Abu H&dotbelow;afs&dotbelow; `Umar al -Suhrawardi (d. 632/1234) and the institutionalization of Sufism.

Although there is a growing body of scholarship on the Sufi orders during the late pre- and early-modern periods, our understanding of the early history of this institution is, at best, defective and uneven. The reason for this is simple: many of actors associated with the rise of the orders have yet to be adequately studied. This dissertation attempts to address this lacuna by examining one such individual, the 7th/13th-century Baghdadi scholar, mystic, statesman, and eponym of one of the earliest t&dotbelow;ariqa-lineages, Abu H&dotbelow;afs&dotbelow; `Umar al-Suhrawardi (d. 632/1234). Configured as an exercise in writing social and religious history through the careful study of apparently disconnected textual artifacts, this dissertation grounds itself in the works of al-Suhrawardi himself, a body of material extant largely only in manuscript which has heretofore never been studied as a unified whole. Reading these works alongside a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish chronicles, biographical dictionaries, hagiographies, Sufi manuals, theoretical treatises, and polemics, this dissertation argues that al-Suhrawardi systematically pursued a broader institutionalizing project through programmatically deploying a number of powerful discursive strategies which allowed him to successfully negotiate a series of overlapping socio-cultural, political, and religious networks and contested discursive spaces. In situating al-Suhrawardi within these networks and spaces, this dissertation shows that the form of institutionalized mysticism which he championed not only reflected broader patterns of intellectual, textual, social and 'vocational' organization within the Islamic religious sciences, but also constituted vertically situated social arenas which allowed for modes of affiliation and participation in the religiosity of the Sufi ribat&dotbelow;s which cut across social boundaries. In laying bare the ways in which various social, religious, and cultural landscapes met, intertwined, and coalesced within these institutions and the nature of the social relationships which obtained within them, this study furnishes a framework for understanding the subsequent translation and transposition of al-Suhrawardi's system into other areas of the Muslim world by his disciples and immediate successors, a diffuse project which helped to secure a place for a pattern of institutional organization which quickly became a ubiquitous feature of urban landscapes throughout pre-modern Islamdom.PhDMiddle Eastern historyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligious historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124276/2/3137909.pd