Ali Karjoo-Ravary

I’ve adorned a garden of delight
from which friends can pick flowers
whose fresh blossoms, with every breath,
perfume the lovers’ senses.
Neither freeze nor hail will cause it to wilt;
nor the winds of autumn bring its leaves to fall.

With this poem, the fourteenth-century historiographer ʿAzīz ibn Ardashīr al-Astarābādī concluded a nearly eight-hundred-page history of his patron’s reign.1  While the literary adornment of such a text has a measure of timelessness, its visual adornment and illumination, including the painted rosettes surrounding the poem above, are the first things lost and changed in its copying. The visual and material features of a book, even when seemingly arbitrary, play an important role in how its text is approached and experienced. While faithfulness to an original is typically important in the transmission of a book’s text, the choices that shape its appearance are where the contextual specificity of the act of transmission is most palpable. These choices, despite their material constraints, always suggest a particular framing that refigures and repurposes a text so that it performs a new meaning for a new audience. In what follows, this article traces Astarabadi’s text, Bazm wa Razm (Feasting and Fighting), from fourteenth-century Anatolia through its various Ottoman-era recensions down to the modern period, examining how each era visually refigures this textual manifestation of his patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad (r. 783-800 AH/1381-1398 CE), for a new purpose. Starting from its first instantiation as a “garment” for a living “shadow of God” in the illuminated manuscript that was produced while he was still alive, the choices that undergird its visuality are intimately tied to the Sufi-inspired ideal of Islamic monarchy imbued in its text. As a book that embodies the presence of a living “king of Islam,” it was made to be seen, heard, and experienced in court so as to convince others that Burhan al-Din was a locus for the manifestation of the entirety of God’s attributes, the equilibrium in which all opposites are gathered. This latent power is clear in the afterlife of the manuscript: after its patron’s death, it remained in elite hands but was not circulated despite its influence on Timurid and later Ottoman historiography. Much later, from the seventeenth century onward, recensions of the text transcribed for Ottoman elites, based on a manuscript tradition that I argue is rooted in Astarabadi’s draft, reveal how routine visual and material changes cancel the power of that initial performance, thereby reframing a once-powerful figure into a contemplative lesson on time, power, and bygone generations. Lastly, seemingly arbitrary visual choices made in two editions of the text printed in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries embed and encapsulate the worldview of nation-states, casting Burhan al-Din as a step in the progress of either Turkish or Iranian-Islamic nationalism. With every twist of this story, the visuality of the book and the choices that produce it frame how it is seen, read, recited, and approached, distilling for its audiences the norms and expectations of Islamic power, past and present.

  • 1
    Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 281b; ʿAzīz ibn Ardashīr al-Astarābādī, Bazm wa Razm, ed. Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (Istanbul: Evkaf Matbaası, 1928), 541. All translations by the author unless otherwise mentioned.

Burhan al-Din’s Life and Context

Burhan al-Din, remembered in Turkey today as Kadı Burhaneddin, has long been considered a minor king. He ruled for almost eighteen years over a part of eastern Anatolia during the political fragmentation of the post-Mongol age.1  From Astarabadi’s history we learn that he was born in 745/1345 to a line of judges in Kayseri and that he received a standard scholar’s education in Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz during his youth. After returning to Anatolia and serving as a judge for some years, he became, in 780/1378, chief minster to the last Eretnid sovereign, ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad (d. 782/1380), whose dynasty ruled eastern Anatolia after the breakup of the Ilkhanate in the early fourteenth century.2  Upon the latter’s death, Burhan al-Din maneuvered against several rivals and ultimately took the throne in 782/1381. During his rule, Burhan al-Din faced multiple insurrections from urban and nomadic elites, and he likely commissioned this chronicle in an attempt to refashion his image for the former group at his court in Sivas. Yet soon after its completion, in the summer of 800/1398, he died at the hands of a former vassal, ʿUthmān of the White Sheep (Āq Qūyūnlū) Turkmen. His capital, Sivas, was destroyed by Timur four years later. 

Burhan al-Din is exceptional as one of the first kings who verifiably studied and directly engaged with the work of the Sufi theoretician Muḥyī al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). According to Astarabadi’s narrative, sometime during 791-792/1389-1390, likely in response to his legitimacy problem, Burhan al-Din sent a gift of two precious carpets to the shrine of Ibn al-ʿArabi’s son-in-law, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), in Konya. The caretakers of the shrine, in turn, sent a copy of one of Ibn al-ʿArabi’s main works, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (Ringstones of Wisdom), written in Sadr al-Din’s hand, to Burhan al-Din.3  While they sent it with the intention of Burhan al-Din deriving blessing (baraka) from simply seeing Sadr al-Din’s handwriting, Burhan al-Din not only studied it, but “sincerely sought to acquire and master this craft.”4

This mastery is corroborated by other sources, such as a series of letters preserved by his companion and teacher, Yār ʿAlī Shīrāzī (d. 814/1411), which show his deep engagement with Ibn al-ʿArabi’s metaphysics and cosmology.5  Yar ʿAli himself was an important Sufi theoretician of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, embedded in larger networks that spanned from Anatolia to other centers of Islamic power.6  He was also a key member of Burhan al-Din’s retinue and served as his ambassador multiple times, including when the aforementioned carpets were sent to Konya. In these letters, Burhan al-Din capably debates the finer points of Ibn al-ʿArabi’s thought with Yar-ʿAli, displaying a knowledge of its main texts and themes as developed after Ibn al-ʿArabi’s death. This move to master Ibn al-ʿArabi’s work coincided with a period of military and diplomatic confrontation with the Ottoman Bayezid I (r. 791-805/1389-1403) and Timur (r. 771-801/1370-1405), as well as a larger turn toward literary production from 796/1393 to his death in 800/1398. This turn culminated in Burhan al-Din’s own authorship of three works, including an Arabic treatise wherein he demonstrates his command over Ibn al-ʿArabi’s metaphysics. 

It was in this later period that Astarabadi joined Burhan al-Din’s retinue. Astarabadi had originally served as a member of the Jalayirid bureaucracy in Baghdad, working under the reign of Aḥmad ibn Uways (r. 784-813/1382-1410).7  The Jalayirid family had risen to prominence through their service to the Chingissid household until one branch of it, tied to the Chingissids through marriage, was able to rule independently after the fall of the Ilkhanate.8  In 20 Shawwal 795 (August 29, 1393), Timur attacked Baghdad and Ahmad Jalayir escaped to Mamluk Syria.9  Astarabadi and other prominent members of the court were unable to escape and were forced into the retinue of Timur’s son, Mīrānshāh (d. 810/1408), as he marched towards Mardin. Astarabadi writes that he knew of Burhan al-Din because of his virtuous reputation, but any Jalayirid courtier would have had an awareness of the political situation of eastern Anatolia.10  Taking advantage of the proximity of Mardin to Sivas, he escaped Miranshah’s company by night, journeying via the mountainous road to Amid (present-day Diyarbakir). He reached Burhan al-Din on Thursday, 11 Shaʿbān 796/June 11, 1394.11

Shortly after, during a feast at court and a conversation about the histories and deeds of previous kings, Burhan al-Din asked Astarabadi to write an account of his life and work. It took him four full years to complete the work. He writes:

I named it, “Feasting and Fighting,” so that all the Sultans of the world and the majority of the commanders of the Arabs and non-Arabs will take these good codes of conducts and beloved laws, which are the rising places of the lights of felicity (saʿādat) and the dawning points of the good news of kindness and mastery, as their guidebook for their worldly lives and beyond, taking them as a code of law for their own guidance and righteousness. So that when they traverse the path of waging war and spreading out feasts, they will emulate these noble and good deeds:

            So that kings who possess religion (dīn) and kingdom will learn
                       the manner and tradition of ruling the world
                                   and the conditions of being a ruler.12

The text’s articulated goal, without a doubt, is moral and pedagogical: to teach the common people and other rulers the arts of upright living and just statecraft. But, as we will see below, in so doing it also casts Burhan al-Din’s name, memory, and presence as the most perfect king of Islam and a true shadow of God. This display seeks to convince others that Burhan al-Din’s unique nature, tied to his own scholarship and mastery of language, unites the opposing factions of his kingdom. In this respect, it embodies at every level the ideal of being a king of Islam.

  • 1
    Portions of this article are taken from my PhD dissertation. Ali Karjoo-Ravary, “Becoming a King of Islam: The Imperial Project of Qadi Burhan al-Din of Sivas (1345-1398 CE)” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018). The classic study of Burhan al-Din’s kingdom is Yaşar Yücel, Kadı Burhaneddin Ahmed Ve Devleti (1344-1398), (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1970). On Bazm wa Razm specifically see Heinz Helmut Giesecke, Das Werk des Aziz ibn Ardasir Astarabadi: Eine Quelle zur Gesch. d. Spätmittelalters in Kleinasien (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1940); Jürgen Paul, “Mongol Aristrocrats and Beyliks in Anatolia. A Study of Astarabadi’s Bazm wa Razm,” Eurasion Studies IX/1-2 (2011): 103-156; and Jürgen Paul, “A Landscape of Fortresses: Central Anatolia in Astarābādī’s Bazm wa Razm,” in Turko-Mongol Rulers: Cities and City Life, ed. David Durand-Guédy (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 317-345. For a survey and wide-reaching analysis of the important influence of Mongol rule on Islam in Anatolia in the period building up to this moment, see Andrew C. S. Peacock, Islam, Literature, and Society in Mongol Anatolia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
  • 2
    On the Eretnids see Kemal Göde, Eratnalılar (1327-1381) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1994).
  • 3
    According to Chittick, this is possibly Evkaf Müzesi 1933, but I have been unable to gain access to this manuscript. William C. Chittick, “Sultan Burhân Al-Dîn's Sufi Correspondence,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Moregenlandes 73 (1981): 35 f8.
  • 4
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 384.
  • 5
    Chittick, “Sultan Burhân Al-Dîn's Sufi Correspondence”; Andrew C. S. Peacock, “Metaphysics and Rulership in Late Fourteenth-Century Central Anatolia: Qadi Burhan al-Din of Sivas and his Iksīr al-Saʿādāt,” in Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Anatolia, ed. A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz (Istanbul: Orient-Institut Istanbul, 2016), 118-121; Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 2349.
  • 6
    Peacock, “Metaphysics and Rulership,” 120-122.
  • 7
    The dynasty was one of the successor states to the Ilkhanid empire. See Patrick Wing, The Jalayirids (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Astarabadi does not mention that Baghdad was under the rule of Ahmad’s brother ʿAli for most of his career. Given Astarabadi’s attitude towards Ahmad Jalayir, one wonders if his loyalties were first and foremost to ʿAli. Wing, The Jalayirids, 148.
  • 8
    Wing, The Jalayirids, 66. Even Abu Saʿid Bahadur Khan (d. 1335 CE), the last effective Ilkhan, had a güregen (imperial son-in-law) behind him when he was young. After his death in 1335 CE, households like the Jalayirids and the Chobanids continued to prop up rival Ilkhans from the Chingissid family until at least the middle of the fourteenth century. Later on, Timur (d. 1405 CE) revived the practice when he propped up a puppet khan and styled himself as the güregencausing his descendants to be known by the Persian title gūrkānī.
  • 9
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 19-20; Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū, Zubdat al-Tawārīkh, ed. Sayyid Kamal Javadi (Tehran: Intishārāṭ-i Vizārat-i Farhang wa Irshād-i Islāmī, 2001 CE/1380 SH) 766-767.
  • 10
    In fact, the Jalayirids claimed the Eretnids who preceded Burhan al-Din as their deputies, were related to them by marriage, and maintained contact even during Burhan al-Din’s political career. Wing, The Jalayirids, 78.
  • 11
    Contrary to Astarabadi’s own account, Ibn ʿArabshah in ʿAjā`ib al-Maqdūr, written in 839/1435, gives a different account of Astarabadi’s flight from Ahmad Jalayir. According to Ibn ʿArabshah’s narrative, Astarabadi had been a favored courtier of Ahmad Jalayir. Burhan al-Din had requested Astarabadi’s presence from Ahmad Jalayir multiple times, but Ahmad Jalayir denied him. Finally, Burhan al-Din made secret promises to Astarabadi, convincing him to escape. Astarabadi snuck out of Ahmad Jalayir’s camp one night, stripped his clothes, and swam across the Tigris. When Ahmad Jalayir woke up and saw his clothes and footprints by the shore, he thought Astarabadi had drowned and did not bother to pursue him. While both accounts are literary creations, the notion that Astarabadi had been promised patronage seems very likely. Ibn ʿArabshah’s account highlights that it was Burhan al-Din who sought Astarabadi, promising him favor and fortune in exchange for his service. In other words, Astarabadi’s project was essential to Burhan al-Din’s performance of kingship. Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿArabshāh, ʿAjā`ib Al-Maqdūr fī Nawā`ib Taymūr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjlu al-Misriyya, 1979), 121-122. Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) also relates the same story.
  • 12
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 32; Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 21a. It is noteworthy that the other recensions all mention majesty and beauty in this section.

Textual Production

The last four years of Burhan al-Din’s reign resulted in several significant manuscripts—two in Arabic, one in Persian, and one in Old Anatolian Turkish. While a full discussion of their contents and roles in his larger project is beyond the scope of­ this article, a basic understanding of how and when they were written is necessary to understand the manuscripts of Bazm wa Razm.

The earliest of these works is the sole copy of Burhan al-Din’s Dīvān (London, British Library, Or. 4126), a collection of his poetry written in Old Anatolian Turkish; the colophon tells us that it was transcribed by his scribe, Khalīl ibn Aḥmad, in 796/1393-1394.1 In addition, the frontispiece carries a dedication written while Burhan al-Din was alive, praying for the continuation of his kingdom and identifying the poems as his. More will be said about its decorative program below as it relates to Bazm wa Razm.

  • 1
    The full colophon, which is in Arabic, reads (on fol. 305a): “The most weak of His servants has written it, who confesses his faults and mistakes, Khalil the son of Ahmad, of the King, of the Sultan, God have mercy on whoever prays for mercy upon them, in the year 796, with praise to God the exalted for His blessings and with salutations upon His prophet Muhammad and his folk, and with assured peace to them all.”

    كتبه اضعف عباده المعترف بتقصيره و خطائه خليل بن احمد

    الملكي السلطاني

    رحم الله من دعا لهم بالرحمة من سنه ست و تسعين

    و سبعمائة حامدا لله تعالى علي نعمه

    و مصليا على نبيه محمد و آله

    و مسلما تسليما

    The manuscript (London, British Library, Or. 4126), like Aya Sofya 3465, is written in a clear naskh (a standard calligraphic style) and fully vocalized for clarity of reading and meaning. While our sources acknowledge that Burhan al-Din was skilled at poetry, no premodern source references the writing or existence of a Turkic language divan. The Divan has been thoroughly studied in regard to its linguistic aspects, such as in the studies of Muharrem Ergin, who also prepared an edition in Latin script. See Muharrem Ergin, Kadı Burhaneddin Divanı (İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1980). Smaller studies have considered aspects of the content of the Divan. On identifying Sufi themes in the Divan (likely a response to earlier European scholarship identifying his poems as “profane”), see Ali Nihad Tarlan, “Kadı Burhaneddin’de Tasavvuf,” Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi 8 (1958): 8-15; Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi 9 (1959): 27-32. On references to music and musical modes see Mehmet Arslan, “Kadı Burhaneddin’in Divanı’nda Musik,” Yedi Đilim IV 32s 15 (2000): 25. For earlier published editions of his poems and some contextualization, see Kadı Burhaneddin, Kadı Burhaneddin Divanı’ndan Seçmeler, ed. Ali Alparslan (Ankara: MEB, 1977); and Kadı Burhaneddin, Divan-i Kadı Burhaneddin: Gazel ve Rubaiyatından Bir Kısım ve Duyguları, ed. Fred Field Goodsell (Istanbul: Matbaa-yi Amire, 1922).

Burhan al-Din’s second work is the aforementioned Arabic treatise on metaphysics and the obligatory acts of worship in Islam titled The Elixir of Felicities: On the Secrets of Acts of Worship (Iksīr al-Saʿādāt fī Asrār al-ʿIbādāt), which, according to Astarabadi, was finished in the winter of 798/1395-1396 in twenty days. It exists primarily in two manuscripts, neither of which are dated or signed.1  One exhibits the characteristics of a draft (Bursa, Inebey Yamza Eserler Kütüphanesi, HC 500), including a frontispiece dedication that was composed during Burhan al-Din’s lifetime.2

The third text by Burhan al-Din is an Arabic treatise on uṣūl al-fiqh, the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, called Tarjīḥ al-Tawḍīḥ (The Superiority of the Explanation). Styled as a defense of the principles of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, it was completed in about a year on 3 Shaʿbān 799/May 2, 1397, a date corroborated in Astarabadi’s narrative (which also reproduces its introduction) as well as the colophon of its clean copy (Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ragip Pasa 381). The colophon of this copy also mentions that it was transcribed directly from Burhan al-Din’s own draft (al-musawwada al-sulṭāniyya al-burhāniyya) on 1 Rajab 800/December 10, 1397, when he was still alive.3  The copyist of this manuscript did not write their own name, but, at moments, the writing begins to resemble the hand of Yar-ʿAli Shirazi, from whom two different styles of handwriting exist.4  It is Burhan al-Din’s most popular work and exists in numerous copies.

The last text to be produced for Burhan al-Din and the only one that was not written by him is the subject of this article, Bazm wa Razm.5  The presentation copy (Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465) was transcribed from a draft copy (sawād taʾlīfihi) on 1 Rajab 800/March 21, 1398, by the same scribe who transcribed the Divan, signing this time only as Khalīl al-Sulṭānī. It is the most complete extant manuscript, missing only its introduction and frontispiece dedication. The colophon of this copy identifies Dār al-ʿulāʾ Sīwās as the location of transcription, using the chancery title of Sivas, Dār al-ʿulāʾ (the Abode of Loftiness).6

  • 1
    For the latest on these and later translations, as well as their manuscript history, see Peacock, “Metaphysics and Rulership,” 102-107. They were first spoken about by Ahmed Ateş, “Konya Kütüphanelerinde Bulunan Bazı Mühim Yazmalar,” Belleten 16 (1952): 72-73.
  • 2
    Bursa, Inebey Yazma Eserler Kütüphanesi, Hüseyin Çelebi 500; Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 1658. There is a chance that Hüseyin Çelebi 500 could be a draft based on the title page and its draft-like nature and script, and the paper is of similar quality and weave to other manuscripts from that time period and region. The second is a fair copy held at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul (Aya Sofya 1658) and is written in a clear naskhlikely within the century after Burhan al-Din’s deathIt measures 6.6 x 5 inches / 5 x 3.5 inches (169 x 128 mm / 128 x 87 mm). The title page indicates it was written after Burhan al-Din’s death and it has features of a presentation copy. The date of completion is derived from Bazm wa Razm as neither colophon contains a date of completion. The text is discussed in the aforementioned, Chittick, “Sultan Burhân Al-Dîn's Sufi Correspondence,” 33; and, in detail, in Peacock, “Metaphysics and Rulership.” The text was recently published in Beirut using only Aya Sofya 1658: Burhān al-Dīn, Iksīr al-Saʿādāt fī Asrār al-ʿIbādāt, ed. Mohammed Zahid Qalfakil (Beirut: Kitāb Nāshirūn, 2019).
  • 3
    Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ragip Paşa 381. For a study of this text with an edition see Emine Nurefşan Dinç, “Kadı Burhâneddin’in Tercîhu’t-Tavzîh İsimli Eseri: Tahkîk ve Değerlendirme” (PhD Diss., Marmara Üniversitesi, 2009); as well as Yunus Apaydın, “Kadı Burhan al-Din’in Tercihu’t-Tavzih Adlı Eseri,” Sosyal Bilimler Enstitūsū Dergisi 6 (1995): 33-45; and Mustafa Baktır, “Kadı Burhan al-Din Ahmed’in İlmi ve Hukuki Yönü,” in XIII ve XIV Yüzyıllarda Kayseri’de Bilim ve Din Sempozyumu (Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi, 1996), 142-152.
  • 4
    The hand in this copy of the Tarjih (Ragip Pasa 381) does not match Yar-Ali’s distinct hand as preserved in the aforementioned letters (Aya Sofya 1658) as well as a personal collection of texts and notes belonging to him (Bursa, Inebey Yazma Eserler Kütüphanesi, Hüseyin Çelebi 1183). Yet the letters and notes have visible indications that they were for his own use. The one text that is signed by him (Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 1918) is clearly a presentation copy of his work, Lamaḥāt, and is written in Nastaʿlīq, which makes it one of the earliest Anatolian examples of the script, another indication of cultural relations with other Jalayirid domains. Its shaky nature is similar to other early Nastaʿliq examples and suggests that he was indeed experimenting with a new hand (my thanks to Dr. Elaine Wright for her comments in this regard; Elaine Wright, personal correspondenceDecember 5, 2020). On the development of Nastaʿliq and its early forms, see Elaine Wright, The Look of the Book: Manuscript Production in Shiraz, 1303-1452 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2012), 231-254. In this vein, it is easy to assume that he experimented with hands, and it is noteworthy that at times, particularly near the end, the hand of Ragip Paşa 381 starts to incline towards the right and take on a boxy shape, two of the hallmarks of Yar-ʿAli’s personal hand as seen in Aya Sofya 1658 and Hüseyin Çelebi 1183. Yar-ʿAli’s distinct hand also appears at the end of the 31st volume of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s second recension of the Futuhat, replacing a page that was likely damaged. See Istanbul, Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi 1875, fol. 132a.
  • 5
    Aya Sofya 3465.
  • 6
    Shams-i Munshī, Dustūr al-kātib fī taʿyīn al-marātib (Moscow: Farhangistān-i ʿulūm-i jumhūrī-yi showrawī-yi sūsiyālīstī-yi Ādharbāyjān, 1964), 187; Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī, ʿIqd al-Jumān fī Tārīkh Ahl al-Zamān (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-miṣriyya al-ʿāmma lil-kitāb, 1407 AH/1986 CE), 1.152.

From this body of manuscripts, we can make several general conclusions about manuscript production under Burhan al-Din’s rule. While there is no evidence of a dedicated scriptorium, the Divan and the presentation copy of Bazm wa Razm are signed by Burhan al-Din’s scribe, Khalil, and are in the same hand. In the colophon of each, Khalil identifies himself as a royal scribe through his use of the nisba adjectives “al-sulṭānī” (of the sultan) and “al-malikī” (of the king).1 Furthermore, the process of manuscript production is similar to that in other parts of the central Islamic world: the texts were composed in drafts that were then copied by a professional scribe. A measure of illumination was completed with the transcription, usually rosettes and borders, but the bulk of the illumination followed the transcription of the text, and was not always by a single person. Paintings, as we will see, were the last part of the process; blank places were left for them, and captions on the edges of the pages indicated their subject matter. Through the colophon of his legal work, Ragip Pasa 381, we learn that it took a maximum of seven months to transcribe a clean copy from Burhan al-Din’s draft, from Shaʿbān 799/May 1397 to Rabīʿ al-Awwal 800/December 1397. Bazm wa Razm does not give a month for the end of its composition, simply that it happened in 800 AH, but the text dates the completion of transcription from the draft to 1 Rajab 800/March 21, 1398.2  As 800 AH started in September 1397 CE, that means it took a maximum of six months to transcribe the whole text. Given the amount of work put into the transcription, it seems likely that a full six months were taken, a point supported by the fact that the narrative ends with events in the summer of 799/1397.

  • 1
    For the Divan, see footnote 14. The colophon of Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 382a reads:
    Transcribing and copying this book from the draft of its composition and compilation was finished through the aid of God, the exalted, and his succor the forenoon of Thursday the first of Rajab, the solitary, in the year eight hundred from the hijra and in the Abode of Loftiness, Sivas, may it be inaccessible to the evil amongst men, in the hand of the slave, in need of God, who bows before the generous, the sinner, Khalil al-Sulṭānī, may God hold back the evils of his hand and forgive him and his parents. To God belongs praise, and may blessings be upon his prophet, upon his pure family, and his chosen companions.
    و قد وقع الفراغ من تحرير هذا الكتاب وتنميقه نسخا عن سواد تاليفه و تلفيقه 

    بعون الله تعالى و توفيقه ضحوة يوم الخميس من غرة رجب

    الفرد لسنة الثمانمائة الهجربة بدار العلاء سيواس

    حميت عن شرار الناس على يدي العبد المفتقر

    الى الله الحاني على المحسن و الجاني خليل

    السلطاني

    كف الله عن السيآت يديه و غفر له 

    و لوالديه و لله الحمد و الصلوة

    على نبيه و على آله

    الطاهرين و صحبه

    المنتجبين

  • 2
    A date that was likely intentionally chosen to correspond to Nowruz, the royal new year—a major feature of court ritual. There is also the possibility that the draft was written in multiple books, and that Astarabadi passed each to Khalil as he finished them.

The Draft of Bazm wa Razm

Paradoxically, the premodern reception history of Bazm wa Razm is not based on Aya Sofya 3465, but rather on a draft that was extant until the eighteenth century. The evidence for this is threefold. First, the entirety of the text’s manuscript history after Aya Sofya 3465 follows an alternate ordering of the text that is identical in all of its later recensions. These recensions uniformly feature, in several sections, word choices that differ from Aya Sofya 3465. Second, this draft’s existence is attested to in a manuscript dating from 1127/1715 (Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Ahmet III 2822). This volume’s colophon says that it was transcribed from the author’s copy (nuskha-yi muṣannif) using the word tabyīḍ, which indicates making a fair copy from a draft.1  Third, and perhaps most importantly, another manuscript dating from the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément Persan 211) offers far clearer evidence that it was based on a draft, even affording an explanation for the alternate ordering of the text.2

The text of Supplément Persan 211 is based on a single copy of Bazm wa Razm whose narrative was heavily edited. The most important of these revisions are marked in Supplément Persan 211 with the words “transfer to an isolated folio” or “transfer to a detached folio.”3  Together, these sections account for nearly all sections of the text that Astarabadi changed between his draft and the fair copy of Aya Sofya 3465. These sections are also missing in its later recensions until the twentieth century.4  While Supplément Persan 211 does not always offer what was on the detached or isolated folio, perhaps because those specific folios were lost, the marked location always indicates a place where Aya Sofya 3465 offers a section that is missing in all other manuscripts. In other words, Supplément Persan 211 is the only recension that offers a glimpse at the editorial process that resulted in Aya Sofya 3465 through the addition of detached folios. It seems likely that by the eighteenth century, when Ahmet III 2822 was transcribed, the loose folios were lost and the copyist transcribed the text without taking into account the added or edited sections. Furthermore, the conclusion is missing from all recensions post-Aya Sofya 3465, suggesting either that the draft had already lost its terminal pages by the sixteenth century or, alternatively, that Astarabadi did not compose his conclusion until after Khalil ibn Ahmad’s transcription from the draft was nearly completed.5  Supplément Persan 211 folio 2a also preserves the dedicatory inscription that is missing from all other recensions, including Aya Sofya 3465.6  In fact, Aya Sofya 3465 is missing two folios after the first half of what was likely a double-page frontispiece. These pages, which as a matter of custom would have featured some of the most elaborate decoration and adornment in the manuscript, were removed sometime in the two centuries after the completion of its text.7  The incomplete frontispiece illumination now faces the tail end of Astarabadi’s introduction. Furthermore, as will be discussed in detail below, Supplément Persan 211 notes almost exactly where each image was supposed to appear in the manuscript, corresponding directly in nearly all cases to a blank space for painting in Aya Sofya 3465. Since Supplément Persan 211 also preserves the captions for these images, it allows for the reconstruction of the planned illustrative program (see Table 2), suggesting that it was designed by Astarabadi himself. 

