Mystical bodies/unruly bodies: Experience,empowerment and subjectification in Syrian Sufism

Abstract

Religious experience can be a tool for the constitution of social subjects, the construction of symbolic meanings and values, as well as for shaping the subjectivity and corporality of the faithful. An ethnographic account and analysis of the Sufi ritual, the darb al-shish, as it was performed in the zawiya (Sufi lodge) of shaykh Mahmud in Afrin, Syria, shows how religious experience allows the embodiment of capacities and dispositions that are lived as deriving from the sacred dimensions of existence, producing religious selves endowed with power that can be defined as charisma. The embodied charisma derived from the darb al-shish posed challenges to the power structures of the religious community in which it emerged. The analysis focuses on collective ritual performances as the main arena of incorporation of the various charismas of the disciples into the hierarchical structure of religious power and authority of the Sufi community. This approach to the ritual tackled the connection between religious experiences and the production of embodied forms of power, such as charisma, and posed the question of how religious codification deals with it.

Introduction

In recent decades, the anthropology of religion has recognized religious experience as a powerful tool for the constitution of social subjects, exploring its role in the construction of symbolic meanings and values, as well as in the shaping of the subjectivity and corporality of the faithful. Notwithstanding the renewed interest in the topic, the centrality of subjective religious experience had been already pointed out by many authors who approached religion as a human or social phenomenon. William James aimed to show in his philosophical exploration of religious experiences across religions how they expressed existential aspects of human nature (James, 2012 [1902]). Later on, Émile Durkheim considered – in his outline of a sociological theory of religion – that the ecstatic experience of ‘collective effervescence’ was at the origin of religious ideas (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 216–220). Similarly, Max Weber saw the capacity of achieving and controlling ecstatic experiences as the basis for the charismatic authority of the first magicians or religious specialists (Weber, 1978: 400–403).

The current attention to religious experience, and, we could add, to ‘experience’ as a key category to understand the individual engagement in cultural phenomena, emerged in the early 1980s, when the postmodern critique of structuralism shifted the focus of anthropological research from social or cultural systems to individual actions and understandings of reality (Bruner, 1986: 3–4). In a pioneering essay, Victor Turner presented experience as both the object and the reflexive arena of anthropological inquiry on cultural and social realities by pointing out that a large part of the anthropological knowledge is ‘most deeply rooted in the social and subjective experience of the enquirer … [for] all human action is impregnated with meaning, and meaning is hard to measure, but it can often be grasped, even if only fleetingly and ambiguously’ (Turner, 1986 [1982]: 33).

Inspired by the work of the German philosopher, Wilheim Dilthey, Victor Turner distinguished between ‘experience’, which he defined as ‘the passive endurance and acceptance of events’, and ‘an experience’, which he described as a bounded ‘structure of experience’ that shapes and informs ‘the whole repertoire of thinking, willing, desiring and feeling, subtly and varyingly interpenetrating on many levels’ (Turner, 1986 [1982]: 35). These structures of experience function as frameworks that are evoked to generate meaning as new forms of perception or events lead to the repositioning of the self in ways that disrupt the habitual flow of everyday life. This mobilization of the past into the present aims at transforming these dissonant periods into ‘an experience’ (Turner, 1986 [1982]: 35–36).

Elaborating on Turner’s definition, Edward Bruner summarized the cognitive program of the anthropology of experience by saying that:

[the] critical distinction here is between reality (what is really out there, whatever that may be), experience (how that reality presents itself to consciousness), and expressions (how individual experience is framed and articulated) (…) There are inevitable gaps between reality, experience and expressions, and the tension among them constitutes a key problematic in the anthropology of experience. (Bruner, 1986: 6–7)

This emergence of ‘experience’ as an object of anthropological research had a strong impact in the anthropology of religion, renewing theoretical efforts to incorporate religious experience as a constitutive part of the analysis of religious phenomena. An early work on religious experience, which was contemporary to Turner and Brener’s efforts in outlining an anthropology of experience, was Gananath Obeyesekere’s inquiry into the ecstatic practices of Hindu-Buddhist devotees in the pilgrimage shrine of Kataragama in Sri Lanka.

Obeyesekere showed how the religious experiences of the ascetics infused new meanings into religious symbols, creating personal symbols that were connected to both ‘the life-experience of the individual and the institutional context in which they are embedded’ (Obeyesekere, 1981: 13), presenting an interesting framework for grasping the creative tension between what Bruner called ‘experience’ and ‘expression’. However, despite the merits of Obeyesekere’s analysis, he understood ‘experience’ purely as a psychological phenomenon, which he framed in Freudian terms.

