Neguin Yavari

Shifting Modes of Piety
in Early Modern Iranand the Persephone Zone

Working Paper #10

Working Paper Series of the HCAS
“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities“#10: Neguin Yavari. “Shifting Modes of Piety in Early Modern Iran and thePersephone Zone.”
Leipzig University, 2019.
© Neguin YavariThis Working Paper has been published online and can be downloaded fromwww.multiple-secularities.de/publications/working-papers or ordered in print via
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Please cite as:
Yavari, Neguin. “Shifting Modes of Piety in Early Modern Iran and the Persephone
Zone.” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond theWest, Beyond Modernities” 10. Leipzig University, 2019.

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Contents

1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 4
2 Mobilizing the Past: Abū ‘Alī al-Fārmadhī ............................................ 5
3 The Performative Regard of Religious Discourse .................................. 9
4 Forging a Context of One’s Own ............................................................ 13
5 Contextualizing Old Divides in the New Piety ....................................... 18
6 The adab of siyāsa in the New Piety ........................................................ 26
7 New Pieties ................................................................................................... 28
8 Global New Pieties ...................................................................................... 31
9 Bilbliography ................................................................................................ 371

Shifting Modes of Piety in Early Modern Iran and
the Persephone Zone

Abstract: If any one thing marks early modern history, it is religious transformation. Confessional and pietist movements, both European firsts, areprominent examples of such catalysts for change.1 In large parts of theIslamic world in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was Sufi piety that carried theday. The historiographical record reveals strikingly new imaginaires andnovel modes of connectivity to the past. The focus in this paper is on the
manifold ways in which new forms of religiosity redefined the landscapeof politics in the eastern Islamic world. It traces invocations of the past inFakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī’s (d. 1532) Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt 2 (Sprinklings fromthe Fountain of Life), a 16th-century collected biography of NaqshbandīSufi masters, to argue that the classificatory schema adopted by the author
reveals a template of secularity that marks a significant departure from pastmanners of adherence.

1

2

On religious change rather than incremental secularism as the engine of change in earlymodern Europe, see Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (2003); on parallels between modern (18th-19th century) Sufism and American pietism, see Albrecht Hofheinz,“Illumination and Enlightenment Revisited, or: Pietism and the Roots of Islamic Modernity,” Lecture delivered at the University of Bergen, 1996, http://folk.uio.no/albrech/
Hofheinz_IllumEnlightenment.pdf; and for confessionalization as the impetus for state
formation, see Heinz Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization and its Political andCultural Dynamism (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2008).
Mawlānā Fakhr al-Dīn al-Ṣafī ‘Alī b. Ḥusayn Wāi’ẓ Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt, ed.
and intr. ‘Ali Asghar Mu‘iniyan, 2 vols (Tehran: Bunyad Nikukari Nuriyani, 1977); Arabictranslation as ‘Alī b. al-Ḥusayn al-Kāshifī al-Ṣafī, Tarjamat Rashahḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt, tr.
Muhammad Murad b. ‘Abd Allah al-Qazani (Mecca: Matba‘a al-Muhammadiya, 1882 or1883); English translation as Mawlana Ali ibn Husain Safi, Beads of Dew form the Sourceof Life, tr. Muhtar Holland (Oakland Park, CA: Al-Baz Publishers, 2001). On the manuscript history of the text, see H. Beveridge, “The Rashaḥāt-i ‘Ain al-Ḥayāt (Tricklings
from the Fountain of Life),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 48, no. 1 (1916). “Sprinklings from the Fountain of Life” is Nile Green’s translation, see “The Dilemmas of the
Pious Biographer: Missionary Islam and the Oceanic Hagiography,” Journal of Religious
History 3, no. 4 (2010): 386. For more on the author, see Jürgen Paul, “‘Alī b. Ḥusayn
al-Wā‘iẓ al-Kāshifī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer,Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson, 2009.
3

1 Introduction
In the standard iteration that governs the history of Sufi movements, thealtered social and political landscape brought about by the Mongol invasions which began in the early 13th century is regarded as the impetus fortheir flourishing. In that narrative, a mystical dimension to Islam was bornsometime late in the 9th century, and developed as a spiritual alternative tothe legalistic Islam of the ‘ulamā’.3 On the political register, the flourishingphase was coeval with the fall of the Abbasids, a protracted process thatbegan in the mid-9th century and lasted until the Mongol invasions, and theensuing freefall that lasted from the mid-13th to the mid-18th century, whencolonial interventions derailed indigenous modes of social, political andeconomic life and reset the clock. Told as such, the history of the Islamic
world in the contemporary period is severed from that which transpiredin the pre-colonial past. If Sufi movements and currents dominated large
swathes of the Islamic world in the 16th and 17th centuries, they are mostly
absent from histories of the modern Islamic world, the contours of which
are held to have been determined by the encounter with Europe beginningin the 1800s, rather than by currents and developments that may have percolated in the region over long centuries.4
In the larger study of which this paper is a part, I suggest a recasting of thatconventional narrative, and the periodization schema that accompanies it – acentral component of which is the erasure of an early modern phase from
Islamic history. Here, however, the focus is on two specific dimensions: thebroader, more historicized context and the instrumentalization of the past3
4

For a history of that scholarship see Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–124.
Devin DeWeese has come to much the same conclusion regarding Sufi movements inCentral Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries, see Devin DeWeese, “Re-Envisioning the History of Sufi Communities in Central Asia: Continuity and Adaptation in Sources and Social Frameworks, 16th–20th Centuries,” in Sufism in Central Asia: New Perspectives on Sufi
Traditions, 15th–21st Centuries, ed. Devin DeWeese and Jo-Ann Gross (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
For a historiographical discussion of early modern Sufism, see Rachida Chih, “Discussing
the Sufism of the Early Modern Period: A New Historiographical Outlook on the Tariqa
Muhammadiyya,” in Sufism East and West: Mystical Islam and Cross-Cultural Exchange
in the Modern World, ed. Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh (Leiden: Brill, 2019). For
more on the historiography of the early modern period in the Islamic world, see Justin
Stearns, “Writing the History of the Natural Sciences in the Pre-modern Muslim World:
Historiography, Religion and the Importance of the Early Modern Period,” History
Compass 9, no. 12 (2011).
4

to legitimate a new religious ethos, and the performative regard of religious
discourse that seeks to effect political change, both of which are exemplified
in the text under consideration. I will begin with an examination of the deliberate rooting of Naqshbandī history in earlier debates and developmentsin Kāshifī’s 16th-century collected biography. The performative regard of Sufi
discourse, and the perlocutionary force of Kāshifī’s genealogical approachand the architectural layout of his text is the subject of the second and third
sections. The focus in the remaining sections is on several aspects of the new
Sufi piety that lords over the religious landscape of the eastern Islamic worldin the early modern period, including its novel approach to sectarian affiliation, its proximity to power, its explicit recognition of the pursuit of common
good and the preservation of public peace as the prerogatives of religion, its
adoption of Persian as the lingua franca of the new piety, and its emphasis
on individual piety. The conclusion attends to the question of a global earlymodern context to the new piety.

2 Mobilizing the Past: Abū ‘Alī al-Fārmadhī
There may have been ascetic, pietist, or Sufi luminaries, and even spiritualcommunities that coalesced around them since the earliest days of Islam,but the political engagement of the Sufi reformation that altered the landscape of the Islamic world had its roots in the political crisis that engulfed
the Islamic domains in the 11th century. At that critical juncture, it had
become increasingly clear that the de facto formula for Abbasid rule – acaliph in Baghdad, and one or several strongmen, usually Turks, holding
the empire together – could no longer be sustained. Resolving the crisisand pushing back against attempts to resuscitate the caliphate with inoperable notions of Islamic legitimacy attracted the energies of intellectualsfrom all walks of life. At stake was the very scope and purpose of government in a properly ordained Islamic society.
On the social register, the 11th century witnessed an intensificationof factional violence, between Ḥanbalī Sunnis and Shi‘is in Baghdad. In
the greater Khurasan region in the east, which is our geographical focus,
however, sectarian strife was inter-Sunni, between Ḥanafīs and Shāfi‘īs. It
was in this context – of increasing intransigence and frequent outbreaks ofviolence – that Sufism gradually rose to prominence, thanks to its robust
5and explicitly anti-sectarian stance.5 As such, it also provided support in
the prescient anti-sectarian policies enacted by statesmen such as Niẓām
al-Mulk (d. 1092), the fabled 11th-century vizier who ruled for three
decades over the Saljūq empire in the sultan’s stead.
According to medieval sources from an astonishing array of ideologicalpositions, the vizier’s true legacy was his enduring political vision, marked
by pragmatism, compromise, and the fostering of durable institutions. Of
the latter, the Niẓāmiyya schools dedicated to the propagation of Shāfi‘īlaw and Ash‘arī theology, founded and funded by the great vizier, are thebest known. Although he patronized leading ‘ulamā’ from a host of legal
and theological backgrounds, his own writings as well as other medieval
sources testify to his singular attachment to Sufi notables and institutions,his chief allies in the denouncement of sectarian partisanship. Many of theSufi masters that dominated the intellectual landscape of the post-Mongol
period, especially in Iran, began their careers at a Niẓāmiyya school.6 This
is in stark contrast to the dearth of notable jurists associated with theschools in later centuries.7
The luminaries in the story of Sufi ascendancy in 11th-century Khurasan are well-known: Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 1072), Abū Ḥāmid
al-Ghazzālī (d. 1111), and to a lesser extent, Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī
567On Sufi anti-sectarianism in the 11th century, see Neguin Yavari, Future of Iran’s Past:Niẓām al-Mulk Remembered (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 118–25; and on
Qushayrī’s politics and theology, see Martin Nguyen and Matthew Ingalls, eds., “Al-Qushayrī and His Legacy,” Special Issue, Journal of Sufi Studies 2, no. 1 (2013).
Apart from al-Fārmadhī who was associated with the Niẓāmiyya in Nīshāpūr duringNiẓām al-Mulk’s lifetime, and al-Ghazzālī and Ghujduwānī who turned to Sufi practice following a Niẓāmiyya career, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 1492) was educated at theNiẓāmiyya in Herat, and Abū al-Najīb Suhrawardī (d. 1168) was appointed as mudarris to
the Niẓāmiyya in Baghdad in 1150 by the Saljūq ruler Mas‘ūd (r. 1134-52), to mention but
a few of the best known among them. For the role played by madrasas in the propagationof Sufi teachings and extra-curricular activities in Baghdad, see Erik S. Ohlander, Sufism
in an Age of Transition: ‘Umar al-Suhrawardī and the Rise of the Islamic Mystical Brotherhoods (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 34–42, 79.
On the Niẓāmiyya schools, see Yavari, Future of Iran’s Past, 90–94; Michael Chamberlain,
Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 69–90; and on the disconnect between the Niẓāmiyyas and thereligious or administrative elite of the period, see Vanessa van Renterghem, “Les élites
dans le monde arabo-musulman médiéval: l’exemple de Baghdad sous les Seldjoukides,”Hypothéses 1 (2001); and Daphna Ephrat, “Religious leadership and Associations in the
Public Sphere of Seljuk Baghdad,” in The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies, ed. Miriam
Hoexter, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Nehemia Levtzion (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2002).
6

