Rasheed Araeen’s Bismullah (Fig. 1) is noteworthy as the first work by the Karachi-born, London-based artist to enter the collection of Britain’s Tate Gallery in 1995. Part of Araeen’s “Cruciform” series of the 1980s and 1990s, Bismullah is a wall-mounted, mixed-media construction assembled from nine rectangular panels.1  At each of the work’s four corners sit canvases painted a verdant green and silk-screened with a delicate golden patterning that recalls vegetal and floral motifs common in Islamic architecture. The green panels are disconnected slightly from the work’s inner components, and the white gallery wall appears in the gaps like fissures and borders internal to the work.2  Set between the green panels are four identical photographs of candles, formed in the shape of a cross. The candles are set on a piece of glass that, on close inspection, appears to sit atop one of Araeen’s own artworks: the three-dimensional, open-faced “structural cubes” that the artist conceptualized in the mid-1960s. At the work’s center is a photograph of a splash of blood, closely cropped to omit explanatory information. The vermillion shape is Rorschach-like, encouraging a play of associations.

Araeen created Bismullah at the tail end of the 1980s—a decade of considerable socio-political and cultural change in Britain. Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government inaugurated a period of neoliberal governance and re-ignited imperialist ambitions indexed by the 1982 Falkland Islands War—developments paralleled across the Atlantic under Ronald Reagan’s administration and its aggressively interventionist foreign policy. Domestically, the UK experienced social unrest sparked by racist violence and countermanding anti-racist struggles, motivating public policies aimed towards multiculturalist integration.3  These events reverberated in artistic practice. While mainstream and commercial art worlds celebrated a conservative return to painting, a resurgent radicality animated the work of diaspora artists who sought to contest the sedimented edifices of a narrowly Eurocentric artistic canon.4

Within this artistic field, montage was an exemplary artistic tactic.5  A strategy of juxtaposition and recombination aiming to reshape perception, montage practices reprised the experimental and interventionist legacies of the twentieth-century vanguards. Araeen had deployed montage towards politicized ends since the early 1970s, perhaps most famously in For Oluwale (1971-3/5), which combined a variety of printed media in an acidulous response to the 1969 murder of David Oluwale by the Leeds police. In the 1980s, as Kobena Mercer has argued, “cut and mix” strategies also appeared prominently in a younger generation of British-born artists including Eddie Chambers, Maud Sulter, and the Black Audio Film Collective. These artistic techniques were, he argues, a key means of interrupting and reworking systems of signification shaped by the ongoing legacies of empire and colonial racism.6  Mercer’s analysis can be extended to consider Bismullah, which deploys strategies of juxtaposition, disjunction, and doubling to combine visual imagery that references religion, empire, art history, and the artist’s personal biography. Through its montage tactics Bismullah not only maps the binaries of self and other that structure colonial discourse within and beyond the artistic field, but also recontextualizes these signifiers.

Bismullah signals its intervention through its title—a play on the Islamic phrase bismi’llāh. Recalling the Dadist and surrealist propensity for puns, Araeen shifts its meaning from “in the name of God” to “in the name of the priest (mullā)” through a slight orthographic intervention. To Western viewers unaware of the word play’s significance, the title might evoke media representations of Islam on the stage of global politics during the period of the Cruciform series, indexed by the Iranian Revolution of 1978–9 as well as the “Islamicization” program under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s decade of autocratic rule in Pakistan (1978–88). Stereotypes of Islamic “extremism” and supposed incompatibility with Western liberal democracy intensified, shortly after Bismullah’s creation, with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in September 1988, generating controversy that reached famously heated proportions in early 1989.7  Yet, as the artist has noted, the title’s reference to priesthood points to the structure of religious authority in Christianity—an association reinforced by the cruciform shape organizing the candle photographs. Reversing the mediatic gaze that framed Islam as a particularly political or politicized religion, Bismullah invites us to instead consider how secularized institutions of Christianity have shaped the West’s legal, political, and cultural frameworks.

This tactic of delimiting and destabilizing encoded binaries ramifies throughout Bismullah’s visual operations. The image of blood punctuating the work’s center was taken by the artist during a 1973 visit to his hometown of Karachi, and documents a goat sacrifice made during the festival of ‘Īd al-Aḍḥā.8  Yet repurposed for Bismullah without indication of its originating circumstances, the image’s indexical referent is partially stripped away and its significance determined by the work and its historical context. The bloodshed could evoke contemporaneous conflicts such as the 1979–89 Soviet-Afghan War—the latter side fueled by American aid funneled through Pakistan—and the violence inflicted by such Cold War proxy battles. The shape might resemble a geographic territory: a map of Britain, to the artist; and to other viewers, a map of Pakistan.9  From another perspective the splatter could appear as drips and drabs of paint, evoking the “American-type” modernism that enjoyed institutional hegemony in Britain and internationally in the postwar period.10  Double-coded as paint and blood, the splash evokes the well-documented history of American art’s ideological uses as a tool in the cultural front of the Cold War.11

While the blood splash is positioned at Bismullah’s center, the green and gold-patterned panels sit on the work’s peripheries. The panels are confined to the margins and physically divided from the work’s interior body, visualizing modernism’s anxious efforts to defend its purity from the frivolity of decoration—famously deemed “degenerate” in Alfred Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”—and its autonomy from the encroachments of utilitarianism.12  These fears converged in the orientalist construction of the category of the arabesque in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship on Islamic art—a history that Bismullah alludes to with the green panels’ golden patterns.13

Through these operations, Bismullah anticipates Araeen’s contemporary project of translating modernism into a reconceptualized visual and intellectual framework of Islam. This endeavor is apparent in Guftugu I (A discussion between Al-Bīrūnī and Ibn Sīnā about Aristotle) (2014, Fig. 3), of the “Homecoming” series (2010–14). The work reimagines the Islamic tradition of calligraphy within chromatic blocks whose linear configurations also evoke the concrete art abstractions of Richard Paul Lohse (1902–88).26  Its title references a correspondence that, to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, is “one of the highlights of Islamic intellectual history . . . and science in general.”27  This encounter is notable for the challenge that Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī (973–1048 CE) poses to the Aristotelian cosmology of Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā (980–1037 CE) by advocating a scientific method of empirical observation and experimentation. The reference recalls al-Bīrūnī’s significance for Iqbal, who believed that the scholar’s radical break with Hellenistic philosophy’s “static view of the universe” enabled Islamic thinkers to innovate the scientific method that has since been claimed as a “European discovery.”28  Within these works, and against the violent processes that have universalized European colonial modernity, Araeen insists on the universality of modernism understood as an ongoing process of translation and insurgent critique.

In this image, entitled Hüdayi Yolu (The Way of Hüdayi), we see a watery background constructed by abstract zigzags that represent the Bosporus strait dividing the Asian and European sides of Istanbul. Hikmet Barutçugil usually creates his ebru, or paper marbling art, and then commissions illustrators to work with the random and surprising outcomes of the process. Here, Hacer Ünal Hazar, a student of Barutçugil, completed the painting appearing in opposite corners of the work, and Ali Hüsrevoğlu, a well-known calligrapher, wrote the name Hazrat ‘Aziz Mahmut Hüdayi (d. 1628), which dominates the center of the work.29  Hüdayi was a Sufi scholar and poet, one of the principal founders of the Celvetîyye Sufi order and patron saint of Üsküdar, an older neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul. After his name appears a shorter phrase in Arabic that translates as “May his secret be made sacred,” a eulogy for Sufi saints. At the top right, we see Hüdayi’s mosque-shrine (1594, rebuilt in 1825) alongside the distinctive dome and minarets of the Mihrimah Sultan Mosque (1543-48) and the angular lines of the Fountain of Ahmed III (1728-29), prominent Ottoman Islamic structures in Üsküdar. On the lower left, on the European side of Istanbul where the Ottoman sultanate was once headquartered, the Süleymaniye Mosque (1550-57) can be seen as it would appear to a viewer standing on the banks in Üsküdar. 

The illustration also contains a reference to a little-known legend from the life of Hüdayi, according to which when the Sultan Ahmet Mosque was completed in 1616 during the rule of Sultan Ahmed I (d. 1617), Hüdayi was invited to preside over the opening ceremonies and to give the Friday sermon. He lived in Üsküdar and had to cross the Bosphorus to get to the mosque, but the weather was stormy and dangerous for sailing and the sailors were scared, yet Hüdayi was able to cross the water without trouble, his small rowboat unaffected by the waves. From that day on, the route he took on the water has been called Hüdayi yolu. Sailors follow it on stormy days as they believe it is sanctified by the baraka, or blessing, of Hüdayi.30  Visually and discursively, Barutçugil’s Hüdayi Yolu draws the Ottoman cityscape of Istanbul into dialogue with its Sufi history, using the fluidity of ebru marbling and Arabic calligraphy to evoke the watery bridge between continents that is the Bosporus strait. In so doing, the artist collapses the temporal bridge between past and present, introducing innovative and contemporary techniques and materials to the traditional Turkish craft of ebru and drawing a triumphant, Ottoman, Islamic history into a spiritual vision for the present Turkish republic. 

The location depicted in the piece is significant for numerous reasons. Ebristan, Barutçugil’s atelier, known as “the Istanbul ebru house,” is located in the neighborhood of Salacak in the district of Üsküdar, overlooking the same route across the Bosporus depicted in the piece.31  Üsküdar was also home to some of the most renowned earlier ebru artists, such as Necmettin Okyay (d. 1976) and Mustafa Düzgünman (d. 1990), who was a caretaker of the Hüdayi shrine. The neighborhood remains one of several hubs for ebru and other traditional Turkish arts in Istanbul as well as for Sufism.

Hüdayi Yolu hearkens both to Barutçugil’s connection to Sufism and his presentation of ebru as a Sufi art. It is a part of his Ebristanbul series, in which he employs artists to illustrate historical sites of the city over what he calls his “Barut ebru” pieces. Barutçugil explains that this series of illustrations commemorates the 550^th anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, declaring that “the imaginary world of ebru reflects Istanbul, surrounded by water, between two seas, my beloved, beautiful Istanbul, the meeting point of two continents.”32  Since the Ottomans defeated the Byzantine Empire and took control of Istanbul in 1453 under Sultan Mehmet II (d. 1481), the city has often been presented as Islamic. Later Ottoman sultans commemorated their victory as a sign of divine favor and a justification for Ottoman rule.33  Despite the Ottoman Empire’s endurance for centuries, the secular Turkish Republic rejected its legacy following its abolishment of the caliphate in 1924.34

But in the past two decades, the Islamist political party AKP has gained prominence and contributed to the rise of the religious middle class. Concomitantly, neo-Ottomanism has increased, emphasizing the city’s Islamic context and reclaiming the city’s connection to its romanticized Ottoman past and its Sufi history in particular.35  In Istanbul, religiously-oriented Turks embrace its historic buildings and neighborhoods in their attempt to claim “Muslim space” and assert the Islamic soul of the city.36

Working with the Ministry of Culture, Barutçugil has been able to get ebru official recognition and support; the AKP promotes the ebru in state-sponsored art contests, exhibitions, and conferences. Barutçugil, like many contemporary practitioners of “traditional” Turkish arts, participates in the nationalistic commemoration of the Muslim conquest over the Byzantines. His art, such as Hüdayi yolu, makes visible a process of renewal and a new approach to Islamic artistic heritage in contemporary Turkey, containing references to Sufi symbolism and sainthood, neo-Ottoman nationalist placemaking, and Islamic aesthetics.

Hüdayi Yolu is representative of the growing trend of “traditional” Turkish artists using new artistic techniques to depict historical scenes and heritage. Among urban Turks, both conservative and secular, Sufism has become “trendy.” Sufism-related tourism generates a significant source of income; Konya, the burial site of Rumi, is a popular destination, and whirling dervish shows are common at restaurants and cultural venues.37  Both secular and religious Turks adopt the aesthetics of Sufism, including associated artistic practices, especially calligraphy, depicting the names of God and other spiritual messages. Prints of Barutçugil’s pieces can go for upwards of a few hundred dollars while his original work sells for many thousands of dollars, and to have an original artwork is a status symbol among some Turks. Barutçugil’s work and that of other “traditional” artists can be found in homes, places of business, and government offices. 

