The Andalusian mystic Abd al-Haqq ibn Sab'in of Ricote (d. 1270 CE) is one of the most enigmatic figures in Islamic intellectual history. Many medieval Muslim writers portrayed him as the epitome of whatever faults they could find in Sufism, esotericism, or mysticism in general. However, he was also the author of works “the likes of which no one has ever seen” and manuscripts of his writings can be found throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Surprisingly, despite the fact that most of Ibn Sab‘in’s surviving works have been edited and published, few scholars have studied them in detail. This paper attempts to rectify this situation by presenting an analysis of the mystical landscapes and mindscapes of Ibn Sab‘in’s treatise Risalat al-Nuriyya (The Epistle of the Illuminative). Despite the fact that it so far has remained unstudied, it is one of the most important works of Ibn Sab‘in because it provides an outline of his spiritual method (tariqa), which the text refers to as al-Sab‘iniyya. This Way proves to have been an eclectic mix of Islamic devotionalism, Sufism, Neo-Pythagorean theosophy, Iamblichan theurgy, Neoplatonic cosmology, Hermetism, and Shi‘ite esoterism, in the context of a radically monistic or even pantheistic theology. A key spiritual landscape of the Way of Ibn Sab‘in was the notion of the world as “The Garden of God’s Existence” (bustan wujud Allah), where everything that exists is a theophany of Absolute Oneness (al-wahda al-mahda). In this sacred garden, even inanimate objects invoke God (dhikr al-jamad), through the “language of existential right” (bi-lisan al-istihqaq). An important link between landscapes and mindscapes in this text is provided by the concept of epistemological stations or “standings” (mawaqif), which was first developed by the Sufi Muhammad al-Niffari (d. 965 CE). These “standings” occur at the final stage of mystical ascent, when the seeker finds his invocation of God “flying by itself” through the eighth and ninth spheres of the Neoplatonic cosmos and reaches the true homeland of the soul, in which one attains to the Divine Intellect. In this state of spiritual unification, the seeker understands that “there is no existent but God” (la mawjuda illa Allah), that “subjectivity is objectivity (al-anniyya hiyya al-huwiyya), the known is the knower, the dead is the living, and the outward is the inward.”

This paper explores the development of abwab al-birr (endowed charitable complex) first effected by the Mongol Ilkhan, Ghazan (r. 1295-1304 CE), and his courtier in and around the medieval city of Tabriz. It argues that through this construction the Mongol rulers and subsequent dignitaries and kings desired to embody in death the charisma of Muslim saints whose tombs were popular sites of visitation believed to generate benefit and blessing. It further argues that this act of embodiment and generation of benefit also intimated that the land surrounding the tombs be rendered as sacred. The paper follows the development of abwab al-birr through three monumental urban centers: the Ghazaniyya (est. 1297 CE) built by Ghazan and modeled on the twelve signs of the zodiac and thereby mapping the heavens, the Rab’-i Rashidi (est. 1309 CE) built by Rashid al-Din al-Hamadani (d. 1318 CE) and modeled after the four humors, and the Muzaffariyya (est. 1465 CE) built by Jahanshah Qaraquyunlu and envisioned as the gateway to paradise. It further investigates the processes through which each tomb-centered-complex rendered its enclosure and the surrounding area into sacred spaces. These complexes discursively mapped out the space of the city of Tabriz and established an economy of benefit, maintaining in perpetuity sacred and pious ritual practices connected to the land and benefit emanating from the body of the endower. Finally, the paper focuses on the last of the aforementioned complexes, the Muzaffariyya, and analyzes the manner in which the language of its endowment deed situates the complex within the urban geography of Tabriz and the countryside while simultaneously positing the complex as a threshold between the lower world and paradise. In this manner, pious activities of Muzaffariyya and its spiritual economy, as well as those of its predecessors, bind the abwab al-birr to the religious landscape outside of the city of Tabriz and, through the practice of the economy of benefit, bring Tabriz into the fold of hitherto recognized Islamic sacred geography.

