Between Words and Worlds: Masters’ Sayings in Early Sufi Literature

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the intersections between the corpus of sayings in the Sufi tradition and the changing realities in the period between the third/ninth and seventh/thirteenth centuries. The main hypothesis is that masters’ sayings were neither expressions of abstract theories nor mere responses to changing forms of religious identities but rather a powerful engine for the shifts then occurring in the Sufi tradition as a whole. This notion is examined from two realms. The first is an examination of the ways Sufi sayings went far beyond being a vessel for mystical themes and acted as an effective instrument in the hands of Sufi masters in their quest for authority. Sufi sayings helped masters build the foundations for a shared Sufi “science” transmitted through generations of Sufis and contributed, thereby, to establishing a powerful collective identity and institution. In the second realm, this paper categorizes the bulk of sayings according to prevalent themes, structures, and performativity to propose major outlines of the development of these sayings across time. There were three significant phases in the development of Sufi sayings: the first refers to the late second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries; the second to the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries; and the third covers the period from the sixth/twelfth century onwards. Inspired by speech act theory and other theories on the performativity of language, I argue that Sufi sayings, including ecstatic utterances, were designated as social acts seeking to change the basics of religious consciousness.