Moving away from psychological models, Thomas Csordas proposed a closer ethnographic scrutiny of religious experience in his analysis of ritual healing among Catholic Charismatics in the United States (Csordas, 1997: 1–5). Csordas focuses on the body as the experiential arena of the self, showing how pre-abstract embodied experiences are objectified (expressed, in Bruner’s terminology) within the conceptual framework of a Catholic Charismatic healing system, transforming the ‘suffering self’ of the afflicted into an empowered ‘sacred self’ (Csordas, 1997: 57–72). Csordas connects experience and its expression as a continuum that can be explored through ethnography, for, in his words, ‘we can identify how emotion is objectified and taken up from experience into language’ (Csordas, 1997: 282).

Building on Csordas’ ethnographic approach to religious experience, I will analyze the embodied processes of production and communication of religious experiences in the Sufi ritual of the darb al-shish (body piercing with needles or iron skewers) among members of the zawiya (ritual lodge) of shaykh Mahmud, a Sufi community linked to the tariqa Rifa’iyya ¹ in the town of ‘Afrin, in northern Syria. Particular attention will be given to the ritual uses of the body, the stimulation of the senses and the evocation and display of emotions as experiential arenas where the religious self of the participants is shaped, objectified as part of individual subjectivity and communicated as an index of one’s positioning and engagement with the world.

My analysis nonetheless departs from the Csordas model on two main points. While I agree with Csordas that experience and its expression are not fully separated realms, but rather interconnected and interdependent processes, I do not think that this relation is as unproblematic as Csordas seems to imply. ² Surely language, both verbal and embodied, is what allows particular bodily processes to become ‘an experience’ that can be perceived and lived differently from the continuous experiential flow of life, being a constitutive part of experience. Nevertheless, the categories, concepts and body techniques ³ that are mobilized in this process are not mere verbal translations of embodied engagements with the world, but rather disciplinary mechanisms ⁴ that delimit, combine and objectify them as experiences.

I also agree with Csordas that the contact with sacred dimensions of existence achieved in religious experience empowers those who go through it, providing them with symbolic and existential resources that can allow them to overcome their present condition (Csordas, 1997: 45–49). Nevertheless, I think that he overlooks the disruptive tensions for group organization and cohesion that can emerge in this process. ⁵ My main argument is that religious experience – meaning a cluster of sensations, emotions and uses of the body that is objectified, perceived and communicated through categories and concepts from a particular religious system – allows the embodiment of capacities and dispositions that are lived as deriving from the sacred dimensions of existence, producing religious selves endowed with forms of power that can be defined as a sort of charisma. ⁶

The embodied charisma that derives from religious experience poses challenges to the hierarchies and power structures of the religious community in which it emerged. These potential challenges have to be negotiated and, in most cases, neutralized in order to preserve the internal organization of the religious community. Collective ritual performances are the main arena of incorporation of competing charismas into the hierarchical structure of religious power and authority of the religious community. Therefore, the incorporation into the community of the selves empowered by religious experiences is the result of disciplinary efforts in neutralizing charismatic challenges to the power structure of the religious community, and not an unproblematic consequence of religious experience itself.

Embodiment and experience: An ethnographic account of the Sufi ritual of the darb al-shish

The initiatory character of religious experiences in Sufism, which constitutes the major mystical tradition in Islam, provides a conducive ethnographic context for the analysis of the connection between religious experiences and the constitution of empowered or charismatic religious selves. Sufism was a major trend in Syrian Islam before the beginning of the Civil War in 2012, being present among the religious elite as well as structuring beliefs and practices of popular religiosity. Aleppo was the major religious center for Sufi religiosity in northern Syria, for the main zawiyas and the most prestigious Sufi shaykhs of the region were located there.