The background of Hüdayi Yolu is representative of Barutçugil’s style, developed in the 1970s after much trial and error, which he calls Barut ebru, after himself.38  Basic techniques of ebru include creating background patterns and then manipulating paint pigments mixed with ox gall with thin needles to form flowers, birds, and geometric shapes.39  Barutçugil’s flower pieces have a signature look that someone familiar with ebru can easily identify, but it is his extensive use of the “Barut technique” coupled with the incorporation of illustrations and calligraphy that sets him apart. He keeps the Barut method closely guarded and has only taught it to a select group of students. It most probably involves the use of acrylic paints, whereas “traditional” ebru uses paints made of natural minerals and soil. Several other artists, such as Garip Ay, have figured out how to produce the same effect, but Barutçugil does not discuss his technique publicly.40  In recent years, younger artists have started including illustrations and calligraphy in their ebru making it a widespread phenomenon in traditional Turkish art. 

In interviews on TV, with journalists, and in his writings, Barutçugil frequently discusses the mystical dimension of his art, focusing on the difference between the bāṭin, esoteric meanings, and ẓāhir, external realities, both terms central to Sufi epistemology and Islamic cosmology. He explains that most artists only understand the ẓāhir of the art, which consists of the techniques and appearance of the ebru designs and is based on Western designs and aesthetics. For Barutçugil, by contrast, the bāṭin of ebru is based on Islamic-Sufism and is the heart of the art. 

My fieldwork among ebru artists in Istanbul shows that Barutçugil can be credited with popularizing the associations between Sufism and ebru in Turkey and beyond. As a member of the older generation of contemporary ebru artists, Barutçugil has promoted ebru both within Turkey and among Westerners since the 1990s. In his writings and talks, he presents his take on the aesthetic principles of Islamic art through ebru. He only teaches the bāṭin of the art to students who prove they will be receptive. This advanced level deals with the symbolic meanings behind the use of colors and designs, how to “read” the paint on the water as signs of God, and how to manifest the beauty of God in art. All the while he imparts Sufi teachings and stories to initiate them into a spiritual practice. Barutçugil ritualizes the practice of ebru more than most ebru artists, likening his relationship with his advanced students and the training he gives them to how Sufi teachers train and teach proper adab, or etiquette, including teachings on self-discipline and humility. For Barutçugil, ebru not only has spiritual meanings in its symbolism, colors, and patterns, but the process of creating the art itself is representative of the spiritual journey of the artist. His main requirement to teach a student the bāṭin of ebru is that they have gönül, or a heart full of love and free of negativity. 

Barutçugil gives most of his students a color print-out of a du‘ā, a supplicatory prayer, with his ebru as the background. One side gives the original Turkish du‘ā, and the other side of the paper offers an English translation (see Fig. 2). Following the Muslim tradition of providing supplications for specific activities, Barutçugil instructs his students to recite this du‘ā before beginning their ebru practice, to center themselves spiritually, and to show respect for the art. The words of the du‘ā are reminiscent of Sufi prayers that ask God for guidance and support. This du‘ā guides the artist to ask God to ensure that their artistic output is not impacted by the nafs, or ego, as well as to grant grace to the work of the artist and ensure that the artist is engaged in the remembrance of and a desire for God. For Barutçugil, the du‘ā can be used by any artist involved in what he calls “Islamic” art or by anyone interested in leading a spiritual life. It helps the artist enter into a state of piety so that when they start painting, they are worshiping God at the same time, allowing the artist’s inner being to appear in their creation. Because of his public profile and interweaving of Sufism into discussions of ebru, ebru has gained an additional dimension of spirituality that was not previously present. Although some of the earlier ebru artistshad close associations to Sufism and Sufi lodges, their practice of ebru was not ordinarily informed by their spiritual inclinations and interests. 

Hüdayi Yolu is representative of a flourishing modern art form in Turkey based on an older Turkish craft. In this piece, Barutçugil gives tribute to the glory and height of the Ottoman empire and its culture combined with the spirituality of Turkish-infused Sufism. On the ẓāhir, this piece is quite straightforward, but upon further inspection, it contains hidden symbols and histories that lay beneath its surface as bāṭin. It represents a modern artist’s loving depiction of his hometown and neighborhood, an homage to a local Sufi saint, the romanticized communal memory of Istanbul as an Ottoman metropolis, and Barutçugil’s approach to “Sufi” art.

Egyptian Sufis of the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries recorded several extraordinary stories about a Kurdish émigré to Cairo, a Sufi master Yūsuf al-Kūrānī (d. 768/1367). Al-Kūrānī was famous for, among other things, his practice of khalwa: self-isolation, typically in a small cell, in order to focus on pious devotions. Sufi biographers recount how when al-Kūrānī would emerge from khalwa he was so powerful that his eyes, “burning like embers,” bestowed miraculous power and authority on other people just by looking at them. On two separate occasions his glance happened to fall upon a dog. So powerful was his gaze that in each case the local people and other canines sought the dogs out, followed them around, and mourned them when they died. In one case, the dogs developed a small shrine cult around the dog saint’s tomb.41  On one hand, these stories are clearly about the unique power and authority of al-Kūrānī as a Sufi master and his skill as a teacher. Indeed, his biographers remember him chiefly for his popular and effective training regimen for novices, a reputation supported by the number of texts he wrote devoted to explicating in clear and plain language both the practical and theoretical aspects of his approach to Sufism.42  On the other hand, these stories underscore the unique and powerful effects of the practice of khalwa. They demonstrate what happens to Sufis when they are properly trained, prepared, and then exposed for extended periods of time to the presence and power of the divine reality, al-Ḥaqq (The Real). Al-Kūrānī’s powerful gaze was produced by a combination of his own training regimen, his physical and mental discipline, the material conditions of the cell, proximity to divine power, and the expectations of his students. Furthermore, al-Kūrānī’s time in khalwa spent communing with The Real not only transformed him, intensifying and focusing his already potent powers, but in so doing transformed the material and social relations of those around him as well. In this particular case, that transformation is apparent in his flaming eyes, in his powerful gaze, and in the fact that a mere inadvertent glance could completely reconfigure the social order, even among canines.43

The practice of khalwa is rooted in the late antique matrix of ascetic Christianity. But by the seventh/thirteenth century, Sufis had developed it into a distinctly Islamic practice that was ubiquitous across the medieval Islamic world. Muslim authors (as well as some Jews) produced a sizable body of literature devoted to explicating its function in both practical and theoretical terms.44  It is clear from these texts that khalwa consists of a demanding and difficult array of conceptions and practices that required a great deal of time, particular material and social conditions, and intense preparation and discipline. The latter were critical because khalwa was fantastically dangerous. The Andalusian Sufi Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) cautioned that one who undertakes khalwa “must be courageous and brave, not weak or cowardly” because of the devastating psychological and physical harms that may befall the unprepared practitioner.45  These dangers stemmed largely from the fact that khalwa left the mind particularly susceptible to the influence of passing thoughts (khawāṭir), the source of which were believed to be either divine or satanic, angelic or demonic. But other negative effects quickly rippled out beyond the psychological. The Central Asian Sufi master Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 618/1221), wrote of a man who entered khalwa without proper guidance and quickly went mad; he became an unbeliever, cursed his mother, and ate his own feces.46  One of Kubrā’s students, Najm al-Dīn Dāya Rāzī (d. 654/1256), warned that a devotee in khalwa must be absolutely committed to his shaykh and to following his precise guidance. If not, Satan will appear to that devotee in the form of his shaykh and obliterate his confidence, mental stability, and physical ability to remain in the cell. However, when one is absolutely committed to one’s master (by having “tied his heart to the shaykh”), the disciple will be protected by the promise of the prophet Muhammad when he said, “One who sees me in a dream, has seen me. Satan cannot take my form.”47  So well-known and harrowing were these dangers that they even turn up in the encyclopedic treatise on Mālikī law and popular practice in Egypt by Ibn al-Ḥājj (d. 737/1336), who writes at great length about the dangers of entering khalwa unprepared and without the guidance of a qualified teacher.48  Ultimately, however, and despite all these risks, the rewards were well worth the effort. Only khalwacould produce such extended proximity to the divine Real, producing new insights about reality, inculcating new forms of knowledge, transmuting the Sufi’s body, and allowing him to live amidst the distractions of society without deleterious effect. There are so many wondrous benefits associated with khalwa that the Egyptian Sufi ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī (d. 973/1565) devoted an entire book to recounting in great detail all the distinct forms of knowledge, esoteric and exoteric, God bestows upon the practitioner of khalwa.49  These texts also make clear that the psychological and spiritual benefits of khalwa are inseparable from the embodied practice and its material and social contexts. Rather than producing disembodied minds, stripped of corporeality and social consciousness, entering khalwa reconfigured the body and mind, opening up an entirely new sensorium and providing access to unseen realms. Rather than shutting off the senses, this reconfigured self was able to experience vivid sensory inputs—sounds, smells, lights, things, persons, animals. These phenomena were not psychic ephemera, symbolic representations, or projections of interior states. A khalwa cell was a vibrantly material place in which Sufis interacted with and produced affects in all manner of human and non-human things. Likewise, and even more importantly, all those vibrant things interacted with and produced noticeable and lasting affects in Sufis. Al-Kūrānī’s burning eyes are not merely symbolic. Nor are they simply charismatic proofs of his ascetic abilities or representations of his spiritual power. Al-Kūrānī’s eyes burned because the things he encountered in khalwa changed them and caused them to burn, an effect that persisted even after he left the cell, at least for a time. Khalwa was not simply being alone in a small room for a while. It was a process in which elements corporeal, material, spiritual, imaginal, and social were all entangled together, producing uniquely powerful affects in those who entangled themselves. A thorough description of the medieval practice of khalwa must account for all these elements—human, spiritual, material, and social—the ways they interact and the affects they produced. 

This article offers one possible approach to theorizing the heterogenous elements of khalwa coherently by insisting that we take the material and the social as seriously as we do the human and the spiritual. My focus is on a number of Arabic treatises on khalwa most of which were written in the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries. Some of these texts are explicitly about khalwa, like Risāla fī l-khalwa (Treatise on Khalwa) by Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 618/1221) and al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa (The Ultimate Khalwa) by Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), while others treat khalwa as part of a larger exposition about Sufi devotions, like ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (The Gifts of Gnosis) by Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), Risālat al-anwār (Treatise of Lights) by Ibn al-ʿArabī, Manārat al-sāʾirīn (The Lighthouse for Travelers), by Najm al-Dīn Dāya Rāzī (d .654/1256), and Miftāḥ al-falāḥ (The Key to Happiness) by Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī (d. 709/1309). Among the latter I draw heavily on one text in particular: al-Waḥīd fī sulūk ahl al-tawḥīd (The Unique Guide to the Comportment of the Sufis) by the Upper-Egyptian Sufi Ibn Nūḥ al-Qūṣī (d. 708/1308). Ibn Nūḥ’s al-Waḥīd is a free-wheeling and wide-ranging text on Sufism in Upper Egypt during the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk period.50  The text combines elements of the Sufi manual, doctrinal treatise, memoir, biographical dictionary, and hagiography in service of a detailed picture of the history, scope, and variety of Sufism in Mamluk Upper Egypt. In the course of his discussion, Ibn Nūḥ often includes detailed narratives and descriptions of various Sufi practices that illustrate his broader themes. Elaborate and fascinating stories involving khalwa occur frequently, a few of which I will relate here with an eye for what these stories might reveal about the material and social contexts of its practice. At the same time, I aim to formulate an approach to studying medieval Sufi texts that is informed by recent scholarship on religion and materiality. But I want to stress that what follows is not an attempt at a comprehensive explanation of khalwa. There are hundreds of Sufi texts from across the Muslim world which deal with khalwa in some way, revealing a wide variety of practices, attitudes, and spaces. It would be folly to attempt any general accounting of or definitive approach to khalwa, for, as Scott Kugle has shown, Sufis have theorized the relationship between the body, the self, and the social in a variety of complex ways, expressed in a variety of different media.51  Rather, my remarks here are preliminary and meant to be suggestive, the result of my narrow reading in the particular medieval Sufi milieu in which Ibn Nūḥ, whose al-Waḥīd first drew my attention to the critical social and material dimensions of khalwa, participated. My references to several other well-known texts on Sufi khalwa thus serve as reference points that have helped to explicate this milieu. Many of these texts were written prior to Ibn Nūḥ’s treatise and provide a solid grounding in the Sufi tradition he inherited and was familiar with. Most of these are normative texts containing prescriptive accounts of khalwa. Ibn Nūḥ’s accounts, while clearly indebted to this normative tradition, are much more descriptive in nature and thus offer an interesting window onto the practices surrounding khalwa. Occasionally I refer to texts written after Ibn Nūḥ’s demise when they elucidate a particularly ambiguous idea within the Sufi tradition to which Ibn Nūḥ contributed. 

