From Blessed Lips: the Textualization of Abu Saʿid's Dicta and Deeds

This is the Author’s Original Manuscript (pre-Peer-Review) of an article published in the Journal of Persianate Studies 12.1 (2019). The Version of Record can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341330 From Blessed Lips: The Textualization of Abu Saʿid’s Dicta and Deeds Abu Saʿid-e Abu’l-Khayr, a mystical preacher active in Khorasan in the mid-eleventh century, is most often remembered for his extravagant life style and love of samāʿ, which earned him the hostility of more conservative religious leaders. After his death, a shrine community grew up around his tomb in Mayhana, which became a site of pilgrimage managed by his descendants and their followers until they were dispersed during the Ghuzz depredations of the 1150s. His legacy largely rests on the Asrār al-towhid, a massive hagiographical work compiled by his great-great-grandson Ebn-e Monavvar after the destruction wrought by the Ghuzz; it contains stories of the shaykh’s miracles, a loose account of his life, collections of his sayings and letters, and a selection of the verses that he recited.1 It has been edited multiple times and is often cited as an example of stylistically strong prose (Safā, II, 982; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, clxxi-clxxiv). The Asrār was preceded by an earlier hagiography, the so-called Hālāt va Sokhanān-e Abu Saʿid, which was compiled by Abu Rowh Lotfallāh while the shrine community was still flourishing. It is much shorter than the Asrār and survives in a single manuscript.2 These two hagiographical works, especially the more comprehensive Asrār, have long been mined for data regarding Abu Saʿid’s life, thought, and milieu. Fritz Meier, in his encyclopedic Abū Saʿīd-i Abū l-Ḫayr (357-440/967-1049): Wirklichkeit und Legende, has identified and evaluated an enormous amount of information on Abu Saʿid, his descendants, and his interlocutors. Terry Graham has argued that Abu Saʿid represents a specific Khorasanian type of sufism, and Ahmet Karamustafa has examined Abu Saʿid’s methods of spiritual guidance in the 1. 2. Editions include those by Valentin Zhukovski, Ẕ abihallāh Safā, and Mohammad Rezā Shafiʿi-Kadkani. An English translation has been published by John O’Kane. Editions have been produced by Valentin Zhukovski, Iraj Afshār, and Shafiʿi-Kadkani. The unique manuscript is held in the British Library under shelf number OR 249. For a description see Rieu, I, 349. The text was previously ascribed to Abu Rowh’s son by Zhukovski; see Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 1987, 10-15. 1 context of adab. Omid Safi has utilized hagiographical accounts of Abu Saʿid in his analysis of how holy men used their spiritual blessing to negotiate with political figures. Finally, Shafi’iKadkani’s introductions to his editions of the Asrār and the Hālāt contain valuable information on the saint and his community, as does John O’Kane’s introduction to his translation of the Asrār. The aforementioned scholars have done an admirable job using these hagiographies to unearth both the historical Abu Saʿid and the dynamics of his sainthood as remembered and represented by his disciples. The hagiographical tradition on which this scholarship has relied, however, has largely been taken as either a given, or as a natural outgrowth of earlier oral material, without much critical evaluation. A close examination our sources, however, shows that the emergence of an extensive hagiographical work like the Asrār was by no means a foregone conclusion. Textualization was a contingent process of linguistic and social translation, in which oral material was reworked for new audiences with differing spiritual needs. The present paper examines these processes and shows how the Asrār, although perhaps similar to the Hālāt at first glance, represents a major rhetorical reorientation and opening up of the community’s traditions for a broad audience of non-disciples in light of the community’s sinking material fortunes. More specifically, I show how Lotfallāh’s Hālāt, written before the Ghuzz attacks, was composed as an extension of a living oral tradition for members (and potential members) of Abu Saʿid’s shrine community; as a text, it did not seek to displace the oral tradition, but to complement it. Ebn Monavvar’s Asrār, by contrast, was written after the community was dispersed by the Ghuzz, and it therefore seeks to capture a disappearing oral tradition as completely as possible in a fixed textual form. Instead of addressing a flourishing shrine community, Ebn Monavvar speaks to a virtual community of literary devotees who are not necessarily members of any sociologically discrete community or order, which requires 2 changes to the form, scope, and style of the material. Moreover, it necessitates a rethinking of Abu Saʿid’s spiritual blessing (baraka), which would now be made available to devotees not through pilgrimage or participation in a specific social network, but through literary engagement with the Asrār itself. The present study will thus illuminate the intertwined oral and written genealogies of the Abu Saʿid hagiographical tradition, as well as the changing ways in which knowledge was transmitted within the shrine community. More broadly, it will also shed light on the literization and vernacularization of sufi texts during the twelfth century, when mystically minded authors began to write increasingly in literary Persian, addressing broad audiences in self-consciously authorial texts. As the case of the Asrār demonstrates, this literization was not a simple transcription of existing oral traditions, but an act of translation that implied new notions of authority and community, and was thus not necessarily uncontested. The Life of Abu Said Abu Saʿid was born in Mayhana, a small town in the desert of Khābarān near Sarakhs, on December 7, 967, and he died there on January 12, 1049. Much of what we know about his life is derived from the Asrār and the Hālāt, which include considerable legendary material and are not overly concerned with chronology, although they do attempt to stitch anecdotes together into a loose overview of his life.1 According to these hagiographical accounts, he first 1. Limited information about Abu Saʿid can be found in a number of other sources as well, such as Hojviri’s Kashf al-mahjub. Biographies of the saint in later sources, such as Jāmi’s Nafahāt al-ons, have generally been considered derivative and unreliable, although Shafiʿi-Kadkani points out that they include information that must have been taken from sources other than the Hālāt and Asrār. Recently, Shafiʿi-Kadkani also suggested that the vita of Abu Saʿid found in some late manuscripts of ʿAttār’s Taẕkerat al-owleyā (but which is almost certainly not original to ʿAttār) was based on an earlier hagiographical text that emerged outside of the Hālāt/Asrār tradition (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2006, 65-107). It is not clear, however, who actually wrote this vita or when. In any case, it does not substantially change Abu Saʿid’s biography as known from the traditional sources. 3 encountered sufism in his hometown via Abu’l-Qāsem Beshr Yāsin, who allegedly taught him a quatrain that functioned as his first ẕekr (Ebn Monavvar, 19). He then studied the religious sciences in Marv and Sarakhs, where one day a wise-fool character known as Loqmān lead him by the hand to the khānaqāh of Abu’l-Fazl Hasan, who became his formal spiritual guide. Eventually Abu Saʿid returned to Mayhana, where he continued to practice extreme austerities under Abu’l-Fazl’s direction from Sarakhs, such as reciting the entire Quran while suspended upside down in a well (Ebn Monavvar, 30-31). At some point, Abu Saʿid was sent by Abu’l-Fazl to Abu ʿAbd al-Rahmān al-Solami, where he was invested with the kherqa and completed his training (Ebn Monavvar, 32-33). Later, after Abu’l-Fazl’s death, he travelled to Āmol, where he stayed for at least a year with Abu’l-ʿAbbās al-Qassāb, who invested him with a second kherqa (Ebn Monavvar, 45).1 During his maturity, Abu Saʿid split his time between Nishapur and Mayhana—according to Lotfallāh, he spent summers in the former and winters in the latter—maintaining his spiritual community in both locations (125). The sources do not state exactly when he first established himself in Nishapur, but Meier has deduced that it must have been around 1024, when Abu Saʿid would have already been fifty-five years old (52-59). In Nishapur he attracted a large number of followers and maintained a khānaqāh on ʿAdani-Kuyān street that supported resident dervishes as well as traveling sufis. At some point he also acquired a large house (sarāy) in Mayhana, facing which he constructed a tomb (mashhad) to house his body after death (Harrow, 198-99; Ebn Monavvar, 348, 363). From the time that he established himself in Nishapur, Abu Saʿid is no longer presented as an ascetic, but joyful mystic given to music, food, and samāʿ. O’Kane suggests that we may be dealing with two separate hagiographic traditions, 1. For further information on Abu Saʿid’s early years, see Böwering; Meier, 39-45. 