Sufi Civilities

Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan

*Winner of the 2024 Nikki Keddie Book Award by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA)
*Winner of the 2025 inaugural Charles H. Norchi Award of the Royal Asiatic Society

Despite its pervasive reputation as a place of religious extremes and war, Afghanistan has a complex and varied religious landscape where elements from a broad spectrum of religious belief vie for a place in society. It is also one of the birthplaces of a widely practiced variant of Islam: Sufism. Contemporary analysts suggest that Sufism is on the decline due to war and the ideological hardening that results from societies in conflict. However, in my book Sufi Civilities, published in 2023 with Stanford University Press, I argue that this is far from a truthful depiction. Members of Sufi communities have worked as resistance fighters, aid workers, business people, actors, professors, and daily workers in creative and ingenious ways to keep and renew their networks of community support.

Based on twenty-five months on-the-ground ethnographic field research among multiple Sufi communities in different urban areas of Afghanistan, the book examines navigational strategies employed by Sufi leaders over the past four decades to weather periods of instability and persecution, showing how they adapted to changing conditions in novel ways that crafted Sufism as a force in the civil sphere. I explore the dexterity of religious civil society in Afghanistan to navigate complex and shifting social environments, especially in transitional moments such as the death of a leader.

The book offers an exploration of marginality and leadership in wartorn contexts as well as a way to understand grassroots community organizing. Percolating under the surface is a critique of the post-2001 foreign intervention in Afghanistan, both in terms of its development agendas and political myopia.

Read more about the book in reviews of the Afghanistan Analyst Network, the British Journal of Middle East Studies or the International Journal of Middle East Studies or listen to podcasts on the New Books Network, the Ajam Podcast and the Society of Reluctant Anthropologists. Or start reading the Introduction straight away!

What People Say

  • “An engaging, compelling, and beautifully-written ethnography that traverses the heterogeneous Sufi sociosphere of contemporary Afghanistan. Schmeding documents, in arresting detail and acute sensitivity, the dexterity of Sufi adepts in creating and maintaining civil communities amidst violence and ruptures. At once profound, riveting, and timely, the book is a vital contribution to the study of religion and civil society."

    — Ismail Fajrie Alatas, New York University

  • "Sufi Civilities opens the door to a marvelous world of faith that lies hidden in plain sight. Schmeding's path breaking ethnographic account of diverse Sufi communities in contemporary Afghanistan is both new and exciting. Over the past half century they have outlasted every radical political regime that failed to appreciate just how deeply Sufism is embedded in Afghanistan's Islamic culture."

    — Thomas Barfield, Boston University

  • “Through astute anthropological observation, Annika Schmeding shows how Sufis became important players in the contests for religious authority that emerged from the cultural whirligig of a NATO-supported Islamic Republic. This is a major contribution to the study of modern Afghanistan."

    — Nile Green, University of California, Los Angeles

  • "Sufi Civilities will remain for decades a mandatory (English-language) text for understating the role of Islam in Afghanistan."

    — Christian Bleuer, Afghanistan Analyst Network

  • "Rather than the top-down approach to civil society imposed on Afghanistan, Sufi Civilities offers a blueprint of the strategies Sufi communities use that fit the bottom-up cultural structures of the country, highlighting new pathways for progress."

    —Soraya Afzali, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

  • "The ethnographic breadth of the work and the willingness to learn to think otherwise about matters of spiritual negotiation and authority are what lend this work its unique perspective... Schmeding's careful attention to their interlocuters' ways of knowing, dreaming, intuiting, valuing, and judging amid the dissolution of traditional orders is crucial to the book's role in revealing a philosophy of the self that takes seriously the occult and the place of gnosis in collective life."

    —Fatima Mojaddedi, International Journal of Middle East Studies

Listen in: Recent Podcast