This paper is a discription of the debate over the issue of legitimacy of tarekat in the Minangkabau region in the early 20th century between the old traditionalist ulama and the young modernist ulama. The theoretical framework used to analyze the problem above is the theory of challenge and response by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee. The theory is about the dialectics of history and culture due to the causality of the challenges and responses, both in ideas, discourse and movement. The importance of this theory is to answer the fundamental issue about the meaning of tarekat from the perspective of the two groups of ulama along with the things underlying these differences.