Muhammadan Modernities
Vanquishing the Kingdom of Fear Part II: A Muhammadan Vision for End-Time Justice-Seeking
This post is part II of Vanquisher of the Kingdom of Fear
For my PhD research on 19th century West Africa’s most widely circulated text, I visited the maqam (burial site) of a 16th century Egyptian scholar, ‘Abdul Wahāb al-Sha‘rānī (d.1565) in Cairo. It might sound counter intuitive, but it is exactly where I needed to go to understand the legacy of revolutionary warrior-scholar and Caliphate-builder, Hajj Umar Futī Tāl (d.1864).
Among others, Sha‘rānī is my ultimate “spirit ‘alim.” He has been described as “the last great, (or at any rate, original) thinker and writer before the final cultural decadence of the Arabic-speaking world in the later Middle Ages”1 He represents the quintessential dynamic scholar: a mystic, a jurist, a unifier, and a visionary anti-dogmatist whose self-awareness came with a strong sense of honor and integrity.
He was known for constantly engaging in an auto-critique of his own “in groups” ie. Sufis, scholars, jurists, and the religious elite. He even wrote a treatise criticizing scholars who scurried to rulers and salivated over positions of leadership. His sharp, constructive critiques—similar in vein to that of his masterful teacher Imam Suyūtī—stemmed not in spite of an ardent, mystical devotion to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, rather, it was arguably because of it. Simply put, this scathing principled acumen came from a commitment to preserving and protecting Prophetic ethics. For more of Sha‘rānī’s works, check out the sheer breadth of his written corpus, here.
Even the generic Sothebys page—where the opener image of the exorbitantly priced but beautiful manuscript of his text, al-Mizān al-Kubra, is from—credits him for being “a moderate in all his views and in many of his works sought to reconcile differences among religious and social groups. He expounded moderate forms of Sufism that did not contradict the shar'ia, condemned scholars who confused the population with hair-splitting legal and theological arguments and even wrote a treatise advising scholars and Sufis how to deal effectively with the military elite.”
I would take the Sothebys descriptor with a grain of salt, of course, especially on the subjectiveness of the “moderate” signifier, but there is some truth to it. His approach to mysticism was indeed “moderate” in the sense that he did not make an idol out of the unseen and was very much invested in activating tazkiya towards affecting the world for the better. Even a cursory reading of his writings will show that he didn’t carve out a siloed, insular existence for himself and his community using spirituality as an escapist crutch.
Rather, Sha‘rānī practiced a corrective approach to tassawuf, one that did not see ihsan as an elitist, mystical escape, rather, one that centered the experiential knowledge of God and the agency that came with that at the very heart of religion. He was not simply content with an insular, spiritual practice of purification, but rather, one actively sought to transform the social, cultural and political conditions of the day. He was a known critic of jurists and theologians who quibbled to no end, deepening intra-Muslim and intra-madhab rifts. To remedy this, he wrote the aforementioned Al-Mizān al-kubrā (“The Supreme Scale”), in which he compares the rulings of all four Sunni schools of shari‘a as if they were a single school.
Not only that, he believed this would be the legal manual for the end of times.
This eschatological frame makes his relevance to 21st century Islamic scholarly discourse all the more timely. It is more crucial than ever to pay attention to prescriptive scholarship that has a concern for the ummah’s condition in its latter stages given the lacking vacuum in Muslim visionary leadership in our present moment of systemic collapse, internment, nation state tyranny and genocide.
Reading the work of 16th century Sha‘rānī (and others) is crucial to understanding 19th century Sufi-led revolutionary resistance movements, and by extension, the near total absence of this reformist, revolutionary discourse among Muslim scholars today, especially those of more Sufi leaning/traditionalist/Islamist persuasions.
