The papers in this panel explore the varying dimensions and nuances of authorities, such as women’s authority, ascetical and renunciant, political authority, particularly through the prism of mahdis, ‘awliyas, and imams. These modes of authority are explored using various textual (hagiographies), hermeneutical traditions, and more. The discussions in these papers unsettle normative assumptions of guidance in Islamic mystical movements, from Sufism to Shi‘ism, across space and time and its continued legacies today.
This presentation introduces the recently published critical edition (Brill, 2020) and monograph (Cambridge University Press, 2024) on the legacy of the sixteenth-century female Sufi master from Bukhara, celebrated as Aghā-yi Buzurg, along with the hagiography Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib dedicated to her by her male disciple Ḥāfiẓ Baṣīr.
It is widely held by scholars of early Sufism that Sufism developed out of ascetic and renunciant traditions (*zuhd*). In this view, Sufi ideas about the love of God and about union with the divine Beloved enriched, or in some cases, replaced earlier ideals of renouncing the world, fear of God, and fear of divine punishment. This paper reconsiders our understanding of a transition from ideals of fear to ideals of love by examining the seventh-century ascetic of Basra, ʿĀmir b. ʿAbd Qays. ʿĀmir was remembered for his lifelong celibacy, which he defended as an act of “betrothal” to God. I argue that ʿĀmir’s biographers saw him as an early exemplar of love mysticism, saw no conflict between his fear of God and his engagement to God, and understood him as articulating the value of celibacy for Muslims as a form of spiritual marriage.
Recent studies on Islamic mysticism in the early modern period have explored the influence of Muḥammad ibn ‘Arabī (1165-1240) on political theory and social movements in Asia. However, to what extent did Ibn ‘Arabī see himself as contributing to Islamic political theory. This paper explores the ways in which Ibn ‘Arabī bridges the classical Ṣūfism of the Islamic East with a native, Andalusī-Maghribī mystical tradition (I‘tibār). I argue that the political dimensions of texts like The Meccan Revelations and the Bezels of Wisdom represent draw heavily on caliphal and mahdist ideologies from the Islamic West (Fāṭimids, Umayyad Córdoba, Almohads) that are absent from classical Ṣūfism. I further argue that Ibn ‘Arabī’s “Seal of the Saints” (khātim al-awliyā’) recasts the mahdī as a transhistorical, mystical influence on awliyā’ across time and functions as new constitutional principle for a caliphate that incorporates the mahdī’s power to create post-prophetic sunna.
This paper is about how borrowings from Shiʿism shaped ideas of mystical and political authority among the Niʿmatullāhiyya, a major Sufi order of medieval and modern Iran. Roughly a century before becoming Iran’s official religion and political instrument of the Safavid Empire, Twelver Shiʿism provided inspiration for the Niʿmatullāhiyya’s founder Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī and his successors in their formulation of a decentralized view of collective identity that gave nominal recognition to worldly sultanates, while teaching complete loyalty to a Sufi shaykh and ascribing ultimate authority only to the Hidden Imam. I present evidence for these Sufi Shiʿite teachings for the first time in scholarship, considering their significance as a quietist alternative to the centralizing imperial messianism of the Sunni Timurids. I argue that Niʿmatullāhī teachings reflected the order’s social and political reality as a loosely incorporated, transregional network with economical and political autonomy on the margins of imperial power.