(d. 1085). Extensive reference is also made to the fame and stature of Abū‘Alī al-Fārmadhī (d. 1084), and his multifarious connections to key figuresin the period. Despite this, scant attempt has been made to assess suchreferences and explain the significance of his impact. Looking at contemporary sources, a historian in search of the Sufi master and madrasa
instructor would have to surmise that he was often mentioned but little
known. Nothing of substance has survived from his writings either, although it should be noted that particularly in the case of Sufis in earlier
periods, word of mouth was often used in place of the written word.
Al-Fārmadhī is known to have shunned power, but the biographies ofNiẓām al-Mulk, including the account of the noted genealogist and ḥadīth
scholar al-Fārisī (d. 1134), record in abundance the Sufi master’s close interactions with the vizier, who served for a while as khādim (superintendent) at al-Fārmadhī’s lodge (khānaqāh).8 Al-Fārisī was intricately connected with al-Fārmadhī’s circle of friends: his mother was the daughter ofal-Qushayrī, he studied jurisprudence with al-Juwaynī, and recited ḥadīth
on the authority of al-Fārmadhī. It is reported by Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1233)
that whenever al-Qushayrī and al-Juwaynī visited Niẓām al-Mulk, hewould rise to greet them. Yet when al-Fārmadhī called on him, he would
stand up and offer him his own seat. When questioned about this, thevizier responded:
The former two and their like praise me for that which I do not possess, andtheir words make me arrogant and vain. Al-Fārmadhī mentions the flaws
in my soul and how much I am living in injustice, and it makes me refrainfrom much of what I am.9

If al-Fārmadhī shunned power at all, he did it not in terms of withdrawing
from earthly concerns or avoiding encounter with power, but rather, in
8

9Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Ghāfir b. Ismā‘īl al-Fārisī, “Ta’rīkh al-Nīsābūr: almuntakhab min al-siyāq,” in The Histories of Nishapur, ed. Richard Frye (London: Mouton, 1965), f. 121, r + v; and Ibrāhīm b. Muhammad al-Ṣarīfīnī (d. 1243-44), Al-Ḥalqahal-ūlā’ min ta’rīkh Nīsābūr: al-muntakhab min al-siyāq ta’līf Abū Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Ghāfirb. Ismā‘īl al-Fārisī, ed. Muhammad Kazim al-Mahmudi (Qum: Jama‘at al-Mudarrisin
fi al-Hawzah al-‘Ilmiyah, 1983), 600.
Ibn al-Athīr, ‘Izz al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥasan, The Annals of the Saljūq Turks, transl. and ann. D.
S. Richards (London: Routledge, 2002), 257. The same story is found in Abū al-Faraj ‘Abd
al-Raḥmān b. al-Jawzī, Al-Muntaẓam fī ta’rīkh al-mulūk wa al-’umam (Hyderabad-Deccan: Osmania Oriental Publishers, 1939–41), XVI, 303; and Shams al-Dīn Abū al-Muẓaffar Yūsuf b. Qizughlī Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī, Mir’āt al-zamān fī ta’rīkh al-a‘yān, ed. Salman al-Juburi (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2013), XIII, 207.
7

drawing on his spiritual capital to critique power. And why was he singularly important to Niẓām al-Mulk’s heart?
The historical import of al-Fārmadhī appears in the full light of day
in the collected biographies/histories of the 15th century. The Naqshbandī
master, Nūr al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s (d. 1492)10 collected biographyof Sufi notables, Nafaḥāt al-uns, for example, offers a slightly moretextured portrait. We learn that al-Fārmadhī had first-rate teachers. He was
first a disciple of Abū Sa‘īd Abū al-Khayr (d. 1049),11 and then studied with
al-Qushayrī. Even such illustrious instructors did not sufficiently quench
his thirst for learning. Al-Fārmadhī’s search for “someone to take him
beyond where he was led him to Kurragānī (d. 1073 or 1077), who took
him on first as a tutee, and then a son-in-law.”12
There is yet another valence to al-Fārmadhī’s lore that sets him apartfrom his peers. According to al-Dhahabī, quoting al-Fārisī, al-Fārmadhī
was unique among his Sufi peers for his mode of tadhkīr,13 a form of Sufi
devotion in which the worshipper is absorbed in the rhythmic repetition ofGod’s name and his attributes. Although al-Fārisī does not elaborate on thematter, his privileged status as an attendee of al-Fārmadhī’s ḥadīth sessions,lends credence to the claim.
Overall, the later recollections of al-Fārmadhī point to a legacy that was
conjured up retroactively. A few centuries after al-Fārmadhī’s death, as institutionalized Sufism gained ground, so too did his fame and reputation.14
This may perhaps explain the exceptional favor he carried with Niẓām alMulk. The vizier desired effective rule, which in turn demanded justice. As
such, in the hyper-sectarian milieu of 11th-century Iran, unsectarianism
10 Hamid Algar, Jāmī (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Jawid A. Mojaddedi, The
Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The tabaqāt genre from al-Sulamī to Jāmī (Richmond,
Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001).
11 Muhammad b. al-Munawwar, Asrār al-tawḥīd, ed. Muhammad Rida Shafi‘i-Kadkani(Tehran: Agah, 1987), I, 118–20, 180–81.
12 Nūr al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds, ed. Mahmud ‘Abidi (Tehran: Ittila‘at, 1991), 318–20.
13 Shams al-Dīn b. Muhammad al-Dhahabī, Siyar a‘lām al-nubalā’, ed. S. al-Arna’ut and H.
al-Asad (Beirut: Risala, 1984), XVIII, 565–66.
14 Al-Fārmadhī was not the only Sufi master who grew in splendor with the passage oftime. Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār (d. 1221), the famous composer of Manṭiq al-ṭayr and othermasterpieces, “was hardly known as a poet in his own lifetime […] and his greatness as a
mystic, a poet, and a master of narrative was not discovered until the 9th/15th centuries;”
see Benedikt Reinert, “Aṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, accessed June 4,
2019 [1987]. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attar-farid-al-din-poet.
8emerged as a cornerstone of Niẓām al-Mulk’s political views.15 In thatquest, the Sufis were among his best allies, and among the Sufis the vizier
proffered special favor on those who shared his vision, and were keen on
fostering institutions and lasting policies. Much later the Naqshbandīs
chose a posthumous alliance with al-Fārmadhī, with whom they shared
not just a worldview, but a desire to put that worldview into action andfashion society and politics along its lines as well.

3 The Performative Regard of Religious Discourse
The performative regard in Sufi cosmology in the 11th century, along withthe rise of Sufi movements in tandem with the fall of Abbasid power, has
not gone unnoticed.16 As various Sufi communities stepped up to the plate
and assumed certain functions of governance abandoned by the dysfunctional caliphate, Sufi manuals adopted multi-dimensional metaphors ofregality. To take one example, the adoption of the title shāh by spiritual
guides coincided with the Būyids’ (932–1062) assumption of the same
title, according to Richard Gramlich and Fritz Meier before him, and highlights their efforts to delegitimate Shi‘i Būyid rule.17 In the same period,the Ḥanafī Sufi Ḥakīm Abū al-Qāsim Samarqandī (d. 953), referred to AbūḤanīfa (d. 767), eponym of the Ḥanafī madhhab as the shāhanshāh of fiqh
(jurisprudence) in his popular Sawād al-a‘ẓam, and traced his lineage back15 I have written elsewhere on the political valences of Niẓām al-Mulk’s alleged disdain for
Shi‘is and for non-Shāfi‘īs in general, see Yavari, The Future of Iran’s Past, 105–26; and Neguin Yavari, “Deciphering Difference in Premodern Islamic Political Thought,” in Origin,
Transmission and Metamorphosis of the Concept of Adab, ed. Catherine Mayeur Jaouen,
Francesca Bellino, and Luca Patrizi (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2019).
16 For a concise overview of previous scholarship, see Luca Patrizi, “Adab al-mulūk: L’utilisation de la terminologie du pouvoir dans le soufisme médiéval,” in Ethics and Spirituality
in Islam: Sufi adab, ed. Francesco Chiabotti, Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, and Luca Patrizi (Leiden: Brill, 2016); and for the far-reaching impact of theclose ties between the Baghdad-based Sufi master ‘Umar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234)
and the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Nāṣir, see Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 187–248.
17 Richard Gramlich, Adab al-mulūk: Die Lebensweise der Könige (Stuttgart: Kommissionsverlag Steiner, 1993), 5–6 of Gramlich’s “Introduction,” as quoted in Patrizi, “Adab almulūk,” 205–06; Fritz Meier, Zwei Abhandlungen ūber die Naqšbandiyya (Istanbul: In
Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag, 1994), 188–95.
9to the pre-Islamic Sasanids (224–650).18 Jean-Claude Garcin19 and Alexandre Papas20 have studied Sufi strategies for appropriating power – symbolicand political – beginning in the 14th century in the Maghrib and India, andin the 15th century in Egypt. In a recent study, Luca Patrizi found similar
analogies between political and spiritual power in much earlier texts,
such as the 10th-century anonymous Kitāb Adab al-mulūk fī bayān ḥaqā’iq
al-taṣawwuf, wherein the assumption of regality by Sufi masters is fully
conceptualized as al-mulūkiyya al-ṣūfiyya (Sufi kingship).21
Both the texture and the tenor of Sufi involvement in political lifechanged dramatically in the altered landscape of the Islamic world in the
post-Mongol period, in the Maghrib, Egypt, Iran, Asia Minor, Central
Asia, and India.22 The emergence of Sufi silsilas – or chains of authority –that linked living leaders to the Prophet and entwined moral exemplars tocreate saintly genealogies in the Mongol and Tīmūrīd periods (ca. mid-13th
to early 16th centuries) is an important watershed in this regard.23 Genealogical tables and ‘ilm al-rijāl as legitimacy tools have of course been awidespread feature since early times, most notably among ḥadīth scholars
and Turkic dynasts. With silsilas, Sufis forged a corporate identity, Devin
DeWeese argues.24 In this new template, heirship was no longer a mere
18 Abū al-Qāsim Isḥāq b. Muhammad Ḥakīm Samarqandī, Tarjumah-i al-Sawād al-a‘ẓam, ed.
‘Abd al-Hayy Habibi (Tehran: Bunyad Farhang Iran, 1969), 22. Incidentally, Khwāja Muhammad Pārsā revised Kitāb Sawād al-a‘ẓam in 1393, to make the language more contemporary.
19 Jean-Claude Garçin, Espaces, pouvoirs et idéologies de l’Égypte médiévale (London: Variorum Reprints, 1987).
20 Alexandre Papas, Soufisme et politique entre Chine, Tibet et Turkestan: études sur les
Khwajas Naqshbandis du Turkestan oriental (Paris: Jean Maisonneuve, 2005); and Alexandre Papas, “No Sufism without Sufi Order: Rethinking Ṭarīqa and Adab with Kāsānī
Dahbidī (1461-1562),” Kyoto Bulletin of Islamic Area Studies 2, no. 1 (2008).
21 Luca Patrizi, “Adab al-mulūk: L’utilisation de la terminologie du pouvoir dans le soufisme
médiéval,” in Ethics and Spirituality in Islam: Sufi adab, ed. Francesco Chiabotti, Eve
Feuillebois-Pierunek, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Luca Patrizi (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
22 Lawrence G. Potter, “Sufis and Sultans in Post-Mongol Iran,” Iranian Studies 27, no. 1/4(1994): 77–82; and Jo-Ann Gross, “The Naqshbandīya and Khwāja ‘Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār,” inThe Letters of Khwāja ‘Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār and His Associates, ‘Ubayd Allāh ibn Maḥmūd
Aḥrār, ed. Jo-Ann Gross and Asom Urunbaev (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 14–17. On the spreadof institutional Sufism from Iran to the western Islamic domains, see Richard W. Bulliet,
Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 145–68.
23 Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2013), 11–12.
24 Devin DeWeese, “Spiritual Practice and Corporate Identity in Medieval Sufi Communities of Iran, Central Asia, and India: The Khalvatī/‘Ishqī/Shaṭṭārī Continuum,” in Religion
and Identity in South Asia and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Patrick Olivelle, ed. Lindquist
10biological matter. Succession was determined by spiritual affinity and personal charisma rather than descent.
Among those to adopt the silsila model was the Naqshbandiyya community that sprouted from several Sufi lineages – collectively known as
the Khwājagān – in the 14th century, under the leadership of Bahā al-Dīn
Naqshband (d. 1389) and his disciples. A century later, now led by‘Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār (d. 1490), the protagonist of Kāshifī’s Rashaḥāt, thecommunity spread throughout Central Asia and the Ottoman empire,including Syria and the Hijaz. Initially, inherited leadership and the silsila were both rejected among the Naqshbandīs,
leaving personal charisma (including direct spiritual contact with deceased
masters or the Prophet himself) as the main grounds of leadership, even if,of course, shaykhs also could identify their immediate teachers and therefore could pose as their spiritual heirs.25

