The academic study of Sufism in Western scholarship began more than two centuries ago. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, Carl Ernst has demonstrated that it had its origins largely in the need of European colonialists to better understand the religions, cultures and beliefs of the people they governed (1997: 1-18). 1 With the exception of some familiarity with the ideas of such figures as Rabi'a (d. 801), Ibn al-Farid (d. 1235) or Sa'di (d. 1292) in the pre-colonial period, very few in Europe or North America possessed any serious knowledge of the Sufi tradition (Chodkiewicz, 1994: 12; Schimmel, 2011: 7-8). We find mention of strange mendicants and exotic Easterners engaging in wild dances and chants, performing miraculous feats, or begging for money, in the travelogues of a wide range of adventurers and diplomats. These exotic characters became standard articles of attraction in travel packages that were offered to Europeans who had the means to journey to the so-called Orient. These packages included, for example, ''la grande tour,'' which provided an opportunity to venture into Ottoman territory and visit places such as the capital Constantinople as well as various regions of the Balkans. Egypt was also a popular destination, no doubt because it was home to the pyramids. The tales these travelers brought back with them helped create an image of exotic and ''mystical'' Orientals that proved difficult to shake, even for more probing and culturally self-reflective European intellectuals.The attention given to Sufism only took a serious scholarly turn after the colonial powers began to administer their new holdings in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The religion of the ''natives'' became important to state interests. Scholars who specialized in the languages and cultures of the East -Orientalists -were recruited and trained to study eastern religions. It was only natural that their study of these other religions would be undertaken largely through a Christian lens. The Orientalists Sir William Jones (d. 1794) and Sir John Malcolm (d. 1833), both of whom were associated with the British

During the events that led to the “soft coup” of the Erbakan-Çiller coalitiongovernment in 1997, the Turkish military declared that the number onethreat to national security was not Kurdish separatism, but Islamic radicalism.Despite this shift in security strategy, the Justice and Developmentparty, which was born from the ashes of Erbakan’s openly Islamist Refahparty, won a decisive victory at the polls in November 2002. These seriesof events from Turkey’s recent history have raised many questions in theminds of observers, both international and domestic, as to the nature andstrength of Islamic political and social movements in the Republic ofTurkey – a state that since its birth in 1923 had undergone a systematic programof westernization and secularization.In his Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, M. Hakan Yavuz attempts toanswer these very questions by providing a comprehensive analysis of themain Muslim social groups that have come to dominate Turkish-Muslimsociety, namely, the Nakshibendi Sufi orders and the Nurcu movement.These groups have made significant inroads into Turkish civil society, crossingclass, regional, and ethnic lines, by taking advantage of new opportunityspaces in the market, the print media, and education. This was a directresult of the political and economic liberalization policies of the Özal governmentduring the 1980s.As the author argues, “the secularizing, state-centric elite failed effectivelyto penetrate and transform traditional society, and was similarlyunsuccessful in developing an alternative value system and associational lifefor the rural population of society” (p. 4). Thus, the social and ethical vacuumcreated by the Kemalists was appropriated by a diverse group of Islamicsocial movements that were then urbanized by way of the gecekondus, theshanty-towns built overnight by rural migrants to the big cities during the1960s and 1970s. These movements, which were silently germinating in theAnatolian countryside, underwent what Yavuz aptly terms the “vernacularization ...

The academic study of Sufism in Western scholarship began more than two centuries ago, and had its origins largely in the need of European colonialists to better understand the religions, cultures, and beliefs of the people they governed. With the exception of some familiarity with the ideas of some of Sufism’s most prominent figures in the precolonial period, very few in Europe or North America possessed any serious knowledge of the Sufi tradition. This article traces the development of the study of Sufism with a focus principally on the time period spanning John Malcolm (1769–1833) and James W. Graham (up until World War II), and slightly afterwards. In the process of exploring the views of such towering intellectuals as Tholuck (1799–1877), Dozy (1820–1833), Renan (1823–1892), Goldziher (1850–1921), Palacios (1871–1944), Nicholson (1868–1945), and Guénon (1886–1951), to name but a few, it will be demonstrated how various dynamics of power and notions of race and religion colored the way Sufism and its relation to Islam were conceived. The article ends with some brief remarks about the future of Sufi studies.