Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), often called the “Greatest Shaykh,” is the most discussed and debated Sufi master of the late medieval Islamic world. Although many scholars have produced works on his life, ideas, and contemporary reception, few have undertaken the task of tracing the consequences of his work for sovereignty well after the shaykh’s death. This paper argues that Ibn ‘Arabi’s concepts of the “Oneness of Being,” the “Perfect Man,” and his distinct use of tahqiq (verification, realization) worked in tandem as a subset of ideas beneficial to leaders for establishing absolutist sovereignty in the Mughal and Safavid Empires. The thought of Ibn ‘Arabi and his intellectual descendants strongly influenced the absolutist sovereignty of the Mughal and Safavid Empires, the legacy of which reverberates to this day in the cultural memory of the Middle East and South Asia. As historians Khaled el-Rouayheb and Matthew Melvin-Koushki have shown, paradigm shifts in the post-Mongol Islamic world have much to teach us about our own biases and prior definitions of modernity, attached as they are to Western ideals. This paper hopes to add to the discourse on this important subject. As interest in global studies and the early-modern period continues to grow, the integration, wittingly or otherwise, of Akbarian philosophy into the ethos of sovereignty will continue to be a vibrant area of research. For regional focus, this study is limited to the Mughals, Safavids, and their interactions with contemporaneous mystical groups. It compares the ideas found in Ibn ‘Arabi’s works, primarily the Fusus al-Hikam and ‘Anqa’ Mughrib, to these movements and governments in order to demonstrate where the shaykh’s philosophy aligns with the crafted personas of charismatic leaders. For secondary sources, this paper references themes found in Kathryn Babayan’s Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs and Azfar Moin’s Millennial Sovereign. It is of course also indebted to previous researchers, namely William Chittick, Gerald Elmore, and Henry Corbin among many others, of topics surrounding Ibn ‘Arabi.

Of all the groups of intellectuals of Islam in the Middle Periods, Sufis were among the most likely to contemplate themselves and the world around them, and to record their personal or collective life experiences. The dilemma posed by the conflict between the ego, the antagonist of the drama of mystical perfection, and the Divine eternity, in which Sufis aimed to drown themselves, notwithstanding, one finds scores of biographical notices in contemporary literature by and about Sufis. A significant deal of this material involves encounters with other Sufis including those occurring along the fault lines that mark the perceived boundaries of religious propriety. During the fifteenth century, a period of profound cultural creativity and one of inception of rigorously defined schools of piety, Sufis found themselves in increasing contact with fellow Sufis they would otherwise describe as deviant, and even, heretic. Sufis were frequent travelers and were typically wont to share spaces with fellow wayfarers; and the diversity and ambiguity of the political climate of the fifteenth century, unlike the next which witnessed the emergence of sectarian imperial politics, provided ample venues and opportunities of contact between various types of Sufis. The present study examines the intersection of the paths of Sufis of competing identities as reflected in contemporary biographical and autobiographical narratives. I am particularly interested in the accounts related to Zayn al-D?n al-Khw?f? (d. 1435), a shar??a-minded Sufi of Herat, and those of his disciples, who pursued to disseminate a normative piety that was conscious of the social and political balance of Islamdom. In their constant journeys for learning and instruction between places like Bukhara, Tabriz, Baghdad, Konya, and Cairo, these madrasa-educated “sober” Sufis shared rooms, private items, and books with other Sufis, “drunken” in behavior and “liberal” in discourse. How were these seemingly irreconcilable mystics so intimate? Why and how did their paths cross? What facilitated their cohabitation and what caused them to break up? Which subjects did they agree upon and which were divisive? How did these Sufis characterize these experiences? More importantly, what do these confrontations and the proceeding narrations mean for the history of culture and politics in the period? To conclude briefly, this study aims to contribute to the cultural history of the fifteenth century by shedding light on these aspects of the development of communal Sufism as regards the transformation of the political order in Islamdom.

