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Paper short abstract

The ’Issawy Sufi order is known for its animal-mimicking rituals: a practice often labelled as un-Islamic. Challenging this view, I argue that 'Issawy rituals are based on a distinctively Islamic idea: the notion that the divine names have a transformative power, one that affects both body and soul

Paper long abstract

The ‘Issawiya is known in the ethnographic literature as “the most exotic and notorious of all North-African (Sufi brotherhoods)” (Gellner 1981: 137). Such reputation is due to the supposedly un-orthodox nature of its rituals, some of which include mimicry of animal behaviour. As shown by previous studies (Brunel 1926), ‘Issawis maintain that, through powerful secret formulas, they can acquire the qualities of animals: an aspect of the order that has been interpreted by ethnographers as the remnant of pre-Islamic forms of animism (Glasse 2002). In this paper, I will problematise this view. Based on my fieldwork with the ‘Issawy order in Libya, I will show that, in fact, the brotherhood’s supposedly animistic practices rely on specifically Qur’anic understandings of the transformative power of divine names, and in that sense they share the same logic as another, more recognisably Islamic aspect of the brotherhood: the spiritual exercises. These entail recitations of God’s names to be performed daily: a quotidian, mundane and repetitive form of dhikr (“remembrance of God”) aimed at producing internal, and therefore largely invisible transformations in one’s character, behaviour and interpersonal relations. As we will see, both the formulas for the embodiment of animal qualities and these more ordinary recitations are based on the notion that the divine names affect those who abandon themselves to their power. Both, therefore, are part of the same transformative process, one that entails both moments of spectacular metamorphosis and more subtle, imperceptible yet no less powerful forms of moral reconfiguration.