The Chain of Transmission Runs Through Ali

Nearly every Sufi order traces its authority through a silsila, a chain of teachers reaching back link by link to the Prophet Muhammad, and the tradition recognizes that this chain runs by one of two principal routes. Some orders trace their silsila through Abu Bakr, the first caliph, emphasizing his standing as the Prophet's closest companion and the outward transmission of authority that followed him. A larger number of the major orders instead trace their chain through Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet's cousin and son in law, on the understanding that Ali received not only the Prophet's outward teaching but an inward, esoteric instruction alongside it, passed privately from teacher to disciple down the generations. Orders as different in region and practice as the Qadiriyya, the Chishti, the Mevlevi and the Rifa'i all claim descent through this Ali line in some part of their transmission, even while remaining firmly within Sunni Islam in doctrine and law. The chain is not treated as a mere historical curiosity; a Sufi master's authority to initiate new disciples and transmit the order's practices rests on being able to show an unbroken silsila back through this line to the Prophet himself.

The Ali silsila is one of the places where Sunni religious life visibly overlaps with themes usually associated with Shia Islam, without the overlap meaning what it might first appear to mean. Shia Islam holds Ali to be the Prophet's rightful successor as imam, a position bound up with a specific claim about legitimate political and religious authority after Muhammad's death, a claim Sunni Islam does not accept. The Sufi orders that trace their silsila through Ali are not making that claim at all; they honor him instead as the channel through which an inward, esoteric teaching passed, a role compatible with also holding, as orthodox Sunni theology does, that Abu Bakr was the Prophet's rightful caliph in the outward, political sense. The two claims sit in different registers, one about spiritual transmission and one about political succession, which is exactly why a firmly Sunni order can honor Ali's spiritual role without adopting any Shia position on the succession. The overlap has nonetheless made Sufi devotion to Ali a recurring point of suspicion for reformist and Salafi critics within Sunni Islam, who read reverence for Ali's esoteric role as an unwelcome importation of Shia sensibility into Sunni practice, whatever the doctrinal distinction Sufi tradition itself draws.