The inner caliphate

The heroes of this book, or those called the "renewers," are a wide and complex network of Sufi scholars, who lived approximately in the 18th and 19th centuries, on both sides of the Sind and Jihun (Amu Darya) rivers, and who underwent strict teaching and training in poetry, ethics, logic, medicine, and jurisprudence, within pioneering institutions with the highest level of education, in cities such as Bukhara, Kabul, Peshawar, and Delhi. But that was only the "apparent" from which they ascended to higher "inner" sciences, and learned to activate the metaphysical energy centers distributed across the physical body. They embarked on an internal spiritual journey, which qualified them, through the knowledge and wisdom contained within, to lead others in their spiritual development as well as in worldly affairs. Thus, they represented a remarkable form of popular leadership that transcended the political structures of their time, and established a kind of "inner caliphate" that perhaps rose above the "outer caliphate." This book explores the reciprocal influence between universality and locality and responds to the ongoing debate about the nature of Islam before colonial interventions and modern transformations, and before colonizers and Orientalists imposed their own definitions.