Withstanding Fire and Blades Testifies to the Saint's State

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.

The order traces itself to Ahmad al-Rifa'i, a twelfth century figure active in the marshlands of southern Iraq, and Sufism: A Global History records that the order spread widely across the Arab world, Anatolia and beyond in the centuries following his death, carrying the burhan practice with it into new regions where it continued to draw public attention. The Sufi Orders in Islam notes that the practice drew censure as often as fame, criticism directed at the order from other Sufi orders as much as from jurists who questioned whether public demonstrations of this kind belonged to sound religious practice or risked shading into spectacle performed for onlookers rather than devotion offered to God. That criticism has never been confined to outsiders hostile to Sufism generally, since some of the sharpest objections on record came from within the wider Sufi tradition itself, from teachers who accepted the reality of spiritual states but doubted that public display of endurance was the right way to bear witness to them. The order has continued to practise forms of the burhan into the present, and it remains, centuries after Ahmad al-Rifa'i's death, the feature by which the Rifa'i order is most widely identified outside its own membership.