Papers by David Jordan
Der Irak. Randprovinz - kulturell blühende Grenzregion - autonome lokale Haushalte
Geschichte der arabischen Welt, 2024
State and Religion in Iraq: The Sufi Insurgency of the Former Baʿth Regime in Historical Context
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 22, issue, Roundtable: Iraq Twenty Years after the US Invasion: Memory Politics, Governance, and Protests5, 2023
Abū l-Hudà al-Ṣayyādī (1850-1909), the niqābat al-ašrāf, and Sufism between Sunnah and Šīʿah in Late Ottoman Iraq (Šarīfism in Modernity I)
Oriente Moderno, Vol. 103, 1, 2023
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Ottoman state’s efforts to centralize... more During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Ottoman state’s efforts to centralize the Syndicate of Prophetic Descendants (niqābat al-ašrāf) was paralleled by the massive growth of Prophetic descendants (sādah and ašrāf) and the mass conversion to the Šīʿah among the tribes in the Iraqi provinces. This contribution aims to shed new light on the role of Abū l-Hudà al-Ṣayyādī (1266/1850-1327/1909), the imperial naqīb al-ašrāf and paramount šayḫ and architect of the Sunnī Rifāʿiyyah Sufi order, in this context. Analyzing a selection of Ṣayyādī’s publications on genealogies, Sufi doctrine, and poem collections, the article focuses on his contribution to the emergence of a special subgroup of Prophetic descendants in the Arab tribal landscape, namely al-sādah al-rifāʿiyyah, and on the significance of his genealogical constructions for his understanding of Sunnī Islam as distinct from Šīʿism.
The Reading of an Ibāḍī Sufi Mawlid Text and Its Controversial Legacy in Oman Abū Muslim al-Bahlānī’s (1860–1920) al-Nashʾa al-muḥammadiyya
The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam Volume 3, Prophetic Piety: Individual and Collective Manifestations , 2023
In contrast to Sunnī and Shīʿī communities, Ibāḍīs in Oman refrain from any pompous celebration o... more In contrast to Sunnī and Shīʿī communities, Ibāḍīs in Oman refrain from any pompous celebration of the Prophetic birthday. Instead, they see the call to follow the example of the Prophet and to adhere to his Sunna as the only legitimate way of expressing love and respect for Muḥammad. For centuries, Ibādīs have used the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday to gather in mosques or at home for the reading of mawlid texts about Muḥammad’s biography.
Interestingly, several prominent Ibāḍī scholars became deeply influenced by Sufi thinking during a period of Ibāḍī renaissance and reform in the late nineteenth century. One of them, the well-known Zanzibari qāḍī and Oman’s most important poet Abū Muslim al-Bahlānī (d. 1920) produced al-Nashʾa al-muḥammadiyya, a mawlid text that is saturated with Sufi ideas and emerged as the textual Ibāḍī standard for the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. This chapter offers a historical and ethnographic study of Bahlānī’s merger of Ibāḍism and Sufism as part of a wider mawlid renaissance in the Gulf region and along the East African coast. It traces al-Nashʾa al-muḥammadiyya’s role in the nation building process and its religious adaptation in twentieth century Oman, thereby highlighting a shift in Ibāḍī scholarly attitudes toward the Prophet.
Sufism, subjectivity and parapsychology: refashioning the dirbāsha ritual among Sufis in modern Iraq
Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft - Revue de la Société Suisse-Asie, 2021
This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its ro... more This paper explores the ritual of the dirbāsha as an extraordinary miracle performance and its role as a bodily practice in the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities among the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya Sufi communities in Iraq. During the climax of collective dhikr gatherings, male Sufi novices perform extraordinary and dangerous acts, perforating parts of their bodies with swords or long skewers without seriously injuring themselves. From the Sufi perspective, this ritual is, first of all, interpreted as the miracle of a Sufi shaykh and not of the performing Sufi novice since it is seen as an expression and proof of God’s power as transmitted through the shaykh. Moreover, it has been argued that the ritual is constitutive for the formation of the religious subjectivity of the performing Sufi novice since it allows the embodiment of mystical concepts as emotional, sensorial and existential realities. For the individual ritual experience to work, the social construction and constant reframing of these “miracles” needs to be taken into account as well, namely the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary which allow the miracles to be perceived as such. The present case of the Kasnazāniyya will show how Sufis combined their pious with a modern, critical and self-reflexive subjectivity and successfully managed to reframe this highly controversial practice – which is criticised by religious reformists and secularists alike – beyond its traditional ritual context with the modern science of parapsychology.
The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam Volume 2, Heirs of the Prophet: Authority and Power , 2021
Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Thi... more Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
Jihadism Revisited. Rethinking a Well-Known Phenomenon, 2019
Contains many interesting essays worth reading! Among them my own "The Tangled Nature of Iraq's F... more Contains many interesting essays worth reading! Among them my own "The Tangled Nature of Iraq's Fight against the "Islamic State". Thanks to the Alsharq-Team, especially Sören Faika!!!
