Eaton Richard Maxwell. The Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700. Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India

Princeton University Press, 2015. — 392 p. — ISBN 81-215-0740-5.Historically, Islam's normative vision of society and piety was mediated to the masses in large part by Sufi shaikhs, heirs to Islam's rich mystical tradition although anthropologists have examined the social roles played by Sufis in some contemporary societies, few historians have done the same for earlier periods, in any part of the Islamic world. Richard Maxwell Eaton's 'The Sufis of Bijapur' is an attempt to fill this gap by scrutinizing the social careers of Sufis of a single city-state, the Deccani Kingdom of Bijapur, from the early fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries the aim is two-fold: first, to identify the dominant social roles played by Sufis of Bijapur; and second, to explain why certain kinds of sufis appeared when they did the book thus blends cultural history with social biography during a critical period of Deccani history.
The Sufis were heirs to a tradition of Islamic mysticism, and they have generally been viewed as standing more or less apart from the social order. Professor Eaton contends to the contrary that the Sufis were an integral part of their society, and that an understanding of their interaction with it is essential to an understanding of the Sufis themselves.
In investigating the Sufis of Bijapur in South India, the author identifies three fundamental questions. What was the relationship, he asks, between the Sufis and Bijapur's 'ulama, the upholders of Islamic orthodoxy? Second, how did the Sufis relate to the Bijapur court? Finally, how did they interact with the non-Muslim population surrounding them, and how did they translate highly developed mystical traditions into terms meaningful to that population? In answering these questions, the author advances our knowledge of an important but little-studied city-state in medieval India.
The book was originally published in 1978.