Sufis, Saints, and Shrine: Piety in the Timurid Period, 1370-1507
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Sufis, Saints, and Shrine: Piety in the Timurid Period, 1370-1507 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Salikuddin, Rubina Kauser. 2018. Sufis, Saints, and Shrine: Piety in the Timurid Period, 1370-1507. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41129127 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Sufis, Saints, and Shrine: Piety in the Timurid Period, 1370-1507 A thesis presented by Rubina Kauser Salikuddin to The Department of History and The Committee on Middle Eastern Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Subject of History and Middle Eastern Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2018 © 2018- Rubina Kauser Salikuddin All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Roy P. Mottahedeh Rubina Kauser Salikuddin Sufis, Saints, and Shrines: Piety in the Timurid Period, 1370-1507 Abstract This dissertation is a study on piety and religious practice as shaped by the experience of pilgrimage to these numerous saintly shrines in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Timurid Iran and Central Asia. Shrine visitation, or ziyārat, was one of the most ubiquitous Islamic devotional practices across medieval Iran and Central Asia, at times eliciting more zeal than obligatory rituals such as the Friday congregational prayer. This dissertation makes use of a broad source base including city histories, shrine visitation guides, compendiums of religious sciences, court histories, biographies of Sufis, endowment deeds, ethical or moral (akhlāq) treatises, and material culture in the form of architecture and epigraphical data. This work contributes to a better understanding of how Islam as a discursive tradition informed and was informed by the piety and religious practice of medieval Muslims of all classes. It challenges a vision of a monolithic Islamic orthopraxy by showing how the very fabric of Islam in medieval Iran and Central Asia represented both continuity with an Islamic past and a catering to local and contemporary needs. The aim of this study is three-fold. First, it argues that the forms of ritual prescribed in the Timurid shrine manuals largely coalesced into a coherent program in this period and reflect a vernacular understanding of shrine visitation found in the more scholarly Islamic literature. It also demonstrates how the performance of the physical practices and oral litanies of the ziyārat formed part of the habitus of a pilgrim. Second, the hagiographic stories of the holy dead revered at these shrines represent tangible ideals of pious living for society to imitate. They point to the centrality of esotericism, miracle-working and a rigorous adherence to the Sharia in constructing -iii- Dissertation Advisor: Roy P. Mottahedeh Rubina Kauser Salikuddin this template. For example, a major part of the saintliness of Abū Yūsuf Hamadānī, an important saint buried in Samarkand, stems from his extreme religious observance. He is said to have made the Hajj thirty-three times, finished the Qur’an over a thousand times, memorized over seven hundred books on the religious sciences, received over two hundred and sixteen scholars and spent most of his life fasting. On the other hand, the patron saint of this same city, Shāh-i Zinda, is revered for his supernatural powers and his relation to the Prophet Muḥammad. This amplified reverence for the Prophet Muḥammad and his family demonstrates the increasing precedence of shrines of people genealogically linked to the Prophet Muḥammad as objects of veneration by the largely Sunni populations in the Timurid period. The third and final aim of this dissertation is to provide a map of the actual places of pilgrimage and establish the importance of the “locality” of saints in creating a shared identity and history using the methods of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). It traces the ways that pilgrims would move through their cities to visit the various shrines scattered across the landscape. The journey to some shrines fell well within the normal daily movements of an inhabitant of a particular city, while other journeys proved more arduous, pointing to the possibility of a varied ziyārat experience. While many shrines were presented as single locations, there are instances when a pilgrim is advised to make a circuit of many important shrines in a certain area or of a certain type of holy person (e.g. prophets). The routes and spaces, along with mosques and madrasas, are embedded in a sacred geography of the city. -iv- To my parents Dr. Mohammed Salikuddin and Mrs. Naseem Salikuddin for their unwavering support and infinite kindness -v- TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... vii A Note on Transliteration and Dates ....................................................................................... viii Figures .................................................................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER 1: Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: The Shrine as a Center of Timurid Piety and Ritual ..................................... 35 CHAPTER 3: Stories of Saints: Pious Exemplars and Collective Memory ...................... 79 CHAPTER 4: Ahl al-Baytism and the Timurid shrine ........................................................... 152 CHAPTER 5: The Geography of Sanctity .................................................................................. 186 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................................... 234 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 238 -vi- Acknowledgements This dissertation comes at the end of a journey that was much longer than imagined. I am thankful and grateful to God to have had the privilege to undertake this journey and to the many people who also made it possible. I have benefitted greatly from a number of mentors and teachers at Harvard. I owe many thanks to my indefatigable advisor, Prof. Roy P. Mottahedeh, for his continued support, generosity in reading multiple drafts of chapters and offering of wise guidance throughout this process. I thank Prof. David Roxburgh for opening up the beautiful world of Timurid art and architecture. I am also grateful for the kind feedback I received from Prof. Cemal Kafadar and Prof. Ahmed Ragab. I am thankful to family. To Asif for his unending patience, encouragement and role as my head cheerleader. To Azher for his humor and expert help in many parts of this work. To Tamanna for always being my sounding-board. To my parents for allowing me to take this wrong turn into the study of history and supporting me always. To my father-in-law for his positivity and prayers. And most of all to my two babies, Mahrukh and Faiz, who made writing a dissertation very hard but make my life so much brighter. -vii- A Note on Transliteration and Dates Transliteration for Persian and Arabic words will follow the IJMES Transliteration System for each respective language with the following changes: the terminal ta-marbuta in Persian words will be represented with the letter “a” and not be followed by an “h.” With the exception of proper names of people and places, Persian and Arabic words that are transliterated will also be italicized. Words and names that have been generally accepted into the English language will not be transliterated according to this system nor will they be italicized. Some examples include: sayyid, Sunni, Shi‘i, masjid, hadith etc. Dates will be given with the hijrī date coming first followed by the Common Era date. For example, the death date of Timur would be given as d. 807/1405. -viii- Figures Figure 1: Wide View of Herat Shrines Map Figure 2: Shrine Sites Mentioned in Maqṣad al-Iqbāl Chart Figure 3: Map of Samarkand. From J.M. Bloom and S. Blair, eds. The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture, Vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 170. Figure 4: Hawż at the Shrine of ‘Abdī Darūn, Samarkand. From Harvard Fine Arts Library, Digital Images & Slides Collection 1990.19721, downloaded May 2018. Figure 5: Close-up View of Herat Shrines Map Figure 6: List of Major Shrine Sites Chart Figure 7: Map of Walled City (Herat) and Immediate Environs, from T. Allen, A Catalogue of the Toponyms and Monuments of Timurid Herat (Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art at Harvard University and MIT, 1981). Figure 8: Elevation Profile Journey to Darb-i Khush & ‘Abdullāh Taqī Figure 9: Elevation Profile Journey to Khiyābān & Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī Figure 10: Mazār of Abū al-Walīd, Qariya-yi Āzādān. From Harvard Fine Arts Library, Digital Images & Slides Collection d2009.02875, downloaded May 2018. Figure 11: Elevation Profile Journey to Abū al-Walīd Figure 12: The Shrine Complex of ‘Abdullah al-Anṣārī at Gāzurgāh. From Harvard Fine Arts Library, Digital