Sheikh

Sheikh means an elder, and its usage is far broader than any single office, which is precisely the point to grasp about the word.

One word, many roles

The title is applied to tribal leaders and to the rulers of the Gulf states, to men of religious learning and standing, to the heads of Sufi orders, and to the elderly and respected generally, so that it names a standing of authority or reverence rather than one defined office. In its religious use it commonly denotes a scholar of Islam recognised for his learning, or the master of a Sufi order who initiates and guides disciples, and in these senses it carries real religious weight, but the same word in another context names a secular ruler or a tribal chief.

Standing, not ordination

In every use the title marks recognised standing, whether of age, of lineage, of learning, or of spiritual authority, rather than an office conferred by ordination, since Sunni Islam has no ordained clergy, and it is bestowed by acceptance and reputation. To read the word rightly one must attend to the context, for the religious scholar, the Sufi master, the tribal chief and the Gulf ruler are all called sheikh, and the honour the word carries is common to them while the offices are entirely different. This breadth is characteristic of a tradition in which authority is recognised rather than conferred, and in which a single term of respect can span the sacred and the secular.

In Sufi practice the authority of a sheikh rests specifically on the silsila, an unbroken chain of spiritual transmission from teacher to disciple reaching back, each order claims, to the Prophet himself, and a Sufi sheikh's standing to initiate and guide disciples depends on having received that authorisation from his own sheikh in turn, a genealogy of teaching taken as seriously in Sufi orders as a line of ordination is taken in traditions that have one, even though Sufism itself sits within Sunni or Shia Islam rather than as a separate ordained clergy.

The political sense of the word has its own separate history: the tribal leadership denoted by sheikh among Arabian tribes predates Islam, and several of the ruling families of the modern Gulf states, including the Al Sabah of Kuwait, the Al Thani of Qatar and the ruling families of the emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, descend from tribal sheikhly lineages that consolidated political power over the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so that the head of state of several modern countries still bears, formally, the same title as a village elder or a Sufi spiritual guide. The two senses, religious authority earned through a line of teaching and political authority inherited through a tribal line, remain entirely distinct in practice even though a single word covers both.