The End of the Confraternal Era : Crisis of Spiritual Identities and the Call to Inner Maturity
Feb 16, 2026
« A path that needs an enemy in order to exist has already forgotten its center. »
Editorial Prelude
Visible crises are often symptoms of deeper mutations.
In recent years, internal conflicts within spiritual paths have increasingly unfolded in public view. Contested successions, rival claims of authority, campaigns of validation and delegitimization, what once remained contained within closed circles now becomes spectacle.
This phenomenon cannot be dismissed as merely personal weakness. It may indicate something more structural : the exhaustion of inherited confraternal forms in the face of a consciousness that has changed.
This reflection targets no individual and no specific group. It addresses a historical moment.
What is the value of belonging if it does not produce maturity?
What is the value of religious identity if it covers over the original simplicity of the soul?
What is the value of Sufism if it reproduces the same human mechanisms it once sought to transcend, rivalry, status, symbolic power ?
We may be witnessing the end of a cycle, a form of spirituality organized primarily around belonging, tutelage, and charismatic centrality.
The question is not whether spirituality survives.
The question is whether it evolves.
From Unity to Rivalry
There are moments in history when forms survive after their spirit has thinned.
Initiatic chains remain.
Titles remain.
Affiliations remain.
But the center shifts.
When a path meant to guide toward Unity becomes the stage of rivalry, this is not merely a human disagreement. It is a structural sign, a revealer.
Perhaps we are not witnessing an accidental crisis.
Perhaps we are witnessing the end of an age.
From Khilāfa to Khilāf: The Ontological Slippage
Khilāfa is a trust.
An amāna.
A vertical responsibility.
But when succession becomes competition, when transmission becomes a stake to be claimed, when followers become mobilized actors, khalāfa slips into khilāf.
What was vertical becomes horizontal.
What was meant to align with the Center becomes a line of fracture.
Legitimacy is measured by numbers, by narrative control, by the capacity to defend an image.
And when authority must be secured through the demonization of a rival, it reveals its fragility.
This is not merely a moral failure.
It is a shift in ontological orientation.
Fitra : The Ontological Simplicity to Be Reclaimed
Fitra is not instinct.
It is not raw impulse.
It is the primordial simplicity of the soul.
A transparency prior to identities.
An inner state not saturated by the need to defend belonging.
A spiritual path has meaning only if it returns us to that simplicity.
Not toward emotional intensity.
Not toward collective pride.
Not toward group consolidation.
But toward lightness.
If belonging makes the heart heavier, if it hardens speech, if it strengthens the urge to oppose, then Fitra has not been deepened.
It has been covered.
Simplicity does not proclaim itself.
It reveals itself in restraint.
The Post-Colonial Confraternal Model : From Matrix to Fortress
Confraternities historically played an immense role: spiritual formation, social cohesion, cultural resistance.
But during the colonial and post-colonial periods, they underwent transformation.
In the face of political collapse, social fragmentation, and the shock of modernity, the tariqa became a refuge of identity.
This was historically understandable.
Yet every structure born from survival carries defensive reflexes.
When the path becomes a fortress, it counts its members.
It protects its image.
It reacts to threats.
Without intending to, it enters the modern logic of groups: identity against identity.
Sufism, once an inner deepening, becomes a banner.
And banners inevitably oppose one another.
Spectacle and the Loss of the Center
Our age amplifies the visible.
Spiritual states become images.
Intensity becomes proof.
Fervor becomes argument.
But intensity is not the Center.
When collective exaltation coexists with public campaigns against rivals, a dissonance emerges.
On one side: spectacle.
On the other: polarization.
The path oscillates between display and combat.
The Center, however, is silent.
When noise becomes structural, it often signals that the Center has shifted.
Dynastization and Symbolic Power
Spiritual transmission is not monarchy.
When succession becomes dynastic rivalry, when authority becomes tied to bloodline or clan, the path slides into symbolic power.
Symbolic power is subtle.
It feeds on recognition.
It consolidates through loyalty.
It stabilizes through polarization.
But authority rooted in Fitra does not require an enemy.
If it must be defended through attack,
it is already weakened.
The Passers of Identity
In every age, there emerge figures and structures that function not as guides to Unity, but as mediators of belonging.
One becomes a member before becoming mature.
One becomes a defender before becoming lucid.
The path ceases to be passage.
It becomes camp.
And camps eventually define themselves against other camps.
Subtle Tyranny
Tyranny is not always political.
It may be the tyranny of the ego that refuses introspection.
The tyranny of a group that demands absolute loyalty.
The tyranny of a deviation normalized.
When demonization becomes common language, when propaganda becomes method, when polarization becomes culture, we face a diffuse tyranny.
And silence becomes comfortable.
But comfort is not fidelity to truth.
To speak a word of truth in the face of subtle tyranny is not aggression.
It is refusal to normalize distortion.
The Explicit End of the Confraternal Era
It must perhaps be said clearly :
The confraternal era, as structured in the 19th and 20th centuries, has reached its historical limit.
Not the end of spirituality.
Not the end of teachers.
But the end of a model based on closed belonging, charismatic exclusivity, and mass loyalty.
These forms served.
They protected.
They transmitted.
But when a form begins producing more rivalry than elevation, more polarization than maturity, more identity than depth, it signals that a cycle has reached completion.
This is not catastrophe.
It is mutation.
Forms that refuse to evolve eventually crack.
Imān as a Post-Identitarian Space
Imān is not belonging.
Imān is space.
A space of trust.
A space of interior peace.
A space of assumed responsibility.
A space where Fitra becomes central again.
Where partnership replaces belonging.
Where enlightened trust replaces blind belief.
A space where authority is recognized through maturity, not imposed through group pressure.
Belonging ceases to be enclosure.
It becomes passage.
The future of spirituality may not lie in multiplying camps, but in expanding consciousness.
Cosmological Mutation
Sacred language speaks of moments when the earth trembles and hidden things are exposed.
There are spiritual tremors.
What was concealed becomes visible.
What was superficial cracks.
What is authentic remains.
When a path publicly disputes itself, it reveals what it truly contains.
And revelation is mercy.
Perhaps we are witnessing the end of an age of tutelage.
An age where belonging structured the soul.
Where the shaykh was the exclusive axis.
Where the community contained consciousness.
Now consciousness demands maturity.
The path was never a flag.
It was always a passage.
Elevation does not proclaim itself.
It reveals itself in restraint.
An authentic path defends itself through depth, never through noise.
And when noise becomes constant, it may be the sign that one age is closing and another is beginning, not founded on tutelage, but on the maturity of the soul.
