This paper traces the process whereby lettrism (‘ilm al-huruf) became widely accepted as a universal science among the intellectuals of 15th century Iran, this largely through the efforts of Sa’in al-Din Turka (1369-1432) and his Isfahan circle. While various elements of lettrism had been vaunted in the Islamicate intellectual tradition from Jabir b. Hayyan (d. ca. 815) and the Ikhwan al-Safa’ (10th c.) onwards, Sa’in al-Din expresses the millenarian universalism endemic to his own day by synthesizing a new brand of intellectual lettrism. Most significantly, he awards this science supreme epistemological status by inverting its relationship to both mystical theory and philosophy: indispensable, all-encompassing matrix, not subsidiary tool. Sa’in al-Din’s subversion of the tradition through lettrism may be seen, for example, in his commentary on the Fusus al-Hikam of Ibn ‘Arabi; uniquely among the host of commentaries on this text, earlier and later, his is thickly veined with lettrist concerns. He also breaks with long and venerable precedent in striving to popularize intellectual lettrism among the Timurid elite, finding a receptive audience in Iskandar Mirza (r. 1409-14) and Baysunghur b. Shahrukh (d. 1433) in particular. This project necessarily involved a new disregard for the secrecy and circumspection so scrupulously observed by previous generations of occultist thinkers, and is thus symptomatic of the larger cultural shift toward a universalist openness that took place in the Islamicate heartlands during the 15th century. The effectiveness of Sa’in al-Din’s retooling of the tradition is reflected in the writings of subsequent Timurid-era thinkers. Two will be touched on here: Jalal al-Din Davani (d. 1503), the prominent illuminationist philosopher and theologian; and Husayn Va‘iz Kashifi (d. 1505), polymath and thoroughgoing occultist. In his concern to preserve the choice fruits of the intellectual tradition, Kashifi, unsurprisingly, penned no less than five lettrist works; his unfinished Javahir al-Tafsir, for example, appears to be the first — and last — lettrist tafsir of the Quran. More surprisingly, Davani treats of both the practical-magical and theoretical aspects of lettrism in two separate works, Tuhfa-yi Ruhani fi Khavass al-Huruf and R. Tahliliyya. While it is Kashifi’s catchall approach that serves to canonize the new importance of lettrism in intellectual circles, Davani’s unexpectedly high regard for the science — even he elevates it above both philosophy and mystical theory, that is to say, his own fields of expertise — stands eloquent testimony to the ubiquity of occult philosophy in 15th century Iran.

The mu‘amma was one of the most popular literary genres in the Persianate literature of the late medieval and early modern periods. By its simplest definition, the mu‘amma is the practice of codifying a person’s name in a poem. The name is encoded in the visual structure of the poem, and the reader of the poem is expected to discover how the name is encoded in the poem. Given that deciphering a mu‘amma involves a process of puzzle-solving, the genre is usually classified under the general rubric of riddles. However, the mu‘amma diverges from riddle as traditionally understood in several ways. First, the answer to the mu‘amma is known to the decoder at the beginning. In other words, the name which is encoded in the poem is already known to the decoder; the point is rather to discover the mechanics of its encoding. Second, riddles may refer to anything, animate or inanimate, but a mu‘amma must encode a person’s name. In contemporary and near contemporary sources, the famous Timurid historian Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi (d. 1454) is usually credited with inventing the mu‘amma genre in his Hulal-i Mutarraz. Yazdi was also a prominent member of a lettrist intellectual circle in Iran and Central Asia. Yazdi and his peers in Iran were dedicated to using the science of letters as a method of understanding the cosmic order. In my presentation, I will explore the connections between the mu‘amma genre and certain techniques employed by the philosophical science of letters in the 15th century. I will argue that the mu‘amma was not simply a poetical genre, but that it was in fact a form of divinatory practice, which Timurid intellectuals of western Iran used in order to riddle the secrets of the cosmic order. Their method was ultimately radical and subversive to a certain extent, because they believed that such an approach would enable them to understand what the cosmic order was and how it was constructed by the divine creative power. That their activities were suppressed and the mu‘amma genre was reduced to a simple game of riddle solving in the early 16th century is one of the tragic episodes of late medieval intellectual history.

