A Muslim Life in Learning and Politics: 'Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami of Antioch (d. 1454or 1455) 'Abd al-Rahman al-Hanafi al-Bistami (b. Antioch ca. 1375, d. Bursa 1454), a peripatetic Muslim polymath, spent a life located in all senses at the intersection of the extraordinary political and spiritual contestations of his day. Both a legist and mystic, he systematized and popularized occult sciences and apocalyptic prognostication, which he taught to the foremost intellectual and political figures of his day, and for centuries he remained a leading authority on Last Things; his Miftah al-jafr al-jami', for example, became the apocalyptic and prophetic Urwerk from which sixteenth-century Ottomans, including Sultan Slleyman (1520-66), hewed a specifically Ottoman eschatological and saintly image. In addition to some thirty works (he would be remembered foremost as an expert on matters apocalyptic and as systematizer and popularizer of the Science of Letters, 'ilm al-huruf) on topics ranging from medicine, to the occult, to advice for princes, to universal history. Bistami naturalized the esoteric currents--and political opportunities available to men of broad learning-- of his day in the service of a millenialist social vision that was at once universalist and adamantly Sunni and Hanafi, locating the Islamic dispensation within a larger, not solely Islamic, cosmology and scheme of history. Via his sojourn in Cairo at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Bistami was in close contact with the most accomplished and ambitious scholars of the Islamic world in his time--including Sharaf al-din Ali Yazdi, Sa'in al-din Turka, Sheikh Bedreddin, and Molla Fenari--and clearly valued these as more important and stable than fleeting political patrons. He further left a unique autobiographical memoir (a rarity in medieval Islamic letters) of his life in learning in a spiritually experimental environment. I will examine his still unpublished Arabic corpus, in conjunction with his biography set in its political context, in order to 1) delineate the esotericist and chiliastic currents underlying late medieval Muslim intellectual life, 2) suggest the existence of a real network of scholars and political figures with whom he was in primary contact, a group that stretched from Heart to Cairo and Rumelia and which he termed The Brethren of Purity), and, if time remains, 3) examine the role these played in sacralizing the early modern regional Muslim empires established at the turn of the sixteenth century.