As mentioned, the text in Aya Sofya 3465 is the only extant manuscript of Bazm wa Razm that has a conclusion. In it, Astarabadi writes: 

If the appointed time (ajal) is delayed and the age of life extended, if the bird of spirit does not take flight from the nest of the body and the composition of existence does not fall apart, I will bring into the place of discourse and the center of composition the history of the remaining future years of the auspicious reign (may it connect and link to eternity-without-end), which I have already started. If God wills, one is He, and what He wills will be.8

The planned second volume referenced in Astarabadi’s conclusion never appears, for Burhan al-Din was killed a few months later in the summer of 800/1398. The sudden change of fortune is palpable within the decorative program of the manuscript. Its illumination was abandoned hastily and its illustrations, for which there are eighty blank spaces (including twenty-nine extant captions at the edges of the pages), were never attempted.9  After Burhan al-Din’s death, all of these manuscripts would be dispersed, ending up in the hands of his enemies, whether through spoils of war or through the migration of his family and friends to their domains. 

  • 1
    Tabyīḍ means “making white” and the word for draft is “black or blackened” (musawwada), referring to the visual dominance of black ink in a draft.
  • 2
    Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, Supplément Persan 211. The manuscript was dated by Francis Richard, the cataloger and former director of Islamic art at the Louvre, who based his dating on watermarks from the European paper as well as its provenance. My gratitude to my colleague Evyn C. Kropf, Librarian for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Religious Studies and Curator for the Islamic Manuscripts Collection at the University of Michigan Library, for her aid in understanding the dating of this manuscript and its analysis.
  • 3
    Intiqāl bi varaq-i mujarrad (9a for example) or varaq-i munfaṣṣil (31a for example).
  • 4
    For instance, a section of odes to Baghdad that is missing from the beginning in every recension other than Aya Sofya 3465 is found at the end of Supplément Persan 211, with notes in each place marking where it should be placed inside the narrative.
  • 5
    As is quoted below, Astarabadi writes in the conclusion that he had already started writing the history of the present and planned to continue in the future until he completed a second volume. This may lend support to the conclusion being written after the transcription of Aya Sofya 3465.
  • 6
    Supplément Persan 211, fol. 2a, in Arabic:
    The book of the occurring states and actualized acts that emanated from the sublime presence, the most mighty sultan, the most noble and grand champion, the one who possesses the necks of the servants, the one who seizes the forelock of the lands, the one who sets the foundations of Islam, the one who deliberates the best interests of the elect and the common folk, who possesses the power of unity, the vicegerent/caliph of God over His creation, and His shadow spread out over His people, the father of victory, the proof of the Real, the realm, and religion, Ahmad, the son of Muhammad, may God the exalted make his caliphate, kingdom, and sultanate endure, and safeguard him from what could dishonor him as a magnification for Islam and in seeking His great blessings, by Muhammad, his noble family, and his descendants the best of creation.

    كتاب واردات الاحوال واقعات الافعال الصادرة عن عالي حضرة

    السلطان الاعظم و القهرمان الاكرم الافخم مالك رقاب العباد

    آخذ نواصي البلاد ممهد قواعد الاسلام مدبر مصالح الخواص

    و العوام ذي القوة الاحدية خليفة الله على خليقته

    و ظله المبسوط على بريته ابي الفتح برهان الحق

    و الدولة و الدين احمد بن محمد

    خلد الله تعالى خلافته و ملكه 

    و سلطانه و صانه عما شانه

    تعظيما للاسلام و تيمما النعمائه

    الجسام بمحمد و آله

    الكرام و عترته

    خير الانام

  • 7
    This is based on an estimate for the spaced needed to fit the amount of text that is missing and a dedication. Or. 4126, the Divan transcribed by Khalil, also features a dedication on fol. 1a:
    From the words of the sultan, the scholar, the just, the generous, the free-handed, the locus of manifestation for the prophetic character traits who makes manifest the nation of Mustafa, sultan of sultans, the extract of water and clay, the proof of the Real, the world, and religion, who is aided through the confirmation of the One, the Haven, the father of victory, Ahmad the son of Muhammad, may God make his sultanate endure and clarify, to all worlds, his proof.

    من کلام السلطان العالم العادل المنعم

    الباذل مظهر الأخلاق النبویة

    و مظهر الملة المصطفوية سلطان

    السلآطين خلاصة الماء و الطين

    برهان الحق و الدنيا و الدين المويد

    بتاييد الأحد الصمد ابو الفتح احمد بن محمد

    خلد الله سلطانه و اوضح على العالمين برهانه

  • 8
    Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 281b; Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 541.
  • 9
    As I will discuss below, I have been able to compile most of the captions for the planned images using another manuscript.

Islamic Kingship in Manuscript Form

In a section titled, “The cause of composing (taʾlīf) this book and refining it (taḥrīr),” one of two sections wherein Astarabadi discusses the aims of his work, he writes:

[in Persian] The unraveler of this secret, the adorner of this embroidery (ṭirāz), the weaver of this garment (nassāj-i īn jāma), and the transcriber of this book of deeds (kārnāma) . . . ʿAzīz ibn Ardashīr, born in Astarabad but who lived in Baghdad, says that . . . after attaining the felicity of standing before him [Burhan al-Din] and achieving the honor of reaching him, what did I see when my eyes were illuminated by examining that resplendent face and witnessing that world-adorning countenance?

Intellect and soul in a single existence,
     kingdom (mulk) and religion (dīn) in a single body,
The sun (mihr) and moon in a single cap,
     and heaven (āsimān) beneath a single cloak.

A face glimmering in its announcement of the glad tidings of joy and lightheartedness, or rather, a sun veiled (mubarqaʿ) by the lights of magnificence and loveliness. Expressions that encircled the treasures of eloquence, or rather, allusions that drew down the secrets of rhetoric and ingenuity. [in Arabic] What a thought that one could reach his summit or overtake his far reaches. I know none like him in excellence nor his equal in generosity. His words are licit magic (siḥr ḥalāl) and his speech is sweet water, purer than wine and softer than the rain of clouds, for it is a revelation revealed, taught to him by one intense in power (Q 53:5). . . . [in Persian] The wanting faces of the good smile through the teardrops of his pens, and the hearts and sights of the evil burn and cry from the lightning blows of his swords. Through the interconnection of knowledge and wisdom, he has made the sword and the pen a single language, and through holding fast to justice and generosity, he has made water and fire companions to one another.1

Astarabadi identifies himself as the “adorner of this embroidery and the weaver of this garment,” building on a long-established notion in Arabic and Persian literature wherein the art of composition is likened to crafts such as weaving.2  This bears not only on the intentionality behind the structure of any composition, but also on its appearance. Garments come in many types, however, and history writing had multiple forms in the Islamic past. In the above-quoted passage, Astarabadi clarified the form of his history: panegyric. Panegyric histories as a rule were almost always devoted to a single patron or dynasty.3  The exemplar of this form of panegyric history is Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-ʿUtbī's (d. ca. 427 or 431/1036 or 1040) Arabic work, al-Yamīni, which he wrote for Maḥmud of Ghazna (r. 388-421/998-1030) and which, together with its thirteenth-century Persian translation by Nāṣiḥ ibn Ẓafar Jurfādiqānī (fl. early seventh/thirteenth century), are clear archetypes for Bazm wa Razm.4  Premodern authors recognized the connection between al-Yamini and Bazm wa Razm, and the historian Aḥmad ibn ʿArabshāh (d. 854/1450) quotes an unnamed source to say that Bazm wa Razm, in fact, surpassed al-Yamini in its eloquence and form.5  It is precisely the formal excellence of Bazm wa Razm that transformed it into an example of the genre for later Muslim dynasties as an ideal embodiment of Islamic kingship. 

  • 1
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 11, 26-27. Magnificence (ubbuhat) and loveliness (ṣabāḥat) are synonyms for majesty and beauty.
  • 2
    See Margaret S. Graves, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 144-150. Graves’s work as a whole is an illuminating study of the reciprocal and analogical relationship between literary, monumental, and plastic arts and crafts. On these metaphors in Arabic and Persian literature see Julie Scott Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 15-22.
  • 3
    In this sense, they were rooted in the laudatory odes (qaṣīda) of the Arabic and Persian poetic tradition which were gifted to patrons, and continued, even in Persian, to incorporate an abundance of Arabic verse. Bazm wa Razm’s structure follows the structure of a qasida, starting with Astarabadi’s nostalgia for a lost Baghdad (nasīb), his perilous journey to Burhan al-Din’s court (raḥīl), and then cycling between multiple genres that usually follow the previous two, including praise (madīḥ), invective (hijāʾ), and wise reflection (ḥikam). It also includes four Arabic qasidas written specifically by Astarabadi for Burhan al-Din, two in its first half and two in its second half. All of this clearly signals to the reader that this is primarily a work of praise. For more on the many faces of the Qasida, see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ʿAbbāsid Age (Leiden: Brill, 1991). On the Persian and Arabic Qasida, see Meisami, Structure and Meaning, 144-189. On the relationship of rulers to history writing in Persian historiography, see Julie Scott Meisami, “Rulers and the Writing of History,” in Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationship from Abbasid to Safavid Times, ed. Beatrice Gruendler and Louise Marlow (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2004), 73-95. For a number of different types of history and a strong theoretical approach to medieval Islamic historiography, see Mimi Hanaoka, Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
  • 4
    On this work see Julie Scott Meisami, Persian Historiography to the End of the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53-66; as well as Ali Anooshahr, “ʿUtbi and the Ghaznavids at the Foot of the Mountain,” Iranian Studies 38 (2005): 271-291; and Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam (London: Routledge, 2009); and Andrew C. J. Peacock, “ʿUtbi’s al-Yamini: Patronage, Composition, and Reception,” Arabica 54 (2007): 500-525.
  • 5
    Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn ʿArabshah, ʿAjā`ib Al-Maqdūr fī Nawā`ib Taymūr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjlu al-Misriyya, 1979), 121-122.

In addition to the type of history, the type of Islamic kingship at play in this manuscript is also clarified by Astarabadi in the above passage.1  He describes Burhan al-Din’s status as both a scholar and a king as uniquely embodying an equilibrium in which opposites are gathered together, stylistically referring to Burhan al-Din’s dual status as the pen and the sword, the sun and the moon, water and fire, magnificence and loveliness, and importantly, their synonyms majesty and beauty. The very title of the work is itself an exposition of this same theme. Bazm means feasting, merriment, and holding court, while razm means fighting, procession, and waging war. The pairing of bazm and razm is, at the very least, as old as the poet Firdowsī’s (d. 411/1020 or 416/1025) Shāhnāma  (The Book of Kings).2  An epic poem of more than fifty thousand couplets in New Persian, Firdowsi’s account of the kings and heroes of pre-Islamic Iran became a paradigmatic model for Islamic monarchy up to the modern period, and many rulers either commissioned their own copies, made their own verse histories in its style, or, like Astarabadi, derived inspiration from its themes. For Firdowsi, the pair simply referred to what kings do. For instance, when praising his patron, the aforementioned Mahmud of Ghazna, he writes: “In feasting, he is as generous as the heavens, / In fighting, he is as a sharp dragon’s claw.”3  This pair of opposing-yet-complementary principles (feasting and fighting) built on and reflected another pair taken from Arabic literature, al-sayf (the sword) and al-qalam (the pen), with which Astarabadi ended the above passage. While initially, in Arabic literature, this pair referred to the fundamental division of courts between civil and military elites, it quickly grew to refer in abstract to ideas such as literature and martial arts, peace and war, and theory and action. Persian literature expressed the indebtedness and close association of bazm and razm to the pen and the sword early on. For instance, the famous panegyrist of the Seljuk dynasty, Amīr Muʿizzī (d. ca. 519-21/1125-7), writes for his patron: “The argument for fighting and feasting derives from the sword and the pen; / in both fighting and feasting, the argument of the sword and the pen is yours.”4 Similarly, his contemporary, Sanāʾī (d. ca. 525/1130), writes: “Since the body and soul are put into order through the pen and the sword / On the day of fighting and feasting, may the court be guided by your grip.”5  These pairs were nearly synonymous in the rhetoric of kingship in the medieval Persianate world, though they primarily referred to the workings of court.

What is new in Astarabadi’s work is the mapping of these concepts onto the attributes of God and the notion that they must all be present within the king himself. Before the collapse of the caliphate in Baghdad in 1258, as seen in al-Yamini, the divine sanction of kings was rooted in their role as a tool that upheld the scales of justice through the sword, representing wrath and punishment.6  The collapse of the ʿAbbasid Caliphate after the Mongol invasions witnessed a restructuring of kingship in the Islamic East in keeping with the norms of Sufism. Two changes were deeply important in this regard: one, the explicit articulation of the Prophet Muhammad as a “king,” from whom other kings derive authority; and two, the linkage of bazm and razm to the theological concepts of jamāl and jalāl  (beauty and majesty), a link absent in the works of Firdowsi and other early Persian poets.7

  • 1
    For a survey of some of the different types of kingship in the Islamic world see Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1997); and Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India 1300-1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). Of particular importance to this article is chapter three of the latter work.
  • 2
    On the roots of this term, see A. S. Melikian-Chirvani, “The Iranian Bazm in Early Persian Sources,” in Res Orientales IV: Banquets d'Orient, ed. R. Gyselen (Bures-sur-Yvette: Groupe pour l’étude de la civilisation du Moyen-Orient, 1992), 95-118. On the parallel notions of al-sayf, “the sword,” and al-qalam, “the pen,” a theme that is also widely used in Astarabadi’s text, see Geert Jan van Gelder, “The Conceit of Pen and Sword: on an Arabic literary debate,” Journal of Semitic Studies 32, no. 2 (1987): 329. On its role in the Shahnama, see Olga M. Davidson, Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 156-167, who connects it to the heroic cycles of the text.
  • 3
    Firdowsi, Shahnama, ed. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh (New York: Bibliotheca Persa, 1988), 1.17 (line 194).
  • 4
     حجت‌ ز تیغ وز قلم آرند رزم و بزم
    در رزم و بزم حجت تیغ و قلم توراست Amīr Muʿizzī, “Dar madḥ-i pādishāh” Dīvān, ed. ʿAbbās Iqbāl (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-yi Islāmiyya, 1318 S.H/1939 CE) 114 (line 2510).
  • 5
     چون ز کلک و تیغ می باشد تن و جان را نظام

    روز رزم و بزم دیوان با کفت همراه باد Sanāʾī, “Tarkībband dar madḥ-i Īrānshāh,” Dīvan-i Sanāʾī Ghaznavī, ed. Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar (Tehran: Nigāh, 1398 SH/2019 CE), 582.

  • 6
    This is al-ʿUtbi’s interpretation of Qur’an 57:25. Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-ʿUtbī, al-Yamīnī, ed. Yusuf al-Hādī (Tehran: Markaz-i Pizhuhishī Mirās-i Maktūb, 1387 SH/2008 CE), 199-203.
  • 7
    On the pairing of jalal and jamal, as well as the role of complementary opposites in Islamic cosmology broadly, see Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). The explicit articulation of Muhammad as a king was also paralleled in painting in the post-Mongol period, which saw a growth in representation of an “enthroned Muhammad.” See Christiane Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Image (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018), 37-67.

The theological pairing of beauty and majesty as complementary opposites is present in early Sufi literature and is linked to the notion of the unity of God, tawḥīd (to make one). This builds on the systematic attempt by theologians and Sufis to map God’s many names in the Qur’an to the primary name of God, Allāh, the “union” or “gathering of opposites” (jamʿ al-aḍdād).1  Majesty refers to all attributes and names that instill a sense of distance, awe, and reverence. Beauty refers to all attributes and names that instill a sense of proximity, intoxication, and love. These were mapped onto other similar pairs, such as gentleness (luṭf) and severity (qahr) or mercy (raḥma) and wrath (ghaḍab), to show that God is simultaneously the same and different, near and far, first and last. With the pre-eminence of the identification of God with Being (wujūd) itself, particularly after the career of the philosopher Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037), the notion that existence was fundamentally a series of complementary opposites whose resolution could only be found in God and God’s loci of manifestation became a hallmark of Islamic thought well beyond Sufi discourse.2

Astarabadi draws heavily on this application of Sufi metaphysics to Islamic monarchy in an introductory section titled “Praise of the King of Islam, the Possessor of Victory, Sultan Burhān al-Haqq wa-l dawla wa-l dīn (The Proof of the Real, the Realm, and Religion), Ahmad ibn Muhammad, may God make his caliphate and sultanate endure.”3  In this section, he first remarks that God, “the Absolute King” (pādishāh-i ʿalā al-iṭlāq), made all “just kings his caliphs and representatives” in the Qur’an. He then builds on the popular hadith, “the Sultan is the shadow of God (ẓill Allāh) upon earth to which every oppressed person turns,” remarking that “by ascribing to [the Sultan] the name of the Essence (al-dhāt), he [the Prophet] has alluded that the relationship of all existent things to the king is like the relationship of all the Names to the name Allah.”4  The Essence is a term that refers to the inner reality of God beyond any name, entification, or delimitation. It is the presence to which all of God’s names point. The Arabic name Allah is the name of the Essence, and thus the name to which all other names refer, including opposing names. As mentioned above, it is the meeting place of all names and the “gatherer of opposites.” To be a “shadow” of an all-encompassing “gatherer of opposites,” the king had to gather, in his own being, the traits of God. Through this, he would in turn unite, encompass, and gather the opposites of his kingdom. In this respect, the entirety of the hierarchical order of the world, Astarabadi clarifies, reaches its summit in the person of the king from whose being everyone benefits in respect to their own capacity. For him, just and pious kings are second only to the Prophet.

This exposition from Astarabadi derives from the work of Ibn al-ʿArabi. Ibn al-ʿArabi writes in his magnum opus, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (“The Meccan Openings”), that: 

God has placed in the elemental world (al-ʿālam al-ʿunṣurī) a creation like the celestial governing angels, among whom there are the messengers, the vicegerents, the sultans, the kings, and the governors of the affairs of the world. God has placed between the spirits of the celestial governors and those whom He has made governors on the earth correspondences (munāsibāt) and threads (raqāʾiq) that extend from those [celestial] governors through justice, pure of any admixture, free of any fault. The spirits of the earthly governors receive from them in respect to their own preparedness (istiʿdād). Whoever’s preparedness is beautiful and strong receives this command (amr) in its own form, pure and purified, and is a ruler of justice and an imam of bounty. But whoever’s preparedness is debased, receives this pure affair and reduces it to his own shape: debased and ugly. He is a ruler of injustice and a deputy of oppression and miserliness, and he has no one to blame but himself.5

Ibn al-ʿArabi makes it doubly clear not only that God’s messengers and vicegerents are in the same category as kings and worldly rulers, but that the relationship between worldly rulers and celestial governors exists regardless of how the worldly ruler rose to power. What distinguishes worldly rulers from one another is their preparedness, istiʿdād, which also means capacity or capability, and which Astarabadi tellingly used to distinguish Burhan al-Din in regard to his own study of Ibn al-ʿArabi. “He read many books about that science [associated with the works of Ibn al-ʿArabi],” wrote Astarabadi, “solving its ambiguities and difficulties with the aid of the Holy Effusion and his own pure preparedness (istiʿdād), opening thereby the gates of Felicity (saʿāda) and Goodness.”6

Preparedness is a key technical term in this discussion and refers to a spiritual fertility that allowed the king to bear the effects of cosmic realities. Gaining it was only possible through following Sufi practice in order to refine and purify himself, struggling against his desires, and ridding himself of blameworthy character traits. The established metaphor by the fourteenth century for how this happened was alchemy, mentioned most famously in Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī’s (d. 1111) Kīmiyā-yi Sa`ādat (The Alchemy of Felicity).7  Ghazali differentiates between worldly alchemy and inner alchemy, comparing the transmutation of base metals into gold with the transmutation of beastly natures into angelic ones. This latter transmutation, he writes, 

is more deserving of the name alchemy because the difference between copper and gold is only a matter of yellowness, and the fruit of that other alchemy is just worldly comfort; how long does the world last? How far is the difference between beastly attributes and angelic attributes—which extends from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high? The fruit of this alchemy is everlasting felicity which has no end, and its blessings have no end . . .8

Ghazali’s spiritual alchemy in turn influenced Ibn al-ʿArabī, who names an important chapter of the Futuhat, “The Alchemy of Felicity.”9  This chapter is the main influence on Burhan al-Din’s aforementioned Arabic treatise, The Elixir of Felicities.10  In it, Ibn al-ʿArabi does not distinguish between worldly and inner alchemy; rather, he stresses that they are one and the same. Alchemy, he writes, is a science that is concerned with “measures and weights in relation to all that can be measured or weighed, whether of corporeal bodies or meanings, sensible or intelligible, and their ruling power (sulṭān) in regards to transmutations (istiḥāla), that is, the change of states in relation to the single entity. It is a natural, spiritual, and divine knowledge.”11  Its primary aim is the return of all things, whether natural or spiritual, to their most perfect state—goldness (dhahabiyya). It does this through the elixir. 

The knowledge of alchemy is knowledge of the elixir. It has two parts, by which I mean its action. One is bringing forth an essence from the beginning like the mineral gold. The other is eliminating defect and illness like artifactual gold that is joined to the mineral gold – like the configuration of the next world and this world in seeking equilibrium (iʿtidāl). Know that all the minerals return to one root. This root, in its essence, seeks to join the degree of perfection, which is goldness.12

Things deviate from this original state because of the secondary causes and accidents of the created world, causing some of the four elements to dominate over the rest. These bring that perfect original equilibrium (iʿtidāl) into imbalance and cause things to appear as something else. The quickest way to return to that state is to gain access to the elixir, an alchemical substance which either creates gold or removes the impediments that prevent the original golden nature of a thing from appearing. Ibn al-ʿArabi clarifies that this original nature and equilibrium are “the path” (al-maḥajja) that leads to “the Perfect Golden Virtuous City" (al-madīna al-fāḍila al-dhahabiyya al-kāmila) in which “none can be transmuted to what is less perfect.” By using a term associated with political philosophy, “the Virtuous City,” Ibn al-ʿArabi makes it clear that the alchemy of felicity has political implications.13  This is also clear in the opening poem of the section:

The elixirs are a proof (burhān) that indicate
     the alterations and changes in existence.
When the elixir of solicitude (iksīr al-ʿināya) is cast
     upon the enemy, in a measured scale
in that very moment he will emerge sincerely from enmity
     to friendship (wilāya) in rule and measure57

The elixir thus refers to something that brings out the true nature of someone or something. And while natural alchemy returns things to their golden nature, the golden nature of humans, their original perfection, is “vicegerency” (khilāfa), the Qur’anic notion of human responsibility over earth whose political implications are a primary concern for Ibn al-ʿArabi. 

Know that the sought perfection for which the human being was created is vicegerency. Adam took it through the ruling property of Divine Solicitude (al-ʿināya al-ilāhī). This is a station that is more exclusive than messengerhood among the messengers, because not every messenger is a vicegerent since the degree of messengerhood is specific to conveying the message, for God has said, “the messenger only has to convey the message” (Q 5:99). It does not include ruling control over an opponent (al-taḥakkum fī al-mukhālif). . . . When God gives him control over those to whom he has been sent, this is called “making someone a vicegerent” (istikhlāf) and “vicegerency.” The messenger is a vicegerent, but not everyone who was sent with a message also ruled. When he is given the sword and he effectuates the Act (al-fiʿl), he then has perfection, and he brings to manifest the authority (sulṭān) of the Divine Names (al-asmāʾ al-ilāhiyya). He thus gives and holds back, raises and abases, gives life and gives death, benefits and deprives, and makes manifest the Contrary Names (al-asmāʾ al-taqābul) along with prophecy (al-nubuwwa), this is inescapably so. If he makes manifest ruling control without prophecy, then he is a king, not a vicegerent. No one is a vicegerent except for he whom the Real has made a vicegerent over His servants, not one who has been raised up by the people and to whom they have pledged allegiance, bringing him forward for and over themselves. This is the degree of perfection.58

Here we see that, for Ibn al-ʿArabi, manifesting the opposing names of God is an essential element of rule, but such a rule cannot be achieved except through “the Divine Solicitude,” which he also calls “the Divine Specification” (al-ikhtiṣāṣ al-ilāhī).59  Simply put, it is something that can only be gifted by God to whomever He wills, and only such a rule is granted the elixir. The most a human can do is perfect their preparedness (and its adjacent principle “receptivity,” qābiliyya), which allows them, according to Ibn al-ʿArabi, to receive God’s commands directly: “Know that the soul, in respect to its essence, is ready to receive the preparedness (istiʿdād) for what is to be extracted from it by the Divine Edicts (al-tawqīʿāt al-ilāhiyya). . . . This is because the souls were created from a single mineral.”60  It is these Divine Edicts that lead to the differences between those who are destined to be messengers, messengers and vicegerents, or vicegerents only (that is, kings). By perfecting preparedness and receptivity, a human being is capable of receiving the Divine Edicts and harnessing the elixir. 

The process of perfecting preparedness and receptivity is the same process described by Ghazali above—it is the process of removing “blameworthy” or “beastly” attributes so as to actualize their opposites, the character traits of God.61  These attributes are the aforementioned Names of God and, in Ibn al-ʿArabi’s cosmology in particular, are the root of every existent thing. For Ibn al-ʿArabi, the only real distinguishing factor between things is in the degree to which they manifest and gather these names in their own being. And the most perfect locus of manifestation is that being whose preparedness exceeded that of all others, the Prophet, the one who was a messenger and a vicegerent, and whose being gathers and encompasses all things and displays their apparent contradictions in perfect equilibrium (iʿtidāl). Burhan al-Din himself clarifies this in the Iksir, where he writes that “Muhammad is a gatherer in reality, and the form of his rank of equilibrium . . . [brings together all other levels] in his perfect, all-gathering, and all-encompassing reality.”62  Muhammad is the primary locus of God’s name Allah, whose significance was already highlighted in relation to kings being shadows of the name Allah. Like that name, his being gathers all levels of reality. Since Ibn al-ʿArabi and other Sufis connect Muhammad directly to kingship (as the most perfect messenger and vicegerent who ruled), to be a just king is to be a Muhammad-like king who is in perfect equilibrium. This connection between justice and equilibrium is clear in Arabic where ʿadl (justice) and iʿtidāl (equilibrium) have the same root (linked to the image of the scales of justice).63  In fact, Burhan al-Din’s Iksir is devoted to explicating, under the rubric of Ibn al-ʿArabi’s Alchemy of Felicity, how all the rituals of Islam aim to return the human being to perfect alchemical equilibrium. Only by achieving this state can a king be second to the prophets, and thus a locus for the “gatherer of opposites.” In terms of kingly action, this alchemical equilibrium was between beauty and majesty, and was enacted through their feasting and fighting. 

