Based on his doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of London,the present book is a wonderful study of the Sufis ofAurangabad (and, moregenerally, in the Deccan realms of Hyderabad’s Nizams) and their consequentlegacy in independent India. Green builds upon earlier research on theMuslim Deccan undertaken by Carl Ernst (Sufism at Khuldabad, which isadjacent to Aurangabad) and Richard Eaton (Sufis of Bijapur) and brings tothe fore insights from religious studies on the nature of holy men and theirinteraction with politics, words, and worlds.The Deccan has a rich Muslim heritage: Persianate from the fourteenthcentury and then dominated by the Mughals and their successor states fromthe end of the seventeenth century. This heritage also accounts for the significanceof Sufis and their shrines in the region: theAurangabad shrines are animportant facet of this landscape, and this book is a welcome introduction tothem. Green also furthers the theoretical position of Ernst and Eaton: the centralityof the cult of saints for Sufism means that the studies should focus onshrines as “realms of the saint.” Sufism is thus not merely about masters anddisciples or obscure and metaphysical arguments about gnosis, enlightenmentand themarvellous; rather, it concerns sacred spaces and geographies ofspiritual vitality and currency centered on the saints’ shrines.Starting fromAurangzeb’s conquest of the Deccan and establishment ofhis capital at Aurangabad (the former Khirki of the Nizam Shahs) and followingthrough to the legacy of the Panchakki shrine in the 1990s, Green’swork comprises five chapters that weave together an incisive textual analysisof Persian and Urdu sources, readings of architecture as repositories ofSufi text, and fieldwork among Aurangabad’s Sufis ...