4 and that the compilers attempted to harmonize them by attributing asceticism to his youth and more permissive mysticism to his maturity (17). In both Nishapur and Mayhana Abu Saʿid would deliver regular “assemblies” (majāles) or sermons. According to the hagiographies, when in Nishapur he would preach from a platform set up either inside of the khānaqāh or in front of it, and when in Mayhana he would preach from a platform in front of his tomb (Ebn Monavvar, 148, 168-69). Men and women would attended his assemblies, although they seem to have been segregated. Multiple miracle stories involve women or children falling from the roof during Abu Saʿid’s sermons and being miraculously suspended in the air and saved from harm (Ebn Monavvar, 58, 80, 184). This suggests that men may have clustered around Abu Saʿid at ground level, while women sat on the roof of the khānaqāh, sarāy, or other nearby buildings. As for the sermons themselves, no complete example has come down to us. The hagiographies only preserve snippets of his assemblies, which often serve merely as a backdrop to some display of his miraculous power. Nonetheless, they do offer a few clues as to how a typical assembly may have unfolded. Abu Saʿid’s assemblies, like those of his contemporaries, seem to have been interactive affairs, with audience members asking questions and Abu Saʿid calling out specific listeners—his legendary mind-reading ability was often on display during assemblies as he would exactly address the concerns of listeners without any apparent prompting (O’Malley, 138-39). He incorporated poetry into his sermons, which earned him the animosity of some of his contemporaries (Ebn Monavvar, 68-69). The recitation of a striking or particularity apropos verse could trigger states of ecstasy in his audience, or lamentation and wailing. In their affective power, Abu Saʿid’s mystical assemblies bear a great resemblance to his samāʿ sessions, in which music and poetic recitation would produce ecstatic movement in participating dervishes. Based on the accounts found in the hagiographic tradition, Abu Saʿid 5 seems to have kept a signer (qavvāl) in his company, and he would often instruct him to recite specific verses for samāʿ (Ebn Monavvar, 53, 72). The hagiographies are full of stories of spiritual rivals who opposed his samāʿ practice—including Qāzi Sāʿed, Qoshayri, and Bu ʿAbdallāh Bāku, among others—but who eventually saw the error of their ways and accepted Abu Saʿid’s spiritual authority, often after a display of the latter’s miraculous power. Another point of contention seized upon by Abu Saʿid’s critics was his fondness for sumptuous banquets featuring candles, lavish foods, incense, and other extravagances. The hagiographies detail a number of episodes in which Abu Saʿid receives large donations, and rather than hoarding the money, spends it immediately on feasts for his dervishes and followers. Other times he causes food to miraculously appear for such feasts or money to pay the debts incurred thereby. The later tradition has remembered Abu Saʿid as a composer of verses, and hundreds of quatrains have been attributed to him in a variety of works (Nafisi). According to the Lotfallāh, Abu Saʿid claimed to have never composed poetry himself, but rather to have quoted verses from earlier shaykhs, especially Abu’l-Qāsem Beshr (92). Ebn Monavvar reports that, despite rumors to the contrary, Abu Saʿid “was too immersed in his own state of witnessing God to be able to compose verse,” but he also quotes two snippets of poetry that are attributed to Abu Saʿid (202-3). Both hagiographers portray the Shaykh as a lover of poetry who always had a verse ready at hand; he is said to have memorized thirty thousand verses of pre-Islamic poetry as a student, and to have once recited over one thousand verses in a single day (Lotfallāh, 13; Ebn Monavvar, 20, 142). The scholarly consensus has generally been to take the hagiographers at their word and dismiss later attributions as spurious (Meier, 210-13; Rypka, 234; De Bruijn, 16-17). Some, however—most prominently Nafisi and Shafiʿi-Kadkani—have argued otherwise (Graham, 94-106; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2006, 41-43; cf. Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, cv-cxv). In any case, 6 even if Abu Saʿid did compose quatrains or qetʿas, there is no reliable way to judge the authenticity of the vast majority of attributions, many of which are also ascribed to other poets. Abu Saʿid attempted the hajj once but did not complete it; he turned back at Bestām after visiting the tomb of Bāyazid Bestāmi. On the same journey he also visited the famous sufi Kharaqāni. In his later years, probably around 1046 according to Shafiʿi-Kadkani’s reckoning, he left Nishapur for the last time and returned to Mayhana, where he died in 1049 and was interred in the tomb (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, lxxiii). Orality and Textuality in a Shrine Community After his death, leadership of the community fell to Abu Saʿid’s descendants. According the hagiographies, Abu Saʿid’s son Abu Tāher was named the “pole” (qotb) by his father on his deathbed, and ten of the Shaykh’s relatives were marked as recipients of special blessings—five of his sons, three of his grandsons by Abu Tāher, as well as the husband of an unnamed daughter and their son (Ebn Monavvar, 340-41; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, cvl). Although these traditions are doubtlessly intended to bolster later claims of family control—especially the line of Abu Tāher, which produced both of our hagiographers—the familial inheritance of a saint’s spiritual authority was an expected pattern at this time. Although this organization never evolved into a trans-regional tariqa, the shrine complex at Mayhana was a major center for cultic and economic activity under the control of at least four generations of Abu Saʿid’s descendants. Ebn Monavvar lists some of these activities: five ritual prayers would be preformed every day in congregation, two communal meals would be served, the entirety of the Quran would be recited over Abu Saʿid’s tomb every morning, candles would be lit at dusk and dawn, and samāʿ would be performed (Ebn Monavvar 341-42, 350). At its apogee, the shrine complex housed over one hundred descendants of Abu Saʿid and 7 resident dervishes, as well as visitors and pilgrims (Ebn Monavvar, 341). There seems to have been a specific yearly pilgrimage, although some devotees came more often as well, and O’Kane speculates that there may have been a festival on the anniversary of the Shaykh’s death (Ebn Monavvar, 341-42; O’Kane, 46n85). Pilgrims came to receive spiritual blessings from the Shaykh’s tomb and via various relics maintained on the site. The most celebrated of these relics was a piece of the robe that Abu Saʿid was wearing when he uttered his famous ecstatic utterance, “There is not but God in this robe!” As he spoke these words, he slipped his hand under the robe and onto his “blessed chest,” and his “blessed index finger” passed miraculously through the fabric, leaving a small hole. According to Ebn Monavvar, this piece of robe with the hole from the Shaykh’s finger was on display at the shrine complex, and after pilgrims visited the tomb, they would make their way to see it (Ebn Monavvar, 201-2). Several other relics (ās̱ār) are mentioned, including the platform form which the Shaykh delivered his sermons, as well as the stool that he used to mount the platform, and another stool that he used while performing ablutions. These were apparently held in high esteem by the community, and would