(22105956 - Journal of Sufi Studies) The Yasaviyya in The Nasā Im Al-Ma Abba of Alī Shīr Navā Ī - A Case Study in Central Asian Hagiography

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66
brill.com/jss
The Yasaviyya in the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba of

ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī: A Case Study in Central Asian
Hagiography
Nicholas Walmsley
Indiana University Bloomington (USA)
Abstract
The Timurid statesman and poet ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī (d. 906/1501) was the author of the first
biographical dictionary (taẕkira) of Sufi saints to be written in the Central Asian dialect
of Chaghatay Turkic. Although he started it as a translation of Nafaḥāt al-uns by Jāmī, he
expanded upon that work by including many saints from Khurasan, India, and
Turkestan. Of particular note are his entries for a clutch of Sufis associated with Aḥmad
Yasavī, whom he described as the mashāʾīkh-i turk—the Turkish shaykhs. This was the
first substantial overview of these saints in hagiographical literature, even though they
had been active since the seventh/thirteenth century. The problem for historians is that
Navāʾī supplies little by way of chronology for these saints, nor does he provide a clear
indication of his sources. The problem for scholars of Sufism is that he provides little
information on issues of doctrine or praxis. What is significant about this survey is its
emphasis on the importance of hereditary descent among the shaykhs, suggesting that
what was key to uniting them was not an institutional framework, but one of common
genealogies from one of the immediate successors of Aḥmad Yasavī.
Résumé
Le homme d’État et poète timouride ʿAlī Shīr Navaʾī (m. 906/1501) est l’auteur du
premier dictionnaire biographique (taẕkira) de saints soufis à être écrit dans le dia-
lecte d’Asie centrale de Tchaghataï. Bien que ce livre ait été conçu comme une tra-
duction du Nafaḥāt al-uns de Jāmī, Navaʾī l’a étendu en incluant de nombreux saints
du Khorassan, d’Inde et du Turkestan. D’intérêt particulier sont ses entrées sur un
groupe de soufis associés à Aḥmad Yasavī qu’il décrit comme mashāʾīkh-i turk (« les
cheikhs turcs »). Bien qu’ils aient été actifs depuis les VIIe et XIIIe siècles, ce fut la
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/22105956-12341261

Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM
via Aletheia University
A Case Study in Central Asian Hagiography 39
première présentation substantielle sur ces saints dans la littérature hagiographique.

Le problème pour les historiens est que Navāʾī fournit peu de détails chronologiques
sur ces saints, ou d’indication claire sur ses sources. Le problème pour les chercheurs
du soufisme est qu’il fournit peu d’information sur les questions de doctrine ou de
pratique. Ce qui est important dans cette étude est l’accent mis sur l’importance de
l’hérédité chez les cheikhs, ce qui laisse supposer que ce qui était central pour les
unir les uns avec les autres n’était pas d’avoir un cadre institutionnel, mais plutôt
d’avoir des généalogies communes avec un des successeurs immédiat d’Aḥmad
Yasavī.
Keywords
Aḥmad Yasavī – ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī – biography – genealogy – hagiography – Nasāʾim

al-maḥabba – Sufism – taẕkira – translation – Yasaviyya
Introduction
It is unfortunate that ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī himself described his Nasāʾim al-maḥabba
as a “translation” of the better-known Nafaḥāt al-uns by Jāmī, and thus obscur-
ing its true value, for on three counts it should be considered an important and
original work in its own right: first, as the earliest surviving biographical
dictionary (taẕkira, lit. “reminder, remembrance, memorial”) of Sufi saints
composed in the Central Asian dialect of Chaghatay Turkic; second, as the lon-
gest prose work by Navāʾī; and third, as a major source for the study of several
hundred Sufi shaykhs, including the Yasaviyya, who are the subject of this dis-
cussion. However, it was not by that name that Navāʾī referred to this amor-
phous group of shaykhs and dervishes, arranged by either hereditary or
initiatory lineages, whose fountainhead appeared to be a saint of sixth/twelfth-
(and, probably, seventh/thirteenth-) century Turkestan (the region immedi-
ately north of modern-day Tashkent) called Aḥmad or Atā Yasavī, but rather
by the term mashāʾīkh-i turk—the Turkish shaykhs. This term, which had been
in currency since the seventh/thirteenth century, was used by Navāʾī to encap-
sulate not just the successors of Aḥmad Yasavī, but also other Sufi groups (for
example, the ʿIshqiyya) whose members were active in Turkestan and Khorezm.
That said, even the term itself is misleading, for the Turkish shaykhs, as catego-
rized by Navāʾī, were also active in the Persianate areas of Mawarannahr and
Khurasan, their literary legacy is primarily in Persian, and it is from Persian
sources that we learn the most about them.
journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

