Dhikr (remembrance of God)

The division that organises Sufi practice is whether the remembrance is voiced.

Silent dhikr is associated above all with the Naqshbandi order, which holds it to be the higher form on the ground that it cannot be displayed and therefore cannot decay into performance. The practitioner places the formula in the heart, coordinates it with the breath, and in some lineages moves it through named points of the body. The practice is undetectable from outside and can be sustained continuously in ordinary company, which is precisely the intended advantage.

Voiced dhikr is collective. A circle sits or stands, a leader sets the formula and the pace, and the phrases shorten as the session proceeds, often reducing to a single syllable or to the sound of the breath itself while the tempo rises. Bodies move with it: swaying, rocking, a turn of the head from side to side. Sessions of an hour or more are usual, and some orders add drums.

What the two forms share is that the text is assigned. A teacher gives a particular disciple a particular formula, a particular number and a particular time, and the assignment is personal and adjusted as the disciple progresses. That is the feature most sharply distinguishing Sufi dhikr from the general Muslim practice of remembrance, which any believer performs without authorisation from anybody, and it is why the orders are built around a chain of transmission rather than around a congregation and a building.

Organised dhikr has been contested within Islam for as long as it has existed, and the argument concerns form rather than remembrance itself, which the Quran commands and nobody disputes.

The objections have been consistent across centuries. That collective rhythmic recitation with movement and music is an innovation with no basis in the practice of the earliest community. That it resembles the practices of other religions rather too closely. That the states it induces are physiological and are mistaken for spiritual attainment. That attachment to a living teacher who assigns litanies verges on placing an intermediary between the believer and God. Ibn Taymiyya made versions of most of these in the fourteenth century, and modern Salafi teaching reproduces them, generally accepting individual remembrance while rejecting the organised collective form.

The defence is equally old: that the Quran commands abundant remembrance without prescribing a manner, that the earliest generations gathered to recite together, and that the effect on the practitioner over years is itself the evidence.

What altered the balance was state power. The Ottoman lodges were closed by law in 1925 and that law has never been repealed. Saudi Arabia, formed around the reformist theology, suppressed the orders and the shrine culture attached to them. Soviet and later Chinese authorities suppressed Sufi organisations in Central Asia and Xinjiang. In each case the practice continued privately, and in several it has re-emerged. Across West Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Turkey, the Balkans, South Asia and Indonesia the orders remain very large, and in a number of countries they are the dominant form of Islamic religious life rather than a mystical fringe attached to it, a fact that general accounts of Islam still routinely understate.