In the middle of the thirteenthcentury, a drought settled on the Tafilalt oasis. Desperate, tribesmen from the oasis embarked on the arduous pilgrimage to Mecca. In Mecca, they hoped to receive the baraka (blessings) of adescendent of the Prophet Muhammad. When they arrived in Mecca, they sought admittance to the presence of an ‘Alawī sharīf, who was a descendant of the son-in-law and cousin of the prophet, ‘Alī ibn Ṭālib. They asked him for intercession in the drought strangling their date palms. The sharīf promised them one of his sons. To choose, he turned to each of his sons and asked them how he would treat a man who acted rudely versus one who acted with goodness.Only the last, the youngest son, responded that he would treat a man with goodness, regardless of how the man treated him first. His answer pleased his father—this was the son he would send. The Tafilalt tribesmen returned to their home with the sharīf’s son (Ḥasan al-Dakhil). As the sharīf’s son entered the Tafilalt, the rains came.

In Morocco, water is perceived as sustenance (rizq) from God and a confirmation of saintly authority. This narrative, one of many water miracles attributed to saints in written and oral hagiographies, links the physical place of the Tafilalt within the space of saintly authority. It enacts the origin story for the ruling ‘Alawite family, rooting their political powers in the baraka bestowed upon them as descendants of the prophet (shurafā’) and friends of God (awliyā’). In this forthcoming chapter, I examine the ways in which water miracles entwine sainthoodand saints within the Moroccan landscape. By drawing on written and oral hagiographies as well as fieldwork among rural Sufi institutions in Southern Morocco, I consider the ways in which water narratives are used to signify notonly spiritual power but also work to increase social and political capital. Historically and still today, Sufi institutions (ribāṭ and zāwīya), which are often strategically located near a river or irrigation canal, may beendowed with land rights, giving them domain over the water that flows through it. Water circulates as a blessing within the immaterial and material traces of sainthood, yet it also carries a worldly reward, investing local religious institutions with the power to manage water distribution and act as political and societal brokers in land disputes.

‍

“How can these two things that are in total conflict continue?” wonders a female member of the Afghani Gailani (Jilānī) Sufi order living in the diaspora (60). Her bewilderment comes in response to reports of the pre-2001 Taliban participating in Sufi devotional techniques of invoking God’s name (zikr; dhikr). These devotional techniques, Annika Schmeding’s interlocutor remarks, seem antithetical to the narrow interpretation of Islam preached by Taliban forces. With these few lines, Annika Schmeding captures the ambiguity, incongruity, and social strategies that center her foundational study of modern Sufi social spheres in Afghanistan entitled Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul and Herat, Afghanistan, and the Afghan diaspora in the U.S. and Europe from 2016 to 2021, including two years of consecutive fieldwork in Afghanistan from 2017 to 2019, Sufi Civilities charts what Schmeding terms the “navigational dexterity” of different Afghan Sufi communities in post-2001 Afghanistan.

This study examines the logics of masculinity, manliness, and the corporeal male body in shaykh Muḥammad al-ʿArabī ibn Aḥmad al-Darqāwī al-Ḥasanī’s (d. 1239/1823) Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil (“Collection of Epistles”). It argues that al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil constructed a prescriptive pious masculinity defined by mastery of the body and self, practical acts of ascetic devotion and humility, the hierarchical relationship between a Sufi master and his disciples, and the denigration of normative masculine virtues and behaviours. While al-Darqāwī instructed his followers to practice tajrīd, or divestment from the material world, and to eschew the habits of the men of murūʾa, this act did not seek to completely transcend the masculine body. Rather, his understanding of prescriptive pious masculinity was centred in embodied ascetic acts which created an analogous relationship between the physical act of purifying the corporeal body with the disciplining of the self (nafs). Mastering the body and the self, al-Darqāwī wrote, would lead to both growing near to God as well as, importantly, his Sufi followers’ mastery over other men, their wives and children, and even the natural environment. Al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil highlight the tension between Sufism as a spiritual and mystical path that seems to transcend gender hierarchies with its imbrication in epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies shaped by a masculine way of being in the world.

In this article, I examine what narratives of enraptured madness (jadhb) and the figure of the mad female saint (majdhūba) reveal about the articulation of gendered saintly orthodoxy within the modern Moroccan hagiographical compendium Salwat al-Anfās wa-Muḥādathat al-Akyās bi-man Uqbira min al-‘Ulamā’ wa’l-Ṣulaḥā’ bi-Fās [The Entertainment of Souls and the Discourse of the Wise concerning the Scholars and the Sufis who in Fez Met Their Demise]. Written by the 19th-century Moroccan historian and Sufi, Muḥammad ibn Ja‘far al-Kattānī, this text draws on and also plays with the genre of Sufi hagiography. Because it is arranged as a “tomb visiting guide,” it appears to scatter traditional vestiges of Sufi hierarchies and rhetorical organization strategies, presenting a composite picture of Sufi sainthood. Yet, al-Kattānī also reaffirms entrenched gendered hierarchies of spiritual authority. Throughout Salwat al-anfās, al-Kattānī’s depiction of the majdhūba acts as a literary foil for the paradigm of the “Good Sufi woman” or normative female sainthood. Although al-Kattānī includes narratives of the majdhūba that depict potentially transgressive gender performances experienced within the state of enraptured madness—such as uncovering the body, growing a beard, babbling, gossiping, and acting aggressively in public spaces—these deviant performances serve to solidify normative modes of sainthood. Or in other words, enraptured madness sticks to certain saints more than others, creating gendered hierarchies of spiritual authority.