also be visited by pilgrims (Ebn Monavvar, 348-49). A myrtle tree planted by the Shaykh was also a favorite site for both locals and visitors, being thought to transmit his spiritual blessings (Ebn Monavvar, 42). Abu Saʿid’s descendants lead this community and wielded considerable local and regional political clout. They mediated between the people of Khābarān and members of the political-military elite, facilitating compliance and submission in return for safety, security, and material support. For example, Abu Rowh Lotfallāh, the compiler of the Hālāt, was the leader of the community during the Khwārazm-Shāh’s incursions into Khorasan. He interceded with the Khwārazm-Shāh when he arrived with his army in the environs of Mayhana, going out to meet him, attending to him personally, and regaling him with anecdotes about Abu Saʿid. The 8 Khwārazm-Shāh’s decision to spare Mayhana is presented by Ebn Monavvar primarily a result of the miraculous intervention of the deceased Abu Saʿid, but the anecdote also shows how Abu Said’s descendants functioned as local notables, meeting regional military powers, negotiating submission, and ensuring the safety of their community (Ebn Monavvar, 378-80). According to the sufi biographer Semʿāni, Lotfallāh was also part of a delegation (wafd) from Khābarān to the Seljuk capital of Marv; although no further details are given, this also suggests his status as a regional leader (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 1971, 249; Meier, 522). As for Ebn Monavvar, he reports that he, like other leaders of the family before him, served as the primary representative of the people of Khābarān before the Seljuk sultan: At all times, in matters relating to the welfare of the province, no one could intercede but the descendants of the Shaykh, and if any one else attempted to intercede, they would not be heard. No one could be appointed as headman (raʾis), tax collector (ʿāmel), or overseer (shahna) without the approval of the descendants of the Shaykh, and if anyone of them committed any injustice, it would be enough for the leader and pir of the descendants of the Shaykh to simply write “so-and-so should not be in Khābarān” and have someone immediately take the note to the army camp and present it to the Sultan, and the offender’s dismissal would be effected. Ebn Monavvar himself received gifts of grain and cash from Sultan Sanjar for the shrine after the first round of Ghuzz depredations, resources that the headman of the Mayhana was unable to secure on his own (Ebn Monavvar, 349-50). Clearly, the Shaykh’s descendants were local notables of some clout, even accounting for the expected familial self-glorification. A lively oral tradition developed in this environment, with Abu Saʿid’s dicta and stories of his miraculous feats circulating among his descendants, resident dervishes, and visiting pilgrims. Ebn Monavvar writes nostalgically of this community and the oral tradition they supported: All had learned the greater part of the states and stations of our Shaykh, as well as his sayings (favāʾed-e anfās) and deeds (ās̱ār), and passed the time discussing them. For this reason, our shaykhs did not compile them in a collection. Because 9 all thoughts were illuminated with them, and all ears were fragrant with their mention, and all tongues perfumed with their recitation and dissemination . . . they did not require a collection (4). Ebn Monavvar paints a vivid (if likely embellished) picture of a thriving community, in which stories and sayings of the Shaykh were memorized and transmitted orally—perfuming the hearts and tongues of the devotees—so that the community had no need for a written collection (jamʿ). He does recognize the collection of his predecessor, Lotfallāh, who wrote in the first half of 1100s, but he emphasizes its “brevity” (ijāz) and “abbreviation” (ekhtesār), as well as the fact that Lotfallāh wrote in an “upright age” (ahd-e isteqāmat) when the oral tradition was still maintained (6). Lotfallāh, for his part, indicates the ongoing importance of memorization within the oral tradition when he writes that he spent a lifetime “seeking out the deeds and sayings of that great one, and collected them in memory,” until, at the urging of his devotes, he set them down in writing (9-10). The resulting textual compilation represented only a small fraction of the oral tradition available to him, since Abu Saʿid’s sayings were “more than written pages could contain” (Lotfallāh, 96). Likewise, he incorporated only a few of the circulating miracle stories, specifically those that were “easiest to understand,” for the sake “brevity” (Lotfallāh, 80). Besides their direct references to the oral tradition, both of our hagiographers also point in more indirect ways to the large oral tradition from which they drew. For example, they often claim to have “heard” particular anecdotes or sayings, and they sometimes name their sources explicitly. When narrated orally within the community, these traditions would often have been accompanied by full chains of transmission back to Abu Saʿid and his companions on the model of Prophetic hadith, and Ebn Monavvar explains that he dropped these chains of transmission in his textual collection so as not to weary the reader (8). Despite the richness of the oral tradition, both hagiographers obliquely reference written material that preceded their own textual enterprises. In particular, Ebn Monavvar 10 claims to have come by a handful of traditions not aurally, which would have been the standard mode of transmission at the time, but textually. For example, he recounts a miracle story according to which the Shaykh was miraculosuly saved one night when, performing devotions at the edge of a cliff, he fell asleep and began to fall. The story itself is rather unremarkable, but the mode of its transmission is not: Ebn Monavvar reports to have seen the account written down in the hand of Abu’l-Qāsem Jonayd b. ʿAli Sharmaqāni, a companion of the Shaykh who had heard the story directly from him (28-29). There are at least five other traditions in the Asrār that Ebn Monavvar reports having seen written down in the handwriting of specific transmitters known to him (105, 184, 291, 322). Three of these were written down by one Abu’l-Barakāt, a great-grandson of the Shaykh (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, cli). Although he wrote these traditions down, Abu’l-Barakāt had apparently received them aurally since he includes full chains of oral transmission, all the way back to the reports’ originators, in his written versions. The Shaykh’s sayings and feats may also have been recorded in his own lifetime, as implied by a tradition in which Abu Saʿid rebukes a dervish who wrote down stories (hekāyat-hā) about him at the request of another disciple; the offending dervish is admonished not to be “someone who writes stories,” but rather to be “someone that they tell stories about” (Ebn Monavvar, 187). The anecdote is used by Ebn Monavvar to illustrate Abu Saʿid’s humility, but it also suggests that accounts of his feats might have been committed to text by his immediate disciples while he was still alive, even if the practice was frowned upon. Abu Saʿid himself often wrote down verses, blessings, and other short pieces of text, which he gave to his disciples and sent to various interlocutors (Ebn Monavvar, 116-117, 202, 238, 331-332). Some of these were likely saved by the community after his death. Finally, Lotfallāh claims that “nearly two hundred of his [Abu Saʿid’s] homiletic assemblies [majles] are in the hands of the people” (96). The phrasing of the sentence suggests that these are textual records of Abu Saʿid’s ser11 mons, and both Meier and Shafiʿi-Kadkani have taken it that way (Meier, 21-22; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, clxxvi). How does one reconcile these hagiographers’ repeated allusions to copious textual material, some apparently dating from the lifetime of Abu Saʿid himself, with Ebn Monavvar’s insistence that, before Lotfallāh, the community did not produce any textual compilation of the Shaykh’s sayings and deeds? The apparent contradiction can be resolved if we understand the earlier textual material not to have been full hagiographies, as Shafiʿi-Kadakni suggests, but rather personal, ad hoc notes, used primarily for memorization and to support oral transmission (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, clxxvii). Gregor Schoeler, in his study of orality and textuality in the Arabic intellectual traditions, borrows the classical Greek distinction between syngramma and hyponēma (21). Whereas a syngramma was a full literary work, containing an developed authorial voice that addressed an anonymous readership and was meant for wide circulation, a hyponēma was composed for private use and often served as an aide-memoire to support further oral transmission. The early textual material produced in Abu Saʿid’s shrine community, which has not survived but whose existence is obliquely documented in the later hagiographical tradition, should be considered a species of hyponēma, not syngramma. The dervish whom Abu Saʿid rebukes for writing down stories was not composing a hagiography for a literary public, but rather writing out a “few stories for another dervish who asked for them” (Ebn Monavvar, 187). This is not a formal commission or a request for a literary work, but an ad hoc composition for personal use. Ebn Monavvar, for his part, reports having seen certain traditions written down, but he does not seem to have had them in front of him while writing the Asrār. These earlier pieces of text were likely personal records used for memorization and reference, the property of those who wrote them or their families, that Ebn Monavvar had simply chanced to see on occasion. And the bulk of Ebn Monavvar’s narrations, when he specifies his 12 sources, are based on oral transmission. Thus we have a situation in which stories of the Shaykh’s deeds and sayings circulated primarily through oral channels, but this oral tradition was bolstered by private, informal written accounts. When Ebn Monavvar writes that there was no “collection” before Lotfallāh’s Hālāt, he does not mean that there was no textual accounts of the Shaykh’s sayings and feats—he himself indicates multiple times that there was— but rather that there was no extended authorial work intended for public or semi-public consumption. In the first half of the twelfth century, Abu Rowh Lotfallāh drew on this oral tradition to compile not a private record of the shaykh’s sayings for his own use, but something closer to a syngramma—a semi-public literary work, addressed to a community of pilgrims, disciples, and potential recruits. This was not a private, ad hoc aide-memoire, but a semi-public, standardized one. Little is known about Abu Rowh himself, except that he was Abu Saʿid’s great-great-grandson. According to Semʿāni, he had heard hadith from his forefathers, was born before 1097, and died in 1147 (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 1987, 15-16). He appears to have been the leader of the shrine community, as illustrated by his reception of the Khwārazm-Shāh and his participation in the delegation from Khābarān to Marv. We cannot be exactly sure when his compilation was written, but even if composed at the end of his life, this would have been before the height of the Ghuzz onslaught in the mid-1150s. Unlike the private aides-memoirs that had previously been produced in Mayhana, Lotfallāh’s compilation was intended to circulate as a semi-public text. It has an extensive introduction, directly addresses an anonymous readership, references its own written nature, and is endowed with a clear structure. It contains five chapters, thematically arranged. The first gives a loose chronology of Abu Saʿid’s early life and his introduction to sufism. The second covers his ascetic feats and later spiritual training. The third deals with his miracles, the fourth his sayings (favāʾed-e anfās), and the fifth his death and 13 testament. The work also includes a letter from Avicenna to Abu Saʿid, and a letter from Abu Saʿid to ʿAbd al-Rahmān b. Abi Bakr al-Khatib al-Marvazi. Each chapter also begins with a hadith with a complete chain of transmission back to the Prophet, so that “you might know the mystical way (tariqat) is not incompatible with the law (shariʿat),” which perhaps indicates a certain defensiveness regarding sufism’s orthodoxy (Lotfallāh, 11). Unlike the stories and sayings jotted down by earlier devotees, the Hālāt was intended to circulate among disciples and pilgrims, so that “by studying these sayings, the devotion of the people to the sanctified shrine (rowza-ye moqaddas) might increase” (Lotfallāh, 10). Unlike the later Asrār, this written collection was never intended to replace the community’s living oral tradition, but rather to complement it by attracting new devotees into the community and highlighting a core set of traditions for memorization and recitation. As Lotfallāh himself reports, the text contained only a small part of the many traditions known to the community, all of which would have continued to circulate orally. The shrine continued to be a hub for the oral transmission of knowledge related to Abu Saʿid, including the oral transmission of the Hālāt itself, a process which has left its mark on the text with the incorporation of phrases like “The Glorious Shaykh, the Imam, Abu Rowh Lotfallāh bin Abi Saʿid, reports . . . ” (27, 45). These phrases are unlikely to have been included by Lotfallāh; rather, they would have been inserted as the text was being dictated, either by the reciters who read the text out loud or by the scribes transcribing it (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 1987, 14-15). Such formulae are textual vestiges of the continuing importance of oral transmission within specific communities, even in the case of fixed literary texts. Despite the Hālāt’s self-conscious textuality as an authorial work, the manuscript acknowledges the continued significance of the oral tradition from which it arose and through which it continued to be disseminated and transmitted. 14 Although determining the reach of a medieval work is always somewhat speculative, the Hālāt likely never enjoyed wide circulation outside of the shrine network. Besides the fact that it exists in only a single manuscript, several other pieces of internal evidence suggest that it it was intended to be read within the community, where it largely remained. First, the Hālāt lacks a proper title, which would have facilitated its circulation among a dispersed, heterogeneous readership. The unique extant manuscript bears no title at its head. Nor is there any indication of a title within the work itself. The title by which the book is now known is taken from the later Asrār, where Ebn Monavvar explains how Lotfallāh had previously “brought forth the summary of the states and stations of our Shaykh” (makhlas be hālāt va sokhanān-e shaykh-e mā bāz āvard, p. 6). Scholars have generally understood “states and stations” as a proper name, but it seems more likely to be simple description of its content, and from the perspective of someone within the community at that (cf. Meier, 19; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, II, 457). There is no indication that Lotfallāh or his immediate readers felt the need to name the text and thereby distinguish it from the oral tradition of Abu Saʿid’s “states and stations” that it extends and complements. This is quite different from the later Asrār, which has a fixed, authorially chosen, rhyming title—Asrār al-towhid fi maqāmāt al-Shaykh Abi Saʿid (The Secrets of Oneness in the Stations of the Shaykh Abu Said), and was thus explicitly conceptualized by its as author as a discrete textual entity, separate from the larger tradition upon which it rests. Furthermore, the Hālāt displays some non-standard dialectical features, which suggests a local orientation and sphere of circulation. In particular, the second-person plural verbal ending is usually—but not always—written as -it instead of -id. The word chun is also written without a vav, an unusual orthographical convention. Because only a single manuscript exists, however, it is unclear if these features should be traced to Lotfallāh or the scribe of this particular manuscript. Copied by one Mahmud b. ʿAli b. Salma in 699/1299, the extant manuscript 15 also includes a collection of sayings attributed the saint Kharaqāni, entitled the Montakhab Nur al-ʿolum, which displays the same unusual verbal ending as the Hālāt, but not the dropped vav in chun. Shafiʿi-Kadkani believes that these features were introduced by the scribe, presumably because the unusual verbal ending is found in his copies of