The adoption of the silsila model was instrumental in facilitating the spreadof Naqshbandī influence; and that new identity was amplified in collectedbiographies such as Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns and Rashaḥāt itself.
The silsila template was essentially a rhetorical strategy used to distinguish one Sufi order from another, as Alexandre Papas has suggested.26
His point draws attention to narrative strategies as a clue to understanding
what Sufi communities did, and how they participated in and reshaped
power relations in the Islamic world, and invites close reading and interpretation, suggesting that there is more to Sufi movements than theosophical debate. The interconnections between peers, disciples, mentors andexemplars were also integral to the institutionalization of Sufism, which
was crafted primarily on the narrative plane. This is only superficially aparadox as I hope to explain below. Various Sufi groups bound their community to past authority through histories and genealogies so that doctrine
and practice could be reinterpreted to accommodate and outlive changing
circumstances, the true prize of institution-building.
Steven E. (London; New York; Delhi: Anthem Press, 2011), 251–54.
25 Jürgen Paul, “The Rise of the Khwajagan-Naqshbandi Sufi Order in Timurid Herat,” in
Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban, ed. Nile Green (Oakland, California:
University of California Press, 2017), 81. On Bahā’ al-Dīn’s explanation of why the silsila
is not required, see Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ‘Īrāqī, “Naqshī az Naqshbandiyān,” in Jashn nāma-i
Muhammad Parwīn Gunābādī, ed. Muhsin Abu al-Qasimi (Tehran: Tus, 1975), 267–74.
26 Alexandre Pappas, “Shaykh Succession in the Classical Naqshbandiyya: Spirituality, Heredity, and the Question of Body,” Asian and African Studies 7, no. 1 (2007): 37.
11

Sufis lineages in Iran and Central Asia were also key participants inthe process of vernacular regionalization, to use Travis Zadeh’s term, continuing a tradition that commenced earlier in the 10th century under the
auspices of the Ghaznavid (977–1186) and Sāmānid (819–1005) local
dynasties, and was initially confined to producing Qur’an commentaries
in Persian.27 The text studied here, Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt, enjoys thedistinction of being the first dedicated collected biography of a single Sufi
community – as opposed to earlier ones that charted and classified vitaeof all Sufi luminaries, regardless of creedal orientation. It is also the fourthcollected biography of Sufis written in Persian.28 Significantly, the adoptionof Persian as the language of Sufism was a deliberate and even theoreticalmove by Sufi thinkers, as is evident in the discussion on the relative meritsof Arabic and Persian in the Kubrawī master ‘Alā’ al-Dawla Simnānī’s(d. 1336) “Zayn al-mu‘taqad li zayn al-mu‘taqid” to cite but one example.
Noting that all languages are ill-suited for expressing abstract principles,
Simnānī points to Persian’s particular inadequacies when compared to
Arabic, and relies on Arabic loanwords to instruct his disciples in theirquest for the Truth (ḥaqq, ḥaqīqat).29
Lamenting the limitations of the Persian language was not limited to
Sufi authors. Simnānī echoes the sentiments of the celebrated scholar andpolymath Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī (d. after 1050) on the inadequacies of Persian

27 Travis Zadeh and Alya Karame, “The Art of Translation: An Early Persian Commentaryon the Qur’ān,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 2 (2015): 185; and for a more comprehensive
account of the emergence of New Persian literature, see Gilbert Lazard, “The Rise of the
New Persian Language,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4, The Period fromthe Arab Invasion to the Saljūqs, ed. R. N. Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), 628–32.
28 Rashaḥāt follows after Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī Hujwīrī’s (d. 1073) Kashf al-maḥjūb, Farīd
al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār’s (d. 1221) Tadhkirat al-awliyā’, and Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns. For a comparative analysis of Persian-language Sufism, see Denise Aigle, “‘Aṭṭār’s Tadhkirat al-awliyā’
and Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns: Two Visions of Sainthood,” Oriente Moderno 96, no. 2 (2016).
29 Maria Giovanni Martini includes a critical edition of ‘Alā al-Dawla Simnānī’s “Zayn almu‘taqad li zayn al-mu‘taqid,” in his ‘Alā al-Dawla al-Simnānī between Spiritual Authority
and Political Power: A Persian Lord and Intellectual in the Heart of the Īlkhānate (Leiden:
Brill, 2017), 379. Appraisals of the relative merits of Arabic and Persian are not rare. See,for example, Jurfādiqānī’s lament in his translation of al-‘Utbī’s (d. ca. 1036 or 1040) history of the Ghaznawids, completed in 1206-7, Abū al-Sharaf Nāṣiḥ b. Ẓafar Jurfādiqānī,
Tarjumah-i Tārīkh-i Yamīnī, ed. Muhammad Ja‘far Shi‘ar (Tehran: Bungah Tarjumah va
Nashr Kitab, 1978), 10. For more on the face-off between Arabic and Persian, see ‘Alī b.
Aḥmad Asadī Ṭūsī’s (d. 1072-3) account of a debate between an Arab and a Persian reproduced in Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, “Asadī Ṭūsī 2,” Majallah-i Dānishkadah-i adabiyātva ‘ulūm-i insānī Danishgāh Firdawsī 14, no. 1 (1978).
12

for writing scientific prose. Bīrūnī described the fate of a scientific text
when translated into Persian as follows:…it loses all clarity; its horizon becomes blurred and its practicalapplication disappears. The function of the Persian language is toimmortalize historical epics about the kings of bygone ages and toprovide stories to tell on night-watches.30
By establishing Persian as the language of this new piety that is mindfulof its audience,31 by downplaying sectarianism while at the same time upholding boundaries and marking communities (as we shall see), and byreconfiguring the principle of hereditary rule to combine charisma withthe legitimacy of past authority, Sufi communities redefined the ideationallandscape of late medieval/early modern Khurasan. How the Sufis drewon the past was a key component of that transformation, and in the case of
the Naqshbandiyya, spiritual authority was twined with the remembranceof al-Fārmadhī,32 who is credited in Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt as a principal
fount of the Naqshbandiyya. The Naqshbandīs also recast the Sunni-Shi‘i
divide, a constitutive element of the new piety they advocated. What follows is a detailed investigation of the illocutionary force of the text. I argue
that the text’s apparent identity as a genealogy is in fact the top layer of acomplex edifice, designed to serve as a new template of authority; one thatin effect proselytized a nation.

30 Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī, Al-Ṣaydana, as cited in Lazard, “The Rise of the New Persian Language,” 631.
31 The bibliography on this subject is extensive. For a recent example, see Jāmī in Regional Contexts; The Reception of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca.
9th/15th–14th/20th Century, Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas, eds. (Leiden: Brill,2018), 27–223.
32 The present study does not engage with doctrinal specificities, but it is useful to bear inmind that certain elements of the teachings of al-Fārmadhī’s star pupil al-Ghazzālī wereincorporated into Khwājagān-Naqshbandī principles according to Alexei Khismatulin,
including Ghujduwānī’s eight principles that shaped the Khwājagān. Khismatulin’s pointis that rather than a Persian translation of his Iḥyā ‘ulūm al-dīn, al-Ghazzālī’s Kīmīyā-yisa‘ādat must be considered as an independent text and one of the earliest specimens ofSufi books written in Persian; see Alexei A. Khismatulin, “ ‘The Alchemy of Happiness’:
Al-Ghazālī’s Kīmīyā and the Origins of the Khwājagān-Naqshbandiyya Principles,” in
Ideas, Images, and Methods of Portrayal, ed. Sebastian Günther (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
13

4 Forging a Context of One’s Own
Kāshifī’s Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt is a clear example of textual institutionalization.33 The author hailed from a family of scholars active at the courtof the last Tīmūrid sultan Ḥusayn Bāyqara who ruled in Herat from 1469
to 1506. His famous father, the preacher and polymath Ḥusayn Wā‘iẓ
al-Kāshifī (d. 1504), wrote on both Sunni and Shi‘i topics.34 His exegesison the Qur’ān was popular among Persian speakers in eastern Iran andnorthern India (the vast majority of whom were Sunni); while prominent
philo-‘Alīd themes and references in the family’s writings generated accusations of Shi‘i sympathy.35
Both Kāshifīs were prominent members of the Naqshbandī community,a Sunni Sufi community that rejected antinomian currents and sought
to integrate the Sufi ṭarīqa (spiritual path, almost Tao) with the practiceof the sharī‘a.36 Such was their steadfast orthodoxy that one 13th-century
Naqshbandī leader boasted that only one of his disciples would have sufficed to save al-Ḥallāj who was accused of heresy and executed by theAbbasid caliph in 922, and set him on the correct mystical path.37
A collected biography with a distinctive authorial voice rather thana descriptive primer on Sufi etiquette, the approach to Sufi history in
Rashaḥāt is thoroughly classificatory with a prescriptive spatial structure.

