"Sunni" Veneration of the Twelve Imams in Khotan.

• Author: Thum, Rian

Over a century ago European explorers in Eastern Turkestan (southern Xinjiang) made a remarkable discovery: the Sunni inhabitants of Khotan were engaged in elaborate veneration of the Shi'i twelve Imams, whom they believed to be buried at various holy sites in the Khotan region. This paper investigates Khotan's network of holy sites and the narratives that were attached to them, from the sixteenth century to the present. While the political landscape of the present may sometimes make the Sunni-Shi'i divide appear natural, the case of Eastern Turkestan, which had its own, idiosyncratic approach to sectarian identity, reminds us that the maintenance of such a Sunni-Shi'i consensus on sectarian designation was dependent on networks of knowledge reproduction that did not embrace the entirety of the Muslim world. Pre-Islamic sacred geographies, the power of locally networked holy sites, the phenomenon of textual appropriation, and a popular and eclectic manuscript tradition overwhelmed weak sectarian distinctions, bringing Muslim followers of the Hanafi legal tradition to pray at the purported tombs of Twelver Imams.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries European scholars and adventurers mounted dozens of missions to Eastern Turkistan, driven by both imperialist ambitions and scholarly curiosity. Some became celebrities back home for their discoveries of "lost" prelslamic civilizations in the romanticized region now famed as the Silk Road. Among the most compelling discoveries were those of the Hungarian-British scholar M. Aurel Stein, who excavated the ruins of the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Khotan. He documented his findings not only in detailed scholarly publications, but also in a popular travel account, The Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan. (1) But for all the attention these archaeological findings garnered, Stein and his contemporaries' equally fascinating discoveries about Islam in Eastern Turkistan were largely ignored. Among them was the network of Islamic shrines in Khotan, a region that became known to the Muslims of Eastern Turkistan as "the land of Imams" or "the land of the Twelve Imams." This epithet emerged from a phenomenon already documented by the early European explorers, but now mostly forgotten: the Sunni inhabitants of Khotan were engaged in elaborate veneration of the Twelver Shi'i Imams, whom they believed to be buried at various holy sites in the Khotan region, though without much awareness that reverence for these figures had implications for sectarian identity.

This article investigates Khotan's network of Twelver Imami holy sites and the narratives that were attached to them, from the sixteenth century to the present, and offers hypotheses about the origin and significance of veneration of the Twelver Imams among this group of Muslims normally described as Sunni. A close look at the Khotan material turns up details that lie far outside known delineations of Shi'ism and Sunnism, demonstrating not just the inapplicability of sectarian frames of reference in Khotan but also the development of distinctive Twelver historical traditions along surprising, independent lines. For example, in Khotan's local narrative tradition, the eleventh Imam is thought to have passed his authority to a line of a further eight Imams, also buried around Khotan, whose names appear only within this local tradition. This, of course, runs counter to Twelver Shi'i beliefs that the eleventh Imam had only one son, the occulted twelfth Imam. At the same time, despite this belief in a continuation of the imamate, the twelfth Imam was venerated in Khotan as the imam mahdi of the end of time. In another interesting detail, one of the later Imams, "Imam Aftah," whom we might call the fifteenth Imam, is credited in his shrine hagiography with converting the populace of Isfahan to Sunnism, or, more precisely, making the inhabitants chahar yarl, a phrase referring to the four rightly guided caliphs of the Sunni tradition. (2) Despite the strong sectarian resonances these historical traditions might have in, say, modern-day Mesopotamia, this article argues that they are best understood outside of sectarian frameworks and inside of their local shrine-focused contexts.

The case of Khotan is not unusual for its nonsectarian veneration of Alids, the descendants of the prophet Muhammad's nephew "All, of which the Twelve Imams were one line. Although reverence for the Alids is a point of special emphasis in Twelver Shi'i traditions, reverence for Alids can be found in myriad forms throughout the Sunni world. (3) This prevalence and diversity of 'Alid veneration led Marshall Hodgson to declare that "Sunnt Islam can be called at least half Shi'ite." Hodgson argued that reverence for 'Alid descent developed along two separate trajectories. One was the "development of sectarian groupings which have come to give Alt and certain of his descendants an exclusive role in special religious systems." The other was a more general respect that has "come to color in manifold ways the life of Sunni Islam." (4) Even in Sunni contexts this more general respect could take on profound religious significance, as in the case of the numerous Sufi lineages that traced their origins though Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq. Ja'far al-Sadiq eventually came to be seen as the sixth Imam in the Twelver tradition, but he also remained a notable religious thinker outside of Shi'i traditions. General Alid reverence also had socioeconomic ramifications, creating special status for Adid descendants in many parts of the world, which Teresa Bernheimer has described as the Muslim world's "nobility." (5)

