Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus By Waleed Ziad

Abstract

In 1909 in the Russian city of Kazan a Tatar printing house published a small verse hagiography titled Manaqib-i piran-i ʿazizan, devoted to the Sufi saints of what is today far western Mongolia and the Chinese Altay. The work was written in the Kazakh language and centred on a saint from the Ferghana Valley known as Muhammad-Mansur Ishan, who had come to Mongolia and became a patron saint (pir) of the local Kazakh Muslim inhabitants. The work opens with Muhammad-Mansur’s spiritual lineage (silsila), which identifies him as a member of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya order, and as a spiritual descendent of Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī, the Indian founder of that order. Sirhindī’s lineage is the topic of Waleed Ziad’s fine monograph, which has serious implications for the history of Sufism in South and Central Asia, and beyond. This Kazakh book bears mentioning because, although not included in the vast body of sources Ziad consults, it illustrates well how even in the twentieth century the Mujaddidiyya network—called in the title the ‘Hidden Caliphate’—extended to the very ends of the Islamic world, and whose inhabitants—here subjects of China—placed themselves firmly under the spiritual protection of the network Ziad examines. A community of Kazakh nomads publishing in a Russian city on the Volga a book centred on a Central Asian member of Ahmad Sirhindi’s spiritual lineage neatly encapsulates the geographic arc of the historical phenomena Ziad examines.