Readers should know that there are other important Sufi traditions of khalwa that fall outside of the purview of this article. For example, I do not discuss texts of the Khalwatī order, which is so named for the centrality of khalwa, but whose formation dates to a much later period.52  Nor do I discuss the Naqshbandī principle of khalvat dar anjuman, retreat in the midst of society, which is rooted in a different set of assumptions about the nature of the Sufi path and constitutes a Sufi milieu Ibn Nūḥ would have been unfamiliar with.53  What follows, then, is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive of the Sufi tradition as a whole. It is meant to draw attention to elements of khalwa which are often ignored in its explication as a spiritual retreat in scholarly writing on Sufism.

Historians of Sufism have tended overwhelmingly to focus on the personal or spiritual function of khalwa rather than its material or social contexts.54  The following definition of khalwa is fairly representative of the scholarship: “a method of withdrawal or isolation from the world for mystical purposes.”55  Whether deliberately or not, these studies rely on a Weberian framework of mystical practice. They cast khalwa as a “flight from the world” in which Sufis use khalwa as means to separate themselves from society and to subdue and subjugate the body and ego-self (al-nafs) in order to achieve “a subjective condition of a distinct kind.”56  Theorized in this way, khalwa would seem to be the mystical technique par excellence for negating both the body and the world, leaving only the heart, the reflective site of maʿrifa (or gnosis), and producing a purely intellectual experience. However, such descriptions are contingent upon a Cartesian mind-body dualism that betrays a Christian-inflected bias against the body that Sufis would have found baffling.57  Sufis certainly developed complex techniques to exercise control over their unruly physical selves, but not to negate them. In his discussion of khalwa, for example, Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, explicitly links excessive mortification of the body with Christians and Buddhists.58  Rather than a mystical technique, it is perhaps more helpful to think about khalwa in terms of the Arabic concept of zuhd, which is not the asceticism of the spiritual athlete, but “rather a code of behavior that should be followed by any pious Muslim.”59  This approach to the body stands in stark contrast to the Christian ascetic heroes of the late antique Roman world. Narratives of these ascetics, drawing heavily on earlier martyrological narratives, valorized “in pornographic detail” the destruction, violation, and rupture of the body.60  Zuhd, by contrast, is an ethical disposition of detachment. It is an attitude of indifference to worldly trappings, not a categorical rejection of them.61  In other words, a zāhid (one who practices zuhd) could be wealthy or impoverished so long as they care nothing for wealth or poverty. This is precisely the sentiment we find in most descriptions of khalwa. In early Sufi literature, we find Sufis explicitly prioritizing an ethic of detachment over bodily mortification: Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072-3) describes khalwa as a separation of character traits, good from bad, and not the separation or withdrawal of the body from society, citing a Sufi who charged his companions to “wear with people what they wear and eat what they eat, but separate yourself from them in your heart of hearts.”62  The fundamental issue at stake in these accounts is that the self, a complex whole comprised of heterogenous parts—primarily the body, soul, and ego—is simply not properly organized, oriented, and disciplined. The problem lies not in the parts themselves, but that they are collectively disorganized, undisciplined, and in disharmony with the environment. These Sufis inhabit what Talal Asad has called “untaught bodies.”63  The techniques involved in Sufi devotional exercises, including khalwa, were thus designed to teach those bodies some discipline. By entering khalwa and following the specific devotional instructions of his shaykh, a Sufi could reconstitute the self in such a way that it will function correctly, capable of interfacing directly with the realm of the unseen (al-ghayb), the hidden world beyond the senses, and ultimately gain access to the divine presence itself.64  In other words, a human being cannot access that realm of the unseen without a body and the material and social conditions required to discipline it. As Kugle puts it, for Sufis “[t]he body is a limitation that allows us to move beyond limitations.”65 But, and this is critical to my understanding of khalwa, these useful limitations are inseparable from the material and social conditions in which they exist. The body of the Sufi, the material facts of the cell, and the guidance and expectations of other human beings are all irreducible and irreplaceable components of khalwa; we must account for all of them equally and holistically.

To get a better sense of what I mean here, a brief examination of the word khalwa is in order. The word itself covers wide semantic ground, referring to the physical cell, to the devotional practice that took place therein, and to the social relationships that governed it all. In other words, khalwa is both a process and an entanglement of multiple elements. Describing khalwa this way has the advantage of not requiring us to pry these semantic fields apart, for medieval Islamic sources do not. In Arabic texts a typical locution for the practice is al-shaykh adkhala al-murīd fī l-khalwa, literally “the master placed the novice into khalwa,” a phrase that elegantly encompasses all these elements: the material space itself, the corporal practice within the cell, and the social relationship of master-disciple that governed the entire enterprise. It was a physical space, constructed of specific materials in a precise way, wherein the body, its components, and the environment were reconfigured into a properly functioning unit. But khalwa was much more than a room with a body in it. It was a space rendered extraordinarily powerful by socially constructed norms and expectations, and above all by the presence of The Real. It is significant that many Sufi authors insisted that the cell be located within a populated house; it was in dialogue with the master in the context of the collective expectations of fellow Sufis that rendered the experience intelligible for the adept. The process of khalwa entailed the formation of new selves which were reconstituted within new relationships to society—both narrowly construed as the society of local Sufis, and broadly construed as society outside the walls of the hospice.66

In order to understand the complexity of Sufi khalwa, both holistically and historically, as the totality of its material, social, and human components, we must get away from the notion that Sufism is best understood as a form of mysticism, a framework that is too often rooted in what Elizabeth Spelman describes as “psychophilic somatophobia.”67  Studies of Sufism qua mysticism are underwritten by a mind-body dualism that privileges belief over practice, the spiritual over the physical, and the individual over the social. In certain comparative contexts, this analytical framework makes sense. Indeed, my argument is not that Sufism is not mysticism but rather that the kinds of questions such a framing elicits are not well suited to understanding khalwa. Centering questions about the corporality, materiality, and sociality of khalwa promises to provide a much clearer idea of what the practice involved and how it functioned within Sufi praxis more broadly. There are several trends in recent scholarship on religion that may be useful in that respect. Based in part on a dissatisfaction with the constructivism inherent in the linguistic turn in religious studies, there has been a marked shift towards the material.68  The last twenty years have seen a growing body of scholarship pushing historians and scholars of religion to include material culture and the body in their analyses.69  Sonia Hazard has described this scholarship as “the material turn” in religious studies, comprised of several distinct lines of inquiry and methodologies.70  Likewise, Thomas Tweed has described this larger shift from belief to practice, and especially the development of the concept of “lived religion,” as “the quotidian turn” in religious studies.71  However, as effective and salutary as this scholarship is, for my purposes it is hamstrung by an anthropocentric and instrumentalist approach to material culture that marks a sharp distinction between the human and non-human. Drawing on the work of Jeremy Stolow, Hazard argues that the material turn (and, I would add, the quotidian turn) is predicated on “the notion . . . that technologies serve as pliant tools to better fulfill prior religious intentions. . . . [This instrumentalism] is rooted in a false dichotomy in which religion is equated with human agency on the one hand, and technology with inert materiality on the other.”72  At the same time, Severin Fowles wonders if in the turn toward things “we have over-privileged a crude notion of presence linked to physicality and tangibility, as if the only meaningful relations were those between entities that can be seen, smelt or felt.”73  Fowles wants to take “absent objects” seriously, by which he means very specifically material objects that are not there (like a lost set of keys, or the absence of people on a normally busy street).

I would add that much of the material/quotidian turn in religious studies is organized around an incoherent object of study. The history of religion, as category and field, is the history of its interiorization, privatization, and spiritualization, all predicated on a valorization of the primacy of belief over practice. In the pantheon of early comparativists of religion, William Robertson Smith (d. 1894) is the only scholar I am aware of who wrote about religion (or at least one form of religion) primarily in terms of ritual and practice and not belief: “Ritual and practical usage were, strictly speaking, the sum total of ancient religions.”74  Smith’s insistence on this point stands in stark contrast to the colonial anthropologists and sociologists of religion in the Anglophone and Francophone world and their near singular focus on animism.75  It is not that early scholars of religion simply ignored the material or the quotidian. They invented and constructed the category of religion itself as one predicated on the primacy of belief in spiritual beings; material or social concerns like the totem or the fetish were secondary effects of that bedrock belief. So, there is an inherent tension involved in the analytical construction of concepts like “lived religion,” “everyday religion,” or “material religion,” wherein the foundational a priori disciplinary distinction between sacred/profane that locates and authorizes the object of religion is erased by paradoxically locating the sacred within the profane. This paradox raises another question: What, exactly, are we studying?

Is the object of our inquiry material religion or religion, studied materially? This distinction is subtle, but critical because the former assumes a stable and identifiable phenomenon. The latter, by contrast, is merely one approach to religion among many. In other words, there is a tendency in much of the work on material religion to assume and posit that the material analysis is itself only the product of a particular data set: material religion, which would appear to be a subset, perhaps, of material culture (chairs, books, houses = pews, gospels, synagogues). From this perspective, it would appear that the scholars of material religion have discovered a new, hitherto overlooked, stable object to study; the trick is simply to find it and describe it. But “material religion” is not analogous to “material culture,” at least not as typically construed, because the objects of analysis and their respective conceptual apparatuses are not the same (just as materiality and material culture are not the same).76  Material culture generally refers to the objects humans make, the meanings they ascribe to them, the ways they interact with them, and so on. Scholarship on material religion does all these things as well, of course. But it does so on the back of a kind of sui generis materiality that exists uniquely qua religious artifact before scholars interact with it.