Conference Presentations by David Jordan
Sufism and Paraspychology in Twentieth-Century Iraq: The Case of the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya After... more Sufism and Paraspychology in Twentieth-Century Iraq: The Case of the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya After tremendous political and social processes of modernization and secularization over the course of the twentieth century, Iraq, like most other Muslim societies, experienced an Islamic resurgence that began in the late 1960s and lasts to this day. In Iraq, the Islamic resurgence included a growing influence of Sufism in society. Decades of a growing societal marginalization of Sufism due to a widespread Islamic reformist and secularist criticism against its popular practices were followed by a state-promoted revival of Sufism beginning in the 1980s. From that period onwards, one particular Sufi order, namely the Qādiriyya-Kasnazāniyya, experienced an incredible success story and gradually rose as the most popular order among Sunnīs and Shīʿīs in Iraq to date. Part of this success was, next to state sponsorship, the order's effective emphasis on miracle performances in its self-promotion and advertisement, i.e. bodily practices like the perforation of the body with skewers or the shooting into the lower parts of the belly. While also other orders are known and criticized for such performances in Iraq and the wider Islamic world, the Kasnazāniyya successfully uses them as a central part of its proselytizing efforts in combination with parapsychological research. In order to prove the authenticity of its miracle performances, the order combines Islamic teachings with the pseudoscience of Parapsychology which grew in a Western context during the nineteenth century and gained a foothold in Iraq in 1986. Thus, Western pseudoscientific methods offered a way to reestablish and justify those controversial bodily practices in modern Iraq.
ANR/DFG Conference in Marrakesh and in Cooperation with the Moroccan Ministry of Awqaf and Islami... more ANR/DFG Conference in Marrakesh and in Cooperation with the Moroccan Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs
ANR/DFG Workshop at Ruhr UNiversity Bochum, 17-18 May 2018
Books by David Jordan
State and Sufism in Iraq is the first comprehensive study of the Iraqi Baʿth regime’s (r. 1968–20... more State and Sufism in Iraq is the first comprehensive study of the Iraqi Baʿth regime’s (r. 1968–2003) entanglement with Sufis and of Sunnī Sufi Islam in Iraq from the late Ottoman period until 2003 and beyond.
For far too long, the secular and authoritarian Baʿth regime has been reduced to the dictator Saddam Husayn and portrayed as antireligious. It’s growing political employment of Islam during the 1990s, in turn, has been interpreted either as an abstract Baʿthist-nationalist Islam or as an ideological U-turn from secularism to a form of Islamism that ultimately contributed to the spread of Islamist terrorism after 2003. Broadening the narrow focus on Saddam Husayn, this book analyses other leading regime figures, their close entanglement with Sufis, and Baʿth religious politics of a state-sponsored revival of Sufi Islam and Iraq’s broad and distinct Sufi culture. It is the story of a secular regime’s search for "moderate" Islam in order to overcome the challenges of radical Islamism and sectarianism in Iraq.
The book’s two-pronged interdisciplinary approach that deals equally with politics and Sufi Islam in Iraq makes it a valuable contribution to scholars and students in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Religious Anthropology and Sociology, Political Science, and International Relations.
This second collective volume of the series The Presence of the Prophet explores the growing impo... more This second collective volume of the series The Presence of the Prophet explores the growing importance of the figure of the Prophet Muhammad for questions of authority and power in early modern and modern times.
The authors provide a rich collection of case studies on how Muhammad’s material, spiritual, and genealogical heritage has been claimed for the foundation of Muslim empires, revolutionary movements, the formation of modern nation states and ideologies, as well as for communal mobilization and social reform.
This novel comparative, and diachronic study, which is unique for its wide coverage of regional cases and perspectives, reveals diverse political representations of the Prophet in an increasingly globalised struggle over the control of his image between secularization and sacralization.
My PhD thesis analyzes the revival of Sufism under the Baʿth Party in Iraq (1968-2003) against th... more My PhD thesis analyzes the revival of Sufism under the Baʿth Party in Iraq (1968-2003) against the background of its presumed decline throughout the early twentieth century.
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Papers by David Jordan
Interestingly, several prominent Ibāḍī scholars became deeply influenced by Sufi thinking during a period of Ibāḍī renaissance and reform in the late nineteenth century. One of them, the well-known Zanzibari qāḍī and Oman’s most important poet Abū Muslim al-Bahlānī (d. 1920) produced al-Nashʾa al-muḥammadiyya, a mawlid text that is saturated with Sufi ideas and emerged as the textual Ibāḍī standard for the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. This chapter offers a historical and ethnographic study of Bahlānī’s merger of Ibāḍism and Sufism as part of a wider mawlid renaissance in the Gulf region and along the East African coast. It traces al-Nashʾa al-muḥammadiyya’s role in the nation building process and its religious adaptation in twentieth century Oman, thereby highlighting a shift in Ibāḍī scholarly attitudes toward the Prophet.
Conference Presentations by David Jordan
Books by David Jordan
For far too long, the secular and authoritarian Baʿth regime has been reduced to the dictator Saddam Husayn and portrayed as antireligious. It’s growing political employment of Islam during the 1990s, in turn, has been interpreted either as an abstract Baʿthist-nationalist Islam or as an ideological U-turn from secularism to a form of Islamism that ultimately contributed to the spread of Islamist terrorism after 2003. Broadening the narrow focus on Saddam Husayn, this book analyses other leading regime figures, their close entanglement with Sufis, and Baʿth religious politics of a state-sponsored revival of Sufi Islam and Iraq’s broad and distinct Sufi culture. It is the story of a secular regime’s search for "moderate" Islam in order to overcome the challenges of radical Islamism and sectarianism in Iraq.
The book’s two-pronged interdisciplinary approach that deals equally with politics and Sufi Islam in Iraq makes it a valuable contribution to scholars and students in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Religious Anthropology and Sociology, Political Science, and International Relations.
The authors provide a rich collection of case studies on how Muhammad’s material, spiritual, and genealogical heritage has been claimed for the foundation of Muslim empires, revolutionary movements, the formation of modern nation states and ideologies, as well as for communal mobilization and social reform.
This novel comparative, and diachronic study, which is unique for its wide coverage of regional cases and perspectives, reveals diverse political representations of the Prophet in an increasingly globalised struggle over the control of his image between secularization and sacralization.