Sufis Saints Bodies

Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power. Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.

Islam is often described as particularly abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power.

"Bashir weaves a rich history of Sufi Islam around the depiction of bodily actions in Sufi literature and miniature paintings produced circa 1300-1500 CE. Focusing on the Persianate societies of Iran and Central Asia, he explores medieval Sufis' conception of the human body as the primary shuttle between interior (batin) and exterior (zahir) realities with particular attention to three arenas: religious activity in the form of rituals, rules of etiquette, asceticism, and a universal hierarchy of saints; the deep imprint of Persian poetic paradigms on the articulation of love, desire, and gender; and the reputation of Sufi masters for working miracles, which empowered them in all domains of social activity. Bashir ultimately offers a new methodology for extracting historical information from religious narratives"--Cover p. [4].

This book focuses on women’s important contribution to Sufism by analysing the lives and seminal contributions of six mystic Sufi women to Islamic spirituality. To help reverse the sidelining of Sufi women in the recorded academic literature, the author has selected a representative sample of figures from diverse Islamic dynasties with varying backgrounds, social status, and devotional contributions. Taking a historical approach attentive to specific political contexts, readers will be introduced to the contributions of Umm Ali al-Balkhi and Fātima of Nishāpūr in the ninth-century Khurāsān, Aisha al-Mannūbiyya of the Hafsid dynasty in Afriqya, Aisha al-Bā‘únīyya of the Mamlūk dynasties of Egypt and Syria, the Mughal princess Jahan Ara Begum, and the daughter of the Caliph of Sokoto, Nana Asma’u. It is argued that these ascetic and Sufi women were recognized by their male and female peers, became political leaders in their communities, and were honored as examples of sanctity and erudition. Their works influenced mystical discourse, hagiographical writings, religious language and models of religious authority to secure legacies of Islamic orthopraxis. The book will appeal to anyone interested in Sufism and Sufi history, as well as to those wishing to delve into the understudied topic of Muslim women’s spirituality.

Living Knowledge in West African Islam examines the actualization of religious identity in the community of Ibrāhīm Niasse (d.1975, Senegal). With millions of followers throughout Africa and the world, the community arguably represents one of the twentieth century’s most successful Islamic revivals. Niasse’s followers, members of the Tijāniyya Sufi order, gave particular attention to the widespread transmission of the experiential knowledge (maʿrifa) of God. They also worked to articulate a global Islamic identity in the crucible of African decolonization. The central argument of this book is that West African Sufism is legible only with an appreciation of centuries of Islamic knowledge specialization in the region. Sufi masters and disciples reenacted and deepened preexisting teacher-student relationships surrounding the learning of core Islamic disciplines, such as the Qurʾān and jurisprudence. Learning Islam meant the transformative inscription of sacred knowledge in the student’s very being, a disposition acquired in the master’s exemplary physical presence. Sufism did not undermine traditional Islamic orthodoxy: the continued transmission of Sufi knowledge has in fact preserved and revived traditional Islamic learning in West Africa.

The colonial encounter between France and Morocco in the late nineteenth century took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor's murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

This rare and remarkable book brings together the life and teachings of eight torch-bearers of Sufism -- among them Rabia, Abu Hasan, Junnuna Misri and Sachal. An inspired and elevating work from the pen of Sadhu Vaswani, the book offers us the distilled wisdom and devotion of Sufism. The Sufi saints can indeed teach us valuable truths that will help us discover the true meaning and purpose of our life upon this earth.

Recentering the Sufi Shrine is a study of ritual, Sufi eschatology, and vernacular theopoetics of pilgrimage to Sufi shrines in the Indus region of Pakistan. The book examines the distinction between two different ritual contestations over pilgrimage to Sufi tombs: (1) an exposition of Ṭariqa-i Muhammadiyya’s millenarian Scripturalist reform of Sufism, and (2) Bulleh Shah’s (d. 1767) vernacular Sufism, a hard-hitting Sufi-poet of textual ("bookish") knowledge of religious scholars. This is the first work examining the legal theology of ritual intervention in using scripture to regulate the resurrected bodies of saints, on the one hand, and the ritual metaphysics of presence in understanding the significance and meaning of Sufi shrines, on the other.