This book is an effort to utilize stories related in words and depicted in paintings to understand societies that existed many centuries ago. In the process of writing it, I have been asked many times to tell the story that I have found especially interesting or entertaining. Most often, my response to this has been to relate a very short one that has stayed with me from the time I first began working on this project. It comes from the famous Naqshbandi work Rashahat-i ʿayn al-hayat: Khwaja ʿUbaydullah Ahrar said, “I went into the presence of Shaykh Bahaʾ ad-Din ʿUmar quite often. He would say to me, ‘Come here, shaykhzada, and massage my shoulders.’ I massaged his shoulders frequently, and sometimes I would pull off his socks from his feet. I have never smelled a more pleasing odor than what came off from his stockings.”¹

The thought of smell coming off of stockings provokes a visceral reaction. By remarking upon it as beautiful, the author of this work is able to convey the idea of a particularly intimate devotional relationship between Ahrar and ʿUmar without requiring an intellectual gloss. The immediacy of the author’s imagery collapses the differences of time and space that would ordinarily distance us from having an intuitive understanding of relationships between Central Asian Sufis who lived nearly six centuries ago.

This story has stayed with me because it encapsulates the promise I felt when I first contemplated focusing on corporeal themes to interpret Persianate texts and paintings from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It seemed quite logical that matters related to bodies would enable me to overcome the strangeness of ways of being and expression long past. This could, in turn, allow me to recover a social imagination that is otherwise difficult to grasp. Although I believe some part of my initial instinct has been borne out, the process of writing the book has led me to consider carefully the particularities that must be taken into account when interpreting images whose meanings seem selfevident from their surfaces. While the smell of soiled stockings—or the practice of shaking hands with which I began this book—may need little explanation to be meaningful, understanding why such matters are evoked in Persianate Sufi hagiographic literature requires consideration of socioreligious patterns that are not intrinsic to the evocative images in and of themselves. In stories, matters that are familiar can provide the first points of access to the narratives. But it is crucial to inquire further, for the significance of images and stories resides in the interrelationships between them far more than in their isolated impacts.

The smell of socks one registers when one reads the story related above is emanating from a narrative rather than a piece of cloth. Within its own point of articulation, the smell belongs in the relational space between three men: it legitimates claims of intimacy between Khwaja Ahrar and Bahaʾ ad-Din ʿUmar, and between Ahrar and the narrative’s author. The story’s original addressees were Sufis who relied on Safi, the author, to learn about Ahrar’s intellectual attitudes and bodily comportment in order to emulate him. Despite its readily appreciable materiality, the story is no simple exercise in realism. It constitutes a strategic deployment of a theme within a highly formalized and typological literary form. The story has to be unpacked from its nesting place in between the social relationships that connect these Sufis, to whom it mattered as a meaningful narrative both personally and socially. Such unpacking leads to the kind of story I have constructed in this book to represent Persianate Sufism.

When we read hagiographic narratives or observe paintings in a straightforward way, they appear as flat and two-dimensional accounts of a fantastical worldview. But when we take seriously both their representational content and the contexts of their production, the images contained in them acquire movement in three dimensions. Here the questions of who produced these materials, and with what apparent and latent purposes, are our keys to unlocking their historiographic potential. These narratives and paintings represent, simultaneously, the memory of great Sufi masters and expressions of social and political interests of those who held authority in Sufi communities. Historiographic “meaning” in these sources is to be found in the middle of these two matters that constitute the reasons behind their production. From this perspective, my thematic explorations of these materials substantiate processes that were central to the functioning of Persianate Islamic societies during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

These considerations corroborate my argument that, far from being an insurmountable hindrance, the highly stylized nature of representations found in hagiographic narratives and miniature paintings is a valuable datum for understanding sociocultural matters pertaining to pre-modern Islamic societies. However, mining these texts and images as historical sources requires that we ask questions regarding their origins, rhetorical purposes, social uses, and intended audiences. Seen through such lenses, these materials become major venues for reconstituting the social imagination at work in them. In particular, these sources are indispensible for understanding matters such as the articulation of religious and social authority, intergenerational transfers and negotiations surrounding gender, contextual meanings ascribed to affective forces that activate love and desire, and sociopolitical relationships between narrators and their subjects, sponsors, and audiences. By paying attention to these topics we can illuminate intellectual and social worlds that are impossible to access from any other types of sources available from medieval Islamic societies. If I have been able to demonstrate this to the satisfaction of readers, I would consider myself to have met the objective I set for myself in writing this book.