33 For an insightful discussion of the codification and institutionalization of Sufi thought
and practice in Baghdad, see Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 187–248.
34 For his biography, see Maria E. Subtelny, “Kāšefi, Kamāl-al-Din-Ḥosayn, Wā‘eẓ,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, accessed June 4, 2019. Originally published December 15, 2011.
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kasefi_kamal. According to Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ‘Irāqī,Ḥusayn Kāshifī followed the Ḥanafī madhhab, see his “Introduction,” in Khwāja Muhammad Pārsā-yi Bukhārā’ī, Qudsiyya, ed. Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ‘Irāqī (Tehran: Tahuri, 1975), 27.
35 Abbas Amanat, “Meadow of the Martyrs: Kāshifī’s Persianization of the Shiʿi Martyrdom
Narrative in the Later Tīmūrid Herat,” in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essaysin Honour of Wilferd Madelung, ed. Farhad Daftary and Josef W. Meri (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); and Mu‘iniyan claims that Fakhr al-Dīn Ṣafī ‘Alī may have converted to Shi‘ism
sometime in the early decades of the 10th/16th century; see Rashaḥāt, “Introduction,” 85–86.
36 For more on the Naqshbandiyya and a comprehensive account of the extensive secondary
literature on their history and creed, see Jürgen Paul, “The Rise of the Khwājagān-Naqshbandiyya Sufi Order;” Dina Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshbandīs in the Ottoman
World, 1450-1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 14–33, and Jo-Ann
Gross, “The Naqshbandīya and Khwāja ‘Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār,” 1–22.
37 Rashaḥāt, I, 66.
14

In Kāshifī’s own words:
The construction of this collection rests on a preamble (maqāla) that recounts
the Khwājagān generations of the Naqshbandī silsila, three chapters (maqṣad)– each divided into three sections (faṣl) – on the life and accomplishments ofKhwāja ‘Ubayd Allah Aḥrār, his origins and the beginnings of his quest; firsthand accounts of his doctrines, beliefs and the anecdotes he has recited; andmirabilia attributed to him; followed by an epilogue (khātima).38

Kāshifī’s organizational principle is decidedly teleological: it begins with along introduction on the birth of the Naqshbandī silsila, culminates in thelife and legacy of Aḥrār the Sufi master who wielded enormous politicalinfluence, and ends with his transition from this world to the next, andthe brief tenure of two of his sons as spiritual authorities. This fortuitously
coincides with the downfall of the Tīmūrids in 1501, and the fall of Samarqand to the Uzbek Shībānī Khan (r. 1501–10). In Kāshifī’s own words, thetext is constructed in this manner because “from Him is the beginning and
to Him the return.”39
The preamble – the longest section of the book – crafts a prehistory for
the Naqshbandīs by linking them to the earlier Khwājagān order, withthe 12th-century Khwāja Yūsuf Hamadānī (d. 1140) as its founder. Yet theorigins of the Khwājagān-Naqshbandī lineage are stretched further back to
the lifetime of Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (d. 634), the first caliph who ruled for
two years following the death of Muhammad in 632.40
Apart from the connection to the first caliph, the preamble also includes
a complex genealogy that connects the order via several distinct lineages to
Abū Bakr’s main rival, ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 661), Muhammad’s cousin andson-in-law, and to his progeny, who in due course came to be regarded as
the twelve holy imams of the Shi‘is. Khwāja Yūsuf Hamadānī appointed
38 Rashaḥāt, I, 10.
39 Rashaḥāt, I; the phrase is a frequent Qur’anic quote [Q 2:156].
40 Conflating genealogies was de rigeur in Tīmūrid Herat. Tīmūr (Tamerlane, r. 1370–1405)
himself claimed, apart from the title ṣāḥib qirān (Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction),
genealogical affiliation with Chingis Khan (r. 1206–27), and ‘Alī, the aforementioned
cousin, son-in-law and eventually successor of Muhammad. For Tīmūr’s colorful genealogy, see John E. Woods, “Tīmūr’s Genealogy,” in Intellectual Studies on Islam: Essays
Written in Honor of Martin B. Dickson, ed. Michel M. Mazzaoui and Vera B. Moreen (Salt
Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1990); Beatrice Forbes Manz, “Tamerlane andthe Symbolism of Sovereignty,” Iranian Studies 21, no. 1–2 (1988); and Denise Aigle, “TheTransformation of a Myth of Origins, Genghis Khan and Timur,” chap. 6 in The Mongol
Empire Between Myth and Realities, Historic Anthropological Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
15

four caliphs to represent him and to propagate his teachings. That too, isan appropriation of the past, as it resonates with the four rightly guided
caliphs who ruled the Islamic community following Muhammad’s death(Abū Bakr, r. 632–34, ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, r. 634–44, ‘Uthmān b. ‘Affān,r. 644–56, ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, r. 656–61). That template of pious government
wherein succession was not hereditary lasted for thirty years, after whichdynastic rule prevailed when the Umayyad dynasty was founded in 661.
It deserves mention here that statecraft organized around the principle offour, as in the fourfold division of the Mongol empire following Chingis’
death in 1227, or the four subordinate beys leading four ruling tribes, often
referred to as clans in modern scholarship, prevailed in the Mongol successor states and was a staple of Turco-Mongol political life.41
The fourth of Hamadānī’s caliphs was ‘Abd al-Khāliq al-Ghujduwānī(d. 1220). Among those who mentored his mentors was the Prophet’s great
great grandson and Shi‘i imam Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq who had passed in 765, along time before Ghujduwānī’s teachers were born. Ja’far al-Ṣādiq was agreat grandson of ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib and a descendant on his mother’s side of
Abū Bakr.42 In other words, he was scion of the two leading contenders for
Muhammad’s mantle which in time became known as the Sunni and Shi’i
communities, where Shi’ism is best considered as a conceptual antipode
to Sunnism, rather than a derivative of it. The fusion of Sunni and Shi’ilineages of authority is a recurring feature of Naqshbandī creed, as we shall
explore in further detail below.
The lineages, genealogies and biographical information in the text
are accompanied by detailed discussions of rashaḥāt (sprinklings, singular rashḥa), teachings transmitted by the masters.43 In fact, Rashaḥāt ‘ayn
al-ḥayāt is a quasi three-dimensional text, one where a genealogy is mapped
spatially and is best read with the aid of a floorplan rather than a table of contents. In this spatial classification, each ṭabaqa (generation as well as floor) is
41 Uli Schamiloglu, “Tribal Politics and Social Organization in the Golden Horde,” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Department of History, Columbia University, 1986, 19–32,
127–71. For a parallel system of four spiritual leaders alongside the four qarači beys, see
71–73; for the four uluş emirs in Īlkhānid Iran (1256–1335), 83–86.
42 Abū Bakr’s grandson Qāsim was Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq’s maternal grandfather, see Rashaḥāt, I,
11–13.
43 Rashaḥāt, I, 38–51; the dicta proffered by Naqshbandī masters also functioned to cool
one’s spirit, as in the sprinklers used in summer houses, another meaning associated withrashḥa/rashaḥāt.
16

built upon a set of four pillars, the caliphs appointed by the previous mastershaykh. While the Sufi masters uphold the floors, the walls of the edifice areprovided by rashaḥāt or sprinklings, rules and instructions that flow fromgeneration to generation to bind and nurture the Naqshbandī community.
The text traces each set of four lineages, each of which in turn produce theirown successor chains, so as to draw an ever-expanding cladogram comprising successive generations as they replicate themselves fourfold.
The house that the Naqshbandīs build, or at least the one that Kāshifībuilds for them, boasts both concrete pillars and abstract ones. While
prominent masters or lead chains, their caliphs and their sprinklings
represent the former, the collusion of ‘Alī and Abū Bakr in the forgedprehistory that brought about the order in the earliest days of Islam is an
example of an abstract pillar. As mentioned, the template of authority in
Rashaḥāt is explicit in its intention to connect Naqshbandī-Khwājagānelders with both Sunni and Shi‘i luminaries. ‘Alīd exemplars are aplenty,
as is explicitly anti-Shi‘i polemic. In a master stroke, Kāshifī both historicizes creeds and ideologies by reducing them to human actors, a strategic
move necessary to instrumentalize the past for present concerns; and, atthe same time, defies natural law by crafting an anachronistic genealogy
that assigns 7th-century teachers and companions to 12th-century Sufi masters. The multiple connections and inter-connections between the various
lead chains, their teachers – actual and imagined – and their successors,prevent a chronological reading of the history of the Naqshbandī order.
Kāshifī’s genealogy does not trace the development of his Sufi community
over time, but instead conjures up a history of the past that underscores
themes, tropes and watersheds that bolster its creedal and political standing by forging its own ideational context.
And he does more still. For the house that Kāshifī builds is part of acountry – a land that the Naqshbandīs come to claim as their own. It is
enclosed by Samarqand, Herat, and Bukhara on one side, and stretches
widely, through travel and diffusion, as well as lineage, to include Baghdad,
Egypt/Syria, the Hijaz, and India. Hamadānī traveled to Baghdad at theage of eighteen, and studied in Isfahan and Bukhara, and had followers in
Iraq, Khurasan, Khwarazm and Transoxiana.44 And Khwāja Bahā’ al-Dīn
Naqshband’s exertions took him around Khurasan, Central Asia, Hijaz and
44 Rashaḥāt, I, 13–14.
17

Syria.45 In fact, the Naqshbandīs had several centers: the community wasprominent in the region of Bukhara during the lifetime of Naqshband, thedisciples around Jāmī were anchored in Herat, and Aḥrār and his devotees moved to Samarqand in the mid-15th century. Armando Salvatore has
written on the conceptual ties between locality and institution-building
in modern Sufi organizations.46 Beyond holy sites, however, which is thefocus of Salvatore’s piece, the house that Kāshifī built also reveals theterritorial claims of the Naqshbandīs. By affixing a place for Sufi activity notjust in terms of a school, or a place of congregation, a hostel, or even a sacredsite associated with a specific master – the traditional geographies of Sufi
piety – but also in terms of a country, Kāshifī set about the task of institutionbuilding. In traveling saints, in acquisitions through conquest by princes
under Sufi protection, and most importantly in links forged across timeand space, or to borrow Yuri M. Lotman’s term, a semiosphere,47 a cultural
boundary crafted by proselytization, Kāshifī and his Naqshbandī friends
redrew the contours of the landscape of politics and of religion in latemedieval Islam, and claimed land to transform their spiritual community
into a concrete, if textual, institution.