Shaykh Mahmud’s zawiya was located in ‘Afrin, a Kurdish town north of Aleppo, which had around 36,000 inhabitants before 2010. Since then, the population of ‘Afrin increased sharply with the influx of Kurds fleeing war-torn Aleppo. ‘Afrin fell under the control of Kurdish forces in 2012, and was thereby spared the violent combat between the Syrian government and opposition groups, which destroyed most of the urban fabric of Aleppo. While most Sufi communities in Syria had their religious spaces destroyed and/or their religious life disrupted or discontinued because of the civil war that engulfed large portions of the country since 2012, those in ‘Afrin were able to continue their activities with relatively minor disruption. Nevertheless, when the civil war started, shaykh Mahmud’s zawiya had already been badly hit by an internal crisis that almost destroyed it. The ethnographic data analyzed here comes from several periods of fieldwork research among the Sufi communities in Aleppo and northern Syria from 1999 to 2010. ⁷

This analysis will focus on the ritual of the darb al-shish (piercing the body with needles or skewers), which is regularly performed in shaykh Mahmud’s zawiya. This ritual exists in several ritual traditions within Syrian Sufism, such as the Qadiriyya, but it is seen by most Sufis and non-Sufis as mainly connected to the tariqa Rifa’iyya. In this Sufi tradition, the advancement in the mystical path is considered to be connected to the capacity of those who are initiated into the mystical path to perform various sorts of karamat (miraculous deeds) in ritual contexts. These karamat include a vast range of extraordinary deeds, such as eating glass or burning charcoal, walking or standing on fire, licking red-hot iron skewers, handling poisonous snakes, taming wild animals, stabbing oneself with knifes or iron pins attached to round handlers (rahmaniyat) and perforating various parts of the body with iron skewers (darb al-shish) or with swords (darb al-saiyf).

The darb al-shish is also the subject of the religious debate about the legitimacy and authenticity of the Islamic credentials of certain Sufi rituals. This debate mobilizes Sufis and non-Sufis on both sides of the divide between those who accept the Islamic character of bodily and miraculous Sufi rituals, such as the darb al-shish, and those who deny it. ⁸ Beyond the debate, the darb al-shish remains a central ritual practice in the Sufi communities linked to the Rifa’iyya, as well as other Sufi traditions, such as the Qadiriyya, in Syria. The darb al-shish is defined by the Rifa’i shaykhs as a ‘proof of faith’ (dalil al-iman), meaning that it is a material evidence of the religious quality of the self (nafs) of the faithful. It is important to note that the darb al-shish is not seen by the Sufis as a form of mortification or denial of the body. On the contrary, it demonstrates the control achieved by the disciple over his nafs through the expansion of the capacities of his body.

Usually the darb al-shish is not performed by the shaykhs themselves, but rather by their disciples, as it is used both as an ordeal that the latter have to pass through in order to advance through each stage of the Sufi path, and as a miraculous deed (karama) that confirms publicly the reality of the mystical states (ahwal, sing. hal) claimed to be achieved by them. The miraculous character of the darb al-shish is understood by the Sufis who perform it as the result of the action of baraka (grace/sacred power) over the disciple’s body. While all baraka is seen as ultimately flowing from God, the Sufi shaykhs are unanimous in saying that they are necessary intermediaries in this process, which can only happen with their consent. Therefore, according to the doctrinal rules that regulate the darb al-shish, the disciple must volunteer and obtain permission from his shaykh in order to legitimately perform it.

During my fieldwork among the Sufi communities in Syria I was able to witness performances of the darb al-shish in Aleppo and throughout the Kurd Dagh (the Kurdish region north of Aleppo). These performances happened mainly in zawiyas linked to the Rifa’iyya, which were located in both urban and rural environments. In all these zawiyas, the instruments used in the ritual performance of the darb al-shish, such as skewers (shish), iron pins with round handlers (rahmaniyat) and swords (saiyf), hang on the walls as visible symbols of the miraculous deeds that the members of these Sufi communities could perform. The ritual gathering (hadra) was seen by the members of these communities as the appropriate arena for the performance of the darb al-shish, as they were the occasions when the disciples of the shaykh were publicly tested in order to prove their mystical powers or to ascend to a higher stage in the Sufi path. ⁹

While the darb al-shish constitutes the more elaborated form of the ordeal, it has several degrees of difficulty itself, depending on the area of the body that is pierced and on the diameter of the piercing instrument. ¹⁰ The darb al-shish comprises the following acts in order of growing difficulty: the perforation of the cheeks, tongue, neck, shoulders and belly. The darb al-shish in the abdomen also has degrees of difficulty that increase with the risk of damaging vital organs, beginning with the ‘easy’ lateral parts of the belly until the ‘difficult’ parts around the navel. Similarly, in each part of the body there is a gradation of difficulty that starts with the thin needle-like skewers and increases until reaching the use of thicker ones and, in the highest level of difficulty, the sword.

