Notes on Contributors
Muzaffar Alam
is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on Mughal political and institutional history, and the history of Indo-Islamic culture. His publications include The Languages of Political Islam in India: c. 1200–1800 (2004), and with Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1400–1800 (2007) and Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (2011).
Hamid Algar
is Professor Emeritus of Persian and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. During his forty-five years of teaching, he gave instruction on a wide variety of subjects, including Qur’anic exegesis, Sufism, Persian and Turkish literature. The main foci of his research have been the history of Shi’ism in pre-modern and contemporary Iran, and the origins and expansion of the Naqshbandi order. He has contributed numerous articles to the Encyclopaedia Iranica and Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi. Among his recent publications is Jami, published by Oxford University Press in the series “Makers of Islamic Civilization.”
Thibaut d’Hubert
is Associate Professor in the department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC) at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on Middle Bengali and Indo-Persian poetics and literary history. He published articles in various periodicals and collective volumes, and he contributed entries on Bengal for Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islam, THREE. In his book titled In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) d’Hubert studies the encounter of Persian, Sanskrit, and vernacular poetics in the courtly milieus of the kingdom of Arakan (Bangladesh/Myanmar).
Ève Feuillebois-Pierunek
is Senior Lecturer of Persian Studies at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, and research staff member of Laboratoire d’Etudes sur les monothéismes in Paris. She has published books and articles on Sufism and Persian Mystical Literature, especially on Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, and ʿIrāqī.
Rebecca Gould
directs the European Research Council–funded project “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared” at the University of Birmingham, where she is Professor of the Islamic World and Comparative Literature. Her books include Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016), awarded the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies and the best book award from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies, After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016, as translator) and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus (Central European University Press, 2015, as translator).
Ayesha A. Irani
is a scholar of Islamic intellectual traditions of early modern and colonial South Asia, with a focus on Islamic literatures of Bengal and Arakan. She is currently completing a monograph on the Islamization of Bengal, entitled The Muhammad Avatara: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam. Her other major project focuses on recovering the many ‘faces’ of the Bengali fakir/darveś, as portrayed in their own writings and as viewed by multiple early modern and colonial actors. She now teaches in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, prior to which she taught in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto.
Alexey Khismatulin
is a Senior Researcher at the Middle and Near East Department of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (St. Petersburg) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He graduated from the Department of Oriental and African studies of the Leningrad State University in 1991 and he received his PhD from the same Institute in 1997 with the major in Historiography and Source Studies (Islamic period). Since then he has been affiliated to the Institute specializing in the fields of Islamic mysticism, manuscript and textual studies. Up to the present time, he has published the results of his researches in different areas of classical Persian literature. Most of them deal with studying, editing and translating classical Persian texts.
Franklin Lewis
is Associate Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He writes about classical and modern Persian literature, including Firdawsī, the ghazals of Sanā’ī and ʿAṭṭār, Saʿdī’s Gulistān, the semiotics of Ḥāfiẓ, the ghazal tradition, spirituality in Persian poetry, the social production of literature in medieval Persia, the relationship of painting to poetry, and the shared circulation of tales in Arabic, Persian, English and Italian tale collections of the medieval Mediterranean.
Chad G. Lingwood
is Associate Professor of Middle East History at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, U.S.A. His areas of research specialization are medieval Iranian history and classical Persian literature with a focus on fifteenth-century poetry and Perso-Islamic works of political advice. His publications include: Politics, Poetry, and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl (Brill, 2014); “Jāmī’s Salāmān va Absāl: Political Statements and Mystical Advice Addressed to the Āq Qoyūnlū Court of Sulṭān Ya‘qūb (d. 896/1490)” (in Iranian Studies, 2011); and “The Qebla of Jāmi is None Other Than Tabriz’: ʿAbd al-Rahmān Jāmi and Naqshbandi Sufism at the Aq Qoyunlu Royal Court” (in Journal of Persianate Studies, 2011).
Paul Losensky
(Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1993) is Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches Persian language and literature, comparative studies of Western and Middle Eastern literatures, and translation studies. His research focuses on Persian literary historiography, biographical writing, and the Fresh-Style poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His publications include Welcoming Fighāni: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (1998), Farid ad-Din ‘Attār’s Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis (2009), and In the Bazaar of Love: Selected Poems of Amir Khusrau with Sunil Sharma (2013). He has authored numerous articles on Persian literature for journals such as Iranian Studies and is a frequent contributor to Encyclopedia of Islam and Encyclopaedia Iranica. He is a former fellow at the National Humanities Center.
Mohamad Nasrin Nasir
is Head of the Research Centre for Malay Manuscript Institute of the Malay World & Civilization Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. His primary research area is the Malay Sufi world of the 17th century and its connection to Ibn ʿArabī. He has published widely in the field of Islamic studies, thought and Southeast Asian Studies. His select publications include Metaphysical Epistemology: The Teachings of Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatra’ī (d. 1630) (2017); “Convergences and Divergences in Understanding a Malay Sufi Text of the 17th Century,” Islam & Civilisational Renewal 7/3 (2016); “Presence of God according to the Ḥaqq al-Yaqīn fi Aqīdat al-Muḥaqqiqīn fī Asrār al-Ṣūfī al- Muḥaqqiqīn, a 17th century treatise by Shaykh Shams al-Dīn al-Sumatra’ī (d. 1630),” Journal of Islamic Studies 21/2 (2010). He is currently preparing the critical edition of a seventeenth-century Sufi theological text written by al-Rānīrī.
Luther Obrock
is Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and is interested in Sanskrit literary culture in the second millennium. His research centers particularly on Sanskrit works written under the Islamicate sultanates of North India. He has published on the Sanskrit language histories of Kashmir from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, translation and interaction between the Indic and Perso-Arabic cultural spheres in South Asia, and commentarial culture.
