The history of the eastern Islamic lands in the 15th century is one of the greatest challenges of late medieval Islamic history as this century is often found as 'confusing' by the students of history. One of the main reasons for this is we do not yet have a refined picture of the intellectual life for that period. Scholarly and Sufi networks is one of the areas where we can expand our knowledge of the intellectual discourse that prevailed through the 15th century. This paper aims to contribute modestly to greater historical issue of the intellectual discourse in eastern Islamic lands in the 15th century through an analysis of the scholarly and Sufi networks of Abdurahman Jami (d. 1492), the well-known scholar. Naqshbandi Sufi and poet. The reason for exploring scholarly and Sufi networks at the same time is scholarly and Sufi activity influenced each other significantly, and these networks and their products constituted parts of the same intellectual/spiritual discourse. To arrive at a relatively comprehensive view of the 15th century intellectual discourse, the scholarly and Sufi networks have to be examined together recognizing their relationship with each other In this paper I will concentrate on two groups of people, Sufis and scholars, i) in their capacity as authoritative figures who influenced Jami in an intellectual-spiritual way ii) with whom Jami came into contact with either physically, or through their works, with the condition that Jami met other individuals who met those authoritative figures -thus, we can still talk about a palpable network-. To answer my research question in a feasible way I will focus on the Sufi network in Herat in especially the first half of the 15th century, and the early Naqshbandiyya chain starting from the earliest Naqshbandi intellectual Muhammad Parsa. As for the scholarly network my starting point will be the famous Taftazani-Jurjani debate. Then I will proceed to the renowned Samarqand astronomy-theology school where Jami was exposed the latest theological ideas before he made his decisive turn in favor of Sufism.

Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi is most famous for his celebrated biography of Timur, the Zafarnama, which is an indispensable source for any study focusing on the formative period of the Timurid Empire. The immense popularity of the Zafarnama as a historical source, however, clouded the personality of Sharaf al-Din Yazdi as a prominent intellectual of the Timurid period. In fact, in his own time, Yazdi was more famous as a poet and an expert on the mu'amma, anagrammatic poetry, and wafq, which was a divinatory practice using magic squares. He was active at the courts of two Timurid princes: Ibrahim-Sultan b. Shahrukh Shiraz and Sultan-Muhammad b. Baysunghur in Qum. In my paper, I shall discuss Yazdi's relationship with a little-known intellectual network called Ikhwan al-safa. The Ikhwan al-safa was mentioned in the works of Ottoman intellectual 'Abd al-Rahman Bistami as a scholarly network which would include such prominent members of the Ottoman intelligentsia as Sheikh Bedreddin. The members of this intellectual network seem to be interested in esoteric sciences and mystical philosophy of Ibn 'Arabi. Although the Ikhwan al-safa's presence in the Ottoman lands and the Mamluk Cairo has been mentioned before, its presence in Iran and Central Asia under Timurid rule is an issue which has not been adequately addressed before. My paper aims at contributing to the debate on late medieval intellectual networks through the prism of Yazdi's published and unpublished corpus.

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.

The fall of Constantinople in May 1453 created apocalyptic apprehensions and expectations that spanned the whole Eurasian continent. The Muslim conquest of the city was seen, in various Abrahamic apocalyptic traditions, as one of the portents of the End Time. The manifestation of this particular portent had considerable impact on Ahmed Bican, a mystic and litterateur who lived in Gallipoli. Ahmed resorted to divination, the science of letters and numerology to determine the nature and characteristics of the events leading up to the impending Day of Judgment. More importantly, he believed that the Ottoman enterprise was located in the middle of the tribulations preceding the End Time. He went so far as to attribute a near-messianic role to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II. Ahmed predicted that Mehmed was poised to conquer Rome and repel the attacks of the Blond Peoples, the apocalyptic enemy par excellence of the Muslim community. Ahmed's projections and predictions are important for a variety of reasons. First of all, his work is an interesting representative of the post-classical Muslim apocalyptic tradition, a tradition that has not yet received the attention it deserves. Next, Ahmed's writings signify the emergence of an Ottoman apocalyptic tradition expressed in the Turkish vernacular. Also, Ahmed's portrayal of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II indicates that messianism was already beginning to filter into the ideology of Ottoman imperialism around the middle of the fifteenth century, even though it would reach its full-fledged from only in the first decades of the sixteenth. Finally, Ahmed's works reflect the characteristics and preoccupations of many other treatises that were produced in the Muslim world in the fifteenth century. (He was educated in Cairo, and probably knew 'Abd al-Rahman Bistami, whose work he often cites as a major influence.) Very much like his counterparts in other parts of the Muslim world, Ahmed, motivated by a belief that the end was near, sought to uncover the true meaning of history. While doing this, he endowed Ottoman history with an unprecedented level of universality and described the Ottoman sultan as an actor in the cosmic battle between good and evil.