40 Walmsley
In re-asserting the importance of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba as a source for

the study of Sufism, we need re-think two key aspects of the work itself and
one key aspect of classical approaches to the study of Sufism. Firstly, regarding
its origins, the Nasāʾim is not merely a “translation.” This is a term that encap-
sulates a whole range of processes and editorial decisions in which the transla-
tor (who in fact assumes the role of co-author) must endeavor to produce in
the target language a close approximation of the form, content and spirit of
the subject work, without slavish devotion to like-for-like substitution of
vocabulary, syntax and grammar, and without superimposing his or her voice.1
The Nasāʾim is not that, for the translated sections are intermingled with a sub-
stantial volume of original material, based on Navāʾī’s own researches. Secondly,
the work is both generic and non-generic, for while Navāʾī situates his work,
and that of Jāmī’s within the taẕkira tradition, the origins of both works reflect
unique socio-historical circumstances. One (the Nafaḥāt) was written by a
master at the request of a pupil, the other (the Nasāʾim) was written by an
author outside Sufi circles, pursuing his own literary project. The Nasāʾim
al-maḥabba still succeeds as a taẕkira, because it is constructed with capsule
biographies, which Chase Robinson describes as the “building block” of such
works,2 and within each lies wealth of data on individual Sufi shaykhs about
whom we know very little from other sources. While the entries do not always
provide us with the fundamental details of the individual’s life—full name,
genealogy (nasab), reputation, training/career, date of death3—they still allow
us to construct a broader picture of Sufi life in Central Asia up to the end of the
ninth/fifteenth century, in particular those of the “Turkish shaykhs” closely
associated with the hereditary and initiatory successors of Aḥmad Yasavī.
Thirdly, it is not clear that the Yasaviyya constituted an order by the time Navāʾī
was writing, by which I mean a body of Sufis unified by adherence to a com-
mon history, practices, and beliefs, an established hierarchy, and defined pro-
cesses of initiation and promotion. In short, it lacked an institutional
framework.4 As will become clear, one of the elements that distinguished
Navāʾī’s coverage of the “Turkish shaykhs” from that of near contemporaries
1 See the comments of e.g. Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), 10.
2
Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 68.
3 Ibid., 70.
4 When I refer to the “Turkish shaykhs” in the ninth/fifteenth century and earlier as “Yasaviyya,”
I do so anachronistically.

and later hagiographers was the absence of a hierarchical structure, a sustain-

ing feature of any Sufi “order.”
With these three adjustments in mind, we can begin to reconsider the value
of the Nasāʾim as a source on Central Asian Sufism, with the Yasaviyya serving
as a case study. The Nasāʾim al-maḥabba has suffered for the fact that relatively
few copies have survived, and it was not widely utilized by Muslim authors of
the medieval and early-modern period as a source for Sufi hagiography. The
paucity of surviving copies, and the baleful influence of the attitudes towards
the work outlined above, have restricted its influence and historical signifi-
cance, and thus denuded its purpose as a biographical dictionary, containing
original material from a range of sources, written and oral.
The originality of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba, and in particular the utility of
the material on the “Turkish shaykhs,” can be demonstrated in a three-stage
process. First, I will examine the origins of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba and its
relationship to the Nafaḥāt al-uns, a process described by both authors, and
symbolic of the symbiotic relationship that bound both men together as
friends and competitors. Key to understanding this relationship is the Khamsat
al-mutaḥayyirīn, Navāʾī’s memoir of Jāmī, in which he describes the origins of
Jāmī’s decision to write the Nafaḥāt and the subsequent decision to translate
the work into Turkic. Navāʾī, however, was not merely translating the Nafaḥāt:
he was using his adaption of it as the kernel for his own hagiographical project,
which was to include additional material culled from a range of different
sources not utilized by Jāmī, including those relating to the Turkish shaykhs.
The non-inclusion of the “early saints of Turkestan” (as Ivanow styles them) in
the Nafaḥāt has long been noted; it seems astonishing in retrospect that Jāmī
could not have known of them.5
In the second part of the discussion, I examine Navāʾī’s presentation of the
“Turkish shaykhs.” We know that he was referring principally to the successors
of Aḥmad Yasavī when he used the term “Turkish shaykhs” to describe them.
This term had appeared in Sufi literature since the seventh/thirteenth century,
but Navāʾī was not describing an order based on chains of transmission (sil-
sila). Navāʾī never uses the term Yasaviyya, which only enters currency in the
tenth/sixteenth century, when hagiographers construct a history of the Yasavi
shaykhs around the principle of the silsila. In fact, his presentation of the
“Turkish shaykhs” appears messy and haphazard, beginning with the position-
ing of Aḥmad Yasavī in the work, somewhat apart from the entries on Yūsuf
Hamadānī, ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī and the Naqshbandi shaykhs, with
5 W. Ivanow, “The Sources of Jami’s Nafahat,” Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal (hereafter JPASB) 18, n.s. (1922): 388.

