The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of Ala ad-Dawla as-Simnani.

• Author: Babayan, Kathryn
• Position: Review

By JAMAL J. ELIAS. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1995. Pp. xvi + 255. $16.95 (paper).

In The Life and Thought of Ala ad-Dawla as-Simnani, Jamal Elias provides the student of both late medieval sufism and Ilkhanid cultural history with the first comprehensive monograph on this thirteenth-century sufi (659-736/1261-1336). Drawing on the scant, but worthy scholarship on Simnani (H. Corbin, H. Cordt, Abd al-Rafi Haqiqat, H. Landolt, F. Meier, M. Molt, and S. M. Sack), as well as on Simnani's voluminous unpublished writings, Elias consolidates two hitherto separately studied dimensions of tiffs eminent mystic's life: his politics and culture, and his philosophy and psychology. Simnani's family connections with the Ilkhanid (654-736/1256-1336) court allow Elias to historicize the narrative of this prince-turned-ascetic, for Simnani himself figures in contemporaneous court chronicles, providing rare glimpses into the obscure landscape of Ilkhanid religious life.

The structure of the book, as spelled out in the title, reflects this dichotomy between context and ideas. Mindful of Simnani's conscious image-making, Elias delineates the way in which Simnani provides fragments of autobiographical information throughout his works as he constructs his own history, relating his personal experiences to his mystical thought. The life of his ancestor Biyabanak, who belonged to a Persian landed notable family from Khurasan at the time of the Mongol conquests, illustrates administrative continuity from the court of the Khwarazmids to that of the conquering Ilkhanids. Raised to be a courtier for the Ilkhanids, Simnani provides a picture of the religiously mixed court of the Buddhist Arghun (683-690 / 12841291), where Sunnis, Shicis, Jews, and Christians served, and Buddhists from Tibet or Kashmir engaged in religious debates with sufis like himself. His personal story, his dramatic battlefield conversion (683/1284), his abandonment of court life, his sickness and miraculous recovery, and his subsequent journey along the sufi path provide precious vistas of the religious landscape of Ilkhanid Iran - Simnan, Azarbaijan, Hamadan, and Baghdad.

The particular language of Simnani's sufism, both his anti-wujadi stance and his blending of Sunni and Shici motifs, elucidate the ambiguous idiom alive in the cultural milieu of Ilkhanid Iran. His rejection of Ibn al- Arabi's (d. 638/1240) ontology, whose influential legacy among contemporaneous sufis Simnani...