Notes on Contributors Alberto Fabio Ambrosio read philosophy and theology at the Dominican College in Bologna and then undertook studies in Turkish language and civilization at Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg. In 2002 he completed an M.A. in Turkish, the subject of his thesis being the ritual of initiation into the Bektashi Order. In the same year he completed a second M.A. in theology with a paper on Hinduism and Sufism (the case of Bistami). In 2007 he finished his doctoral studies in modern history at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) on the subject of doctrines and practices of the Whirling Dervishes in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century. His publications on Rumi and the Whirling Dervishes include: Les derviches tourneurs: doctrine, histoire et pratiques (2006) with Eve Pierunek and Thierry Zarcone, some articles on Ismail Rusuhi Ankaravi in Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (2006), and contribu - tions to the Journal of the History of Sufism. An ordained Catholic priest, he is currently pursuing his research on Sufi culture and Rumi’s order of the Whirling Dervishes in Istanbul, where he has been residing since 2003. Robert (Abdul Hayy) Darr travelled and lived in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s. He was introduced to Sufism in the 1970s through the works of Idries Shah. By 1985 he left the Shah groups and began working in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and making over - land trips inside Afghanistan. In the ensuing years, he befriended a number of Sufis in the region. Darr spent the next couple of decades studying traditional Sufism along with specialized disciplines such as abjad (Islamic numerology). For almost two decades he has been the student of the Afghan Sufi, Raz Mohammed Zaray. For a decade, he studied miniature painting with Afghanistan’s great miniaturist, Homayon Etemadi (d. 2007). Darr is the author of The Spy of the Heart (2007), his own personal auto - biographical account of initiation into a Sufi order in Afghanistan, and several books on Islamic mysticism (Sufism), including a translation of the Quatrains of Khalilullah Khalili (2002) and a translation of The Garden of Mystery: The Gulshan-i raz of Mahmud Shabistari (2007). 244 c o n t r i b u t o r s Devin DeWeese is a professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University; he earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 1985. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradi - tion (1994) and (with Ashirbek Muminov) of Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, Vol. I: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries (2013). His numerous articles on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and Iran focus chiefly on problems of Islamization, on the social and political roles of Sufi communities, and on Sufi literature and hagiography in Persian and Chaghatay Turkic. Recent articles include ‘cAla’ al-Dawla Simnani’s Religious Encounters at the Mongol Court near Tabriz’, in Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz, edited by Judith Pfeiffer (2014); ‘Ahmad Yasav in the Work of Burhan al-Din Qïlïch: The Earliest Reference to a Famously Obscure Central Asian Sufi Saint’, in Asiatische Studien/Études asiatiques (Bern), 67/3 (2013); ‘“Dis-ordering” Sufism in Early Modern Central Asia: Suggestions for Rethinking the Sources and Social Structures of Sufi History in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, in History and Culture of Central Asia, edited by Bakhtiyar Babadjanov and Kawahara Yayoi (2012); ‘Spiritual Practice and Corporate Identity in Medieval Sufi Communities of Iran, Central Asia, and India: The Khalvati/cIshqi/Shattari Continuum’, in Religion and Identity in South Asia and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Patrick Olivelle, edited by Steven Lindquist (2011); and ‘Succession Protocols and the Early Khwajagani Schism in the Maslak al-carifin’, in Journal of Islamic Studies, 22 (2011). Carl Ernst has been on the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1992, where he has served as Department Chair (1995–2000) and Zachary Smith Professor (2000–2005). He is now William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor and Director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He is a specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. His published research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of three areas: general and critical issues of Islamic studies, premodern and contemporary Sufism, and Indo-Muslim culture. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright programme, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and he.