Other recent scholarship has shown that even phenomena with more apparently sectarian resonances can straddle the Sunni-Shi'i binary in ways that complicate our understandings of Islam's most famous sectarian divide. For example, Chiara Formichi and Michael Feener point to the proliferation of the A.lid martyrdom narrative, Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyya, in the Sunni Malay context. (6) Stephennie Mulder's study of 'Alid shrines in medieval Syria shows that even when political elites foregrounded sectarian debate, pilgrims of various traditions amicably shared veneration of Alid tombs. Mulder also describes periods in which rulers who were otherwise champions of Sunnism patronized shrines of Shi'i Imami significance, to the extent of inscribing praise of the Twelve Imams on shrine walls. (7) And Teena Purohit argues that the Khoja community of Bombay in the early nineteenth century was so uncommitted to sectarian labels that the plaintiffs and defendants in an intracommunity political dispute were willing to adopt Sunni and Shi'i labels, respectively, in bids for British support, with the ironic result that the colonial government designated the previously fluid Khoja community as firmly "Shi'i Imami Isma'ilis." (8)

Khotan's Twelver tradition adds to this catalogue of historical examples that demand more nuance in our understanding of the Shi'i-Sunni binary, but it also presents a distinctive case. For one, Khotan's pilgrims were not venerating just any 'Alids. Such Sunni (or, perhaps more accurately, nonsectarian) veneration of the Twelve Imams is extremely rare, if not unprecedented in the course of Islamic history. By venerating shrines assigned to the seventh through twelfth Imams of the Twelver Shi'i tradition, the pilgrims of Khotan have elevated a group of personages whose lineage and authority were codified at the height of Shi'i sectarian formation. The Twelver tradition would become synonymous with sectarianized Shi'ism, as reflected in Hodgson's seminal essay "How Did the Early Sh?'a Become Sectarian." which treats the consolidation of Twelver Shi'ism and the rise of sectarianism as one and the same phenomenon. Secondly, Khotan's Twelver veneration is not a case of rulers encouraging ecumenism and tolerance among a community divided along sectarian lines, as was the case in Mulder's Syrian examples. There is no historical record of any concerns over Twelver veneration by any segment of Khotan's population, much less any evidence of a Sunni-Shi'i divide in the community. In Khotan local pilgrims adopted historical narratives and symbols that had been elaborated in highly sectarianized environments outside of Eastern Turkistan, but they then recontextualized them so thoroughly that the shrines of the Twelver Imams in Khotan were indistinguishable from other holy places in Eastern Turkistan.

Outside of Eastern Turkistan, the veneration of the Twelver Imams and the assertion of their legitimacy as successors to the Prophet have long been taken as badges of identity, not only in Arab and Persian lands but also in Central Asia. For example, the competing Timurid princes of Central Asia flaunted their shifting sectarian loyalties by placing, alternatively, the names of the Rashidun (the four rightly guided caliphs or chahar yar, three of whom were considered illegitimate rulers by the Shi'a) and the Twelver Imams on the borders of their coinage. However, the potency of sectarian understandings of the Imams in other parts of Central Asia did not extend to Eastern Turkistan, as will be described in detail below.

For all the examples of sectarian fluidity, whether in Khotan. Malaysia, or Bombay, hardened sectarianism has been a very real phenomenon in certain times and places, and it is a common one in the present. In our contemporary global context, Sunni-Shi'i sectarianism amounts to an extraordinary agreement among those Sunni and Shi'i believers with high levels of sectarian consciousness, residing in various places from the Maghreb to Southeast Asia, who concur that, from among the astounding variety of Islamic beliefs and practices, a small number of characteristics (relative to the much larger mass of shared beliefs) can be used to signal one's basic religious identity. That such widely dispersed and sometimes bitterly antagonistic parties so often...