In more recent times the question of confessional ambiguity and religious boundaries in Islamic Intellectual History in the 13th to 16th Century in the lands of the eastern Caliphate has been widely debated. However, these perspectives have not so far adequately addressed the issue of religious boundaries in Khurasan. The present paper addresses the issue of religious boundaries with special attention to Jami’s views in his work "Haft aurang". Jami is one of the Naqshbandiyya affiliates, who had considerable influence during the 15th and 16th Centuries in Herat and Khurasan. In this book the author In the section of Eteqad nama introduces some aspects of Sunnism. I will be looking at Sunni, Shiites and Rawāfiḍ characteristics as depicted by Jami. It will be showed that Jami considered no difference between Shiites and Rawāfiḍ. After reading “Haft aurang,” the reader cannot determine a sharp boundary between the Shiites and the Rawāfiḍ. Despite this obvious bias, there is an important point to be noticed: the author discusses topics which are not considered by today’s Sunni scholars, the virtues attributed to the twelve Imams of the Shiites.

Following the death of Nadir Shah (d. 1747), the political landscape of the Turkestan, Khurasan, and Hindustan underwent dramatic transformations. While decentralized states gradually emerged at Khiva, Khoqand, and Bukhara, Ahmad Shah Durrani began carving out an empire from Nadir Shah’s eastern provinces. This turbulent period also witnessed the proliferation of an intricate network of shrines, khāneqāhs, and madāris associated with the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi order, which had originated several generations earlier with Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), the widely revered yet controversial Hindustani mystic. This paper focuses on the efforts of one of the Mujaddidi scholars-saints who emerged in this period, Mian Fazl Ahmad Masumi, popularly known as Hazrat Jeo Peshawari, and the networks developed by his sons and khulafa. Hazrat Jeo forged a network of institutions spanning from Punjab and Ghazni to Khoqand and Bukhara, attracting a range of adherents from ascetics to local rulers (including Mahmud Shah Durrani, the Akhund of Swat, and the rulers of at least five khanates in Turkestan). This paper will focus on the parallel development of his networks in the Peshawar Valley, Khoqand, and Bukhara after his death.

This paper explores a nineteenth-century tadhkira from Badakhshan, the Bahār‐i Badakhshān (‘Spring of Badakhshān’) of Sayyid ʿAbdal‐Karīm Husaynī. Recent scholarship on Ismāʿīlism in Badakhshān (Beben, Gross, Iloliev, Kalandarov, Mamadsherzodshoev, Mastibekov, Mock Oshurbekov, van den Berg, et al.) has contributed to the developing field of Ismāʿīlī Studies in the Pamir, and has brought attention to previously unstudied published and unpublished local sources acquired through archival and field research. Such research utilizes textual sources such as risalas, nasab-nāmas, farmāns, and tadhkiras, as well as on-site interviews and the performance of music, poetry and prayer, for understanding religious identity, sacred geography, and the family history of religious notables. My own research utilizes oral narratives, local histories, genealogical histories (nasāb-nāmas) and the built environment of sacred shrines in Shughnan, Roshanb, Wakhan, and Bartang (present-day Tajikistan and Afghanistan) to understand issues of confessional and communal identity and local patterns of genealogically-based family sanctity in Badakhshan. This paper will focus on the unpublished manuscript Bahār‐i Badakhshān (‘Spring of Badakhshān’) of Sayyid ʿAbdal‐Karīm Husaynī to further explore the relationship between orality and textuality in Ismāʿīlī foundational narratives and the light it sheds on Ismāʿīlī identity, religious practice and local history in Badakhshan.

This paper explores a 19th-century work in Chaghatay Turkic verse that combines a ‘sacred history’ of the region of Khwārazm (in present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) with a catalogue of that region’s holy places; the work, called simply Khwārazm taʻrīfi (‘Description of Khwārazm’), survives in a unique manuscript in Tashkent. In its combination of ‘historical’ vision—beginning with a tale of the ‘secret’ conversion of Khwārazm’s people during the Prophet’s lifetime—and geographically-framed shrine guide, the ‘Description of Khwārazm’ resembles several other Persian and Turkic works from 19th-century Central Asia that reflect the local lore, and ‘home-town pride,’ of various regions beyond the better-known urban centers of Bukhara and Samarqand (for which shrine catalogues and sacred histories are known already from the 15th and 16th centuries); these other regions include Tashkent, the Farghana valley, and especially Sayrām, for which several versions of a sacred history and shrine guide, produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries, offer the most direct parallel to the text explored here. The work focused on Khwārazm is distinctive, however, for being more clearly grounded in the recent religious history of the areas it covers; where other examples of these local histories tend to situate the ‘personnel’ of their sacred geographies in the distant past (including even pre-Islamic times), the saints whose shrines are noted as the focus of pilgrimage (ziyārat) in Khwārazm are, as a group, skewed much more toward recent times, with a relatively strong presence for Sufis of the 18th and 19th centuries. The work thus integrates the more recent history of Sufi groups in Khwārazm with the ongoing presence, through their shrines, of the celebrated saints of the region’s past, from Najm al-Dīn Kubrā and Ḥakīm Ata to a lineage of Naqshbandī shaykhs that includes a 17th-century Chinggisid khān of Khwārazm. This paper will outline the ‘sacred history’ presented in the work, but will focus chiefly on its accounts of shrines in Khwārazm, with particular attention to the anonymous author’s construction of a sacred regional space, delineated by prescribed itineraries of pilgrimage and ‘populated’ by saints whose lives knit together a connected ‘history’ of the region.