both the Hālāt and the Montakhab Nur al-ʿolum, and his writing is admittedly careless (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 1987, 21). Nevertheless, I think it unlikely that a scribe would “correct” the text to accord with his or her local dialect at the end of the thirteenth century, when the Persian literary idiom was already well established. It seems more plausible that this usage is an original feature of the texts. Because Kharaqāni is closely connected to Abu Saʿid in the latter’s hagiographical tradition, it is possible that both texts—the Hālāt and the Nur al-ʿolum—originated in Abu Saʿid’s shrine community before the mid 1150s, which would explain their shared dialectical features and also the reason for their association. This would also indicate that Lotfallāh had a local readership in mind for his hagiography, since he retained the features of his local dialect rather than composing the Hālāt in standard literary Persian. In short, although accounts of the shaykh’s sayings and deeds were written down as far back as the eleventh century, and perhaps in the lifetime of Abu Saʿid himself, these were primarily hyponēma—ad hoc notes and aides-memoirs for private use. The first hagiography, in the sense of an authorial work intended for public circulation, was the Hālāt of Lotfallāh. It did not aim to replace the oral tradition, however, but rather to complement and standardize it. It was written within the community and for the community, with the express aim of bolstering readers’ devotion to Abu Saʿid and his shrine. 16 An Endangered Legacy But this flourishing shrine complex, and the regional network that it anchored, was destroyed in the Ghuzz rebellions of the 1150s, meaning that Ebn Monavvar’s Asrār stands in a very different relationship to the oral tradition and community than its predecessor. Likely composed in Herat around 1178, several decades after the attacks, Ebn Monavvar describes the Ghuzz assault as catastrophic (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, clxviii).1 One hundred and fifteen descendants of Abu Saʿid were killed, and many others fled to other cities and regions (Ebn Monavvar, 4). The shrine itself seems to have remained standing, but other buildings that made up the complex were damaged or destroyed. All in all, the community was dispersed and activity at the complex more or less ceased. There seem to have been several phases of dispersal and destruction. The Ghuzz depredations, according to Ebn Monavvar, began exactly one hundred years after Abu Saʿid’s death (Ebn Monavvar, 341). If we accept this dating, it would mean that they commenced in 1146/540 by the lunar reckoning, or 1149 by the solar. But this was only the prelude to greater destruction. According to biographical sources from outside the community, five prominent descendants of of Abu Saʿid were killed by the Ghuzz in 1154-55/549 (four in Mayhana, one in Marv), which would be nine years after the centennial of the Shaykh’s death, and which corresponds with the most violent period of the Ghuzz depredations as known from other sources (Meier, 520-22). According to Ebn Monavvar, the majority of the shaykh’s descendants fled to ʿIraq, while he himself stayed in the region. In an attempt to rebuild the community, he journeyed to Marv and appealed for funds from Sultan Sanjar, who had himself just been released from Ghuzz captivity. Given a grant of cash and seed, which he used to establish a vaqf, Ebn Monav- 1. At one point Ebn Monavvar speaks of thirty-four years having passed since the attacks (342); if this is measured from the beginning of the period of Ghuzz depredations, which he places 100 years after Abu Saʿid’s death, this would mean Ebn Monavvar was writing in 574/1178. 17 var managed to attract around fifty people back to the shrine complex and to restart its cultic activities. But Sultan Sanjar died in 1157, and his successor was defeated by the Ghuzz in 1158. The Ghuzz raiders then returned to Khābarān, “and this time, they destroyed the complex (boqeʿa) completely, and things turned out how they did” (Ebn Monavvar, 349-51).1 Ebn Monavvar then left Mayhana for good, perhaps for Herat, where he would later compile the Asrār and eventually was buried (Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, clxv-clxvii). Still, the area was not completely abandoned. After a period of two years, a few people returned to Mayhana and took up residence in a small fortified area of the town. This fortification was “quite a ways” from the shrine complex, which no longer supported residents and was generally ruined. Still, an old man, one Mohammad ebn ʿAbd al-Eslām, continued to care for the tomb itself—which apparently was still standing—for a period of twenty years. Occasionally pilgrims would arrive, and Ebn Monavvar returned to Mayhana himself “after a long while,” but it seems to have only been a brief visit (Ebn Monavvar, 380-81). The shrine’s former prosperity, like that of Mayhana itself, lay in the past. The shrine would be repaired and embellished several times, once during the late twelfth or early thirteenth century—likely after the composition of the Asrār—and at least once during the Timurid period (Harrow, 206-7). Pilgrims would visit occasionally, and we have an account by the Safavid bureaucrat ShāhHosayn Sistāni, who arrived there around 1600. The shrine’s economic and spiritual importance, however, remained but a shadow of its former glory, and there is no indication that Abu Saʿid’s final resting place ever again supported a large community of dervishes as it had done during the early twelfth century. 1. Boqeʿa must indicate something more than just the tomb here, since the tomb itself was one of the few buildings to escape total destruction. 18 It was the destruction of this community, and the subsequent risk to the oral tradition that they maintained, which drove Ebn Monavvar to compile the Asrār. In former times, Ebn Monavvar nostalgically remarks, people did not need a written compilation of Abu Saʿid’s words and deeds because everyone memorized them. But with the scattering of the shaykh’s descendants and their followers, “out of what of had been remembered, much was forgotten because of the passing of time, worry for the children and survivors, and the various traumas and trials brought on from torture by the Ghuzz” (5). Ebn Monavvar’s primary purpose in compiling the Asrār was to set these accounts down in text so that “more of his [Abu Saʿid’s] deeds, states, and stations would remain among the people of this age and humankind writ large, so that some of that which has been effaced or obscured by the trials and tribulations of the Ghuzz might be recovered” (6-7). The Asrār is thus an attempt to preserve an oral tradition under threat. Whereas the Hālāt had been composed as a complement to a living oral tradition, the Asrār is meant to be its substitute: a literary, textual record that will survive the community’s decline. Ebn Monavvar, like many members of the community, had likely started collecting material as a young man living in Mayhana, and he may have even made written notes (hyponēma). The compilation of those notes into a massive hagiography, however, was motivated by the Ghuzz attacks (cf. Algar). Given these circumstances, it is unsurprising that the Asrār is much longer than the Hālāt: about five time longer, in fact. It is marked by an encyclopedic scope, as if Ebn Monavvar were eager to record as much reliable material from the community as he could manage. The work is dedicated to the Ghurid sultan Abu’l-Fath Mohammad b. Sām (d. 1203) and is composed of three books (bāb), which loosely correspond to the beginning, middle, and end of the Shaykh’s life. The first book focuses on his childhood and spiritual training. The second book includes separate sections devoted to the Shaykh’s miracles, sayings, prayers, and letters, as 19 well as the verses he recited. And the third book contains sections on his final testament, the circumstances of his death, and posthumous miracles. Whereas Lotfallāh “had travelled the route of brevity and condensation,” Ebn Monavvar claims to have compiled the most complete (jāmeʿ-tar) and beneficial (fāyeda-tar) compilation that a disciple had ever composed regarding the deeds and sayings of his pir (Ebn Monavvar, 6, 9). This is not only a matter of more stories, more sayings, and more miracle