42 Walmsley
whom the Yasaviyya are often closely linked in later hagiographical literature.
He does not, however, name his sources. This makes the task of identifying and
exploring early hagiographical traditions about the Yasaviyya somewhat frus-
trating because written sources for them before Navāʾī are scanty, hence the
significance of his work. Therefore, the concision of many of the entries for the
“Turkish shaykhs” could be regarded as an accurate reflection of the paucity of
information about them, and the emphasis on hereditary descent reflects the
organization of the “Turkish shaykhs” along not institutional, but communal
lines, taking as their starting point a shaykh of Turkestan and his followers.6
Consequently, the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba is an important stage in the history of
Central Asian hagiographic traditions and in the history of Central Asian Sufi
orders; most significantly, it is the first major hagiographical work to demon-
strate the interlocking nature of religious life in the adjoining regions of
Khorezm, Khurasan, Mawarannahr, and Turkestan.
Yasavi shaykhs active during Navāʾī’s time and in the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury constitute the third and final part of my discussion. In addition to the
Nasāʾim al-maḥabba, we can draw upon a broad range of materials that relate
directly or indirectly to the Yasaviyya: better known hagiographical works,
such as Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt; hagiographies of little known saints, like the
Hasht ḥadīqa (or Ḥadāʾiq al-jinān); taẕkiras of poets, as in the Muẕakkir-i
aḥbāb; or regnal histories, for example the Tārīkh-i Abū l-Khayr Khānī. These
works indicate that the “Turkish shaykhs” were present throughout the settled
regions of Central Asia, were often deeply entrenched within the ruling classes,
and sometimes constituted whole settlements. But these accounts were mostly
written by authors looking in from the outside; only the Muẕakkir-i aḥbāb,
composed by a descendant of Zangī Atā, can be regarded as an internal source,
and even then the Yasaviyya are not the main focus of the work. The first uni-
versal treatment of the Yasaviyya does not appear until the eleventh/seven-
teenth century. Compared with most of these works, the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba
6 In emphasizing the importance of communal affiliation based on common descent, I draw
heavily on the arguments of Devin DeWeese. In addition to works cited later, see also by him,
“The Descendants of Sayyid Ata and the Rank of Naqīb in Central Asia,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 115.4 (1995): 612–34; and idem, “The Politics of Sacred Lineages in
19th-Century Central Asia: Descent Groups Linked to Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi in Shrine
Documents and Genealogical Charters,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999):
507–30; on the need to move away from an analysis of Sufism based on the idea of orders, see
his “Dis‘Ordering’ Sufism in Early Modern Central Asia: Suggestions for Rethinking the
Sources and Special Structures of Sufi History in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” in History and
Culture of Central Asia, ed. Yayoi Kawahara and Bakhtiyar Babajanov (Tokyo: University of
Tokyo, 2012), 259–79.

retains its uniqueness in two aspects: as the first work to provide accounts of
most of the major “Turkish shaykhs” from the time of Aḥmad Yasavī up to the
late ninth/fifteenth century; and as the only broad survey to avoid the empha-
sis on hierarchy and historical continuity that defines later accounts.
The Composition of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba
Navāʾī began working on Nasāʾim al-maḥabba in 901/1495–6, initially by trans-

lating the Nafaḥāt al-uns. Twenty years had passed since the completion of the
Nafaḥāt, and “with God’s guidance I turned my hand to this task and I set
the pen to this great duty.”7 He describes the principal groups of individuals he
added, namely “some of the great shaykhs” from the Taẕkirat al-awliyāʾ of Farīd
al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, whom Jāmī had omitted from the Nafaḥāt, and both Turkish
shaykhs from Aḥmad Yasavī and Indian saints from Shaykh [Farīd al-Dīn]
Shakarganj (fl. sixth–seventh/twelfth–thirteenth centuries) up to the time of
writing. Another important group was that of mainly local shaykhs who had
died in-between the completion of the Nafaḥāt and the commencement of the
Nasāʾim. The composition of the Nasāʾim marks the second stage of a process
which Navāʾī himself (if we are to believe his account) had initiated. In the
third section (maqālāt) of the Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn, his memoir of Jāmī,
Navāʾī describes the three great Sufi taẕkiras of the fifth/eleventh and sixth/
7 Alisher Navoiy, Nasoyimul muhabbat min shamoyimil futuvvat, ed. Hamidkhon Islomiy
(Tashkent: Movarounnahr, 2011), 1. This is an edition in Arabic script based on a collation of
three of the earliest surviving manuscripts. All references are to this edition (unless other-
wise noted); other published editions (not in Arabic script) include Alī-şīr Nevāyī, Nesāyimü’l-
maḥabbe min şemāyimi’l-fütüvve, ed. Kemal Eraslan, vol. 1, 2 vols., ‘Alî-şîr Nevâyî Külliyâti 12
(Ankara: Atatürk Kültür, Dil ve Tarih Yüksek Kurumu, 1996); and Alisher Navoiy, Nasoyimul
muhabbat min shamoyimil futuvvat, Mukammal asarlar to’plami 17 (Tashkent: Fan, 2001);
extracts of the material on the Turkish shaykhs have been published in Carl Brockelmann,
“Newā’īs Biographien türkischer und zeit genössischer Mystiker,” in Documenta islamica
inedita, ed. Johann Fück (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1952), 221–49; and M. Fuad Köprülü,
“‘Orta-asya Türk dervişliği hakkında bazı notlar,” Türkiyat Mecmuası 14 (1965): 259–62.
Manuscripts consulted for this study include Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, Nasāʾim al-maḥabba, MS
Asiatic Society of Bengal (Kolkata), Tk. 1069 III Col.; idem, Nasāʾīm al-maḥabba, MS British
Library (London), Or. 402; idem, Kullīyāt-i Navāʾī, MSS Bibliothèque nationale de France
(Paris), Supplément turc nos. 316–17, fols. 22b–154a; idem, Nasāʾim al-maḥabba, MS Oriental
Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan (Tashkent), Fond I, 1828; and
idem, Nasāʾim al-maḥabba, MS Oriental Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of
Uzbekistan (Tashkent), Fond I, 857.