Astarabadi drew on all of these theories in both his narrative and, most clearly, his choice of title. This identification of beauty and majesty with feasting and fighting is rooted in the Persian poetry of the Sufi Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273), a major influence on Burhan al-Din and Astarabadi:

From him, feasting (bazm) has beauty (jamal).
     From him, fighting (razm) has majesty (jalal).
In both feasting and fighting, [he is] the grace of the world, darling.64

In this respect, he marks the full explicit connection of feasting and fighting (and by extension, sword and pen) to the presence of God himself, whereas before him, it was usually a reference to human kings.65

When I come fighting (razm) at the time of battle,
     he is the guardian of the ranks and the commander of the army.
When I come feasting (bazm) at the time of joy,
     he is the cupbearer, the minstrel, and the cup.66

In fact, Rumi makes full use of the language of kingship for praising his own beloveds, the human loci of God whose names fill his poetry.67  But this appropriation of the language of kingship allowed kings to use the Sufi turn to their own ends. Burhan al-Din is a clear example of this. Astarabadi relates that before he took power, Burhan al-Din used the art of bibliomancy to divine a fortune from Rumi’s divan in a court gathering, opening to a poem that perfectly illustrates the convergence of these different discourses. It reads, in part: 

Whatever that king (khusraw) does, he does sweetly (shīrīn),
     like a fig tree that only gives figs.
Wherever he recites a sermon on two opposites,
     he marries them together like milk and honey.
The fountain of life flows with his breath;
     the dead come alive when he reads their last rites.
Don’t you know? Whoever is his bird,
     Will turn, through felicity (saʿādat), his eggs into gold.
From now on I’ll stop, I’ll pray in secret,
     But how will it remain secret once the king says “Amen?”68

While Rumi’s poem is about God and God’s friends, its use of the language of alchemical monarchy and its capacity to unite opposites allowed Burhan al-Din to use it as a sign for his own political project. As Sufis adapted the language of monarchy for their own end, kings and their courtiers in turn used the vocabulary of Sufism to legitimize their status as embodied shadows of God. In so doing, they sought to directly connect to the embodied lights of God and the true vicegerents, Sufi saints, whether through living saints or through their presence as mediated and preserved in shrines, books, or other objects.69

Beyond his personal affiliation with Sufism and scholarship, Burhan al-Din’s decade-long legitimacy problem helps explain his decision to study Ibn al-ʿArabi and focus on scholarly production. In these writings, he found a method to become a true and legitimate king without being appointed by another ruler or being born to a royal line: observing and following the alchemy of Sufism so as to acquire what Ibn al-ʿArabi called “the elixir of solicitude,” a means to turn enemies into friends. It is clear that, in his case, the elixir was found in his books. His literary production and the textual garment Astarabadi wove for him, Bazm wa Razm, including their visual appearance, manifest his strategies for convincing others that he was unique among kings of his age, transformed through his own preparedness and receptive capacity. And as a garment for a living shadow of God, Bazm wa Razm cycles between Burhan al-Din’s feasting and fighting to depict him as a perfect equilibrium of the two. Even the structure of the book reflects this: after its introduction, its narrative features twenty-four cycles of feasting and fighting, always in succession. The use of twenty-four, twelve passages of feasting and twelve of fighting, further illustrates how vital equilibrium was to this notion of kingship.70  To underscore that this was a cycle between majesty and beauty, Astarabadi himself states, writing at the transition between a fighting and a feasting section, that Burhan al-Din “turned from burning enmity towards setting the feast alight, switching the garment of majesty for the garment of beauty.”71  Astarabadi’s garment, Bazm wa Razm, becomes the medium through which Burhan al-Din’s equilibrium between the garments of majesty and beauty is stitched together. By producing books couched in the cosmology of Sufism, he could argue for his own divine sanction and alchemical nature. In this way, he proved his status as an alchemical king: an elixir that spread beauty and majesty (produced works of art and knowledge) wherever it was sovereign. This, I argue, is why Burhan al-Din took such a personal interest in the production of scholarly works, poetry, and adorned manuscripts. His interest in being portrayed as a “shadow of God” animates both the content and the appearance of Bazm wa Razm as preserved in Aya Sofya 3465. 

  • 1
    See William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 59-61, 112-115; and Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 130-132.
  • 2
    This is what Shahab Ahmed calls “coherent contradiction,” which he also roots in the thought of Ibn al-ʿArabi; see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 398-408. On how this sense applies to notions of belonging and origin, see Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). On its relationship to theories of kingship, particularly those influenced by the universalization of the occult sciences, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Imperial Talismanic Love: Ibn Turka’s Debate of Feast and Fight (1426) as Philosophical Romance and Lettrist Mirror for Timurid Princes,” Der Islam 96, no. 1 (2019): 42-86.
  • 3
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 6-7.
  • 4
    This hadith is not found in any of the canonical collections and is routinely classified as “weak” by traditionists. It begins to appear in hadith collections from the third/ninth century (Ibn Qutayba, Ibn Zanjawayh, al-Bayhaqī) onwards and quickly becomes a staple of nearly all political discourse.
  • 5
    Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb (Cairo: al-Majlis al-Aʿlā li-l-Thaqāfa, 2013) 2:139. On Ibn al-ʿArabi’s own relationship to political rulers see Sara Nur Yıldız and Haşim Şahin, “In the Proximity of Sultans: Majd Al-Dīn Isḥāq, Ibn ‘Arabī and the Seljuk Court,” in The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East, ed. A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013).
  • 6
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 384. This is, of course, not the only reference to Ibn al-ʿArabi’s thought in the text. For instance, Astarabadi also uses Ibn al-ʿArabi to interpret Burhan al-Din’s dreams in Bazm wa Razm (1928), 384.
  • 7
    On the multivalence of alchemy in the aesthetics and literature of the Islamic world, see Jamal J. Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 175-197. The relationship of ethics and human refinement to alchemy is older than Ghazali, and can be seen in the work of the philosopher Abu ʿAli Miskawayh (d. 421/1030). Of particular importance is Miskawayh’s insistence on the importance of equilibrium, which will influence Ibn al-ʿArabi as will be seen later in this article. See Miskawaih, An Unpublished Treatise of Miskawaih on Justice, ed. M. S. Khan (Leiden: Brill, 1964) 17. My gratitude to Kambiz GhaneaBassiri for this observation.
  • 8
    Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazali, Kitāb-i Kīmiya-yi Sa`ādat (Tehran: Kitābkhānih va Chāpkhānih-yi Markazī, 1954), 2-3.
  • 9
    Ibn al-ʿArabi names multiple chapters of the Futuhat after works by Ghazali. On this as well as a full introduction to and translation of this chapter, see Ibn ʿArabi, The Alchemy of Human Happiness, trans. Stephen Hirtenstein (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2017). While Hirtenstein’s translation was referenced in this paper, the translations from this chapter are my own.
  • 10
    This is something missed in the secondary scholarship—everything from Burhan al-Din’s emphasis on the elixir, and on the acts of worship (including his inclusion of jihad), to his approach towards how action is alchemical (meaning by it, that they balance each other out), and how this all relates to politics, builds on Ibn al-ʿArabi’s chapter directly.
  • 11
    Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 5:474.
  • 12
    Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 5:474. Note again the insistence on equilibrium which recalls Miskawayh. See footnote 50.
  • 13
    The Virtuous City is most associated with Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’s treatise Arāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila; see al-Fārābī, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Abū Naṣr Al-Fārābī's Mabādiʼ Ārāʼ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fāḍila: A Revised Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, ed. and trans. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Even the usage of felicity in both Ghazali and Ibn al-ʿArabi builds directly on the discourse of Islamic Philosophy, including Farabi, which used saʿāda (felicity) as the Arabic equivalent of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimoníā). The use of the word maḥajja, a broad path, is a deliberate referent to a common topic of discussion for Ibn al-ʿArabi derived from the hadith literature. See, for instance, Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 8:551.
  • 57
    Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 5:474.
  • 58
    Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 5:478.
  • 59
    Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 5:478. These two terms are crucial to Astarabadi’s depiction of Burhan al-Din also, and head one of his theoretical sections. Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 33-38.
  • 60
    Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 5:479. This can also read, “were created from a single mine,” but Ibn al-ʿArabi draws a parallel between this line and Q 4:1, which says, “your Lord who created you from a single soul,” so mineral seems more apt given the context.
  • 61
    On taking on the character traits of God, see Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge, 274-278.
  • 62
    Aya Sofya 1658, fol. 44a; Hüseyin Çelebi 500, fol. 18a.
  • 63
    For a general overview of justice in the Islamic tradition, see Majid Khadduri, The Islamic Conception of Justice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
  • 64
    Rumi, Kulliyāt-i Shams-i Tabrizi, ed. Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1378 SH/2000 CE) 4.207: poem 1964, line 20719.
  • 65
    It is, of course, likely that others had made this rather obvious connection, but regardless, it is Rumi’s usage that directly influences Astarabadi and Burhan al-Din in their literary production.
  • 66
    Rumi, Kulliyāt-i Shams-i Tabrizi, 5.83: poem 2251, lines 23855-23856.
  • 67
    This, of course, is part of a larger trend in medieval Sufism. For a survey including earlier and later examples, see Luca Patrizi, “Adab al-mulūk: l’utilisation de la terminologie du pouvoir dans le soufisme médiéval,” in Ethics and Spirituality in Islam: Sufi adab, ed. Francesco Chiabotti, Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, and Luca Patrizi (Leiden: Brill, and Burhan al-Din in their literary production.
  • 68
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 337; Rumi, Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, 2.157-158, poem 820, lines 8560-8562, 8569-8570.
  • 69
    Burhan al-Din’s life, in fact, is peppered with the presence of these antinomian friends of God, though detailing this relationship is beyond the scope of this paper.
  • 70
    In fact, the absence of equilibrium in such types of representation could be seen as a subtle critique of a patron or ruler.
  • 71
    Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 409.

Bazm wa Razm in Modern Scholarship

Modern scholarship on Bazm wa Razm has missed its important role in Islamicate historiography precisely because of a lack of attention to the visual forms its manuscripts have taken over time. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the overwhelming tendency has been to view the chronicle as an important account of Anatolia in the fourteenth century or a window into regional and local political and social structures. Burhan al-Din received short mentions in Ismail Hakki Uzunçarşılı’s 1937 study on the different Beyliks in the late medieval period.1  In 1940, Heinz Helmut Geisecke furnished what is basically an abbreviated translation of Bazm wa Razm into German with valuable commentary.2  In 1970, Burhan al-Din received his first and only monograph at the hands of Yaşar Yücel. While it remains the most thorough historical work done on his life to date, it does not deal with manuscript production at any length and engages with his scholarly output only in a cursory way.3  Yücel was the basis for other studies on adjacent principalities, including Kemal Göde’s thorough political history of the Eretnids.4  Bazm wa Razm’s commentary on the figure of Timur was also analyzed in 2008 by Michele Bernardini, who hints briefly that Burhan al-Din’s critiques (among those of many others) may have inspired Timur’s choice to invade India.5  A more thorough engagement with the work is by Jürgen Paul, who has demonstrated its wealth of historical detail for elucidating the relationships between regional lords and vassals and between nomads and cities, as well as the role of citadels in the Anatolian countryside.6

Despite the significant value of all the above works, situating Bazm wa Razm solely in an Anatolian context misses Burhan al-Din’s own westward- and southward-facing imperial ambitions. These ambitions are nowhere clearer than in his recruitment of Astarabadi with his thoroughly Jalayirid (and by extension Ilkhanid) pedigree as a migrant from Baghdad. The first study to consider the broader political worldview of the text was that of Tilman Nagel in 1993, who considered its importance for understanding the life of Timur and who argued that it encapsulates the worldview of Astarabadi and Burhan al-Din. In so doing, Nagel highlights its importance in several regards—the usage of the term “possessor of conjunction” (ṣāḥib qirān, which would be fully coopted by Timur despite being far older), its use of numerology and astrology, dreams and visions, and the heavy presence of Sufism and dervishes in the text. Nagel identifies, through close attention to Astarabadi’s account of Burhan al-Din’s dreams, that Burhan al-Din is meant to be depicted as a gatherer of all realities like the Prophet, a messenger and possessor of the sword. He also uses Burhan al-Din’s poetry to highlight glimmers of this relationship, including an interesting deliberation on the meaning of wine and its relation to transcendence. While he rightfully marks that the terms bazm and razm take on a new meaning in this age, including their need to be balanced, he does so briefly without linking them to the discourse of beauty and majesty, the notion of God as the ”union of opposites,” or Ibn al-ʿArabi’s thought.7  The only study to briefly consider this specific shift underlying Bazm wa Razm is by Matthew Melvin-Koushki in an article that masterfully elucidates the notion of the king as “the union of opposites” through the Timurid scholar Ṣāʾin al-Dīn ibn Turka’s (d. 836/1432) Debate of Feast and Fight, written in 1426.8  Melvin-Koushki’s short account of Astarabadi’s text correctly recognizes that it uses “astrological and numerological proofs” to fashion “his scholar-turned-ruler patron as a true philosopher-king.”9  While Melvin-Koushki convincingly argues that Ibn Turka marks the explicitly occult adaptation of the notion of the king as “union of opposites,” he does not address the older usage of this notion in both poetry and historiography. Without doubt, it is already fully crystallized in Astarabadi’s Bazm wa Razm and runs throughout the entire text, as exemplified in the above passages where Astarabadi stressed that the king is the shadow of the name of the Essence, Allah, which gathers all realities, or that the cycle of feasting and fighting is a cycle between the garments of beauty and majesty. But in so doing, Astarabadi was simply building on the cosmology of the day as already laid out in the works of Ibn al-ʿArabi, Rumi, and even Burhan al-Din himself. Even in Timurid historiography, the political understanding of the king as union of opposites is already explicit well before Ibn Turka. The first panegyric biography of Timur to be written, Niẓām al-Dīn Shāmī's (d. before 814/1411-12) Zafarnama (Book of Victory), is clear in this regard: 

In keeping with the requirements of each age, the sultans and lords of the reign are of three kinds: either they are completely the locus of manifestation for gentleness and mercy, or completely the locus for severity and retribution, or they gather these two, and such an existence is closer to perfection, a perfect essence that gathers the self-disclosures of majesty and beauty (jāmiʿ bāshad miyān-i tajalliyāt-i jalālī wa jamālī). Such an individual is the gathering of the two seas (majmaʿ al-baḥrayn) of these two attributes and will be manifest over the ages (qarnhā). The traditions, customs, and results stemming from his actions and words will remain upon the days for years, if not ages.10

According to the Zafarnama’s own narrative, Timur asked Shami to write this history in 804/1401-2, roughly a year after his destruction of Sivas and four years after Burhan al-Din’s death and the completion of Bazm wa Razm. Shami completed the first recension of the Zafarnama in 806/1404.11  As already shown in multiple studies, this text became a model for Timurid historiography. While the coincidence of Timur’s timing will be briefly considered below, what is more important is that Shami was, like Astarabadi, a former courtier of the Jalayirids. In fact, he left their service at the same time as Astarabadi following Timur’s invasion of the city in 20 Shawwal 795 (August 29, 1393). Since the two were colleagues, it is reasonable to assume that Shami would have knowledge of Astarabadi’s work for Burhan al-Din. More notably, their shared notion of kingship as an embodiment of God as the Union of Opposites is likely a development that can be traced to the Jalayirid chancellery and how it, in many ways, furthered the ideological projects of the Ilkhanid era.12  Yet Astarabadi’s and Shami’s careers also suggest that the Jalayirids never took advantage of the resources at their disposal. Instead, it was Burhan al-Din, and six years later, Timur and his descendants, who made full use of these new strategies of kingship.13

This is not an argument for direct influence, nor is it an attempt at tracing origins, but by the late fourteenth century, the earlier threads identified above led to an important change in the language and cosmology of kingship across the Persianate world. These new changes did not replace earlier notions entirely; rather, they were amended to its mix and interwoven into its fabric.14  What is clear is that Burhan al-Din’s court should be seen in conversation with the intellectual and cultural domain that we identify as Jalayirid, and the two together should be seen as influencing the Timurid age. From this perspective, Astarabadi’s description of his journey to Burhan al-Din in Bazm wa Razm and its multiple pages of prose and poetry in praise of a lost Baghdad, including a planned but never completed full-page illustration of the city, can be seen as a conscious attempt at not only imitating the Jalayirids, but rivaling them.15  In fact, in the same section, Astarabadi describes Timur and Ahmad Jalayir in a way that clearly resembles Shami’s division of kings into three types. Timur is depicted as a pure manifestation of God’s wrath (hence his violence), Ahmad Jalayir as a pure manifestation of his gentleness (hence his cowardice), and Burhan al-Din is placed at their center, an equilibrium between the two and thereby, a more fit candidate for Islamic rule, symbolized by Baghdad itself. While this may seem dubious to some in retrospect given the military superiority of the Timurids, the situation must have appeared different before Burhan al-Din’s sudden death. And his success at attracting Astarabadi to his court must have been part of a larger strategy of inviting Jalayirid talent to Sivas with the ultimate goal of challenging the Jalayirids themselves. Nowhere is this clearer than in the visual and material features of the presentation copy of Bazm wa Razm, Aya Sofya 3465.

  • 1
    İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Anadolu Beylikleri ve Akkoyunlu, Karakoyunlu Devletlerı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1984).
  • 2
    Heinz Helmut Giesecke, Das Werk des Aziz ibn Ardasir Astarabadi: Eine Quelle zur Gesch. d. Spätmittelalters in Kleinasien (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1940).
  • 3
    Yaşar Yücel, Kadı Burhaneddin Ahmed Ve Devleti (1344-1398) (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1970).
  • 4
    Kemal Göde, Eratnalılar (1327-1381) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1994).
  • 5
    Michele Bernardini, Mémoire et Propagande à l’Époque Timouride (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), 80-90.
  • 6
    Jürgen Paul, “Mongol Aristrocrats and Beyliks in Anatolia. A Study of Astarābādī’s Bazm va Razm,” Eurasian Studies IX/1-2 (2011): 105-158; and Jürgen Paul, “A Landscape of Fortresses: Central Anatolia in Astarābādī’s Bazm wa Razm,” in Turko-Mongol Rulers, Cities and City Life, ed. David Durand-Guédy (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 317-346.
  • 7
    Tilman Nagel, Timur der Eroberer und die islamische Welt des späten Mittelalters (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993), 233-268. Most of the chapter is a retelling of Burhan al-Din’s life and follows Giesecke, cited in footnote 70. For his expert analysis of Burhan al-Din’s horoscope see 237-238. On how Burhan al-Din’s dreams and Astarabadi’s interpretation of them, as well as his life events, through the prism of Muhammad are connected to Muhammad’s all-encompassing nature that combines messengerhood with the sword, see 245. He does not show where in Ibn al-ʿArabi’s work Astarabadi is taking this interpretation from. The comments on wine and Sufism can be found on 266-268.
  • 8
    Melvin-Koushki, “Imperial Talismanic Love,” 42-86; Melvin-Koushki’s work as a whole sheds light on the critical role of the occult sciences in later Islamic political formations and their central role in the history of science and empire. See also his dissertation, Matthew S. Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Sā'in al-Dīn Turka Isfahānī (1369–1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2012).
  • 9
    Melvin-Koushki, “Imperial Talismanic Love,” 67-68.
  • 10
    Niẓām al-Dīn Shāmī, Ẓafarnāma, ed. Felix Tauer, 2 vols. (Prague: Orientální Ústav, 1937), 1:8-9.
  • 11
    For an analysis of Shami’s Zafarnama including a summary of the extensive historiography related to it see İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAli Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 173-175.
  • 12
    On Ilkhanid history writing, in whose norms this later period is rooted, see Stefan Kamola, Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jami al-Tawarikh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). On some of the ideological innovations of the age, see Jonathan Brack, “Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016). On the manuscript of the Ilkhanid historian Rashid al-Din’s work, see Sheila S. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles (London: Nour Foundation, in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1995); and Robert Hillenbrand, “The Arts of the Book in Ilkhanid Iran,” in The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353, ed. Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carbo (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), 134-167. On how the ideologies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries competed with and against each other in the Islamic world, see Anne F. Broadbridge, Kingship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  • 13
    This would result in the forms of sacral kingship that have been well studied already; see Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam, (London: Routledge, 2008); Hüseyin Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Christopher Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 353-75.
  • 14
    For instance, Astarabadi paraphrases the Nasirean Ethics in a passage titled “Explicating the nobility of the existence of the King (pādishāh) in a summary fashion (ṭarīq-i ijmāl) and the wisdom of his distinction by divine solicitude (ʿināyat-i ilāhī).” Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 33-38. This important passage would be verbatim copied by the Timurid historian Hafiz-i Abru in his historical works, as will be mentioned later in this article.
  • 15
    It is significant to note that these were all added, according to the draft, after Astarabadi had finished his draft. This may reflect a palpable increase in Burhan al-Din’s fortunes in the last four years of his life.

The Visuality of a Manuscript

An Islamic manuscript is open to a spread with calligraphy in black and red ink.

Fig. 1 Note the mise-en-page which places, in red, “the attributes of the Pen,” on the right parallel to, in red, “the attributes of the sword,” on the left. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 96b–97a.

Manuscripts in the Islamicate context were produced with the complete appearance of the book in mind.1  This is especially the case in royal manuscripts, where many hands worked to produce books fitting the stature and status of a king. Books like the history of Burhan al-Din’s reign had the added significance of being made to convince others of Burhan al-Din’s divine sanction, and thus remained politically charged even in their very adornment.2  Margaret Graves has shown that allusion was a primary feature in the crafts and arts of the medieval Islamic world. Objects, architecture, and other forms of art (even poetry) were located in a “web of connections” through which they developed “modes of indirect reference” to “generate formal and conceptual correlations” between their practices.3  In other words, the different art forms of the Islamic world consciously pointed to one another, reflecting, echoing, and resonating with one another in a web that, through the imagination, drew together the senses as well as the intertextuality that was part and parcel of the literature of the Islamic world. In such a scheme where objects constantly pointed to one another, a manuscript like that of Burhan al-Din is unique in that, as both an object and a text, it refers to itself as well as to many of the visual forms of power that were already common in the Islamic world, such as textiles. In describing his composition as an act of weaving and Bazm wa Razm as an embroidered and adorned garment, Astarabadi suggests also that its visuality was meant to clothe Burhan al-Din as an alchemical sovereign who embodied the gathering, in equilibrium, of God’s beauty and majesty, the union of the pen and the sword (Fig. 1). As a garment that consciously weaves together different facets of past authority—whether that of God, prophets, kings, scholars, saints, or poets—in the presence of Burhan al-Din as displayed at court, Bazm wa Razm visually represents these threads through its play with script, illumination, mise-en-page, and, had it been completed, its illustration program. When examined as a whole, the two principles of beauty and majesty, bazm and razm, can be seen to animate the different forms of all the books produced at his court, each showing a different face of Burhan al-Din as an alchemical sovereign who acts as an elixir to the materials (paper, ink, language, manpower) of his kingdom, transmuting them into their ideal forms. In so doing, he ties his authority directly to Muhammad, the ultimate bringer of a book that functions as an elixir that changed his people and, by extension, the world.4

  • 1
    See Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 24-25; and Elaine Wright, The Look of the Book: Manuscript Production in Shiraz, 1303-1452 (Washington D.C: Smithsonian Institution, 2012), xi. Wright contextualizes and analyzes a large corpus of materials from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from an art historical perspective.
  • 2
    The number of such works increases exponentially in the fifteenth century and beyond. See, for example, Wright, The Look of the Book, 104-105. The politically charged nature of books frequently gave them interesting afterlives; for one example, see Priscilla Soucek and Filiz Çağman, “A Royal Manuscript and Its Transformation: The Life History of a Book,” in The Book in the Islamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, ed. George N. Atiyeh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 179-208.
  • 3
    Graves, Arts of Illusion, 23.
  • 4
    While this cannot be fully explored here, it plays out in Burhan al-Din’s dreams of Muhammad, which fit into a larger corpus of dreams about the Prophet that involve books, indicating that the image itself had great currency.
An illuminated Islamic manuscript is open to its cover page with gold Arabic calligraphy. The text is framed by multiple blue and gold borders of flowers and interlace.

Fig. 2 The cover page of Burhan al-Din’s Divan. London, British Library, Or. 4126, fol. 1a.

The royal copy of Bazm wa Razm (Aya Sofya 3465) is the largest book produced at Burhan al-Din’s court(measuring 380 x 270 mm), and its adornment indicates that it was intended to be seen at court and to display beauty and majesty. While the narrative content shows Burhan al-Din as a perfect balance between feasting and fighting, Bazm wa Razm would have been displayed and read at court gatherings that were to be marked by joy and feasting. Thus, even narratives of battle are stylized for entertainment. The Divan, while smaller (measuring 278 x 190 mm), was similarly intended to be displayed and read in contexts of feasting, but it was likely aimed at a different audience: the nomadic elites who made up the bulk of Burhan al-Din’s army and whose bazm was held outside of the cities (Fig. 2).1  In contrast, Burhan al-Din’s legal work, the Tarjih (measuring 268 x 181 mm), as mentioned above, is written in a different hand—a scholarly cursive—and lacks excessive ornamentation and design. Conforming to scholarly conventions, it only uses black and red ink and is not vocalized (Fig. 3). While beautiful, its continuous cursive skips dots and connects even at points where a space would normally be expected, instilling a sense of the urgency of razm and the importance of the matter at hand. This is intentional, as both Astarabadi’s narrative and the introduction of the Tarjih frame the work as a type of scholarly battle in defense of the principles of the Hanafi school of law. Given that Burhan al-Din’s theoretical work on Sufism is also couched in similar terms of defending Ibn al-ʿArabi from his opponents, one would expect that had a presentation copy survived, it too would have looked the same, the visual properties of these four manuscripts reflecting a conscious effort to maintain equilibrium between the complementary principles of beauty and majesty.

  • 1
    The reason for this is not only its smaller size but also its linguistic qualities—it is written in a type of Old Anatolian Turkish, includes some poems in a purely Turkic style (tūyūgh), and even clearly addresses the “tatars” and the poet’s own Turkic identity when it plays with why he chose to write in Turkish. On Burhan al-Din’s nomadic camp, see Jürgen Paul, “Mongol Aristrocrats,” 147-154. It is my contention that, together, the Divan and the chronicle are a way for Burhan al-Din to unite his urban and nomadic base, a strategy that later sovereigns would successfully implement.
An illuminated Islamic manuscript lies open to a page of scholarly Arabic cursive in black and red.

Fig. 3 The colophon of Burhan al-Din’s legal treatise, copied while he was still alive. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ragıp Paşa 381, fol. 217b–218a.

The size of Aya Sofya 3465 is comparable to royal manuscripts produced in other late-fourteenth-century courts, such as in Jalayirid Baghdad and Tabriz or Muzaffarid Shiraz. While in no way comparable to the largest manuscripts of the period, it was large enough to be seen from a distance at court where presumably it would have been recited out loud.1  One round of illumination was finished with the text, likely by the scribe himself. What appears to be a second round of illumination by a far more delicate hand was left unfinished, likely due to Burhan al-Din’s unexpected death (Fig. 4, right side; note unfinished border at the bottom which was left mid-stroke, incomplete outlines throughout, and incomplete inscriptional calligraphy). As mentioned before, the first folios, which, as a rule, would have had the most elaborate illumination, are missing. 

  • 1
    The size of royal manuscripts fluctuated a great deal, and as little as half a century earlier there were far larger books being produced. This tendency did continue in respect to monumental Qur’ans, such as the famed ʿUmar Aqtaʿ Qur’an. But royal books in the late fourteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries tended to be of this size or smaller; see Wright, The Look of the Book, 138-140. That a book be large but not too large was likely important for works of personal propaganda like Bazm wa Razm, where the implications of a larger-sized work would have caused the propaganda to backfire, though it is just as possible that Burhan al-Din lacked access to bigger paper. One way of referring to the size of Bazm wa Razm is that it was written on “Quarter Baghdadi” paper, though the names of paper fluctuate. I thank Sheila Blair for identifying the paper as Quarter Baghdadi. One important royal manuscript from the same period that is of a similar size is the Baysunghur Shahnama in 1430, which helps situate this manuscript at the beginning of a new generation of books that were produced for royal patrons in the Islamic east. Robert Hillenbrand, “Exploring a Neglected Masterpiece: the Gulistan Shahnama of Baysunghur,” Iranian Studies 43, no. 1 (2010): 97-126.
The left page of an open Islamic manuscript is filled with Arabic calligraphy in black, red, and gold ink. The right page has an unfinished illumination with an incomplete border and outlines.

Fig. 4 Unfinished illumination. Note that the first folios of the manuscript, which would have had the most lavish illuminations in the manuscript, are missing. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 1b–2a.

