For a tradition that generated many affirmations of the essentially oral character of its transmission, Sufism has left an enormous paper trail, with a rich literary legacy that offers historians access to the doctrinal, ritual, devotional, and organizational aspects of Sufi communities. The study of doctrinal texts dominated the early stages of scholarship on Sufism, and the past quarter century has seen expanded study of the hagiographical legacy left by Sufi communities; the present panel is intended to explore other sorts of written material produced by and for Sufi groups as they legitimized their activities, competed for patronage and affiliates, and articulated various visions of the ways in which their authority and experience were transmitted, all in the context of shifting political, economic, linguistic, and technological conditions. These other types of literary production include certificates of licensure, pictorial or diagrammatic representations of initiatic chains, genealogical texts, collections of litanies and dhikr-formulas, travel accounts, collections of devotional verse, letters, assemblages of multiple literary formats attributed to individual Sufi masters, and adaptations of other documentary forms linked to Sufi institutions (e.g., waqfiyyas incorporated into hagiographical works). The four panelists will discuss specific types of previously under-utilized sources employed in their work, reflecting studies of Sufi communities ranging from the 15th century to the 20th, and from Anatolia to India and Central Asia. The first paper addresses the diverse literary works of a prolific Sufi of 15th-century Anatolia, exploring his development of an alternative discourse of the Sufi life through the use of vernacular Turkish and varied written forms that confound conventional analysis. The second examines a remarkable text, from 16th-century Iran, that offers one of the few internal perspectives on the Sufi profile of the Safavid movement, in the form of a treatise on the distinctive headgear of the Qizilbash. The third discusses a late 18th-century work from Central Asia that draws upon conventional fixtures of Sufism's textual profile to document the life constructed for a saint known primarily through his shrine. The fourth explores the wide range of textual forms and religious discourses that developed as Sufi communities of Bombay adapted to new technologies in the shifting religious economy of the 19th century. Together the four papers suggest the possibilities offered by innovative use of an expanded source base for improving our understanding of Sufism's historical development.
Religious Studies/Theology
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Dr. Devin A. DeWeese
This paper will explore the interplay of hagiography and documentary sources in constructing a narrative personality from the world of Sufism to accompany a prominent shrine. It centers on a largely unstudied Chaghatay Turkic hagiographical text, compiled at the end of the eighteenth century, about a saint called Zayn al D?n Q?ghr?q?, whose shrine, known as that of “?a?rat i Mull?m,” was prominent near the town of K?shghar, in Eastern Turkist?n (i.e., Xinjiang in the P.R.C). The work’s author, a certain Mu?ammad ?Abd al ?Al? of K?shghar, creates a hagiographical narrative that appears largely formulaic and paradigmatic, with a minimum of ‘life-specific’ content. He hangs the narrative, rather, on a set of legitimizing elements with special local resonance: the saint is linked genealogically with the Islamizing ruler-saint Sat?q Bughr? Kh?n, and with a prominent Naqshband? shaykh of the fifteenth century; he is identified as an Uvays? saint (i.e., one with no living master), a frequently-evoked legitimizing motif for shrine-saints of Eastern Turkist?n, but is nevertheless linked initiatically with the ‘founding’ saints of the Yasav? and Naqshband? lineages; he is linked in a reciprocal sainthood/patronage relationship with a prominent local ruler of the 15th century; and he is also portrayed sanctifying the site of his shrine by making the Ka?ba appear there. Although the author clearly signals the priority of the shrine, rather than the saint, in inspiring the work, he also appeals (in different ways) to the evidentiary authority of three types of written sources—an earlier hagiography, a genealogy affirming sayyid-status, and a waqf?ya drawn up for a ruler—in order to locate the shrine’s saint in the social context of Sufism’s initiatic, hereditary, and social components. The work thus focuses on a shrine linked with a saint who may have had only tenuous links with an actual Sufi community, but it can nevertheless reveal interesting aspects of late eighteenth-century expectations regarding what a Sufi life should look like. The recent re-identification of shrines in this region by local scholars suggest the ongoing relevance of creating an updated narrative, and a new identity, for the ‘inhabitant’ of a prominent shrine.
