The Burhan and What Withstanding It Is Held to Prove

The Rifa'i order became known across the Islamic world for the burhan, public demonstrations in which practitioners handle fire, pass iron skewers through the body or perform other feats without apparent injury, offered within the order as evidence of the spiritual state its practitioners have attained rather than as entertainment or magic performed for its own sake. Mystical Dimensions of Islam situates the practice within a wider Sufi vocabulary in which visible endurance of what would ordinarily cause harm is read as a sign that the practitioner's ordinary bodily nature has been overridden by a state of spiritual absorption, a demonstration meant to point beyond the performer to the reality of the state itself rather than to the performer's own power. The Sufi Orders in Islam records that this feature has been closely associated with the Rifa'i order since the medieval period, to the point that outside observers have often identified the entire order by the burhan alone, sometimes at the cost of overlooking the order's ordinary devotional life, its litanies, gatherings and teaching, which occupies far more of Rifa'i religious practice than the public demonstrations that made the order famous.