This study on the Sufi orders in Egypt covers the period from the appointment of ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Bakrī to the office of shaykh mashāyikh al-ṭuruq al-ṣūfiyya in early 1911 until the demise of the then shaykh, Muḥammad Maḥmūd ʿAlī al-Suṭūḥī, in 1982. It is a sequel to my Ṭuruq and Ṭuruq-Linked Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, published by Brill (Leiden 1978) and in a reset version as Volume 9 in the Brill Classics in Islam series (Leiden/Boston 2021). In the year 2000, a collection of my studies on the Sufi orders in Egypt was published in a volume of the Analecta Isisiana series, under the title Sufi Orders in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Egypt and the Middle East (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2000). After the publication of this volume, I had the opportunity to visit Egypt a number of times to buy books, travel around, and visit members of brotherhoods, their shaykhs and their shrines.
I abrogated most of my work on taṣawwuf and Sufi orders in 2002 to participate in the International Conference on Altaic Studies in Beijing in August of that year and for a sabbatical term which allowed me to stay on to travel around China, notably Xinjang. Hereafter I refocused my scholarly attention to the Turkic world of Central Asia, which was facilitated by annual periods of teaching and research at Minzu University of China in Beijing. In these years, I produced some Uyghur-related publications concerning Uyghur language (Uyghur: A Manual for Conversation [Utrecht: Houtsma 2000] and A Grammar of Modern Uyghur [Utrecht: Houtsma 2007]), and on Uyghur culture (Uyghur Texts in Context: Life in Shinjang Documented from Public Spaces [Leiden: Brill 2018]).
To continue my work in the field of Uyghur studies seemed an attractive option but became an impossibility due to strictures placed on foreigners, especially after the start of the large-scale incarcerations of Uyghurs in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Therefore, I decided to shelve this idea and to return to my material on Sufi orders in Egypt in the socialist period and the era of Anwar al-Sadat. At the time I was already exploring the possibility of republishing a selected number of my previously published articles in a single volume. Consequently, I contacted Brill Publishers. Our exchange of views resulted in the invitation to republish my Ṭuruq and Ṭuruq-Linked Institutions.
The reprint of this book took me back to my research notes and photographs taken when I was working in public and private archives and libraries in Cairo in the 1970s and ‘80s. Reading these notes made me aware of their value for writing the history of the Sufi orders in the post-qadam era.