Paper short abstract:

Drawing on long-term fieldwork, this paper examines the intersections of gender, class, and religious ethics in shaping Sufi moral selfhood through an ethnographic analysis of moral exemplarity and mystical ethical reflections exercised in the Turkish Rifai Sufi order led by Shaykha Cemalnur.

Paper long abstract:

Rifaiyye is an upper-class Turkish Sufi order led by an unveiled female Sufi master named Cemalnur Sargut. The Rifai tradition requires cultivating a certain kind of Muslim selfhood through “spiritual exercises” (Hadot 1995; Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006). However, the forms of practices and the means of self-formation differ from most mainstream Islamic traditions. One of the differences is the centrality of, not the text, but moral exemplars as the main authoritative source of piety. However, moral exemplarity entails more than being a role model of ideal piety. Rather, it is an intimate, interactive, affective, reflective, and potentially transformative relationship.

Shaykha Cemalnur imagines Sufism as a totalizing lifestyle aimed at developing greater capacities to see, hear, and love God in daily life through the exercise of mystical ethical reflections (Vicini 2020). These reflections are not only historically situated, but also entangled in the web of gendered social relations within the upper-middle-class habitus. Drawing on long-term fieldwork research, this paper demonstrates the intersections of gender, class, and religious ethics in shaping Sufi moral selfhood through one of the unique ways in which Cemalnur trains her students as a female religious authority: namely, by decorating their luxury houses. I will analyze the content of their “mystical ethical reflections” to shed light on the ethical implications of Cemalnur’s aesthetic interventions into their private spheres as part of their spiritual training. I aim to highlight the relational nature of pious self-formation that unfolds through mundane master-disciple interactions.