Dry Ice Factory

Juan Cole has an interesting post on Sufism that builds off a story about the bombing of a Sufi shrine in Baghdad. Amongst the many things he talks about that I didn't know, 'Sufism was so successful as an organized movement from about the 1100s that it took over Islam, and there were very few Muslims who were not in some sense Sufis in the period 1200 through about 1850.' It seems rather strange that a mystic religion could be that widespread within a society, but I clearly don't understand much about Sufi mysticism. What's more interesting is that it was the Wahhabi and Salafi fundamentalists who attacked Sufism, beginning in the eighteenth century, which led to the decline of Sufism in the Muslim world. These fundamentalist strains reach into our era in the form of the Taliban and al Qaeda, amongst other groups. Cole also makes this fascinating comment, which echoes an earlier discussion I posted about in which bin Laden was described as trying to reform Islam: 'Modern Wahhabism (mostly a Saudi Arabian phenomenon) and Salafism (much more widespread) have a "Protestant" character to them, emphasizing puritanism and the casting down of all images (iconoclasm) and saints' shrines.' One is reminded too of the Taliban's bombing of the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.