Saints, Shrines, and Timurid Piety

This paper will focus on popular rituals and beliefs surrounding shrines and graves in late fourteenth and fifteenth century Timurid Iran and Central Asia. Popular religion, with its saints and shrines, festivals and mystics, formed the backbone of religious and cultural life in the medieval period, especially in the Timurid lands. The Hanbalī jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) wrote vigorously against such practices in Mamluk Syria and his critique was exponentially more severe when he wrote of the ‘un-Islamic’ practices of the ‘Mongols’ found to his east. Acceptable forms of piety and religion that were normal in the Timurid world were not always recognized as such in other parts of the Islamic world or even by some of its own population, hence creating internal difference within the Timurid Muslim world as well. This paper seeks to examine the intellectual underpinnings of popular piety and its actual performance by Timurid Muslims. To do this, I will focus on works by the great Persian poet and Naqshbandī, Mawlanā ‘Abd ar-Rahmān Jāmī (d. 1492) and also make use of the more popular grave visitation manuals of the period.

Additionally, this examination of popular piety raises various related questions, some of which I hope to explore in this paper: Is there a basis for Ibn Taymiyya’s accusations of syncretism in this post-Mongol and Mongol-revering culture? Did the Islamic encounter with Mongol, Buddhist, and shamanistic and other influences, in this period in particular, play a role in shaping popular piety and the performance of piety in ways different from the central Islamic lands? Focusing on Timurid piety as a case of religious difference on the frontier of the Islamic world provides an interesting way to look at the religious and cultural life in the late medieval period.