accounts, but also of fleshing out those items that had been previously included in the Hālāt with greater description and dialogue. The following passage is a typical example of the Hālāt’s abbreviated narrative style. It recounts how the Karrāmis and Hanbalis of Nishapur—presented as opponents of Abu Saʿid—reacted after Sultan Mahmud sent a letter approving their request to test Abu Saʿid’s orthodoxy: This letter arrived on Thursday during the evening prayer, and the Karrāmis and People of Reason were greatly delighted, and the People of Hadith and the Bench (soffa) and the devotees were all pained, and no one dared to tell the Shaykh about this event (51). Now compare this with the analogous passage in the Asrār: This ruling arrived on Thursday, and those that were deniers were delighted and sat together and said: “Tomorrow is Friday. On Saturday, we will call an assembly and string up the Shaykh and all the sufis on the gallows at the head of the market.” They all agreed on this, and rumors of it spread through the city, and those who were believers were pained, and all the sufis were saddened, and no one dared to speak to the Shaykh about it. But no one has to tell the Shaykh about any event, because he knows and sees whatever occurs by virtue of his miraculous foresight (69). Given similarities in vocabulary and the story’s position within the Asrār, it is clear that Ebn Monavvar had Lotfallāh’s work in front of him as he composed this passage. But he also significantly alters and expands on his source. The introduction of the term “sufi” is notable, as is his interest in clarifying motivation and causation. Ebn Monavvar has the deniers congregate 20 and explicitly articulate their plan to hang the Shaykh and his followers. Likewise, he explains exactly how the Shaykh’s disciples found out about this letter and the deniers’ nefarious intentions: specifically, rumors of the planned hanging had circulated throughout the city. Finally, he clarifies for his audience that the Shaykh already knew about this event because of his miraculous foresight. Over the long durée of Persian literary history, prose texts display increasing syntactic complexity, but the Asrār and Halāt were written only a few decades apart. These differences, then, cannot be easily attributed to global changes in Persian prose style. Rather, they are the result of a conscious rhetorical decision to both preserve the oral tradition and open it up to a new kind of audience. Compiled in the city Herat, a distance of 600 kilometers from community’s former center, Ebn Monavvar was forced to write for a broader, less devoted, and less informed audience than the disciples and pilgrims for whom Lotfallāh had been writing. Ebn Monavvar “fleshes out” the various stories to provide important context that, unlike Lotfallāh, he could not simply assume, such as Abu Saʿid’s gift of clairvoyance. Other elaborations, such the account of the deniers’ plan to hang Abu Saʿid, likely represent material in the oral tradition that Lotfallāh felt no need to record in his “abridgment” for a more familiar audience. Ebn Monavvar, however, had to include this material since his readers could not ask reciters or transmitters for elaboration or clarification. Given this broad readership, Ebn Monavvar also sought to standardize the particular idiosyncrasies of Abu Saʿid’s speech as it had been preserved in the oral and written hagiographic traditions. The unusual second-person plural ending -it, ubiquitous throughout the unique manuscript of Hālāt, was replaced with the standard -id in the Asrār.1 By recasting Abu 1. Compare, for example, Lotfallāh, 102 and Ebn Monavvar, 337-38. 21 Saʿid’s sayings into a standard Persian literary idiom, Ebn Monavvar makes them more accessible for a literary public that far exceeds the local readership of the Hālāt. Indeed, other editorial interventions in Abu Saʿid’s sayings are explained by Ebn Monavvar in his introduction in precisely these terms. In particular, he refers to Abu Saʿid’s unusual habit of referring to himself in the third-person plural, which he changes to first-person plural for the benefit of readers from outside of the Mayhana tradition.1 The passage is worth quoting in full: Know that our Shaykh never said “I” or “we.” Whenever he referred to himself, he would say: “they (ishān) said such-and-such, they did such-and-such.” If in this collection, this well-wisher, for the sake blessings (tabarrok), were to maintain this particular usage and construction just as it was uttered by his blessed tongue, then it would land far from the understanding of the general populace. Some readers—most of them, in fact—would be lead into error in terms of form and meaning. They would not be able to constantly keep in mind that the Shaykh would refer to himself with “they” (ishān), and so it would be difficult for them. In particular those people would fall into error who have not read this introduction to the book and noted this point, but simply picked it up with the aim of reading an anecdote. Thus, with this excuse, wherever the Shaykh has uttered “they,” this well-wisher has recorded it as “we,” since this is the common and expected usage, and will thus be easier for readers to understand (15). This bit of meta-discursive commentary is noteworthy for several reasons, not least because it gives us some idea of how people read lengthy compilations: starting form the beginning was not necessarily to be taken for granted. But it also shows the steps Ebn Monnavvar was willing to take to make his work intelligible to a wide audience. The great Iranian literary critic of the twentieth century, Malek al-Shoʿarā Bahār, famously argued that pre-modern scribes were reluctant to change the sayings of sufi saints, and, all things being equal, Ebn Monavvar also displays a preference for leaving them unchanged. As he puts it, there are “blessings” to be had in retaining the exact manner of Abu Saʿid’s speech. But, because he is attempting to make Abu 1. It should be noted that this usage does not appear in the Hālāt. It must therefore refer to sayings in the oral tradition, or perhaps informal written sources. 22 Saʿid’s legacy understandable for those without access to or familiarity with the community’s oral traditions, he decides to standardize Abu Saʿid’s sayings and bring them closer to “common and expected usage,” so that they “will be easier for readers to understand.” As he seeks to textualize the oral tradition as far as possible, he must also translate the community’s “inspeak” into a form understandable to outsiders. In other ways, too, Ebn Monavvar curates his material to make it accessible and spiritually valuable for a readership that is presumably sympathetic to mysticism and saint veneration, but is nonetheless uninitiated into his own community’s customs and traditions. For example, he removes the chains of transmission that would have accompanied the sayings and anecdotes when they were formally transmitted within shrine community “for the sake of brevity and concision, and to ward off boredom and tedium” (8). This does not imply that Ebn Monavvar was unconcerned with the authenticity of these reports—on the contrary, as he assures readers elsewhere, he strives to verify everything he transmits—but rather that the chains of transmission would have been of little use for readers outside of a community of disciples familiar with the transmitters, their reputations, and their contexts (6, 54).1 Similarly, he chooses not to follow Lotfallāh, who, in his Hālāt, introduces each chapter with an Arabic hadith and full esnād from Abu Saʿid or a subsequent leader of the community all the way back to the Prophet. Ebn Monavvar imagined a broad but educated readership that would have understood Arabic—he includes more of the Shaykh’s Arabic sayings than Lotfallāh—but they would not have had detailed knowledge of the community’s oral tradition or its carriers, nor would they 1. Despite this explanation, Ebn Monavvar does often provide esnāds, or at least the name of the first transmitter. Furthermore, when Ebn Monavvar relies directly on the text of Lotfallāh, he does not remove the chains of transmission provided by the latter. When discussing the omission of esnāds, therefore, he must be referring to other sources, perhaps the oral tradition in general, or informal written aides-memoirs. 