44 Walmsley
twelfth centuries—the Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya of Khoja ʿAbdallāh Anṣarī,8 the

Taẕkirat al-awliyāʾ of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār,9 and the Ṭabaqāt Sulamī of Abū ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān Sulamī10—and then he remarks, “no book had an account of the
great shaykhs and honorable saints who appeared in the four or five centuries
after the abovementioned works.”11 It occurs to Navāʾī that such a work is pre-
cisely what is needed, and presents this idea to Jāmī. By chance, “exactly the
same notion had apparently occurred to his blessed mind; however, he had
been detained and delayed because of certain impediments.”12 Jāmī then sets
about composing the Nafaḥāt, and presents each completed page to Navāʾī for
his inspection.
There are numerable fascinating dynamics at play: the obvious one is the
relationship between patron and writer, in which Navāʾī encourages Jāmī on a
new literary endeavor. This, however, is a tidy inversion of the Sufi relationship
between master and pupil, in which rather than the pupil producing work at
his master’s behest, it is the pupil who encourages the master to write. There is
also the dynamic in which two major writers of Herat effectively collaborate, in
a loose sense, to produce a pair of complementary hagiographical dictionaries
that encompass all the major figures of Central Asian Sufism. When we talk
about collaboration here, we do not mean in the pro-active sense of two col-
leagues working alongside each other, but rather in the reactive sense of one
author revising the work of a predecessor to produce a new redaction that cov-
ers the gaps left in the first recension. That said, we might query the reliability
of Navāʾī’s version of events, and the flattering light they present him in. It is
very much in the nature of Khamsat al-mutaḥayyirīn for Navāʾī to situate him-
self at key junctures in the life and works of Jāmī. We can further interpret the
sub-text of the narrative of creation surrounding both the Nafaḥāt and the
Nasāʾim as a process in which Navāʾī comes to realize the imperfections of
Jāmī’s work, and sets out to correct them.
It is not necessary to revisit all the differences between the two works in
terms of structure and content; these have been adequately described else-
8 For a description of this work, see Charles Ambrose Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-
Bibliographical Survey, vol. 1 (London: Luzac and Co., 1953), 926.
9 For a description of this work, see ibid., 930–3.
10 Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1943), 218–19;
and idem, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, Supp. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1937), 361–2.
11 Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Navāʾī, Khamsat al-mutahayyirīn, MS Bibliothèque nationale de France
(Paris), Supplément turc no. 970, fol. 48a; and Alī-şīr Nevāyī, Ḫamsetü’l-Müteḥayyirīn, ed.
Ayşehan Deniz Abik (Ankara: Seçkin, 2006), 48.
12 Navāʾī, Khamsat al-mutahayyirīn, fol. 48a; and Nevāyī, Ḫamsetü’l-Müteḥayyirīn, 48.

where.13 That said, it is worth noting the salient differences, if only to re-
emphasize the point that Navāʾī’s work was more than just a “translation”: it
was a re-conceptualization of an entire work. Navāʾī was not merely rendering
in Turkic what Jāmī had written in Persian; he was imagining what Jāmī might
have written in Turkic (had he been capable of doing so), and imagining what
Jāmī might have written had he had access to a wider range of sources. Where
Jāmī provides capsule biographies of 616 Sufi saints, Navāʾī provides 770 (of
whom thirty-five were women); Navāʾī duplicated 556 entries from the Nafaḥāt,
and added a further nineteen from the Taẕkirat al-awliyāʾ, as well as eighty-four
Indian and 111 Turkish shaykhs.14 These entries added geographical dimensions
to Navāʾī’s work that were missing from the Nafaḥāt and expanded the network
of vibrant Sufi communities in Turkestan and India.
The addition of the so-called “Indian shaykhs” (Hind mashāʾīkhī) serves as a
good example of this expanded and integrated geographical range. The entry
for Shaykh Farīd al-Dīn Ganj-i Shakar (whom Navāʾī styles “Shaykh Farīd
Shakarganj”) follows those of two well-known saints of India, Shaykh Bahāʾ
al-Dīn Zakariyyā-yi Multānī (d. 661/1262) and Shaykh Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ
(d. 725/1325), and then Navāʾī describes the first group of thirty-five shaykhs
with Indian connections.15 The entries at both ends of this group link them
with Sufi communities in adjacent regions. Of Shaykh Farīd Shakarganj, Navāʾī
writes: “in the course of his spiritual and physical travels (sulūk-u siyāḥat
zamānī-dā), he came into the company of many of the shaykhs of Khurasan
and Iraq, for example Shihāb al-Dīn Suhravardī, Shaykh ʿĀlim Shaykh Sayf
al-Dīn Bākharzī, Sarī Saqaṭī, and Shaykh Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī; and of the
shaykhs of India, he entered the company of Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Zakariyyā-yi
Multānī.”16 Navāʾī metaphorically closes the circle in his description of Shaykh
Shādī, the last of the thirty-five, by bringing us back to Herat:
Although he himself was from India, however, he made his home in some
of the small settlements among the districts of Herat. He was a devout
and abstinent man, and for years he presided over the prayer-mat of piety
13 Hamidkhon Islomiy, “‘Nasoyimul muhabat’ning o’rganilishi, tarkibi va uning manba

