Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics in Islamic Mysticism

This paper examines how late Kubravī hagiography in Central Asia imagined the future of saintly authority during political upheaval. It analyzes the Majmaʿ al-faẓāʾil, a hagiography completed in 1606 by Mīr Ḥusayn in honor of his father and master, Pāyanda Sāktarigī (d. 1601). The work survives in a single manuscript preserved at the al-Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent and provides rare insight into the later history of the Kubraviyya in Central Asia. The text constructs a vision of continuing saintly authority through lineage, visionary experience, and prophetic foresight. By situating sainthood within cycles of sacred time and political upheaval, it embeds the present within an ongoing genealogy linking past masters, living disciples, and future saints, highlighting the importance of Central Asian materials for rethinking sacred temporality in Islamic mysticism.

This paper examines Molla ʿAbdullāh Ilāhī’s (d. 1491) commentary on the Wāridāt of Bedreddin of Simavna (d. 1420), a Sufi jurist and rebel accused of heterodoxy. Focusing on waḥdat al-wujūd (Unity of Being), this study argues that while both reflect a shared mystical monism, Ilāhī places primacy on the "Muhammadan Truth" (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya) and rejects Bedreddin’s skepticism regarding the afterlife by grounding his analysis in the Qur’an and Sunna. In keeping with the 2026 AAR theme “Future/s,” Ilāhī’s commentary represents a pivotal reshaping of a heterodox text to conform to the Naqshbandi Order’s Orthodox Sunnism. A student of ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār, Ilāhī became a foundational figure in spreading this order upon returning to his—and Bedreddin’s—home region of Rumelia. By analyzing the Kashf al-Wāridāt, this paper reveals how mystical monism was strategically reframed to suit an emerging Sunni orthodoxy that dominated the future of Ottoman Sufism.

While recent decades have shown a steady academic interest in the Bā ʿAlawī sāda and their large diasporic communities across the Indian Ocean region, the premodern origins of their Sufi tradition in Hadhramaut remains poorly understood, with lingering concerns surrounding the reliability of available primary sources on their formative history in the valley. By closely re-examining the available primary sources from the 15th and 16th centuries (historical chronicles; biographical literature; Sufi intellectual works), this paper argues against the predominant academic narrative that far from reflecting a provincialist phenomenon, as the product of an intellectual and cultural backwater, the Bā ʿAlawī scholarly tradition, and Hadhrami Sufism more broadly, remained historically well-integrated within the wider intellectual and spiritual currents of western Yemen and the Hejaz, exhibiting a sophisticated intellectual engagement with the wider legacy of philosophical Sufism, including the thought and doctrine of its foremost classical authority, Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī. 

Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) stands as a theological architect of both Ismaili and Twelver Shiism, the reviver of Avicennian philosophical thought, and the founder of his own political and ethical school. While many works have been published on his role in Shiite theology and Avicennian thought, little has been produced on the influence of his political thought. Furthermore, little has been done on the role of Plato’s Republic on Ṭūsī’s political thought. The last study conducted on Ṭūsī’s political thought was G.M. Wickens' translation of Ṭūsī’s Nasirean Ethics (Ar. Akhlaq-e-Nasirī) published in 1964. However, since this translation, new studies on Ṭūsī’s political thought have seldom been produced.  This paper examines Ṭūsī’s political thought from the perspective of Plato’s Republic and commentaries on it that entered into the Islamic world.