The illumination is another place where Jalayirid influence is visible. A palpable improvement can be seen from the frontispiece and heading of the Divan to the Bazm wa Razm illuminations. The date given for the Divan’s completion is simply 796, which could be any date from November 1393 to October 1394. Astarabadi reached Burhan al-Din on 11 Shaʿbān 796/June 11, 1394 and he never referenced the Divan in Bazm wa Razm. While this may be because, to urban Persianate audiences, a Turkish composition did not boost Burhan al-Din’s credentials, it is more likely that the Divan was already completed before Astarabadi’s arrival and had already become a feature of Burhan al-Din’s nomadic court gatherings, which were held outside of the cities.1  While the scribe Khalil’s hand only shows slight development in the ensuing four years between the two manuscripts, the illumination improves drastically.2  This suggests that Astarabadi brought Jalayirid artists with him. In fact, the hand and style of the illumination in Bazm wa Razm resembles that of a Jalayirid manuscript dating from Ramadan 20, 792/September 1, 1390 (Fig. 5, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément Persan 913 fol. 2b). We also know that Jalayirid artists were experimenting with a new script, Nastaʿlīq, at this moment, and tellingly, Burhan al-Din’s aforementioned adviser, ambassador, and teacher, Yar-ʿAli Shirazi, wrote a manuscript in an experimental attempt at Nastaʿliq.3  Furthermore, Bazm wa Razm’s use of gold demonstrates techniques not used in the Divan. The gold in the Divan is gold leaf, whereas Bazm wa Razm also uses gold ink, a substance that is more complicated (and likely more expensive) to create but which could be used more fluidly and more copiously throughout the manuscript.4  All of these suggest the import of Jalayirid artists and techniques.

  • 1
    See footnote 91.
  • 2
    The recent and authoritative study of manuscript production in Anatolia, including illumination, is Cailah Jackson, Islamic Manuscripts of Late Medieval Rūm, 1270s-1370s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). The examples provided by Jackson help clearly situate the artistic style of the Divan’s illumination as building on an Anatolian style, even in its use of multicolored paper. See Jackson, Islamic Manuscripts, 172. In fact, slight resemblances of the manuscript to several Mevlevi manuscripts of Rumi’s works from eastern Anatolia which also include the use of tinted paper may actually have been an intentional and important feature of Burhan al-Din’s self-legitimation (see ch. 4 of Jackson’s work). This is doubly true as manuscripts of Rumi’s writing associated with Erzincan are an important feature of Burhan al-Din’s claims to legitimacy in Bazm wa Razm. As Jackson shows, the patron of these manuscripts from Erzincan was a Mevlevi Sufi by the name of Sātī ibn Ḥasan (d. 1386) who also served the Jalayirid court from 1372 onwards. Jackson shows that Sati was the grandson of Jalāl al-Dīn Maḥmūd Mustawfī, which, according to my own analysis, would make Sati the paternal cousin of Burhan al-Din’s mother. Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 46. Burhan al-Din’s maternal family were major supporters of his political project, and he even owned property in Erzincan. Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 207. It is possible that the book of Rumi’s poetry referenced in relation to footnote 68 is one of Sati’s books, but I have yet to see the manuscript for myself. Astarabadi’s narrative claims the book was in Rumi’s own hand, which is highly improbable.
  • 3
    See footnote 18.
  • 4
    Gold leaf is still used in some of the illumination, particularly as a background, but the presence of gold ink is quite clear in the script. On how to make a variety of golden inks, and other techniques related to alchemical book making, see Lucia Raggetti, “Ordinary Inks and Incredible Tricks in al-ʿIrāqī’s ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʿiq,” in Traces of Ink: Experiences of Philology and Replication, ed. Lucia Raggetti (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 154-191.
Two Islamic manuscripts are shown side by side to showcase a similar style in their layout. Both have a central foliate shape and a rectangular header and footer with more swirling foliage.

Fig. 5 Juxtaposition of Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 1b (left), with Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément Persan 913, fol. 2b (right), dating to 792/1390, which showcases a similar style (particularly in the layout) and hand. The preciseness of the hand in the flowers and borders is better in Aya Sofya 3465. Aya Sofya 3465 seems to have had more than one illuminator working on its manuscript as there are other sections of illumination in a less delicate hand.

A page in an illuminated Islamic text contains a formal ode (qaṣīda) in honor of the king. It is set off by a border of natural and geometric motifs on either side of the calligraphy.

Fig. 6 Excerpt from Bazm wa Razm, an Arabic qasida for Burhan al-Din. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 25b–26a.

Despite its unfinished nature, the entire text is divided by golden rosettes (from the first round of illumination) as well as variations in indentation and centering. These formal variations mark standard sections of the genre. The opening laudations of God and the Prophet, the formal ode (qaṣīda) in honor of the king (Fig. 6), the king’s horoscope and birth chart, descriptions of important stages in his life (such as his crowning), and the colophon are all clearly set off from the rest of the text using spacing, indentation, illumination, and other visual cues. This serves a twofold function: it allows the experienced reader a means to find a set of standard information about the text and its patron, while also visually and experientially fitting Burhan al-Din into the typology of an ideal sovereign for readers, listeners, and other attendees at court who would have expected such details about a king.

A page from an illuminated Islamic text preserves an empty space for an illustration.

Fig. 7 Empty space for illustration with extant caption to the far left. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 65b–66a.

An illuminated Islamic text is open to a spread that preserves a space on the left page for a missing illustration of Baghdad. Black and gold calligraphy fills the right page.

Fig. 8 Blank space for an image of Baghdad, caption at the end of the text block on the left in gold. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 10b–11a. 

An illuminated Islamic text is open to a spread of black text with Qur’anic verses overland in red. A caption for an image not visible on the spread is included in the margins of the right page.

Fig. 9 Caption on the right, Qur’anic verses overlined in red. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément Persan 211, fol. 156b–157a. 

The unexecuted illustrations of Aya Sofya 3465 also reflect a balancing of bazm and razm (Fig. 7). The manuscript has eighty blank spaces for illustration, none of which preserve even an outline. Given his conscious attempts at attracting and utilizing Jalayirid talent, one expects that Burhan al-Din was trying to bring a Jalayirid painter to his court to complete them.1  Out of the eighty spaces, twenty-nine have extant captions, all but one of which are at the far edge of the page written perpendicular to the main text. The one caption not in the margin is the aforementioned reference to Baghdad as a symbol of the caliphate and Islamic power itself. Instead, the calligrapher Khalil ibn Ahmad wrote the Baghdad caption in gold facing the place of its image (Fig. 8). The hand of all the other captions is relatively homogenous but rough and unsigned. Given that some of the extant captions are nearly gone, it seems likely that all the captions were once extant and have disappeared due to the degradation of the paper. Comparison to Astarabadi’s draft recension as preserved in Supplément Persan 211 not only corroborates the existing captions but also allows for the reconstruction of a nearly complete caption list for the image program. Supplément Persan 211 only preserves captions, not the blank spaces which accompany them in Aya Sofya 3465 (Fig. 9). Furthermore, small differences in the text of the captions (as well as the narrative) between Supplément Persan 211 and Aya Sofya 3465 demonstrate that the scribe of Supplément Persan 211 did not have access to Aya Sofya 3465. Given that the draft was meant to plan out Aya Sofya 3465, it seems logical that Supplément Persan 211 only has captions without blank spaces. In fact, the placing of the captions in the text of Supplément Persan 211 frequently corresponds to the exact text breaks for blank spaces in Aya Sofya 3465, further suggesting Astarabadi’s role in precisely guiding and planning the illustration program. 

  • 1
    While much has been said about whether there is a distinct school of Jalayirid painting, there were multiple books with painting produced under the reign of Ahmad Jalayir. Regardless of how we describe them, Burhan al-Din was keen to attract talent from Baghdad and Tabriz. For a summary of the debates as well as the painted manuscripts, see Wing, The Jalayirids, 186-193.

The twenty-nine extant captions in Aya Sofya 3465 already hint at an attempt to balance depictions of bazm and razm in between scenes of dreams, cityscapes, and important meetings with scholars, political figures, or Sufis. When the reconstructed caption list based on Supplément Persan 211 is analyzed together with contextual cues in the narrative, it is clear that out of eighty images, there were to be twenty-two scenes of bazm and twenty-four scenes of razm. The cycling between bazm and razm begins when Burhan al-Din starts his political career. Notably, the twelfth image of bazm marks when the people of Sivas pay allegiance to Burhan al-Din, and the twelfth image of razm marks when Burhan al-Din kills one of his major rivals for the throne. This is followed by the fourteenth image of bazm, Burhan al-Din enthroned after eliminating all contenders for the throne, and the fourteenth image of razm, showing the punishment and execution of those who rebelled against Burhan al-Din after his seizure of power, marking a relative “end” to internal dissent (all later dissent is then stylized as rebellion against a legitimate ruler). In other words, just like the cycles that run through the narrative of the book, the images would have depicted the events of Burhan al-Din’s life in a larger premeditated rhythm of feast and fight infused with the presence of sacred figures and places. Interestingly, Supplément Persan 211 lists 81 images, not 80, and includes three extra scenes of bazm for which there is no space in Aya Sofya 3465. Furthermore, Aya Sofya 3465 has an extra scene of bazm for which there is no caption or note in Supplément Persan 211. This would indicate that, in the planned illustrative program of Supplément Persan 211, the number of scenes of bazm and razm were meant to be completely equal, twenty-four each (just like the aforementioned cycles in the narrative). Why that balance skewed in the favor of razm in the illustrative program of Aya Sofya 3465 is an intriguing question to which no definite answer can be found. It may have been linked to whatever plans Astarabadi had for a second volume, or it could be intended as a subtle critique of his patron following Burhan al-Din’s controversial execution of his rebellious nephew on 15 Muharram 799/October 19, 1396.1

  • 1
    Even almost a century later, Abū Bakr al-Ṭihrānī’s major history of the Aq Quyunlu dynasty, whose progenitor killed Burhan al-Din, uses the rhetoric around his nephew’s execution to justify killing Burhan al-Din. Al-Tihrani’s account was written between 875 and 883 AH (1469-1478 CE) and consciously constructs the history of the Aq Quyunlu against Burhan al-Din’s heritage. Abu Bakr-i Ṭihrāni, Kitāb-i Diyārbakriyya, ed. Faruk Sümer and Necati Lugal (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1962), 1:43.
An illuminated Islamic text lies open to a spread filled with black, gold, and red calligraphy with small geometric and foliage embellishments.

Fig. 10 Khalil’s script builds on Ilkhanid models and anticipates many of the unique characteristics of Timurid calligraphy in Shiraz. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 43b–44a. 

An illuminated Islamic text is open to its colophon with the signature of the royal scribe Khalil b. Ahmad.

Fig. 11 Colophon with Khalil’s Signature. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 281b–282a.

Nowhere is the ambition of Aya Sofya 3465 clearer than in its calligraphic program (Fig. 10). It is written in the hand of his royal scribe Khalil ibn Ahmad, whose signature is also on the smaller Divan, which he completed four years earlier. Khalil was likely the greatest artist in Burhan al-Din’s retinue (Fig. 11, see also Fig. 2).1  Unlike the Divan manuscript, which used up to seven different ink colors (mostly in headings) and multiple types of tinted paper, Aya Sofya 3465 only used three: black, red, and gold—but the volume of gold used dwarfs that of any other extant manuscript produced at Burhan al-Din’s court. The manuscript’s extensive use of gold, using a technique that was previously unavailable at his court, is not only a citation of the aforementioned discourse of alchemy, but also an expression of an important aspect of the visual culture of the Mongol and post-Mongol period, wherein, according to their contemporaries, the Mongols saw gold as a representation of the divine. Khalil was a master of the Arabic scripts naskh (used for the main body of text) and tawqīʿ (which he used for headings and Qur’anic quotations), and he used features like long curving tails that would become hallmarks of later Timurid art. Yet in all of these choices, he is clearly hearkening back to the use of naskh in the Great Mongol Shahnama, dating from the 1330s, further contextualizing the manuscript’s imperial goals within the Ilkhanid heritage.2  The size of the script is not uniform and varies, together with the ink, to distinguish quotations from the author’s own prose, functioning as a visual form of citation that does not endure in print. These distinctions differ in relation to the importance of the quoted authority. For instance, quotations from the Qur’an, which fill much of the text, are larger than the rest and are in either gold or red ink. Burhan al-Din’s name and title are also written in gold in larger script, visually linking him to the presence of God, a strategy that built on Jalayirid practice and which would become the norm in the Timurid era (Fig. 12).3  These lines in different script and ink color further develop the analogy to a garment, acting as threads that are pulled together to clothe Burhan al-Din as a king of Islam.

  • 1
    Khalil uses the nisba “al-Sultānī,” which, when considered in light of all the aforementioned manuscripts and compared with information from other courts, suggests Burhan al-Din was, at least, in the process of forming a royal atelier for his manuscripts.
  • 2
    On the Great Mongol Shahnama, also called the Demotte Shahnama, see Sheila Blair, “Rewriting the History of the Great Mongol Shahnama,” in Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 35-50; Hillenbrand, “Arts of the Book”; and the forthcoming, Robert Hillenbrand, The Great Mongol Shahnama (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).
  • 3
    My gratitude to the reviewer for pointing out that this was a Jalayirid practice, of which I was unaware.
An illuminated Islamic text is open to a spread of black and gold calligraphy. The patron Burhan al-Din’s name in rendered in gold on the right page equivalent in size to the rendering of the Qur’an.

Fig. 12 Burhan al-Din’s name in gold on the right, equivalent in size to the Qur’an on the page (as well as the words, “from the author,” introducing a couplet Astarabadi wrote for Burhan al-Din). Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 30b–31a.

The performative aspect of the text is also clearest in the visual features of the manuscript. First, its fully vocalized text (with the representation of short vowels above or below the main seat of the Arabic script) invites even an inexperienced reader to recite it out loud. Full vocalization was primarily used in Islamicate contexts for works that were commonly recited, chiefly the Qur’an but also prayer manuals and books for those not yet fluent in the target language.1  Aya Sofya 3465 also includes visual cues in the form of painted rosettes (see Fig. 4) that mark pauses and changes in the rhythm of a passage in order to further facilitate the text’s recitation. These rosettes also denote shifts from prose to poetry and even to rhymed prose (sajʿ), highlighting each shift and drawing attention to it. For instance, when the narrative switches to rhymed prose, the rhyme is marked with a rosette, allowing a reader to emphasize the correct rhyme word while also visually distinguishing it from other prose or poems. 

This visual invitation to read the manuscript aloud, combined with the constant interweaving of the Qur’an into its narrative, connects its words to the elevated place of both spoken and written word in Islamic contexts. Astarabadi articulates the importance of the spoken word in a Persian poem explaining the reason for writing Bazm wa Razm:

Speech is the adornment of every gathering
     Speech is the greatest foundation of the wise
Speech reveals the substance of every man
     It makes apparent the good and bad of all.
Speech is the touchstone of existence,
     Through speech and hearing, it reveals jewels.
Speech that is not esteemed and pure
     Is just a shell without a kernel.2

For Astarabadi, speech is a touchstone, a material that can discern between true gold and fool’s gold. This touchstone can reveal the true substance of any human being. A golden king, transformed by God’s alchemy, is thus known by his speech. For this reason, Burhan al-Din’s own words are paramount to his legitimacy as sovereign. But not all speech and language are created equal, and Arabic, as the language of God, is privileged above all. Astarabadi writes, in Persian:

When this servant who confesses his incapacity . . . was first tasked by the presence of Kingship (ḥaḍrat-i salṭanat) to issue forth and write these events and feats, I desired to compose in the Arabic language and adorn all that is in this text with Arabic expressions so as to display this bride in the garment of Iraq and to show and illuminate its embroidery with the imprint of Hijaz, so that the lovers of virgin thought would be bewildered by witnessing its beauty. . . . And this desire was approved of and pleasing to the great and divine opinion of the king. . . . But since the majority of the people of the kingdoms of Anatolia desire and prefer the Persian language, and most of its residents speak and converse in Persian and all of their sayings, writings, letters, accounts, notes, judgments, etc. are in this language . . . it was decided that this book would be written in the Persian language and this fresh pearl would be strung together in a Persian fashion so that its benefit would reach both the elites and the common people. . . . Thus anxiously I descended from Arabic expression, which is an eloquent and open language . . . that has been preferred over all the other languages of the children of Adam through the testimony of . . . the Qur’an and the marvels of the Clarification (tibyān).3  I composed Persian, whose words are thin, phrases are heavy, whose paths are coarse, and whose sounds are constricted and ambiguous. . . . There is no doubt that Persian cannot be compared to Arabic . . . for Arabic has endless resources and limitless ability. One word from it contains many meanings and topics and for one meaning it has stacks of expressions. 

[In Arabic, quoting Abīwardī (d. 507/1113)]
My words are necklaces upon necks
     when ages extinguish, they remain.
The mind guides to their adornment
     through delicate phrases with deep meanings.
A desired familiar, near and far
     They are the intimate of the resident
And the provision of the traveler.4

Note the tangibly material description of the difference between the two languages, stylized again as garments that adorn “the bridges of meaning,” “embroidered” with the imprint of the birthplace of the Qur’an, and as having textures akin to fabric, such as the “heaviness” and “coarseness” of Persian. Astarabadi introduces the image of weaving from the beginning of the book, but, as the passage makes clear, not all garments are the same. For Astarabadi, Arabic is a finer weave than Persian. This, as is clear in his own explanation, is because Arabic is God’s chosen medium of self-expression and thus provides a depth of meaning for pious Muslims that leads to the very essence of God.5  Arabic is a God-infused human language and so, before Astarabadi “descends” into Persian, he makes it clear that both he and the king prefer Arabic; in other words, that they, like the Prophet, are also infused with God’s presence-made-word.

Since words reveal the substance of human beings, Burhan al-Din’s preference is the real issue here. In order to further illustrate this linguistic nearness to God and convey Burhan al-Din’s intimate relationship to Arabic, Astarabadi quotes the entire prefaces of both of the king’s Arabic works within the narrative of Bazm wa Razm (in contrast, as mentioned before, Burhan al-Din’s Turkic poetry is not mentioned anywhere)The preface is, as a matter of custom, one of the most eloquent parts of any premodern Islamicate book and where authors sought to display their eloquence and mastery of rhetoric. Since Astarabadi had asserted that the people of Anatolia preferred Persian and, therefore, had a weak understanding of Arabic, the role of Arabic in these sections has a significant performative function. For listeners who did not understand Arabic and for whom literary Arabic was primarily a signifier of God’s word, the prefaces were not meant to be understood in full, but rather to convey the aural continuity between Burhan al-Din’s eloquent Arabic and the Qur’an that filled every page of Astarabadi’s narrative.6  This continuity which, as pointed out earlier, was already apparent in the text’s full vocalization visually tied itself into the look of the Qur’an, the only book that would have been consistently fully vocalized in this period.7

  • 1
    For Qur’ans see Wright, The Look of the Book, 27, 50; David James, Qur’ans of the Mamluks (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 36-110, 156-177; and Jackson, Islamic Manuscripts, 90-104.
  • 2
    Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 378b.
  • 3
    A title of the Qur’an.
  • 4
    Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 378b-380a; Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 536-539.
  • 5
    Readers familiar with earlier Islamic literature may recall the ethnic rivalries of early Islam in this passage, but suffice it to say that, by this point, this style of argumentation is a trope that is put to different purposes. Astarabadi and his patrons are all ethnically non-Arab.
  • 6
    It is the same even for those who know Arabic, but to a lesser degree. Rather, the performance before them is one of distinguishing Burhan al-Din as a scholar-king from his rivals.
  • 7
    As mentioned before, prayer books would also usually have been vocalized, and there are other examples of the use of full vocalization, but the style becomes iconic of and through the Qur’an.
A gold-thread caftan with a side tie is patterned with drop-shaped elements holding stylized lions. These are surrounded by swastika shapes.

Fig. 13 A type of gold thread garment from the early-fourteenth-century eastern Islamic world or China. It is difficult to identify exactly what would have been worn by a king, but this example serves to show what such a garment looked like. The David Collection, Copenhagen, Inv. no. 23/2004.

The Persian that Astarabadi employs is intentionally replete with Arabic, and he describes his writing as a combination of the two languages. He alludes to the arts in so doing, describing his work either as an interweaving of two garments or as his beading of a Persian necklace with Arabic gems from the Qur’an, the Ḥadīth, wisdom literature, and Arabic poetry, all untranslated and almost always visually distinct in the manuscript. The technical term in medieval Persian literary theory for the intermixing of Arabic and Persian, primarily in poetry, is mulammaʿ, a word with a root that mean shining, glimmering, or sparkling, but which also means a patchwork or multicolored fabric.1  While the term was used in theoretical works from early on, it also referred directly to court ritual in fourteenth-century Turco-Persian courts. Earlier in the century, when the world traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 770 or 779/1368 or 1377) was visiting the courts of the Golden Horde north of the Black Sea, he reported that at court,

when we stopped eating, the [Qur’an] reciters recited with beautiful voices. A pulpit was set up and the preacher alighted it, the Qur’an readers sitting before him. He delivered an eloquent sermon, praying for the sultan, the amir, and those present, and he said this in Arabic and then interpreted it for them in Turkish. In the midst of this, the Qur’an readers would repeat verses from the Qur’an in a wondrous refrain (tarjīʿ). They would then begin to sing, singing in Arabic, which they called qawl, and then in Persian and Turkish which they called mulammaʿ. They then brought more food.2

As a term that was used for a type of garment and the intermixing of languages in court ritual as well as in poetry and prose, mulammaʿ’s multiple literal meanings bear on the visuality and aurality of Bazm wa Razm. If language is a garment, Astarabadi’s switching between the two languages resembles a gleaming multicolored patchwork garment, or a type of nasīj, a fabric popular in the Mongol and post-Mongol era that wove gold into silk (Fig. 13).3  Paging through the manuscript (Fig. 14) reveals the interpenetration of gold, red, and black ink, functioning as threads that both separate and tie together not only Arabic and Persian, but also different registers of speech. The garment woven by Astarabadi visually showcases Burhan al-Din as a gatherer of all realities and a “uniter of opposites.” The Persian garment of Bazm wa Razm, like silk, is interwoven with God’s Arabic word, in gold, in a book that is bound with God’s presence in the image of a king of Islam.

  • 1
    On the mullamaʿ, see Nargis Virani, “Mulammaʿ in Islamic Literatures,” in Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms, ed. Beatrice Gruendler (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2008), 291-324.
  • 2
    Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Al-Riḥla, ed. Karam al-Bustānī (Beirut: Dār al-Nafāʾis, 1425/2004), 327.
  • 3
    T.T. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2-4. On this particular example, see Eiren Shea, “Textile as Traveller: The Transmission of Inscribed Robes across Asia in the Twelfth through Fourteenth Centuries,” Arts Asiatiques 73 (2018): 97-112, 103-106.
An illuminated Islamic text is open to a spread where gold and red Qur’anic quotations are included among Persian prose.

Fig. 14 Gold and red Qur’anic quotations interwoven into Persian prose. Unfortunately, because of the difficulties in imaging a manuscript, the way the shine of the gold in fabric and paper could allude to each other (building on Graves’s use of the term) is not as clear as it would be to the human eye in person. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 47b–48a.

A juxtaposition of different shots of a manuscript shows how the color and vibrancy of its gold changes depending on imaging technologies.

Fig. 15 Different shots of the manuscript show how the color and vibrancy of gold changes depending on imaging technologies. Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 49b–50a.

As if to visually accentuate the image of the king as an alchemical elixir in whose equilibrium opposites are brought together, this gold-inked embodiment of divine proximity exists on nearly every page of the work.1  When it was opened and read at court, likely after recitation from an illuminated copy of the Qur’an, the pages would have shimmered in the flickering light (Fig. 15). The aural and visual experiences would have complemented and enhanced one another. And throughout this court performance, in a society where garments reflected status and golden threads were interwoven (at times with calligraphy) in the clothing of the elites, none would be as covered in gold as the king himself.2  God’s book would shine, the king’s book would shine, and the king himself would shine. The expert use of language, with prose broken up by poetry, and languages woven into one another, was intended to act as what Ibn al-ʿArabi called “the elixir of solicitude,” a means to cast an awe-inducing spell on the audience, supplemented by the glittering visual appearance of the page, so as to turn them from enemies into friends. As we saw at the beginning, Astarabadi refers to Burhan al-Din’s command over language as “licit magic” in keeping with a longstanding image in Arabic and Islamic literature. By sharing in this experience, the two poles of Burhan al-Din’s kingdom, the “people of the pen and the people of the sword,” would be entranced and gathered together under the fabric of Burhan al-Din’s presence—a presence which was, in a Persian poem composed by Astarabadi,

The subjugator of infidelity and misguidance,
     the gatherer of justice and generosity,
The locus of manifestation for the lights of mercy,
     The shadow of the gentleness of God.3

Like nasij, these manuscripts (Fig. 16) articulated the king’s presence and authority in a way that interwove the myriad languages and discourses of his kingdom to embody what it meant to be a king of Islam. By producing books whose visuality and aurality were permeated with the image and sound of the Qur’an, kings were able to directly connect themselves to Muhammad, the original bringer of the book for Muslims and the ultimate embodiment of God’s beauty and majesty. Instead of appealing to caliphal authority, this shift in discourse redirected the attention of kings to production and performance, as is clear in the rise of poet kings in Burhan al-Din’s own generation.4  And as an embodiment of the reality of Islamic kingship with complete inner and outer excellence, Bazm wa Razm’s reception and transmission reveal how visual features amplify the power vested in such a manuscript.

  • 1
    It should be noted that this extensive use of gold is also a nod to Mongol notions that gold represents the divine. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, 61. Gold-thread textiles became a major part of Mongol and post-Mongol material culture throughout the empire; see Eiren Shea, “The Spread of Gold Thread Production in the Mongol Period: A Study of Gold Textiles in the China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 50 (2021): 381-415. That said, gold was no stranger to earlier Islamic art or its cosmology; rather, it increased in its already multivalent properties.
  • 2
    For descriptions of these golden garments, see Ruy González de Clavijo, Embajada a Tamorlán, ed. Francisco López Estrada (Madrid: Castalia, 1999), par. 158, 161.
  • 3
    Aya Sofya 3465, fol. 30b.
  • 4
    Burhan al-Din’s Divan was mentioned above, but famously, his rival Ahmad Jalayir compiled his own Divan four years after Burhan al-Din’s death (eight years after Burhan al-Din’s divan was compiled). Washington, D.C., The Freer and Sackler Galleries, F1932.
An illuminated Islamic text is open to a page with two columns of Arabic calligraphy topped by a shining golden header.

Fig. 16 Beginning of the Divan. London, British Library, Or. 4126, fol. 1b.

After Burhan al-Din

Burhan al-Din’s sudden death and Astarabadi’s escape left Bazm wa Razm’s illumination and illustrations unfinished, and it is unclear where his manuscripts were located in the first few decades following Burhan al-Din’s death. The historian Ibn ʿArabshah reports that he heard that Astarabadi’s chronicle was in “the dominions of Qaraman in four volumes.”1  It is unclear what four volumes Ibn ʿArabshah may be referring to. While one is tempted to connect the four volumes to Burhan al-Din’s four manuscripts, the late arrival of both the Tarjih and the Divan to Ottoman libraries makes it unlikely that they remained together after his death. Given the length of Bazm wa Razm, it is possible that the draft itself was divided into four smaller books, but without further evidence, we are at an impasse in that regard. 

But what of Aya Sofya 3465? The manuscript, given its size and the fact that it was incomplete, was likely kept in Sivas. ‘Uthman of the Aq Quyunlu was unable to take Sivas after killing Burhan al-Din, and it is possible that the text remained there until Timur destroyed much of the city and executed its commanders in 1400.2  It seems probable that the Timurids took Bazm wa Razm with them after conquering the city. While this is not mentioned in any Timurid source, it is worth mentioning that it was only after the conquest of Sivas that Timur approached Shami, Astarabadi’s former colleague, to request a history of his reign. What is undoubtedly clear is that the Timurid historian Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū (d. 833/1430) had access to Bazm wa Razm while working under the reign of Shāhrukh (r. 807-850/1405/1447). He used two introductory sections from Astarabadi, including the theoretical sections quoted above, verbatim in several of his historical collections and compilations. These two sections are the section titled, “Praise of the King of Islam,” wherein Hafiz-i Abru simply changed the king’s name to that of the Timurid Shahrukh, as well as the section titled, “Explicating the nobility of the existence of the king (pādishāh) in a summary fashion (ṭarīq-i ijmāl) and the wisdom of his distinction by divine solicitude (ʿināyat-i ilāhī).”3  Of similar intrigue is the manuscript of the Zafarnama of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 858/1454) produced under Ibrāhīm Sulṭān (d. 838/1435) in Shiraz. That manuscript’s well-studied use of calligraphy, a remarkable naskh that resembles that of Khalil ibn Ahmad, as well as the content of its illustrative program, all appear to echo Bazm wa Razm.4  That the manuscript influenced this early layer of Timurid historiography without being mentioned underscores Astarabadi’s success at creating a formally excellent work that could serve as a model for other historiographers. While Timurid historiography would blaze new trails in history writing and the art of the book, Bazm wa Razm was a part of that story. Its limited circulation suggests that, even as a model, it still retained something of Burhan al-Din’s power as a rival, and thus was not allowed to leave the hands of a select few.

