The literary genre of shrine visitation guides (kitāb al-ziyārat or kitāb al-mazārāt), highlighting the important merits (fażā’il) of a city and deceased saintly figures whose shrines ennoble the city, were extremely popular texts in 14th and 15th century Iran and Central Asia. However, like many Persian texts of the late medieval period, they defy easy categorization into distinct literary genres. Instead, the structure, content, and tone of Timurid shrine visitation guides give evidence to their connections to other literary genres. This paper will analyze how and why shrine guides employed elements of these other genres of literary writing—the historical, the hagiographic, the legalistic, and the folkloric—in creating something to both entertain and inform diverse audiences of pilgrims. Shrine visitation guides developed from a long tradition of local histories and made use of many structural aspects of these histories. The biographical focus, discussion of local events, and praising of a city’s unique qualities found in local histories remained an important part of shrine visitation guides. However, these texts expanded into new literary directions over time. The guides became much more hagiographic in content, including detailed descriptions of the lives of both local and non-local saints in ways that mirror the Sufi tażkira. Shrine guides also came to incorporate sections on the proper ritual practice necessary to effectively make pilgrimage to shrines of the holy dead. The articulation of proper ritual practice employed legalistic language, though in a simplified form, and borrowed from more scholarly works of fiqh. Furthermore, the stories of miraculous events contained within the shrine guides often evoked the riveting qiṣṣa, or prose tales of the medieval storyteller. This paper also argues that the audience of shrine guides was broader than the audiences of the other literary genres discussed above. This focus on audience and reception, alongside a discussion of the literary elements that make up shrine guides, moves the narrative of the shrine guide beyond a narrow textual analysis. By making use of a literary approach to the construction of Timurid shrine visitation guides and making clear the porous nature of genre boundaries, this paper will illustrate how medieval audiences might have understood and received these shrine guides.

Works of adab al-qāḍī, or "The Judge's Protocol," are an Islamic genre that is characterized by the juristic concern with the judge’s role and responsibilities in legal procedures of a case. This genre was written by jurists, some of whom had also held positions as judges, to demonstrate their commitment to the subordination of the exercise of power to a well-defined legal system within the parameters of fiqh. Due to the fact that the genre occurs solely as works of substantive law (furūʿ), modern scholarship has utilized this legal literature primarily as reference works to be mined for discrete types of historical information about the judiciary, rather than as an autonomous, comprehensive legal genre. However, this form of analysis ignores how the depiction of judgeship as derivative of the jurists’ ideals of a political ruler brings adab al-qāḍī into discourse with other earlier literary, non-legal genres, particularly advice literature for rulers known as the “mirror for princes.” Whereas the short adab portion of an adab al-qāḍī work functions as the recommended set of behavioral rules for the judge to maintain the dignity of his office, distinguished from the rest of the text its lack of legal justifications, this legal genre’s intersections with adab literature go well beyond this aspect. By examining both Sunnī and Shīʿī works of adab al-qāḍī from Iran and Iraq in the 10th-14th centuries CE, I will show that concerns about power and rulership in mirror for princes texts permeate not only the genre as a whole, but also inform juristic legal reasoning within the adab al-qāḍī works themselves. A comparative analysis with adab literature thus demonstrates how adab al-qāḍī texts as a genre are distinct from other works of furūʿ, both as individual works and as chapters in a single furūʿ text.

On the day of ‘Arafa, 362 A.H./ 973 CE, the Fatimid Imām-Caliph al-Mu‘izz (d. 975) ordered that a shamsa, a royally commissioned drapery (kiswa) meant to be placed on the Kaaba in Mecca, be showcased in the iwān of his palace at al-Manṣūriya. While named the shamsa, a word meant to denote the brilliant metallic embroideries intended to radiate like a sun, the Fatimid shamsa’s ornamentation was quite different. It consisted of a series of embroidered crescent moons (hilāl) ornamented with luminescent pearls. This textile was meant to be placed on the Kaaba during the Ḥajj, a moment of the calendar year when a large gathering of Muslims from around the world would see it and ponder on the meaning of the Fatimid design and deliberate use of crescent moons as ornamentation. The crescent moon is a frequent occurrence in various cultural facets of the Fatimid ethos, ranging from jurisprudential texts to material culture. This paper argues that a consideration of Fatimid adab literature, particularly panegyric poetry, is necessary to shed light on the meanings of what the hilāl represented in Fatimid society. Specifically, this paper addresses the use of adab literature to understand the Fatimid jurisprudential viewpoint of ruʼyat al-hilāl, the common Muslim practice of sighting the new moon to mark the beginning and ending of the fast in Ramadan. While the Fatimids were considerably pluralistic in their state policies, their implementation of strict regulations against the practice of ruʻyat al-hilāl, which goes against other Islamic legal schools of thought, is noteworthy. Adab is key to understanding this aspect of their policy and its intersection with both jurisprudence and visual culture. Fatimid panegyrics frequently compare the Imām-Caliphs to celestial bodies of spiritual guidance, and in some instances as the embodiment of the crescent moon. These comparisons are more than literary tropes; rather, they echo deep esoteric representations of the cosmos deeply rooted in Ismaili tāʼwīl literature. In this esoteric literature, the Imām-Caliph assumes the role of the master of time (ṣāḥib al-ʿaṣr) and his divine authority and spiritual guidance mirrors the hilāl, since it is a determinant of time according to the Quran. This paper will bring forth several key examples from medieval Fatimid panegyrics and other literary works to weave together a clear understanding of what the hilāl esoterically meant to the Fatimids and its resulting impact on fiqh.