These are the two traps I would like to avoid in my description of khalwa: an a priori categorical distinction between the “material Islam” of the cell and the (non-material?) Islam of the Sufi; and an anthropocentric instrumentalism that amplifies that distinction by subordinating the socio-material elements of khalwa to its psycho-spiritual effects. One means to avoid these traps can be found in the body of scholarship generally described as the new materialism. While there are several distinct trajectories within this scholarship, “the general consensus seems to be that new materialism embraces a non-anthropocentric realism grounded in a shift from epistemology to ontology and the recognition of matter’s intrinsic activity.”77  In other words, matter has a vitality and agency that exists independently of human beings. Whether one is looking at stars, rocks, elbows, street trash, baptism, or complex societies, the new materialism insists that our knowledge about a phenomenon is provisional and incomplete, our experience of it partial and limited, unless we accept and account for the vitality and agency of all those things, human and nonhuman, that make it what it is.78  I take an expansive definition of non-human agents to include all manner of things which humans can become entangled with, from rugs, rocks, and snakes to cemeteries, voices, and jinn.79  But there is more! Discursive agents like stories and dhikr formulas also possess a vitality and the power to elicit affects in other agents.80  Likewise, we can think about the agency of institutions, or “social facts,” which have an existence apart from any individual person while possessing the ability to shape human behaviors and non-human processes.81  I would suggest, therefore (borrowing language from Jane Bennett) that all these non-human agents are “vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.”82

But medieval khalwa was not simply a jumble of independent and free-wheeling human and non-human elements. As Karen Barad argues: “Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.”83  Barad’s philosophy of agential realism seeks to understand the role of “human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices.”84  I propose, then, that we think about khalwa as an entanglement, a process of engagement between multiple agents that has profound effects for all parties involved. From one perspective, that of the Sufi undergoing khalwa, this entanglement is precisely the process of disciplining the self in order to produce yet more entanglements with the world of the unseen. Unlike the Deleuzian concept of assemblage, which similarly rejects a distinction between the human and the non-human, Barad’s entanglement places an ethical demand on the scholar herself as she becomes entangled in turn.85  Thus, not only do I argue that the entanglements of khalwa necessarily entailed an ethical response from the Sufi—described below as the reintegration into society through new entanglements with the social world—but I would also suggest reading these texts elicits an ethical response from the one entangled in these stories, namely me. Indeed, reading and engaging these narratives has had a profound effect on my understanding of the agential and vibrant nature of all matter and the implications of living in a world of human and non-human agents. There is much more that could be said here. But my goal is not a defense of new materialism or an explanation of agential realism, both of which can be found elsewhere.86  My goal is primarily to articulate the conceptual framework that emerged from my own entanglements with new materialist ontologies and medieval Sufi khalwa texts. In what follows I flesh out these entanglements using examples from Ibn Nūḥ and other Sufi authors, organized heuristically into three broad categories of agents with which a Sufi in khalwa was entangled: the material, the Real, and the social. But I have a secondary goal as well, to introduce some of these ideas into Sufi studies more broadly. This is not to say that Sufi studies are not already engaged with some of these ideas. As Sonia Hazard has noted, many fields have been engaged with and productive of many of the ideas associated with the new materialisms without being a product of this particular academic genealogy.87  For example, Shahzad Bashir’s Sufi Bodies is not explicitly a work of new materialist scholarship. But his work would nevertheless be at home within any number of new materialist discourses.88  Others are more directly engaged. Michael Muhammad Knight’s Muhammad’s Body takes up the Deleuzian notion of assemblage to trace the multiple networks that produced the prophetic body in multiple ways.89  And in his recent book, Islam and the Devotional Object, Richard McGregor brilliantly theorizes the ways that religious objects negotiate with and resist the creative ideas associated with them.90  But in general the new materialist ideas I discuss here have yet to appear in studies of medieval Sufism. What follows will, I hope, introduce a wider audience to the utility and value of this important body of work.

In a section of his treatise devoted to the Sufi practice of dhikr (the mindful recitation of litanies), Ibn Nūḥ al-Qūṣī describes how dhikr should be performed in the khalwa cell:

And these cells are famous and well known. They should be just tall enough to stand up and just wide enough to sit down. They should not have any kind of window because a window will attract the eye’s inclination for light and separation (tafriqa) occurs in the light. But there is unification (jamʿiya) in darkness. And the entire purpose [of dhikr] is unification of the heart.91

This brief passage encapsulates how most Sufis in this milieu understood the basic purpose and function of khalwa: to eliminate all distractions and focus the mind and body on a singular goal. And while Ibn Nūḥ does not provide much detail about the cell itself we can deduce a great deal about the general conditions of physical spaces of khalwa from other sources. It is not always entirely clear what earlier Sufi authors meant by khalwa, other than that they often stress practicing devotions away from habituated areas. But with the institutionalization of Sufi thought and practice during the late-tenth and early-eleventh century, we see the standardization of the practice across a wide swath of territory.92  The evidence suggests that the development of khalwa, as Ibn Nūḥ would have known it, does not predate the mid-twelfth century. For example, when Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) writes about khalwa he is still concerned with the earlier debates about the merits of isolation vs. companionship, arguing that an absolute preference for either one is a mistake.93  Elsewhere, al-Ghazālī describes his own isolated devotions (al-ʿuzla, al-khalwa) that took place not in cells but within locked rooms in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.94  The earliest text in which it is absolutely clear that khalwa has become standardized as a distinct practice that involves retreating into a cell is in the writings of Abū Ḥafṣ al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234).95  As Michel Chodkiewicz has shown, most everything that al-Suhrawardī describes here is scattered across earlier sources, but al-Suhrawardī was the first to systematically arrange it and provide concrete instructions.96  After al-Suhrawardī there is a certain uniformity in the descriptions of the practice that indicate a high degree of institutionalization and underscores how important the physical space was for Sufi practitioners. The khalwa cell was a small room within the house of the master, or multiple cells within a larger hospice. Ibn al-ʿArabī insists that while the space should be quiet, the cell itself should be located within a house full of people.97  The cell was just tall enough to stand, just wide enough to sit, and just long enough to prostrate in prayer. The only aperture was a lockable door. As Ibn Nūḥ stressed, there should be no windows because no light whatsoever should enter the cell.98  The cells were constructed of brick or stone with a wooden door. The only sounds in the cell would be that of gently murmured chanting and breathing. In the early stages of research for this article I suspected the cell must have smelled a bit of unwashed human and sweaty laundry given how long the Sufi spent in there, but this was certainly not the case. The cells would have smelled of perfume or incense; as a place of dhikr, the cell would have been immaculately cleaned and perfumed prior to habitation and regularly thereafter.99  Cleanliness, daily ablutions, and immaculately clean clothing were fundamental requirements for practitioners of khalwa.100  Ibn al-ʿArabī suggests that those prone to lice should shave off every bit of their hair so as not to be distracted by all the creeping and crawling around.101

Contrary to what one might expect, the Sufis were very pragmatic about food, drink, and comfort while involved in khalwa. The object was to maintain a precisely neutral corporeal equilibrium. This equilibrium meant nourishment to keep the body alive, functioning well, and to prevent it from becoming a distraction. Najm al-Dīn Kubrā recommends that “nourishment should not be too much or too little, but just enough to keep the ego self (nafs) quiet.”102  Our authors insist that intake be precisely calibrated to each individual by the master (often framed in medical terms) so that one will neither be excessively hungry nor excessively full. Ibn al-ʿArabī is quite detailed on this point. He instructs his reader to prepare his own food in order to suit his own disposition (mizāj). If one does not know one’s disposition, he should consult a doctor for a diagnosis and for the proper diet. The main rule is that one should eat “light food, which reproaches nature, is slow to digest, satiates, but does not require frequent trips to the bathroom.”103  In his discussion of food, al-Suhrawardī’s focus is on paring down one’s food intake to that which is ḍarūra, or “necessary.” For some, such necessity may amount to eating nothing for days at a time, but he concedes that when it becomes a distraction it would be better to eat every day than attempt such feats of fasting.104  Some of the authors outline a strictly vegetarian diet. Ibn al-ʿArabī counsels to “pay close attention to your nourishment, it should be something fatty but not from an animal.”105  Dāya Rāzī (d. 654/1256) also has a quite detailed discussion of the relationship between nourishment and the proper constitution (or lack thereof) of the body, going even into the difference between a carnivorous and herbivorous diet.106  Ibn Nūḥ marvels at a man who undertook forty-day stretches of khalwa and ate only raisins.107  Aḥmad al-Ṣayyād (d. 670/1271-2), an early Rifāʿī master, advises eating a very specific diet exactly twice a day: barley bread, sweet water, and almonds every morning and evening.108  Sleep should be kept to a minimum, but one should not be too tired either. Najm al-Dīn Kubrā recommends that one only sleep when absolutely necessary.109  Al-Suhrawardī suggests the same.110  Aḥmad al-Ṣayyād,is more specific, noting that sleep should occur at night, for not less than two but not more than four hours.111  The Kubrawī master ʿAzīz al-Dīn Nasafī, who lived in the seventh/thirteenth century, went so far as to articulate that the cell should be neither too hot nor too cold.112

As for the body itself, it should also be properly prepared and precisely arrayed within the space of the cell. There were a number of physical preparations that precede entry to the cell. Al-Suhrawardī encouraged a healthy preliminary regime of weeping, for example.113  The ideal comportment was to sit cross-legged, straight-backed, with hands on knees, facing Mecca. Najm al-Dīn Kubrā commends sitting cross-legged, although he does allow sitting on the heels or squatting if necessary.114  ʿAziz al-Dīn Nasafī, describes several different bodily postures.115  Most texts prescribe a series of vocal litanies (adhkār, awrād, etc.) that, over time, will become internalized, or “implanted in the heart,” so that vocalization is no longer necessary.116  Each particular master had his or her own idiosyncratic program of recitation. Al-Kūrānī describes the precise way in which the embodied practice of dhikr constituted the practical bridge connecting the realms of material existence and divine existence.117  Nasafī, for example, advocated a fully embodied dhikr that involved striking the body with the fist; while this would be painful “at first,” the practice would eventually become fully integrated and interiorized, and the pain would disappear.118  Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāḥ al-Iskandarī (d. 709/1309) explains how the different names of god produce specific emotional effects and healing benefits depending upon which name is chanted.119  Ibn al-ʿArabī also describes different types of devotions within the cell and the different forms of enlightenment that will result from each type.120  Al-Kūrānī has a similar discussion.121  Al-Suhrawardī adds a temporal component as well, stressing that khalwa requires “structuring one’s moments and disciplining the limbs away from forbidden activity.”122

 It should be clear at this point that the physical space of the cell acts in concert with all these other elements to structure and discipline a Sufi’s body. It is not that a Sufi uses the space instrumentally, as some kind of simple technology, but that all these agents within and around the body are intra-acting together. A fascinating example of what I mean here is the description by ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī of a rope that helped him stay awake during khalwa:

One of the things I worked out by myself, without the direction of a shaykh, was to attach a piece of rope to the ceiling of the khalwa cell and tie the other end around my neck while seated. It didn’t reach the ground and thus prevented me from lying down. So, I would place [the rope] around my neck from the evening prayer until the morning prayer. I did this for years.123

A truly holistic account of khalwa, must pay attention to the ways these non-human agents participate alongside the human Sufi to produce very specific phenomenal results.124

The sources repeatedly stress the importance of following all the aforementioned requirements quite strictly. Every single element—the physical dimensions of the cell, the clothing worn, specific types of food and drink, the activities of the limbs and tongue, insects, and weather—they are all intra-acting and entangled elements of a phenomenal process in which the body of the Sufi is transformed (as are the other elements). Ibn Nūḥ provides us with one of the clearest descriptions of how this entanglement transforms the body in the process:

This is the fastest way to enlightenment of the heart (fatḥan li-l-qalb) and proximity to the Lord (qurban min al-rabb), which is to say the dhikr aloud, continuously, so that the heart and tongue are united and the light of the heart rends the heavens and rends Satan. At that point the light of the heart will strengthen and take over his dhikr. Then the dhikr of the tongue will weaken and the limbs will fill with light. The heart will be purified of anything else (al-aghyār), whisperings will be cut off, and the devil will not dwell in his courtyard. He will become receptive to divine onrushes and a polished mirror for manifestations and divine gnoses.125

As I noted at the beginning of this section, the goal of the material-physical practice of khalwa is to effect what Ibn Nūḥ calls jamʿīyat al-qalb (unification of the heart), a unification that would be fractured and disrupted by mundane sensory distractions (light, sound, body aches, temperature fluctuation, etc.).126  The material constraints of the cell and its various components act on the body to facilitate a kind of centripetal bodily flow that creates a unified self. Ultimately, the intra-action of this careful orchestration and entanglement of space, place, time, body, and matter produces a newly articulated self, which is then capable of a new entanglement with the divine presence of The Real.