Regardless of where exactly it was kept in the Timurid period, by the reign of the Ottoman Bayezid II (r. 886-918/1481-1512) it was in Istanbul; Bayezid II’s seal is on the cover page of the manuscript and it appears in his palace inventories.5  It would stay in the Topkapi palace library until the reign of Maḥmūd I (r. 1143-1168/1730-1754), when it was transferred to the Aya Sofya Mosque’s library until the establishment of the Turkish republic in the twentieth century. While Bazm wa Razm was copied at least five times from the draft, including for an Ottoman chief minister, no copy was made of Aya Sofya 3465 until the twentieth century. This further suggests that its presentation copy, imbued with Burhan al-Din’s status as king of Islam, was not allowed to freely circulate until Islamic kingship itself became ineffectual in the twentieth century.

In the century after his death, Burhan al-Din’s legacy in Ottoman historiography was gradually reduced to his identity as a judge (qadi) and legal commentator, such that, by the Ottoman period, he was simply remembered as Qadi Burhan al-Din. The Tarjīḥ would become Burhan al-Din’s most popular text, with at least four copies in the Süleymaniye Library alone.6  The original clean copy of Burhan al-Din’s Tarjīḥ remained in eastern Anatolia until a later date, reaching Istanbul in the month of Muḥarram 1012/June 1603. Unlike Bazm wa Razm, it never entered a royal library, instead remaining in the hands of legal scholars until finally ending up in the library of the Ottoman chief minister Rāghib Pāshā (d. 1176/1763), which also contained another copy of Bazm wa Razm (Ragip Paşa 982).

The reduction of Burhan al-Din to his role as a qadi is reflected in fifteenth-century Ottoman chronicles, which progressively drop references to his rule as a sultan or diminish that role to something closer to a regent. While in an Ottoman chronicle dating to 824/1421, Burhan al-Din is referred to as “Sultan Qadi Burhan al-Din,” eleven years later, in 835/1431, he is remembered as the “departed Qadi Burhan al-Din,” and his death is placed under the heading of events in Ottoman history as opposed to that of an independent dynasty.7  By the sixteenth century, he was officially subsumed under the framework of Ottoman legal history. Aḥmad ibn Musṭafa Ṭāshköprüzāde's (d. 968/1561) al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya, a compendium of scholars in the service of the Ottomans starting from the reign of ʿUthmān I (r. ca. 687-726/1299-1323/4), situated Burhan al-Din simply as a scholar under the reign of Murad I (r. 761-91/1360-89).8  He calls Burhan al-Din a “distinguished scholar, humble, God-wary, and pure, the author of the Tarjīḥ, who ruled over Erzincan during an interregnum period (ḥīna fatra min al-umarā).”9  Ṭashköprüzade only acknowledges that Burhan al-Din had some measure of political power in the context of an interregnum period, and the only aspect of Burhan al-Din’s written work that was curated for his readers was his legal treatise, further cementing his status as an early Ottoman legal scholar.10  Similarly, Gelībölūlū Muṣṭafā ʿAlī's (d. 1008/1600) Fuṣūl-i Ḥall wa ʿAqd, a history of the rise and decline of the ruling families of the world, mentions Burhan al-Din simply as “the ruler of Sivas, the Qadi Burhan al-Din, the Hanafi,” using “ruler” as a way of acknowledging his political career without affording him a royal title, equivalent in a sense to a governor.11  His political career became irrelevant in the official historiography of the seventeenth century even while, paradoxically, it marked the beginning of the copying of Bazm wa Razm from the draft recension. As if to cement Burhan al-Din’s public memory as a legal scholar, in keeping with the order of text in the draft, none of the later recensions of Bazm wa Razm have a conclusion, but instead end with the introduction of Burhan al-Din’s legal work. In a sense, with the exclusion of the conclusion, the introduction of his Tarjih, which was framed in Aya Sofya 3465 as a key testament of Burhan al-Din’s unique kingship, was converted (by chance) into a reminder that he was primarily a legal scholar. Concluding one book with the introduction of another book is also a visual choice in these manuscripts as it transforms the visual expectation of a conclusion into another beginning. This is because the aesthetic form of an introduction, with a centered basmala invocation, was standardized to the point of being iconic in Islamicate manuscripts (Fig. 17).12  The act of reflecting on Burhan al-Din’s bygone kingdom and choice to end the chronicle with the beginning of his legal work not only instill sober reflection about the futility of everything in life beyond piety and scholarship, but also help further reshape him into Qadi Burhan al-Din, the jurist who chanced upon political power. And while Burhan al-Din was a scholar before being a king, there is no extant work or mention of him before his rule, which lasted a total of eighteen years out of the fifty-three years of his life. His scholarly output only began to appear in historical records after more than a decade of rule and was a result of his kingship, not his previous career as a judge. The choice to reduce him to a scholar or judge is, therefore, a political one. 

  • 1
    Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn ʿArabshah, ʿAjā`ib al-Maqdūr fī Nawā`ib Taymūr (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anjlu al-Misriyya, 1979), 122.
  • 2
    It is my contention that the Divan ended up in Aq Quyunlu hands after ʿUthman killed Burhan al-Din. Tihrani mentions in Kitab-i Diyarbakriyya that they received countless spoils through raiding Burhan al-Din’s camp after killing him. His Divan would have likely been kept at camp with him. Ṭihrāni, Kitāb-i Diyārbakriyya, 1:43-46.
  • 3
    Kamola shows how these introductions are added by Hafiz-i Abru to older copies of the Ilkhanid Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh, though some of the published editions of the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh publish them as if they are original to the Ilkhanid composition; see Kamola, Making Mongol History, 181. Despite this, as far as I have been able to see, no one has previously identified these two sections as being taken from Bazm wa Razm. It is noteworthy that these sections contain poems that Bazm wa Razm identifies as original to Astarabadi (by writing li-l-muʾallif before them). See Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Bagdat 282, fol. 2a-3b. See also Hāfiẓ-i Abrū, Jughrāfiyā-yi Ḥāfiẓ-i Abrū, ed. Ṣādiq Sajjādī (Tehran: Markaz-i Pizhuhishī Mirās-i Maktūb, 1375 SH/1996 CE), 60-70; and Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh, Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh: Tārīkh-i Īrān wa Islām, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan (Tehran: Markaz-i Pizhuhishī Mirās-i Maktūb 1392 SH/2013 CE), 5-10. The copied sections are Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 6-10, 33-38. On this period see Beatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politics, and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
  • 4
    See Eleanor Sims, “Ibrāhīm-Sulṭān’s Illustrated Ẓafar-nāmeh of 839/1436,” in Islamic Art 4 (1990-1991): 175-218; as well as Eleanor Sims, “The Garrett Manuscript of the Zafar-Name: A Study in Fifteenth-Century Timurid Patronage” (PhD diss, New York University, 1973). Sims identifies the illustrated copies of the Zafarnama as marking the first time personal aspects of a ruler’s life, such as births, marriages, deaths, and victories, were depicted in the history of Persianate painting, writing, “Ibrāhīm-Sulṭān and his artists thus added another dimension to the role a panegyric biography might play, in their overall effort to reshape the image of the Timurid rulers.” Sims, “Ibrāhim-Sulṭān’s Illustrated Ẓafar-nāmeh of 839/1436,” 175. If this is truly the case, then Bazm wa Razm marks the first time such a program was planned, and in certain respects, it aimed to do more than the Zafarnama, such as illustrate Burhan al-Din’s dreams. In terms of the script, the unique swooping tail of Khalil’s hand calls to mind a feature that has been described as a hallmark of later-fifteenth-century Shirazi calligraphers of the Zafarnama; see Sheila Blair, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 264. Blair says this was later exported to Anatolia, though Bazm wa Razm complicates this transmission history.
  • 5
    Yar-ʿAli’s copy of his correspondence with Burhan al-Din, Aya Sofya 2349, also entered Bayazid II’s library at the same time. For his palace inventory, see Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, eds., Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library(1502/3-1503/4), 2 vols. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019), 2:133, 341.
  • 6
    Most of these copies refer to Burhan al-Din simply as a jurist. There is one intriguing copy at Princeton, dating from 841/1437-1438, which titles its work as “The book of the Tarjih, a gloss on the Talwīḥ, by our master Burhan al-Din. This is our master Burhan al-Din Ahmad, the qadi then the king in the cities of Sivas and Erzincan. He was virtuous, perfect, miraculous in investigation and wits. He was a king among the kings of the period of fragmentation (ṭawāʾif).” Princeton University, Islamic Manuscripts, Garrett no. 4487Y, 2a. The reason for its acknowledgment of Burhan al-Din’s political power is likely because of its proximity in time to his reign, as it seems that Burhan al-Din’s memory had political currency for at least half a century after his death.
  • 7
    Nihal Atsız, Osmanlı Tarihine Ait Takvimler (Istanbul: Küçükaydın Matbaası, 1961), 16, 26, 100.
  • 8
    Aḥmad ibn Musṭafa Ṭāshköprüzāde, al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya fī ʿUlamāʾ al-Dawlat al-ʿUthmāniyya (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿArabī, 1975 CE/1395 AH).
  • 9
    Ṭāshköprüzāde, al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya, 15-16. He then provides Ibn Hajar’s biography of Burhan al-Din. He situates Yar-ʿAli as a mufti under the reign of Bayazid I. Ṭāshköprüzāde, al-Shaqāʾiq al-Nuʿmāniyya, 25.
  • 10
    On the creation of an Ottoman Hanafi identity see Guy Burak, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
  • 11
    Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî, Füsûl-i Hall ü Akd ve Usûl-i Harc ü Nakd (İslam Devletleri Tarihi: 622-1599) ed. Mustafa Demir (Istanbul: Değişim Yayınları, 2006), 104, 143. On the author of this work see Cornell Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541-1600) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
  • 12
    The introductions of both of his Arabic works are included by Astarabadi, who uses them to showcase Burhan al-Din’s command over the language, which, as I argue elsewhere, is an essential part of his legitimacy. Given that he does not offer them at the end of the manuscript, their performance is still linked to adorning a living king.
An Islamic text is open to a spread of black Arabic calligraphy with red details. This is the introduction of a legal treatise, which lies at the end of the manuscript's chronicle of Burhan al-Din.

Fig. 17 The introduction of Burhan al-Din’s legal treatise at the end of a late copy of Bazm wa Razm. Istanbul, Millet Library, Ali Emiri Farsi 672, fol. 152b–153a.

Ottoman Copies

An illuminated Islamic text is open to a spread of red and black Arabic calligraphy contained within a gold border. The right page is topped by an illustration that resembles a blue headpiece filled with gold foliage.

Fig. 18 Header and beginning, Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément Persan 211, fol. 2b–3a.

An Islamic text lies open to a spread of red and black calligraphy framed by a gold border. The right page is adorned by a gold and red illustration that resembles a headpiece ornamented by foliage motifs.

Fig. 19 Header and beginning, Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Ahmet III (Enderûn) 2822, fol. 1b–2a.

In the absence of a dynasty that would draw legitimacy through him, Burhan al-Din’s performance as king became irrelevant following his death. This is in contrast to Timur’s memory, for instance, which continued to have relevance throughout the centuries (and thus resulted in more adorned and illustrated histories). Comparing Aya Sofya 3465 to later recensions of Bazm wa Razm reveals the ways in which Burhan al-Din’s lack of postmortem political currency translated into manuscripts whose formal features were completely routine. These later recensions are, in chronological order: Supplément Persan 211 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (Fig. 18, likely late sixteenth to early seventeenth century), Enderûn 2822 at the Topkapı Sarayı Museum in Istanbul (Fig. 19, 1127/1715), Ragip Paşa 982 (Fig. 20, likely eighteenth century), Esad Efendi 2079 (Fig. 21, 1241/1825-1826) at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, and Ali Emiri Farsi 671-672 (Fig. 22, two volumes, likely early twentieth century) at the Millet Library in Istanbul. Unlike the copy produced during Burhan al-Din’s reign, Aya Sofya 3465, none of these manuscripts are heavily adorned or maintain any of its dynamism, leaving only words without elaborate decorative flourishes, varying sizes of writing, any attempt at an illustrative program, or extensive use of gold ink and leaf. In a sense, the performance has died just like its patron, and, like a grave marker, becomes a mere reminder of a shadow from the past. 

An Islamic text is open to a spread of black and red Arabic calligraphy framed by a gold outline. The right page is topped by an illustration resembling a headpiece. It is blue and gold and filled with flowers.

Fig. 20 Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ragip Pasa 982, fol. 1b–2a.

A manuscript lies open to a spread of black and red Arabic calligraphy framed by a gold border. On the right page,there is a title piece decoration in the shape of a headpiece filled with gold and flowers. Two pink and blue blooms are shown at its center.

Fig. 21 Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Esad Efendi 2079, fol. 1b–2a. 

A manuscript lies open to a spread of black and red Arabic calligraphy.

Fig. 22 Header and beginning, Istanbul, Millet Library, Ali Emiri Farsi 671, fol. 1b–2a.

Rather than a triumphant performance of Burhan al-Din’s rule, the manuscript tradition of Bazm wa Razm after his death is primarily an exercise of ʿibrat, a meditative lesson for contemporaries about the fate of those long gone. This new meaning infuses the later manuscripts, which are smaller and designed for close study and contemplation rather than courtly display. The term ʿibrat is derived from the Qur’an as a disposition that one should have towards the world and the past, such as in Q 12:111, “In their stories is surely an ʿibrat to those who possess hearts,” where “stories” refers to the tales of bygone messengers and their communities. ʿIbrat is a form of sobering contemplation meant to instill in the Faithful an understanding of mortality and the limits of this present life.1  Building on this, it became an important modality for historical thinking in the Islamic tradition.2

  • 1
    On the relationship of ʿibrat to aesthetics, see Elias, Aisha’s Cushion, 166-167.
  • 2
    For ʿibrat and its relation to history writing, see the introduction of Usama ibn Munqidh, The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, trans. Paul M. Cobb (London: Penguin Books, 2008). See also, Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8-9, 217. This term was used in the title of the well-known history of Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406); see Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldûn’s Philosophy of History (New York: Routledge, 2016), 63-66.
An illuminated Islamic manuscript is open to a spread of black Arabic calligraphy with some red details.

Fig. 23 None of these manuscripts have adornment past the first page. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément Persan 211, fol. 5b-6a.

A manuscript lies open to a spread of black and red Arabic calligraphy framed by a gold border.

Fig. 24 Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Esad Efendi 2079, fol. 2b–3a.

An Islamic manuscript is open to a spread of red and black Arabic calligraphy.

Fig. 25 Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ragıp Paşa 982, fol. 2b–3a.

The visual properties of the later manuscripts can be easily situated in the ʿibrat tradition. They are of varying sizes, though all smaller than Aya Sofya 3465, and they lack any vocalizations, suggesting that they were intended for individual study rather than for group study or recital.1  The bulk of the adornment in these manuscripts is limited to the customary header at the beginning or a thin border around the text on each page (Fig. 23). Similarly, gold was used only in the initial border and header (jadwal), nowhere else (Fig. 24). In each manuscript, the scribes used scripts in keeping with the scholarly conventions of their respective times. The majority of the text is black with the exception of occasional flourishes of red ink for Qur’anic or other Arabic quotations, both of which are completely standard choices in premodern Islamicate manuscripts (Fig. 25). These material choices no longer reflect the beauty and majesty of a living king, but rather the station and wealth of whomever the manuscript belonged to as a semi-adorned text for their private library. Here the adornment is in such customary and standard places that it does not offer any measure of dynamism to the text but rather is consistent with stylistic norms shared by other books made for elite (but not specifically royal) libraries. It marks the text as something that would be of interest to such a patron, but not as something that is inherently politically charged.

The later recensions demonstrate that Burhan al-Din’s history continued to garner interest from elites. At least two of these manuscripts were either made for or ended up in the libraries of eighteenth-century chief ministers of the Ottoman Empire. The most adorned and precious of these manuscripts, Enderun 2822, was written for the library of the chief minister and imperial son-in-law Silaḥdār ʿAlī Pāshā (d. 1128/1716).2  Given that Burhan al-Din was himself a chief minister who replaced his sovereign, the interest of other ministers in Burhan al-Din’s project at a time in which the powers of the Sultan were being tried and tested begs the question if the sudden interest had ulterior motives.3  It seems more likely, however, that the interest in Bazm wa Razm was because of its formal excellence as a panegyric history and that Bazm wa Razm was referenced as an exemplar to be copied. This is particularly the case with Supplément Persan 211, whose preservation of both the captions of the draft as well as insertions could be considered a close study of how Astarabadi wrote and planned his text.4  By the nineteenth century, Bazm wa Razm was undoubtedly a reference for historians. Esad Efendi 2079 (Fig. 21, 24), for instance, is a signed copy that was made in the nineteenth century for the library of a historian and qadi. By muting the dynamism present in Aya Sofya 3465, these manuscripts frame Burhan al-Din’s history as an ʿibrat for a different class of elites in the Ottoman Empire. While this reflected his diminished role as a shadow from the past, it also reveals Bazm wa Razm’s continued relevance to the art of writing history. The change in the visuality of the text from the exceptionality of Aya Sofya 3465 to the relatively ordinary look of these later recensions also helped diminish the potentially rebellious nature of ministers and judges reading about a member of their own class who supplanted the kings of his time. It is interesting to note that Aya Sofya 3465 was only transferred out of the sultan’s private library in the Topkapi palace to the library of the Aya Sofya Mosque during the reign of Maḥmūd I (r. 1143-1168/1730-1754), after Silahdar Ali Pasha commissioned Enderun 2822 and added it to one of the Topkapi palace libraries. That Ali Pasha’s manuscript does not follow Aya Sofya 3465 raises questions as to who knew of Aya Sofya 3465’s existence and where in the palace library it was kept. Even after it was transferred to the Aya Sofya Mosque library, none of the ensuing four manuscripts up to the twentieth century reveal knowledge of it or follow its conventions. While this move from a private royal library to an endowed mosque library demonstrates that Bazm wa Razm no longer contained, in its material presence, a threat to the Ottomans, Aya Sofya 3465’s lack of influence on the recension history of Bazm wa Razm leaves many questions unanswered.

  • 1
    This is supported by the recent characterization of the Ottoman late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as a period that saw the rise of direct private study of texts. On the rise of private “deep reading” see Khaled El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 97-130
  • 2
    Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Ahmet III (Enderûn) 2822. The other copy, which lacks comparable adornment, is Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Ragip Pasa 982. Rāghib Pāshā was also an imperial son-in-law and served as chief minister from 1757 to 1763.
  • 3
    It is beyond the scope of this article, but one can and should think about how this interest in such a figure could have been read. One reading could see it in relation to the weakening of the Sultan’s power, particularly after a series of military defeats in the late seventeenth century and the Edirne Event in 1703 where the Janissaries replaced the reigning Sultan with his brother. On the weakening of the ideological foundation of the Sultanate, see Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 55-62. On the many wars of the empire in this period, see Virginia H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: An Empire Besieged (London: Routledge, 2013).
  • 4
    In which case, it is possible that once this study was over, a quick illumination was added to its front pages and it was sold to a European who may not have been able to pick up on its hasty and disorganized character. Its earlier date relative to the other copies is also interesting, and possibly corresponds to the latter part of a period in which illustrated histories flourished, as studied by Emine Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).

Nationalism and Modern Print Editions

The emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, coupled with the exponential growth of modern print in the Middle East in the twentieth century, gave the text a new role to play that significantly altered its physical appearance.1  The rise of Turkish nationalism brought a renewed interest in the early Turkic history of Anatolia, and with it, Bazm wa Razm came to be understood as a testament to that early history. In this vein, Bazm wa Razm was also translated from Persian into Ottoman Turkish in 1907 and summarized so as to make it accessible to new reading publics in periodicals that were focused on history.2  This renewed interest in Burhan al-Din was also because of the “rediscovery” of his Divan after it was purchased by a British diplomat and taken to London.3  In fact, it was the Divan’s choice of language, Old Anatolian Turkish, that helped recast Burhan al-Din as an early proto-nationalist. Soon after, a new edition of Bazm wa Razm in the original Persian was published in 1928 by the Evkaf Matbaasi, edited by Mehmet Fuat Köprülüzade (d. 1966) for his Key Sources for the History of Anatolian Turks series, the first to incorporate the full text by drawing on Aya Sofya 3465. Köprülüzade’s introduction makes it clear that, for him, Astarabadi’s text and Burhan al-Din’s life are testimonies to the rich history of fourteenth-century Turkish Anatolia and the deep roots of Turkic identity in the region. This was not only an obvious choice for Turkifying the past, but also a contribution to nationalist and state-run efforts to redefine Islamic and Ottoman history as a stepping-stone in the emerging national consciousness of a Turkish nation. 

  • 1
    For more on printing and lithography in the Islamic world, see Ian Proudfoot, “Mass Producing Houri’s Moles, or Aesthetics and Choice of Technology in Early Muslim Book Printing,” in Islam: Essays on Scripture, Thought and Society, A Festschrift in Honour of Anthony H. Johns, ed. Peter G. Riddell and Tony Street (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 161-84; Francis Robinson, “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print,” Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 1 (1993): 229–51; and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, “Commentaries, Print and Patronage: ‘Ḥadīth’ and the Madrasas in Modern South Asia,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 62, no. 1 (1999): 60–81.
  • 2
    For a translation from Persian into Ottoman in 1907, see Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Erzincan 74. It was published in summary fashion by Ahmet Tevhid (d. 1940) in Tarih-i Osmanî Encümeni Mecmuası in volumes 26-33 from 1914 to 1915. See Köprülüzade’s introduction: Astarabadi, Bazm wa Razm (1928), 6. It was also translated into Modern Turkish in 2014 to make it an accessible part of Turkish national history. Aziz b. Erdeşir-i Esterabadi, Bezm u Rezm: Eğlence ve Savaş (Ankara: Afşaroğlu Matbaası, 2014).
  • 3
    The Divan exists in a single manuscript and the only stamps on its front page are late, belonging to Mustafa II (r. 1695-1703) and ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd I (r. 1773-1789). In the nineteenth century, the Divan left these royal libraries and ended up in the hands of Thomas Fiott Hughes, the British consul to Erzurum and later secretary to the British Embassy in Constantinople. After his death, the British Museum purchased a number of manuscripts from his collection through Bernard Quaritch’s auction house on October 11, 1890. It was only after this acquisition that Burhan al-Din’s poetry gained notice in the Ottoman empire (and later Republican Turkey) as a milestone in the development of Turkish national consciousness. On Hughes, see Geoffrey R. Berridge, British Diplomacy in Turkey, 1583 to the Present: A Study in the Evolution of the Resident Embassy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 58; and London, The National Archives, Kew, FO 78/1396. My gratitude to Dr. Muhammad Isa Waley, former curator at the British Museum and the British Library, for the information above.
The logo on the cover of an Islamic manuscript consists of a standing wolf with open mouth holding a torch.

Fig. 26 Cover page, 1928 edition of Bazm wa Razm, personal collection.

While the material constraints of publishing in early-twentieth-century Turkey were a major factor in determining formal visual qualities in publication, the process was still the result of conscious editorial choices. As the first printed edition of Bazm wa Razm and the first full copy of Aya Sofya 3465, the appearance of the Evkaf Matbaasi edition embodies, like its premodern variants, complex worldviews and attitudes toward the past. The late adoption of mechanical type in the Middle East has been attributed to the overwhelming importance of the visual appearance of the book. In fact, further east in Iran and India, the relatively quick adoption of lithographic publication after its invention was likely because of its ability to preserve the formal qualities of a manuscript.1  The wholesale adaption of mechanical type coincided with the rise of nationalism and its views on history and time. In this sense, we could consider the absence of a scribe’s handwriting in the printed editions of Bazm wa Razm as a tangible embodiment of notions like textual fidelity to an original or the existence of an objectively true history that can be mined, like a resource, for important “facts.” In contrast, in all premodern edition of Bazm wa Razm, mistakes were quickly noted within the manuscript and the human fallibility of the scribe was constantly on display. Furthermore, in the 1928 edition of Bazm wa Razm, the text is almost completely unadorned, and the limitations of movable type result in a blocky script with awkward gaps within words where there should be none according to the rules of Arabic orthography. This script is distant from the scholarly hands of the past and imparts a sense of simplicity. The main variant in script is on the cover page and the headings in the introduction and index. There, the script mimics the premier scholarly script of the late Ottoman Empire, ruq‘a, visually reminding the reader of the former regime’s bureaucracy. While the use of a different typeface is a practical way of dividing the book, it also emphasizes the deliberate choices that go into its visual presentation, including the fact that it was fully possible to choose another script for this edition. The simplicity of the main body of the text is reinforced by the use of only black ink, a choice that reflects economic and technological constraints, but which also further dulls the dynamism of Bazm wa Razm’s play with Arabic, Persian, and different genres of literature. In contrast, the entire manuscript tradition preserved, at the very least, the visual distinction of the Qur’an and Arabic through the use of red ink, and, in nearly all cases, full vocalization of their words. Ornament is limited to the title page of the 1928 edition, a line at the end of the book, and a few black-and-white reproductions of Aya Sofya 3465 in the introduction. The black-and-white photographic reproduction again diminishes the performative aspects of the original manuscript, offering a stale preservation of a black-and-white past that encapsulates a particular moment in the progress of history (as opposed to a glimmering manifestation of the presence of God’s shadow on earth). 

  • 1
    See Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 214-226; and Farshid Emami, “The Lithographic Image and Its Audiences,” in Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th Century Iran, ed. David J. Roxburgh and Mary McWilliams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2017), 55-80 (particularly 55-59).
On a page from an Islamic manuscript, the customary Islamic invocation of God’s name, the basmala, is written in a different and larger script than the rest of the calligraphy.

Fig. 27 Basmala on first page of text. 1928 edition of Bazm wa Razm, personal collection.

Whereas premodern Islamicate books began with the customary invocation of God’s name, the basmala, whose iconic stature had a distinct form that was easily recognizable, the most imposing aesthetic choice in this edition is a logo on its title page. The logo consists of a standing wolf with open mouth holding a torch, the seal of the Institute of Turkology at Istanbul University (then the Dār al-Funūn) (Fig. 26). The wolf represents the mythic she-wolf Ashina, who, according to the ideology of Turkish nationalism, mothered the “Turkish race.” The 1928 edition lacks the illuminated header typical of its manuscript forebears and has no basmala until after the introduction, where it appears only as a part of the original text of Bazm wa Razm (though, given its iconic status, in a script different than all others used in this edition) (Fig. 27). This, of course, was a standard feature of publishing in the new Turkish republic, and while it may seem like another arbitrary choice, there is no doubt that it would have been noticed by experienced readers who remembered and still read Ottoman books. The basmala’s absence from the beginning and the she-wolf’s presence aptly symbolize the subsumption of Islamic time under secular time within the structure of a nation-state.1  For the editors of the 1928 edition, the Islamic past now marks a stepping-stone in the progress of the Turkish nation. Just as, after Burhan al-Din’s death, the premodern manuscripts that were produced during the Ottoman period crafted an image of Burhan al-Din as a pious remnant of the past whose deeds were to be contemplated, the 1928 edition casts him as a trailblazing ancestor of the Turkish nation, a son of the mythic she-wolf whose Turkish poetry and political independence mark him as a proto-nationalist. The use of a single ink color and uniform type size also erase the distinction between languages and types of sources. Even the verses of the Qur’an are now indistinguishable from the other text, as Burhan al-Din’s Islam is ancillary to his Turkic identity. Furthermore, the editors have surrounded the text’s Persian narrative with an Ottoman introduction and index, with headings in a distinctly Ottoman script. The effect of these visual choices is clear: the linguistic hierarchy and diversity of the Islamic past is eliminated so as to subsume Arabic and Persian into a Turkish mold. This was a major goal of the Turkish republic, and within a year after the publication of the 1928 edition, the republic replaced the Ottoman alphabet with a new Latin-script alphabet and began a period of language reforms that sought to erase Arabic and Persian words from the Turkish language. This shift to a Latin-script alphabet that immediately followed the publication of the 1928 edition of Bazm wa Razm rendered the text inaccessible to average Turks in the ensuing decades.