hamda ‘Nafahatul uns’dan farqi,” in Abdurahmon Jomiy (575 Yilliga Bag’ishlanadi), ed. Aziz
Qayumov (Tashkent: O’zbekiston FA H.S. Sulaymonov nomidagi qo’lyozmalar instituti,
1997), 88–99.
14 Ibid., 92–3.
15 See e.g. MS Oriental Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan
(Tashkent), Fond I, 1828, fols. 278b–295b.
16 Ibid., fol. 280a.

46 Walmsley
(taqvā sajjāda-sī ustī-dā mutamakkin īrdī). Many people were pupils of

his, and stories of his many miraculous deeds are recounted. His tomb is
also in the small settlement where he lived.17
Threaded throughout the Nasāʾim is a narrative about the peripatetic nature of

certain key Sufis, their role in transmitting traditions between regions, and
their establishment of new communities. Another fundamental aspect of their
identity is charisma and the notion of exemplariness.
The exemplary individual, of whom Navāʾī provides us with numerous
examples, is the stock figure in hagiographic compilations. It is worth bearing
in mind Chase Robinson’s comments on Islamic biographical traditions; to wit:
“Muslim biographers and prosopographers, by contrast, were generally inter-
ested not so much in what made their subjects unique as in what made them
exemplary, and they favored in their modes of characterization the external
(appearance, speech, the sequence of events and actions) over the internal.”18
Robinson’s remarks are pertinent, but with a caveat: it was precisely the inter-
nal that was of interest to Sufi hagiographers. The external served merely as a
way to frame ideal modes of behavior that inculcated the internal condition
best suited to achieve intimacy with the divine (tawḥīd). Unfortunately, as we
shall see, Navāʾī’s sketches of the Turkish shaykhs often provide us with only
cursory details of their lives and acts, and therefore offer few clues to their
internal condition. Indeed, they appear flat, but that is not necessarily a bad
thing, for it is worth considering the remarks of James Wood on the difference
between “flat” and “round” characters in fiction, remarks which do have some
relevance for the subject under discussion here: “if by flatness we mean a char-
acter, often but not always a minor one, often but not always a comic, who
serves to illuminate an essential human truth or characteristic, then many of
the most interesting characters are flat.”19 There is in every instance some tell-
ing detail that marks out each individual in this survey as unique, some strik-
ing aspect that illustrates the impact of that individual on followers and
spectators.
Unlike the Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt, the early tenth/sixteenth-century
Naqshbandi hagiographical work which served as the de facto official history
of the order and its Khojagani predecessors, Navāʾī did not generate a fully
formed silsila, with clear initiatory or hereditary links between every
17 Ibid., fol. 295a–b.

18 Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 62.
19 James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008), 128.

generation.20 Rather, his presentation of the Turkish shaykhs, interlaced with

accounts of shaykhs belonging to the contemporaneous ʿIshqiyya, leads us to
believe that individuals identified first with a kin (blood or fictive) community,
based on hereditary or initiatory principles, and second with a historic pater
familias. In short, they tend not to be defined by their degrees of separation
from Aḥmad Yasavī, but by their membership in a community that traced its
descent from one of his successors.
In addition to hagiographies, the ways Sufi communities defined themselves
are also reflected in the kinds of documents they generated: shrine guides,
genealogies, endowments et cetera. These documents were often attached to
institutions that affirm them as properties of the community, and conse-
quently the serve as sources for history of both institution and community. But
apart from the Nafaḥāt and the Taẕkirat al-awliyāʾ, Navāʾī does not refer by
name to any other sources for the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba. We cannot tell whether
he gathered his material from narrative works or documentary records. By con-
trast, it is possible to name at least thirteen individual or collected works as
sources for the Nafaḥāt. One can but speculate upon the range and variety of
resources which Navāʾī had access to, for he was acquainted with all the major
religious and intellectual figures of Khurasan, and many more from other parts
of Iran, Mawarannahr, and Turkestan; he demonstrated his aptitude for record-
ing both poets and their poems and shaykhs and their sayings; he had a size-
able personal library, which he put at the disposal of the historian Khwāndamīr
for the composition of the latter’s condensed universal history, Khulāṣat
al-akhbār; and through his endowments he supported a whole community of
scholars. Regarding historiographical or biographical writing, authors can go
one of two ways: they can either be diligent in naming and crediting their
sources; or, they can be cavalier in their citation of sources and predecessors.
In the former instance, the oldest works of Islamic historiography were judged
by their use of the isnād, the chain of transmission attached to accounts of the
sayings and doings of the Prophet and his companions. In the latter case, even
someone like Jāmī could be careless in failing to cite his sources.21
Before, during, and after Navāʾī’s time most of the works that mentioned
Aḥmad Yasavī and his successors were produced within the Khojagan–
Naqshbandi continuum. Many of these works can be classified as risāla,
20 Devin DeWeese, “Yasavī Šayḥs in the Timurid Era: Notes on the Social and Political Role of
Communal Sufi Affiliations in the 14th and 15th Centuries,” Oriente Moderno 15.2, n.s.
(1996): 192.
21 Ivanow, “Sources,” 385; and idem, “More on the Sources of Jami’s Nafahat,” JPASB 19, n.s.
(1923): 299–303.

