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| Title: | Succession and inheritance in a Sufi order: the case of Ibr¯ah¯im al-Rash¯id |
| Author: | Sedgwick, Mark |
| Year: | 1997 |
| Periodical: | Islam et sociétés au Sud du Sahara |
| Issue: | 11 |
| Pages: | 149-162 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Sudan Somalia |
| Subject: | Sufism |
| Abstract: | The many disputes amongst Sufis over the true succession to a great sheikh may be analysed in terms of disagreements over direction or doctrine, personality conflicts between amibitious men, or a mixture of the two. Alternatively, they may be seen as structurally inevitable. In this respect Mu.hammad al-Tuh¯am¯i al-.Hasan, a contemporary Sudanese sheikh, distinguishes between succession and inheritance. While there can be only one successor, there can be many inheritors. Since a sheikh's followers are neither exactly a spiritual nor a material inheritance, the present author adds a further category, that of a quasi-material inheritance, using the case of Ibr¯ah¯im al-Rash¯id as illustration. After the death of al-Rash¯id in Mecca in 1874, most of the groups of his followers which had come into existence during his life became autonomous, and new groups were then established nearby, either by his nephew Mu.hammad al-Shaykh or, more frequently, by an Egyptian student, Mu.hammad al-Dandar¯aw¯i. Thus the majority of the significant 'Rash¯id¯i' groups in existence c. 1920 did not have al-Rash¯id as their direct origin. The pattern is the same in the three countries where there is a clear picture of what happened: Malaysia, the Sudan and Somalia. However, fragmentation of al-Rash¯id's '.tar¯iq', leaving only a spiritual inheritance, in such a way that none of the potential inheritors received any significant quasi-material inheritance, should perhaps be seen as 'the bursting of a ripe pod' and may well have been intentional. Notes, ref. |