The 15th century Perso-Islamicate world saw a profusion of spiritual and intellectual movements with their political supporters at various levels. ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s (d. 898/1492) Nafahat al-Uns is one of the major products of this period containing biographies of more than six hundred Sufis who were followers of these several different traditions/movements. Written in the second half of the 1470s, it reached a wide audience and remained a popular and tradition-defining work for centuries. The significance of this work comes from Jami’s reformulation therein of religious and Sufi history, a well-established topic in the secondary literature. What we must now do is identify the main features of this reformulation and contextualize them as much as possible within the socio-political realities of the 15th century Perso-Islamicate world. This is a large-scale task that raises a series of research questions, such as the perception of Herat as a spiritual center vis-à-vis other centers such as Jam and Chisht, the promotion of Ibn ‘Arabian thought and its exponents in the Nafahat al-Uns, or Jami’s recasting of the Kubrawiyya past. For the present paper, I confine the discussion to Jami’s emphasis on an alternative line of the Kubrawiyya as opposed to the Nurbakhshiyya version of it that has been promoted by the well-known 15th century Nurbakhshid family. This was a clear case of the reformulation and synthesis in the highly contested spiritual/social landscape of the Islamicate world. A close reading of Jami’s Nafahat al-Uns together with certain other contemporary sources such as Hafiz Husayn Karbala‘i’s Rawzat al-Jinan is my starting point. In my attempt to deepen our understanding of Jami’s synthesis I will use these sources to see what alternative historical accounts of Sufi/Kubrawi groups were available to Jami. Specifically, I will explore the possibility that Jami’s stay in the Aqquyunlu controlled Tabriz exposed Jami to at least one alternative Kubrawiyya narrative with further implications for the contesting Sufi groups and for interregional political relations in the latter half of the 15th century.

Commentary by its nature sits in the interstices between the past world of the canon and the present world that it imbues with meaning through this canon. The past, in other words, lies at a distance and yet regains familiarity through the institution of commentary; the present remains nonsensical until the past – that is, the canon – provides it with context and significance. The commentary, in this regards, plays a critical role in bringing the past into the present in a meaningful manner, classifying and changing both past and present often through a highly subversive reading of the text. One particularly subversive theme of commentary then emerges in the question of textual primacy. In one sense, a commentary utterly depends on a foundational text, the silent dominion of which determines the boundaries of a commentary and gives life to it by serving as its epistemic goal. In another sense however, the commentary itself is primary, as it controls the foundational text and recasts it, in both form and substance, all while claiming complete subservience to it. As part of an effort to explore this and other subversive themes that beset the larger project of commentary, generally, and the Muslim commentarial tradition, specifically, this paper examines the Asna 'l-matalib, a commentary work by the Egyptian legist Zakariyya al-Ansari (d. 926/1520) in substantive law. Through a close textual reading of the commentary, this paper will identify the means through which al-Ansari breaks from the foundational text (matn) of Ibn al-Muqri (d. 837/1434) and subtly recasts it to suit the intellectual needs of his later context. Though works of legal commentary self-consciously engage in “correcting” (tashih) and “reweighing” (tarjih) the earlier legal opinions found in the foundational text that they are commenting upon, it is on those areas where al-Ansari’s commentary attempts to smooth over the substantive differences between it and Ibn al-Muqri’s foundational text that this paper will focus. In other words, what devices does al-Ansari’s commentary use to recast its foundational text all while maintaining an implicit and explicit veneer of allegiance to it? Moreover, for what reasons and to what ends does it do so? Answers to such questions promise to shed much needed light on the role of commentary in pre-modern Muslim society and the subversive creativity that lies within it.