48 Walmsley
manāqib, or maqāmāt, which focused on the words and deeds of Sufi masters,
as recorded by their pupils. Jāmī had a well-stocked personal library, which he
had brought with him from Mawarannahr, and an interesting quirk in the his-
toriography of the Yasaviyya is thrown up by a copy of the Nafaḥāt, in the mar-
gins of which may be found a Turkic work called Ḥadīqat al-ʿārifīn, the
hagiography of Isḥāq Khoja [or, Atā] b. Ismāʿīl Atā.22 Existing in other redac-
tions known simply as risāla,23 this work places Ismāʿīl Atā (an important fig-
ure in the early history of the “Turkish shaykhs” or Yasaviyya) in the late
seventh/thirteenth and early eighth/fourteenth centuries. It recounts his
childhood, the martyrdom of his father Ibrāhīm when he was twelve, and his
subsequent peregrinations throughout Central Asia. The copy found in Kabul
must date from after 881/1476, when Jāmī completed the Nafaḥāt. The issue is
not whether or not it could have been a source for the Nasāʾim, but who saw fit
to amend a copy of the Nafaḥāt with the work of Isḥāq Khoja, thus improving
on it, in a manner similar to Navāʾī. Or, to frame it in a clearer manner, the
copyist inserts that which is so conspicuously missing from the Nafaḥāt: an
account of the Turkish shaykhs, more replete and solidly-grounded than even
that supplied by Navāʾī. But like the Nasāʾim, the Ḥadīqat al-ʿārifīn (or risāla)
has also has been overlooked by hagiographers and scholars, though it deserves
to be compared with the former as an important source on Central Asian
Sufism in the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries, and as a
staging-post in Chaghatay Turkic literature. Yet neither work exerted either a
stylistic or intellectual influence on subsequent compilers of Sufi hagiogra-
phies, due in part (at least in the case of Navāʾī) to the obscurity of hagiographi-
cal works written in Chaghatay Turkic; consequently, the value of these works,
both in their literary and their historical sense, has depreciated.
Navāʾī’s Presentation of the Turkish Shaykhs
In contrast with Navāʾī, Jāmī’s account of the Turkish shaykhs is perfunctory; at

the end of his description of Yūsuf Hamadānī he writes: “There are four succes-
22 M S National Archives of Afghanistan (Kabul), No. 63/17. See the forthcoming study by
DeWeese et al.
23 Devin DeWeese, “Yasavian Legends on the Islamization of Turkestan,” in Aspects of Altaic
Civilization III: Proceedings of the Thirtieth Meeting of the Permanent International Altaistic
Conference, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, June 19–25, 1987, ed. Denis Sinor,
Uralic and Altaic Series 145 (Bloomington, Ind.: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies,
Indiana University, 1990), 5–6.

sors of Khoja Yūsuf Hamadānī: Khoja ʿAbdallāh Baraqī and Khoja Ḥasan
Andaqī and Khoja Aḥmad Yasavī and Khoja ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī. And
after Khoja Yūsuf each one of the four held the position of convocator, and the
other successors served him in the correct manner. And when Khoja Aḥmad
Yasavī set off in the direction of Turkestan, he directed them to obey Khoja
ʿAbd al-Khāliq.”24 Aḥmad Yasavī’s rejection of his appointed mission for his
own ends marks the classically defined beginning of the Yasaviyya’s history as
an offshoot of the Khojagan. It also provides another example of the migratory
process by which shaykhs sought to establish new communities of followers.
So why is Jāmī’s survey of the Turkish shaykhs (as Ivanow noted) so sparse?
Only once more does he refer to the “Turkish shaykhs” en masse (“Qutham
Shaykh [. . .] is one of the Turkish shaykhs, one of the camp-followers of Khoja
Aḥmad Yasavī”),25 and later mentions Aḥmad Yasavī as a teacher of Shaykh
Rażī al-Dīn ʿAli Lālā al-Ghaznavī, who then transfers his allegiance to Najm
al-Dīn Kubrā.26 Jāmī’s barebones treatment of the Turkish shaykhs is intrigu-
ing, considering that stories about him in hagiographical literature remark that
he held them close to his heart, but while there is a temptation to treat it as a
weakness of the Nafaḥāt that he failed to deal comprehensively with Aḥmad
Yasavī et al., we should instead see this as an opportunity to consider it a
strength of the cumulative and complementary nature of the taẕkira tradition
that Navāʾī was able to rectify this particular lacuna in his own treatment.
Furthermore, it demonstrates the cooperative nature of their friendship and,
in some cases, rivalry.
Navāʾī provides capsule biographies of twenty-three Turkish shaykhs who
are unequivocally linked either to Aḥmad Yasavī or his successors. In order of
appearance, they are: Qutham Shaykh,27 Khalīl Atā,28 Aḥmad Yasavī,29 Rażī
al-Dīn ʿAli Lālā al-Ghaznavī,30 Quṭb al-Dīn Ḥaydar, Ḥakīm Atā, Ismāʿīl Atā,
Isḥaq Atā, Khoja Bahāʾ al-Dīn, Khoja Bāyazīd, Khojam Khalīlullāh, Qūrqūt
Atā, ʿAlī Atā, Qïlïch Atā, Ṣadr Atā, Ḥubbī Khoja,31 Kīshlīk Atā, ʿUmar Atā, Sayyid
24 Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns min hażarāt al-quds, ed. Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī
(Tehran: Sukhan, 1386 sh. / 2007–8), 382.
25 Ibid., 388.
26 Ibid., 438.
27 Navoiy, Nasoyimul muhabbat, 199–200.
28 Ibid., 200–1.
29 Ibid., 326–7.
30 In some editions, this is presented as a separate entry. See e.g. Brockelmann, “Newā’īs
Biographien türkischer,” 222.

