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Classical Sufism crystallized in Baghdad in the last quarter of the ninth century C.E.1 Biographers of the early eleventh century worked out a spiritual lineage for Sufism going back to the Companions of the Prophet. They identified the immediate forbearers of the Sufis as eighth- and ninth-century renunciants known as zuhhad, nussak, or 'ubbdd.2 They under-went austerities, devoted extraordinary amounts of time to Qur'anic recitation and prayer, and generally cultivated a solemn attitude toward life.3 Some spoke of thinking often and steadily of God, but the ideas of mutual love and mystical union were yet to come. A few wore wool, but express references to safiyya before the later ninth century usually have to do with marginal, disreputable figures not identified as forebears by the later Sufi biographers.4 Modern research has largely confirmed that Sufism grew out of this earlier, ascetic tradition.5
According to the Sufi biographers, most of these earlier renunciants had been active transmitters of Hadith. (For zuhhad and nuddak, I normally use "renunciants," suggested to me by Michael Cooperson, rather than "ascetics" in order to avoid implying the opposition of "mysticism" to "asceticism" as worked out by Max Weber.6) The piety of the ninth-century Traditionalists (those who would base their law and theology mainly on Hadith as opposed to rational speculation), so far as we can reconstruct it, was identical to that of most eighth-century renunciants as the Sufi sources present them.7 Hadith and Sufism thus had origins in common (confirmed, incidentally, by the way Hadith collectors identified certain ones of their own number as abdal, later a favorite concept of the Sufis8). But when exactly did Hadith and Sufism separate?
The voluminous literature of rijal criticism shows us how Hadith collectors and critics thought of their renunciant forebears and contemporaries. For the most part, it must be said, the great ninth-century rijal critics (evaluators of Hadith transmitters) ignored the renunciants of the later eighth century, at least as transmitters of Hadith; however, they were inclined to respect as many as they did comment on. They regarded the renunciants of their own century more suspiciously, depreciating more of their Hadath transmission. Finally, with the advent of classical Sufism near the end of the ninth century, the mystical tradition went its own way....