Authority as Guidance: Studies in the History of Sufism

This paper is about how borrowings from Shiʿism shaped ideas of mystical and political authority among the Niʿmatullāhiyya, a major Sufi order of medieval and modern Iran.  Roughly a century before becoming Iran’s official religion and political instrument of the Safavid Empire, Twelver Shiʿism provided inspiration for the Niʿmatullāhiyya’s founder Shāh Niʿmatullāh Walī and his successors in their formulation of a decentralized view of collective identity that gave nominal recognition to worldly sultanates, while teaching complete loyalty to a Sufi shaykh and ascribing ultimate authority only to the Hidden Imam.  I present evidence for these Sufi Shiʿite teachings for the first time in scholarship, considering their significance as a quietist alternative to the centralizing imperial messianism of the Sunni Timurids.  I argue that Niʿmatullāhī teachings reflected the order’s social and political reality as a loosely incorporated, transregional network with economical and political autonomy on the margins of imperial power.