178 178 5 A New Political Model and Its Suf Dimensions The political reformer and Suf Ibn Qası (d. 546/1151) was both the head of a short-lived city-state in present-day Portugal and a writer of Suf metaphysics. His mysticism, like that of his predecessors, synthesized philosophical doctrines in psychology and cosmology, esoteric herme- neutics, and controversial claims about the religious authority of Sufs. In the later Mamluk era in the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldu ̄ n strongly condemned Ibn Qası ’s Suf treatise, Doffing of the Sandals ( Kita ̄ b Khal ʿ al-Na ʿ layn ), in a fatwa ̄ issued as one of four head judges in post-Fatimid Cairo. The late date of this fatwa ̄ , written more than 200 years after Ibn Qası ’s death and in a city far from al-Andalus, is indicative of how Ibn Qası ’s striking political activity as an anti-Almoravid separatist earned him enduring notoriety among ruling and scholarly circles. Ibn Khaldu ̄ n’s one- time colleague Ibn al-Khat  ı b, the chief minister in Nasrid Granada, was likewise a critic. In contrast with Ibn Barraja ̄ n’s (d. 536/1141) and Ibn al- ʿ Arı f’s (d. 536/1141) theories of communal leadership, which blended the roles of Suf metaphysicians and scholars, Ibn Qası ’s conception of communal leadership blended the roles of Suf metaphysicians and politi- cal reformers. His political movement and that of the advancing Almohads of Marrakesh, who represented their founder as a saintly semi-messianic ( mahdı  ) fgure, marked the diminishing of the earlier political challenge of the Platonizing Isma ̄ ʿ ı lı ima ̄ m -caliphs and the rise of a variety of new politi- cal models from within Sunnı political circles that drew on Sufsm. A Suf Debate about Communal Leadership In many ways, Ibn Barraja ̄n and Ibn Qası were very different fgures, and their lives were cut short under very different circumstances. Ibn Barraja ̄n, like Ibn al- ʿ Arıf, was a Suf among the twelfth-century scholars ( ʿ ulama ̄ʾ) of al-Andalus, while Ibn Qası does not appear to have had a strong scholarly background. He is represented in the sources as having turned to a more austere and ascetic life following an early career as a Excerpt from Akhtar, Philosophers Sufis and Caliphs, Cambridge University Press 2019, Paperback $30 Author: Dr. Ali Humayun Akhtar, PhD (mail: ali.akhtar@nyu.edu) Subject: Ibn Qasī’s (d. 1151) Rebellion in Portugal during the life of Afonso de Henriques (d. 1185) Text: Excerpt from paperback Philosophers Sufis and Caliphs (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 178-210