Year: 2019
Type: report
Abstract: If any one thing marks early modern history, it is religious transformation.Confessional and pietist movements, both European firsts, are prominent examples of such catalysts for change. 1 In large parts of the Islamic world in the 15 th and 16 th centuries, it was Sufi piety that carried the day.The historiographical record reveals strikingly new imaginaires and novel modes of connectivity to the past.The focus in this paper is on the manifold ways in which new forms of religiosity redefined the landscape of politics in the eastern Islamic world.It traces invocations of the past in Fakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī's (d.1532) Rashaḥāt 'ayn al-ḥayāt 2 (Sprinklings from the Fountain of Life), a 16 th -century collected biography of Naqshbandī Sufi masters, to argue that the classificatory schema adopted by the author reveals a template of secularity that marks a significant departure from past manners of adherence.1 On religious change rather than incremental secularism as the engine of change in early modern 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 (18 th -19 th 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 and Cultural Dynamism (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2008). 2 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); Arabic translation 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 or 1883); English translation as Mawlana Ali ibn Husain Safi, Beads of Dew form the Source of 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), "
Author: Neguin Yavari
Language: English
Topic: Islamic Studies and History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: University of Cambridge
OpenAlex ID: W3028493958