This paper brings together three types of contemporary concerns within our academic field. The first is the rise in interest in the Indo-Persian or rather the forms of Persian literary expression, cultural and intellectual history, and the longevity of Persian expressions of the self in South Asia, especially in the early modern period. The second is the increasing interest in the occult and in the ways in which language is used – not least poetry – to express both the ideas and the practice of the occult. And the third is the quest for selfhood in non-European and non-modern contexts, not merely as a way to demonstrate different trajectories of modernity but rather to understand one example of the dynamic between the self as a multi-dimensional expression of self-personality as well as the quest for the aspirational self that is a transcendent entity. After an introduction that locates B?dil in the venerable tradition of the Persian poetic school of Ibn ?Arab? (d. 1240), most exemplified in the earlier period by Mu?ammad Sh?r?n Maghrib? (d. 1407), and especially intersecting with the occult reception of Ibn ?Arab? in Sufi circles, I will examine B?dil’s poetic oeuvre in his masnav?s, ?Irf?n and M????-i a??am, on the quest for the elusive aspirational self. The Persian poetical tradition already brings up the notion of the ?Anq? (mughrib) (The Fabulous Gryphon as Elmore famously translated it) as a cipher for the self as the perfect human, as the ultimate presence of the divine and the microcosm, as well as the peacock (??v?s) as the strutting, self-confident and self-satisfied notion of the subject and the person expressing his mastery over the cosmos through the deployment of the arts. One central question will be the role of the practice of the occult arts as a means to grasp the Gryphon whilst avoiding the trap of becoming the peacock. In my final comments, I will consider the reception of B?dil’s expression of these ideas in the oeuvre of the late Indo-Persian poet Gh?lib Dihlav? (d. 1869).

What role did the Islamicate occult sciences play in the formation and transmission of environmental knowledge between Oman and East Africa? After the retreat of the Portuguese empire by the mid-17th century from Eastern Arabia and the Swahili Coast, Omani planters and peasants increasingly migrated to East Africa. They joined relatives or made new homes in the Omani transoceanic expanding agrarian economy. This movement across thousands of miles to the southern hemisphere enabled new opportunities for learning. Coming from a mostly arid ecology, the transoceanic crossings of these actors introduced them to alien flora and fauna in the newly encountered East African monsoon-rain fed forests and farmlands. Since the early modern period, the ensuing environmental conceptualizations, experiences, and affective interactions resulted in transporting not only environmental infrastructures but also a novel epistemology. It intertwined both Omani and Swahili occult sciences planted in the soil of East Africa. Several Omani jurists and polymaths have observed and learned from their environments, producing textual instruments in the form of grimoires, manuals, and treatises. These instruments employed not only Omani epistemic technologies but also locally rooted Swahili idioms and experiential ways of knowing. This transcultural convergence nourished the emergence of an epistemic field that represents a generative archive for environmental history. It takes into perspective the local and the translocal cosmological concepts and material praxis. In this paper, I draw on a variety of texts by Omani occultists from the 18th to the 19th centuries, and I read connected amulets, talismans, and other textual sites as a collective knowledge repository. Further, I trace how the occult practitioners aimed to enact ontological and material changes in the natural world. Building on the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of “geontology,” I examine, among other fields, the environmental meaning of the occult in which non-life “geos” and being “ontology” come together. They inform the ways in which hydrological, ethnobotanical, and agricultural knowledge operated and circulated between the Arabian and African coasts; animated in occultist idioms written in both Arabic and Swahili languages. Moreover, I detail the process by which multilingual occultist works were theorized and phenomenologically experienced by literate and illiterate Swahili and Arab actors. This paper explores uncharted waters to write a connected environmental history told through a fusionist epistemological domain. Thus, it historically contextualizes the intersection between occult sciences and ecosystems in the environmental history of the Indian Ocean world.