Christopher Melchert Essay

Arguments concerning the reasons why the extreme archetypes of Islamic renunciation began to dissipate have been the subject of many scholars’ writings. Christopher Melchert in his essay “Origins and Early Sufism” contends that the increasingly growing amount of converts to Islam and their attachment to various social and economic orders led to the degradation of the extreme austerity exhibited in early Islam. He states, “It seems likely that mass conversion to Islam was a major reason for growing distrust of outward renunciation...When most people were Muslims, normal devotional life could no longer be allowed to hinder making a living” (12). Similarly, Peter Awn in his essay “The Ethical Concerns of Classical Sufism” suggests that early proto-Sufi, renunciatory conceptions of materiality and the physical world as “a rotting corpse with a dog (i.e., the devil Iblis) perched on top” began to shift to

Non-Sufi Muslims too participated and utilized the concept of zuhd concomitantly with other spiritual activities apart from the mystical knowledge attained by means of Sufism. She writes, “In this study I propose to break down the narrow boundaries in which zuhd is usually delimited by claiming that zuhd is the philosophy of life inherent in Islam ... no matter what religious current he thinks he belongs to ...” (29). Therefore, to these non-Sufis, “[Wara‘] is the key word for understand zuhd. Leading a scrupulous way of life promises the achievement of zuhd” (Kingberg 43). Her claim is further validated by the literature of those Muslim scholars such as Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855), whose Kitab al-Zuhd served as “a reconstruction of his own piety, that of the early Sunni circles around him, and more generally of Muslims in the eighth century” (Melchert, “Ahmad Ibn Hanbal’s”