5 Contextualizing Old Divides in the New Piety
The desired outcome of Kāshifī’s constructivist agenda is a model for religion which can be put to use in politics – a religious blueprint for a genuinely Islamic society that tempers religious fervor with the preservation of
public peace, while simultaneously drawing on the past to legitimate thedirect involvement of religious leaders in political life. Kāshifī’s template(much like Khomeini’s several centuries later) is for a public religion,48 one
45 Rashaḥāt, I, 93–99.
46 Armando Salvatore, “Notes on Locality, Connectedness, and Saintliness,” in Dimensionsof Locality: Muslim Saints, their Place and Space, Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam 8, ed.
Georg Stauth and Samuli Schielke (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008). See too Martha L.
Henderson. “What is Spiritual Geography?” Geographical Review 83, no. 4 (1993).
47 Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 123–42.
48 By public religion I have in mind a concept similar to what the “Early Modern Civil Religion Reading Group” based at Newcastle University have chosen to call “civil religion” – alanguage and concept seeking to reconcile government with religion, and to craft a model
for religion that is conducive to maintaining public peace. “Liberated from the confines18

that lubricates the machinery of governance. This illuminates the rising
fortune of Sufi movements in the 11th century, as part of a concerted effort
by politicians and religious leaders to stem confessional strife, and addressa political crisis that had been simmering for decades.
As mentioned, institutionalized Sufis movements came of age a century
or so after Niẓām al-Mulk’s death, in the course of the two and a half centuries that separate the fall of the Abbasids in 1258 and the coming to powerof the Ṣafavid (1501–1736) ruling house. These are arguably the most critical centuries in the social and religious history of Iran, at the end of which
an overwhelmingly Sunni Iran was transformed into a robustly Shi‘i nation,or so at least the conventional story goes. The role of Sufi communities intransitioning Iran between the two creeds remains hotly debated. Hamid
Algar attributes the rapid Shi‘ification of Iran to a crypto-Shi‘ism arising in
Khurasan and moving westwards sometime after the 15th century. Patricia
Crone and others, including Abbas Amanat, see an increased devotion to‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib and his progeny among Sunni Iranian Sufis in the 14th and15th centuries that predisposed Sunnis in Iran to embrace Shi‘ism.49 The
consensus in the field, though perhaps never explicitly recognized, is thatstates and governments were not the main agents of the social changes that
overtook the Iranian/Persephone world from the 13th to the 16th centuries.
Should that role instead be attributed to the Sufis?
It is in this light that the anti-Shi‘i polemic of the Naqshbandīs is best
understood. While they accept the sanctity and special status of ‘Alī andhis progeny, and even the hotly contested concept of a mahdī that will return at the end of time, the venom of Naqshbandī Sufis is directed at therejectionist strand that has shaped Shi‘i history from its very inception.
Shi‘i failure to accept the choice of the majority of the Muslim community
upon Muhammad’s death, and the ensuing split that has defined Islamic
thought and history ever since, is regarded as an unpardonable offence.
of being a subsidiary to republicanism,” and explored as an intellectual tradition on its
own terms, they argue, civil religion emerges as a “rich and complex discourse, throughwhich efforts were made to develop a persuasive vision for a religion conducive to atolerant and harmonious citizen body,” see https://newcastlecivilreligion.wordpress.com/
category/news/, accessed June 27, 2019.
49 For a summary of the debate, see Hamid Algar’s review of Patricia Crone, The Nativist
Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism, in Journal of Shi‘aIslamic Studies 8, no. 3 (2015); and Christoph Werner, “Die Schia in Iran: Von der Minderheit zur Mehrheit,” in Religiöse Minderheiten und gesellschaftlicher Wandel, ed. Edith Franke(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014).
19

Hence the appellation rāfiḍī (rejectionist, referring to those who rejected
the consensus of the majority of the Muslim community) in Naqshbandī
and other polemical literature.50 In that vein, the Sufis of this period
present their creed not as a hybrid Sunni-Shi‘i affair, or even a synthesis of
the two, but instead as a new religion, albeit cast as “the true Sunni” creed.
In the words of Simnānī:
true Islam is that of the Sunnis, the most balanced of persuasions, in which
the four rightly guided caliphs and Muhammad’s progeny (ahl al-bayt) andhis disciples are praised; no Muslim is accused of disbelief; and all prophets, scriptures and angels are respected, so that confessional prejudice iseschewed and various communities can live in peace.51

In this novel iteration of the Sunni creed, Sufis are its most perfect practitioners, as we shall explore in more detail below.
A similar architecture of the Sufi creed, again found in the company ofa new template of public Islam, is the central thesis of Simnānī’s Al-Wārid
al-shārid al-ṭārid shubhat al-mārid,52 a refutation of philosophy, specifically of Avicenna (d. 1037) and the Aristotelian tradition. Al-Wārid is composed of three architectural stages, argues Giovanni Maria Martini. It demolishes an old construction that was built with the ‘wrong’ architecture, it uses
pieces from the old edifice to reconstruct the ‘right’ new architecture, andfinally, it rebuilds a new edifice. First, a demolition ball is taken to philosophical views, then Simnāni collects viewpoints on those views from across the
spectrum of Islamic thought, and shows how all except one are incompatible
with the rest. To rebuild the edifice correctly, he ranks the various creeds
50 The succession crisis that followed Muhammad’s death in 632 divided the nascent Islamic community. The shī‘at ‘Alī (followers of ‘Alī), Shi‘a for short, held that ‘Alī had been
robbed of his rightful position as the Prophet’s heir and leader of his community. The
opposing view, which was the default position of the vast majority of Muslims, came to be
known in time as the ahl al-sunna wa al jamā‘a (those who uphold past precedence andthe community’s consensus), Sunni for short. The latter argued that as judgment belongs
to God alone, Muslims should postpone taking a stance on the issue of succession. In the
Sufi writings considered in this study, the Shi‘is are scorned not on account of minutiaeof doctrine, but because they rejected the consensus of the community, refused to accept
the course of history and sowed dissent.
51 ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Simnānī, “Zayn al-mu‘taqad,” in Martini, ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Simnānī between Spiritual Authority and Political Power, 298–9.
52 It is telling that Simnānī also practiced silent dhikr, and corresponded with the Naqshbandī Khwāja ‘Alī Rāmtīnī on that topic. See Jamal J. Elias, The Throne Carrier of God:
The Life and Thought of ‘Alā’ ad-dawla al-Simnānī (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1995), 201; and Rashaḥāt, I, 63.
20

from the most exclusionary to the most universal. The most limited view
belongs to the naturalists, followed by the physicists/mathematicians, thephilosophers, and finally the Sufis, who sit atop the entire edifice, as a roof.53
Its practice is the purest, its outlook the most universal, and its worship themost perfect.54 Just as the Sunni creed, the wider net, is the most universal ofIslam’s creeds, the Sufi madhhab, the fifth Sunni madhhab, is the most universal: it is built upon the principle of community and consensus.55 It comprises all that is esoteric and material; it honors all proper boundaries, desistsfrom slander and raising accusations of heresy and infidelity against anyone
who prays to the Ka‘ba, and its followers revere their religious leaders, theProphet’s companions and his family, and all prophets and messengers.56
Simnānī’s ideal creed is not the antidote to Shi‘i doctrine, but the optimal
safeguard against factional zeal and sectarian violence. It does not seek toreconcile Shi‘i beliefs with Sunni ones but to construct a new path to true
Islam, the Truth.
An unsectarian worldview cloaked in sectarian terminology is thehallmark of Naqshbandī langue. They considered the Shāfi‘ī al-Fārmadhī
among their principal founders, but many of their leaders, including
Khwāja Muhammad Pārsā and Jāmī,57 are known to have hailed from aḤanafī background. Khwāja Yūsuf Hamadānī is claimed for the Ḥanafīs
in Rashaḥāt, but he is listed as a Shāfi‘ī in several earlier sources.58 Although Kāshifī notes ‘Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār’s veneration for the Imam AbūḤanīfa, frequently referred to as imam-i a‘ẓam (supreme leader), suchhigh esteem has its limits. In one anecdote, the Sufi master Zayn al-Dīn
Abū Bakr Tāybādī (d. 1389) asks one of his disciples if he likes the Imam-iA‘ẓam Abū Ḥanīfa more than his own shaykh. The disciple confesses that
he likes his own master better. Offended at his response, Zayn al-Dīn
insults the man and expels him from the gathering. Moments later, heMartini, ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Simnānī between Spiritual Authority and Political Power, 126–28.
Martini, 211.
Martini, 111–12, 216.
Martini, 211–12, 455.
Dina Le Gall suggests most Naqshbandīs, at least among those in the east, were of theḤanafī persuasion, whereas among their adherents in the Kurdish territories, Arabia andEgypt, Shāfi‘ism prevailed; see A Culture of Sufism, 92–93; and according to Algar, Jāmīat least “does not appear to have attached any significance to this fact,” Algar, Jami, 129.
58 Al-Sam‘ānī’s 12th-century collected biography of Shāfi‘ī notables is one such example, see
Wilferd Madelung, “Yūsuf al-Hamadānī and the Naqšbandiyya,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi
5, no. 6 (1987–1988), 499–509.
53
54
55
56
57

21

regrets his extreme reaction and seeks the disciple in order to apologize.
The disciple says,
I followed the madhhab of the Imam-i A‘ẓam for several years, but none of
my defects were rectified. After a few days following this leader, however, I
have shunned all dishonor. What is wrong with liking such a master morethan the Imam-i A‘ẓam, and is it written anywhere that such sentiment isabhorrent and forbidden?

Zayn al-Dīn apologizes and praises him.59 The moral of the story, it
appears, refutes the significance of madhhab affiliation. Finally, from apoem valorizing the Sufi path, we learn that the truth of divine love is revealed only to those with an esoteric inclination and not to jurists; AbūḤanīfa did not teach it, and al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 820) said nothing on the matter.60
While Naqshbandī commitment to orthodoxy and to the Sunni consensus
is ubiquitous, the political freight of their allegedly anti-Shi‘i stance remains
contested. Consider an anecdote by ‘Ubayd Allāh Aḥrār regarding the cursingof Abū Bakr by Shi‘is: A Sufi master happened onto rāfiḍī territory. A groupof extremists gathered around his retinue and cursed Abū Bakr. The shaykh’s
companions wanted to attack the offenders. But the shaykh intervened:
Do not harm them, for they do not curse our Abū Bakr. Our Abū Bakr isdifferent from their Abū Bakr. Their imagined Abū Bakr landed the caliphate without merit and bore ill-will against the Prophet and his family; we
too repudiate their Abū Bakr.

