This is an excellent history of Sufism to about the end of the twelfth century ce. Chapter 1 treats “The Sufis of Baghdad”. “The Ṣūfiyya”, says Karamustafa, “developed as a convergence of many disparate ideas and practices into a distinct movement in Baghdad in the second half of the third/ninth century” (p. 20). Distinguishing characteristics were especially devotion to experiential knowledge of God, the idea of a spiritual path, and the special camaraderie and status of the friends of God. Chapter 2 treats “Mystics outside Baghdad”, especially in Basra (Sahl al Tustarī), Khurasan and Transoxania. Chapter 3 is about “The spread of Baghdad Sufism”, as travel in both directions acquainted renunciants outside Baghdad with the new style of piety, which tended to absorb local traditions, most importantly in Nishapur. Chapter 4, “Specialised Sufi literature”, is about manuals and biographical dictionaries of, mainly, the eleventh century. Chapter 5, “Formation of communities”, treats the development, again mainly in the eleventh century, of regular methods of forming disciples and formalized relations between masters and disciples. Chapter 6, “Sainthood triumphant”, is about the rise of Sufi shaykhs in broader society, especially popular Islam on the one hand and high politics on the other.

A lamentable feature of much writing about Sufism has been a tendency to treat it as transcending history, as if it had some essence not subject to change over time. The first excellence of Karamustafa's history is his care to distinguish persons and groups. For example, he distinguishes renunciants called Sufis in their lifetimes from those not so called, and tries to put his finger on just what separated Sahl al Tustarī from his Sufi contemporaries in Baghdad. Second, he carefully distinguishes what was going on in each century; for example, rather than generalizing about an era of handbooks, he credits Sarrāj (d. 378/988) with an accurate summary of Sufi doctrine but Hujvīrī (d. 465/1072–3?) and Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) with integrating Sufi perspectives with contemporary juristic and theological views. (The last observation is balanced by another, that an enduring traditionalist strand runs through Abū Ṭālib al Makkī and ʿAbd Allāh-i Anṣārī, which can still be made out much later in the Maghrib and elsewhere, continuing to resist the Khurasani synthesis.)

Karamustafa mainly synthesizes the latest historical research. The names associated with the greatest number of entries in his bibliography are (roughly in descending order) Bernd Radtke, Naṣr Allāh Pūrjavādī, Richard Gramlich and Fritz Meier. This shows how important European research (especially in German) has been to recent progress in the field, and also how important scholarship in Middle Eastern languages is becoming. Sometimes he takes sides, as with Pierre Lory against Alexander Knysh (representing a long tradition) that Sarrāj's Lumaʿ is principally an exposition of Sufi doctrine for the developing discipline, not an apology to fend off further attacks from the legal-minded. He does not follow his leading authorities slavishly; for example, although he takes up Bernd Radtke's idea of ʿilm al bāṭin as a crucial turning point on the way from early renunciation to the familiar Sufism, he is more cautious about finding it already in the second/eighth century.

If the first tendency of the book is to remind us of change over time (along with local differences across space), its second may be to play down hostility between legal- and mystical-minded Muslims. An example just mentioned is Karamustafa's resistance to dismissing the tenth-century manuals as insincere attempts to show that Sufis are orthodox. “Without denying the existence of debate and controversy about some aspects of Sufism from its very inception (after all, there were no approaches and orientations in this early phase of Islamic history whose credentials, authenticity, and truth were not debated or controversial), it seems more plausible to take Kalābādhī's remarks at their face value …” (p. 70). This seems to me to be right as far as it goes. Sympathy for social nonconformity and scorn for Fundamentalist moralism are prevalent among modern Western academics, and those who study Sufism need to be on their guard against projecting similar values onto tenth-century Sufis, as if (for example) they could not really have shared their legal-minded contemporaries’ horror of antinomianism. But let us not go too far in the other direction: Ḥallāj, Ibn ʿAṭā’, and several others were actually put to death, and a larger number were exiled from one place or another at one time or another. From time to time, men were exiled for theological offences (e.g. the traditionists Bukhārī from Nishapur and possibly Bukhara and Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣbahānī from Isfahan), but Sufis seem to have been treated with unusual severity. If we follow the rule of taking texts seriously, at least to begin with, then we must suppose that the persecutors were first of all concerned with religion, not politics, and that there was something peculiarly threatening about developing Sufi mysticism.

Karamustafa does not do everything. There is little here about patronage (with little evidence to go by, it must be said, and less past research) and not much evocation of mystical experience. “Heart” is a recurring term in Karamustafa's quotations that needs a gloss: in the Islamic tradition, it is the locus of thought, so it concerns not emotion as opposed to thought but, platonically, non-sensual perception as opposed to sensual. I like Karamustafa's observation that, as Baghdadi Sufism absorbed Nishapuran Malāmatism, so the Malāmati background probably made the more sober side of Baghdadi Sufism prevail in the further development of Sufism, especially in Khurasan and Central Asia. He probably underestimates, though, the contribution of Karrāmism (Kirāmism), the apparent matrix of the khānqāh and possibly more.

I urge scholars to acquire this book to acquaint themselves with the latest understandings of the historical development of Sufism. For use as a textbook, I highly recommend it alongside one or another translation of actual Sufi texts from the same period; e.g. John Renard, Sulamī by Cornell (with due caution regarding her introduction), Qushayrī by Knysh, and Hujvīrī by Nicholson. By contrast, Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, 1975), is a readable introduction to Sufi literary imagery but shows a lamentably weak historical sense. Carl Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston, 1997), is far better than its title suggests but to some extent tries to sell Sufism as legitimately Islamic, which issues in something probably easier for undergraduates to read than Karamustafa's more concentrated history but also less forthright about points of contention. Alexander Knysh, Islamic Mysticism (Leiden, 2000) comes at an obviously unsuitable price (what were they thinking?). Moreover, although Knysh is commendably historical-minded, he tends to be a little less successful at everything than Karamustafa; for example, he is less clear in his theses, and less wary of back projection in the sources. Karamustafa is the new standard.