The Letters of Khwaja 'Ubayd Allah Ahrar and His Associates.

• Author: Mitchell, Colin Paul
• Position: Book review

The Letters of Khwaja 'Ubayd Allah Ahrar and His Associates. Translated by JO-ANN GROSS, edited by ASOM URUNBAEV. Brill's Inner Asian Library, vol. 5. Leiden: BRILL, 2002. Pp. xxii + 542. $134 (cloth).

Studies of Khwaja 'Ubayd Allah Ahrar and his role in the success of the Naqshbandiyya Order in the fifteenth-century Timurid empire have been framed traditionally by two main considerations. First, research on charismatic, mystical leaders such as Ahrar is often dependent on historical materials which are more likely to fall under the rubric of hagiography than biography. Second, archival research on Central Asian phenomena such as the Naqshbandiyya was, until the 1990s, the privileged domain of Soviet scholars who operated with methodological and epistemological Marxist tools that were not always kind to popular religious movements and belief systems. The book under review here is clearly a successful example of how Naqshbandiyya studies can overcome such historiographical and ideological obstacles, and in so doing offer new and fresh perspectives for students and scholars of Central Asian Sufism.

The great Chaghata'i poet and statesman, 'Ali Shir Nava'i (1441-1501), chose to compile and present a collection of eminent correspondence, as his famous contemporaries 'Abd Allah Marvarid (Sharaf nama), Khwandamir (Nama nami), and Husain Va'iz Kashifi (Makhzan al-insha) had done. However, insha compilations almost invariably come to us thanks to later generations of industrious scribes who copied such works and transmitted them south to India, and west to Iran and Anatolia. In the case of 'Ali Shir Nava'i, however, his collection (muraqqa')--known in scholarship as the Al'bom Navoi--consists of 594 original autograph letters, missives, petitions, and memoranda from different Naqshbandiyya notables to the central Timurid court of Herat in the second half of the fifteenth century. Given that half of the letters were penned by the great Timurid poet Jami, not surprisingly portions of the Al'bom Navoi--housed in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan--have already been published, most notably in Russian (Pis'ma-avtografy Abdarrakhmana Pzhani iz "Al'boma Navoi," 1982) and Persian (Nama-ha va munsha'at-i Jami, 2000) by the editor of the present study. The remaining 257 letters in this manuscript were written by Khwaja Ahrar and a number of his spiritual brethren from the city of Samarqand and outlying...