In this paper I introduce an extremely important but little-known hagiography of sixteenth century female saint Agha-yi Buzurg entitled Mazhar al-aja’ib wa majma al-ghara’ib. This manuscript was written by Agha-yi Buzurg’s disciple Hafiz Basir who relates his master’s ideas, teaching, and events of the final years of her life preceding her death in the Bukhara region around 1522. Agha-yi Buzurg’s hagiography until recently due to variety of reasons has been viewed as part of literary legacy of the Naqshbandiya brotherhood. However, this manuscript, which on its surface level appears to be a Sufi treatise, is actually much more complex. The text describes tensions between rival religious groups, juxtaposing Agha-yi Buzurg and her circle to doubting religious and political authorities. It presents a challenge to the dominant model of religious authority by discourses that serve both as a defense strategy against accusations of heresy, and as an effort to legitimize one’s system of belief and practices. In his effort to defend their belief system as well as to claim a religious authority for his master Agha-yi Buzurg and for himself, the author Hafi? Basir created an unusual text written in a highly symbolic language, characterized by technical terminology, obscure and inconsistent utterances, and ambiguous conversations between master and disciple. The text’s inner content, often incoherent and puzzle-like, makes it unsystematic and difficult for the reader to have a clear picture and to follow the author’s arguments. The author seems to be trying to give the impression that he is concealing while revealing and vice versa. Applying methodological approaches used in scholarship on Western Esotericism (Faivre, Von Stuckard, Kippenberg), guidelines developed by scholars in the study of Shî?ite Islam (Kohlberg, Amir-Moezzi, Sachedina, Corbin), Islamic and Central Asian historiography (Manz, Hermansen, Hodgson), philosophy (Gutas, Strauss), and discourse analysis (Foucault) in exploring the text’s ambiguities, I argue that, in order to avoid persecution, the author wrote it in a peculiar mode of concealed narrative with multiple layers of intended meaning. On the one hand the author used various strategies to defend his group against accusations and persecution. On the other hand the text also served as a tool to transmit ?gh?-yi Buzurg’s legacy to those who were initiated into her tradition. Mazhar al-aja’ib is a unique source which sheds a new light on the religious environment of the early Shaybanid Transoxiana, a period whose history remains largely unexplored.