Understanding Muslim women’s approach to Islam in the absence of extensive documentary archives has long proved to be an elusive task. In the context of the premodern Persianate world, scholars have paid much attention to a unique Persian text titled ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ (The Beliefs/Dogmatics of Women), also known as Kulthūm Nana after the name of one of its protagonists. This short treatise purports to be a collection of the opinions of a number of learned female authorities on a variety of issues relating to Muslim women’s religious practices. But the text was in fact intended to be a satirical parody of women’s way of engaging with Islam. Recent studies have mostly concentrated on reading the inevitably mediated content of the text as a rare window onto ordinary Muslim women’s religious life in Safavid Iran. My paper in comparison highlights the vast networks of the text’s circulation between Iran, Central Asia, and India from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. In doing so, this paper shifts our focus from recovering subaltern lives to examining the epistemological and affective works that the text performed in various historical contexts. Methodologically, this paper switches from the commonly used published edition of ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ to closely reading multiple manuscripts as well as early printed versions, most of which have never been carefully analyzed before. The textual variations between these copies reveal the complicated afterlives of ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ spanning across much of the Persianate world from Bukhara to Madras and from Tabriz to Delhi. This paper thus argues that these processes of circulation and adaptation attests to a lasting tension embedded in the text of ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ between the idea of a distinctly feminine form of knowledge-making and its perceptions among male scholars. While the text was intended to be a satire of women’s religious knowledge, this tension creates an excess of meaning that disrupts the original authorial intention. It exposes how the very definitions of knowledge in both the Islamic and the modern Western intellectual traditions have been profoundly gendered.

Historical scholarship on Sufism often posits an early medieval transition away from the harsh asceticism of figures like Hasan al-Basri (d. 728) to a form of “love mysticism” attributed to Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya (d. 801) (Schimmel 1975, 34 Knysh 2000, 13-16, Hoffman 2007, 366). There are deeply gendered implications to these academic theories about the emergence of medieval Sufism that essentialize gender as a collation of certain qualities (thus conflating maleness vs. femaleness with masculinity vs. femininity, harshness vs. gentleness, elite knowledge vs. innate faith, mind vs. body). An intersectional gender-sensitive analysis as a method of inquiry engages class, race, age, ability, religion, and location as integral aspects of the medieval construction of gender in the Islamicate world and dismantles essentialized and universalized notions of gender (Crenshaw 1989, 139-40; Shaikh 2012, 26; Katz 2014). This paper re-examines notions of the “inward turn” in Sufism by investigating waning practices of voluntary poverty (faqr) as Sufi institutions began to rely on endowments to support sites of Sufi teaching and practice (Karamustafa 2005, 1-2). Through tracing the rise of female-donated waqf (charitable endowments) that enabled the construction of gender-segregated Sufi institutions, this study traces sociopolitical and economic factors in the confluence of disparate ascetic mysticisms into an elite, urban androcentric Sufism. By analyzing changing discourses of ascetic poverty, this study emphasizes the role of elite urbanism in the creation of gendered spaces of Sufi practices. After the eleventh century, male Sufi theologians presented spiritual reliance on God (tawwakul) as the truest form of poverty (faqr) over and above surrendering one’s wealth (e.g. Qushayri 2007, 286). In practice, this was enacted differently across various gender categories. This study undertakes a critical analysis of male-authored historical narratives of pious women including Rabi’a bt. Isma’il (d.c./9th century) and Karima Amat al-Rahim (d.c. 12th century), lauded in Sufi hagiographies for donating their wealth to male Sufi aspirants (Sulami 1999, 126-7; Farisi 1989 #1485). These case studies demonstrate the gendered dimensions of donating wealth and highlight the ways in which donations distinguished female Sufi affiliates from male Sufi practitioners, and consequently reified boundaries around knowledge, authority, and practice. Changing discourses of poverty in response to shifting economic and institutional models of Sufi practice established gendered boundaries in sacred spaces of Sufi practice, elevating elite male Sufi practitioners over members of lower classes and elite female patrons whose wealth supported the proliferation of Sufi institutions throughout medieval Islamic history.

This presentation is based on a recently published article that explores the Central Asian adaptation of the ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ, preserved as a unique manuscript within the collections at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Beyond unveiling the little-known realm of rituals and customs among women in early modern Central Asian societies, this adaptation plays a crucial role in balancing the androcentric perspective on the gendered history of the early modern Persianate world. Simultaneously, it challenges preconceived notions surrounding women's agency and authority in pre-modern Muslim societies.