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With the advent of the 20th century, Sufism found itself under increasing attack in many parts of the Muslim world. In previous centuries, mystical movements had played a prominent role in the struggle for the revival of Islam and occasionally, where governments were weak or nonexistent, also in actual resistance to European encroachment. In the wake of the increasing consolidation of the state and the spread of Western rationalism, however, Sufis came to be regarded as a major cause of the so-called decline of Islam and an obstacle to its adaptation. In the Arab world, this anti-Sufi feeling was generally associated with the Salafiyya trend. The Salafi call for a return to the example of the forefathers (al-salaf al-**sdotu**ali**hdotu** ) amounted to a discrediting of latter-day tradition, which was described as cherishing mystical superstition as well as scholarly stagnation and political quietism. Under the burden of this critique, and as a response to the general expansion of education and literacy, Sufism has been forced to assimilate new ideas and to make room for a new form of organization; the populist Islamic association. These developments culminated in the establishment of the Society of the Muslim Brothers.
Scholarly research has paid considerable attention to the emergence of Islamic associations in the Arab world, most notably in Egypt and Syria, during the first half of the 20th century. It has also been observed that these associations appealed primarily to the common people in the poor quarters of the cities and in the towns. Yet owing to a basically dichotomous view of the Salafi-Sufi divide, scholars have failed to attach due importance to the fact that, despite their critique, Salafi thinkers themselves had roots in the revivalist Sufi tradition of the previous centuries. Concomitantly, researchers have practically ignored the organizational continuities between the populist Islamic associations and the Sufi orders, the leading conveyers of popular religiosity in the pre-modern era. These failures reflected the tendency to focus on the metropolitan centers of Cairo and Damascus, where Western influence was relatively advanced, at the expense of smaller towns on their peripheries, in which traditional social and religious structures persisted longer.
This article seeks to advance our understanding of the socio-religious process of the "popularization" of modern Islamic discourse and...