Returning to his relevance to West African Islamic intellectual history, let me take you on a nerdy detour through my academic research labyrinth. What led me down the Sha‘rānī rabbit hole is the fact that he is the single most cited scholar in Tāl’s magnum opus, Kitāb al-Rimāh “The Book of the Spears of the League of Allah the Merciful upon the Necks of Satan the Accursed” (aka. the text I spent 5 years of my life working on at Harvard), which essentially institutionalized tarīqa formation in West Africa and was the precursor to the Fayda (flood) of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse in the 20th century. The prolific late Mamluk/early Ottoman Egyptian scholar is cited so often in the Rimāh, that the German Islamicist Bernd Radtke wrote an entire study about this citational favoritism (see table below). Radtke didn’t quite explain fully why exactly he is cited so much, but I set out to do so.
Interestingly, in turn, Sha‘rānī himself singularly quotes one, singular voice: his illiterate, sagely teacher, ‘Alī al-Khawwāṣ (d.1532), the most frequently quoted figure in the extensive Sha‘rānian corpus. In one of his many excellent studies on Sha‘rānī, Professor Adam Sabra notes, in a manner so similar Radtke’s study on Tāl: “Sha‘rānī quotes ‘Alī al-Khawwās so frequently that one wonders which man is the mouthpiece and which the authorial voice.”2
Consider this one of many quotes in Tāl’s Rimāh wherein he cites his beloved Sha‘rānī who cites his beloved Khawwās and notice the centrality of the Prophet Muhammad as the ultimate shaykh and guide:
"The whole point being, is that the Prophet–God bless him and give him peace–is the true Shaykh for us, through the intermediacy of the shuyūkh of the spiritual path, or without intermediacy, as in the case of someone who becomes one of the friends of God who meet with him–God bless him and give him peace– in the state of wakefulness. Praise be to God, for we have come to recognize a community of the people of who have achieved this union, like Sayyidī ‘Alī al-Khawwāṣ, Shaykh Muḥammad al-‘Adl, Jalāl ad-Dīn as-Suyūṭī and others of their kind. May God the Exalted be well pleased with them all.
Tāl, Sha‘rānī, Ibn ‘Arabī, Suyūtī, Khawwās, Niasse, etc. are all “inter-authors in the dhawq sphere.” They borrow and cite one another extensively driven by devotion and shared experience and devotion to the Prophet, not authorial politics. Western notions of authorship are not very helpful in understanding Islamic intellectual and textual history. Instead, it is more productive to turn our focus on the affinity-building processes of Muslim sages who cited each other to draw nearer to each other through shared experiential knowledge (dhawq) and not just “rational” textual aims. More than just “authors", they lovingly and reverently borrow from one another to shape and enrich their Muhammadan projects in a way that transcends space and time.
On the edifying link between Sha‘rānī and Tāl, their inter-connected dhawq-sphere can point us so much: a neglected vision for a more prosperous, united Muslim modernity that is rooted in authoritative Prophethood. While serious scholars in their own right, who contributed to the sciences of usul and furu’, Sha‘rānī, like Tāl, wrote of an Islam centered not only on taqlīd (conformity) of bygone scholars and consensus of past giants, but on the imperative of tahqīq (realization) based on a living connection with the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
More importantly, they both wrote with eschatological aims in mind and proposed conclusive doctrines for the end-of-times. As such, they were not just docile Sufis concerned with signs of doomsday, the unseen, God’s Greatest Names or the different levels of the souls. Rather, their projects encompassed a vision that reaffirms and activates—rather than abrogates—the essence of past scholarly projects. This needs to be taken more seriously in the study of modern and current Islamic intellectual thought.
To give but a brief summary, Sha‘rānī’s 16th century Egyptian and Tāl’s 19th century West African doctrine are bound but some of the following key features:
The Living Prophet: the striking centrality of the Muḥammadan Path (tariqa Muhammadiyya) with its intensified devotion to the Prophet as the ultimate guide and shaykh, both censuring those who deny the possibility of witnessing the Prophet in a waking state.
Reviving understandings of the sharī‘a that are not bogged down by score-keeping, egoism, exotericism and hair-splitting legal and theological debates.
Challenging the authority of sultans and princes who are perceived to be oppressive and unjust.
Proposing a unifying legal, theological and political agenda for the end of times.
