Shifting Modes of Piety in Early Modern Iran and the Persephone Zone

If any one thing marks early modern history, it is religious transformation. Confessional and pietist movements, both European firsts, are prominent examples of such catalysts for change.1 In large parts of the Islamic world in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was Sufi piety that carried the day. The historiographical record reveals strikingly new imaginaires and novel modes of connectivity to the past. The focus in this paper is on the manifold ways in which new forms of religiosity redefined the landscape of politics in the eastern Islamic world. It traces invocations of the past in Fakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī’s (d. 1532) Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt 2 (Sprinklings from the Fountain of Life), a 16th-century collected biography of Naqshbandī Sufi masters, to argue that the classificatory schema adopted by the author reveals a template of secularity that marks a significant departure from past manners of adherence. 1 On religious change rather than incremental secularism as the engine of change in early modern Europe, see Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (2003); on parallels between modern (18th-19th century) Sufism and American pietism, see Albrecht Hofheinz, “Illumination and Enlightenment Revisited, or: Pietism and the Roots of Islamic Modernity,” Lecture delivered at the University of Bergen, 1996, http://folk.uio.no/albrech/ Hofheinz_IllumEnlightenment.pdf; and for confessionalization as the impetus for state formation, see Heinz Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization and its Political and Cultural Dynamism (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2008). 2 Mawlānā Fakhr al-Dīn al-Ṣafī ‘Alī b. Ḥusayn Wāi’ẓ Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt, ed. and intr. ‘Ali Asghar Mu‘iniyan, 2 vols (Tehran: Bunyad Nikukari Nuriyani, 1977); Arabic translation as ‘Alī b. al-Ḥusayn al-Kāshifī al-Ṣafī, Tarjamat Rashahḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt, tr. Muhammad Murad b. ‘Abd Allah al-Qazani (Mecca: Matba‘a al-Muhammadiya, 1882 or 1883); English translation as Mawlana Ali ibn Husain Safi, Beads of Dew form the Source of Life, tr. Muhtar Holland (Oakland Park, CA: Al-Baz Publishers, 2001). On the manuscript history of the text, see H. Beveridge, “The Rashaḥāt-i ‘Ain al-Ḥayāt (Tricklings from the Fountain of Life),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 48, no. 1 (1916). “Sprinklings from the Fountain of Life” is Nile Green’s translation, see “The Dilemmas of the Pious Biographer: Missionary Islam and the Oceanic Hagiography,” Journal of Religious History 3, no. 4 (2010): 386. For more on the author, see Jürgen Paul, “‘Alī b. Ḥusayn al-Wā‘iẓ al-Kāshifī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson, 2009.