Ibn Nūḥ recounts an utterly fantastic tale of a wandering Sufi and his recently converted friend who encounter a group of Sufis on the road led by a mysterious master. They decide to follow the group back to the master’s home for refreshments. There the Sufi falls into a kind of trance (ghayba aw-bahta) after seeing the beauty of a young servant boy and eating some marvelous apricots. The story is worth quoting at length:

Suddenly [my friend] placed his hand on me and I noticed that everyone had finished eating. The shaykh said, ‘Bring the Sufi newly arrived among you.’ They took my hand as they might take the hand of one who has an audience with a king.

When they had placed me in front of him, he said to me: Muhammad!

I said: Yes?

[He said]: The apricots pleased you! The young man pleased you!

I replied: My lord, you are one of the spiers of hearts (jawāsīs al-qulūb)!

The shaykh said to one of the Sufis: Take this plate of apricots, the young man, and this Sufi and place them all in this khalwa – and he pointed to a khalwa cell—and lock them in without the key.

So, they placed me and the apricots and the young man in the cell and locked the door. No sooner had I sat down then the apricots had become snakes and were circling all around me. And the young man had turned into a pig and was baring its tusks as it turned to me. I was struck with indescribable fear, pain, and weeping. I pleaded for someone to help me, but none came. All the other Sufis uncovered their heads and began crying. But they knew better than to ask the shaykh to intercede.

I continued in this condition until [my friend] threw himself against the door of the cell saying: ‘Master I beg you in the name of God to take mercy on him, for he is the reason I became a Muslim and entered this noble [Sufi] path!’

This entreaty does the trick and the master releases our Sufi and asks him: “How was it in the cell with your beloveds?” Muhammad does not answer but simply asks permission to leave. “But,” his friend objects, “where will you find another [master] like this? Or training like this?” To which poor Muhammad can only respond, “I am not able to handle his method.”127

Severin Fowles writes that the goal of a materialist analysis should “be to draw the immaterial into the field of encounter and expose the ability of non-things no less than things, immateriality no less than materiality, and absence no less than presence to intrude upon human lives and stand, object-like, before perceiving subjects.”128  While taking seriously the presence of non-human agents is one of the hallmarks of the new materialism, there is also good precedent for this analytical stance from the sociology of Islam, Bryan Turner’s discussion of Max Weber specifically. It is well known that Weber’s verstehende sociology involved a two-part stance: first to interpret the precise ways in which actors themselves make sense of their motives, actions, and social relations; and second to place these emic interpretations into an etic/comparative explanatory framework. In other words, verstehende sociology depends upon the double move, from interpretation to explanation. However, Turner criticizes Weber on one hand for not following his own method when he wrote of the prophet Muhammad and Islam (he ignored Muslim interpretations). On the other hand he critiques Weberian sociology as fundamentally predicated on a definition of the social that “explicitly excludes the subjective behaviour of a solitary actor and the subjective behaviour of individuals or an individual to animals and to inanimate objects.”129 Turner’s critique extends not only to Weber’s exclusion of animals and objects, but also  “interactional dilemmas which arise from their commitment to superhuman or supernatural actors, so too it precludes the analysis of social orientation to sacred objects or sacred places.”130  Following Fowles and Turner, in this section I ask what khalwa looks like if we take seriously the presence of such superhuman actors.

Ibn al-ʿArabī characterizes the nature of khalwa broadly as one’s “innermost secret speaking with the Real [in a place] where there is no other thing or person but him.” ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. 730-6/1329-35) glosses this statement: “This is the reality of khalwa and its true meaning. As for its form, it is comprised of any regimen of piety that leads to this result.”131  The “innermost secret,” of course, being precisely the reconstituted and centripetally interiorized self in khalwa. ʿAmmār al-Bidlīsī (d. between 590/1194 and 604/1207–8) contends that khalwa leads to “witnessing” (mushāhada), which is “the end of the stations,”132  and then actually equates the station of “perfect/complete witnessing” (al-mushāhada al-kāmila) with divine disclosure: “sometimes [the devotee] is witnessed and sometimes he witnesses.”133  Najm al-Dīn Kubrā portrays this transformation as “closing off the paths of the [external] senses,” which leads to “opening the senses of the heart.”134  In fact, the auditory and the visual were linked synesthetically for Kubrā and those who trained in the Kubrawī tradition.135  Others describe this process as polishing the mirror of the heart to the point that it becomes reflective of The Real.136  But Kubrā, Ibn al-ʿArabī, and the others do not mean the elimination of the sensing body in favor of pure cogito, but a rearrangement of the self in such a way that it can ignore one kind of sensory data in order to accommodate another. To return to our hydraulic terms, we might say that most of the Sufis of this period theorized the self as a complex system of flows (physical, sensory, emotional, psychical) that functioned together to facilitate mundane social intercourse. What the Sufis describe in khalwa is, in effect, the employment of a technology to reconstitute these pathways and reroute these energies in ways that are both traditional and novel; khalwa is a means to perform the ambiguity of the self, “to reverse the flow of the body” as Gavin Flood has suggested in his discussion of asceticism.137

This new self, an entanglement of multiple elements reconstituted as an interiorized unity, will then have access to and intra-act with an entirely new realm of sensory input, a presence from the realm of the unseen. Some of this input was auditory. During one of his experiences in khalwa, Najm al-Dīn Kubrā was able to hear the devotions of the angels and noted that at a certain point they began speeding through their devotions as a child who fears his father.138  A few pages later he writes of being able to communicate with his master al-Bidlīsī telepathically from the cell and hear his master’s voice. Later, when Kubrā hears music during his devotions, al-Bidlīsī tells him it is a bad sign and to exit the khalwa or he will either go crazy or perhaps even die.139  Al-Suhrawardī relates the story of a man in khalwa who intuits that his son is about to fall off a ship and drown, so he is able to project his voice from within the cell so that his son heard it and did not fall in.140  Aḥmad al-Ṣayyād relates a story about Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī hearing a voice in the cell telling him that god will grant him three wishes.141  There are many other such examples.

Other forms of input were explicitly visual. While al-Suhrawardī cautions that the purpose of khalwa is not to have visions, he nevertheless acknowledges that the sincere practice of khalwa and dhikr will result in a state in which certain forms and imaginings will appear that are revelatory.142  Ibn al-ʿArabī claims that one will see wondrous things when practicing what he called khalwat al-hudhud, which involved crushing the hearts of hoopoe birds (al-hudhud) into a powder and eating it.143  Similar to visions experienced in dreams, these visions also require the help of one’s master to decipher. Indeed, ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Kāshānī for example, describes visions of the unseen that occur during khalwa as functionally similar to those seen in a dream; they may be true or false. At the same time, he differentiates these visions from the unveilings of the unseen realm experienced by a Sufi in khalwa who is fully awake and present; the latter are always true.144

 Ibn Nūḥ tells of an Upper-Egyptian Sufi who, upon placing a disciple into khalwa, casually mentions “a reciting cat and lamb” whom he’ll meet in the cell. The story continues in the Sufi’s own words:

So I entered the cell reciting sūrat Yāsīn [from the Qurʾān]. Suddenly a cat appeared, sat in front of me, and recited Yāsīn with me from its beginning to its end. I sat in a state of alarm because of it. On the second day I was reciting and performing dhikr and suddenly a lamb entered before me, placed its mouth upon my mouth, and recited Yāsīn from its beginning to its end. And on the third day I left the door of the cell open so that if something appeared I could get out. But a huge serpent descended from the door and began to grow larger until it completely filled up the cell around me. I recited the name of God until it departed.145

Ibn Nūḥ’s account here makes it clear that the Sufi would have been unable to complete his devotions as intended without the quite material ways in which these superhuman agents kept him in the cell and focused him on his task. Najm al-Dīn Kubrā recounts fighting with “the accursed one” by using the sword of focused intention—sayf al-himma—which quite literally has the name of God written down the length of it, to vanquish distracting thoughts.146  Najm al-Dīn Kubrā travelled outside his cell and entered the sun.147  He even received a text message once: in his cell Kubrā sees a piece of paper with a string of letters written on it, which he proceeds to write down for himself. Later, a man sees the string of letters and reveals that it is actually the greatest name of God.148  One practitioner fasted so intensely that God made an apple appear to him. When he cut the apple open a ḥawrāʾ (one of the beautiful-eyed women of paradise) popped out, which pleased him greatly and negated his hunger.149  In a remarkable passage, the typically sour Ibn al-Ḥājj writes: “It is related about one of them that an intense hunger and need struck him so he implored God in his khalwa and requested support (al-ʿaṭāʾ) from him. Then he heard a voice saying: Do you desire food or silver? He said, silver, absolutely, and quick as a flash he held 400 dirhams.”150

These are all forms of sensory input involving either the presence of non-human actors or scenes playing out within the realm of the unseen. Unlike the intra-actions described in the previous section that were intended to produce entanglements of a newly reconstituted self, in this case, Sufi authors are describing intra-actions with superhuman agents that are only possible given the newly disciplined and reconfigured self. Ibn al-ʿArabī describes how one must have already become able to spend extended periods of time alone, in silence, eating and drinking very little prior to any subsequent activity. “So when your nafs becomes comfortable with withdrawal and isolation, you are ready to enter khalwa,” which I take to mean a secondary state of entanglement with the realm of the unseen.151  Sufi authors described the entanglement of this newly constituted self in different ways. Ibn Nūḥ uses a compelling graphological metaphor to describe this process, explaining that one must erase what is written on a tablet before writing something new “because writing atop writing obliterates both writings altogether.”152  In other words, the purpose of khalwa is not an erasure of the self but rather the creation of a self that is capable of intra-acting with input from the realm of the unseen. One of the most explicit descriptions of this process is in a short treatise by Ibn al-ʿArabī. In his Risālat al-anwār (Treatise on Lights), he describes time spent in khalwa as a progression of unveilings of The Real. If at any of these unveilings one is satisfied with the progress made, unveilings will cease. But for those who press on, the unveilings will continue until the Active Intellect (al-ʿaql al-awwal) is unveiled, and ultimately that which moves the Active Intellect itself (al-muḥarrik) will be unveiled.153  And if you proceed beyond that point,

you will be erased, then removed, then annihilated, then pulverized, then eradicated, to the point that the effects of the erasing and its companions are completed in you. Then you will be established, then made present, then made to persist, then joined together, then appointed. You will be clothed in the appropriate robes and you will return to your level (madraja) and you should examine all the forms that you saw, until you return to the world of your senses, which is tied to the earth.154

Again, the apparent annihilation of the self is not the end game here. Rather, annihilation describes the process in which the previous entanglement of the Sufi in the cell gives way to an intra-action with elements from the realm of the unseen and, ultimately, the Real. Note in particular that Ibn al-ʿArabī charges his reader here to “examine all the forms that you saw” before returning to mundane sensory perceptions. Elsewhere, in his much more complicated Meccan Openings, Ibn al-ʿArabī situates khalwa within his complex metaphysics that link the senses to multiple modes of divine knowledge.155

This intra-action with the Real produced significant material and social affects in a Sufi entangled in khalwa. The significance and permanence of these affects (not the affects themselves) are often marked by the metaphor of death in these texts. While many of these texts speak of entering the cell as a form of death, as a body being interred in a crypt, or as a body being prepared for burial, this does not mean the end of that body. Rather, this death is processual, a way of creating a new (in a sense, resurrected) self within a new relationship to society. ʿAmmār al-Bidlīsī, has a fantastic exposition of this idea in which he refers to devotees as martyrs because they have killed their former selves, passions, and desires “with the swords of strenuous practice and piety . . . sticking to the Sufi hospices as if they were in the graves of the people of destiny.”156  Elsewhere, al-Bidlīsī tells Kubrā that he should not intend to stay in the cell for forty days, for that will surely end in disappointment. Rather, he should intend to enter the cell as though he is entering the grave until the day of resurrection. This attitude will ensure success.157  Kubrā himself had his initiates who intended to enter khalwa washed in the manner of a corpse being prepared for burial (ghusl al-mayyit).158  The post-death reintegration into society is made absolutely explicit when Ibn Nūḥ recounts that when one Sufi exited the cell after his devotions, the assembled Sufis celebrated his emergence by holding an ʿurs, a term referring both to a wedding feast and to the anniversary of a saint’s death.159  Not surprisingly, then, the term for the end of khalwa is jalwa, which generally refers to the presentation of the bride to the groom before the wedding ceremony, but here it clearly means exiting the cell and reintegrating the Sufi into the social body. This is an important point because it indicates that the entire process of khalwa does not end with the exit from the cell but with a new entanglement, a new intra-action within the realm of the social. 