50 Walmsley
Atā, Bāb Māchin, Zangī Atā, Ḥusayn Shaykh, Yūsuf Shaykh, and Ḥājjī Shaykh.32
Another four—Yigit Aḥmad, Kūk Shaykh, Tīmūrchī Atā, and Adīb Aḥmad—
appear interspersed within the this cluster of entries, but their relationship to
Aḥmad Yasavī or his followers is less clear-cut. Perhaps indicative of both the
unstructured nature of Navāʾī’s treatment of the Turkish shaykhs and the
unclear organization of the work as a whole is the inclusion of Adīb Aḥmad,
who is in all likelihood is the figure better known as Aḥmad Yïgnaqī, a scholar
of the second/eighth–ninth centuries from Yïgnaq, near Samarqand, who emi-
grated to Baghdad.33
Navāʾī’s description of Aḥmad Yasavī is the first stand-alone account of that
saint in hagiographical literature up to the point, although references to him
and his ilk may be found in a range of sources (mainly Sufi) from the seventh/
thirteenth century onward: Martaʿ al-ṣāliḥīn va zād al-sālikīn, by Burhān al-Dīn
Qïlïch, whom other sources indicate was active in the early seventh/thirteenth
century; Maslak al-ʿārifīn, a Khojagani text of the eighth/fourteenth century;34
Ḥadīqat al-ʿārifīn, the autobiographical work attributed to Khoja Isḥāq b.
Ismāʿīl Atā;35 Hasht ḥadīqa or Ḥadāʾiq al-jinān, a hagiography of a eighth/four-
teenth and ninth/fifteenth-century saint of the mid-Zarafshan valley region;36
Maqāmāt-i Amīr Kulāl, a hagiography dedicated to one of the teachers of Bahāʾ
al-Dīn ibn Naqshband;37 and finally Nafaḥāt al-uns.38 It is impossible to gauge
the range or impact of these works, and to what extent they helped propagate
knowledge of Aḥmad Yasavī and his ilk. That said, by the time Navāʾī was set-
tling down to write the Nasāʾim it had been nigh on a full century since Tīmūr
32 Ibid., 331–3.
33 Shamsiddin S. Kamoliddin, “K biografii Akhmada Yugnaki,” O’zbekistonda ijtimoy fanlar
no. 1–2 (2005): 93–109.
34 Devin DeWeese, “Succession Protocols and the Early Khwajagani Schism in the Maslak
al-ʿārifīn,” Journal of Islamic Studies (hereafter JIS) 22.1 (2011): 17.
35 Khoja Isḥāq b. Ismāʿīl Atā, Ḥadīqat al-ʿārifīn, MS Oriental Institute, Academy of Sciences
of the Republic of Uzbekistan Tashkent), Fond I, 11838; on this author and his work, see
H.F. Hofman, Turkish Literature: a Biobibliographical Survey Section III, Moslim Central
Asian Turkish Literature (Utrecht: published by the University of Utrecht under the aus-
pices of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1969), 316–18.
36 On which, see Devin DeWeese, An “Uvaysī” Sufi in Timurid Mawarannahr: Notes on the
Hagiography and the Taxonomy of Sanctity in the Religious History of Central Asia, Papers
on Inner Asia 22 (Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1993).
37 Relating an encounter between a son of Amīr Kulāl and disciples of Ismāʿīl Atā (Shihāb
al-Dīn, Maqāmāt-i Amīr Kulāl, lithograph [Bukhara, 1328/1910], 59–60).
38 Jāmī, Nafaḥāt, 382.

