how was Sufism popularized in Egypt? I would kind of jokingly but not really call it a perfect storm or a virtual conspiracy. This is a linguistic term, virtual conspiracy. Number one, the institutionalization of Sufism in Baghdad created a reproducible social movement. 
So once the institutions are in place, it can be reproduced anywhere. The political and economic instability of the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries in the east and the west. And I'm talking about the collapse of the Iranian economy, the Reconquista and everything in between. It pushed all of these Sufis from these places into Egypt.
Egypt was a kind of island of stability during this period and they all got pushed in there. The Crusader states and the Mongol threats also catalyzed the emergence of these Sunni polities, the Ayubans and the Mongluts, who are particularly interested in having Sufis bless them publically for a number of reasons. 
Not only does it make them look good, but if they pray for them all the time, then maybe they'll get to go to heaven. And number four, genius Sufis--and I mean really, these Sufis are brilliant--capitalized on these events, performing and producing Sufism on a wide scale all over the place, in many different ways for many different people and popularizing across the socioeconomic spectrum.
So hopefully I have put some agency back into the Sufis here and given them a voice in the story of how Sufism came to Egypt and got so popular. And I think that is it. I'll take any questions if you have them. Or if you're done, we can just be done.
^M00:47:23
[ Applause ]
^M00:47:35
Thank you. Ahmed, yes?
>> Question: Thank you so much.
>> Nathan Hofer: Yeah, Ahmed is one of the few people who's actually read it so far.
>> Question: But is there, from what you looked at, is there a language? [Inaudible] But do you see any kind of circumstantial or substantial evidence that the popularizing Sufis are kind of doing it in the vernacular as opposed to using the language of the scholars? That question would be most important.
>> Nathan Hofer: So the answer is we do have some evidence that that is the case, that he Sufis were vernacularizing their message in a certain way. So for example the Sufis that lived at the Hanka were really these elite Sufis from the far east, from Iran mostly.
And the sources will often say that when they came to Cairo they would give teaching sessions and people would make fun of them and laugh at them because their Arabic was so bad. So not surprisingly, none of the Sufis who lived at the Hanka became famous Sufi masters, because they don't speak Arabic well. They speak Persian as their first language. They can write in Arabic very well, but they don't speak it extemporaneously. So there's that.
The ones that are really popular, Abul-Hasan Ashavoli, Al-Iskandari and the Sufis of Upper Egypt, Al-Iskandari we actually have a text of his sermons. It's called the [foreign word], and it's written in like a very classicizing Arabic. But the message of it is very kind of simple and plain and it seems geared toward a non-educated, at least juridically, audience.
What's more, this manuscript that I'm working with from Upper Egypt Eben Nur Al-Kuzi's manuscript, is full actually of vernacular Arabic. It's written in classicizing Arabic, but there's tons and tons of vernacular Arabic in it, interestingly enough.
^M00:50:07
Yeah?
>> Question: For the language, were there distinguishing physical characteristics of Sufis when walking down the streets of Cairo or wherever?
>> Nathan Hofer: That is a really good question that I'm afraid I don't completely know the answer to. In Upper Egypt I would suspect not. There were some Sufis. So Ahmed has written this really great book about Sufi that are called Qalandar, these like antinomian Sufis who shaved their heads, but not just their heads but their eyebrows and their mustaches and their beards, which is unbelievable and wore chains and walked around without clothes on and stuff like this. So those definitely.
The Sufis that I look at here probably not visually marked necessarily. If anything marked them, it was Sufis like at the Hanka that would be marked by these big processions of 300 Sufis at a time. But normally like in a bridge if they're just travelling from place to place. And some of them are known for being a Muela or a Mushdo, which is a kind of person that has bene touched by God in such a way that they're no longer coherent in any recognizable way.
And they sometimes dressed very oddly. But they also gave their food to dogs and spent their time at the cemeteries, so they did all kinds of terrible things. Normatively terrible things. So they would be recognized.
But mostly, not as far as I could tell, they didn't have a kind of Sufi uniform. Jeff?
>> Question: I was wondering if you could talk a little more about [inaudible].
^E00:52:05
^B00:52:39
>> Nathan Hofer: Oh definitely. And not extensively, but one of my heroes is Georg Simmel the German sociologist who emphasizes conflict as one of the primary modes of human association itself. So I'm really interested in conflict.
So the Sufis definitely did not get along with each other all the time. So in the book I have some examples of this, that in one instance a Sufi at the Hanka will be valorized as a Sufi and in a text written by a Sufi he's a fool.