The rejectionists (rāwāfiḍ) regretted their actions and repented of theirfalse beliefs.61 The account carefully segregates individual Shi‘is from unpalatable dogma, but it also highlights the contingencies that divided theMuslim community, thus opening a path to reconciliation. The divergent
readings of early Islamic history naturalize difference, and temper sectarian sentiment by suggesting a modus vivendi between conflicting creeds.
They also stand in stark contrast to the violent and even obscene confrontations of the time between Shi‘is and Sunnis as reflected in popular literature.
Dogma, even if well entrenched, is subject to interpretation. In onerashḥa, Aḥrār, drawing on the authority of two prominent Naqshbandī
masters, suggests that a dedicated and careful disciple is not obligated to
59 Rashaḥāt, II, 462–63.
60 Rashaḥāt, II, 511.
61 Rashaḥāt, II, 490–91.
22follow a master to achieve spiritual perfection. Revelation makes it clear, heclaims, that the holy book and prophetic precedence suffice as guidance.62
Nuance is key in distinguishing the proper from the deficient. The good
and the proper in the Shi‘i worldview is carefully separated from its deficiencies with a command exhorting the true Sufi to hold descendants of ‘Alīin the highest esteem, as laid out in a rashḥa.63 In his own writings, Khwāja
Muhammad Pārsā (d. 1420), Bahā’ al-Dīn Naqshband’s khalīfa active in
Bukhara is equivocal in his full confidence in the probity of Muhammad’s
companions, a sui generis pillar of the Sunni creed, and in the necessityof venerating the twelve imams, a core element of the Shi‘i school.64 The
same has been said of Jāmī. Pointing to his writings on ‘Ali and other Shi’i
imams, Sajjad Rizvi suggests that Jāmī’s triumphalist Sunni identity must
be considered as part of a concerted effort to bolster Tīmūrid legitimacy
against rival claims forwarded by Shi‘i and messianic movements “throughacts of appropriating for the Sunni imperial traditions the very figures andsymbols that defined Shi‘i identity: the Imams.”65
In another rashḥa, Aḥrār is found to fix a Sufi cosmological hierarchy:
There is sharī‘at, ṭarīqat (Sufi path) and ḥaqīqat (truth): sharī‘at is fulfilling God’s
exoteric commands, ṭarīqat is mindfulness and undivided attention to various
aspects of the internal life, and ḥaqīqat is sharp insight into those matters.66

The triangulated rules of piety in Aḥrār’s model abrogate any competition
between sharī‘a and ṭarīqa by proposing a third plane that encompasses
and transcends – in its purview as well as its content – the exigencies ofboth. Like Simnānī’s philo-‘Alid Sufi madhhab that integrates the teachings of the four Sunni schools of law with basic elements of the Shi‘i creed,and surpasses them all, the reach of Aḥrār’s ḥaqīqa extends far beyond theideals promulgated by both the sharī‘a and the ṭarīqa.

62 Rashaḥāt, II, 467.
63 Rashaḥāt, II.
64 Khwāja Muhammad Pārsā, Faṣl al-Khiṭāb (Tashkent: Litografiya Gulam Khasandzhanova,
1913), 400–43, as quoted in Hamid Algar, “The Naqshbandis and Safavids: A Contribution
to the Religious History of Iran and Her Neighbors,” in Safavid Iran and her Neighbors, ed.
Michel Mazzaoui (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 31. Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā is also known for updating the Sufi Abū al-Qāsim Isḥāq Samarqandī’s Sawādal-a‘ẓam, a popular exposition of the Ḥanafī creed; see Wilferd Madelung, “Abu’l-QāsemEsḥāq Samarqandi,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, accessed June 4, 2019. Originally published December 15, 1983. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abul-qasem-eshaq.
65 Sajjad Rizvi, “Before the Safavid-Ottoman Conflict: Jāmī and Sectarianism in Timurid
Iran and Iraq,” in Jāmī in Regional Contexts, 255.
66 Rashaḥāt, II, 503.
23

Resorting to a sectarian past is another feature of Naqshbandī history
that is called upon to evidence its divisive core. The outlier Naqshbandī
choice of performing dhikr, which, as noted above, also distinguished Abū‘Alī al-Fārmadhī from his peers, is one such example. Where the majority
of Sufis practiced vocal dhikr, the Naqshbandīs opted for the silent mode.
In Naqshbandī lore, it was the prophet Khiḍr who initiated Ghujduwānī
into the Sufi path, and gave him special dispensation to persist in silent
dhikr.67 In so doing, Ghujduwānī contravened the practice of Khwāja
Yūsuf Hamadānī, who introduced him to the Khwājagān community.68 Ghujduwānī’s prescription for silent dhikr was adopted by Baha’al-Din Muhammad Naqshband. When still the Khwājagān, the order
practiced silent dhikr in private sessions and resorted to vocal incantation in public. The conversion from private silent dhikr and public
vocal dhikr to silent dhikr to the exclusion of vocal incantation marked
the revival of true piety in this Sufi community, and was commemorated by its being renamed the Naqshbandiyya. The rebranding must dateto the 16th century, ‘Alī Asghar Mu‘iniyan suggests, since Khwājagān still
predominates in Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt and Kāshifī’s Rashaḥāt.69 And Devin DeWeese and Jürgen Paul have shown that the connection was wrought at
the expense of those collateral lines of the Khwājagān that did not leadto Bahā’ al-Dīn Muhammad Naqshband, and reflected internal disputes.70
67 Rashaḥāt, I, 35; Anna Krasnowolska, “Ḵeżr,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, accessed
June 4, 2019. Originally published April 15, 2009. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/
kezr-prophet.; Patrick Franke has gathered over a hundred accounts of encounters withKhiḍr, see his Begegnung mit Khidr: Quellenstudien zum Imaginären im traditionellen Islam (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000); and for a superb description of Khiḍr in Sufi literature, see
Armando Salvatore, “Notes on Locality, Connectedness, and Saintliness”.
68 According to Ghujduwānī’s Maqāmāt Yūsuf Hamadānī, Khwāja Yūsuf Hamadānī toopracticed silent dhikr, although the claim is contradicted in Kāshifī’s Rashaḥāt, see Hamid Algar, “Abū Ya‘qūb Yūsuf b. Ayyūb Hamadānī,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, accessed June 4, 2019. Originally published December 15, 1983. http://www.iranicaonline.
org/articles/abu-yaqub-hamadani.
69 See Mu‘īniyān’s “Introduction,” Rashaḥāt, I, 45.
70 Devin DeWeese, “The Legitimation of Bahā’ al-Dīn Naqshband,” Asiatische Studien 50,
no. 2 (2006); and Jürgen Paul, Doctrine and Organization: The Khwājagān/Naqshbandīya
in the First Generation after Bahā’uddīn (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1998), 18–30. Hamid Algar offers an alternative interpretation, see his review of Dina Le Gall’s A Cultureof Sufism: Naqshbandis in the Ottoman World, 1450–1750 in Journal of Islamic Studies 18,
no. 3 (2007).
24

The ideological freight of vocal vs. silent dhikr has, in addition, a sectarian component, according to Algar, who points to the association of vocal
dhikr with ‘Alī, and of silent dhikr with Abū Bakr. In Naqshbandī writings,
the origin of silent dhikr dates to the Prophet’s migration from Mecca toMedina. Fleeing persecution, Muhammad took refuge with Abū Bakr in acave. The Qur’anic revelation:[h]e had no more than one companion; the two were in the cave, and hesaid to his companion, ‘Fear not, for God is with us;’ then God sent down
His peace upon him [Q: 9:40];71

is read in that tradition to mark the birth of silent dhikr that provides thesame peace that Abū Bakr received.72 The attribution of silent dhikr to Abū
Bakr, however, must be understood as a later hagiographical interpolation,and certainly not indicative of standard Naqshbandī practice. The adoptionof silent dhikr by Bahā’ al-Dīn Naqshband followed intense inter-Naqshbandī strife, as documented in earlier sources, including the 14th-century
Masālik al-‘ārifīn. In the period before Bahā’ al-Dīn, when neither uniform
doctrine nor practice prevailed among the Khwājagān, both styles of dhikr
were present, and both persisted among his followers. Khwāja Muhammad
Pārsā, for example, advises those among his followers who engage in vocal dhikr to make sure that their heart is in sync with their tongue when
so doing, which is necessarily a dispensation to persist in their practice.73
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that silent dhikr was the modus operandi ofa good majority of Naqshbandī Sufis. What is questionable is whether that
preference was endowed with a confessional lineage.

71 ‘Abdullah Ysuf ‘Ali, The Meaning of the Glorious Quran, accessed June 4, 2019, http://
www.islam101.com/quran/yusufAli/QURAN/9.htm.
72 Hamid Algar, “Silent and Vocal dhikr in the Naqshbandī Order,” in Akten des VII. Kongresses für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, Göttingen, 15.–22. August 1974, ed. Albert
Dietrich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), 41; and Paul, Doctrine and Organization, 18–30.
73 Muhammad Pārsā’s “Kashfiyya,” still in manuscript, is cited in Paul, Doctrine and Organization, 28.
25

6 The adab of siyāsa in the New Piety
The adab of siyāsa – the ethics of politics – is spelt out nicely in one anecdote, where the protagonist Aḥrār explains how it is that the Naqshbandīs
have not overcome their competitors. Had we not been preoccupied by thecommand to protect Muslims from injustice, Aḥrār claims,
there would not have been a single shaykh from another Sufi lineage who
could boast even one disciple. But we need to interact with sultans to conquer their souls and in this manner avail the wellbeing of Muslims.74

Activism and involvement in the social world while continuing to tend to
one’s spiritual needs is explicitly endorsed in Naqshbandī teaching, as reflected in a series of paired contraries: khalwat dar anjuman, or seek solitudein the crowd, and safar dar waṭan, or journey in the homeland (one’s ownsoul), which point out that preserving one’s spiritual equanimity is possible
even if one goes into the crowd or attends a princely court, as long as one
does not lose sight of a higher spiritual realm.
For spiritual leaders who claimed to shun mundane affairs, Sufi masters
placed a heavy premium on proximity to power. That conundrum is nicely
captured in a modern collected biography of Naqshbandī shaykhs by the
Egyptian Sufi master and poet Yāsīn b. Ibrāhīm al-Sanhūtī (d. 1935). The
Sufi worldview, he holds, is one that rests on shunning worldliness, but at
the same time it is tasked with upholding justice, ensuring that governors
act in accordance with the law of God, and promoting public welfare.75
That concept of a public religion that acknowledges the imperative ofgovernance – as has been sketched in this study – exemplifies secularity,
understood not in contradistinction to religion or at least not allied withor hostile to any particular religion, but rather in a more specific sense to
denote those “institutionally as well as symbolically embedded forms andarrangements that distinguish between religion and other societal areas.”76
74 Rashaḥāt, II, 531.
75 Yāsīn b. Ibrāhīm Al-Sanhūtī, Al-Anwār al-qudsiyyah fī manāqib al-sādah al-Naqshbandiyya, (Cairo: Matba‘a al-Sa‘ada, 1925), 130. For modern Naqshbandī political involvement,
see Dina Le Gall, “Forgotten Naqshbandīs and the Culture of Pre-Modern Sufi Brotherhoods,” Studia Islamica 97 (2003).
76 Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Research Programme of the HCAS ‘Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’,” Working Paper Series HCAS
“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 1 (Leipzig University,2016), 8; see too Armando Salvatore, “The Euro-Islamic Roots of Secularity: A Difficult
Equation,” Asian Journal of Social Science 33, no. 3 (2005).
26