Clearly, neither scholar lived in the end of times themselves, but they worked for that time, knowing full well the existential necessity of centering the Prophet ﷺ as the uniting, corrective, central vehicle and ultimate guide and authority. They wrote for the future. They lived in service of us today. The fact that we are discussing their works to this day on this 21st century Substack, shows that their works had timeless and reverberating repercussions.
Sha‘rānī’s vision not only helped build Tāl’s Sufi revolutionary scholarly state in 19th century West Africa, he was also the most widely read scholar in the Levant in Ottoman Damascus. On this, academic Leila Hudson notes that just as it is important to study the life and times of Sha‘rānī, “it is even more rewarding to try to piece together a picture of how and why Sha‘rānī’s works were prominent in another society undergoing traumatic change nearly four hundred years after [he] lived.” Hudson’s research talks about his printed works and the political milieu of early Ottoman Damascus as a backdrop for the popularity of Sha‘rānī’s books. She also sketches his appeal and influence in the modern period across the Muslim world, even among European Orientalists:
Goldziher used Sha‘rānī as source material for his philological work. Von Kramer used Durar al-ghawwāṣ, al-Anwār al-qudsiyya, al-Yawāqīt wa-l-jawāhir, and three other manuscripts by Sha‘rānī as the major sources for his history of the main ideas of Islam. A Frenchman translated and hoped to make Sha‘rānī’s Mīzān the basis of French legal policy in Algeria.
There is also a near unanimous consensus in secondary literature describing Sha‘rānī’s project as playing a large role in popularizing the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabī. On his essay on the diffusion of the thought of Ibn ‘Arabī, Michel Chodkiewicz highlights how Sha‘rānī’s works spread “in all directions of the Moslem (sic) world” and how he summarized and disseminated Ibn ‘Arabī’s Futuḥāṭ through his popular work the Yawāqīt wal-Jawāhir.
Interestingly, Tijānī Sufism has similarly been credited for distilling “much of [the] esoteric thought of Ibn ‘Arabī, making it available to ordinary Muslims in concrete devotional practices.”3 Centuries after Ibn ‘Arabī, this is precisely what the work of the enigmatic scholar Hajj ‘Umar Tāl accomplished in the mid 1800s in West Africa when he built the last sovereign Muslim scholarly state before colonialism.
I am certainly biased, but Tāl Rimaḥ’s wide-ranging, persuasive rhetoric aided in spreading a “sealing” Muḥammadan Path across large swaths of West Africa guided by a rhetoric of khatmiyya (sealing sainthood)–with the Prophet/Shaykh as its vehicle. Though the idea of a Muḥammadan Path is not new and saw its peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Muslim world, Tāl’s project in the Rimāḥ gave “Muhammadan Sainthood” an unprecedented religious and political dynamism in the modern Muslim world.
Instead of taking as an idol any constructed notion of “tradition” as their guiding path, scholars in the Muhammadan Path like Abd al-Aziz al-Dabbagh (d. 1719), Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi (d. 1731), Mustafa Kamal al-din al-Bakri (d. 1749), the Shaykh al-Azhar Muhammad al-Hifni (or Hifnawi, d. 1767), Muhammad al-Samman (d. 1775) and Mahmud al-Kurdi (d. 1780), centered an experiential approach to knowledge-seeking. Being guided by an individualized and actualized—rather than passive—relationship with God and His Messenger ﷺ by means of verification or tahqiq, one is able to make sure their religious identity is not a statue or an idol, in the sense that it provides the knowledge experience necessary to identifying, resisting and withstanding end-time moral rot, abuses of religious and political authority and the one-sided literalism of jurists and theologians.
Essentially, this was a consciously drawn blue print to save Islam from malaise, corruption, stasis and dogmatism by constantly enlivening it with a living connection with the Prophet ﷺ rather on one that realize solely on piggy-backing off the legacies, opinions and books of bygone scholars. This project stressed the importance of living connections and by extension, continuous access to the authority of Prophecy. This approach offered a portal out of ignorance and a living link to the sources of shar‘ia in such a way that had grave intellectual and spiritual ramifications: they were building a collective vision towards a Muhammadan Modernity.