We can get a sense of the often quite social nature of khalwa from an account that Ibn Nūḥ relates about a young novice undergoing khalwa under the watchful eye of his Sufi master. “[The shaykh] took my hand and placed me in a cell, gave me a dhikr to chant and stipulated that I must not sleep at night and that I must remain ritually pure (ʿalā l-wuḍūʾ).” Critically, the master does not just leave him in the cell alone to fend for himself, lest he misunderstand the experiences that occur therein. “[The shaykh] came to see me every three days, and when he would enter [the cell] he would explain to me what had happened to me [during the previous days].” After a period of time, the shaykh “smiled in my face and told me that my enlightenment (fatḥī) was imminent and left.” True enough, his master was correct:

Then the enlightenment from God came. I experienced something I am not able to describe and my spirit constricted dramatically.

[The shaykh] said to one of his servants: Take him out [of the cell] for he is no longer able to bear it, lest his spirit leave [his body].

He brought me out of the cell and [I found that] Sufi masters from all over had come to see my master. For it is their custom that when a Sufi exits khalwa they come and gather baraka [from him], for such a person has come from the presence of God.”160

It should be clear by this point that despite all the talk of isolation and solitude in modern scholarship, medieval khalwa cells were chock-full of all kinds of human and non-human beings involved in all kinds of ways. These intra-actions range from simple one-on-one diagnostic sessions with a Sufi master, to socializing with human and non-human beings within the cell, including Sufis outside the cell. Khalwa was not nearly as disconnected from the material and social world as we often imagine. In fact Ibn al-ʿArabī is quite explicit on this point, noting that “the purpose of removing oneself from the company of others is not to be removed from them physically, but rather that your heart and ears not be a container for the useless speech they bring.”161  Accounts of Sufi novices consulting with their mentors during the process of khalwa are an integral part of the literature. Indeed, “tying one’s heart to the shaykh” is one of the fundamental rules of the practice.162  This was because of the unpredictable and often confusing nature of the experience; only the master could properly parse the significance of what happened, as Ibn Nūḥ described in the anecdote above. Najm al-Dīn Kubrā writes that the shaykh is there for the purpose of “solving difficult problems and interpreting experiences.163  Al-Suhrawardī insists that the visionary experiences of the true devotee require explanation, either from the Sufi master or directly from God.164  Ibn al-ʿArabī notes that only a truly gifted shaykh can help one who is unprepared for khalwa.165  In his commentary on this statement, ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (d. 832/1428) observes that one will hear and see all manner of remarkable and terrifying things in the cell and it is only the shaykh who can help the novice understand what these are all about.166  ʿAzīz al-Dīn Nasafī claimed that merely gazing upon the face of the master every seven to ten  days during khalwa would strengthen the disciple’s resolve.167  ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla Simnānī (d. 736/1336) describes how the novice should attempt to communicate with the master intra-mentally from within the cell; one should only leave the cell to consult face-to-face in the event that one lacks such a telepathic ability.168  In all these cases, the master and disciple must work together whether in order to complete khalwa successfully. We could add here that the different types of dhikr performed within khalwa not only produced unique intra-actions within the cell, but they marked and contributed to the social differentiation of Sufi communities from each other in the world outside the cell.169

But as interesting as these conventions with the shaykh are, what are most fascinating to me are accounts in which large numbers of Sufis are seen in and around the practice of khalwa. Al-Suhrawardī grants a dispensation to those who are too weak to leave the cell for communal prayers and admits that it is okay if someone comes into the cell to pray alongside them.170  In Ibn Nūḥ’s account of the Sufi and his “beloveds”—the apricots and young servant boy recounted above—note that the other Sufis are all gathered outside the cell and are active participants in the events unfolding within. And while Ibn al-ʿArabī recommends that one keep their practice of khalwa a secret from others, he still advises novices to post someone outside the door of the cell, just in case things get a little too Real.171  There are also accounts of mass khalwa, that is to say multiple people undergoing khalwa together at the same time. Aḥmad al-Ṣayyād describes a Rifāʿī ritual known as the khalwa muḥarramīya, which was, as its name implies, a special khalwa begun on the second day of ʿĀshūrāʾ during the month of Muḥarram. This khalwa lasted for seven days and involved all the brothers entering khalwa at the same time together, presumably each in his own cell. Note the overlapping entanglements of all the Sufi brothers involved in this practice: they were to fast for seven days on a strictly vegetarian diet, stay awake for seven days, remain in a state of ritual purity for seven days, change their clothes every day, and chant a set of prescribed litanies together after each prayer.172  ʿAbd al-Raʾuf al-Munāwī (d. 1031/1621) tells of a Shādhilī Sufi who heard a voice in the midst of khalwa telling him to go out and talk to people. When he exits the cell he finds that he can now see what is in the hearts of other people, which manifests as the people appearing to him as monkeys, dogs, pigs, and rabbits. This was all too much for him to handle and he asked to be veiled again.173

In all these cases, the Sufi is fundamentally changed by the process of khalwa. Not surprisingly, then, emerging from khalwa could mark one’s authority or indicate a chain of charismatic succession.174  This was clearly the case for the Sufis of medieval Upper Egypt, who used khalwa to indicate or determine leadership of a group. For example, after the well-known master Abū l-Ḥasan Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh (d. 612/1215) died, there was some confusion about who would succeed him. Should it be his son Ḥasan (d. 655/1257) or his prized pupil Abū Yaḥyā ibn Shāfiʿ (d. 647/1249)? The matter was definitively resolved when Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh’s son Ḥasan submitted to and entered khalwa under the guidance of Abū Yaḥyā. This was a definitive and socially marked sign that the son deferred to the authority of Abū Yaḥyā.175

My thanks to the presenters and participants in the first material Islam seminar at the AAR, where I presented the initial, very different, version of this article. Their helpful comments and suggestions proved invaluable as I continued to work on this piece in the intervening years. Likewise, my thanks to this journal’s anonymous reviewers who provided many pages of critical feedback on the subsequent iterations of the article. And finally, my eternal gratitude to Anna Bigelow and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, who kindly hosted me at that first material Islam seminar, encouraged me to pick this piece up again after several years of neglect, pushed me to clarify my ideas and straighten out my prose in various drafts, and in general shepherded it to publication as only the best editors can; it would never have seen the light of day without their generous and expert guidance. 

Although prasat sop are made individually for each funeral and their style varies depending on factors such as region, ethnicity, and the deceased monk’s status, they share important characteristics. They are open-sided structures built on top of a plinth with a layered roof that comes together in a tall spire, puncturing the sky (Fig. 3). Often quite colorful with a mixture of green, yellow, white, red, and blue, prasat sop structures are created using a combination of wood, bamboo, foam, paper mâché, paint, and colored paper. Rich yellow- and orange-gold colored materials that include foil, paper, and paint applied to the surface of the built structure shimmer in the sunlight throughout the funeral ceremony (Fig. 4). These materials give monks’ prasat sop their characteristic golden hue; cremation structures for the laity by contrast might be colorful and beautifully decorated, but they are not built at the same scale or eye-catching golden color. 

Some monks’ prasat sop are built on top of mythical animals. Perhaps the grandest and most sought-after structure for a monk’s cremation is the prasat nok hatsadiling, a towering construction of a prasat sop with the upper palace structure sitting atop a nok hatsadiling, a colorful, elephant-headed mythical bird the size of a small house, which has the unique ability to fly directly to heaven (Fig. 5).183  Built so that the bird’s head and wings move, the prasat nok hatsadilinggives the impression that it is ready to take flight once the cremation is complete. These particular prasat are built only for those who have achieved particularly high status through dedication to the ten Buddhist perfections;184  they are associated with royalty and important monks—men who have lived as monks for over ten years. Such unique people are said to possess barami, the spiritual perfection or supreme moral virtues a being can attain through the accumulation of merit over a series of lives.185

Merit-making and barami also influence the use of gold in the monk’s funeral, both on the structure and in a less obvious location: on the corpse of a deceased monk, if it is understood that his practice, dedication, merit, and perfection have brought him to the cusp of enlightenment. After such a monk dies, the corpse is treated with utmost care. Other monks and novices attend to the body, using embalming techniques to keep the body in a preserved state, giving the body a ritual cleansing, and then covering it in its entirety with gold leaf. The gold leaf is evidence of the monk’s high status and accumulated barami. This is reminiscent of the great historic Buddha himself, whose golden skin created a radiance from his body in a physical manifestation of his achievement of nirvana. The Buddha’s golden complexion is described in many parts of the Lalitavistara sutra which chronicles the early life of the Buddha. In one example, the sutra states that golden light shone forth from his mother’s womb as divine visitors came to be in his pre-natal presence. His golden hue was one of his thirty-two auspicious marks that set him apart as a great being (Fig. 9). This connection between the gold of the monks and that of the historical Buddha is important because monks seek enlightenment through the vows and words that the Buddha taught.

Northern Thai written chronicles called tamnan, dating as far back as the fifteenth century, present the religious and political history of Lanna through a tangled approach that conflates legend and historical truth.191  Tamnan make direct connections between the Buddha and gold, further linking the Buddha’s golden hue with local communities. The Tamnan Ang Salung, or Legend of Water Basin Mountain, which tells about the Buddha’s travels in Northern Thailand, links following Buddhist precepts with gold. This story tells of the Buddha’s visit to a Lawa village, where King Ashoka (who is traveling with the Buddha in this narrative), tells villagers that if they take the Buddha’s precepts and follow his teachings, their fields will prosper.192  After the villagers took the precepts, they returned home to find that everything inside and outside of their house had turned to gold. The sudden manifestation of gold demonstrates that taking the Buddha’s precepts and finding refuge in the Buddha brings wealth and good luck, as the Buddha’s power radiates through his dedicated followers.193  For devotees of deceased monks, the golden skin of the corpse, and perhaps the radiating prasat sop, have a similar effect of spreading the power of the Buddha.

An artist’s statement accompanying the photographic project Qoyllur rit’i: The Lord of the Snow Star. Translated from the original Spanish by Emily C. Floyd. Versión en español disponible aquí.

The festival of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i, the “Lord of the Snow Star” in Quechua, is an important pilgrimage in the southern Peruvian Andes to the sanctuary of the same name at the base of the snow-capped mountain Sinakara, more than 4600 meters above sea level in the Cuzco region. Every year in the months of May and June, depending on the date of Lent, thousands of pilgrims from the most remote regions of the southern Peruvian Andes congregate at the site. Fortified by their devotion and faith, they confront high altitudes and extreme temperatures in a steep upward climb of more than eight kilometers.

The origins of the festival may extend back to before the arrival of Europeans in the region, but it is with the coming of the Spaniards and syncretic Catholicism that Qoyllur rit’i acquired the form and scale of today’s event. In the pilgrimage, ancestral rites converge and often overlap with Catholic traditions centered on a rock displaying a miraculous painting of the crucified Christ. The festival and sanctuary were declared Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación (National Cultural Heritage) in 2004 by the Peruvian state. In 2011 UNESCO listed the pilgrimage as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The first time I went to the sanctuary was in 2001, when the paved highway that now connects the Cuzco region with the Peruvian jungle was not yet in existence. My memory is of a long, cold, and dusty journey by truck with a group of dancers who sang songs in Quechua and Spanish throughout the trip. Back then I was part of the Catholic school that organized the excursion, and I didn’t understand much of what was going on. On my second visit in 2006, I went with devout family members, a few days after the main festival. I found the route and sanctuary practically empty and for the first time I had the opportunity to approach the miraculous rock. From then on, until 2018, I returned to the sanctuary on various occasions. On each trip, I was fascinated by the spectacle, the rituals, and everything related to this festival, a festival which I was only beginning to understand.

