Health, Mind, Beauty and Relations

Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India

                                             Kelly Pemberton

ABOUT THE BOOK

Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women’s participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton grounds her firsthand research into India’s Sufi shrines and saints by setting her observations against the historical backdrop of colonist-era discourses by British civil servants. Orientalist scholars, and Muslim reformists and the assumptive portrayals of women’s activities in the milieu of Sufi orders and shrines inherent in these accounts. These early narratives, Pemberton holds, are driven by social, economic, intellectual, and political undercurrents of self-interest that shaped Western understanding of Indian Muslims and, in particular, of women’s participation in the institutions of Sufism.

    Pemberton’s research offers a corrective by assessing the contemporary circumstances under which a woman may be recongnized as a spiritual authority or guide—despite official denial of such status—and by examining the discrepancies between the commonly held belief that women cannot perform in the public setting of shrines and her own observations of women doing precisely that. She demonstrates that the existence of multiple models of master and disciple relationships have opened avenues for women to be recognized as spiritual authorities in their own right. Specifically Pemberton explores the work of performance, recitation, and ritual meditation carried out by women connected with Sufi orders through kinship and spiritual ties, and she maps shifting ideas about women’s involvement in public ritual events in a variety of contexts, circumstances, and genres of performance. She also highlights the private petitioning of saints, the Prophet, and God performed by poor women of low social standing in Bihar Sharif. These women are often perceived as being exceptionally close to God yet are compelled to operate outside the public sphere of major shrines.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dy. 261pp. with 6 b/w illustrations & 2 figures. (hb). 2015.

ISBN 978-81-215-1285-5.  Rs 895.

Sufi Heirs of the Prophet

The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh

        Arthur F. Buehler (Author) & Annemarie Schimmel (Frwd)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Sufi Heirs of the Prophet explores the multifaceted development of personal authority in Islamic societies by tracing the transformation of one mystical sufi lineage in colonial India, the Naqshbandiyya. Arthur F. Buehler isolates four sources of personal authority evident in the practices of the Naqshbandiyya—lineage, spiritual traveling, status as a Prophetic exemplar, and the transmission of religious knowledge—to demonstrate how Muslim religious leaders have exercised charismatic leadership through their association with the most compelling of personal Islamic symbols, the Prophet Muhammad. Buehler clarifies the institutional structure of sufism, analyzes overlapping configurations of personal sufi authority, and details how and why revivalist Indian Naqshbandis abandoned spiritual practices that had sustained their predecessors for more than five centuries. He looks specifically at the role of Jama’at ‘Ali Shah (d. 1951) to explain current Naqshbandi practices. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arthur F. Buehler is a senior lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is senior editor of the Journal of the History of Sufism.

Dy. 339pp. with 7 b/w illustrations, 2 maps & 7 figures. (hb). 2015. ISBN 978-81-215-1283-1.  Rs 1195.