Borrowing a term from Joseph Fletcher, Waleed Ziad has described his new book on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Naqshbandi Mujaddidi Sufi network as an “inquiry into the nature of a fibre” threading together different parts of Eurasia. While Fletcher's fiber solely concerned horizontal continuity, Ziad uses multiple fibers of varying length, texture, and color to weave together a tapestry displaying the complex patterns of a world not stained by the dull hues of colonial and nationalistic thought. This tapestry ignores these inorganic and anachronistic boundaries and provokes the modern reader to reimagine space, institutions, and mystic knowledge across South, Central, and Inner Asia. With this vivid revisualization, Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus patches together concepts torn apart in more dated historiography to reveal a network of Sufis that was simultaneously political and spiritual, hallowed and mundane, scholastic and popular, and, finally, both Central Asian and South Asian.
Revealing the connections and the functions of a vast tariqa or Sufi order, Hidden Caliphate focuses on the movements of Sufis through the nodal points of a transregional network of khanaqas, or Sufi lodges, and their transportation of all manner of things tangible and intangible: ideas of political authority, manuals of exoteric and esoteric knowledge, caravans of commercial goods, and even the impetus for armed rebellion. Ziad has framed this network within a carefully defined Persianate space qualified by an original periodization schema. Ziad's tripartite periodization corresponds with the crisis of the Mughal, Uzbek, and Safavid empires in the aftermath of Nader Shah's invasions, the subsequent political reformations until the end of the eighteenth century, and the concurrent centralization and decentralization of states in a space increasingly encroached by nineteenth-century colonial empires. This novel periodization serves the book well as it allows Ziad to correlate broad patterns observed among Mujaddidi Sufism – for example, the widespread acceptance of Mujaddidi doctrine in urban North India in the second period, or the mediatory roles of Mujaddidis within the centripetal state-building efforts of the Uzbek rulers of Ferghana in the third. This adds nuance to multiple crises across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, presenting a strong counterpoint to antiquated paradigms of Central and South Asian decline. Readers may, however, find themselves mired in Ziad's meticulous description of the eastern Persianate cosmopolis of Khurasan, Turan, and Hindustan, an attestation of the book's genesis in a dissertation, while waiting for the more fascinating discussion about the tariqa itself.
Ziad reveals the flexibility exhibited by the tariqa through the diverse experiences of the various branches of the network, but also traces all these branches to a single predecessor, Shaykh Ahmed Sirhindi. With a close and critical reading of his hagiographies, spiritual manuals, and epistles, Ziad argues that Sirhindi laid out the contours of an orthodoxy that seeded the eventual Mujaddidi network, allowing it to find roots across the diverse landscapes of Persianate Islam. While Ziad's framing of Sirhindi's career in the context of the structures he created explains the eventual proliferation of the tariqa across the Eastern Persianate world, it can also leave a bit of a teleological aftertaste. This may simply be derivative of the primary sources, theological stances, and practices from the later tariqa that valued their connection to Sirhindi and his structures.
Following these initial chapters, Hidden Caliphate becomes the story of Mian Fazl Ahmed Masumi, a successor to Sirhindi. Each of the stories narrated concerns a different chapter of Masumi's network and demonstrates the ways in which this network embodied a peculiar model of Islamic sovereignty not explained in prior scholarship. By studying the center of the network in Peshawar, for example, Ziad reveals how the tariqa facilitated the journey of British explorers to Bukhara, mobilized armed resistance against the expanding Sikh Empire, and established an opposition that was both militant and doctrinal to the jihad movement of Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli. In the node of Zakori, south of Peshawar, the tariqa adapted to a nomadic culture as it moved beyond an urban, high cultural milieu to create a mediatory structure facilitating the movement of caravans and horses between Ghazni and the Indus. In Uzbek Khoqand, the presence of this network gave the ruling Ming dynasty access to a hallowed Sufi legacy, which it needed to compete with their Manghit rivals in Bukhara as well as to the widely respected Sufis themselves, who mediated between the urban Uzbek state and its nomadic subjects. In the Yaghestan region centered around Swat, the successors of Fazl Ahmed, by occupying a liminal space in Yusufzai society, acted as impartial, outside mediators in a politically decentralized space and assisted the Yusufzai states in their negotiations with neighboring states and empires; a role that was threatened by the increasingly centralized Afghan state of Amir Abd al-Rahman and the growing British Raj.
Among these stories, which tie local chapters to a larger transregional network, one can discern another kind of fiber used by Ziad in this tapestry. This fiber uses the distinct experiences of each local chapter to engage with various themes previously explored in academic writing and places them together in conversation. Themes as varied as the Indo-Afghan horse trade, anti-Wahhabi polemics, popular occult practice, and Central Asian diplomacy with Tsarist Russia thus find a common space in this book. This quality makes it a welcome addition to a growing body of work seeking to reappraise the history of the Persianate world while eschewing the distortions created by decline paradigms, Great Game narratives, and nationalistic readings of history. It can thus be placed in conversation with other recent works like Mana Kia's Persianate Selves that deals with both the Persian Cosmopolis and with crisis or James Pickett's Polymaths of Islam that reveals the complex and vibrant networks of religious leaders across the Eastern Persianate World.