In 2012, I began to make a graphic record of the pilgrimage, which little by little evolved into a photographic project. In this project, my interest in the complexity of the festival, beyond its veil of Christianity, increased, and I began to investigate beyond what my Catholic beliefs had taught me. In attempting to comprehend the syncretic world of the festival, photography allowed me to capture and narrate what I saw.

In 2018 I made my most recent visit to the sanctuary, a visit which in some ways represented the culmination of my modest photographic project. On this occasion, I traveled with “Hermanos Qapac Qolla del Cusco,” a comparsa or group of dancers who wear regional costumes and dance as a form of devotion in honor of a specific image of the Virgin, Christ, or a saint. In contrast to my previous trips, I was able to experience the traditional three days of the pilgrimage together with the comparsa, as just another member of the group. The photographs I took on this pilgrimage accompany this text. These written reflections convey what I have learned and observed in my repeated visits to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i.

The tradition as it is known today has its origins in a miraculous story, which the more experienced pilgrims relay to the newer ones, a story based in accounts from the mid-twentieth century, but with the earliest sources dating the miracle to between 1780 and 1783.194 A mysterious “white” child appeared to Marianito Mayta, the young son of a shepherd from the town of Mahuayani, near the present location of the sanctuary of Qoyllur rit’i, and the starting point for the modern pilgrimage. The child played with Marianito and helped him care for the flock he was herding in the valley of Sinakara. After days of playing together, Marianito grew curious about his friend’s clothing, which never aged or got dirty, only to have his friend appear the next day with his clothing threadbare and torn. Marianito offered to travel to Cuzco to look for the necessary fabric to repair his new friend’s tunic, but when he went to the city he discovered that the cloth was of a kind reserved for the exclusive use of bishops. As such, according to the story, Marianito sought out the then bishop, Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta (1723-1811), to beg him for some fabric for his friend’s tunic. This petition caught the prelate’s attention. He accepted the child’s petition and sent a letter to the parish priest of the neighboring town of Ocongate asking him to investigate the matter.

According to the accounts, on June 12, 1783 the parish priest of Ocongate convinced Marianito to bring him to meet his friend. On reaching the valley, the priest was startled to see a child dressed in a tunic tending to the flock, but when he tried to approach him, the child began to emit a radiant light, hiding the child and forcing the priest to desist in his efforts. A few days later, this time accompanied by communal authorities, the priest returned to the place and tried again to approach the mysterious child, who once again emitted the radiant light. This time, however, the parish priest did not desist in his effort to capture the child, leading the child to flee to a pinnacle of rock, pursued by the priest and his party. Reaching the rock, they found that the light and the child had disappeared. In their place, the priest and the communal authorities discovered, in a tayanka bush, a shrub that grows at high altitude and is used for firewood by local inhabitants, a figure of the crucified Christ with blood in his wounds. According to the story, Marianito collapsed and died in the resulting commotion and was buried at the base of the rock. Later, the priest ordered that the miraculous apparition be excised from the tayanka bush and sent to the Church of Tayankani.195 A chapel was built around the pinnacle of rock where the child disappeared, upon which, according to the miracle accounts, an image of Christ Crucified had also appeared, which the parish priest subsequently contracted a painter from Cuzco to “touch up.” As the news of the miraculous apparition of the image spread, the first pilgrims began to come to the site. This chapel would become what we know today as the Temple of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i, a holy place and central focal point of the pilgrimage.

Like many sacred spaces in the Andes, the sanctuary is situated near one of the Apus or sacred mountains of the city of Cuzco, in this case Mt. Ausangate. The sanctuary is located in a narrow glacial valley at the foot of the snow-capped peak called Sinakara. The modern construction that houses the rock of the apparition is located at 4700 meters above sea level; nothing remains of the original building. The modern building is a cement structure with a tin roof. An enormous stairway at its entrance leads to an atrium of generous dimensions, in which various comparsas dance day and night for the three days of the celebration. In the surrounding area of the valley, pilgrims set up plastic tents to pass the night, although the majority prefer to sleep in the open air, wrapped in sleeping bags or traditional regional woven blankets, just as the generations that preceded them did. At the entrance of the sanctuary and in the lower part of the temple, vendors in multicolored plastic stalls offer a wide range of religious products together with alasitas, miniature objects whose ritual purpose is to convert wishes in reality. It is also possible to find stands where all kinds of food and beverage are sold, with the exception of alcoholic beverages, which are not offered, at least officially.

There are two pilgrimage routes: the first, which may preserve traces of a pre-contact route predecessor to the modern Catholic one, is called the “24-Hour Procession.” It begins at the Church of Tayankani, in Ocongate, and winds along a path of gullies and plateaus. According to Constanza Ceruti, there is evident syncretism in the rituals practiced at specific geographic points.196 The second route, which is shorter and more trafficked in the present day, is the route I took in all my visits to the sanctuary. This route begins at the town of Mahuayani, following a steep road of more than 8 kilometers divided into a via crucis of fourteen stops, which are used as places of rest and prayer. The route starts out narrow at the beginning and widens as it enters the valley, following the sinuous curve of the stream that emerges from the glacier. This path can be taken on foot or by horse, although in recent years, as I was able to observe in my last visit, the horses are being replaced by motorcycles. The two potential starting points can be reached via bus and truck from the city of Cuzco, a 150-kilometer trip that lasts 5-6 hours along the interoceanic highway that unites the region of Cuzco with the Peruvian jungle.

The pilgrims hail from many places, but the majority are Indigenous Quechuas and mestizos from the valleys of the region of Cuzco, although there is also an important presence of Aymara peoples from the Lake Titicaca basin, as well as residents of the city of Lima. More recently, there has also been a confluence of foreign pilgrims coming from Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, as well as a smaller number of Europeans and North Americans motivated by adventure and “mystic” tourism. Mystic and adventure tours to Qollyur rit’i are marketed in Cuzco as packages to tourists.

The vast majority of the pilgrims are part of a comparsa, which can be small or large. These comparsas are integrated into the eight “nations” of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i. The word “nation” refers to groupings of comparsas representing one of the regions of Cuzco. The comparsa Hermanos Qhapaq Qolla del Cusco (Brothers Qhapaq Qolla of Cuzco), for instance, belongs to the nation of Tahuantisuyo, representing the city of Cuzco. Each comparsa has a carguyoq, called “mayordomos” in Spanish, who are the organizers and managers responsible for all the preparations for the pilgrimage, as well as the comfort and well-being of the pilgrims during the festival. They cover the costs demanded by the pilgrimage in exchange for celestial favors, and generally march at the front of their respective groups carrying the apuyaya, a kind of relic or standard with the image of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i. The election of the carguyoc takes place annually from among the most influential of the pilgrims in a solemn ceremony at the base of Sinakara. Additionally, each comparsa has a quimichu or guardian of traditions. In the comparsa that I accompanied, our quimichu was responsible for making the stops and offerings along the path. One of the rituals that the quimichu oversaw consisted of carrying a rock of the size that we considered equivalent to our sins from one station of the via crucis to the next, until we reached Cruzpata, the last station of the via crucis. This final station is a very emotional, because it is from there that one can first see the sanctuary.

The social status of the pilgrims is very diverse, but the majority are low- and middle-class peasants, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs. Such was the case with the comparsa Hermanos Qhapaq Qolla del Cusco, the majority of whom were businesspeople from the city of Cuzco.197 Members of comparsas are easy to recognize at the site as, in contrast with spontaneous pilgrims, or “visitors” as they are called, members of comparsas wear traditional regional costumes, and make the ascent carrying everything the need for the three days of the celebration on their backs, including blankets, foodstuffs, and firewood. In my case, I helped out by carrying some pieces of firewood.

Like all the pilgrims arriving at the sanctuary, even before setting up camp we went immediately to visit the church and offer homage to the crucified Christ of the rock with a few brief songs and dances. This was the preface to three days of continual celebration whose mystic essence was the invocation of the Christ of brilliant snow, pagos (payments) or offerings to the Apus, various signs of respect towards the sacred rock in the church, and processions to a small chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. All of these rituals are accompanied by the continuous dances performed by the comparsas of the various nations.

At daybreak, in a ritual thought to preserve some link to the pre-contact sun cult of the Incas, the comparsas form lines, waiting for the emergence of the sun.198 The quimichu, lifting his arms towards the east, makes supplication in Quechua and Spanish, a mix of Christian prayers and petitions to the Apus, while the rest of the members of the comparsa kneel as a sign of respect. This act tends to be accompanied by the playing of pututus, large marine conch shells known as “Andean trumpets.” As our comparsa was small we did not have pututus in our ceremony, but we heard the sound of the Andean trumpets of the other comparsas. Following the prayers of the quimichu, we paused silently out of respect for those who are no longer among us, before wishing each other mutually “Wataskama” (“until next year”).

Once the sun begins to radiate across the sanctuary, the unending dances begin, as do the processions to various religious objects and sites scattered throughout the sacred space, including crosses, niches, altars, or spaces that house a devotional object. But the principle place for offering devotion is always the temple, where the comparsas, including Hermanos Qhapaq Qolla del Cusco take turns parading and dancing before the sacred image of the rock. From what I observed, and later confirmed in research, dance is the principal form of devotion that the devotees offer, alongside ritual flagellation and exhaustion.199

The sacred space of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i is also the setting for offerings or pagos made to the Apus or mountain spirits. Within Andean cosmovision, nature, and runas, or people, are complementary and constitute a whole. Entities like the Pachamama (mother earth) are considered ensouled and spirited living beings. Andean people do not dominate the natural environment, but rather live and coexist with her. The ritual of the pago symbolically returns in an act of reciprocity all that has been produced in collaboration with the earth, invoking at the same time blessings for future harvests.

As a photographer, I normally prefer to present my photographs in color, but, on this occasion, I chose to have the final images printed in black and white when the project was exhibited in 2020-2021 as part of the Religion in the Andes exhibition at the Institute of Sacred Music, Yale University. In addition to honoring the solemnity that is part of the traditional photographic process, I also wanted to convey the sacred atmosphere that is pervasive in everything that surrounds this festival and in the physical space of the pilgrimage, without the distraction of color. From my perspective, the colors of the original images intoxicate the gaze, pulling the viewer’s attention away from the sense of the sacred that draws thousands of people each year from the most diverse regions of the Andes, to brave the high altitudes and extreme temperatures in a pilgrimage as unique as the landscapes that serve as its backdrop.

Through the photographic project, as well as this text that now accompanies it, I wish to leave a testimony of my lived experience and of the small changes I have witnessed over time. I hope I have conveyed what I have learned and come to understand in visits to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur rit’i over the past decade.

The implications for non-Western societies and for subaltern and excluded subjects around the world would be quite different if colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism were thought of not as regretful by-products of modern Europe, but as part of the conditions that made the modern West possible. 

Edgardo Lander, “Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Thought”200

For without exception, the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents of those who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. And just as such a document is not free of barbarisms, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from owner to owner.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

While scholarship on the historical extraction and working of silver in the so-called “New World” is anthropologically informed, politically attuned, and attentive to historical and ecological issues, when it comes to silver artifacts in Europe, scholarship and gallery displays are overwhelmingly connoisseurial, drily technical, narrowly specialist, and aridly drained of political engagement (Fig. 4).203  In a parallel and related bifurcation, while scholars have engaged energetically with the politics of colonialism in Andean silver production, they have all but ignored the politics of colonialism in Europe, especially in the Italian peninsula, whose way was paved in silver. These bifurcations are not the result of mere oversight. Issues that are materially and politically conjoined have been kept apart by European scholarship overwhelmingly driven by a point of view over-identified with the European elites.204  While scholars have been alert to silver’s economic role in Spanish rule, they have been slow to recognize its cultural role as an intrinsic part of imperialism­­­­—especially within Europe. Existing art historical studies fall prey to or collude in the glamor (at once superficial, material, profound) of colonialist effects. This is particularly marked with regard to the study of precious metals, although it extends way beyond them. Jennifer Montagu, one of the few art historians to engage with silver baroque artifacts, approaches them as “objects for the display of virtuoso silversmithing” and “symbols of their owners’ wealth.”205  What is now urgently required is art historical analysis that goes beyond conjugating colonial history and the isolated study of fine objects.

