Shifting Modes of Piety in Early Modern Iran and the Persephone Zone
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Neguin Yavari Shifting Modes of Piety in Early Modern Iran and 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 the Persephone Zone.” Leipzig University, 2019. © Neguin Yavari This Working Paper has been published online and can be downloaded from www.multiple-secularities.de/publications/working-papers or ordered in print via email to [email protected] The HCAS’s Working Paper Series serves to disseminate the results of work in progress prior to publication to encourage the exchange of ideas and academic debate. Inclusion of a paper in the Working Paper Series should not limit publica- tion in any other venue. Copyright remains with the authors. 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 the West, Beyond Modernities” 10. Leipzig University, 2019. Leipzig University HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities“ Nikolaistraße 8–10 04109 Leipzig Germany The HCAS is part of Leipzig University and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). 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 ................................................................................................ 37 1 Shifting Modes of Piety in Early Modern Iran and the Persephone Zone Abstract: If any one thing marks early modern history, it is religious trans- formation. 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 15th and 16th 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 16th-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 Secu- larization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (2003); on parallels be- tween modern (18th-19th century) Sufism and American pietism, see Albrecht Hofheinz, “Illumination and Enlightenment Revisited, or: Pietism and the Roots of Islamic Mo- dernity,” 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- afī ‘Alī b. usayn Wāi’ 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- usaynṢ al-KāshifīḤ al- afī, Tarjamatẓ Rashahḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt, tr. Muhammad Murad b. ‘Abd Allah al-Qazani (Mecca: Matba‘a al-Muhammadiya, 1882 or 1883); English translationḤ as Mawlana Ali ibnṢ Husain Safi, Beads of Dew form the Source of Life, tr. Muhtar Holland (Oakland Park, CA: Al-Baz Publishers, 2001). On the manu- script history of the text, see H. Beveridge, “The Rasha āt-i ‘Ain al- ayāt (Tricklings from the Fountain of Life),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 48, no. 1 (1916). “Sprin- klings from the Fountain of Life” is Nile Green’s translation,ḥ see “The ḤDilemmas 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. usayn al-Wā‘i al-Kāshifī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson, 2009. Ḥ ẓ 3 1 Introduction In the standard iteration that governs the history of Sufi movements, the altered social and political landscape brought about by the Mongol inva- sions which began in the early 13th century is regarded as the impetus for their flourishing. In that narrative, a mystical dimension to Islam was born sometime late in the 9th century, and developed as a spiritual alternative to the legalistic Islam of the ‘ulamā’.3 On the political register, the flourishing phase was coeval with the fall of the Abbasids, a protracted process that began in the mid-9th century and lasted until the Mongol invasions, and the ensuing freefall that lasted from the mid-13th to the mid-18th century, when colonial interventions derailed indigenous modes of social, political and economic life and reset the clock. Told as such, the history of the Islamic world in the contemporary period is severed from that which transpired in 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 beginning in the 1800s, rather than by currents and developments that may have per- colated in the region over long centuries.4 In the larger study of which this paper is a part, I suggest a recasting of that conventional narrative, and the periodization schema that accompanies it – a central component of which is the erasure of an early modern phase from Islamic history. Here, however, the focus is on two specific dimensions: the broader, more historicized context and the instrumentalization of the past 3 For a history of that scholarship see Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–124. 4 Devin DeWeese has come to much the same conclusion regarding Sufi movements in Central Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries, see Devin DeWeese, “Re-Envisioning the His- tory of Sufi Communities in Central Asia: Continuity and Adaptation in Sources and So- cial 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 de- liberate rooting of Naqshbandī history in earlier debates and developments in Kāshifī’s 16th-century collected biography. The performative regard of Sufi discourse, and the perlocutionary force of Kāshifī’s genealogical approach and 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 world in the early modern period, including its novel approach to sectarian affilia- tion, 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 early modern context to the new piety. 2 Mobilizing the Past: Abū ‘Alī al-Fārmadhī There may have been ascetic, pietist, or Sufi luminaries, and even spiritual communities that coalesced around them since the earliest days of Islam, but the political engagement of the Sufi reformation that altered the land- scape 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