A Chain of Teachers, and a Chain of Rulers

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.