Ertuğrul Ökten
is a faculty member at the Istanbul 29 Mayıs University, the Department of History. Among his research interests are the intellectual and socio-cultural history of the Islamic world in the 13th–16th centuries, especially the Persophone section of it. Currently, he works on alfāẓ al-kufr as speech act within the context of the fatwās of Yaḥyā Efendī (d. 1644), the Ottoman shaykh al-islām, and the intellectual history of Sivas in the 13th and 16th centuries. He is in the process of preparing his manuscript on Jāmī.
Alexandre Papas
is a Senior Research Fellow (Directeur de recherche) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He is a historian of Islamic mysticism since the 15th century to present. His main publications include: Soufisme et politique entre Chine, Tibet et Turkestan (Paris: J. Maisonneuve, 2005); Mystiques et vagabonds en islam. Portraits de trois soufis qalandar (Paris: Cerf, 2010); Ainsi parlait le derviche. Les marginaux de l’islam en Asie centrale, XVe–XXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2018; English translation, forthcoming). He is co-editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of Islamic Mysticism.
C. Ryan Perkins
is the librarian for South Asian Studies and Islamic Studies at Stanford University and teaches in the Department of History. His research interests include the socio-cultural and literary history of the Urdu and Pashto speaking regions of South Asia in the 18th–20th centuries. His publications include: “From the Meḥfil to the Printed Word: Public Debate and Discourse in Late Colonial India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 50 (January–March 2013); “A New Pablik: Abdul Halim Sharar, Volunteerism and the Anjuman-e Dar us Salam in late nineteenth century India,” Modern Asian Studies 49/4 (July 2015); “London, Lucknow, and the Global Indian City c. 1857–1920,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 27, Issue 4, October 2017.
Francis Richard
is a Library Curator with an expertise in Oriental manuscripts. He was the Director of the Bibliothèque des Langues et Civilisations (BULAC) in Paris. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and directed the Department of Islamic Art at the Musée du Louvre. His publications include: Scribes et manuscrits du Moyen-Orient (with F. Déroche); Splendeurs persanes, manuscrits du XIIe au XVIIe siècles; Le siècle d’Ispahan; Catalogue des manuscrits persans, I, Ancien fonds; Catalogue des manuscrits persans. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits. Tome II.
Sajjad H. Rizvi
is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. He specialises in the intellectual history of the later Persianate East and has also written on mysticism, Quranic hermeneutics and normative theology. He is the author of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (Oxford, 2007), Mullā Ṣadrā and Metaphysics (Routledge, 2009), An Anthology of Qurʾanic Commentaries Volume I: On the Nature of the Divine (with Feras Hamza, Oxford, 2008), and The Spirit and the Letter (with Annabel Keeler, Oxford, 2016). He is currently writing a monograph on Islamic philosophical traditions in the 18th century.
Florian Schwarz
is Director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria. His publications include Unser Weg schliesst tausend Wege ein : Derwische und Gesellschaft im islamischen Mittelasien im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000), Zwischen Alltag und Schriftkultur. Horizonte des Individuellen in der arabischen Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (ed. with Stefan Reichmuth, Beirut and Würzburg, 2008) and “Writing in the margins of empires: The Husaynabadi family of scholiasts in the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands,” in Buchkultur im Nahen Osten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (ed. T. Heinzelmann and H. Sievert, Bern, 2010).
Sunil Sharma
is Professor of Persian & Indian Literatures at Boston University’s Department of World Languages & Literatures. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, during which time he studied and traveled in Iran. He has held various fellowships and is the author of a number of books and articles. His research interests are in the areas of Persianate literary and visual cultures, translation, and travel writing. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Persianate Societies, Studies in Persian Culture (Brill), and Murty Classical Library of India.
Yiming Shen
is an Associate Professor in the Department of West Asian Languages and Cultures at Peking University. She received her PhD in Sinology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her research focuses on Persian Sufi literature and modern Persian literature, particularly the Chinese translations of Persian Sufi texts made in the 17th and 18th centuries. Shen has published several papers on Persian literature such as “Imitation or Innovation: Some Thoughts on the Language of the Chinese Islamic Works Written in the Late Ming and Early Qing Period”, “A Preliminary Comparison between a Chinese Character dong in Liu Zhi’s Zhenjing zhaowei and the Corresponding Persian Words in Jāmī’s Lavāyiḥ”. Her Chinese translation of Jāmī’s Bahāristān will be published in 2018, which is the first full translation in China. She is currently responsible for a project titled “The Study on She Qiling’s (d. 1703) Chinese Translations of Islamic Scriptures” supported by National Philosophy and Social Science Foundation in China.
Marc Toutant
is a member of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. His research focuses on Turko-Iranian interactions and their contributions to Central Asian history and culture. He is the author of Un empire de mots: Pouvoir, culture et soufisme à l’époque des derniers Timourides au miroir de la Khamsa de Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Nawā’ī (Peeters, 2016), and co-editor of Literature and Society in Central Asia: New Sources for the Study of Culture and Power from the 15th to the 21th Century (Cahiers d’Asie centrale 24, 2015).
Paul Wormser
is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History at the French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO, Paris). He has mostly worked on Indian Ocean trading networks and the borrowing of Arabo-Persian literary traditions in the early modern Malay world. His main publications include Le Bustan al-Salatin de Nuruddin ar-Raniri, Regards croisés sur Aceh (Archipel n°87) and “The spread of Islam in Asia through trade and Sufism, 9th–19th centuries”.