Is Islam Relevant In Relation To Disenchantment Or Enchanted?

For hundreds of years in Egypt, prior to European colonialization, Sufism, or otherwise popularly known as Islamic Mysticism, dominated the religious landscape of Egypt, essentially making practices that most scholars consider particularly Sufi today indistinguishable from just “ordinary” Islamic ones. Nile Green in his book, Sufism, makes this point, arguing that “By diversifying their spiritual method and vernacularizing their means of communication, and by founding brotherhoods and saint cults, the Sufis reached a point at which Islam became effectively inseparable from the persons, ideas, and institutions of Sufism” (73). Nevertheless, while the many diverse aspects of Sufism are studied extensively by scholars today, one particular mode

Often enchantment or enchanted is understood primarily in relation to disenchantment or disenchanted, the terminology made famous by Max Weber and more recently revamped by Charles Taylor to describe the progression of secularization. According to Weber, the process of disenchantment was one in which the world became less mysterious, conquered by man’s modern, rational, and explanatory faculties, and hence, secularized and increasingly subject to formal means of power; moreover, the enchanted world would eventually cease to exist under Weber’s disenchantment paradigm (Jenkins 12, 15). Nevertheless, as Richard Jenkins points out, Weber’s discussions of the enchanted world are limited in that they presume that it was “unified or homogenous in its cosmology and beliefs” and also lack the potentiality for re-enchantment and/or the permanence of enchantment (Jenkins 15, 29). Of course, the concepts of enchanted and disenchanted continued to inhabit the academic landscape, with among the

Furthermore, it is this struggle between the gods and their opponents that has aroused a series of questions that will be the subject of this essay: How come this social, enchanted, Islamic landscape in Egypt filled with gods, or specifically living and dead saints, jinn, relics, and other non-human actors physically, literally present in everyday life, come to be marginalized and relegated into the periphery of Islamic experience today and denigrated as the ignorance of the masses? What are the factors that led people to abandon their enchanted understandings of the world for more disenchanted ones? What is enchantment’s side of the historical narratives of disenchantment, which are then reinforced by disenchanted discourses? Ultimately, the redefinition of Sufism by Islamic intellectuals and reformists as morality and self-interior-reflection and the imposition of modernist conceptions of order/disorder onto the Egyptian social landscape facilitated the disenchantment process by diminishing the ontological status and agency of the saint, who was the paradigmatic figure in proving the world was indeed enchanted, and his vessels, or his embodied presences, such as shrines, talismans, and/or other things. With the saints, or the “living ‘interfaces’ (barzakh) between