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The Sufis of Baghdad: A Topographical Index of the City

A new interest in Sufism in Baghdad has emerged within the last two decades. This interest reflects the unease that modern Arab intellectuals feel with respect to the transformation of the city’s space to conform to the politics of the modern nation state and its ideological apparatus. This chapter will focus on three modern texts that look back at the intersection of Sufism and Baghdad’s urban landscape when the city was the recognized leader of the Islamic world. The first Azīz al-Sayyid Jāsim’s Mutaṣawwifat Baghdād (The Sufis of Baghdad) (1990), the second Hādī al-‘Alawī’s Madārāt Ṣūfiyya (Sufi Orbits) (1997), and the third ‘Umar al-Tall’s Mutaṣwwifat Baghdād fī al-Qarn al-Sādis al-Hijrī/al-Thānī ‘Ashar al-Mīlādī: Dirāsa Tārīkhiyya (The Sufis of Baghdad in the Sixth Century AH/ Twelfth Century: A Historical Study) introduced by the well-known Iraqi historian and distinguished authority on the Abbasid economy ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Dūrī . The chapter examines how in the hands of these intellectuals, Sufi itineraries serve as a kind of oblique criticism while simultaneously providing a topography of the city that resonates in the popular imaginary with both the piety and protest of its past Sufi masters.