The complex articulation between meanings and sensations that produce the religious experiences connected to the ritual of the darb al-shish was well expressed in a performance that I saw in March 2000 in the zawiya of shaykh Mahmud. That night there were around 80 people in the zawiya, and the crowd of participants was overflowing in the courtyard, where the latecomers pressed to see the action through the door of the zawiya.

At a certain point of the dhikr the rhythm of the music became frenetic, with the loud singing of ‘la ilah ila Allah’ (‘there is no god but God’) and the rapid and violent beating of drums. In this part of the ritual, the shaykh’s disciples could volunteer to perform an ordeal with his consent. Usually the disciples volunteered in a hierarchical order, with the ones at a lower rank performing the ordeal before those more advanced in the Sufi path.

The first performances involved the use of rahmaniyat to pierce the cheeks or to stab the chest or the belly. When the more advanced disciples volunteered, the instrument of ordeal changed to the iron skewer (shish). Then, a disciple (murid) went to shaykh Mahmud and kissed his hand asking his permission to endure an ordeal in order to prove his faith in God. The shaykh consented to the request by placing his hand over the head of the disciple. Then the disciple went to the center of the room and invoked the names of Muhammad, Ali, Abd al-Qader Jeilani and Ahmed al-Rifa’i; recited the opening verse of the Qur’an, the Fatiha; and said the shahada (Muslim profession of faith).

At this point, the shaykh pointed to one shish (skewer) hanging on the wall, revealing the ordeal that the disciple was going to endure. The disciple lifted his shirt. Then, a disciple from a higher rank in the mystical path (jawish) ¹¹ took it from the wall and pushed it into the murid’s abdomen with a sharp and fast movement, transpiercing his body with the shish, which came out from his back without any drop of blood coming from the wound. This was a very dramatic moment in the ritual, as loud singing and the frenetic rhythm of the drums created an emotionally charged ambience that complemented the astonishment and concern of those in the audience who attentively watched the act, usually the non-initiated or disciples in the early stages of their mystical initiation. On the other hand, the disciples with higher degrees of initiation dealt with the performance of the darb al-shish in a very nonchalant matter-of-fact way, as they also were able to perform it themselves.

Cries of ‘Allah’ (‘God’), ‘Allah Akbar’ (‘God Almighty’) and ‘Ya Latif’ (‘Oh Gentle One’) came from the audience while the man walked among the participants with the skewer hanging across his body. Everyone could visually examine the absence of bleeding from the wounds that, according to the religious tradition of this Sufi community, confirmed the miraculous nature of his deed. Those who wanted could even touch the material proof of the miracles (karamat) that were taking place in the body of that disciple, and many, including me, did so. After all those present in the room had had the chance to closely examine or touch the concrete evidence of the mystical qualities of the disciple, at a sign of the shaykh, the jawish removed the shish from the abdomen of the disciple, who returned to his place.

During the rest of the ritual there were other less spectacular, albeit very intense and dramatic, bodily expressions of the experiential achievement of mystical states by the participants, who would violently rock their bodies back and forth or from side to side, jump, fall on their knees, faint, cry, laugh or shout the names of God. Some of these religious experiences, in particular those of the disciples who were initiated in the esoteric path of Sufism, were communicated according to the patterns set by the Sufi tradition for the mystical states that demarcate their ascension in the Sufi path.

However, the ordeal was not completed just with the simple performance of the act, as the esoteric (batini) nature of the act had to be established beyond any doubt. In the codification of the Sufi tradition that circulates in the Rifa’i zawiyas in northern Syria, extraordinary acts, such as the darb al-shish, can have two sources: God’s baraka, through the mediation of the Prophet, the saints and the Sufi shaykhs, which would validate the acts as karamat (miraculous/extraordinary deeds) and demonstrate that the disciple is on the right path; or jinns, what would make the performance an act of magic (sihr) and show that the disciple did not have the mystical qualities that he claimed. In order to determine the causal source of the act, as well as the true character of the disciple, each zawiya developed its system of identifying the precise signs that reveal the divine or the magical nature of the phenomenon.

In shaykh Mahmud’s zawiya in ‘Afrin the absence of bleeding from the wounds is the first sign of karamat, as opposed to a magical act. ¹² All participants carefully scrutinised the wounds left by the darb al-shish, in order to see if there was any bleeding, in which case the whole performance would be declared by the shaykh as a magical act caused by jinn possession. Other signs include the closing of the wound within the period of two weeks and a reddish tonality to the scar occurring within another week. If the disciple fulfilled these conditions, he was granted success in the ordeal and either lifted to a higher stage or confirmed in his present stage of the mystical path. However, if he failed in any of them, this was seen as evidence of the weakness of his faith in God, which made him vulnerable to the action of jinns and, by consequence, he could be downgraded in the hierarchy of the disciples, or even expelled from the zawiya.

