Abstract
Until recently, many scholars have presupposed inseparable unity between Sufism and saint veneration. It is true that most of the Muslim saints are so-called Sufi saints, although some anthropologists showed cases of non-Sufi Muslim saints. However, the forms of Sufism and saint veneration vary, and the manner in which they are combined is even more diverse. Therefore, we should treat Sufism and saint veneration as distinct phenomena and should ask ourselves what conditions determine the form of combination. In this paper, three different hagiographic traditions of a Muslim saint in the Western Desert of Egypt are introduced. It is shown that Bedouins, settled Bedouins, and non-Bedouins each have their own tales about this saint. Further, it can be seen that each tradition has a particular form of combination of Sufism and saint veneration, corresponding to the social position of its narrators. At the end of this paper, the case of the Sanusi order is examined to suggest that the above notion can be applied to the historical events in which the organization of the Sufi order and that of the tribal people were combined to give birth to the embryonic nationalism in Libya.
