The Iraq Connection: Abu’l-Wafaʾ Taj al-ʿArifin and the Wafaʾi Tradition

In the oldest cluster of the recently surfaced Kizilbash/Alevi documents(mainly Sufi diplomas (ijāzas) and genealogies (shajaras), or fragments thereof(Abu’l-Wafaʾ Taj al-ʿArifin, the eponym of the Wafaʾi order, is frequently named as a familial and/or spiritual progenitor. The story of the Wafaʾiyya, which one rarely encounters in histories of Islamic mysticism, began in eleventh-century Iraq, but its Iraqi branch seems to have faded away over a few generations, leaving behind no permanent imprints. Chapters 1 and 2 address the implications of the historical affinity of some of the most prominent Alevi saintly lineages with the Wafaʾi Sufi tradition. Chapter 1 presents a selective overview of the life and spiritual legacy of Abu’l-Wafaʾ, based on the hagiography of the saint and other near-contemporary Sufi narratives. It underlines the difficulty of categorizing the saint and his spiritual legacy along the lines of conventional binaries of Sunni versus Shiʿi and “heterodox” versus “orthodox.” This chapter makes the point that the metadoxic outlook of the Babaʾi milieu in medieval Anatolia, as well as many components of Kizilbashism-Alevism, explained on the basis of pre-Islamic survivals in the conventional literature, in fact had their parallels and antecedents in the early Wafaʾi milieu.