Edep: ethical imagination and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammed

Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of Sufi edep/adab (spiritual manners) in the ethical self-cultivation among a Naqshbandi Sufi Muslim group in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. It considers how an ethnographic focus on edeb/adab can help us understand Sufi spirituality as a form of everyday sociality on one hand and as a form of religious virtue and piety on the other. The ethnography highlights the importance of inculcating self-reflexivity in the pious and ethical self-cultivation as a way of attaining adab and thus piety as an everyday social. Instead of focusing on the exclusion of other Muslim selfhoods, the Naqshbandi Muslims analyzed in this paper turn to self-critique and self-improvement, a key method for spiritual refinement and a deeper relation to divine authority. Self-critique is a method which opens a path toward the proper internalization of the Prophet’s sunna, and it therefore constitutes a degree of hermeneutic practice. The essay argues for a greater ethnographic focus on how self-critique can be oriented toward the social and contribute toward formulations of ideas of tolerance and local forms of sociality. This makes adab ‘good to think with’ both in tracing the intra-Muslim power dynamics, in exploring broader Sufi engagements as religious subjects who perform ethics in a secular world, and tensions between the subject and the social, together with the practices of dervishes (initiates) to individual and collective ends. Thus, the paper proposes that a religious agency in the present via the cultivation of adab can be used to interrogate the canon, in an ongoing process of ethical cultivation which places the accent of being Islamic on the ethical as a relational category (Zigon, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27(2), 384–401, 2021). Edep is an abstract noun in Turkish, drawn from the original Arabic adab. Though the preferred vocabulary of my interlocutors was edep as most scholarly literature uses adab, in this text, I use adab. The interchange between edep and adab is used only when I am quoting directly from my interlocutors.