Rifaiyya (Rifai Order)

The Rifaiyya is one of the oldest of the Sufi orders and is known, more than any other, for the extraordinary bodily feats performed in its ceremonies.

The marshland founder

The order was founded by Ahmad al-Rifai in the marshlands of southern Iraq in the twelfth century, and before the rise of the Qadiriyya it was among the most widespread orders in the Islamic world. Its remembrance of God is loud and bodily, and its ceremonies became famous, and to outside observers notorious, for feats performed in ecstatic states, the handling of fire, the piercing of the body with skewers, and similar acts held to demonstrate the protection given to the entranced devotee. These practices earned its dervishes the Western nickname of the Howling Dervishes.

Persistence and reputation

The Rifaiyya spread across the Middle East, Anatolia, the Balkans and Egypt, and though it was later overtaken in size by the Qadiriyya and other orders it has continued into the present. Its spectacular practices have always drawn both fascination and criticism, including criticism from within Islam that such displays are foreign to sober devotion, so the order sits at the demonstrative end of the spectrum of Sufi practice, opposite the silent and inward discipline of an order such as the Naqshbandiyya. It remains a living tradition, its feats still performed in some of its branches as a sign of the states its method is held to produce.

Medieval travellers and chroniclers who encountered the Rifaiyya often wrote less about its teaching of humility and self abasement than about the striking physical practices some of its members displayed in ceremonial settings, including the handling of fire, live snakes and other feats presented as demonstrations of a state beyond ordinary bodily fear, practices that drew fascination from some observers and sharp criticism from stricter jurists and more sober Sufi orders who regarded them as spectacle rather than genuine spiritual attainment.

Whatever the balance of admiration and suspicion these practices attracted, the order spread widely across the Ottoman domains, Egypt and the wider Arab world for several centuries, at one point standing among the most numerous and geographically extensive of all the Sufi tariqas. Its relative position eventually narrowed as the Qadiriyya's more flexible, non-exclusive membership let it absorb or coexist with local practice across an even wider area, leaving the Rifaiyya a still significant but comparatively smaller presence today than it held during the centuries when its founder's marshland teaching in southern Iraq had first produced one of the earliest orders anywhere to organise itself on this scale.