IMPACT OF MUSLIM SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS

IMPACT OF MUSLIM SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS: 1200-1400

This essay discusses how Muslim social and religious organizations contributed to stability and/or change during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A variety of such institutions played an important role in promoting the Islamicization of society which in general had a stabilizing effect by filling vacuums created by the turnover and militarization of political leadership and the destruction of traditional political, economic and cultural elites which occurred during these centuries. Some of the schismatic movements within Islam accelerated its fragmentation with different Muslim organizations contributing to the ascendancy of some Islamic sects over others and in some areas to a weakening of central authority.

Role of Muslim Institutions in the Revival of Sunni Islam

According to Lapidus, despite the political fragmentation of the Arab empire during the last three hundred years of the Abbasid Caliphate (950-1258), "a new form of Islamic state, community and religion came into being" (139). During the 10th and 11th centuries various forms of Shiism, Ismailism in Fatimid Egypt and the Druze and Nusayri sects among others, had made inroads on Sunni Islam in the west Mediterranean area. During the reign of the Kurdish-Seljuk warrior kings Nur al-Din and Salah al-Din in the 12th century and their Ayyubid and Mamluk successors in Egypt and Syria in the 13th and 14th centuries, the dominance of Sunni Islam

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t of a Sufi metaphysics and the integration of Sufi thought and practice with other forms of Islamic belief and worship" (168). Whereas the ulama taught the sharia as a way of coping with everyday life, the Sufis were ascetics who taught the tariqa or way of mystical life. Their central tenet was renunciation of worldly things "in the quest for an ecstatic self-realization [purification of the soul] through the direct visionary experience of God's being" (Lapidus 195). The Sufis taught in ribats or community meeting houses and in rural areas and outlying provinces. Their message was inculcated in the young by masters (shaykhs) to their disciples and spread by wandering holy men. Various Sufi brotherhoods were founded, such as the Rifaiyya in Iraq in the 12th century, the Suhrawardiyya in Baghdad in the 13th century and the al-Shadhili order which began in Morocco and took root in Egypt in the 13th century. Lapidus says that "by the end of the fourteenth century, the Sufi tariqat was well established throughout the Middle East" (171). Lapidus says that "as states became militarized and secularized, Islamic religious associations became the almost universal basis of Middle Eastern communal organization" (232). Old political,

Category: History - I