This article analyses the contribution of Mīrzā Āqāsī (1197–1265/1783–1849) to the political theology literature of the Qajar period and, consequently, to the dynamics and tensions between Sufism and power in Iranian Shi‘i society. Āqāsī was the first minister of the Qajar king Muḥammad Shāh (r. 1250–1264/1834–1848) and the author of an important political treatise titled Chahār-i faṣl-i sulṭānī va shīam-i farūkhī (The Four Royal Discourses and the Nobles’ Principles of Conduct). This treatise presents several original features, particularly regarding the classical views on the spiritual and political hierarchy in Islam, as well as within the context of the culture of authority in a Shi‘i setting. These views are expressed by Āqāsī in a partially initiatory mode, which renders their interpretation complex and open.

The Tunisian–Libyan Maluf Slam Collaborative was a multinational group of musicians, poets, artists, educators, journalists, and stakeholders that created a series of music concerts featuring Tunisian and Libyan maluf in July 2019. Maluf is considered cultural heritage across eastern Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya and manifests with great variety between and inside each nation-state. Sourced from ethnography in Libya (2014) and Tunisia (2018–2019), this article documents the collaborative’s work, queries the dynamics of transnational traditions, and analyses musical modes and histories of Sufism in order to explain similarities and differences within performances of maluf today.

This article traces how the Yemeni-origin Sufi order of Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya and its ritual litany of al-Ḥaddād, with chants and prayers for the Prophet and his descendants especially from Hadramawt, became part of everyday Muslim devotional practices in Malabar through immigrant networks of Hadrami Sayyids. Competing, sometimes rivalling, and appropriating other Sufi religiosities, the Alawi order meaningfully involved within the theo-legal Sufi discourses that have been remoulding the Sufi cosmopolis in the Indian Ocean. By focusing on two notable early immigrant Sayyids in Malabar, this article argues that the successful placement of the ʿAlawī order within the Sufi cosmopolis and the permeation of the ritual was a complex socio-religious project that was brought forth by various aspects of the sacred genealogy, Alawi Sufi writings, Sufi activism, and the effective utilisation of Hadrami immigrant networks.

This article examines the complex relationship between Sufism, secularity, and psychiatry through Refik Halid Karay’s 1956 novel, Kadınlar Tekkesi (Women’s Lodge). The article argues that Kadınlar Tekkesi recontextualizes Sufism by medicalizing and pathologizing it through psychiatry and psychopathology. This analysis draws upon discourse analysis and Michel Foucault’s exploration of abnormality and power dynamics. The article contends that this approach diverges from previous anti-Sufi agendas of Turkish novels, which were primarily motivated by religious and moralistic criticisms. The article argues that the application of psychiatric terminology to Sufism suggests a shift in Turkish secularism’s attitude toward Sufism, which transitions from dismissing Sufism as obsolete to engaging with it systematically through scientific study. Informed by modern scientific rationality, this shift signifies a redefined interaction between knowledge and power and the gendered aspects of the medicalization process. The article underscores that interactions between the discourses of secularism, Sufism, and psychopathology suggest a new regime of truth based on secular and scientific thought, while implicitly supported by orthodox Islamic principles.

This article presents the first complete critical edition and annotated English translation of the nineteenth-century Javanese mystical poem Suluk Lonthang. Combining different disciplinary expertise in old and modern Javanese philology, Tantric Studies, and Islamic Studies, it interprets the protagonist of the poem as an expression of the multifaceted and multivocal Javanese religious landscape of the time, whose historical—and translocal—roots can be discerned in Sufi traditions from the Islamicate and Persianate worlds, as well as Tantric traditions from both pre-Islamic Java and the Indian subcontinent.