  • 1
    By Islamic time I do not mean that there is a single or unitary approach to time among Muslims, but rather, that the premodern Muslim authors I work with always worked at crafting, harmonizing, and synchronizing multiple temporalities for the task at hand. In this sense, I build on Shahzad Bashir’s work in this regard: Shahzad Bashir, “On Islamic Time: Rethinking Chronology in the Historiography of Muslim Societies,” History and Theory 53 (December 2014), 519-544.

The last and latest iteration of Bazm wa Razm was published almost a century later. This edition, published in 2016 in Iran, reflects a more recent stage of publishing.1  Unlike all previous editions of Bazm wa Razm, this edition is printed on bright white paper, an aesthetic choice that premodern writers disliked, preferring instead beige and yellowed paper.2  In a sense, the 2016 edition reflects the visual expectations and material realities of the digital age, in which the white screen became the dominant medium for reading.As if keenly aware of the 1928 edition’s choice of encapsulating the basmala in the front and end matter of a modern book, this edition, like many other books published in the Islamic Republic of Iran, places its basmala strategically at the front. It keeps all the customary sections of a modern book (such as the title page, copyright page, publication information, table of contents, and editor’s introduction), except that, before all of them, there is a single stylized basmala with no other text (Fig. 28). In many ways, this affixing of a basmala at the beginning embodies the worldview of contemporary Iran, an Islamized nation-state that has kept the form, structure, and substance of a modern state while only modifying it in various places with the label “Islamic.”

  • 1
    ʿAzīz ibn Ardashīr Astarābādī, Bazm wa Razm, ed. Tawfīq Subḥānī and Hūshang Sāʿidlū (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār wa Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 1395/2016).
  • 2
    Wright, The Look of the Book, 146.

The last and latest iteration of Bazm wa Razm was published almost a century later. This edition, published in 2016 in Iran, reflects a more recent stage of publishing.1  Unlike all previous editions of Bazm wa Razm, this edition is printed on bright white paper, an aesthetic choice that premodern writers disliked, preferring instead beige and yellowed paper.2  In a sense, the 2016 edition reflects the visual expectations and material realities of the digital age, in which the white screen became the dominant medium for reading.As if keenly aware of the 1928 edition’s choice of encapsulating the basmala in the front and end matter of a modern book, this edition, like many other books published in the Islamic Republic of Iran, places its basmala strategically at the front. It keeps all the customary sections of a modern book (such as the title page, copyright page, publication information, table of contents, and editor’s introduction), except that, before all of them, there is a single stylized basmala with no other text (Fig. 28). In many ways, this affixing of a basmala at the beginning embodies the worldview of contemporary Iran, an Islamized nation-state that has kept the form, structure, and substance of a modern state while only modifying it in various places with the label “Islamic.”

  • 1
    ʿAzīz ibn Ardashīr Astarābādī, Bazm wa Razm, ed. Tawfīq Subḥānī and Hūshang Sāʿidlū (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār wa Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 1395/2016).
  • 2
    Wright, The Look of the Book, 146.
A page of an Islamic manuscript has a single stylized basmala, the customary invocation of God’s name, with no other text.

Fig. 28 Opening basmala, 2016 edition of Bazm wa Razm, personal collection.

A page of an Islamic manuscript has a single stylized basmala, the customary invocation of God’s name, with no other text.

Fig. 29 Cover, 2016 edition of Bazm wa Razm, personal collection.

This is also the first edition to have the title embossed on the cover using the nasta‘liq script, a script that was still in its formative period during Burhan al-Din’s life but which became a hallmark of Persianate literature in the centuries that followed (Fig. 29). With the rise of competing nationalisms in the Middle East, this script became a marker of modern Iranian national identity.1  In fact, it too can be read as a response to the 1928 edition, which used, in its headings, a script that became emblematic of later Ottoman scholarship (ruqʿa). The 1928 edition framed Burhan al-Din as an ancestor of the Turkish nation, while the 2016 Iranian edition pulls him back, emphasizing his Persianate credentials and role in the history of a “greater Iran.”2  Furthermore, this edition of the text was published at a time of heightenedIranian tourism in Turkey when Iranian consumption of Turkish historical dramas was also at an all-time high.3  The choices that went into publishing, designing, and framing this edition can be seen as a way of directly contesting the rise of Turkey’s soft power for Iranian audiences by reminding them of the importance of Persian and Iran to Turkey’s Islamic past. The 2016 edition’s logo, a stylized rosette harkening back to the rosettes of the original manuscripts, also lays claim to the long tradition of Persianate historiography as a form of Iranian-Islamic nationalism.

  • 1
    It should be mentioned, of course, that it is associated with Pakistani nationalism and modern Urdu to a much higher degree.
  • 2
    It is important to note here that ethnicity does not map onto nationalism, and while Bazm wa Razm clearly identifies Burhan al-Din as a descendent of Oghuz Turks and thus naturally suited for the project of Turkish nationalism, many modern Iranian nationalists, scholars, and statesmen also claim similar descent.
  • 3
    See “Iranian Tourists to Surpass Germans in Istanbul,” Financial Tribune, August 25, 2017, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/7622fc5e-c9e6-4e42-946a-318dcd4d4b06; and Ali Amīnī Najafī, “Siryāl-i Sulṭān Sulaymān; Ṭarafdārān-i Bisyār wa Dushmanān-i Farāvān,” BBC Persian, December 11, 2012, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/1d1d3a67-003b-40e1-ba91-d92e68962fe1. It is worth mentioning also that some of these historical dramas tend to depict Iran and its history in a disparaging manner.

Conclusion

Each of the instantiations of Bazm wa Razm described in this article is a separate performance for the reader, recasting Burhan al-Din in keeping with the needs of the present. Books in the premodern Islamicate context were produced with the complete appearance of the book in mind. This is especially true of royal manuscripts, where teams were commissioned to produce a book fitting the stature and status of a king. While some books were made solely for the king, panegyric histories were written and planned out as garments that presented a king’s image as a true and just king of Islam. In the post-caliphal age, each king needed to convince others of his status as God’s shadow upon earth and as a successor of the true “king of Islam,” the Prophet of Islam, the original book bringer. To do this, he had to demonstrate that he was an alchemical sovereign, a king who embodied the union of opposites through performing an equilibrium between feasting and fighting, the royal parallels of God’s beauty and majesty. One aspect of this was interweaving this equilibrium in both narrative and visual forms. After Burhan al-Din’s death, the different treatment of Aya Sofya 3465 and the later copies of Astarabadi’s draft reveals how each continued to be seen as an embodiment of Burhan al-Din as a shadow of God. While Aya Sofya 3465’s dynamic presentation likely influenced its limited circulation, readership of Bazm wa Razm’s later iterations suggests it was still understood as a model of Islamic kingship even as it was framed as a source for contemplation on a bygone past: a garment turned into a shroud. But the reframing of the text in the modern era, whether in the image of a Turkish or Iranian nation, corresponded to a new approach to history wherein the ideal of a king of Islam was no longer relevant, and instead, Bazm wa Razm was important only as a source for tangible facts about the fourteenth century. Throughout all of these editions, Bazm wa Razm is not a neutral object, and the choices that frame its visuality also affect how each era reframed Burhan al-Din’s memory. Regardless of Burhan al-Din’s relevance to political or social history, Bazm wa Razm’s manuscript history reveals that, until the modern period, it embodied for its readers the ideal of being a king of Islam and God’s shadow. This latent power, I argue, could not be separated from it until the waning and eventual end of Islamic monarchies and the rise of nationalism. This is not only a political shift, but a cosmological one. In fact, Burhan al-Din’s relatively insignificant political career (together with the manuscript’s lack of illustration) are what likely saved Bazm wa Razm from the fate of many other royal books from the Islamic world, which would be dispersed, ripped apart, or destroyed in the service of a new understanding of history, time, and power. 

About the Author

Ali Karjoo-Ravary is the Richard W. Bulliet Assistant Professor of Islamic History at Columbia University. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Islamic Studies and was previously the Josephine Hildreth Detmer and Zareen Taj Mirza Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Bucknell University. He works on the intellectual, social, and material history of Islam.

Notes

    Imprint

    Author Ali Karjoo-Ravary
    Year 2022
    Type Essays
    Volume Volume 6: Issue 2 Material Islam
    Copyright © Ali Karjoo-Ravary
    Licensing

    CC BY-NC

    Downloads PDF
    DOI

    10.22332/mav.ess.2022.3

    Citation Guide

    1. Ali Karjoo-Ravary, "Adorning the King of Islam: Weaving and Unraveling History in Astarabadi’s Feasting and Fighting," Essay, MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.ess.2022.2.

    Karjoo-Ravary, Ali. "Adorning the King of Islam: Weaving and Unraveling History in Astarabadi’s Feasting and Fighting." Essay. MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.ess.2022.2.

    Kylie Gilchrist
    Five photographs and four silk-screened panels are arranged in a symmetrical three-by-three grid. Four of the photos show lit candles and they surround an image of blood. The silk-screened panels in the corners are green with gold, vegetal patterning.

    Fig. 1 Rasheed Araeen, Bismullah, 1988. 5 photographs, color, on paper, acrylic paint and gold paint on four canvases, 61 x 90 inches. Tate Collection © Rasheed Araeen.

    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

    • 1
      For readings of other “Cruciform” works, see Zöe Sutherland, “Dialectics of Modernity and Counter-Modernity: Rasheed Araeen’s Cruciform Works,” in Rasheed Araeen: A Retrospective, ed. Nick Aikens (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2017), 191–98.
    • 2
      I must thank Elizabeth Robles for drawing my attention to this aspect of Bismullah.
    • 3
      Uprisings against racialized violence broke out across the UK in 1980–1, and again in 1985. Following the Brixton Uprising of April 1981, an official inquiry was conducted and published as the Scarman Report. The report did not admit institutionalized racism but attributed rioting to socio-economic and cultural deprivation, which municipal bodies sought to address through programs including funding for “ethnic minority” artists. Stuart Hall, “From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence,” History Workshop Journal 48 (1999): 189–90; Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 136–48.
    • 4
      The commercialism and conservativism of the mainstream British art world was represented, as Victor Burgin has quipped, by the “firm of Saatchi, Saatchi, and Thatcher.” Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan Education, 1986), 46.
    • 5
      The category of a Black Arts Movement in Britain is an insufficient yet frequently used shorthand for a range of artistic practices by diaspora artists roughly spanning the late 1970s to early 1990s. The significance of montage practices for these artists has been noted by scholars including Gilane Tawadros, Elizabeth Robles, and Kobena Mercer, and was an organizing theme of The Place is Here, a recent series of exhibitions on black artists in 1980s Britain curated by Nick Aikens and Robles. Tawadros, “Beyond the Boundary: The Work of Three Black Women Artists in Britain,” Third Text 3, no. 8–9 (September 1989): 121–50; Robles, “Collage and Recollection in the 1970s and 1980s: Three Black British Artists,” Wasafiri 34, no. 4 (2019): 52–63; Mercer, “The Longest Journey: Black Diaspora Artists in Britain,” Art History 44, no. 3 (2021): 496–504; Aikens and Robles, The Place Is Here - The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019), 34.)
    • 6
      Mercer, “The Longest Journey,” 485, 502.
    • 7
      Araeen dates Bismullah’s creation prior to the publication of The Satanic Verses (Email to Author, July 27, 2021). He responded directly to the “Rushdie Affair” in a controversial public artwork, The Golden Verses (1990). See Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 194–95.
    • 8
      Rasheed Araeen, Email to Author, June 27, 2020.
    • 9
      Araeen, Interview with author, July 27, 2021. One of the editors of this special issue has noted the resemblance to Pakistan.
    • 10
      Such was the name that Clement Greenberg gave to abstract expressionism when he argued that it had supplanted Paris as modernism’s world capital. Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 208–29.
    • 11
      Among the many studies of the topic, a canonical source is Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
    • 12
      Hal Foster elaborates these anxieties in Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2003), 13–26.
    • 13
      On the history of ornamentalism and orientalism in the nineteenth-century British design reform movement, see Ariane Varela Braga, “Owen Jones and the Oriental Perspective,” in The Myth of the Orient: Architecture and Ornament in the Age of Orientalism, ed. Francine Giese and Ariane Varela Braga (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), 149–65.
    A wooden sculpture consists of eight six-foot-tall lattice structures arranged in a two-by-four array. They are painted bright blue, orange, yellow, and red.

    Fig. 2 Rasheed Araeen, Rang Baranga, 1969. Painted wood, 72 x 24 x 181 inches. Presented by Tate Members © Rasheed Araeen.

    As Bismullah unpacks the discursive constructions and containment of Islamic art, it incorporates another biographical referent situating Araeen’s personhood in this history. In 1970, Araeen was surprised to find that the structural works he innovated in the mid-1960s were misrecognized as “Islamic”.1  The three-dimensional, modular, and symmetrical cubical and lattice forms—such as the free-standing structure Rang Baranga (Fig. 2)—emerged in dialogue with international tendencies of constructivism and kinetic art. They responded to conditions of technological modernity that Araeen was intimately familiar with as a professional civil engineer, in a way comparable to, but distinct from, American minimalism. Despite working at the forefront of the period’s advanced artistic tendencies, critics projected onto Araeen the ethno-racialized identity of an “Islamic” artist and associated the geometric forms of his structures with stereotypes of Islamic art.2  This misrecognition effectively excluded Araeen’s work from the modernist context in which it was produced, and occurred in the same period that institutional racism thwarted his efforts to secure gallery representation.3  This experience was a significant marker in the formation of his political consciousness and self-identification as a “black” and Third World artist in the early 1970s, concomitant with his transition towards a radicalized artistic language in which montage was a core tactic.4

    By the time of Bismullah’s creation, the political terrain had shifted considerably from the context of militancy and direct action characterizing the 1970s, to an emphasis on cultural politics and the politics of representation. Multiculturalist and diversity agendas spread through the arts, with the Greater London Council instituting particularly pro-active anti-racist campaigns.5  A strident critic of these agendas, Araeen argued that their separatist funding streams and paternalistic category of “ethnic arts” largely recoded discourses of colonial racism.6  The artistic and political challenge was, as Araeen wrote in 1988, to resist integration within the prevailing terms of the art establishment and sustain the radicalism of what he defined as “black consciousness” in artistic practice: “not an alternative to or a complete rupture from the mainstream,” but a “critical distance or radical position within its broad spectrum.”7

    Operating from such a position of radical critique, Bismullah deploys montage to stage and deconstruct those now-familiar orientalist binaries: East/West, Islam/Christianity, tradition/modernism, periphery/center. In addition to the corner panels’ references to Islamic architecture, their verdant hue evokes the shade of garments promised to the elect in paradise in the Qur’an (76:21). Green, the artist has noted, also signifies nature and youth, addressing the state of “under-development” produced by processes of colonialism.8  At the same time, green appears in the flags of modern nation-states including Pakistan, alluding to pan-Islamic aspirations and the complexities of their territorially-bounded manifestations. In this context, green might call to mind the modernist ideals—and poetic aesthetics—of Pakistan’s founding figure, the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877­–1938). Although he supported an independent Pakistan, Iqbal conceived an Islamic state as a means to transcend national and ethnic boundaries, and Islam as a framework to realize the potential of human universality. Iqbal reworked the ideas of European philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche and recontextualized them—in a way perhaps comparable to Bismullah’s operations—within a reconceived structure of Islam that responded to the experiences and imperatives of colonial modernity.9

    While the green panels are divided and pushed to the work’s margins by the cruciform shape organizing the candle photographs, the images' aleatory symbolism traverses these fissures by transforming particularity into polyvalence. Photographed on an unknown date before Bismullah’s conception, they evoke the thematics of light as a vital conduit within and between a plurality of traditions. The Qur’an’s prominent “Light Verse” (Qur’an 24:35) echoes metaphors of God as light that abound across the New Testament and Hebrew Bible.10  To the artist, the candles prompt memories of celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights shared across Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism.11  Born into a Muslim family in pre-partition India, Araeen recalls Muslims partaking equally in the festivities, indexing the Indian subcontinent’s history of pluralistic co-existence prior to, and continuing despite, the fissures of colonialism and communalism. Light further links Islamic thought to the legacies of Neo-Platonism through the Ishrāqī or Illuminationist tradition, wherein the possible unity of revelation and reason formed a key problematic.12  Light is also the metaphoric root of European enlightenment, whose philosophies are foundational to colonial modernity and have been redeployed—as by Iqbal—in struggles against it.

    • 1
      Araeen, “How I Discovered My Oriental Soul in the Wilderness of the West,” Third Text 6, no. 18 (1992): 91–3.
    • 2
      Araeen, 91–93.
    • 3
      Araeen, “How I Discovered,” 96–8.
    • 4
      As articulated in Araeen's “Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto” (Black Phoenix 1 (1978): 3–12), the artist's political consciousness was formed in the discourses of political blackness that emerged in Britain in response to the historical experiences of British colonialism. Distinct from discourses on blackness defined in relation to African diasporas, political blackness was defined primarily in relation to histories and experiences of racist oppression and encompassed multiple ethno-racial identities.As Aikens and Robles detail the variation in practices of capitalizing b/Black is rooted in the multiplicity of these histories and political traditions; Araeen himself commonly writes "black" in lowercase. Aikens and Robles, The Place Is Here, 10–1.
    • 5
      Richard Hylton, The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector: A Study of Policies, Initiatives and Attitudes 1976-2006 (Bath: Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, 2007), 43–56.
    • 6
      Araeen, “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts,” Third Text 1, no. 1 (1987): 6–25.
    • 7
      Araeen, ed., The Essential Black Art (London: Chisenhale Gallery in conjunction with Black Umbrella, 1988), 5.
    • 8
      Rasheed Araeen and Jean Fisher, The Triumph of Icarus: Life and Art of Rasheed Araeen (Karachi: Millennium Media, 2014), 132.
    • 9
      On Iqbal’s “intellectual cosmopolitanism” see Javed Majeed’s introduction to Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), xii–xvi.
    • 10
      See Gerhard Böwering, “The Light Verse: Qur’ānic Text and Sūfī Interpretation,” Oriens 36 (2001): 116, 120, 120n33.
    • 11
      Araeen, Email to Author, October 13, 2020.
    • 12
      Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 3rd ed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 286.
    A colorful abstract work reimagines Islamic calligraphy using interlocking, bright chromatic blocks with sharp edges.

    Fig. 3 Rasheed Araeen, Guftugu I (A discussion between Al-Biruni and Ibn Sina about Aristotle), 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 63 x 94 inches. © Rasheed Araeen. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020.

    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).1  Its title references a correspondence that, to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, is “one of the highlights of Islamic intellectual history . . . and science in general.”2  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.”3  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.

     

    • 1
      For an analysis of the artistic and philosophical significance of the "Homecoming" series, see Iftikhar Dadi, “Rasheed Araeen’s Homecoming,” in Amra Ali and VM Art Gallery, eds., Rasheed Araeen: Homecoming (Karachi: VM Art Gallery, 2014), 87–98. Since this article was written, Araeen has presented a new exhibition extending the inquiries initiated with the "Homecoming" works, titled “Islam and Modernism: Past to Present” (COMO Museum of Art, Lahore, April 6–July 1, 2022).
    • 2
      Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Mehdi Mohaghegh, Al-As’ilah wa’l-Ajwibah (Questions and Answers), (Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1995), quoted in Rafik Berjak and Muzaffar Iqbal, “Ibn Sīnā–al-Bīrūnī Correspondence,” Islam & Science 1, no. 1 (2003): 92
    • 3
      Iqbal, Reconstruction, 103, 106.

    About the Author

    Kylie Gilchrist is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester.

    Notes

      Imprint

      Author Kylie Gilchrist
      Year 2022
      Volume Volume 6: Issue 2 Material Islam
      Copyright © Kylie Gilchrist
      Licensing

      CC BY

      Downloads PDF
      DOI

      10.22332/mav.obj.2022.2

      Citation Guide

      1. Kylie Gilchrist, "Rasheed Araeen’s Bismullah" Object Narrative, MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.obj.2022.2.

      Gilchrist, Kylie. "Rasheed Araeen’s Bismullah." Object Narrative. MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.obj.2022.2.

      Rose Aslan

      Fig. 1. Hikmet Barutçugil (ebru artist), Ali Hüsrevoğlu (calligrapher), and Hacer Ünal (miniaturist), Hüdayi Yolu, 2007, marbled paper and calligraphy. Courtesy of the artist. 

      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.1  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.2  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.3  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 550th 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.”4  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.5  Despite the Ottoman Empire’s endurance for centuries, the secular Turkish Republic rejected its legacy following its abolishment of the caliphate in 1924.6

      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.7  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.8

      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.9  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.10  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.11  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.12  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. 

      • 1
        "Ali Hüsrevoğlu,” accessed August 26, 2021, http://alihusrev.com/en/eserler.aspx.
      • 2
        “‘hüdayi Yolu’ Nedir?” Islam & Ihsan, November 18. 2015, https://www.islamveihsan.com/hudayi-yolu-nedir.html.
      • 3
        For more information on Ebristan, where Barutçugil conducts his ebru lessons, holds exhibitions, and hosts visitors from around the world, see: “Ebristan: İstanbul Ebru Evi,” Ebristan: İstanbul Ebru Evi, accessed August 26, 2021, http://www.ebristan.com.
      • 4
        “Ebristan Sanat Galerisi,” Ebristan: İstanbul Ebru Evi, accessed August 26, 2021, http://www.ebristan.com/?d=galeri.
      • 5
        Gavin D. Brockett, “When Ottomans Become Turks: Commemorating the Conquest of Constantinople and Its Contribution to World History,” The American Historical Review 119, no. 2 (2014): 407.
      • 6
        In 1953, not long after the establishment of the secular republic, on the 500-year anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, its commemoration resumed. May 29, 1453 to this day contributes to Istanbulites’ sense of national identity. Commemoration events every May 29th are highly ritualistic and meaningful for Turks.
      • 7
        For a comprehensive study on the phenomenon of neo-Ottoman in the contemporary Turkish state, see M. Hakan Yavuz, Nostalgia for the Empire: The Politics of Neo-Ottomanis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); also see Chien Yang Erdem, “Ottomentality: Neoliberal Governance of Culture and Neo-Ottoman Management of Diversity,” Turkish Studies 18, no. 4 (2017); Gabriela Özel Volfová, “Turkey’s Middle Eastern Endeavors: Discourses and Practices of Neo-Ottomanism under the AKP,” Die Welt Des Islams 56, no. 3–4 (2016): 489–510; Murat Ergin and Yağmur Karakaya, “Between Neo-Ottomanism and Ottomania: Navigating State-Led and Popular Cultural Representations of the Past,” New Perspectives on Turkey 56 (2017): 33–59.
      • 8
        Brockett, “When Ottomans Become Turks,” 247.; Heiko Henkel, “The Location of Islam: Inhabiting Istanbul in a Muslim Way,” American Ethologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 58. See also Courtney Michelle Dorroll, “The Spatial Politics of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party): On Erdoganian Neo-Ottomanism,” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Arizona, 2015.
      • 9
        Meena Sharify-Funk, William Rory Dickson, and Merin Shobhana Xavier, Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (London, Routledge: 2017), 1.
      • 10
        Information about Hikmet Barutçugil is primarily based on interviews conducted during fieldwork conducted in Istanbul in June and July 2017.
      • 11
        This video from another Istanbul-based ebru artist, Kubilay Eralp Dinçer, lays out the basic tools, materials, and techniques of ebru: Kubilay Dincer, “Ebru Sanatı - Kubilay Eralp Dinçer,” YouTube video, 4:03, September 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40bCsMStnAA.
      • 12
        In this Turkish-language Ted Talk, Ay describes in detail how he creates the same effect that  Barutçugil produces in Barut ebru: Garip Ay, “Zuhurat,” TEDxBahcesehirUniversity, YouTube video, 12:37, May 19, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcch_9rF6KM.

      Fig. 2. Hikmet Barutçugil, Color print-out of a du‘ā (supplicatory prayer), 1990s.

      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.

      About the Author

      Rose Aslan, Ph.D., is an independent scholar based in Istanbul. From 2014-2022, she was an associate professor of global Islam in the Department of Religion and Theology at California Lutheran University. Her research focuses on the study of the material culture of religion and embodiment in Muslim communities.

      Notes

        Imprint

        Author Rose Aslan
        Year 2022
        Volume Volume 6: Issue 2 Material Islam
        Copyright © Rose Aslan
        Licensing

        CC BY-NC

        Downloads PDF
        DOI

        10.22332/mav.obj.2022.5

        Citation Guide

        1. Rose Aslan, "Hikmet Barutçugil's Hüdayi Yolu," Object Narrative, MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.obj.2022.5.

        Aslan, Rose. "Hikmet Barutçugil's Hüdayi Yolu." Object Narrative. MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.obj.2022.5.

        Nathan Hofer
        In a view from within the courtyard of a khānqāh, the wood doors of khalwa cells are visible on the ground floor of the building. The windows of living quarters line the walls above them. The courtyard itself has a massive pointed arch on one end.

        Fig. 1 Courtyard of the khānqāh of the Mamluk sultan Baybars al-Jāshankīr (r. 1309-1310) in Cairo. Note the khalwa cells with wood doors that face the courtyard on the ground floor. Above the cells are living quarters for Sufis who lived in the khānqāh.

        Eyes Burning Like Embers

        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.1  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.2  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.3

        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.4  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.5  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.6  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.”7  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.8  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.9  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.10  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.11  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.12  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.13  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.14  The following definition of khalwa is fairly representative of the scholarship: “a method of withdrawal or isolation from the world for mystical purposes.”15  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.”16  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.17  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.18  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.”19  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.20  Zuhd, by contrast, is an ethical disposition of detachment. It is an attitude of indifference to worldly trappings, not a categorical rejection of them.21  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.”22  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.”23  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.24  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.”25 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.26

        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.”27  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.28  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.29  Sonia Hazard has described this scholarship as “the material turn” in religious studies, comprised of several distinct lines of inquiry and methodologies.30  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.31  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.”32  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.”33  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.”34  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.35  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).36  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.”37  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.38  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.39  But there is more! Discursive agents like stories and dhikr formulas also possess a vitality and the power to elicit affects in other agents.40  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.41  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.”42

        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.”43  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.”44  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.45  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.46  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.47  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.48  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.49  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.50  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.