These sagely scholars from as early as Imam Tirmidhi, to Ibn ‘Arabī, to Suyūti, Sha‘rānī and Tāl, all worked towards the same project—a Muhammadan notion of progress—even if they differed on manifestations, the goals were the same. Since their projects were all guided by an experiential, shared devotional affinity with the Final Messenger ﷺ as the ultimate arbiter and guide, such a vibrant relationship with the Seal of Prophecy is meant to serve as a strong dam against stasis, strict literalism, and hypocrisy. Their lived, actualized understanding of faith was a litmus test against the potential pitfall of the cult of ancestor and tradition worship and deifying constructed notions of “Islam.”
These aims enacted tangible societal and political change. They had practical, institution-building methodologies in their respective times. For example, ‘Ali al-Khawwāṣ and his devoted student Sha‘rānī were the first to establish zawāyā and majālis salāt ‘alā al-Nabī at al-Azhar in the sixteenth century. By doing this, they reminded the Azharite elite of their true mission: that knowledge—devoid of God at its center, and without the love of Muhammad ﷺ as the wellspring of guidance—is misdirected folly. It risks becoming an Islam without a core.
Sha‘rānī and Tāl would be aghast to witness the state of Sufis and scholars today, those who don sandala accessories, wear aqiq rings and celebrate the mawlid but serve at the pleasure of unprophetic butchers and tyrants. Reading works like the Mizan or the Rimah in this time of rampant tyranny, debauchery and genocide—not to mention widespread hypocrisy in the name of Islam in positions of power and authority—is meant to re-orient us to offering alternative visions of modernity. With the collapse of the rules-based-order, people will be looking to Muslims for answers, and it behooves us to come up with something better than self-congratulatory conferences and empty slogans.
If nothing else, the people of Gaza remind us of this urgency time and time again in both word and deed: that it is not enough to say la ilaha illa Allah to be a sincere believer. Rather, one must embody and act on this proclaimed belief through enacting the living example of the person of Muhammad Rasul Allah and what he actually stood for. Saying “Allah is one” is not the same as acting on one’s professed belief in tawhid. If this were true, then we wouldn’t have “Muslim leaders” with the name Muhammad like MBS and MBZ crying crocodile tears sprinkled with a few disgruntled “Islamic” references to “condemn” Israel while doing absolutely nothing to protect a defenseless refugee population being pummeled to death by 2,000 pound bombs for 12 months straight.
The very dignity and honor of Islam is as stake.
After all, what is the link between humankind and the Divine if not Prophecy? And what should this Prophecy today look like if not that of the fully actualized, universal Message of Muhammad ﷺ? Now and in the turbulent days to come, the only way to distinguish between a hypocrite and a sincere believer is by how much they strive to embody the second part of the shahada. Not those who cherry pick the sira and try to distort the figure of the Prophet as simply some kind of passive “fire fighter” who viewed all injustices as “fitna” and as a “peace maker” who turned the other cheek towards oppression. Embodying the ideals of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is not about wearing turbans, sandala hats and singing the mawlid. It is about sacrifice, conscientious action and benefitting and aiding the believers and human kind. Anything other than this is Islam without a core. A body without a soul. An empty shell. So this mawlid season, let us do the hard work of returning to the true Prophetic teachings and the lived examples of those whose sincere love for the Leader of the Banner of Praise ﷺ has the power to break unjust systems and change the whole world.
“Do not intercede for them oh Messenger of Allah!” - a rousing message for our treacherous times from a woman in Gaza.
Michael Winter, Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt, 1.
’Abd al-Wahhab Ahmad Al-Shaʻrani, Advice for Callow Jurists and Gullible Mendicants on Befriending Emirs, World Thought in Translation (New Haven, [Connecticut] ; London, [England]: Yale University Press, 2017), 7.
Patrick J. Ryan, “The Mystical Theology of Tijānī Sufism and Its Social Significance in West Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 30, no. 2 (2000): 209, https://doi.org/10.2307/1581801.