The performance of extraordinary deeds, such as the darb al-shish, produces in the disciple a dramatically condensed experience of the Sufi path, which is based on the reshaping of the disciple’s sense of self through his engagement in experiential arenas understood as both ‘stages’ (maqamat) on the path towards the divine reality/truth (haqiqa) and ‘states’ (ahwal) that express the existential condition of the mystically transformed self. He has to mobilize in each performance the appropriate cognitive framework and body techniques that he acquired during his initiation into the mystical path in order to achieve a successful result for both himself and the rest of the Sufi community. The sense of having one’s own body chosen as the instrument and the stage for a divine act makes it the existential ground for the doctrinal and ritual principles of Sufism. A disciple of shaykh Mahmud summarized this by saying that ‘I felt the pressure of the skewer on my skin and, after it, the coldness of the iron passing through my body. Then, I felt alive! It was love, God’s love filling my heart. I could feel God in my heart and I was sure that I was close to him’.

The physical sensation of the iron passing through his body was felt by the disciple simultaneously with the fact that he was unharmed by it, giving him the immediate experience he interpreted in terms of the Sufi concept of ‘love’ (hub), which was understood as an emotional and intimate relation to the divine reality. This corporeal experience allowed the embodiment of the mystical concept of ‘love’ as emotional, sensorial and existential realities that the disciples live and feel as constituent parts of their selves. Therefore, the empowerment of the self includes the infusion of the Sufi concept of ‘love’ with the experiential processes unleashed by the performance of the darb al-shish, transforming it into a ‘personal symbol’ (Obeyesekere, 1981: 13) that delimits an existential arena of the disciple’s self and connects it to the larger Sufi tradition shared by the members of the community.

The production of personal symbols as communicative devices of individual experiences often led to the orientation of the empowered self towards the collective tradition in which they were inscribed. This was clearly expressed in the conversation that I had with the disciple who passed the ordeal. When I talked to him about the ritual performance, he said that:

[The performance] proved to myself who I really am. It makes me feel my connection to God and shows everybody how my self (nafsi) was purified and blessed by Him. This feeling accompanies me in my life and makes me behave correctly, always keeping me in the straight path.

Both the disciples and the shaykh classified and communicated the experiential outcome of their religious practices in terms of mystical states. These states, which include tawba (repentance), mukhasaba (self-accountability) and sidq (trustfulness/righteousness), are understood as steps along the mystical path that should lead one’s self to the direct experience of the divine reality (haqiqa). This shared classificatory disposition is produced in the process of initiation of the disciple, which works through the induction and mobilization of desires, feelings and body sensations, and their combination and organization into clusters that are delimited and classified as specific mystical states by the discursive categories, symbols and ritual idioms provided by the Sufi tradition.

The categories that delimit these clusters as realms of religious experience allow their perception and communication in the terms of the disciplinary regime of the Sufi tradition. As we saw in the description that the disciple gave of his experience in the performance of the darb al-shish, the ritual induces existential states that exist as experiences in their expression through the categories and body techniques of the Sufi tradition. The process of initiation in the mystical path embodies in the disciples the normative principles of the Sufi tradition as cognitive and emotional dispositions, creating forms of religious habitus (Bourdieu, 1997: 72–95) that inform the processes of production, objectivation and communication of their religious experiences.

The process of mystical initiation in shaykh Mahmud’s zawiya was a combination of individualized and collective religious practices – such as fasting, praying or listening to sermons or exhortations – all of them centered on the relation between the master (murshid) and his disciples (murid, pl. muridun). While shaykh Mahmud proffered his sermons or told exemplary stories, the disciples were required to stay in specific sitting or standing postures, which after some time became quite demanding on the body. After the sermon, there would be a dhikr or a collective recitation of the wird (mystical prayer), which would also require certain postures and uses of the body. Frequently the shaykh would tell them to remain for hours in a certain posture reciting prayer, Qur’anic passages or simply meditating on certain Sufi concepts. Through these practices and exercises, the disciples acquired a cultural idiom composed of categories, body techniques and emotional dispositions through which they could communicate the re-orientation of their engagement with the word as religious experiences defined by the Sufi tradition.

