DEVIANT DERVISHES: SPACE, GENDER, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANTINOMIAN PIETY IN OTTOMAN ALEPPO

In: International journal of Middle East studies: IJMES, Volume 37, Issue 4, p. 535-565

Abstract

In the letters he wrote from Aleppo in 1600, the British merchant William Biddulph described the daily life of this dynamic center of the East–West trade, the city where spices and silks from India and Iran were exchanged for English broadcloth and New World silver in one of the world's largest covered bazaars. He also presented Muslim practices and religious beliefs, emphasizing those features that seemed to him most unusual and reprehensible. His contempt fell firmly on a fixture of the early modern Islamic street, the ecstatic, antinomian Muslim saint:
They also account fooles, dumbe men, and mad men,…Saints. And whatsoever such mad men say or doe…or strike them, and wound them, yet they take it in good part, and say, that they shall have good lucke after it. And when such mad men die, they Canonize them for Saints, and erect stately Monuments over their graves, as we have here many examples, especially of one (who being mad) went always naked, whose name was Sheh Boubac…they…erected an house over his grave, where…they are Lampes burning night and day, and many idle fellows (whom they call Darvises) there maintained to looke unto his Sepulchre…