23 have been invested in a hadith esnād legitimizing the pious bone fides of Abu Saʿid’s descendants. Judging from the manuscript evidence, Ebn Monavvar was successful in his efforts to preserve and popularize Abu Saʿid’s legacy. Whereas Lotfallāh’s Hālāt is known to us from only a single manuscript, at least eleven copies of the Asrār have been identified, dating from the early 1400s (Storey, I.2, 929-930; Monzavi, II.1, 1028; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, 2010, I, ccxxx).1 Although such numbers can only be a rough guide, they suggest that the Asrār was, over the long term, a more popular text with a greater reach. True, many manuscripts of the Hālāt may have been destroyed in the Ghuzz rebellions, which would have limited its chances of further dissemination. This is, however, precisely the point: the Hālāt emerged and circulated within a specific, sociologically bounded community, and its own fortunes were closely tied to that group. It must have continued to have been copied occasionally after the shrine community was destroyed—the unique extant manuscript dates from 1299—but it was soon displaced by the Asrār, a more complete and linguistically standardized text that was self-consciously directed to a broad audience without access to the Abu Saʿid oral tradition. Textually Transmitted Baraka Even though he dropped the chains of transmission and standardized the language, Ebn Monavvar still had to provide reliable accounts of Abu Saʿid’s life and sayings if he was to meet his religious and rhetorical goals: namely, to provide readers with a conduit to Abu Saʿid’s blessings. In many mystical circles, there was a belief that saintly figures were God’s representatives on earth who mediated between him and his creatures. Saints could thus harness divine 1. Two of these manuscripts are abridgments. 24 power to miraculously aid their devotees or punish their deniers, even from beyond the grave. This charismatic power, or baraka, was closely associated with the saint’s body, and many of the miracle stories in the Asrār, as well the hagiographical tradition more broadly, involve touch or other forms of bodily contact. After Abu Saʿid’s death, when his descendants were leading the community and managing the tomb, disciples would undertake pilgrimages to the shrine and visit relics of the Shaykh so they could obtain the blessings of his continuing baraka. With the destruction of the shrine community, however, old vectors for the distribution of baraka were disrupted. In response to this situation, Ebn Monavvar’s work implies a new model of baraka, in which the saint’s words themselves, codified within the text of the Asrār, become the primary route for accessing his spiritual blessings. The Asrār, like most hagiographies, is full of miracle stories that demonstrate the power inherent in the body of its saintly hero. What is noteworthy, however, is that many of these miracle stories focus on the Shaykh’s mouth as a particularly potent source of spiritual favor. For example, in one memorable anecdote, a woman’s blindness is cured when, on Abu Saʿid’s instructions, she dips his used toothpick (khalāl) into a glass of water which she then uses to wash her eyes (Ebn Monavvar, 73-74; Lotfallāh, 58-60). According to another anecdote, Abu Saʿid gave three toothpicks that he had carved himself to Bu ʿAmr Bokhshavāni, who then established a khānaqāh in the environs of Nasā. Bokhshavāni would dip the toothpicks in water, which he would then distribute to the sick, who would be cured “through the baraka of both shaykhs” (Ebn Monavvar, 154). The toothpick, a lowly item connected to bodily hygiene, is not usually gifted to one’s subordinates; that Abu Saʿid’s disciples would treasure these quotidian, largely disposable items is thus a sign of their submission and devotion. At the same time, the toothpick is an intimate, bodily instrument, penetrating the Shaykh’s body through the orifice of the mouth, contacting areas between the teeth that are otherwise inaccessible, and absorb25 ing fluids. When his disciples then submerge these toothpicks in water, the moisture recalls and activates the Shaykh’s saliva, which infuses the water and is thereby transferred into the patient who drinks it. The toothpick thus provides a procedure for accessing the shaykh’s body through mediated oral contact across time and space. A number of other stories riff on this theme, showing how the saint’s blessings flow through indirect oral contact, mediated by various objects. For instance, according to a tradition found in the Asrār, the famous Hanbali sufi ʿAbdallāh Ansāri was, as a young man, afflicted by a condition in which he would swear uncontrollably. One day, however, he met Abu Saʿid, who was eating a turnip. Having eaten half of it himself, the Sahykh then placed the remainder in Ansāri’s mouth. After that, Ansāri never uttered obscenities again (Ebn Monavvar, 230). In still another anecdote, Abu Saʿid is invited to blow on a jug of water, so that a sick person may drink it and be healed (Ebn Monavvar, 267). After Abu Saʿid’s death, his shrine, as his body’s final resting place, became a locus of spiritual power for his descendants and followers. Indeed, Lotfallāh equates the “sanctified shrine” (rowza-ye moqaddas) with Abu Saʿid’s “blessed body” (shakhs-e maymun) and implores God to never deny humanity its benefits (110). A number of miracles recounted by both Lotfallah and Ebn Monavvar take place at the tomb, demonstrating the continuing activity of Abu Saʿid’s spirit as protector and patron of his community. Even though Abu Saʿid was no longer alive to distribute turnips or toothpicks, he still wielded spiritual dominion over Mayhana and especially the shrine itself; it was a place where the prayers of pilgrims were answered, and God “provide[d] for any need” (Lotfallāh, 138). For Ebn Monavvar, the site’s spiritual power was metonymically indexed by the myrtle tree Abu Saʿid planted there with his “own blessed hand” (dastkesht-e mobārak-e Shaykh). When studying with Bu’l-Fazl Hasan as a young man, Abu Saʿid allegedly turned away from the exoteric sciences, buried all of his books, and then 26 planted a myrtle tree over them. According to Ebn Monavvar, the myrtle was always green and healthy, and residents of Mayhana would make use of its branches when their children were born and when enshrouding their dead. Pilgrims visiting the area would cut branches from the tree to take home with them as blessing-bestowing souvenirs. The tree remained vibrant until the Ghuzz depredations, when it began to decline, and “its condition worsens every day and it will not be long until, like his other relics (ās̱ār-e mobāraka-ye u) it ceases to exist” (42). Even if the tomb itself was still standing, with the scattering of the shrine community Abu Saʿid’s baraka had begun to wilt. One of Ebn Monavvar’s primary—if unstated—motivations for compiling the Asrār was to open a new route for accessing Abu Saʿid’s spiritual blessings in the absence of the shrine community. By preserving the shaykh’s sayings and deeds in a fixed form, he created a textual object imbued with the saint’s baraka. As a literary relic, the Asrār distributes the spiritual blessings of Abu Saʿid, not just to a specific group of pilgrims and resident dervishes, but to a virtual community of readers; whoever picks up the manuscript is invited to partake of the blessings contained therein. Given this attempt to textually transmit the saint’s baraka, Ebn Monavvar frequently casts Abu Saʿid’s sayings and aphorisms as physical extensions of his body. He repeatedly characterizes verses and sayings as having “fallen from the shaykh’s blessed tongue” (zafān-e mobārak) or “from his blessed lips” (lafz-e mobārak), and variations of this formula are found dozens of time throughout the Asrār.1 The term is constructed according to a paradigm in which body parts of the Shaykh are described as “blessed” (mobārak), especially in a context is which their blessings might “rub off” onto nearby physical objects, and from there be transferred to pilgrims and devotees. Thus the myrtle tree was planted by his 1. For examples, see p. 6, 36, 142, 179, 243, 329, 334, inter alia. 27 “blessed hand”; the cloak on display at Mayhana had once covered his “blessed breast” and been penetrated by his “blessed finger”; and, now, the sayings and verses collected by Ebn Monavvar are described as having passed his “blessed