ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a literary analysis of male-authored depictions of early mystic and Sufi women, male youths, slaves and black individuals to provide understandings of gendered dynamics in Sufi thought. It investigates specifically how Abd al-Karim b. Hawazin Qushayri frequently reduced pious and ascetic women, male youths, slaves and black individuals to one-dimensional trickster-types rather than portraying them as fellow aspirants on the Sufi path. Through a comparative investigation of depictions of other marginalized members of classical Islamicate societies in Qushayri’s Risala (Epistle on Sufism), the chapter demonstrates how the gendering of female mystics and other members of the non-elite acts as a marker of difference from the default elite male norm. It provides understandings of gendered social dynamics in eleventh-century Islamicate societies by investigating all who did not hold a dominant position, whether socially or sexually, and how they are rendered effeminate and inferior in the writings of free, elite men who held hegemonic power.