While neither the darb al-shish nor the models for its performance were taught in the process of initiation, the latter was central to understanding darb al-shish as it allowed me to see the process of acquisition of body techniques and embodied dispositions which made it possible. The darb al-shish is not the mechanical reproduction of a model, but rather a performative improvisation over a theme. In this sense it shows a complete domain of the body techniques that constitute the idiom of religious experience, revealing to the community the virtuosi of mystical states and creating the embodied certainties that ground their Sufi subjectivities.

The experience of performing an extraordinary deed, such as the darb al-shish, in one’s own body generates the certainty of having a direct connection to the divine reality and therefore empowers and positions the subject as a moral agent in the world. The repetition of this deed creates embodied memories of the feelings and sensations of the mystical experience induced by it, making the devotee capable of performing it solely based on his own capacities. This creates in the disciple some autonomy in relation to the ritual and doctrinal context of the Sufi community, generating religious individualization and moral autonomy among the members of the Sufi community.

Thus, it is not surprising that some disciples use the darb al-shish as a reflexive practice of cultivation of the embodied certainties that ground the self into a sacred relation with God. One disciple of shaykh Mahmud, a 29-year-old waiter, told me that:

I do the darb al-shish every time I feel my faith in God growing stronger. I feel God’s love in my heart all the time … Sometimes I feel in my body (jismi) the necessity to show my love to God, to see what I am feeling. So, I perform karamat to myself, not to the others … If God lights the passion (ashaq) in my heart it is his will that I show it.

From this example we can see how the body invested with mystical experiences becomes the locus of the materialization of the charismatic characteristics that define the self. This empowerment is usually ritually channeled towards an agonistic construction of the Sufi community as a community of power in relation to the larger society. Therefore, shaykh Mahmud often led processions of his community through the streets of ‘Afrin during which his disciples performed the darb al-shish. The public expression of the power of shaykh Mahmud’s baraka affirmed in a performative way the religious distinction of the members of his community, who defined themselves as khasat al-din (the elite of religion) in relation to the other residents in town. One resident of the town told me that ‘after he [shaykh Mahmud] started doing that [the processions] everyone here respects, admires or fears him’.

However, the individual expressions of embodied power in the public space often go much beyond the framework established by the collective rituals. It is common that the disciples use their power in order to get social distinction, or even material gains. One of the disciples used to walk around the town carrying a shish (skewer) attached to his belt, as a material signifier of his mystical powers. According to him, this was to make sure that ‘everyone knows who I am and remembers the power that God gave me. So, nobody dares to mess with me and everybody has to respect me’. According to him, even the feared intelligence services (mukhabarat) refrained from harassing him.

The production of charismatic power

The public affirmation of the disciples’ charismatic powers creates potential challenges to the power of the shaykh and to the hierarchical structure of the Sufi community itself. Indeed it was not uncommon to see disciples performing the darb al-shish outside the ritual framework of the zawiya, although they always justified these acts by evoking their connection to the shaykh and his tacit approval as the ultimate source of their capacity to perform it correctly.

Therefore, the constant production of new evidences of the shaykh’s power is fundamental to keep the embodied charisma of the disciples within the normative framework of the Sufi community. The weekly performance of karamat (healings, exorcism of jinns, darb al-shish) offers concrete and experiential evidence for the idea that all the embodied power of the disciples is generated by the constant flow of baraka from the shaykh. The importance of a continuous performative display of the shaykh’s power became more evident during the crisis created by the succession of shaykh Mahmud.

Shaykh Mahmud died in December 2000. During the funeral procession that took the shaykh’s body to the local cemetery, his disciples walked in front of the coffin performing darb al-shish. This performance showed publicly the strength of the baraka that still flowed from the dead body and the mystical power of the community which could perform it. Soon after, shaykh Mahmud’s eldest son, Ismail, was consecrated as the new shaykh of the community.

However, Ismail was never properly prepared to succeed his father, and was always hesitant in displaying his mystical powers. As a consequence, he stopped granting permission to the performances of darb al-shish. Despite the initial surprise, nobody questioned the new shaykh’s decision. As time passed, discontent with the lack of karamat started to be voiced in private. During a hadra in 2001, after shaykh Ismail did not grant permission to a disciple to perform the darb al-shish, another disciple who was sitting beside me exclaimed in a low voice ‘What is his problem? I can do it myself!’.

