Fame, Censure and a Founder Named Ahmad al-Rifa'i

The order traces itself to Ahmad al-Rifa'i, a twelfth century figure active in the marshlands of southern Iraq, and Sufism: A Global History records that the order spread widely across the Arab world, Anatolia and beyond in the centuries following his death, carrying the burhan practice with it into new regions where it continued to draw public attention. The Sufi Orders in Islam notes that the practice drew censure as often as fame, criticism directed at the order from other Sufi orders as much as from jurists who questioned whether public demonstrations of this kind belonged to sound religious practice or risked shading into spectacle performed for onlookers rather than devotion offered to God. That criticism has never been confined to outsiders hostile to Sufism generally, since some of the sharpest objections on record came from within the wider Sufi tradition itself, from teachers who accepted the reality of spiritual states but doubted that public display of endurance was the right way to bear witness to them. The order has continued to practise forms of the burhan into the present, and it remains, centuries after Ahmad al-Rifa'i's death, the feature by which the Rifa'i order is most widely identified outside its own membership.