In Upper Egypt, Eben-Nur has all these descriptions of Sufis that he doesn't particularly care for. And talks about it very openly. Eben-Nur actually met Al-Murci, Ashavoli's student, in the city of Kush and he says, "He came to Kush and my friend said let's go talk to this guy, Al-Murci. He's really famous and a really smart Sufi. And I was like, I don't really want to talk to that guy. He's really mean and crabby and I'm just not that interested in him."
And his friends convince him to go meet with him, so they go meet with him and completely incensed Al-Murci goes to a kind of a trance and his eyes turn flaming red. He says, "He's got some power, but I don't know."
You can see these in the text. They're not necessarily doctrinal disagreements. I have not really seen much kind of arguing and pointing about Sufi doctrine. This is more about their legitimacy of their authority.
And when Al-Iskandari writes, he completely writes out his rival for Al-Murci's favorite student. This guy Al-Havashi, or Al-Arshi in some sources, this Abyssinian Sufi who probably was actually Al-Murci's favorite student, but he didn't write a book Al-Iskandari did. So he got to erase him from the record.
That's a really good way to win, by the way, historical arguments, is to write them out. Jean?
>> Question: Can you say something about women?
>> Nathan Hofer: Ah, yes.
>> Question: Was it distinct of the era? Or any sense of proportions?
>> Nathan Hofer: It's really difficult to say. The sources for Cairo and Alexandria are pretty silent, not totally. They mention here and there a few women. Al-Iskandari mentions a few women, but not very many. Eben-Nur has many more mentions of powerful Sufi women. And I am working on a side project to bring that in. I wanted to put it into the book, but I couldn't get it done in time. So I'm working on that separately.
But there were Sufi women and many of them were quite famous and popular it seems, especially in Upper Egypt. But I haven't pulled all of this together yet. But this is a notoriously difficult question to answer.
Oh yes, Jason?
>> Jason Steinhauer: Thank you for a great talk. I'd like you to give a little attention maybe to the language you used to describe the popularization. Maybe the Sufis themselves probably would have understood that popularization. People who are dedicated to subduing the people, you describe them as shameless self-promoters.
Lavishing charisma. The problem is I certainly don't think we should allow as scholars the subject to write themselves into scholarly categories. But beyond this sort of sensation, how do you think they themselves understood this?
>> Nathan Hofer: Thank you. Definitely they don't describe themselves as self-promoters and as seizing the means of production and things like this. And in fact I gave a very small part of this at the history department at Johns Hopkins last year and they were truly incensed that I was using Marxist stuff to talk about the Sufis. Rightly so.
What they understood, so your example about those who subdue the ego selves being called self-promoters is a good one. One of the things that's really interesting about the Ashavoli Sufis is that they revive in a certain way the malamity tradition of Sufism that had not been in Egypt before. So the malamity tradition, it's not Sufism, but malamity tradition is self-blame in that you don't dress like you're an aesthetic and you don't behave like you are a pious person, so that no one will think that you are and they won't help you out.
If you dress as a poor person, someone is going to offer you money to buy bread, or they're going to offer you bread. The malamity said you should dress really well and you should not let on that you need food and you need money. And that it's all up to you.
So this is what the Ashavoli Sufis embraced. You should dress really well. You should have a big family. You should live in a nice house. You should go hang out with rich people. You should put on feasts and things like this.
So they didn't imagine themselves as necessarily self-promoters, but they definitely were bringing--I think they very well knew that they were bringing a message to the people. That this is a form of Sufism that everybody can do. You can do it at your house, just by having a job and taking care of things and reading the Koran and coming to our prayer meetings on Thursdays or whatever.
Others, it's very clear. Like the Sufis at the Hanka, this is not a deliberate attempt to popularize anything. The Sufis at the Hanka are doing this because they're getting paid to do it. Not in a crass way. They're not there for the money, but they are there because they need a place to live and they need entry into Cairene society, and the Hanka provides a place for them to do their studies and to write books. And they also happen to get paid.
But they're not doing it to popularize anything or to spread the message. It's just kind of an unintentional byproduct. I don't know if that answers you question. Is that it?
>> Jason Steinhauer: We're going to stop it there.
^M00:59:07
[ Applause ]
^M00:59:18
So thank you again to Nate for the great talk and thank you all for coming. A quick announcement, so we are back here again at this very same time 4:00 PM in this room next week on Thursday. Our Larson fellow Tara Tapper will be delivering a talk on the research that she has done tracing the history of using arts and crafts technique and making to help with war trauma and military trauma. So she'll be looking at World War I all the way through the current conflicts.
That talk will be cosponsored by the Veterans History Project and the Prints and Photographs division which will also be taking out a small display of treasures from their collection that will sort of correspond to the themes that Tara touches on. So please join us again here for that next week at 4:00. Sign our list on the way out, and thank you again for coming. And thank you, Nate.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.