In Armando Salvatore’s explanation, secularity “manifests itself most directlyin concrete modes of governance, and in the way religion is reconstructed as
experience and belief to be confined to the private sphere of life.”77
Kāshifī’s account of an encounter between two rival Tīmūrid princes,
Abū Saʿīd (r. 1451–69) in Samarqand and Abū al-Qāsim Bābur (r. 1447–57),
who ruled in Khurāsān, is telling in this regard. Faced with an imminent attack from Bābur’s forces, Abū Saʿīd asked ʿUbayd Allāh Aḥrār foradvice. The military commanders in his service had ruled out resistance as
futile, and advised the sultan to seek refuge in Turkestan. Aḥrār disagreed,and said: “I have assumed the task of defeating Bābur. Rest assured: I will
fulfill my task.” The commanders protested, but the Sufi shaykh prevailed
because, we are told, the sultan was steadfast in his conviction. The commanders of Bābur’s army knew that Abū Saʿīd’s forces would not survive
in battle against them. They were certain that his commanders would
arrange his escape from Samarqand, and planned their attack on that basis.
As Bābur’s army descended on the city, Abū Sa‘īd’s soldiers were dispersed
in various neighborhoods. The people of Samarqand put up a fierce resistance, and as instructed, proceeded to cut off the nose and ears of each captured soldier. Bābur’s army was in despair. Then a cholera epidemic befell
their horses and the trenchant smell of decaying corpses exacerbated theirmisery. Bābur sent an emissary to Aḥrār to sue for peace.78
But the story does not end there. As the vanquished Bābur lay on his
side outside the city walls, he is said to have cried out:
It may be true that we did not conquer Samarqand, but we did learn thetruth about Khwāja Aḥrār, who is not an ʿārif, for if he were, he would nothave destroyed us so.

Aḥrār’s retort in defense of his spiritual credentials elevated the status of
Sufi saints to that of prophets:
Like prophets, ʿārifs are judged by the cause not the consequence of theiractions. For if it weren’t so, justifying the destruction wrought by the likes
of Noah and Hūd who destroyed their own people by water and wind
would be a problem.79

77 Armando Salvatore, “The Euro-Islamic Roots of Secularity,” 415. The Sufi exception to
Salvatore’s definition – their espousal of a distinctly public master-disciple relationshipalongside an internalized religious experience based on individual practice – is addressedin more detail in the following section.
78 Rashaḥāt, II, 522–24.
79 Rashaḥāt, II, 525–26.
27

To support his claim, Aḥrār cites Q 8:11, which, addressing the believers,
claims that it was not they who killed the unbelievers, but God himself.
In this episode, Aḥrār emerges as the true ruler of Samarqand, the peopleof the city his true army, and their truth confirmed by divine intervention. The mandate of restraining rulers, and its handmaiden, promoting
the common good, is only feasible if religious leaders engage with politicallife – a nexus of secularity in early modern Islamic political thought. Restraining rulers denotes a differentiated notion of society, for it recognizes
a political realm that must be tamed by religion, and an ideational sphereof religion which must be tempered to make good government possible.
Crucially, however, it does not formulate a secular society, from which
religion is segregated. Instead, Kāshifī’s Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt constructs
a public piety that, although in tension with politics, eschews a secular/
religious divide.

7 New Pieties
That the religious landscape of Iran was drastically transformed in the
period between the Mongol invasions and the coming of the Ṣafavids, originally leaders of a Sufi movement, is self-evident. Most conventional accounts read that history as a gradual migration from Sunnism to Shi‘ism,
facilitated by “Twelver Sunni” religious leaders or creeds that combined
Sunni dogma with elements of the Shi‘i faith.80 These ‘syncretistic’ creeds
and actors paved the way for a full-scale conversion by spending hundredsof years warming Iranian hearts to a Shi‘ism-lite, a creed fused with philo‘Alidism, spirituality, and reverence for human agents, from imams
to Sufi pīrs (masters). Algar has argued against both the claim that Sufi
communities prepared Iran for conversion to the Shi’i creed, and the80 The term was coined by Muhammad Ja‘far Maḥjūb, cited in Algar, “The Naqshbandis andSafavids,” 31; for a rebuttal of the ‘soft Sunnism’ hypothesis from a different angle, see Sajjad
Rizvi, “Before the Safavid-Ottoman Conflict: Jāmī and Sectarianism in Timurid Iran andIraq,” in Jāmī in Regional Contexts, 227-30; and for the Sunnitization of Shi‘ism in the Islamic west exemplified in the Almohad conception of authority in the 12th and 13th centuries,
see Maribel Fierro, “The Legal Policies of the Almohad Caliphs and Ibn Rushd’s Bidāyatal-mujtahid,” Journal of Islamic Studies 10, no. 3 (1999), and her “The Almohads and theFatimids,” in The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West during the
Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Maribel Fierro (London: Routledge, 2012).
28

claim that Iran would have converted with or without the Shi‘i Ṣafavids
at its helm. His view rests to a very large extent on what he sees as
the Sunni zeal of the Naqshbandī Sufis.81 The predominance of the
fiercely Sunni Naqshbandī Sufis in the region, he writes, shouldhave sufficed to prevent any warming to the Shi‘i cause. However,Ṣafavid Shi‘ism was just one of a plethora of new pieties that took holdin the 14th century, a good number of which were not ‘syncretistic’ andlooked not to reconcile but to override differences among communities ofMuslims.
One such piety is the Mughal emperor Akbar’s (r. 1556–1605) muchcelebrated dīn-i ilāhī, or ‘true religion,’ which pivots around the principle ofṣulḥ-i kull, or universal conciliation. Against the prevailing consensus thatplaces the impetus for such cross-confessionalism in the Mughal court andits interest in preserving public peace, Abbas Amanat has recently suggested that the agnostics at Akbar’s court, such as the Nuqṭawīs, played a moresignificant role in its formulation than previously considered. PointistNuqṭawī cosmology “advanced a theory of mystical materialism and cyclical renewal that essentially called for a renewed humanist creed beyond
the pale of Islamic dispensation.”82 Brought to India by Iranian scholars
fleeing Ṣafavid persecution, Nuqṭawī doctrine was naturalized in India’s
multi-confessional religious landscape as it spread among Sufi communities. A particularly influential individual was the Nuqṭawī scholar, Mīr
Sayyid Sharīf Āmulī (d. 1625) who arrived at Akbar’s court in 1576. According to Amanat, Āmulī persuaded Akbar that kingship, as a reflectionof the divine, should incorporate the full gamut of diverse creeds, but thismay be overstating Āmulī’s reach.
Equally emblematic of the new pieties is the politically active andapocalyptic Ḥurūfiyya (Lettrist) movement founded by Faḍl Allāh Astrābādī, who claimed to have received the full meaning of Muhammad’s
message in a revelation, and was executed for this and other such innovative beliefs by the Tīmūrid governor of Azerbaijan in 1394. His followers were particularly influential among the Bektashi Sufis in the Ottoman
81 Algar, “The Naqshbandis and Safavids,” 32.
82 Abbas Amanat, “Persian Nuqṭawīs and the Shaping of the Doctrine of ‘Universal Conciliation’ (SULḤ-I KULL) in Mughal India,” in Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism andthe Construction of Religious Authority in Islam, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden: Brill,2014), 367.
29

empire.83 Although the so-called Ḥurūfiyya were considered a heresy anddecried in mainstream historical sources, the innovations in their creed
were, for the most part adoptions of Shi‘i tenets. These included ta’wīl (inShi‘i creed, the ability to bridge the inner and outer meanings of prophetic
revelation, a privilege granted specifically to the imams), the imam as the
manifestation of the divine word and spiritual guide, the means by which
the divine attributes can be known, as well as the eschatological witnesses
which will explain all the Qur’an’s ambiguities at the end of time.84 In his testament, Astrābādī compares himself to Ḥusayn b. ‘Alī, Muhammad’s grandson
who was killed in battle in 680 and the paradigmatic martyr of Shi‘i Islam.85
In Egypt, overcoming sectarian differences and active involvement in
the design and practice of politics was the Sufi master ‘Abd al-Wahhāb alSha‘rānī’s (d. 1565) project. Sha‘rānī was close to two Sufi communities ofhis day, the Shādhilīs and the Aḥmadīs, and although a prolific writer, henever professed his own affiliation.86 Samuela Pagani has suggested that
Al-Sha‘rānī’s project in his hagiographical treatise, al-Mīzān al-kubrā’,was to arrive at a synthesis between the legal and spiritual traditions inIslam.87 To that end, al-Sha‘rānī resorted to a “wide language” (kalām wāsi‘)to bridge between the madrasa (colleges of Islamic legal and theologicallearning) and the zāwiya (Sufi gathering sites), popular and high Islam,and to publicize esoteric Sufi doctrine in a form that was palatable to theliteralist (ẓāhirī) ‘ulamā’.

83 For more on the Ḥurūfī creed and its history, see Hamid Algar, “Horufism,” Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, accessed June 4, 2019. Originally published December 15, 2004.
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/horufism.
84 Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ‘Irāqī, “Introduction,” in Khwāja Muhammad Pārsā-yi Bukhārā’ī, Qudsiyya, ed. Aḥmad Ṭāhirī ‘Irāqī (Tehran: Tahuri, 1975), 24–25; and Orkhan Mir-Kasimov,“Ummīs versus Imāms in the Ḥurūfī Prophetology: An Attempt at a Sunnī/Shī‘ī Synthesis?” in Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious
Authority in Islam, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
85 Shahzad Bashir, Fazlallah Astrabadi and the Hurufis (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 39–40.
86 For al-Sha‘rānī’s biography, see the introduction to Al-Sha‘rānī, ‘Abd al-Wahhāb ibnAḥmad ibn ‘Alī, Advice for Callow Jurists and Gullible Mendicants on Befriending Emirs,
trans. Adam Sabra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and for his political activities, see Neguin Yavari, “Sufis as Court Advisors,” in Handbook of Sufi Studies: Sufi
Institutions, ed. Alexandre Papas (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2020).
87 Samuela Pagani, “The Meaning of the ikhtilāf al-madhāhib in ‘Abd al-Wahhāb alSha‘rānī’s al-Mīzān al-kubrā’,” Islamic Law and Society 11, no. 2 (2004).
30

A similar argument lies at the heart of Armando Salvatore’s distinction between the rival ethics of adab and hadith inspired moralism,a rather ‘soft’ distinction, whereby the ethical and literary tradition of adabworks as an harmonious counterpoint more than as a sheer alternative,
to the normative discourse subsumed under the notion of shari‘a, the law
originating from Divine will (shar‘).88

That soft distinction has forged differentiations, even if ambivalent anduncertain, between religion and other spheres of human activity, including
politics, law, art, and the economy.

