In Sufi Civilities, Annika Schmeding undertakes a rich analysis of the place of sacrality, authority, and spiritual charisma in contemporary Afghanistan. In the context of political, economic, and social transformation—including in the global sphere—Afghan sufi communities offer us a unique lens into the making of spiritual lifeworlds. Schmeding illustrates that sufi communal life is at once a reflection of historical tradition—the genealogies of authority and spiritual mastery that have been a crucial force in modern Afghan history from at least the 18th century onward—and of more contemporary forms of improvisation that are both ethical and part of a transcendental discourse of subject formation.
As an epistemology of divine understanding that transcends the more orthodox or canonical injunctions of Islamic law (shariʿa), sufism has long been understood among its Afghan adherents as a discourse of spiritual and intellectual transcendence but also is, as Schmeding points out, entwined with the more traditional schools of Islamic knowledge and the contextual, subjective interplay of perception and projection that transpires between sufi pirs (leaders) and their murids (followers). It is within this dynamic exchange that Schmeding situates the place of religious authority in the “situationally produced, relationally negotiated and context-bound nature of the recognition of authority” and “shifting discourses of the changing times that produced them” (p. 19).
This dialectical tie between transcendental thought and its worldly discourses of power and knowledge are refracted in Afghan history and politics through myriad legacies of sufi political influence, notably during the rise and fall of the modernist King Amanullah in 1929, the Afghan–Soviet War and mujahidin era (1978–94), and in the contemporary moment in which networks of spiritual influence remain a fulcrum of economic and electoral life. The relative context in which religious and spiritual authority emerges, refracts, reverberates, and sometimes collapses leads to the more general and well-trodden assertion that “authority is not static but under constant negotiation in the interactions with each other, be they potential followers, their community, other contenders or outsiders” (p. 19). In short, the myriad movements and contestations of “social negotiation” that make sufi communities a vibrant force within civil and symbolic life and allow us to dispense with the more pedestrian binaries of agency opposed to discursive tradition.
But this is precisely the opening where I would appreciate more conceptual groundwork. What, exactly, are we to understand about spiritual charisma and sufi contestations in the absence of questioning the place of imaginative life, including its forms of consciousness and otherworldliness, in the contemporary moment? How do we understand the power of symbolic life and exchange amid structural transformation, and perhaps most importantly—because its concepts are indissociable from the legacies of Islamic philosophy—within the collective unconscious? In other works of contemporary anthropology, the notions of psyche, signification, and the place of uncertainty and skepticism (what Afghans refer to as shak or goman) in social life speak to forms of ambivalence that are central to psychic-subjective formation but irreducible to negotiation. In Afghanistan, these tribulations (ranj, or moseebat) constitute the existential and cultural experience of transformation, including in the forms of sovereign power that decide on the exception of life and death, and of a symbolic order in which signs, gestures, words, symbols, images, and meanings cannot be taken for granted. After all, sovereignty is the ability to decide not only on the difference of life and death but also on the way that meanings mean, or to borrow from the insights of structural anthropology, the floating signifiers and excess that sovereign power dreams of containing but that float, nonetheless.
These insights do not feature in the book but are important to the world of dreams and especially to istikhāra, or dreams of divine revelation. Schmeding describes the importance of this dreamworld as an inspirational perspective that influences decisions about communal life. For example, in the aftermath of the loss of a ṭarīqa (a sufi order) leader in a sufi order in Herat, the question of leadership is decided not through fiat or patriarchal inheritance but through a process of suspension and reflection in which dreams are part of an interactive sphere that is ontological and communal. But this duality of revelation (what I think is better described as the condensed dream image) and deliberation (the discourse on that image) also can be expressed as the problem of how to think about the emergence of signs in psychic life and the power of symbolic thinking despite the contradictions inherent to it. In this sense, the world of istikhāra, zikir (the sufi spiritual practice of remembrance (of God) and meditation; it can include the repetition of prayers, phrases, chants, or even dance), and spiritual insight reveals the relationship between a mode of thought and the operation of discourse in the collective unconscious. It is here—including in the uncertain domain of dreams—that the exploration of subjective and collective understanding can be opened to show how symbolic thought and ontological uncertainty touches on the most intimate aspects of experience and the forms of otherworldliness that cannot be reduced to a negotiation of authority or moral discourse.
Imaginative labor and the improvisatory nature of social life speak to the importance of discontinuous, ambivalent relations and encounters between people that are nonetheless inseparable from subjective trajectories, judgments, expectations, national politics, and historical memory. To this end, I would have appreciated engagement with Afghan legacies of discourse on the role of spiritual transcendence and Islamic epistemology in the modern era, namely in the work of the Afghan intellectual Mahmud Tarzi, whose extensive writings on eschatology, historical inquiry, and modernity illustrate an understanding of the importance of holding the space (rather than trying to move, negotiate, or otherwise mitigate the gap) between the empirical order of events (including historical disasters) and a more transcendental opening that inheres for him in the modern era. This aporia is what allows us to see the centrality of ambivalence, not knowing, and a more protean, metaphysical opening in collective life that generates but is never reducible to sovereignty or social cohesion.
It is important that sufism was historically the normative understanding of Islam in Afghanistan and evolved in discursive and social life, including in the colonial era, when the distinction between sufi Islam and Islam was partly constructed through Orientalist historiography and discourse. One of the key interventions of this book is an expansion of the idea of civil society to include forms of action and knowledge that are irreducible to enchantment and play a crucial role in the moral economy of power and transcendental life. In the context of developmental corruption and neoliberal shocks to the Afghan economy, especially from 2001 to 2021, it is important, as Schmeding writes, to broaden “the view on civil society and civility to include informal interpersonal groups that work neither as neoliberal development providers nor necessarily as proponents of democratization” but forge “social networks of trust that in turn define identities and belonging” (p. 14). It is this capacity for belonging and being with others during upheaval that is particularly evocative of a lifeworld. It teaches us that subject formation and the encounter with radical alterity, be it interpersonal, gnostic, or political, is crucial to reimagining a collective order from a place customarily fantasized as other and marginal to power and influence and indeed to the very understanding of Islam.
Sufi Civilities is a rich evocation of life in communities often considered peripheral to global centers of power, but which are a vibrant, dynamic aspect of our symbolic and collective order. The ethnographic breadth of the work and the willingness to learn to think otherwise about matters of spiritual negotiation and authority are what lend this work its unique perspective. Sufi Civilities considers these questions not as the “other” of modern disenchantment but as its dynamic counterpart that emerges alongside the modern crisis of the state and the failure of socially determined forms of collective life that cannot encompass the transcendental domain of not knowing. Schmeding’s careful attention to their interlocuters’ ways of knowing, dreaming, intuiting, valuing, and judging amid the dissolution of traditional orders is crucial to the book’s role in revealing a philosophy of the self that takes seriously the occult and the place of gnosis in collective life.
