Persian hagiography

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Sūfī saints. The tradition declined around the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries CE, but was revived in the nineteenth and still exists today online.[1]

Pre-Islamic

Hagiography in Persian can be seen as going back to biographical writings about

Dēnkard and the Wizidagiha, and in New Persian texts including the Zaratosht-nama and the Shahnameh.[2]

Islamic

Methods of composition

Using and developing the historiographical methods of the

muḥaddithūn (scholars of the sayings and history of the Prophet), Persian scholars drew on oral tradition and their own observations to write about holy figures. However, many hagiographies also drew on earlier written sources, often adapting those sources to reflect the writers' own view of sainthood. For example, in the twelfth century CE, Muḥammad ibn Munavvar drew on and added to Jamāl al-Dīn Abū Rawḥ Luṭfallāh's Ḥālāt-u sukhanān-i Shaykh Abū Saʿīd Abū l-Khayr to create his own Asrār al-tawḥid fī maqāmāt al-Shaykh Abū Saʿīd (“Secrets of oneness in the spiritual stages of Shaykh Abū Saʿīd”). In doing so, he focused on mystical joys and blessed states.[1]

Traditionally, Islamic scholarship has read Persian saints' lives fairly uncritically as biographical sources for real historical events. More recent work, partly inspired by Western scholarship on medieval Christian hagiography, however, has moved away from seeing hagiographies as repositories of facts, in favour of seeing them as literary creations reflecting the aesthetic, theological, and political agendas of their composers.[3]

Major works

Key early works of Persian hagiography included:[1]

Important later Persian hagiographers included:[1]

  • Mawlānā Rūmī
    (d. 672/1273) and his followers.
  • Shāh Niʿmatallāh
    (d. 834/1430–1), emphasising the subject's simple, agrarian life and distancing him from politics both worldly and sectarian.

Production of hagiographies declined during the

Sunnī minorities[1]

Major compilations

The classic hagiographical collection in Persian scholarship, ranging in its subject matter from the Balkans to Central Asia, was Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ (“Biographies of the saints”), composed by ʿAṭṭār (d. 618/1221).[1]

Later,

Jāmī (d. 898/1492) created a compendium containing 618 biographies, ranging across the Sūfī traditions: Nafaḥāt al-uns (“Breaths of intimacy”).[1]

Muḥammad Samarqandī compiled Tadhkira-yi mazīd (“The great collection of biographies”) around the early sixteenth century CE. Although this is now lost, it is widely quoted in other sources, indicating its once influential status.[1]

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_23914
    .
  2. doi:10.1080/095964103200012756
    .
  3. ^ Carl W. Ernst, Rūzbihān Baqli: Mysticism and the Rhetoric of Sainthood in Persian Sufism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. xiv.
  4. JSTOR 20832622
    .
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