THE VIOLENCE OF THE ENCHANTED SOULS: A GENEALOGICAL APPROACH TO SUFI DEBATES IN PREMODERN IRAN (9th -15th CENT)

Abstract

Religion The Violence of the Enchanted Souls: A Genealogical Approach to Sufi Debates in Premodern Iran (9th-15th cent) Ashkan Bahrani Dissertation under the direction of Professor Richard J. McGregor This is an investigation of the genealogy of the concept of ‘Sufism’ in modern Iranian studies, focusing on the case of Sufi debates in premodern Greater Iran. The portraits of Sufism, in general, and Iranian Sufism, in particular, is drawn in a remarkably monolithic way, and the discourse of Sufism is represented as a normativized and quasi-canonized set of ideas in which significant players had broadly agreed upon a fixed core despite their temporal divergences on accidental components of their intellectual and ritual constellations. I argue that the silence on the issue of Sufi debates and conflicts is fostered by two major resources, modern and premodern. At the modern level, the idea of Sufism has been reformulated and reproduced in the second half of the nineteenth century as an element of world religions discourse. In the first part, I explore a genealogy of the study on the production, authentication, and circulation of Sufism in modern Iran. “Sufism” is the interpretive production of the social construction of knowledge in the present time that was produced in a prolonged constructive interaction with imperial and despotic powers. This is best crystallized in modern collaborative mediations of Imperial theorists, quasi-colonial middle persons, and native scholars in the formation of the concept of Sufism in Iran. At the premodern level, the idea of Sufism, both as a way of thought and a form of life, was formulated through the authority of Sufi manuals that aimed to represent the Sufi intellectual and ritual apparatus as an integral body. In the second part, I embark upon a historiographical assessment through which the main ideas, rituals, and institutions that spurred the debates will be inspected. Finally, the portrait/s that is/are brought about by this assessment may evaluate the fits and misfits of the representations of the term Sufism and its approximate equivalents in Modern Iran.