The renewed interest in Sufism in Baghdad within the last two decades should direct our attention not only to the contemporary Iraqi scene, but also to Abbasid Baghdad itself (762–1258) as the milieu where Sufi masters practiced an everyday life in Michel de Certeau's sense of the term. 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. Azīz al-Sayyid Jāsim's Mutaṣawwifat Baghdād (The Sufis of Baghdad) appeared in 1990 and Hādī al-ʿAlawī's Madārāt Ṣūfiyya (Sufi Orbits) in 1997. Both Jāsim and al-ʿAlawī were prominent neo-Marxists who later turned to Sufism; the former was executed by Ṣaddām Ḥusayn in April 1991 and the latter died in exile in Syria in 1998. The third text, introduced by the well-known Iraqi historian and distinguished authority on the Abbasid economy ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī (d. 2010), is ʿUmar al-Tall's comprehensive study, Mutaṣwwifat Baghdād fī al-Qarn al-Sādis al-Hijrīl al-Thānī ʿAshar al-Mīlādī: Dirāsa Tārīkhiyya (The Sufis of Baghdad in the Sixth Century ah/ Twelfth Century: A Historical Study), which will serve as a complement to Jāsim's and al-ʿAlawī's works. Al-Tall's study is helpful in understanding the “production of space” in this context, to borrow Lefebvre's phrase, whereby Sufis appropriated a “differentiated space” for opposition and dissent.

The question all three texts raise is that of why twentieth-century Iraqi writers would feel compelled to turn to an interrogation of Sufi practice in Abbasid Baghdad. These studies should not be read as an anomalous historical engagement on the part of their authors, rather there is an urgency within the pages of these texts to recall old Baghdad, to save it from erasure and oblivion. Although there is no direct reference to present-day Baghdad, a sense of mourning and loss permeates these works. While the Baghdad of the Sufi masters enjoyed cultural and architectural glory, the perceptive eye of the figures described in these volumes was more discerning. We find that they often critique those in power, standing up for the common people.