Boundaries of Normativity and Authenticity in Islam

In early fourteenth-century Ilkhan (Mongol-ruled) Iran, the Sufi poet of Tabriz Mahmud Shabistari (d. ca. 1320) composed the Gulshan-i Raz (“Rose Garden of Mystery”), a masterpiece Persian poem on Sufi doctrine and practice. The Gulshan concisely encapsulated, in a didactic question-and-answer format, the controversial philosophy of the famed Andalusian Sufi Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240). While the poem’s simple summary of Ibn ‘Arabi’s cosmology and perspective on the unity of belief (iman) in Islam and infidelity (kufr) are well-known, this paper asserts that the Gulshan was a foundational master text for the people of tahqiq ("realization"), or the muhaqqiqs ("realizers"), a new group of Ibn ‘Arabian Sufi-scholars who treated the cosmos and human self as ever-changing scriptures on par with the Qur’an.

This paper argues that modern Muslim reformers’ engagement in the global post-Enlightenment paradigm led to the adoption of a liberal conception of selfhood, reflected in their discourse of jihād. The paper examines the underlying conceptions of selfhood in both pre-modern traditional and modernist discourses of jihād. The Aristotelian conception of selfhood and its reflection on the pre-modern discourse on jihād, represented by al-Ghazālī, is contrasted with the liberal conception adopted by Muslim reformers, such as ʿAbduh, Riḍā, and al-Marāghī. The paper demonstrates how these reformers' argument to annul the legitimacy of offensive jihād is rooted in a conception of selfhood that is rational and autonomous, which departs from the pre-modern conception of selfhood in which socialization and education are necessary for moral character. This shift in the conception of selfhood is analyzed within a global framework, emphasizing the interplay between the Islamic tradition and the global post-Enlightenment paradigm.

This paper contributes to the on-going debate surrounding the religious identity of the Sāmānid court poet Abū Manṣūr Aḥmad b. Aḥmad Daqīqī (d. ~976). I argue that while drawing from Middle Persian texts and detailing Zoroastrian mytho-history in his works, Daqīqī writes within a long-standing tradition of Iranian Muslims who incorporated Zoroastrian themes non-polemically in their works. I argue that such references would not present a challenge to these authors’ identities as Muslim, despite recent claims by scholars. My analysis highlights the benefits of consulting a range of genres including poetry in order to augment our understanding of religious identity formation. References to Zoroastrianism by Muslims authors of early Islamic Iran reflect processes of the indigenization of Islam on the Iranian plateau which allowed such newly Islamized communities to view their ancient histories as part of an Islamic heritage. 

Taṣarruf al-Kawn, the saintly ability to enact material change through spiritual causation, is a core idea that features prominently in Sufi and Shī‘ī traditions, and is also at the heart of South Asian Islamic reformist movements. Further, it is a topic that is understudied and undertheorized academically in terms of the unique conceptions of agency it reflects from 19th and 20th century South Asia. My reading of Shāh Ismail Dehlvi (d. 1831) and his predecessors, such as Shāh Walīullāh Dehlawī (d. 1762), takes seriously saintly powers without denying the actor their agency; it recognizes the human as the agential source of taṣarruf, though not independently. I seek to reformulate the critique in Taqwiyat al-Īmān and other reformist literature as not necessarily directed against taṣarruf or intercession, but against the marking of human agency as independent through forms of practice and devotion, which I identify as performative shirk. . This paper offers a theory of agency as liminal, multidirectional, and capable of enacting supernatural events (effecting change beyond material causal chains), while not explaining it away as miraculous or attributable to a single agential source.

The digital collections of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) include images of fourteen Zaydī-owned libraries from Yemen, over 700 individual manuscripts. While most items in these collections are by Zaydī authors, there are some texts by Sunnīs and a small number by non-Zaydī Shīʻīs. Some Sunnī texts are by early authors, especially Muʻtazilīs. Others are the result of later waves of interest in Sunnī thought among Zaydī scholars, including a faction who were attracted to the Wahhābī movement in the 18th century. The prevalence of non-Zaydī items varies from one library to another with the interests and ideological affiliations of their owners. This study moves beyond research on individual manuscripts to consider entire libraries as intentional assemblages. It will allow us to see how deeply intertwined the Zaydīs of Yemen have been—and continue to be—with their non-Zaydī neighbors in Yemen, across the Arabian Peninsula, and beyond.