In Remembrance Of The Saints

Winner, 2024 Patrick D. Hanan Prize for Translation, Association for Asian Studies In the first half of the eighteenth century, rival dynasties of Naqshbandi Sufi shaykhs vied for influence in the Tarim Basin, part of present-day Xinjiang. In the 1750s, the collapse of the Junghar Mongol state gave one branch of this family an opportunity to assert their independence in the oasis cities of Kashgar and Yarkand. Others sided with the armies of the Qing dynasty, which were massing on the frontiers to invade. The ensuing conflict saw the region incorporated into the expanding Qing imperium. Three decades afterward, Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari was commissioned to write an account of these Naqshbandi Sufis and their downfall. Blending the genres of collective biography and historical epic, mixing prose and verse, Kashghari’s text vividly depicts religious and political conflicts on the eve of the Qing conquest. It became the most popular and influential Chaghatay-language work to grapple with this divisive period. This volume presents the complete, long recension of In Remembrance of the Saints, translated for the first time into any Western language and extensively annotated with reference to both Islamic and Qing sources. The introduction situates the work in the Inner Asian tradition of Sufi biography and discusses the political factors shaping historical memory in Qianlong-era Xinjiang. Providing a rare local perspective on China’s expansion into Muslim borderlands, this translation sheds light on Xinjiang’s political and religious traditions and makes a foundational work of Inner Asian literature available to students and scholars.

Bryan Spinks is one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of liturgy and to have a comprehensive work by him on the Eucharist is a major catch for SCM. Like the author’s previous work on Baptism, this will become a standard work about the Eucharist and Eucharistic theology worldwide. The book, a study of the history and theology of the Eucharist, is the fifth volume in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series and will help to establish the series as a place for landmark books of liturgical scholarship.

Religious figures of remembrance served to consolidate dynastic rule and later nation-state legitimacy and community. The study illuminates the interweaving of (Eastern) Roman, medieval Serbian and Bulgarian, as well as Ottoman and Western European national discourses culminating in the sacralization of the nation.