This panel makes important advances in the field of Sufi historiography, exploring the history of Sufism through uncommon sources and perspectives that have gone understudied. The first paper examines the way hadith sciences functioned as critical arenas for negotiating epistemic authority and spiritual legitimacy in early modern South Asia. The second paper provides a window into Sufi historiography by analyzing colonial documents that were co-created by European Orientalists and Indian Muslims. The third paper explores the contributions of a female philosopher to the tradition of Akbarian mysticism. And the fourth paper examines the intersections of dreams and political power in Suhrawardi's mystical and philosophical teachings.
This paper reexamines hadith sciences in early modern Islam, arguing that beyond their conventional role in textual verification, they functioned as critical arenas for negotiating epistemic authority, historical authenticity, and spiritual legitimacy. Through close analysis of an eighteenth-century South Asian debate between Shāh Walī Allāh (d.1762) and Fakhr al-Dīn Dehlavī (d.1783), two prominent muḥaddithīn deeply embedded within Sufi traditions, the study reveals how hadith criticism served as an adaptable intellectual framework rather than a purely exclusionary discipline. While Walī Allāh deployed rigorous isnād scrutiny to challenge the widely claimed genealogical link between Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Fakhr al-Dīn employed the same methodological rigor to reaffirm its historical plausibility, underscoring hadith scholarship's inherent interpretive flexibility. By foregrounding their nuanced engagements, this paper expands scholarly understandings of early modern Sufi historiography and demonstrates how hadith criticism mediated complex epistemological negotiations concerning inherited spiritual traditions, textual authenticity, and competing religious identities.
This paper explores the position of Sufism in Qanoon-e-Islam, or the Customs of the Moosulmans of India, an 1832 text authored by Ja’far Sharif, an Indian Muslim, under the direction of G. A. Herklots, a Dutch Surgeon in the East India Company. In 1921, a revised edition was published, which made significant changes, including inserting a dedicated section on “Sufi Mysticism.” This paper seeks to provide a step towards decolonizing the study of Sufism. By analyzing colonial documents that were co-created by European Orientalists and Indian Muslims, we can understand what new conditions of knowledge were being created about Muslims. Ultimately, the construction of Sufi practice as an anthropological object of study, as initiated through Qanoon-e-Islam, produces inherent contradictions as Sufism is forced to cohere in the secular grid of intelligibility. This has significant implications for understanding the role of Sufism within broader Islamic thought and practice.
Although scholarship in Islamic Studies has highlighted the contributions of women as religious scholars engaged in the transmission of ḥadīth and in jurisprudence, or as ascetics in the mystical traditions of Sufism, their roles in and contributions to the history of Islamic philosophy remain unexplored. The fourth paper examines the philosophical contributions of Sitt al-ʿAjam bint al-Nafīs, a thirteenth-century philosopher, who is known for her commentary on Ibn ʿArabi’s Mashāhid al-asrār al-qudsiyya as well as authoring two additional works. In addition to being an important text in the reception history of Ibn ʿArabi, the commentary is also important for a central aim in modern scholarship: understanding the ways in which philosophers of the Islamic world engaged with various traditions of Greek thought and Islamic mysticism. The paper also raises methodological challenges and questions concerning the retrieval of women’s philosophical works in the Islamic context, raising larger questions on what constitutes a canon and what counts as philosophy.
The legacy of Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā ibn Ḥabash al-Suhrawardī (549/1155-587/1191) is often remembered in light of his philosophical innovation in formulating the Philosophy of Illumination (Hikmat al-ishrāq). His mystical ontology and epistemology allow for an elaborate role of dreams and vision quests as avenues of knowledge. Among such dreams, scholars of Suhrawardī have extensively analyzed, albeit with varying approaches, the ones elaborating his mystical and philosophical teachings. However, in historical accounts of Suhrawardī, there are a number of other dreams attributed to the shaykh and to other figures that flesh out the making and the reception of the political aspect of his philosophy. My paper will provide an outline of Suhrawardī’s political philosophy by historical contextualization of one of such dream accounts and, in the bigger picture, relating it to a specific motif in dream accounts by ‘ulamā aspiring for political power in the same historical period and geographical region.