After a few months, a man whom people claimed to be possessed by a jinn was brought to the zawiya to be exorcized. The lights were turned off and the man was put in the middle of the room. The shaykh tried to expel the jinn by reciting verses from the Qur’an and evoking the name of the Prophet. However, when the lights went on again the man was still possessed. There was a rumor of shock and disbelief among the members of the zawiya. The possessed was brought to the zawiya in two other weekly hadras and shaykh Ismail continued to fail in his efforts of expelling the jinn.

Then, at the end of one hadra when the shaykh was getting ready to pronounce his sermon, an old man stood up and said ‘You are a shadow compared to your father! We don’t have karamat anymore. We don’t have baraka anymore. We are powerless. You brought shame on us’. This time approving comments were loudly expressed among the audience.

In the following week, the possessed man was brought again to be exorcized in the hadra and, as the lights went off and the shaykh got close to him, the unexpected happened. One of the disciples rose up, pushed the shaykh aside and started to slap and punch the possessed man, evoking the name of the Prophet, the Sufi saints and the deceased shaykh. Then, he took a shish and threatened to kill the possessed man by perforating his throat with the skewer (what, according to a shared belief in Syria, would also kill the jinn). The possessed man fainted and there was a great uproar in the room. The lights were turned on and, to general surprise, the exorcism had worked and the man was behaving normally.

This episode created a deep crisis in the power structure in the zawiya, as the disciples openly practiced the darb al-shish near and, sometimes, inside the zawiya without bothering to ask the shaykh’s permission. Many moved to other zawiyas pleading allegiance to other shaykhs. Some abandoned Sufi practices and a few of them lost their faith in Islam, showing how their religious identity rested on the connection between their embodied experiences and the normative reference of the shaykh as the ultimate source of religious knowledge and power. One former disciple talked bitterly about the time when he followed the ‘liar son of a liar’ (kazab ibn kazab). After a few months, the community had almost disappeared with shaykh Ismail trying to revive it with the help of the few disciples who remained with him.

Therefore, we can see how the interruption of the production of new concrete evidences of the power of the shaykh’s baraka in the flux of ritual performances allowed the embodied charisma that the disciples acquired through the religious experiences induced by performance of the darb al-shish to emerge as a disruptive force of the shaykh’s authority. The fragmentation of charismatic authority into autonomous units of embodied power led to the almost complete dissolution of the community and the dispersion of its members across the religious landscape of ‘Afrin.

Conclusion: Embodied certainties and the banality of power

The analysis of the ritual of the darb al-shish led us to understand the processes through which religious experiences work as important tools for the constitution of empowered selves in a Sufi community in northern Syria. In this context, Sufi mystical experiences constituted cultural idioms that condensed bodily and discursive domains of existence, allowing their holders to live, affirm and/or negotiate an existential position as moral agents in the world. The body appeared in this process not only as the arena in which the religious experiences take place, but also as the existential locus of transformation of the memory of these experiences into charismatic power.

The ethnographic material that enabled us to explore the connections between religious experiences and embodied forms of power or, in a Weberian terminology, charisma, also allowed us to tackle issues that are relevant beyond the particular case of shaykh Mahmud’s zawiya. As Clifford Geertz noted more than a decade ago, religious systems have become intensely connected to public political processes as well as deeply infused with personal commitment and motivation, with the social and political force of religion being largely dependent on its capacity of mobilization of existential issues that engage the faithful (2000: 171–184).

Therefore, religious experiences and their capacity for shaping religious selves regained relevance to the social sciences. Even Clifford Geertz, whose commitment to the analysis of religion as collective symbolic systems led him to express his unease with the use of the term ‘experience’ in the study of religion (Geertz, 2000: 170), recognized the need for anthropological research on the ‘personal inflections of religious engagement that reach far beyond the personal into the dilemmas and conflicts of our age’ in order to make sense of contemporary religious phenomena (Geertz, 2000: 185).

The analytical importance of religious experiences is related to their connection with issues of power and authority. The analysis of the ritual of the darb al-shish showed that some types of religious experience enhance the ties between the faithful and the religious community by giving them an existential character, while others create autonomous moral actors endowed with embodied forms of power that pose challenges to the power structure of the religious community. While the former is acknowledged in most analysis, the disruptive aspects of religious experience are usually overlooked.