lips.” These repeated references to the blessed tongue and lips, whether used consciously or not, emphasize the bodily origins of the sayings collected in the Asrār and thus their potential to channel the shaykh’s spiritual blessings to readers who engage the text. The tendency to materialize and embody speech is also present in the term favāʾed-e anfās, used by both Lotfallāh and Ebn Monavvar to refer to the Shaykh’s aphorisms, and which might be translated as “useful exhalations.” The dicta of spiritual heroes are often called favāʾed in Perso-Arabic sacred biography, a term that connects to notions of utility (fāʾeda) and points to the pragmatic aims of the genre. The sayings of the saints are valuable tools for shaping oneself and the world and thereby bring benefit to those who learn and engage with them. Within the Abu Saʿid hagiographical tradition, however, the dicta are also often referred to as anfās, or “breaths.” The terms favāʾed and anfās are used seemingly interchangeably, and they also appear together in the compound favāʾed-e anfās: utility is thus directly connected to the breath of the saint.1 His dicta are not just words, but exhalations; their sounds have been formed by the flesh of his mouth and the air of his lungs. By engaging with these texts, readers can not only learn something useful, but establish a more intimate, bodily connection with the saint. By mouthing his aphorisms, they intermingle their breath with his. This terminology takes on special significance in the Asrār when read in conjunction with Ebn Monavvar’s focus on the Shaykh’s sayings and verses as physical extensions of his lips and tongue, which are in turn presented as bodily sources of spiritual blessings. In the absence of physical relics, the work 1. See Lotfallāh 10, 81, 96; Ebn Monavvar, 4, 54, 189, 191, 243. 28 thematizes the physicality and spiritual power of speech, which, ironically, is elided with the written word as a carrier of baraka. Within the Asrār, the saint’s body itself is made available through textual renderings his (oral) speech. The spiritual power of textualized speech is encapsulated in a subtle but significant change Ebn Monavvar makes to a conventional optative wish in the earlier hagiography. Near the end of his text, Lotfallāh prays for the continued efficacy of the shrine as channel for the Shaykh’s spiritual blessings: “May God not cut the people off from the blessing (baraka) of that holy body and sanctified shrine!” (110). Ebn Monavvar, by contrast, makes no mention of the shrine, but prays for the maintenance and efficacy of the shaykh’s sayings: “May God not cut us and the rest of the people off from the blessings (barakāt) of the Shaykh’s aspiration and precious exhalations! (anfās-e ʿaziz)!” (54). In light of the decimation of the community and the destruction of the Mayhana complex, the shaykh’s “exhalations,” conveniently translated into a textual form by Ebn Monavvar himself, have replaced the saint’s shrine as the locus of his spiritual power for a new brand of literary devotee. In hindsight, the Asrār appears to have been a natural progression from the Hālāt, but it would not have seemed that way to Ebn Monavvar. If the community had not been dispersed, he likely would have never have put pen to paper, or if he had, the resulting text would probably have looked a lot more like the Hālāt: a condensed, semi-public aide-memoire directed to an audience of insiders and initiates, not a broad literary public. Before the Ghuzz assault, the shrine community had no need for a work like the Asrār, and after the assault, it could not recover its previous success, despite the Asrār’s popularity. Indeed, the compilation of the Asrār seems to have been something of a plan B for Ebn Monavvar, whose career as the shaykh of the Mayhana shrine clearly did not go exactly as planned. In the 1150s, he had acted as a local notable, leading a community of regional importance and securing fiscal benefits for his faction 29 from Sultan Sanjar. In the 1170s, by contrast, he presented himself to the Ghurid sultan not as a local notable, but as an author seeking patronage for a textual compilation of a saint’s dicta and feats. The Asrār is clearly a religious text, and Ebn Monavvar certainly had a special connection to the material, being the erstwhile leader of the community. Nonetheless, the change in social position is striking, as is the nature of the authority he performs: having lost his socio-spiritual dominion over a specific region and community, he compiles a religo-literary work for a mystically minded public in the hopes of royal patronage instead. Conclusion: The Rise of a Persian Literary Sufism The Asrār is far more than a simple expansion or continuation of the earlier Hālāt; it is a major reorientation of hagiography for a new kind of audience. In these two works, we can trace the development of the Abu Saʿid hagiographical tradition from early compilations designed to serve as aides-memoirs, circulating within a thriving shrine community and complementing a living oral tradition, to an unabashedly textual and encyclopedic work targeting a wide readership beyond any particular sociological community tied to Abu Saʿid and his tomb. The process of textualization that culminated in the Asrār was an act of lexical and social translation, through which the shrine community’s knowledge was reshaped in literary Persian to accord with the tastes, expectations, and capabilities of a broad reading public of sympathetic outsiders. This process was not an inevitable one, but the result of the community’s dispersal at the hands of the Ghuzz. Nonetheless, it was only possible because Ebn Monavvar, writing in the 1170s, was able to imagine an new kind of reader for his hagiography: someone sympathetic to sufism and saint veneration, who had perhaps heard of Abu Saʿid and respected him, but who was not affiliated with the then-dispersed community of devotees that Ebn Monavvar was 30 no longer attempting to reconstitute. The fact that Ebn Monavvar was able to imagine such a reader shows the extent to which sufism had become a dominant mode of piety in the region, closely bound up with saint veneration, a process that has been well noted in the scholarship (Karamustafa, 2007, 130-34). But the Asrār’s success also reflects two related trends that are no less significant to the religious history of Iran: the “literization” of sufism, and the concomitant vernacularization of sufi piety. Prior to the twelfth century, most sufi texts produced in Iran were written in Arabic for a class of experts and circulated in school contexts: the manuals of Qushayri, Kalābāẕi, and Sarrāj are prime examples, as are the bio-hagiographical works of Solami and Abu Noʿaym Isfahāni. The production of specialized texts continued, but by the twelfth century authors began to write texts in literary Persian that self-consciously targeted a broad, mystically minded public beyond any specific school or shrine community: this includes hagiographies like Ebn Monavvar’s Asrār and ʿAttār’s Taẕkerat al-owleyā, as well as non-hagiographical works like Ghazzāli’s Kimiā-ye saʿādat. Even as sufism became more institutionalized, sufi writers were increasingly able to envision and address an anonymous, sympathetic readership beyond their own institutional affiliations and self-confidently intervene in their material for rhetorical and aesthetic reasons. As part of this trend to speak to broader audiences, sufi texts began to be written in literary Persian, the dominant vernacular. The vernacularization of sufism implied that Persian was an appropriate vehicle for religious information, but also that engagement with Persian literary texts could be a religiously productive act. For Ebn Monavvar, the Persian sayings and verses of Abu Saʿid, recorded in a text and re-tooled for broad readership, carry his baraka; over the next century, mystically minded authors like Rumi and ʿAttār intervened in stories of saints and prophets even more, setting them in Persian verse and presenting them to their readers as sites for religious meaning-making. 31 Ebn Monavvar’s Asrār, like most hagiographies in the Islamic tradition, has been examined primarily for what it can tell us Abu Saʿid and his community. This is certainly a worthy scholarly endeavor, and one which has born much fruit. 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