        • 1
          These accounts can be found in ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī, al-Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, vol. 2 (Cairo: Maktaba wa- Maṭbaʿat Muḥammad ʿAlī Ṣabīya, 1965), 2:59; ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Munāwī, al-Kawākib al-durrīya fī tarājim al-sādat al-sūfīya (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1999), 3:111; Yūsuf ibn Ismāʿīl al-Nabhānī, Jāmiʿ karāmāt al-awliyāʾ, ed. Ibrāhīm ʿAṭwa ʿAwḍ (Porbandar, India: Markaz-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat Barakat-e-Raza, 2001), 2:535. Compare these accounts of dog saints and dog shrines to Devin DeWeese, “Dog Saints and Dog Shrines in Kubravī Tradition: Notes on a Hagiographical Motif of Khwārazm,” in Miracle et Karama. Hagiographies médiévales comparées, ed. Denise Aigle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 459–97; Devin DeWeese, “Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men: Narratives of Hero and Saint at the Frontier of Orality and Textuality,” in Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Istanbul, March 28–30, 2001 (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2007), 147–73.
        • 2
          Ahmed El Shamsy, “Returning to God through His Names: Cosmology and Dhikr in a Fourteenth-Century Sufi Treatise,” in Essays in Islamic Philology, History, and Philosophy, ed. Alireza Korangy et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
        • 3
          The fact that the story involves dogs (and not some other animal) is important. Dogs appear quite often in medieval Sufi stories as the embodiment of ambiguity. They were ritually impure and maligned by the prophet in a number of ḥadīths. At the same time, they were prized by hunters in rural areas and were essential to public health in urban areas by keeping the streets clean of trash. This ambiguity provided Sufi biographers with a salient means of narrating the ways Sufis often worked within and on the margins. See Nathan Hofer, “Dogs in Medieval Egyptian Sufi Literature,” in Our Dogs, Our Selves: Dogs in Medieval and Early Modern Art, Literature, and Society, ed. Laura D. Gelfand (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 78–93; Jenny Berglund, “Princely Companion or Object of Offense? The Dog’s Ambiguous Status in Islam,” Society & Animals 22, no. 6 (2014): 545–59.
        • 4
          Paul Fenton, “La Pratique de la retraite spirituelle (Khalwa) chez les Judéo-Soufis d’Égypte,” in Le Développement du Soufisme en Égypte à l’époque Mamelouke, ed. Richard McGregor, Adam Sabra, and Mireille Loubet (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2006): 211-52.
        • 5
          Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī, “Al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa,” in Majmūʿat rasāʾil Ibn ʿArabī (Beirut: Dār al-Mahajja al-Bayḍāʾ, 2000), 1:423-54, quotation on 432. Ibn al-ʿArabī discussed khalwa in a wide variety of places across multiple works and Suʿād al-Ḥakīm has done a great service by collecting the references in Suʻād al-Ḥakīm, al- Muʿjam al-ṣūfī: al-ḥikma fī ḥudūd al-kalima (Beirut: Dandara, 1981), 433–38.
        • 6
          Kubrā, Risāla fī l-khalwa, published in Gerhard Böwering, “Kubrā’s Treatise on Spiritual Retreat, Risāla fīʾl-Khalwa,” Al-Abḥāth: Journal of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, American University of Beirut 54 (2006). My thanks to the author for kindly sending me an offprint of this valuable article.
        • 7
          Najm al-Dīn Dāya Rāzī, Manārāt al-sāʾirīn wa-maqāmāt al-ṭāʾirīn (Cairo: Dār Suʿād al-Ṣabbāḥ, 1993), 412.
        • 8
          Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥājj, al-Madkhal (Cairo: Dār Maktabat al-Turāth, 1960), 3:147-158.
        • 9
          ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī, al-Jawhar al-muṣūn wa-l-sirr al-marqūm fīmā tantajih al-khalwa min al-asrār wa-l-ʿulūm, ed. Muṣṭafā Ḥanafī (Dār Jawāmiʿ al-Kalim, n.d.).
        • 10
          On Ibn Nūḥ and the still unpublished al-Waḥīd, see Denis Gril, “Une source inédite pour l’histoire du taṣawwuf en Égypte au viie/xiiie siècle,” in Livre du centenaire 1880–1980, ed. J. Vercoutter (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1980), 441–508; Denis Gril, “Une émeute antichrétienne à Qūṣ au début du VIIIe/XIVe siècle,” in Annales Islamologiques 16 (1980): 241–74; Denis Gril, “Le soufisme en Égypte au début de l’époque mamelouke d’après le Waḥīd fī sulūk ahl al-tawḥīd de ʿAbd al-Ghaffār Ibn Nūḥ al-Qūṣī (m. 708/1308),” in Le développement du soufisme en Égypte à l’époque mamelouke, ed. Richard McGregor and A. Sabra (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2010): 51–73; and Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt1173-1325 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 181–249.
        • 11
          Scott Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
        • 12
          Martin, “A Short History of The Khalwati Dervishes”; Rachida Chih, “Cheminements et situation actuelle d'un ordre mystique réformateur: la Khalwatiyya en Égypte (fin XVe siècle à nos jours)” Studia Islamica 88 (1998): 181-201; John Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350-1650 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
        • 13
          Jürgen Paul, Doctrine and Organization: The Khwājagān/Naqshbandīya in the First Generation after Bahā’uddīn (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1998).
        • 14
          The only studies devoted explicitly (more or less) to the subject during this time period are Ernst Bannerth, “Dhikr et Khalwa d’après Ibn’Ata Allah,” Mideo 12 (1974): 65–90; Hermann Landolt, “Khalwa,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition; Jamal Elias, The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ʿAlāʾ Ad-Dawla as-Simnānī (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 120–45; Bernd Radtke et al., “Two Sufi Treatises of Aḥmad Ibn Idrīs,” Oriens 35 (1996); Michel Chodkiewicz, “Les Quatre morts du Soufi,” Revue de l’histoire Des Religions 215, no. 1 (1998): 35–57; Muhammad Isa Waley, “Contemplative Disciplines in Early Persian Sufism,” in The Heritage of Sufism: Classical Persian Sufism from Its Origins to Rumi (700-1300, ed. L. Lewisohn (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), 497–548; Muhammad Isa Waley, “ʿAziz al-Din Nasafi on Spiritual Retreat (Khalwa),” Sufi: A Journal of Sufism 17 (1993): 5–9; Hamid Algar, Čellā,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica; Alexander Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 314–17; Nelly Amri, “Khalwa et bayt al-khalwa dans le soufisme Ifrîqiyen du IVe/Xe siècle au Xe/XVIe siècle: quelques remarques sur la pratique, ses lieux et sa diffusion »,” al-Sabîl: Revue d’histoire, d’archéologie et d’architecture Maghrébines [enligne], no. 4 (2017); Samir Staali, “La Retraite spirituelle *Khalwa* dans la pensée Arabo-Musulmane : origines, pratiques anciennes et actuelles, et dimensions mystiques” (Unpublished PhD thesis, Lyon 3, 2014); Böwering, “Kubrā’s Treatise on Spiritual Retreat;” ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Bakrī, “Kitāb al-khalwa li-Ibn ʿArabī: dirāsa wa-taḥqīq,” Tasavvuf 37 (2016):1-44.
        • 15
          B. C. Martin, “A Short History of the Khalwati Dervishes,” in Scholars, Saints and Sufis Muslim Religious Institutions Since 1500, ed. Nikki R. Keddie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 275
        • 16
          Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 544–45. Ironically, given the fact that Sufis are almost universally described as mystics, most were actually much closer to Weber’s ideal type of the inner-worldly ascetic who rejects the world but nevertheless continues to work within it to effect transformation.
        • 17
          Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
        • 18
          Abū l-Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif (Cairo: n.p., 2004), 197.
        • 19
          Leah Kinberg, “What is Meant by Zuhd’,” Studia Islamica 61 (1985): 40.
        • 20
          Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 124–27.
        • 21
          We can contrast the forms of late antique Christian piety with the view promoted by Ibn al-Mubārak (d. 181/797) in his Kitāb al-zuhd. Feryal Salem describes Ibn al-Mubārak’s approach to zuhd as an example of a “sober and moderate trend of piety” that had nothing to do with wealth or possession, but rather someone who held that wealth was no problem so long as one loves poverty. Feryal Salem, The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunni Scholasticism: ʻAbdallah b. al-Mubarak and the Formation of Sunni Identity in the Second Islamic Century (Leiden: Brill 2016), 109, 112.
        • 22
          Alexander D. Knysh, trans., al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism: al-Risala al-Qushayriyya fi ‘ilm al-Tasawwuf, (Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 2007), 123.
        • 23
          Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 77.
        • 24
          For a general overview of the world of the unseen, see D. B. MacDonald L. Gardet, “al-G̲h̲ayb,” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 1025-1026.
        • 25
          Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies, xii.
        • 26
          Here I am drawing on Richard Valantasis, The Making of the Self: Ancient and Modern Asceticism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), 7: “At the center of ascetical activity is a self who, through behavioral changes, seeks to become a different person, a new self; to become a different person in new relationships; and to become a different person in a new society that forms a new culture.”
        • 27
          On “psychophilic somatophobia,” Elizabeth Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 119.
        • 28
          Peter J. Bräunlein, “Thinking Religion Through Things,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 28, no. 4–5 (2016), 365–99.
        • 29
          Major achievements in this respect are Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (2005 – present); Daniel Miller, ed. Materiality(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); David Morgan, ed. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (London: Routledge, 2010); Manuel A. Vásquez, More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand, 2011); Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer, eds., Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); Sally Promey, ed. Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); S. Brent Plate, Key Terms in Material Religion, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Vasudha Narayanan, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020).
        • 30
          Sonia Hazard, “The Material Turn in the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 4, no. 1 (2013), 58-78.
        • 31
          Thomas A. Tweed, “After the Quotidian Turn: Interpretive Categories and Scholarly Trajectories in the Study of Religion since the 1960s,” The Journal of Religion 95, no. 3 (2015): 361–85.
        • 32
          Hazard, “The Material Turn,” 68, citing Jeremy Stolow, Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
        • 33
          Severin Fowles, “People Without Things,” in An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Soerensen (New York, NY: Springer, 2010), 23–41, quotation on p. 25.
        • 34
          William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: First Series. The Fundamental Institutions (New York: A. and C. Black, 1889), 20.
        • 35
          By colonial anthropologists of religion, I mean that they were part of the system of knowledge production described by David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
        • 36
          Fredrik Fahlander, “Differences that Matter: Materialities, Material Culture and Social Practice,” in Six Essays on the Materiality of Society and Culture (Gothenburg: Bricoleur Press, 2008), 127–54, esp. 129-131.
        • 37
          Christopher Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, and Thomas Nail, “What Is New Materialism?” Angelaki 24, no. 6 (2019), 111–34, quotation on 118.
        • 38
          To offer some sense of the variety and applicability of this work, note its rapid proliferation across the humanities and social sciences. Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 95–100, quotation on 96. On digital materiality more broadly see Ramón Reichert and Annika Richterich, “Introduction: Digital Materialism,” Digital Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (2015): 5–17. On the new materialism in archeology, see Christopher Witmore, “Archaeology and the New Materialisms,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1, no. 2 (2014): 203–46; in religion, see Hazard, “The Material Turn”; Tamsin Jones, “New Materialism and the Study of Religion,” in Religious Experience and New Materialism: Movement Matters, eds. Joerg Rieger and Edward Waggoner, Radical Theologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016), 1–23; in sociology, see Nick J. Fox and Pam Alldred, Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action (London: SAGE, 2016); in history, see Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., in Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
        • 39
          George Ioannides, “Vibrant Sacralities and Nonhuman Animacies: The Matter of New Materialism and Material Religion,” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 26, no. 3 (2013): 234-253. See also Anna L. Peterson, “Material Religion, Materialism, and Non-human Animals” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality, eds. Vasudha Narayanan (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2020), 274–89.
        • 40
          Jerry Lee Rosiek and Jimmy Snyder, “Narrative Inquiry and New Materialism: Stories as (Not Necessarily Benign”) Agents,” Qualitative Inquiry 26, no. 10 (2018): 1-12.
        • 41
          Ian Lowrie, “What Sort of Thing is the Social? Or, Durkheim and Deleuze on Organization and Infrastructure,” in The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science, eds. Sarah Ellenzweig and John Zammito (London: Routledge, 2017), 154-177.
        • 42
          Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5.
        • 43
          Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), ix.
        • 44
          Ibid., 26.
        • 45
          On the assemblage, see Thomas Nail, “What is an Assemblage?” Substance 46 (2017): 21-37. On the ethics of agential realism, see (in addition to Karen Barad’s work), Jerry Lee Rosiek, Jimmy Snyder, and Scott L. Pratt, “The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful Anti-Colonial Engagement,” Qualitative Inquiry 26, no. 3–4 (2020): 331–46.
        • 46
          In addition to the texts I have already cited, I have found the following particularly helpful: Tamsin Jones, “New Materialism and the Study of Religion,” in Religious Experience and New Materialism: Movement Matters, eds. Joerg Rieger and Edward Waggoner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–23; Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Introduction: Tangled Matters,” in Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms, ed. Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 1- 18; Ulrike Tikvah Kissman and Joost van Loon, eds. Discussing New Materialism: Methodological Implications for the Study of Materialities. (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2019); Beatriz Revelles, Waltraud Ernst, and Monika Rogowska-Stangret, eds., Feminist New Materialisms: Activating Ethico-Politics Through Genealogies in Social Sciences – Special Issue of Social Sciences (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2020); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012).
        • 47
          Sonia Hazard, “Two Ways of Thinking About New Materialism,” Material Religion 15, no. 5 (2019): 629–31.
        • 48
          Bashir, Sufi Bodies.
        • 49
          Michael Muhammad Knight, Muhammad’s Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
        • 50
          Richard McGregor, Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egpt and Syria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

        The Material

        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.1

        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.2  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.3  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.4  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).5  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.6  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.7  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.8  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.9  Cleanliness, daily ablutions, and immaculately clean clothing were fundamental requirements for practitioners of khalwa.10  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.11

        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.”12  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.”13  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.14  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.”15  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.16  Ibn Nūḥ marvels at a man who undertook forty-day stretches of khalwa and ate only raisins.17  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.18  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.19  Al-Suhrawardī suggests the same.20  Aḥmad al-Ṣayyād,is more specific, noting that sleep should occur at night, for not less than two but not more than four hours.21  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.22

        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.23  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.24  ʿAziz al-Dīn Nasafī, describes several different bodily postures.25  Most texts prescribe a series of vocal litanies (adhkārawrād, etc.) that, over time, will become internalized, or “implanted in the heart,” so that vocalization is no longer necessary.26  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.27  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.28  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.29  Ibn al-ʿArabī also describes different types of devotions within the cell and the different forms of enlightenment that will result from each type.30  Al-Kūrānī has a similar discussion.81  Al-Suhrawardī adds a temporal component as well, stressing that khalwa requires “structuring one’s moments and disciplining the limbs away from forbidden activity.”82

         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.83

        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.84

        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.85

        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.).86  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.

        • 1
          Ibn Nūḥ al-Qūṣī, al-Waḥīd fī sulūk ahl al-tawḥīd (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Markazīya li-l-Makhṭūṭāt al-Islāmīya. MS #3182), 1:30a.
        • 2
          On the institutionalization of Sufism, see Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism, 14–23.
        • 3
          Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2000), 2:278–304.
        • 4
          al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1967), 105–6.
        • 5
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 190-208 (chs. 26–28).
        • 6
          Chodkiewicz, “Les Quatre Morts,” 43.
        • 7
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, “al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa,” 447.
        • 8
          Böwering, “Kubrā’s Treatise,” 27–28; M. Molé, “Traités mineurs de Najm al-Dīn Kubrā,” Annales islamologiques 4 (1963): 25; Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa, 447; Elias, The Throne Carrier of God, 120; Ibn-ʿAṭāʾ Allāh al-Iskandarī, Miftāḥ Al-Falāḥ Wa-Miṣbāḥ al-Arwāḥ, ed. Muḥammad Abd-as-Salām Ibrāhīm (Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīya, 2001), 38.
        • 9
          Most texts do not make this explicit. Rather, in separate discussions Sufi authors write of perfuming the place of dhikr, and then commend khalwa as a site of dhikr elsewhere. However, the perfuming of the cell is made explicit in the Miftāḥ al-falāḥ, 21 (where he says it is for the benefit of angels and jinn who accompany the Sufi in the cell), as well as in a late text by Aḥmad ibn Idrīs (d. 1837), Nubdha fī ṣifat dukhūl al-khalwa, which draws on many of these earlier texts; see Radtke, O’Fahey, and O’Kane, “Two Sufi Treatises,” 166.
        • 10
          Al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 203; Waley, “ʿAziz al-Din Nasafi,” 7; al-Iskandarī, Miftāḥ al-falāḥ, 21.
        • 11
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, “al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa,” 437-9.
        • 12
          Böwering, “Kubrā’s Treatise,” 287.
        • 13
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, “al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa,” 442–45.
        • 14
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 205 and 208.
        • 15
          Ibn-al-ʿArabī, “Risālat al-anwār,” in Majmūʿat rasāʾil Ibn Al-ʿArabī (Beirut: Dār al-Mahajja al-Bayḍāʾ, 2003), 1:252.
        • 16
          Dāya Rāzī, Manārāt al-sāʾirīn, 407–9.
        • 17
          Al-Qūṣī, al-Waḥīd fī sulūk ahl al-tawḥīd, 1:153a.
        • 18
          Aḥmad al-Ṣayyād, al-Maʿārif al-Muḥammadīya fī l-waẓāʾif al-aḥmadīya (Damascus: Dār al-Farqad, 2011), 475.
        • 19
          Böwering, “Kubrā’s Treatise, 28.
        • 20
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 204.
        • 21
          al-Ṣayyād, al-Maʿārif al-Muḥammadīya, 475.
        • 22
          Waley, “ʿAziz al-Din Nasafi,” 6–7.
        • 23
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 203.
        • 24
          Böwering, “Kubrā’s Treatise,” p. 277-8; Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa, p. 448 (face the qibla); al-Iskandarī, Miftāḥ al-falāḥ, 21.
        • 25
          Waley, “ʿAziz Al-Din Nasafi,” 8.
        • 26
          For more on this particular notion, see El Shamsy, “Returning to God;” and Elisha Russ-Fishbane, “Physical Embodiment and Spiritual Rapture in Thirteenth-Century Sufi Mysticism,” in Les mystiques juives, chrétiennes et musulmanes dans l’Égypte médiévale. Interculturalités et contextes historiques, eds. Giuseppe Cecere, Mireille Loubet, and Samuela Pagani (Cairo: Institut Française d’Archéologie Oriental du Caire, 2013), 305–332.
        • 27
          El Shamsy, “Returning to God.”
        • 28
          Waley, “ʿAziz al-Din Nasafi,” 8.
        • 29
          Al-Iskandarī, Miftāḥ al-falāḥ, 26–30.
        • 30
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa, 450–54.
        • 81
          El Shamsy, “Returning to God.”
        • 82
          Al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 202.
        • 83
          ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī, Laṭāʼif al-minan wa-l-akhlāq fī wujūb al-taḥadduth bi-niʻmat Allāh ʻalā l-iṭlāq : al-Maʻrūf bi-l-minan al-kubrā(Damascus: Dār Al-Taqwaʹ, 2004), 101.
        • 84
          Bruno Latour famously described actants like al-Shaʿrānī’s rope as “delegated nonhuman characters,” in “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society, eds. Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992): 225–58.
        • 85
          al-Qūṣī, al-Waḥīd fī sulūk ahl al-tawḥīd, 1:30a.
        • 86
          Ibid.

        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.”1

        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.”2  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.”3 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.”4  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.”5  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,”6  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.”7  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.”8  In fact, the auditory and the visual were linked synesthetically for Kubrā and those who trained in the Kubrawī tradition.9  Others describe this process as polishing the mirror of the heart to the point that it becomes reflective of The Real.10  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.11

        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 khalwaNajm 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.12  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.13  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.14  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.15  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.16  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.17  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.18

         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.19

        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.20  Najm al-Dīn Kubrā travelled outside his cell and entered the sun.21  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.22  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.23  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.”24

        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.25  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.”26  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.27  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.28

        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.29

        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.”30  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.31  Kubrā himself had his initiates who intended to enter khalwa washed in the manner of a corpse being prepared for burial (ghusl al-mayyit).32  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.33  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. 

        • 1
          Ibid., 1:47a.
        • 2
          Fowles, “People without Things,” 29.
        • 3
          Bryan Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 41.
        • 4
          Ibid., 42. Of course, as Turner points out, Weber did not have a problem taking seriously the motivations and explanations of Calvinists who would describe their actions in terms of their relationship with a distant and predetermining God. Or, likewise, he took seriously the different kinds of social action produced by an ascetic orientation (transcendent deity) versus a mystical orientation (immanent deity).
        • 5
          ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī, Iṣṭilāḥāt al-ṣūfīyah (Cairo: Dār al-Manār, 1992), 180.
        • 6
          Edward Badeen, ed., Zwei mystische Schriften des ʻAmmār al-Bidlīsī Bahǧat al-ṭāʼifat wa ṣawm al-qalb (Beirut: Orient-Institut, 1999), 43.
        • 7
          Badeen, Zwei mystische Schriften, 73.
        • 8
          Molé, “Traités mineurs de Najm al-Dīn Kubrā,” 25.
        • 9
          Eyad Abuali, “Words Clothed in Light: Dhikr (Recollection), Colour and Synaesthesia in Early Kubrawi Sufism,” Iran 58, no. 2 (2019): 1–14.
        • 10
          The first to speak of using dhikr and khalwa to polish the heart (as far as I know) was Najm al-Dīn Kubrā, Fawāʾiḥ al-jamāl wa-fawātiḥ al-jalāl, ed. Fritz Meier (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlang, 1957). It is also mentioned by Simnānī (Elias, The Throne Carrier, 119), al-Iskandarī, Miftāḥ al-falāḥ, 35, and by Ibn Nūḥ, al-Waḥīd, 1:30a.
        • 11
          Gavin Flood, The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.
        • 12
          Kubrā  Fawāʾiḥ al-jamāl, 10–11.
        • 13
          Ibid., 21–22.
        • 14
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 201.
        • 15
          al-Ṣayyād, al-Maʿārif al-Muḥammadīya, 479–80.
        • 16
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 200.
        • 17
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, “al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa,” 450.
        • 18
          Marcia Hermansen, “Dreams and Dreaming in Islam,” in Dreams: A Reader on Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming, ed. Kelly Bulkeley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 90–91. Hermansen also draws attention to a similar distinction made by Ibn al-ʿArabī; see William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʻArabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 404n24.
        • 19
          Ibn Nūḥ, al-Waḥīd, 113a.
        • 20
          Kubrā  Fawāʾiḥ al-jamāl, 15–16.
        • 21
          Ibid., 27.
        • 22
          Ibid., 84.
        • 23
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 207.
        • 24
          Ibn al-Ḥājj, al-Madkhal, 3:186.
        • 25
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, “al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa,” 433 and 438. Elsewhere, Ibn al-ʿArabī, “Risālat al-anwār,” 1:272, and al-Iskandarī, Miftāḥ al-falāḥ, 36, likewise insist that one must first train oneself to be alone by avoiding all people before engaging in khalwa.
        • 26
          Al-Qūṣī, al-Waḥīd, 1:70a ff.
        • 27
          The text of the “Risālat al-anwār” published in the Rasāʾil of Ibn al-ʿArabī (see above, n. 66) seems to me to be defective here. So, for this particular section, I follow the text published in ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī’s commentary, al-Isfār ʿan risālat al-anwār fīmā yatajallā li-ahl al-dhikr min al-anwār, ed. ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-Kayyālī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīya, 2004), 182-183. There is an excellent English translation of the text as well as selections from al-Jīlī’s commentary by Rabia Terri Harris, Journey of the Lord of Power: A Sufi Manual on Retreat by Muhyiddin ibn ʿArabi (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1981).
        • 28
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, “Riṣālat al-anwār”, 1:283; al-Jīlī, al-Isfār, 184.
        • 29
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, n.d.), 3:225-229.
        • 30
          Badeen, Zwei mystische Schriften, 61.
        • 31
          Meier, Fawāʾiḥ al-jamāl, 59-60.
        • 32
          On this theme of death see Najm al-Dīn Kubrā, al-Uṣūl al-ʿashara, in Molé, “Traités mineurs de Najm al-Dīn Kubrā,” 17, 21; Cyrus Ali Zargar, “The Ten Principles: Theoretical Implications of Volitional Death in Najm al-Dīn Kubrā’s al-Uṣūl al-ʿAshara (A Study and Translation): The Ten Principles.” The Muslim World 103, no. 1 (January 2013): 107–30; al-Isfarāyinī, Fī kayfīyat al-taslīk wa-l-ijlās fī l-khalwaapud Nûruddîn Abdurrahmân-I Isfarâyinî, Le Révélateur des mystères: Kâshif al-Asrâr, ed. and transl. Hermann Landolt (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1986), 123; Waley, “ʿAziz al-Din Nasafi,” 8.
        • 33
          Al-Qūṣī, al-Waḥīd, 1:70a.

        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.”1

        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.”2  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.3  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.4  Al-Suhrawardī insists that the visionary experiences of the true devotee require explanation, either from the Sufi master or directly from God.5  Ibn al-ʿArabī notes that only a truly gifted shaykh can help one who is unprepared for khalwa.6  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.7  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.8  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.9  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.10

        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.11  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.12  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.13  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.14

        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.15  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.16

        • 1
          Ibid, 70a–70b.
        • 2
          Ibn-al-ʿArabī, “Risālat al-anwār,” 1:272.
        • 3
          This is one of the so-called “eight rules of Junayd.” Najm al-Dīn Kubrā was almost certainly the author of these eight (sometimes ten) rules, as they appear nowhere before this point. Further, the sayings attributed to al-Junayd in earlier sources reveal a decidedly communalist bent. See Bernd Radtke, “The Eight Rules of Junayd: A General Overview of the Genesis and Development of Islamic Dervish Orders” in Reason and Inspiration in Islam: Essays in Honour of Hermann Landolt, ed. Todd Lawson (London: I. B. Taurus, 2005), 490-502, esp. 492.
        • 4
          Böwering, “Kubrā’s Treatise, 287.
        • 5
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 198–99.
        • 6
          Ibn-al-ʿArabī, “Risālat al-anwār,” 1:271.
        • 7
          al-Jīlī, al-Isfār, 94.
        • 8
          Waley, “‘Aziz al-Din Nasafi,” 6.
        • 9
          Elias, The Throne Carrier, 122.
        • 10
          Devin Deweese, “Ahmed Yasavi in the Work of Burhan al-Din Qilich,” Asiatische Studien 66, no. 3 (2014): 837–879.
        • 11
          al-Suhrawardī, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 203.
        • 12
          Ibn al-ʿArabī, “al-Khalwa al-muṭlaqa,” 447–8.
        • 13
          al-Ṣayyād, al-Maʿārif al-Muḥammadīya, 478.
        • 14
          al-Munāwī, al-Kawākib, 3:229.
        • 15
          Jean-Louis Triaud, “Khalwa and the Career of Sainthood: An Interpretative Essay,” in Charisma and Brotherhood in African Islam, eds. Donal Cruise O’Brien and Christian Coulon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 53–66.
        • 16
          Al-Qūṣī, al-Waḥīd, 1:105b. See also the accounts in al-Udfuwī, al-Ṭāliʿ, p. 743, and Ṣafī l-Dīn ibn Abī l-Manṣūr in Gril, Risāla, p. 49. Ṣafī al-Dīn’s account is pretty straightforward, noting merely that Ibn Shāfiʿ “will inherit the maqām” of Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh.

        Conclusion

        A view from within the courtyard of a khānqāh looks toward a massive pointed arch and low platform on one end. The wooden doors of khalwa cells line the ground floor of the building with the windows of living quarters up above looking onto the courtyard.

        Fig. 2 Another view of the khānqāh of sultan al-Jāshankīr.

        I hope to have shown here the utility of a new materialist framework to analyze these medieval accounts in order to understand khalwa holistically, taking into account the myriad social and material elements that made the practice effective. At the most basic level of description, the purpose of khalwa was to allow communion with The Real, an encounter that not only transformed individual Sufis, intensifying and focusing their spiritual energies, but in so doing transformed the material and social relations of those around them as well. But access to the divine realm of the unseen and the presence of The Real required a disciplined and properly organized self. This disciplined or reconstituted self was achieved through the intra-action of the body with a diverse host of agents. Simply put, access to The Real would be impossible without the aid of all those non-human agents inside the cell and the human agents outside the cell. Furthermore, the affects generated by these entanglements produced lasting effects in the social world that rippled out from the cell as well. The significance and power of khalwa is thus only truly generated in the collective effervescence of a community of Sufis and non-human agents, the seen and the unseen. It is only in and through the interconnected nodes of the material, the practical, and the social that khalwa becomes efficacious. This, again, is why so many of these authors insist that the cell be built within the confines of a populated space. The large state-sponsored khanqah of the Mamlūk Sultan Baybars al-Jāshankīr (r. 708/1308 – 709/1309) in Cairo illustrates this quite well. The accompanying image shows the courtyard of the khanqah and the large number of khalwa cells built around it on the ground floor, the entrance to each marked by a simple wooden door.1  For Ibn Nūḥ and the milieu of Sufism he represents, khalwa was never simply a private, spiritual, or mystical affair. It was an ethical entanglement with all these elements that produced new selves and new relationships to society. Likewise, my entanglement with these narratives and some of the new materialist scholarship has fundamentally changed my own conception of self and my ethical responsibility to all those human and non-human agents with whom I intra-act on a continual basis. 