This paper illustrates the heterogeneity of Islamic publics in early 20th-century Turkey by examining the life and thought of Ken'an Rifai, a Sufi shaykh and high-ranking bureaucrat in the Ottoman Ministry of Education. It argues that Shaykh Rifai endorsed state secularization reforms on religious grounds and shows how he reformulated Sufi Islam by imbricating Sufi ethics with other social imaginaries of the time through the lens of an upper-class bureaucrat. This paper contributes to Turkish studies by highlighting the previously overlooked role of elite Islamic groups who collaborated with the early republic. It also challenges the dominant paradigm of a binary opposition between the secular ruling elite and pious masses. Additionally, this paper offers insight into broader anthropological and historical Islamic studies by demonstrating the diverse ways Sufi traditions adapted to modern governance.

While the 7th/13th-century Persian Muslim scholar of the Mongol era ʿAzīz-i Nasafī actively engaged with Sufi traditions in his writings, he also introduced an overlooked distinction by drawing a line between Sufis (ahl-i taṣavvuf) and monists (ahl-i vaḥdat), aligning himself with the latter. This paper argues that Nasafī's clear differentiation between these two groups reflects broader transformations in the intellectual landscape of the Persianate Mongol world. These changes marked the emergence of new modes of thought not easily explainable by the established linguistic conventions of classical Sufism. Consequently, Nasafī's works serve as a window into the intellectual and linguistic challenges faced by Muslim intellectuals as they endeavored to shape the pre-modern and early modern Islamic cosmopolis (7th/13th–9th/15th centuries), revealing points of convergence and divergence with their intellectual predecessors.

The Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya order is among the world's largest and most geographically widespread Sufi orders, but it has long been assumed to be absent among Chinese-speaking Muslims. Despite a handful of isolated references to local Chinese Mujaddidī groups in studies of particular communities, comprehensive histories of Chinese Islams make no mention of the Mujaddidiyya, and histories of the Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya make no reference to Chinese-speaking Muslims. This article demonstrates that the Mujaddidiyya order has not only been present at various times and places among Chinese Muslims, but has also played a role in the development of nearly all major strains of Islam in China proper, including those commonly known as the Gedimu, Jahriyya, Khāfiyya, Qādiriyya, and Ikhwān. The article also uses new primary sources to provide an account of how a Mujaddidī order expanded into Eastern Turkistan and was transmitted from there to Muslims in China proper. It shows that adaptation to local environments created distinctive forms of Mujaddidī Sufism, highlights Hui-Uyghur connections, and argues that South Asia deserves a central place in any account of Islam in China.

This article studies some major shifts in the relationship between law and Sufism in South Asian Islam between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It does so by focusing on Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762) to examine, first, how these two key facets of Islam interact with each other in his thought and, second, how some influential Muslim intellectuals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have understood and positioned themselves in relation to this aspect of his thought. Though one would be hard pressed to know this from the sanitized modern image of Wali Allah as a scholar of the Quran and hadith, and of a Sufi piety uncompromisingly anchored in them, his Sufism reveals a wide and, from many a modern Muslim perspective, unwieldly range of ideas and practices. Yet it was precisely in that unwieldy breadth and depth that it was generative of some of his key insights into matters of the law. Even as many people have continued to insist on the imbrication of law and Sufism, a sanitization of Wali Allah’s Sufi image serves to highlight wider processes whereby an earlier era’s generative relationship between the two has come to be increasingly attenuated since the late nineteenth century.

In this article I explore hagiographical narratives about Khwāja Yaḥyā Kabīr (d. 1430), among the earliest of the Sufi masters to be identified as Afghan. The social memory of Yaḥyā Kabīr's life exemplifies the function of hagiography as a key arena for the production of historical knowledge, generating a vivid and specific imaginary of the past for devotees. My goal here is to present a reading of the hagiography, but first I will situate it within the discursive nexus of Persian historical writing, which often essentialized Afghans as innately barbarous while peripheralizing Afghan homelands (identified with the Sulaiman Mountains). Yaḥyā Kabīr's hagiography is both reflective of Indo-Afghan anxieties about social hierarchies and a device by which marginalizing traditions could be subverted through a highly textured portrayal of the past. As such, it exemplifies how saints’ lives can index not only the hierarchies of imperial life, but also the techniques by which to escape them.