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Prof. Nile Green
The Muslim nineteenth century is better known for the writings of its reformists and modernists than its Sufis. Yet as recent scholarship has shown, the smaller world of the industrial era witnessed not only the survival of Sufism, but also its expansion to new regions and audiences, often by means of the new communication technologies of the era. Among the most important of these new audiences were the Muslim merchant and laboring classes developing in such industrializing cities as Bombay. Bringing together Muslims from the Middle East no less than India, the sheer diversity of Bombay’s Muslim communities fueled a voracious and competitive religious economy in which, with their musical soirées and miraculous cures, their social networks and saintly festivals, Sufi masters became highly effective participants. Through the charismatic services they provided to their audiences of market workers and mill hands, Bombay’s Sufis and the printed books that celebrated them contributed to the emergence of an oceanwide economy of religious production which connected Bombay to Tehran in the north and Durban in the south. From journalistic Urdu hagiographies to Persian travelogues and anthologies of praise songs, the texts produced by these mobile shaykhs and their followers allow us to not only chart neglected periods of Sufi history, but also to access unfamiliar dimensions of urban and labor history. Drawing on rumors of collapsing tower blocks and fears of traveling by steamship, the Sufi texts which emerged from Bombay’s economy of enchantment open up new perspectives on the transformations of Islam in the age of steam and print.
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Dr. Shahzad Bashir
The transformation of the ?afavid ??f? order into the ruling dynasty of Iran at the beginning of the sixteenth century has by now received considerable academic attention. This work has proceeded on the basis of literary evidence in which detailed internal accounts of the religious system espoused by the Qizilb?sh, the ?afavids’ ??f? followers, are conspicuous by their near total absence. Our current understandings are based almost entirely on chroniclers’ descriptions of supposed beliefs and behaviors, with very little available in the voice of authors who may identify themselves as Qizilb?sh in the religious sense. My paper addresses this significant lacuna in the religious history of Iran during the sixteenth century by concentrating on a remarkable work entitled ?ar?q al-irsh?d that was composed in 1559-60 and survives in a single known manuscript. To the best of my knowledge, no modern historian has utilized this work to date. The work’s author, a certain H?shim b. A?mad al-?usayn? al-Najaf?, ascribes its composition to a dream in which ??f? and Sh??? luminaries of the past order him to explicate the special qualities of the Qizilb?sh t?j, the distinctive red headgear responsible for the group getting its name (red-heads). The work is dedicated to Sh?h Tahm?sp, the reigning ?afavid king, and contains extensive discourses on the following topics: the hat’s history, from the beginning of creation to being worn by ?afavid soldiers/devotees; metaphysical explanations for its geometrical shape, size, color, and inscriptions; a ritual complex for its handling and use; the noble nature of the physical elements required to manufacture it; and the religious obligations and privileges that pertain to the person who assumes the responsibility to wear it. In this paper (and the longer study of which this is a part), I contextualize the writing of this work in the period of Sh?h Tahm?sp. Moreover, I unpack the work as a sophisticated text that articulates the relationships between sacred history, cosmology, ritual, social and political legitimacy, and a quotidian object part of a group’s attire. Given the period of its composition and its literary sophistication, the work’s perspective cannot be ascribed directly to the ?afavids’ original Qizilb?sh followers who led to the dynasty’s establishment. However, I suggest that the work allows us new windows onto the history of Sufism and Iranian religious and sociopolitical imagination during the sixteenth century.
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Prof. Ahmet T. Karamustafa
The migration of ever growing numbers of Turkish speakers into Southwest Asia from the late fourth/tenth century onwards and also into Asia Minor after the battle of Mentzikert in 463/1073 and the subsequent formation of Turkish Islamic polities in Anatolia beginning the sixth/twelfth century generated the social and cultural conditions for the development of a distinct Islamic literary tradition in the Western Turkish vernacular. This tradition, leavened with Persian Sufi prose and poetry, had unmistakably mystical hues from its inception, but it was only in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that full-blown Sufi discourses began to take shape. While the generic boundaries and literary characteristics of some of these vernacular works are relatively clear - as in the literary corpus of Y?nus Emre (possibly d.720/1320) and ‘A??k Pa?a (d.733/1333), and thus their social and cultural functions are not too difficult to make out, other Turkish Sufi voices, protean in nature and bafflingly variegated in tone, register as well as lexicon, continue to defy attempts to subject them to literary and cultural historical analysis. The rich and complex corpus of Kaygusuz Abdal (d. first half of the fifteenth century) is a case in point. This most colorful and prolific poet/author’s mystical discourse remains understudied, no doubt partly because his works –in prose, verse as well as mixed prose and poetry in the form of monologues, inner dialogs, visions, sermons, and didactic epistles - do not easily lend themselves to literary and historical analysis. This paper will be the initial step of a larger project to draw a religious and cultural portrait of this key Sufi figure. I have already read through his corpus, and I will argue that Kaygusuz Abdal was instrumental in the development of a distinctly “provincial” and “latitudinarian” Sufi discourse in Turkish that explicitly and consciously situated itself against the perceived “metropolitan” and “authoritarian” discourses and practices of institutional Sufis who lived in large urban centers. It is my hope that this new perspective on early Sufi works in vernacular Turkish will enable us to extend the evidentiary basis for the study of Anatolian Sufi communities to include sources such as the output of Kaygusuz Abdal that have hitherto largely defied scholarly analysis and thus remained neglected.
