From the fifteenth-century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne'matullah Vali navigated land and sea routes through Central Asia, Iran, and India, acting as agents of power, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange. Along the way, they built shrines whose poetry, spatial configuration, and materiality created intimate religious spaces that engaged local audiences, invoked distant places, and brought together pilgrims, itinerant artists, merchants, and courtiers from many regions. Pushing back against global art history trajectories that have privileged east-west connections as well as studies of Islamic art in South Asia that have largely focused on the Mughal Empire, Intimacies of Global Sufism explores the opportunities and challenges that Sufis encountered in developing a transregional network of material culture. Using the concept of intimacy to highlight the shrines' affective interconnections between people, objects, and ideas, author Peyvand Firouzeh invites readers to step inside these significant but understudied sacred spaces and rethink their wider religious and material significance. Looking closely at sites ranging across thousands of kilometers, this book combines a detailed analysis of architecture, objects of ritual, and manuscripts, with local and dynastic histories, Sufi poems, patronage documents, and a unique focus on the disciple-artists who created these spaces. Moving between small spaces and global perspectives allows us to make sense of two seemingly contradictory sides of Sufi material culture: its tendency toward asceticism, and its investment in monuments and transregional connections. Richly illustrated with more than 140 images of these sites, their architecture, and their artifacts, Intimacies of Global Sufism offers readers a new vantage point on the early modern world and the making of transregional community through sacred spaces. Intimacies of Global Sufism is the recipient of College Art Association's Millard Meiss Publication Fund, The Barakat Trust Publication Award, The New Foundation for Art History Publication Subvention Grant, and the Persian Heritage Foundation Publication Grant.
Peyvand Firouzeh is Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Acknowledgments Note to the Reader Introduction Part One: Shrine Diplomacy between Kerman, Yazd, and the Deccan 1. Shrines, Thresholds, Palimpsests: The Portal at Mahan 2. Across the Arabian Sea: Gift Diplomacy in an Expanding Shrine Network 3. Shrines, Cosmos, Territory: The Making of the Taft Khanaqah Part Two: Distance, Intimacy, Substitution: Strategies of Self-Representation 4. Betwixt and Between: The Sacred and Material in Taft and Mahan 5. Inscribing as Belonging: Architecture, Textile, Ritual Part Three: Patronage and Authorship Inside-Out 6. The Architecture of Intimate Alliances and Competitions 7. Patronage Beyond the Court, Sufis Beyond the Shrine 8. Mahan's Chelleh-Khaneh and the Disciple-Artist: The Poetics and Politics of the Sufi Body Epilogue: The Fragility of Transregionality Appendices Bibliography Index
"Intimacies of Global Sufism is the first scholarly study dedicated to the well-known Ne'matullahi Sufi community whose extraordinary fortunes are traced here through the intersections between their spiritual and material cultures, and through the making and patronage of art, architecture and spaces of ritual retreat and collective practice. This beautifully produced book offers an overlooked but compelling example of transregional conditions through which art and architectural history should be studied. Through the analytical lens of 'intimacy', Firouzeh captures the nuanced relationship between perceived polarities: between sensorial richness and asceticism; between the global and the local. Profoundly erudite with a remarkably lucid prose and splendidly colourful illustrations, this book studies Sufi material culture through a combination of sensorial and transregional methods of art history, and makes major and original contributions to the field at large."-Sussan Babaie, editor of Isfahan and Its Palaces "Firouzeh, perhaps more effectively than any other scholar to date, has brought a divergent body of materials from multiple sites in Iran and India into rich, fluid dialogue. . . . Few scholars have managed to access all of these sites in India and Iran, let alone with the depth and critical eye that Firouzeh has brought to that endeavor."-Yael Rice, author of The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court "Employing architecture, epigraphy, hagiography, and art history, Peyvand Firouzeh's sumptuously illustrated study explores the many ways that a Sufi tradition based in 15th c. southern Iran became truly transregional, connecting Iran with India in the Timurid and Safavid/Mughal periods."-Richard M. Eaton, author of India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 "In this book, Peyvand Firouzeh brilliantly shows how close readings of individual Nematullahi Sufi shrines and artworks can enrich broader conversations happening in the field of art history."-Deborah Hutton, author of The History of Asian Art: A Global View "Sufi ties between India and Iran have been more often assumed than investigated. In this fascinating study, Peyvand Firouzeh weaves together inscriptions, textiles, ritual objects, and architecture into cycles of gift-giving and patronage that bridged the Indian Ocean."-Nile Green, author of Sufism: A Global History