         

        • 1
          Above the khalwa cells are the living quarters for the Sufis, which are indicated by the windows on the second and third floors around the courtyard. For more on this khanqah, see Leonor Fernandes, “The Foundation of Baybars al-Jashankir: Its waqf, History, and Architecture,” in Muqarnas 4 (1987): 21–42. On the nature of state-sponsored Sufism in Mamlūk Egypt, see Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism, 35-60.

        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. 

        About the Author

        Nathan Hofer is associate professor of religion in the department of Classics, Archeology, and Religion at the University of Missouri. He is interested in materialist perspectives on the history and historiography of Sufism during the Ayyubid and Mamluk sultanates. His first book, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) describes the social and material conditions that led to the mass popularization of Sufism in Egypt during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. More recently, he has been working on the political economy of Ayyubid- and Mamluk-era Sufism and the critical role that pious endowments played in producing the variety of Sufi social formations we find during this period.

        Notes

          Imprint

          Author Nathan Hofer
          Year 2022
          Type Essays
          Volume Volume 6: Issue 2 Material Islam
          Copyright © Nathan Hofer
          Licensing

          CC BY

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          DOI

          10.22332/mav.ess.2022.2

          Citation Guide

          1. Nathan Hofer, "On the Material and Social Conditions of Khalwa in Medieval Sufism," Essay, MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.ess.2022.2.

          Hofer, Nathan. "On the Material and Social Conditions of Khalwa in Medieval Sufism." Essay. MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 2 (2022), doi: 10.22332/mav.ess.2022.2.

          Rebecca S. Hall
          A golden prasat sop with open-sides is built atop a decorative plinth for the body. It has bright hanging curtains and a layered roof on top that culminates in a gold spire. The roof eaves are adorned with flames.

          Fig. 1 Prasat sop for high-ranking monk, Saraphi, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2013. Photo by the author.

          Cremation structures serve the utilitarian purpose of incinerating a corpse to aid transition from life to death, but in contemporary practice in Northern Thailand, opulent, golden-colored cremation structures also create a stunning sight that give local viewers a deeper understanding of all sentient beings’ connection to death (Fig. 1). The structures, called prasat sop or, literally translated, “corpse palace,” are common throughout Northern Thailand, a region culturally distinct from the rest of the country. This essay focuses on prasat sop structures built for Buddhist monks, based on interviews and observations from fieldwork in and around the regional capital of Chiang Mai. In this area, devoted Buddhist monks are accorded high social status due to their religious dedication and their role as protectors of regional traditions. When a monk dies, his community honors his life by having a large prasat sop built for the monk’s funeral, which can last from three to five days. Throughout this time, the prasat sop houses the corpse, displayed at the center of all funerary activities. The golden-hued brilliance and mountain-like shape of the prasat sop combine to evoke Buddhist teachings of impermanence, rebirth, and spiritual perfection, as well as referencing regional and broader shared Buddhist conceptualizations of the sacrality of mountains. This essay explores these material properties of the prasat sop within the specific regional cultural context of Northern Thailand.

          The research presented here developed over a series of visits to Chiang Mai, from 2011 through 2017. Scheduled and spontaneous interviews with monks, funeral specialists, and laity together with funeral attendance and observation provide this context and analysis of prasat sop. The openness, kindness, and generosity of the people in and around Chiang Mai are the reasons an enthusiastic farang from the U.S. had any chance of attending funerals and gaining lots of rich and insightful answers to her questions.1

          Prasat sop are colorful, four-sided open pavilions with elaborate stacked roofs and a tall base, mimicking the architecture of Buddhist wat buildings. Their form also resembles the palaces where celestial beings reside in heaven, as seen in paintings and described in texts. Prasat sop often feature figural details such as naga (serpents), thewada (celestial beings), and hong (swan-like bird). But most eye catching of all is the yellow-gold color that shimmers in the sunlight throughout a funeral ceremony. Not actual gold, the color comes from materials that include foil, paper, and paint applied to the surface of the built structure. The enormous prasat sop built to commemorate powerful and honorable monks draw many visitors from the surrounding area who pose for photos and make merit at their base in the days and hours leading up to the cremation event.

          Prasat sop function as an expression of the intention of the living to successfully aid the transition of the dead from one life to the next, one realm to another. The beauty of cremation structures exudes a kind of “visual splendor” that captures the attention of funeral-goers and creates an environment that invites joy and relief rather than sorrow and pain. These objects give form to the funeral context and help to reassure the living as an accompaniment to the words and actions of the monks and ritual specialists who lead the ceremony.2

          The practice of building and burning a prasat sop is unique to Northern Thailand and surrounding areas. In neighboring areas of Myanmar and in the province of Ubon Ratchathani in Northeastern Thailand similar structures are central to funeral ceremonies. By contrast, in other parts of Thailand and much of Buddhist Southeast Asia, cremation ceremonies utilize communal structures and only the corpse is burned.3

          Northern Thailand is part of a larger cultural area with roots in the historic Lanna kingdom (1292–1775/1873), which had its capital at Chiang Mai. The Lanna kingdom, like many in mainland Southeast Asia, changed in size and influence over its many centuries, surviving as a vassal of Burma before absorption into Siam, now the Kingdom of Thailand. To create a unified national culture in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the Thai government exerted tight control over regional languages, religion, and other cultural practices. In the 1990s, however, regionalism was promoted across Thailand for purposes of tourism and fostering local pride. Local practices once again began to flourish. Since then, Lanna has been central to the revitalization of Northern Thai culture as communities embrace their heritage and strategize ways to build from the past to draw attention to their unique culture on both local and global levels.

          • 1
            Support for this research came from a variety of sources, including the Asian Arts Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Walters Art Museum, and the VCU Department of Art History.
          • 2
            Rebecca S. Hall, “Materiality and Death: Visual arts and Northern Thai funerals,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 46 (2015): 346-367.
          • 3
            For a larger discussion of regional connections, see Rebecca S. Hall, “Onward to Heaven: Burning the Nok Hatsadiling,” Ars Orientalis 44 (2014): 184-188.
          At the center of a shrine sits a golden sculpture of a monk. He wears flowing robes and holds a fan. Necklaces have been draped over his neck and flowers left on his lap as offerings. Sculptures of cross-legged gold monks are sit behind him.

          Fig. 2 Shrine to the monk Khruba Sriwichai, Wat Phra Thai Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Photo by the author.

          An exploration of the relationship between prasat sop and Buddhist monks reveals the lofty status of dedicated monks in the eyes of residents of Northern Thailand. Once specifically associated with the Lanna royal family, these costly and eye-catching structures are closely tied to power in both a material and spiritual sense, as described in Lanna royal chronicles as far back as the sixteenth century.1  As the Lanna royal family lost influence and power due to nationalization efforts from Bangkok, charismatic and high ranking monks dedicated themselves not just to pursuing perfection, but also protecting the Buddhist religion, creating space for the exchange of actions for merit, and guiding followers through secular initiatives. They became central to maintaining Lanna cultural connections and practice. Local monks oversaw regional religious rituals, passed down the knowledge of the Lanna written script, and fostered community in their temple compounds. The contribution of monks to retaining Northern Thai identity and beliefs cannot be overstated. Their dedication to upholding cultural traditions, together with their commitment to the Vinaya (the Buddhist code of monastic discipline), means that monks have maintained their high status in Northern Thai culture through active efforts that ensure the survival of this regional culture for many generations. 

          Specific to the discussion of prasat sop, monks pursue and preserve knowledge related to the forms of these cremation structures. The majority of workshops overseeing the construction and ritual use of prasat sop in and around Chiang Mai are monks or former monks, with the knowledge and training of how to create the structures and oversee the cremation passed down from elder monks to novices.

          Community veneration of monks culminates in hagiographic narratives of “charismatic” monks whose good deeds in and for their communities manifest in material ways. The great respect and fervent adoration given to these monks is expressed in the production and circulation of their portraits in amulets, photographs, sculptures, and paintings (Fig. 2). Perhaps best known is the monk Kruba Siwichai (1878–­­1939), whose dedication to the people and sangha of Northern Thailand continues to be held with the highest appreciation, with his image and impact being celebrated to this day at temples large and small in the Chiang Mai and Lamphun area.2  Prasat sop funeral structures and the cremation events that accompany them are tied into the deep bond Northern Thai Buddhists have with these holy men.3

          • 1
            Sommai Premchit and Pierre Doré, The Lan Na Twelve-Month Traditions: An Ethno-historic and Comparative Approach (Chiang Mai: Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University, 1991), 93.
          • 2
            Katherine Bowie, “The Saint with Indra's Sword: Khruubaa Srivichai and Buddhist Millenarianism in Northern Thailand,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 3 (2014): 681-713
          • 3
            See Paul T. Cohen, ed., Charismatic Monks of Lanna Buddhism (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2017).
          A golden prasat is a highly decorated, open-sided structure built atop a plinth. It has a rounded roof topped by multiple gold roof spires. A red tarp is suspended above it.

          Fig. 3 Prasat sop. Note the open sides and roof spires. Wat Chang Khian, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2016. Photo by Bonnie Pacala Brereton.

          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).1  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;2  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.3

          • 1
            Hall, “Onward to Heaven,” 190-192.
          • 2
            The ten perfections are (1) generosity, (2) virtue or morality, (3) renunciation, (4) wisdom, (5) perseverance, (6) patience, (7) truthfulness, (8) resolution, (9) loving kindness, and (10) equanimity.
          • 3
            Patrick Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jātaka and the Idea of the Perfect Man (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), 58.
          A detail of a cremation structure focuses on its embellished surface. Colorful paint and foil applied in geometric and floral patterns give it a shiny, decorative surface.

          Fig. 4 Detail of embellished surface of monk’s prasat sop, 2017. Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Photo by the author.

          In an elaborate cremation construction, a gold, open-sided structure with a round roof and towering spires sits atop a massive and colorful, elephant-headed bird.

          Fig. 5 Prasat nok hatsadiling, San Pa Tong District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2012. Photo by the author.

          Baskets of colored papers and other craft items are arrayed on tables under a pavilion. A bright red prasat sop structure in the process of being assembled is visible in the background.

          Fig. 6 Prasat nok hatsadiling workshop at Wat Koh Klang, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2017. Photo by the author.

          Monks’ prasat sop structures take between one and three months to build. Craftspeople construct them in pieces at the workshop and then assemble the structures at the cremation site, usually next to the deceased monk’s wat. One prasat sop workshop specializing in prasat nok hatsadiling, located at Wat Koh Klang south of Chiang Mai city, functions for only part of the year during the cool season after the end of the rains retreat and ending before the Thai New Year in April (Fig. 6). The workshop attracts villagers, who can earn money through work, and students focused on learning traditional art forms, both in embellishment and process of creation. Each component of the prasat sop, from the delicately created papier mâché form to the detailed cut and collaged paper and the shaped pieces of foam are carefully created by a team of villagers at small work areas or stations around the space of the workshop area, an open-sided shed-like area located outside the walls of the temple. Specially trained monks oversee the production at Wat Koh Klang. At other regional workshops the methods and breakdown of production are similar, with lay specialists overseeing the work. In the days leading up to the funeral, all the different pieces are transported by truck to the cremation site, then assembled with great care over several days into the completed prasat sop form. A phachiwon or monk’s outer robe is one of the final elements to be added to the cremation site, erected on four tall bamboo poles directly above the prasat sop. From a distance, this cloth marks the cremation site as it draws community members to pay their respects, make merit, and participate in the ongoing funeral event.

          On the first day of the funeral, the corpse is transported in a procession from inside the wihan (image hall) at the wat to its final resting place inside the prasat sop (Fig. 7). Designated members of the temple community raise the coffin into its resting place in the prasat, and then the final days of the funeral can begin, with a steady stream of both laity and monks visiting the site to pay respects, make merit, deliver sermons, and oversee the event. Visitors come from throughout the surrounding area, many of whom pose for photos and nearly all of whom make merit through offerings of incense, flowers, and candles at the of the prasat sop base in the days leading up to the cremation event. Monks’ funerals are multi-day events, lasting up to a week, focused on merit-making opportunities. Monks from other wats will come to give sermons that celebrate the Buddha’s lives and tell attendees stories that emphasize the benefits of dedicating themselves to the ten perfections. Monks also actively participate by chanting sections of the Abhidhamma. These ceremonies often take place in the evenings in front of small groups of dedicated laity. 

          Thai people of different genders and ages accompany a massive gold prasat sop cremation structure as it processes down a street. The people are largely outfitted in white.

          Fig. 7 Funeral procession to deliver corpse to resting place in prasat sop. Wat Kiew Lae Luang, San Pa Tong District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2016. Photo by the author.

          A large, bright frame engulfs a massive, open-sided prasat sop. The prasat sop sits upon a red platform with smaller shrine-like structures at its corners.

          Fig. 8 Burning prasat sop in the cremation fire. Wat Kiew Lae Luang, San Pa Tong District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2016. Photo by the author.

          On the final day, the festivities culminate in several major events. Many monks and novices gather for the cremation day and the community comes together to feed the sangha first and then the funeral attendees. Following the meal, attendees gather facing the prasat sop and the final funeral events begin. A bangsakun ceremony transpires, in which groups of monks receive new robes at the base of the structure, ending with the most senior monk receiving robes from the highest ranking donor. Attendees are then invited to place dok mai jan, handmade sandalwood flowers, at the prasat sop. As the excitement builds, the men who oversaw the construction of the prasat sop prepare the structure to burn. Flowers and extra decorative elements, such as the deceased monk’s portrait, are removed. Bamboo devices intertwined with fireworks are placed around the structure, then a small smoldering stick is used to ignite the pyrotechnic display that precedes the cremation fire. Awe-inspiring, the fireworks emphasize color, light, and sound to build up the suspense of the eventual destruction of the cremation and with it, the corpse (Fig. 8). The fire first burns bright and large and it is attended to for hours, smoldering until the next morning when remaining pieces of bone are removed and washed.

          Dependent on the decisions made by the authorities at the wat hosting the event, the cremation may take place in the afternoon or evening once the sun has set. The event with the fireworks and burning of the prasat sop is well attended by a variety of people, including: members of the sangha and religious laity, the local community, documenters of Lanna culture, and curious bystanders. The shimmering beauty of the prasat sop, the opportunity to have a final send off for a beloved monk, and the performance art-like spectacle of the cremation offers a great deal of solace and contemplation for most, if not all, attendees.

          Rapid destruction of the elaborate, carefully constructed, costly, and visually opulent prasat sop reminds viewers of the Buddhist teaching of impermanence (anicca), the idea that nothing is permanent and attachments to both mental and physical objects result in suffering. One of the three marks of existence (the other two are suffering or dukkha and the non-self or anatta), Buddhists must understand impermanence before they can confront more complex Buddhist concepts. The act of cremation itself makes the ever-changing nature of existence clear as it destroys the earthly remains of an individual. The public burning of a costly and carefully built prasat sop, together with the coffin and corpse, inspires contemplation of the inevitability of death and encourages reflection on opportunities for living a more complete, fulfilling life.1

          If one function of the prasat sop is to remind the viewer of the ever-present nature of impermanence, the visual qualities of the structure also evoke the sumptuousness of heaven. The tall spire of the prasat sop recalls the shape of Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain that connects heavens with earth and is home to many celestial beings, mythological animals, the god Indra, and the Chulamani Stupa, a relic site for continued merit making during one’s time in heaven. Tavatimsa heaven (Daowadeung in Thai), an ideal and attainable location for rebirth, sits at the very top of the mountain. Described as a shaft connecting the world of the gods to the world of humans, Meru is visualized in Thai paintings as a pillar with Indra’s palace on top. Tall structures mimicking mountain peaks are popular religious forms across Buddhist Southeast Asia, rooted largely in Buddhist cosmology but also related to the landscape of areas like Northern Thailand, home of the tallest mountain in the country.2  Architectural forms that refer to Meru are consistently a conical pyramidal shape piercing the heavens with its pointed peak. In Northern Thailand, local narratives make use of mountains to tell the history of the region.3

          Northern Thai Buddhists live along rivers in valleys but locate their most sacred sites atop nearby mountains. The mountains offer a connection to the past and a prelude to heaven. With a Buddhist cosmology that centers on the great Mount Meru, the presence of local mountains reaching into the clouds inspires visions of heavenly rewards. The mountains of Northern Thailand provide a strong personal connection to Mount Meru and sacred mountain forms, including the prasat sopThis connection is encouraged by the sangha of Northern Thailand, as the monks have been instrumental finding ways to adapt Buddhism into continued practices of local belief systems and cultural landscapes.

          In evoking Mount Meru, the shape of the prasat sop visualizes heavenly glamour, as the heavens are filled with golden palaces with the same peaked shape. The high piercing roof of a monk’s prasat sop expresses both this heavenly sumptuousness and the funeral ceremony’s intention of successfully aiding the transition of the dead from one life to the next, one realm to another. Funeral attendees, monks, and artists interviewed for this study all underscored the connection of the prasat structure to heaven, as do announcements made during the funeral ceremony. Rebirth in heaven is a common goal for Thai Buddhists whose cosmological universe contains thirty-one realms including various heavens and hells, divided into three worlds.4  In the world of desire, which contains the human realm, there are six heavens, including the Tusita and Tavatimsa heavens visualized in Buddhist narratives. These are usually the focus of discussions of rebirth in “heaven” in Northern Thailand, where impermanence continues to impact life as time in heaven is limited and its extension depends on how much merit one accrued on earth. The realm is a reward for people who have made merit throughout their lives and approached existence with the intention to do well for others. Families of deceased Buddhists take responsibility for their deceased loved ones’ rebirth in heaven and make merit on their behalf in hopes that they will reside there. But for monks, whose higher status and accumulation of merit and power is not disputed, the general assumption is that they will proceed directly to heaven once their spirit has been released from earth. 

          If the mountain-like shape of the prasat sop evokes heaven’s palaces and Mount Meru itself, the golden color of the prasat sop also mimics the magnificence of heaven. In the Traiphum or “Three Worlds” text popular in Thai Buddhist worldview and visual arts, heaven is described as a city filled with golden buildings covered with gems and with the melodious sounds of musical instruments and the scent of perfume filling the air: 

          There is a golden wall covered with gems surrounding the city that has one thousand gates at various points; and there are peaks in the form of turrets made of gold and decorated with the seven kinds of gems . . . Outside of the city on the northeastern side, there is a large park; it has a gold wall surrounding it with gem turrets on top of each of its gates. In this park are one thousand gold castles decorated with the seven kinds of gems.5

          The idea of living a life of luxury and free of worry is very appealing. The opulence of heaven is regularly represented in paintings and sculpture in the form of golden palaces, golden and gem-encrusted adornment on figures, and beautiful flowers and trees. In these images, gold is consistently used as a central feature to depict the unique splendor of heaven. When Buddhists go to the monastery for merit-making activities or to hear sermons, they see these images, which create a tangible association of gold and palaces with heaven. Monks’ palace-like cremation structures similarly reinforce this link. The shimmering gold that covers the funeral prasat’s surface visually conveys the belief that heaven is filled with wealth and luxury and underscores the understanding that the monk’s path is rebirth in that realm. 

           Gold reminds viewers and funeral attendees of their goals for life and death: to earn enough merit to be reborn in heaven and to become a more perfect, enlightened being following the example of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha. These two goals as practiced in Northern Thailand, are closely connected to the principle of barami. By gaining merit through the ten ideal actions, practitioners evolve towards Buddhahood. Not only do monks provide a living example of this belief, but they also provide laity with the opportunity to improve their merit. The laity practice merit making activities throughout a high-ranking monk’s multiday funeral and listen to sermons, recitation and chanting of Buddhist texts, and the reading of the deceased monk’s biography, all of which reiterate the importance of making merit. 

          • 1
            The incorporation of impermanence into Buddhist arts is a subject in need of further exploration. As varied as the cultures are that have adopted Buddhism, many have developed arts that have made the intangible concept of impermanence more accessible. For example, painted depiction of corpses experiencing decomposition serve as unambiguous reminders of impermanence. Some nineteenth century Thai manuscripts have portrayals of monks meditating on corpses. These images accompany Abhidhamma texts that comment on impermanence and teach monks how to detach from corporeal existence. Kosōzu paintings and illustrations from Japan also depict the decomposition of corpses, intended for devotional practice following a variety of Buddhist sutras. As with the Thai imagery, these depictions are not meant to be sensational but rather helpful for recognizing the transient nature of existence. See Henry Ginsburg, “Thai Painting in the Walters Art Museum,” The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 64/65 (2009): 135; Fusae Kanda, “Behind the Sensationalism: Images of a Decaying Corpse in Japanese Buddhist Art,” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 1 (2005): 42. Perhaps the best-known example of visual arts that emphasize impermanence are the sand mandalas of Tibet, whose days-long, meticulous process of creation is erased from the material world within minutes and dispersed into a river.
          • 2
            Doi Inthanon is 2,565 meters (8,415 ft) tall and is located about 109 kilometers or 67.5 miles from Chiang Mai.
          • 3
            See Angela S. Chiu, The Buddha in Lanna: Art, Lineage, Power, and Place in Northern Thailand (Honolulu: University of Hawai‛i Press, 2017); Donald K. Swearer, Sommai Premchit, and Phaithoon Dokbuakaew, SacredMountains of Northern Thailand and their Legends (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004).
          • 4
            Frank E. Reynolds and Mani B. Reynolds, Three Worlds According to King Ruang: A Thai Buddhist Cosmology(Berkeley: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, 1982).
          • 5
            Reynolds, Three Worlds, 224-5.
          The Buddha sits cross-legged in a massive sculpture. He has bright gold skin, red lips, elongated earlobes, and a gold topknot. Framed images of monks and flower offerings have been left in front of him.

          Fig. 9 Golden Buddha image, San Pa Tong District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand. Photo by the author.

          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.1  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.2  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.3  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.

          • 1
            Chiu, The Buddha in Lanna, 9-13.
          • 2
            Lawa are the Indigenous, pre-Thai residents of Northern Thailand.
          • 3
            Swearer, et al, Sacred Mountains of Northern Thailand, 25-6.
          Thai people of different ages and genders gather around a brightly colored prasat nok hatsadiling structure. It has a blue elephant head atop a bird. An image of a monk framed by flowers stands next to the structure.

          Fig. 10 The golden prasat sop surrounded by merit-making laity. Wat Kiew Lae Luang, San Pa Tong District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2016. Photo by the author.

          Once prepared with gold leaf, a deceased monk’s golden corpse remains on display in the main audience hall of the Buddhist temple for a period of time, from several months to several years, for members of the community to pay respects and make merit. The corpse, connected to the main Buddha image with white string (sai sin), is often housed in a gilded wooden coffin, hidden from sight yet still present. On occasion the corpse is fully visible in a glass coffin and for a period of time the gilded corpse is set out in the open air of the image hall. While the treatment of the corpse and the building of the structure differ in that one uses gold leaf and the other is golden paper, together they utilize gold to evoke ideas of spiritual achievement and its rewards. Everyone in attendance at the funeral is aware of the physical presence of the golden corpse. The golden color of the prasat sop in turn evokes the hidden golden hue of the corpse, linking deceased monk and funerary structure in the minds of attendees.

          Because the gold corpse is housed in the cremation structure, its radiating hue is implied without necessarily being seen during the funeral and cremation (Fig. 10). The connection between the golden cremation structure and the deceased monk’s barami is inherent in the same way: the structure’s coloration evokes the golden hue of perfection and enlightenment and adds an important layer of meaning to the prasat sop. And yet neither the gold of the corpse nor the golden color of the structure is around for long. In the matter of less than an hour after being lit aflame, the entire construction is gone, smoldering in the ashes on the ground.

          While any cremation makes the ever-changing aspect of existence clear, the public burning, together with the coffin and corpse, of a golden palace that took a significant amount of time and money to create makes it very clear. The simultaneous thrill and shock of seeing it burn commands attention and inspires contemplation about the inevitability of death and the opportunities for living a more complete, fulfilling life. The quick destruction of something so grand and golden and costly to produce reinforces the message of impermanence that runs throughout a Northern Thai Buddhist funeral. Yet a more in-depth examination into the cultural and religious context reveals a deeper connection between the use of gold and the structure’s richer meaning.

          Smoke floats up from the pile of burning materials left behind on a platform following the burning of a prasat sop cremation structure.

          Fig. 11 The prasat sop in its final stages of burning. San Pa Tong District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, 2012. Photo by the author.

          Examining the context and construction of many examples of monks’ prasat sop gives evidence that the inclusion of the color gold in the decoration of the monks’ funeral structures goes beyond its mere aesthetic value. The messages embedded in the decoration of the monks’ prasat sop is commensurate to their unique status and accumulation of barami. Gold enhances and highlights the spiritual power of the structure and deceased. It also visually manifests the opulent rewards of heaven. But the most important and integral function of the gold on the structures is in its inevitable destruction as it disappears completely, reduced to a pile of ash on the ground (Fig. 11). The use of gold sets the prasatapart as something connected to spiritual perfection, dedication to Buddhism, and heavenly rewards. But all of these things are impermanent. Working towards perfection in this life to achieve heavenly riches in the next can inspire Buddhists and funeral attendees to be more kind, generous, virtuous, wise, and honest.

          The sight of a golden funeral structure is awe-inspiring, but the use of the golden hue becomes more meaningful with added understanding of the religious and social meaning and context. Because it commemorates the death of a high status and inspiring member of society, a monk’s funeral brings attention to the essence of Buddhist perfection, evokes idealized visions of a heavenly afterlife, and emphasizes the core Buddhist teaching of impermanence. Each of these Buddhist elements present in the structure’s coloration and form are of equal importance and tie into other visual representations of the same themes. Thus, the Northern Thai monk’s funeral prasat is simultaneously part of a larger use of gold to illustrate and communicate Buddhist ideals and a very local means of applying these ideals in a very specific and unique context.

          About the Author

          Rebecca Hall received her PhD from UCLA in Southeast Asian art history and focuses her research on the relationship between Buddhist art, practice, and belief in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Before UCLA, Rebecca focused her attention on textiles: a BFA in Fiber art from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MS in Historic Costume and Textiles from the University of Rhode Island. Rebecca taught Asian Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University and many other places and had a postdoctoral curatorial fellowship curating the Southeast Asian collection at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. She has been Curator at the USC Pacific Asia Museum since 2018 where she has curated exhibitions on Asian textiles and contemporary art with specific attention paid to expanding the museum’s relationship with LA’s Asian diasporic communities.

          Notes

            Imprint

            Author Rebecca S. Hall
            Year 2021
            Type Essays
            Volume Volume 5: Issue 2 Material Religion of High Altitude Ecologies
            Copyright © Rebecca S. Hall
            Downloads PDF
            DOI

            10.22332/mav.ess.2021.8

            Citation Guide

            1. Rebecca S. Hall, "Gold Palaces: Merit, Beauty, and Perfection in the Cremation Structures of Monks in Northern Thailand," Essay, MAVCOR Journal 5, no. 2 (2021), doi: 10.22332/mav.ess.2021.8.

            Hall, Rebecca S. "Gold Palaces: Merit, Beauty, and Perfection in the Cremation Structures of Monks in Northern Thailand." Essay. MAVCOR Journal 5, no. 2 (2021), doi: 10.22332/mav.ess.2021.8.