By thinking of silver in relation to coloniality, its peculiar capacities to interfuse discourses of exploitation and redemption, refinement and salvation come into focus, which in turn helps us to see silver otherwise.208  Walter Mignolo argues that coloniality refers to the logic of domination and exploitation veiled under the language of redemption, and the idioms of modernization and progress. This is not to be confused with colonialism, which refers to specific historical periods of imperial domination, whereas coloniality refers to the logical structure of colonial domination and emerges in the discovery and conquest of the Americas by Europeans.209  To date, decolonial critique focuses on a critique of eurocentricism in relation to subalternized and silenced knowledges. This model occludes recognition that colonization took places also within Europe and—crucially—the degree to which elite culture in Europe was constructed directly or indirectly through discourses of coloniality.210

What interests me here is silver’s enmeshment in the double helix of power systems of court and colonialism on both sides of the Atlantic and the ways in which silver was wrought to endow rich Europeans with glittering allure and shiny irreproachability beyond the display of something already given or simple economic value. In other words, the culturaleffects of silver.211

Baroque silver held peculiar significance as material of sacred and liturgical objects, marker of social niceties and refinement, as engine of the commodity frontier of the Spanish empire, and as justification for calculated exploitation and cruelty.212  If early modern silver was marked materially by trauma, how, if at all, did it efface its own traumatic history through discourses of holiness, brightness, and refinement? Hence is there a material affect, a materiality of trauma, or its effacement? This essay considers specific objects made in colonial Naples in relation to the atrocities of empire, not in order to expose one literally represented in the other—in a sense, their relationship depends on a refusal of any direct representation or acknowledgement—but to discern traces, draw connections, and see one in light of the other. 

The conquest of societies and cultures of what today is called Latin America was part of a constitution of a new world order, a process in which the world’s resources were violently seized and concentrated under the control and for the benefit of a small European minority. I turn now to explore how the lustrous surfaces of silver may be seen as tarnished by the violences silver demanded, made possible, concealed, betrayed, and outshone. I ask whether in some dark way European socio-political charisma actually depended on those very brutalities and their obnubilation. What was it about silver that allowed it to foment, whet, and yet also occlude opportunistic appetites and vicious desires?213

Spanish rule was dealt in silver. Silver was mined in far greater quantities than gold. It spread further (in particular to China and the Far East) and was more widely used in a greater variety of commodities than gold. While gold was king of metals and most prized, the vast bulk of treasure from the Spanish Americas came to Europe in the form of silver. Indeed, the expressions “vale un Perú” (“it’s worth a Peru”) and “vale un Potosí” (“it’s worth a Potosi”) demonstrate that entire histories and geographies of the Indies were reduced to silver. 

Early modern silver was saturated in the politics of conquest, but it was acclaimed as a reward to the Spanish monarchy for its defense of Christianity. In his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), Father José de Acosta claimed the discovery of Potosí, “the greatest treasure known to exist in the world,” was destined by Divine Providence for “the time when Emperor Charles V, of glorious fame, held the reins of empire and the realm of Spain and the seigniory of the Indies.”214  He calculated that Potosí produced “year after year” a million pesos for the quinto royal (the 20% tax leveled by the crown on precious metals) and in 1585 alone the fleet carried 111 million silver pesos, and that these sums allowed his readers to:

understand how great is the power that the Divine Majesty has graciously placed in the hands of the kings of Spain . . . since it has been ordained by the lord on high, who both gives and takes away kingdoms from whomever and in whatsoever way he wishes . . . we must humbly petition him to graciously favor the pious zeal of the Catholic king, granting him good fortune and victory over the enemies of his Holy Faith, for it is in this cause that he pours out the treasure of the Indies that God has given him and still has need of much more.215

The discovery of silver in Spain’s new lands and its astonishing treasures was assumed by Spain’s apologists as an indication of divine justice, providence, and fortune. Hence silver was the indelible link between divine will and Spanish worldly power. If silver was a blessing, then the ends to which it was put might also be assumed to be blessed.

It has been estimated that the Spanish monarchy minted about 4.55 million kilograms of silver and 2,800 kilograms of gold in the years between 1600 and 1639.216  Outputs during the early-seventeenth century of the gold and silver mints owned by the Spanish monarchy were considerably greater than in the later sixteenth century and were certainly much higher than that in England or France.217  The Spanish inspector in Concolorcorvo’s late-eighteenth-century Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes confronts an Indigenous person: 

The Spaniards extracted more silver and gold from the entrails of this land in ten years than your countrymen did in the more than two thousand in which they were established here, according to the calculations of the most judicious men.218

Malleable, soft, ready to be of service, the substance from which other objects had already been made; already passed on, refashioned, reformed, and melted into liquid. It was the preferred medium of valuation and exchange. The value of coins lay in their metal, not in the mint, silver could be assayed for purity, while copper could not. Price was set in silver.219  Reales (worth one-eighth of a peso) bore the Spanish monarchy and emblems of empire as far as the silver circulated (Fig. 5). Reproductive, metamorphic, the material of value itself, silver was coins and profit, the gain of flesh through the material that it imitates. The most mobile of currencies, silver gained charisma from and was equivalent to exchange. 

Thus silver, even as it shone triumphant and redemptive in the faces of the saints, even as it proclaimed the vast wealth of the Spanish Crown and Neapolitan religious institutions, dragged in its wake exploitation and destruction, human and ecological. Profit for some, silver already owed an unpayable debt, was the blood of others. Its brilliant allure, which charged up desire, was fed by loss and mourning.

More silver reliquary statues were made in Naples than anywhere else in the world.224  From the early-seventeenth century, Naples’s protector saints were concentrated in the gleaming Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples Cathedral (Fig.9). I have argued elsewhere that this chapel was at once a treasury, bank, and conversion chamber for Spanish silver, and, as such, activated by the liquefying blood miracle of San Gennaro, it worked to secure Spanish domination, co-opt the local aristocracy, and deliver spiritual salvation to dutiful subjects.225

In Naples the sumptuous silver collections of the Prince of Avellino, Marquis of Campolattaro and duke of Atripalda were particularly renowned.234 Gold and silver were complicit in producing the “refined” and graceful sheen of aristocratic habitus. Silver is the earth’s most reflective metal; its surface pools, flows, and glistens like water. One has to imagine the few objects that have survived shimmering and alive with fulguration, rather than dully imprisoned behind glass, as they are in museums today. Shimmering and glinting, the court was enchanted by its own reflection in silver mirrors on walls and ceilings, sconces, and various accoutrements. The erotic lability of the mirror, its capacity at once to desubstantialize and beglamor, its playing exchange of reflection, unveiling and revealing, are superbly exploited in a celebratory mirror of ca. 1695-98 from Andrea Fantoni’s workshop (Fig. 13). Its frame consists of thick folds of fabric, as if dressed, as fabric clung to the frames of those who gazed at the silvered glass to see themselves and their companions glitter back alluringly in the glow of candlelight. Marine creatures, flourishing flambeaux, support the mirror and its terrestrial register, above which improbably aerial spirits triumph. The mirror implies its own transformative capacity to bear aloft, to offer those reflected in its silvery surface an analogous transcendent capacity. To look in such a mirror was to be enlivened by its glittering promise to be freed from mundanity and elevated into lighter, higher unencumbered realms.

Table pieces were often fantastical metamorphic creations (Fig 17).245  A silver centerpiece by Giovan Battista Buonacquisto of 1704 has cherubim supporting a lower bowl, which is punctuated by putti holding palms and flowering branches, and three shells, separated by doves, from which a pedestal soars bearing an angel with trumpet.246  In this rare survival of princely display, diverse silverwork techniques produce surfaces ranging from the bristling hair of the horse’s coat to the sheen of shells. Mermaids or sirens hold up shell-shaped bowls, articulated by dolphins and seahorses at intervals, from which emerges a pedestal supporting an equestrian statue of King Charles II. The whole stages politics and life as naturally and gracefully interconnected, with the king at its apex, in the position of the source of life-giving water, as if he were the font of life itself.

Scoppa’s ewers and candlesticks thrive on contradiction: figures straining from the edges, often in opposed directions, hold them in tension (Fig. 21). The sense of underlying meaning is an effect of a specific style. Their style here is best thought of as productive, not as external or accidental adornment of content, but the creation of affects from which speakers and messages may be discerned. 

Culturally, silver clad the court in a super, superior and supercilious shine. Nobles wore silver and gold in silver and gold thread, lace, spangles, and embroidery. Gilt silver or silver metal was drawn into wire by specialist wire drawers. The wires might be rolled to make strips (lamellae). The wire or lamella was then wound round a core thread, usually of silk to make silver-gilt and silver wire. Extravagant and brilliant technical skills invited you to stare, take a second look, to admire what thrillingly met the eye. 

In his guide book to Naples of 1692 Carlo Celano emphasized the city’s unsurpassed gold thread, lace and embroidery: “Here [in Naples] is made the most delicate lace of gold thread and of silk, which is inferior in no way to that of Venice or Flanders.”253  “Here are made the most bizarre embroideries of all sorts, that perhaps have no equal in Italy; and they are so much in use that there is no modestly comfortable house that does not have them.’’254  Celano emphasizes both the widespread manufacture and consumption of metallic lace and its marvelous capacities:

There is no festival-supplier, which we call apparatore, who doesn’t have at least seven rooms of embroidery to hire out for church festivals; in addition to which in a great many churches of nuns and regulars they abound in quantity to adorn them [the churches] entirely. There silver and gold are worked most nobly, and especially in the ligatures of jewels, forming from a quantity of small gems one single gem, that makes one marvel.255

The so-called “most noble” working transformed human beings into walking marvels. Alchemically, silver was that into which dross might be turned. Silver was a vital part in the alchemical process of court culture that raised tawdry human bodies into glittering aristocrats entitled to exploit others, make the rules, and suit themselves. All done exquisitely.

Out of the dark a flash here and a gleam there. Sometimes dazzling; sometimes velvety soft (Fig. 24). Like a metaphor for the nefarious plotting, internecine rivalries, and deceitful chicanery amidst the glittering wit and brilliant smiles of court politics. 

Silver’s material qualities were activated in processes that were political and social at least as much as they were technical. Tarnish is endemic to silver, unlike gold. The shine of silver is endlessly threatened by its own staining that constantly surfaces and that can be kept at bay only by repeated polishing—work that renders both tarnish and its own labor invisible. This may be thought both literally and metaphorically. Silver’s shine denoted invisible labor, a silent obscured labor force, largely female, who buffed and polished at dawn and at night to keep nobility looking effortlessly lustrous and pure. Silver’s role in securing and denoting many kinds of refinement may be thought of as part of an effacing of an originary trauma. Instead of looking at European silver in conventional terms that disassociate it from its origins, if we think of it instead in relation to its bloody origins, we perhaps can glimpse the darkness of traumatic materiality.

Generous insights and advice from Kris Lane, Dana Leibsohn, Griselda Pollock, and the anonymous readers have greatly improved this article. I am indebted to the Leverhulme Foundation for a Research Fellowship in 2018-19 that provided me with a year’s research leave and allowed me to travel to Peru and Bolivia.

This essay is part of a series that addresses the theme of “Exchanges in the Americas,” which Dana Leibsohn proposed to MAVCOR Journal.