Letter-magic and 'extremist' Sufism in high medieval Egypt: Ibn Khaldun, Ibn 'Arabi, and Ahmad al-Buni In his discussion of letter-magic (simiya) in the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun names Ibn 'Arabi (560/1165-638/1240) and Ahmad al-Buni (d. 622/1225) as the leading theorists of this art, and 'extremist' Sufis (al-ghulat min al-mutasawwifah) as its practitioners. Modern scholars have had surprisingly little to say about Ibn Khaldun's close association of the great mystical philosopher Ibn 'Arabi with al-Buni, who primarily has been associated with talismans and other 'popular' occult practices, and whose importance in Islamic thought largely has been dismissed. Through a close reading of al-Buni's _Lata'if al-isharat fi 'ilm al-huruf al-'alawiyah_, selected writings of Ibn 'Arabi and his intellectual descendant Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Farghani (d. 700/1300-1301), and Ibn Khaldun's critiques of simiya and Akbarian (i.e. Ibn 'Arabi-derived) Sufism, this paper argues that al-Buni and Ibn 'Arabi and his students drew upon a shared, distinctive pool of cosmological concepts and metaphors that indicates origins in common. Based on these texts and on transmission data preserved in the margins of some Mamluk-era manuscripts of Lata'if al-isharat, this paper further argues that, at least through the Mamluk period, knowledge of Bunian letter-magic and of Akbarian writings and practices moved through shared social networks. Although al-Buni is one of the most famous Muslim occultists, and although Lata'if al-isharat fi 'ilm al-huruf al-'alawiyah survives in multiple early manuscript copies and is one of the most theoretically explicit and detailed of Islamic magical works, the text has never been given an extended scholarly treatment. The majority of modern scholars who have discussed al-Buni have dealt almost exclusively with late manuscripts and printed editions of a work called Shams al-ma'arif al-kubra, a text which even casual examination reveals as having been produced in the Ottoman period and beyond, and as having been heavily interpolated with extraneous materials. This paper is one of the first products of a larger attempt to systematically explore the earliest strata (Ayyubid and Mamluk-era manuscripts only) of the Bunian corpus and the social networks in which it circulated. This talk should be of interest to historians of Islamic knowledge production, medieval Cairo, Sufism, Islamic magic, Ibn 'Arabi, and Ibn Khaldun.

This paper will demonstrate that members of the Naqshbandi Sufi order exerted a greater influence at the court of sultan Ya'qub (d. 1490), leader of the Aq Qoyunlu dynasty from 1478-1490, than previously acknowledged. Among the few investigations into religious figures attached to the Aq Qoyunlu court, most have focused on members of the Khalvati Sufi order, specifically Dada 'Umar Raushani (d. 1487) and his spiritual heir, Ibrahim Gulshani (d. 1534), at the expense of other influential Sufis. This paper suggests that despite its reputation as the un-official Sufi order of the Timurid dynasty in Herat, the Naqshbandi brotherhood and its representatives in Tabriz, namely Sun' Allah Kuzakunani (d. 1523), were involved in the religious and political activities of the Aq Qoyunlu state. In order to substantiate this claim, the paper cites contemporary Persian sources, including the Tarikh-i 'alam-ara-yi amini, Rauzat al-jinan wa jannat al-janan, Rashahat-i 'ain al-hayat, and several literary anthologies, and concludes that the Naqshbandis most closely associated with Ya'qub shared the distinction of being "disciples" of the classical Persian poet 'Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 1492). This paper also seeks to demonstrate that ironically, it was Jami, writing letters and poetry to Ya'qub from his residence in Timurid Herat, who exerted the most lasting Naqshbandi influence over the Aq Qoyunlu court. In order to substantiate this claim, the paper cites Salaman va Absal, an allegorical romance Jami addressed to Ya'qub and the allusions it contains to Naqshbandi spiritual techniques, as evidence that Jami, perhaps in concert with Naqshbandis at the Aq Qoyunlu court, sought to persuade Ya'qub to become a Sufi adept. A case will then be made to suggest that on account of himmat, a technique Naqshbandis believe enables their shaikhs to transmit spiritual guidance to disciples without being physically present, Jami may have been Ya'qub's "virtual" spiritual master. The paper therefore concludes that the conventional view that the Naqshbandi order was not involved in Aq Qoyunlu affairs is no longer tenable, and the overall impact of Sufi mysticism on the politics and personalities of the Aq Qoyunlu court of Ya'qub needs to be understood more broadly.

The emergence of the s?qi-nnmah or cupbearer's song is representative of the innovative spirit of Persian literature at the start of the Safavid era. Integrating elements from the long tradition of Arabic and Persian wine poetry into a form inspired by Ney mi and Hifen, the s?qi-ntmah takes shape as an independent genre in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Over the next 300 years, the genre would remain as protean as the wine imagery at its core, but in the typical cupbearer's song, wine and music help the speaker sever old allegiances, relieve old obsessions, and establish a new sense of identity. The subjective journey of the suqi-n mah often includes a fasb-e cll, a passage in which the poet accounts for his life. Perhaps nowhere is this aspect of the genre more clearly displayed than in the cupbearer's song of Mouammad rufi Mszandar ni (d. 1035/1626). Even in a period characterized by the widespread movement of Persian poets back and forth from Iran to India, Mo ammad fufi's wanderlust is exceptional, taking him from the Caspian Sea across Iran to Shiraz on to Mecca and finally through many of the cities of India, bringing him into contact with several major literary circles of the age. His cupbearer's song captures a crucial moment in his life story. Manuscript evidence suggests that it was written in two parts. In the first, his wine-driven psychological journey ends with an announcement of his allegiance to the Imam 'Ali, typical of Safavid-Shi'ite devotional poetics. But in a short conclusion apparently added later to the poem, Mooammad rufi's announces his departure from Iran in the millennial year 1000/1592. Examining these declarations of allegiance and farewell offers insight not only into the poetics of the sfqi-nimah, but into the dynamics of social and religious affiliation at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Paper Title: A Persian Text, an Ottoman Commentary, and the School of Arabic Grammarians: Ahmed Sudi and the Making of Ottoman Literary Criticism The subject of my paper is a sixteenth-century Ottoman literary commentary on the poetry collection of Hafez of Shiraz (d. ca. 1390), the most celebrated lyric poet of medieval Persia. The commentary is composed by the late sixteenth-century Ottoman scholar Ahmed Sudi (d. ca. 1600), who is renowned as a commentator on the works of the Persian poets Hafez and Sa'di (d. 1292). Completed in 1595, Sudi's commentary on Hafez is accepted as his most widely read and famous work. The commentary elucidates Hafez's text "according to the methods of the Arabic grammarians" and with an emphasis on the linguistic and grammatical aspects of his poems. In addition, Sudi translates every couplet of Hafez into simple Ottoman Turkish prose along with systematic annotations on the meaning and grammatical function of each lexical item. In my paper, first I will study and interpret Sudi's commentary within the idea of literary criticism and will focus on his method of analysis, interpretative strategies and exegetical tools. Second, based on my study of the commentary, I will explore and discuss the issue of Ottoman literary criticism and how it manifests itself in the context of Ottoman literary culture. This issue is significant in terms of understanding the ways in which Ottoman men of letters and their audiences studied, interpreted, discussed and theorized literary texts and issues. In this regard, Sudi's commentary stands as an important text for the study of Ottoman literary practices and their social and cultural contexts. Finally, I will argue that a critical study of Sudi's commentary from the perspective of literary criticism can make significant contributions towards understanding the ways in which literary criticism operated and was practiced within the Ottoman literary tradition.