Acknowledgments
This volume presents ten papers with roots in a symposium on “Sufism and Islam in Central Asia” held at Princeton University on October 21–22, 2011. The symposium, supported by a generous grant from the family of Leon B. Poullada and sponsored by the Department and Program in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, was organized by the editors in conjunction with Professor Muhammad Qasim Zaman. It brought together scholars whose work has dealt with various aspects of the history and contemporary status of Sufi communities in diverse parts of Central Asia, from the 15th century to the 21st, with the aim of addressing a central and ongoing question in the study of Sufism (and of Central Asia): what is the relationship between Sufism as it was manifested in this region prior to the Russian conquest and the Soviet era, on the one hand, and the features of Islamic religious life in the region during the Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras on the other, including some referred to and recognizable as “Sufi” activity as well as others not necessarily labeled as such. Sessions addressed issues of sources and interpretative strategies, realignments in Sufi communities and sources from the Russian to the post-Soviet period, and social, political and economic perspectives on Sufi communities.
The symposium marked an important step, we believe, in the development of scholarship on Sufism in Central Asia, and we are especially grateful to the Poullada family for supporting both the gathering itself and the preparation of this volume; the latter process was delayed by unavoidable personal and professional factors, and we are grateful also for the sponsors’ patience during this extended delay. At the same time, the delay allowed, or prompted, a process of updating, rethinking, and reformulation affecting all the papers included here. Some were virtually rewritten, compared with their initial ‘conference paper’ iterations, and all were substantially revised, edited, reviewed, and revised again between 2015 and 2017. The Princeton gathering was the essential catalyst for setting this volume in motion, but the editors are also grateful to all the contributors for their patience, their openness to thinking anew, and above all, the extraordinary intellectual strength and substance they have brought to this project from its inception.
The original gathering involved lively discussions that regrettably could not be fully represented in this volume, beyond the incorporation of insights derived therefrom in the individual papers. It also involved invaluable comments by three discussants—specialists in Sufi history and literature, and in Muslim religious thought more broadly, elsewhere in the Islamic world—Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Dina LeGall, and Jawid Mojaddedi—whose contributions were of the utmost importance for all the participants, but are likewise not tangibly represented here. In addition, not all the participants were able to offer for publication the papers they presented; the line-up included Florian Schwarz, who presented an excellent analysis of a key Persian hagiographical work compiled in Bukhara in the late 17th century, the S̱amarāt al-mashāʾikh, and Jun Sugawara, who explored waqf documents relating to multiple shrines in Kashghar, thus ‘covering’ the eastern part of Central Asia and balancing the geographical focus, in the papers included here, on the former Soviet Central Asia and Afghanistan. Allen Frank presented material from his then- forthcoming book, Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education, and the Paradox of Islamic Prestige (Leiden: Brill, 2012), and then decided, once preparation of the symposium volume was delayed, to offer a different paper for the volume, rather than repeat or summarize material presented in more depth in his book. In addition, we were happy to invite a contribution from Waleed Ziad, who attended the symposium as a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Yale University.
The editors would like to express their appreciation to all the participants and contributors to this volume for their fine scholarship, and to Şükrü Hanioğlu, Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University at the time of the symposium, and Cyrus Schayegh, Director of the Program in Near Eastern Studies at the time, for their support. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Brill, whose comments and painstaking attention to the manuscript helped immensely to improve the volume, and to Patricia Radder and Kathy van Vliet for their support of the project. Special thanks go also to Paolo Sartori, editor of the Handbuch der Orientalistik series, for envisioning a place for the volume in this venue. We are grateful, lastly, to Rick Batlan for his help in solving multiple technical problems with the electronic files that yielded this book.
During the late stages of work on the volume, we learned the sad news of the death, on August 7, 2016, of Yuri Bregel, whose enormous contributions to the study of Central Asia underlie much of the work of all the contributors. We would like to dedicate this volume to his memory, as a small token of admiration and gratitude for his scholarly, and human, legacy.
Devin DeWeese
Indiana University
Jo-Ann Gross
The College of New Jersey