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 be weaned from earthly interests. From the grouping of devotees around some prominent teacher has arisen the foundation of darwish confraternities, sometimes as sodalities of laymen, who pursue their secular occupations and meet from time to time for religious exercises and instruction, and sometimes as permanent communities living in strict obedience under a sheikh. Traces of such monastic institutions appear in Damascus about 150 A.H., and in Khurasan some fifty years later. None of the existing orders of Islam, however, seem to be of so early a date. We hear of a sheikh Alwan (circ. 149), whose shrine is at Jedda, and who is the reputed founder of the Alwaniya community, a body now existing only as a subdivision of the Rifa'ite order. There are also orders known as the Adhamiya, Bastamiya, and Saqatiya, which trace their origin to Ibrahim b. Adham (cf. above), to Bayazid Bastami, and to Sari as-Saqati respectively, but whose real origin is uncertain.

In the 6th century we are on surer ground. There is no reason to question the claim of the Rifa'ite order to trace its foundation to Abu l-'Abbas Ahmad b. 'Ali l-Hasan 'Ali ibn Abi l-'Abbas Ahmad Rifa'i (d. 578), a native of the village of Umm Abida, near the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates. In his lifetime he gathered a large body of disciples, whom he incorporated in an order in 576, the members living in community under a sheikh, to whom they owed unquestioning obedience, but having also, like other orders, a number of lay adherents. Dying without issue the headship of