By the 15th-century, Anatolia had been transitioning from a majority Christian to a majority Muslim population for several centuries. In this environment, the dissemination of different modes of Muslim piety made for an audience that was curious about the Muslim faith. This curiosity led to a demand for works of an informative nature that instructed their audience in the basics of the Islamic and Sufi piety. In this period, several major works were written in order to answer to the need to educate the Anatolian Muslim population about the basics of Islam. Works such as Muhammediye by Yaz?c?o?lu Mehmed and Envar ül-A??kin by his brother (Yaz?c?o?lu) Ahmed Bican are both composed in the style of instructive works intended for Ottoman populace. A comparable figure was E?refo?lu Rumi (d.1469) who wrote the work Müzekki ün-Nüfus (the Purifier of Souls) to popularize his Sufi ideas and educate common believers about Islamic principles. E?refo?lu Rumi was the author of Tarikatname (The Book of the Sufi Path). In this work, he established a hierarchical vision of Sufi piety, according to which the shaykhs and achieve higher levels of piety than the common people. He characterized the common people as being unable to achieve to higher levels of piety. However, with his work Müzekki ün-Nüfus (the Purifier of Souls), he aimed to educate the common people about the basics of Islamic piety. This work subsequently became highly popular and pious Turkish speaking Muslims still use this work as a manual to understand the basics of their faith. How was a man with such an elitist vision of piety able to find an audience and have a lasting influence on Islamic piety among the Ottoman populace for centuries? Scholarship on religion and particularly the scholarship on Islam in Anatolia and Balkans have engaged in dichotomizing discussions about “high” and “popular” Islam. These two concepts have long been contrasted and perceived as belonging to two realms that rarely intersect. In this paper, I will examine E?refo?lu Rumi’s construction of a “high” Sufi piety that appeals to the Sufi disciples and shaykhs, with a focus on his Tarikatname and Müzekki ün-Nüfus. Furthermore, I will discuss how the strategies he utilizes in his narratives is aim to appeal to more popular audiences. An examination of E?refo?lu Rumi’s Sufi narratives will offer a unique perspective on scholars’ perception of “high” and “popular” Islamic pieties.

A long-standing assumption in Islamic intellectual history is that, following a 10th-century “golden age,” scholarship in the Islamic world underwent a long period of stagnation or decline. Even as historians increasingly abandon this narrative, much work remains to be done in identifying and mapping out the major trends that characterized the later period. This paper argues that one significant area of scholarly activity in Morocco during the 10th/16th and 11th/17th centuries centered on whether and how to teach theology to general Muslim populace. Perhaps the best-documented instance of this activity was in northern Morocco, where the scholar ?Abd All?h al-Hab?? (d. 963/1556) and his companions traveled from village to village training the locals in basic theological doctrine before ultimately establishing a Sufi lodge for this purpose near Chefchauen. By drawing on a range of sources, from fatwas to short theological tracts and from biographical dictionaries to a treatise on marriage, I analyze the intellectual basis for their anxiety that people ignorant of creed were unbelievers who would spend eternity in hell and show how, because of that anxiety, the northern scholars understood their pedagogical efforts as fulfilling the ethical injunction to “command right and forbid wrong.” From these same sources – barely acknowledged in the historiography – it is additionally clear that Hab??’s activities did not emerge from nowhere but rather represented the coming together of two main trends from the prior century. The first was a mode of Sufism inspired by Mu?ammad b. Sulaym?n al-Jaz?l? (d. 869/1465), who encouraged his followers to undertake programs of social, religious, and agricultural reform in the Moroccan countryside. The second was the already deeply influential theological oeuvre of Mu?ammad b. Y?suf al-San?s? (d. 895/1490), a hallmark of which was the insistence that all Muslims, regardless of education, had the obligation to understand basic theological doctrine and its rational underpinnings. Both Jaz?l? and San?s? cast long shadows onto subsequent intellectual and social practices in the Maghrib, and Hab??’s circle was far from alone in forging from their legacies an activist creedal pedagogy. Yet the ample documentation that this particular set of scholars left behind make them a rich starting point for understanding the intellectual contours of the broader trend, as they address such key matters as the nature of valid belief, how people of different educational levels can acquire it, and the role of scholars in facilitating that process.