A Culture of Sufism opens a window to a new understanding of one of the most prolific and enduring of all the Sufi brotherhoods, the Naqshbandiyya, as it spread from its birthplace in central Asia to Iran, Anatolia, Arabia, and the Balkans between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing on original sources and carefully aware of the power of modern paradigms to obscure, Le Gall portrays a Naqshbandiyya that was devotionally sober yet not demysticized and rigorously orthodox without being politically activist. She argues that the establishment of this brotherhood in Ottoman society...