As religious experiences allow the configuration of discrete forms of embodied sacred power among the faithful, they diminish the mystique of the power of the religious authorities. While the embodiment of sacred power through religious experience is usually conceived as a miraculous grace, as could be seen in the performance of the darb al-shish, it becomes routinized in the everyday life of the faithful. Once mastered, the embodied power can be mobilized as an almost ‘natural’ corporeal capacity even outside the ritual spaces where it should be confined.

If we look to the constitution of a sane Sufi ‘mystical body’, meaning a corporeality informed and shaped by the mystical discipline of the Sufi path, what appears is a process that is almost the opposite of the one present in religious healing as described by Thomas Csordas. In order to grasp the processes that lead to Catholic charismatic healing of physical illnesses, Csordas proposed the concept of ‘somatic modes of attention’ (Csordas, 1997: 67), which is a state of heightened consciousness about the body that leads to a ‘modulation of the orientation in the world’ (Csordas 1997: 70).

In the constitution of the Sufi mystical body, after the objectification and communication of the religious experience by the disciple there is less and less awareness about the mechanisms of empowerment that became constitutive parts of this sacred corporeality. Once routinized in the religious practices and/or everyday life of the disciple, the sacred power gradually falls back into what Csordas calls the preobjective or preabstract domain of the body (Csorsas, 1990: 12–13).

The incorporation of this form of power into the habitual corporeality produces a sense of existential connection with the sacred realm that I call ‘embodied certainty’. Embodied certainty is what grounds the capacity of performing extraordinary deeds, such as the darb al-shish, that are lived as simple expressions of a body/self that was empowered by an experiential contact with the sacred. This certainty generates the nonchalant and inattentive attitude of shaykh Mahmud’s disciples towards the karamat (miraculous/extraordinary deeds) that unfold in front of their eyes, for most of them know that they capable of similar performances. ¹³

Similarly, the mystique of the shaykh’s charismatic authority is diluted by the emergence of competing charismatic forms of power among the disciples. The empowerment produced by the religious experiences induced by the performance of the darb al-shish has the paradoxical effect of revealing the banality of power. To the disciples, sacred power, albeit in discrete degrees, is part of their sense of self, which explains their amazement and disbelief when shaykh Ismail discontinued the karamat and, later on, failed in exorcizing the jinn from the possessed man.

This routinization of sacred power as part of habitual expectations also has moral consequences, as it gives greater autonomy to the faithful in the evaluation of their acts and choices. Therefore, the only way to maintain the power structure of the community is to overwhelm the various expectations with the continuous production of extraordinary deeds and to create the sense that all such acts derive from the shaykh’s charismatic power. Therefore, we can say that a charismatic community where religious experiences are the main arena for the constitution of religious subjectivities has to constantly recreate itself in ritual performance.

However, we still must ask why either the cohesive or the disruptive aspects of religious experiences seem to be more dominant depending on the religious context in which they are produced. The configuration of religious experiences and of the self that they inform is very different in Catholic Charismatic healing and in Syrian Sufi communities. The same can be said if we look to religious contexts connected to discrete Islamic traditions, such as Sufism or the Salafiyya. In order to understand that, we have to look to the codification of religiosity that shapes the religious life in each community.

Using Harvey Whitehouse’s distinction between doctrinal and imagistic modes of religiosity (2000: 1–12), we can say that in a community where the dominant religiosity is doctrinal, meaning a religious system that is codified in public symbols that are transmitted through discourses that mobilize argumentative mechanisms, religious experiences are immersed into a dense web of disciplinary mechanisms that will try to orient the religious selves that it informed towards an agonistic relation to the collective context. Conversely, in a community where the dominant religiosity is imagistic, which means a religious system codified into esoteric mysteries that are transmitted through initiation or emotionally charged rituals, religious experiences have greater potential for creative improvisation, which can produce tensions between the religious selves empowered by them and the power structure of the religious community to which they are attached.

These modes of religiosity are variously combined in social reality, with some features being dominant in certain contexts but not in others. Thus, Catholic Charismatic healing is certainly more doctrinal than Sufi religiosity in northern Syria, but religious experiences are also at the core of its practices and can also produce tensions in the power structure of the community, as can be seen in the debate on the experiential authenticity of ‘resting in the Spirit’ (Csordas, 1997: 252–259). Therefore, I hope that looking at the darb al-shish through ethnographic lenses allowed us to see issues that go beyond a small Kurdish zawiya in northern Syria, giving a more complex understanding of the tense and dynamic equilibrium on which power structures rest in religious systems that have embodied experiences as their main arena for the production of religious subjectivities.