God's Unruly Friends

Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550 (first and third chapters)

Abstract

In their deviation from socio-religious norms of dress, looks, behavior and piety, the mendicant dervishes of Islamdom in the Later Middle Period (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries) have been regarded, both by contemporaneous observers and by modern scholarship, as a vulgar expression of popular religion. Karamustafa, who attempts a historical study of deviant religiosity and dervish groups, examines them in the wider context of the study of renunciation in Islam. His argument is that renunciatory dervish piety emerged from within Sufism as a new synthesis of two of its most powerful sub-currents: asceticism and anarchist individualism.