[Bilimsel Haber] Call for Contributions: Nexus of Sufism and Society

[Onur Inal]

Announcing a call for submissions for an edited volume, to be tentatively
published by Routledge, on Sufism in the Middle Period (1200-1800). Please
contact John Curry or Erik Ohlander via the contact information below if you
are interested in contributing.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Nexus of Sufism and Society -- Call for Contributions

The editors invite queries or proposals for original, chapter-length
research articles from scholars whose work reflects new and innovative
approaches to the study of Sufism in the pre-modern Muslim world for a
collective volume entitled "The Nexus of Sufism and Society: Arrangements of
the Mystical in the Muslim World, 1200-1800 C.E.". Having grown out of a
series of formal conversations held at the Middle East Studies Association
Annual Meeting over the past two years, an initial proposal for this volume
has recently received a very positive response from Routledge, and the
editors are currently working to finalize its table of contents. We ask that
individual queries from potential contributors be communicated via email to
either of the editors. It should be noted that the working schedule for the
delivery of chapter abstracts is 15 August, 2008.

A substantive overview of the volume follows below.

Sincerely,
John J. Curry

Assistant Professor of Near Eastern and Islamic History
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
john.curry at unlv.edu

Erik S. Ohlander
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Indiana University - Purdue University, Fort Wayne ohlandee at ipfw.edu

OVERVIEW:
In recent years, historians of mysticism working in geo-historical complexes
laying outside, yet oftentimes contemporaneous with, the medieval and
early-modern Islamic world have been grappling in sophisticated ways with
the methodological difficulties of essentialism. One of the most significant
outcomes of this body of work has been the establishment of previously
unimagined trajectories for the study of mystical and ascetically-minded
movements and religious collectivities as social actors of real historical
consequence. The works of Thomas Head, Caroline Bynum, or Kathleen Ashley
and Pamela Sheingorn on sainthood, mystical religiosity, and ascetic
collectivities in medieval Europe are all particularly excellent examples of
this type of ground-breaking and innovative scholarship.

Although tentative steps have been made in aligning academic research on
Sufism in the medieval and early-modern Islamic world with such discussions,
much
work on the subject remains mired in broad, overly-essentialist readings of
Sufism and its institutions over the wide sweep of the period from the
collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate to the advent of the modern period (ca.
1200-1800 CE). Too often, the result is that religious actors not directly
bound up with a state or government institution are marginalized in the
historiography as having little or no relevance. Although tentative steps
have been made that aim to correct this imbalance by aligning academic
research on Sufism with the narratives of this historical period, they have
been largely episodic and localized. Moreover, such attempts at innovation
continue to remain marginalized by the commonly held assumption that the
only 'proper' way to study a 'religious' phenomenon such as Sufism during
this period is solely through philosophical or literary interpretive frames.
As displayed in the work of our colleagues working on similar materials in
the context of pre-modern Europe, questioning such assumptions can produce
surprising results.

Accordingly, the purpose of this volume is to bring together a group of
scholars whose work intersects with the history or practice of Sufism across
a range of geographical and temporal landscapes, from the decades
immediately preceding the Mongol conquest in Baghdad to the Ottoman Empire
on the eve of its growing integration into a European-dominated
world-system. By doing so, we hope to theorize about why, how and to what
ends we might reconceptualize the basic methodologies, assumptions,
categories of thought, and interpretative paradigms which have shaped our
collective envisioning of Islamic mysticism and its place in the social,
cultural and political history of the pre-modern Muslim world. Individual
contributions to the volume will be organized as chapters grouped evenly
into four,
relatively broad, thematic clusters:

Part I - Historiography
This section will be comprised of chapters which problematize the evaluation
and (re-)categorization of textual sources fundamental to our understanding
of the history of Sufism. In particular, this section will focus on the
historiography of sources such as prosopography, didactic works, and
hagiography. Important issues will include the role of reflexivity and
representation in such literatures, the use of various types of narrative
voices, and issues surrounding the identification and interpretation of
strategies used in such sources for generating historical meaning.
Contributions which consider how, why, and to what ends we might engage in a
re-evaluation of the ways in which scholars have typically categorized and
evaluated basic types of documentary evidence for Sufism during the period
between 1200 and 1800 C.E. would be of particular interest here, especially
studies making use of heretofore unexplored or underutilized sources.

Part II - Landscapes
This section will be comprised of chapters which deal with issues
surrounding the assumed value of dichotomous categories in analyzing Sufism
and other related religious movements over the sweep of this historical
period (e.g., urban versus rural, high versus folk forms of religious belief
and practice, orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, center versus provincial, etc.).
Wherever possible, contributions will seek to assess the degree to which
these can be considered useful categories in plotting various arrangements
of 'the mystical' within the broader sweep of the social, cultural,
political, and economic landscapes of medieval and early-modern Muslim
societies. Here, issues of literacy and storytelling, the formation or
reformulation of social and communal identities through or around Sufism or
Sufis, the construction of new physical networks, the construction of
buildings or structures that altered the urban or rural context in question,
or the relationship between the circulation of Sufi ideas, attitudes,
practices, and modes or levels of affiliation and the specific character of
various socio-cultural, political, or geographical contexts would be of
particular interest here. This section will be especially relevant for
scholars interested in studies that make significant use of non-narrative
sources.

Part III - Doctrine and Praxis
This section will be comprised of chapters devoted to explorations of
specific doctrinal, institutional, or disciplinary configurations typifying
Sufi discourse and communal expression during this period. In particular,
these explorations would hope to address questions concerning the nature of
the "Sufi order" (tariqa) and its attendant particularities. Do the terms
tariqa, murshid, murid, khirqa, silsila, etc. require significant
clarification in different times and places during the broad sweep of the
period under consideration? Or do we require wholly new terms and categories
to properly define and understand the issues that were involved in the,
perhaps largely anachronistic, model of the diffusion of the major
tariqa-lineages during the Age of Mongol Prestige? In addition, how might we
assess the impact of the dissemination and popularization of new or hybrid
forms of Sufi doctrine during this period such as, for example, the effects
of the increasingly widespread circulation of the works and ideas of Ibn
'Arabi beginning in the later 13th century or the shari'a-minded or Sunni
revivalist Sufi systems associated with the early Qadiri, Suhrawardi, or
Shadhili tariqa-lineages?

Part IV - Negotiations
This section will be comprised of chapters which interrogate the
relationship between mystical/ascetic discourse and the activities of
historical subjects when shaped by relations of power and the practices
associated with the generation, cultivation, and enunciation of authority.
One of the greatest areas of confusion in regard to Sufism lies in the
role(s) played by Sufis and associated institutional or social
collectivities in negotiating conflicts and tensions at both the local and
state level. Studies concerning specific examples of the ways in which
authority was gathered, conserved, distributed, and deployed among, by, or
through Sufis (and their relationship to larger real or imagined economies
of authority and the exercise of power) would be of particular interest
here.

John Curry
University of Nevada, Las Vegas