8 Global New Pieties?
In thinking about the Naqshbandīs and other Sufi communities as agentsof religious change in the early modern period in global terms,89 our attention is quickly drawn to the confessionalization paradigm put forward
by Heinz Schilling and others to explain the role of religion in modern
European history. There too, religion at the service of politics, at religion’s
instigation, is a constitutive element. In brief, Schilling argues that the endof the 16th century witnessed the birth of three or four confessional churches
that belong squarely to Europe’s modern history: the Lutheran Church,
the Calvinist/Reformed Church, the Tridentine Catholic Church, and theAnglican Church. The new churches divided Europe into distinct cultural
religious systems, gave birth to a new state system, redefined political
identities and spawned new nations. Confessional Europe may have been
Christian for seventeen centuries, but the dawn of secularization in the
18th century that marked the beginning of modern Europe would not havetaken hold had it not been for confessionalization.90
88 Armando Salvatore, “The Islamicate Adab Tradition vs. the Islamic Shari‘a, from Pre-Colonial to Colonial,” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond theWest, Beyond Modernities” 3 (Leipzig University, 2018), 7.
89 Alan Strathern, “Global Early Modernity and What Came Before,” Past & Present 238,
no. 13 (2018).
90 Heinz Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization, 11–32; and his “Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm,“ in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of
Bodo Nischan, ed. John M. Headley, J. Hillerbrand and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2004), 21–35, and Thomas A. Brady, Jr. “Confessionalization – The Careerof a Concept,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory31For the most part incorrectly, in my opinion, recent discussions on
confessionalization in the Islamic world take the paradigm to imply an intensification of confessional strife and are focused on the fostering of sectarian identity by the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal states in the 16th century. A number of those studies are reviewed in a recent Past & Present
review article by Chris Markiewicz.91 What Markiewicz fails to note, however, is that confessionalization crystallizes on the social register rather
than in government policy, and that as such, the impetus for a wellbounded confessional identity comes from religious actors, be it Aquinas’ disciple Ptolemy of Lucca (d. 1327), or his near contemporary at theĪlkhānid court, ‘Alā’ al-Dawla Simnānī. In this vein, the new Sufi madhhab is confessional, that is, it believes in the truth of its creed as well as its
superiority to its many competitors, but also promotes a universal religion thatis open to all, accommodates public peace and prioritizes the common good.
The majority of the new pieties that marked early modern Islamic history
may have been short-lived and unsuccessful in birthing new religions (Babis
and Bahais are notable 19th-century exceptions). But they were instrumental
in crafting new molds of pious behavior, focused on individual practice, andcentered around a politically active and intensely mobile individual leader.92
They also begat secularity.93 As Reinhard Schulze has demonstrated, the newpieties spawned modern confessional conceptions of religious identity in theof Bodo Nischan, ed. John M. Headley, J. Hillerbrand and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2004), 1–20.
91 Christopher Markiewicz, “Europeanist Trends and Islamicate Trajectories in early Modern
Ottoman History,” Past & Present 239, no. 1 (2018). See too Nile Green, “Islam in the Early
Modern World,” in The Cambridge World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015);
and for another unconvincing application of the confessionalization paradigm to the Middle East, see Ayşe Baltacioğlu, “Formation of Kizilbaş Communities in Anatolia and Ottoman Responses, 1450s–1630s,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 20, no. 1–2 (2014).
92 The kinetic energy of the Sufi masters and their proselytizing agents who crisscrossed
the Islamic lands on a regular basis recalls the role of religious immigrants in creating theentrepreneurial class of the new capitalist cities of Europe in the 17th century, see Hugh
Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social
Change (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 28–42.
93 Reinhard Schulze, “The Ambiguity of the Religious Self in Pre- and Postnational Social
Worlds: Examples from 17th-Century Morocco and 20th-Century Germany” (lecture, 16th
Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions, Bern, June17, 2018); and idem, “Islam and the Global History of Secularity” (lecture, Conference on“Secularities – Patterns of Distinction, Paths of Differentiation” convened by the HCAS
“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities,” Leipzig, October 5, 2018).
32

16th and 17th centuries, that by the 19th century, led to the emergence of national identities, and in time, the rise of nation states. What is genuinely at stakein recasting the religious history of the early modern Islamic world is not
simply a call for new, improved labels, a cleverly angulated composite noun
to supplant ‘syncretistic,’ ‘hybrid,’ or ‘synthesis.’ Rather, the hope is for a paradigm of religious change that is not restricted to a spectrum stretching from
Sunnism to Shi‘ism, along which pieties of dazzling variety may be plotted.
In the longer run, this felicitous turn may finally put to rest the seemingly interminable quest for Islamic secularism, or for an indigenous enlightenment.94 We may be able to stop asking, as Amanat does in his study
on Nuqṭawī influence at the Mughal court, why it was that “the agnostic
trend of the early modern Persianate world differed from [its] equivalents
in Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries,” and failed to produce “a lasting
philosophical movement similar to the early Enlightenment in such places
as the Dutch Republic,”95 and instead consider the Enlightenment
less as the birthplace of secularism than as the birthplace of a distinctly
modern form of religion whose presence and power continues to shape
the present.96

How will our understanding of modern religion change if, in line with theaforesaid, modern confessions such as Bahaism and Salafism are considered in tandem as equally a part of modern Islam?
The new pieties of the early modern period demand not just a thoroughrevision of how the history of Sufi movements and practices is studied,and a reevaluation of categories and concepts used to differentiate religious
94 Albrecht Hofheinz has argued that Sufi movements (what he, following Reinhard Schulze,
calls Neo-Sufi movements) of the 18th and 19th centuries differed sufficiently from their earlier counterparts to successfully catalyze an Islamic Enlightenment. They shared an agenda
with Pietists – especially the American Methodists – that included: “Carrying the simple(and simplified) message of Truth beyond the sterile debating rooms of the theologians,
carrying it to the common people, implementing it in real life, [and] making every individual responsible for its implementation;” see “Illumination and Enlightenment Revisited,
or: Pietism and the Roots of Islamic Modernity,” 18. Nile Green has noted several differences between Western mysticism and Sufism regarding the latter’s collective and public
rather than individualistic and private aspects, see his Sufism: A Global History, 1–10. For
more on the Naqshbandīs in that period, see Waleed Ziad, “From Yarkand to Sindh via
Kabul: The Rise of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi Networks in the Eighteenth and NineteenthCenturies, in The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, Abbas Amanat and Assef
Ashraf, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 125–68.
95 Amanat, “Persian Nuqṭawīs and the Shaping of the Doctrine,” 389.
96 Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” 1080.
33

movements and identities, but also a rethinking of Islamic history in thecontext of global history. Even if convergence between various parts of theearly modern world – in both what came before early modernity and whatcame after it – remains elusive, a comparative approach to religious change
may help illuminate global currents that defy easy categorization and, crucially, predate the empire-building impulse that for many early modernists
sculpts their era from what came before it.97
Focusing on religious change will also force a reconsideration of arguments premised on absence of one sort or another. The absence of institutions – no matter how broadly defined98 – is one example, as it has
been taken to explain why it was that Islamic societies missed the boat tomodernity, secularization and, ultimately democracy. Eduardo Manzano’s
study on the different processes of institutionalization in the medieval Christian and Islamic worlds is a case in point. While institutions served as enginesof growth in 14th-century Europe, he writes, they failed in the Islamic world,
because of the separation between power and authority that emerged at
an early and critical stage in the Islamic polity; and, the distinctive notionof community that emerged as a result of this and helped to shape theself-definition of Muslim societies and the making of the social regularities
that performed processes of institutionalization in early Islam.99

Manzano’s thesis – that strong states grew to dominate the Christian lands
whereas states in the Islamic world remained weak as religion successfully
monopolized the discourse in authority – has been the mantra of scholarship on the Islamic world for almost a century.
97 In his defense of the ‘Cambridge method’ against accusations of insularity and Eurocentrism, J. G. A. Pocock suggests an axial age common to several civilizations aroundthe globe, which was succeeded, “circa 1500–1700, by an age of global empire, in which
European commerce dominated the global ocean and permitted economic and politicaldomination of the world’s cultures.” See J. G. A. Pocock, “On the Unglobality of Contexts:
Cambridge Methods and the History of Political Thought,” Global Intellectual History 4, no.
1 (2018): 7; and for an opposing view, see John Dunn, “Why We Need a Global History of
Political Thought,” in Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of PoliticalThought, ed. Béla Kapossy et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
98 For a range of possibilities for what can be defined as an institution, see Gadi Algazi,“Comparing Medieval Institutions: A Few Introductory Remarks,” in Diverging Paths?
The Shapes of Power and Institutions in Medieval Christendom and Islam, ed. John Hudson and Ana Rodríguez (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 5–7.
99 Eduardo Manzano, “Why Did Islamic Medieval Institutions Become So Different from
Western Medieval Institutions,” Medieval Worlds 1 (2015): 127.
34

In important ways, the reach of this new approach is more modest,
although it extends beyond the question raised by Gadi Algazi:
Can we engage in large-scale comparisons between societies and even groupsof historical societies and ask why they changed in one and not the other without assuming the superiority of one particular historical path, without taking
this path for granted even while rejecting any value judgements, and without
reducing alternative trajectories to no more than the roads not taken?100

The new approach calls for new strategies of reading that will, one hopes,
give rise to better questions, and a modern conceptual lexicon for rethinking the past. Any attempt at globalizing Islamic history, be it premised on
exchange, influence, cross-pollination, or combinative,101 will ultimately
rest on globalizing – read modernizing – its historiographical apparatus.
And that is where we must begin.

100 Gadi Algazi, “Comparing Medieval Institutions,” 3.
101 For more on the various attempts to capture the infrastructure of cross-cultural exchange
in the premodern period, see James E. Montgomery, “Islamic Crosspollinations,” inIslamic Crosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East, ed. James. E. Montgomery, Anna Akasoy and Peter E. Pormann, (Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust,2007), 148–93; and Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, “Introduction: Towards a
Global Middle Ages,” Past & Present 238, Issue supplement 13 (2018).

35

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