God’s Unruly Friends: Rule Breaking World Renouncers of Medieval Islam

According to a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, “Poverty is my pride.” Perhaps no group of Muslims took that adage so seriously as the qalandars and other dervishes who not only renounced the comforts of family and domestic life, but also rejected every trace of social respectability. Nothing mattered more to them—they took pride in nothing else—than their vows of complete poverty. For to renounce the world, and punish the flesh through a life of daily discomfort, was the surest way to negate the self and so fully submit to the will of God. Paradoxically, this logic also led them to renounce the Sharia, since they believed poverty turned them into God’s unruly but saintly friends. For their critics, this was hypocrisy at best and heresy at worst. Yet from the Balkans to India, qalandars wandered from town to town and tribe to tribe, winning followers from the lower classes and literati alike by living up to their arduous principles. Nile Green talks to Ahmet Karamustafa, author of God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550 (University of Utah Press, 1994).