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This article analyses Ibn Taymiyya's neglected commentary on ʿAbū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī 's Epistle on Sufism (al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya fī ʿilm al-taṣawwuf), in which he wages several intellectual battles simultaneously: with Ashʿarī theologians of earlier centuries, such as al-Qushayrī himself; with his Ashʿarī contemporaries like Ibn Jahbal al-Kilābī; and with advocates in Damascus and Cairo of Ibn al-ʿArabī's monistic teachings. Ibn Taymiyya deploys a set of historical and discursive arguments rooted in the early Sufi historiography to argue that both Ashaʿrīs and monistic-minded Sufis do not have a rightful claim to the heritage of the early Sufi authorities. In the struggle to define 'Islamic orthodoxy', Ashaʿrīs and Ḥanbalīs evince two radically different approaches to Sufi sayings. Al-Qushayrī and Ibn Jahbal affirm the harmony between Sufi utterances and the rational proofs of speculative theology (kalām), while, in stark contrast, Ibn Taymiyya accentuates their ascetic-mystical connotations. This Ḥanbalī–Ashʿarī debate comprised two conflicting attitudes to the notion of 'Muslim sainthood' (wilāya): the Ashʿarīs insisted that early Sufi saintly figures (awliyāʾ) mastered the principles of kalām in order to explain the nature of God to different classes of the Muslim community, while Ibn Taymiyya believed that this type of theological reasoning undermined the very foundations of the spiritual teachings of the early Sufis and retarded the spiritual growth of those who undertook the Sufi path. These polemical exchanges demonstrate that Sufi figures, concepts, images, and texts became central to the articulation of theological arguments during the early Mamluk sultanate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares my anthropological monograph about a Pakistani Sufi cult founded by a living saint, known as Zindapir, with a translated hagiography written about the same saint by a devoted poet-khalifa. It aims to compare two representational strategies of an historical figure—on the one hand, that of an anthropologist writing for a wider audience of expert social scientists and Islamic scholars and, on the other hand, an indigenous devotee who knew the saint well, claiming divine inspiration in his writings intended to honour his departed saint and to sacralize his name. The paper interrogates the fuzzy boundary between hagiography and ethnography, literary and descriptive text, fact and fiction, truth and myth, history and archeology in order to raise questions about the limits of dialogical anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]