had initiated the construction of a monumental shrine complex for Aḥmad

Yasavī at Yasī, thus raising the shaykh to landmark status.
The shrine at Yasī had even played a symbolic role in the major Timurid suc-
cession battle following the murder of Ulūgh Beg by his son ʿAbd al-Laṭīf in
853/1449. The latter was in turn overthrown by the amirs in 854/1450 and
replaced by ʿAbdallāh Khān, who successfully contended with Abū Saʿīd
(d. 873/1466) for Samarqand. Chastened, Abū Saʿīd headed north with his
troops to Yasī. There, as recounted by both Fakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī in the Rashaḥāt-i
ʿayn al-ḥayāt and Masʿūd b. ʿUthmān Qūhistānī in the tenth/sixteenth-century
chronicle Tārīkh-i Abū l-Khayr Khānī, Abū Saʿīd dreamed that he was in the
company of Aḥmad Yasavī, who ordered another khoja to say a prayer for the
Timurid prince. According to the version told by Kāshifī, Abū Saʿīd learned
the identity of the khoja who said the prayer for him, but in the version told by
Qūhistānī he did not. In both instances, he made his way to Tashkent, where he
recognized Khoja Aḥrār, the leading Naqshbandi shaykh of the day, as the
khoja from his dream.39 After acquiring the support of Khoja Aḥrār, Abū Saʿīd,
in alliance with Abū l-Khayr Khan, the Chinggisid leader of the Uzbeks, cap-
tured Samarqand and gradually established his supremacy over the central
Timurid domains, including Herat. Although accounts of Abū Saʿīd’s rise
stressed the importance of the blessing and support of Khoja Aḥrār, the pro-
cess began with a nocturnal vision of Aḥmad Yasavī, to whom even Khoja
Aḥrār paid obeisance.
Despite this, he does not appear to have acquired a correlating stronger
presence in the broader cultural milieu, and therefore Navāʾī’s notice is impor-
tant for emphasizing both Aḥmad Yasavī’s historical and contemporary pres-
tige. Navāʾī calls him “the shaykh of shaykhs of Turkestan,” and places him
among the companions of Yūsuf Hamadānī, and also of ʿAbd al-Khāliq
Ghijduvānī, ʿAbdallāh Baraqī, and Ḥasan Andaqī.40 This much we know already
from Jāmī. Navāʾī then asserts that the Kubravī shaykh Rażī al-Dīn ʿAlī Lālā
[al-Ghaznavī] (again, as noted by Jāmī), was formerly in the service of Aḥmad
Yasavī; not only that, but it was at Aḥmad Yasavī’s khānaqāh that he completed
his Sufi training. This suggests that this pivotal figure in the Kubravi tradition
owed his initial spiritual debt not to Najm al-Dīn Kubrā, but to Aḥmad Yasavī.
Finally, Navāʾī states: “[Khoja Aḥmad Yasavī]’s tomb (mazār) is in Turkestan at
the place called Yasā, which is where he was born and raised. He is the
39 Jo-Ann Gross, “Khoja Ahrar: A Study of the Perceptions of Religious Power and Prestige in
the Late Timurid Period” (PhD diss., New York University, 1982), 95–111, 168–71.
40 Navoiy, Nasoyimul muhabbat, 195.

52 Walmsley
direction of prayer (qibla) for the people of Turkestan.”41 This conclusion to the
account of Aḥmad Yasavī implies that at the time of writing, Aḥmad Yasavī—
or, more particularly, his tomb—had acquired a status as local pilgrimage site
and substitute for Mecca. Here Aḥmad Yasavī stands in for the Kaaba as a focal
point for prayer and veneration; to this end, it emphasizes his saintly status, as
a Friend of God who served as a mediator for the believers of Turkestan. The
logistical problems that pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina posed for all but the
richest Central Asian Muslims forced them to seek localized equivalents. A
strict orthodox interpretation of this phenomenon would be to regard it as
idolatry, but since legends surrounding Aḥmad Yasavī in hagiographical mate-
rial imply that he was able to cross time and space to reach Mecca, it is clear
that for Central Asian Muslims Yasī served as a metaphorical gateway to Mecca.
It appears easier, however for Navāʾī to situate Aḥmad Yasavī geographically
than it is to situate him chronologically in terms of his place within the Central
Asian Sufi milieu.
Navāʾī’s recapitulation of Jāmī’s description of Qutham Shaykh (“one of the
great shaykhs and among the court of Aḥmad Yasavī”) precedes the account of
Aḥmad Yasavī by some distance, reflecting (in this instance) Navāʾī’s nominal
adherence to the structure of the Nafaḥāt.42 The next entry is for Khalīl Atā,
who is ascribed a key role in the education of Bahāʾ al-Dīn b. Naqshband, an
account of whom then follows. The story Navāʾī relates is well-known from
both the Nafaḥāt and the Anīs al-ṭālibīn, the hagiography of Bahāʾ al-Dīn: in it,
Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn sees Khalīl Atā in a dream, is informed that that he is
descended from the Turkish shaykhs, and enters his service for six years after
he espies him in the bazaar in Bukhara.43 Khalīl Atā plays an early role in the
spiritual education of Bahāʾ al-Dīn b. Naqshband, but in the greater scheme of
things he is a minor character actor: put another way, he is not celebrated for
being a Turkish shaykh, but for playing a walk-on part in the Naqshbandi
drama. Significantly, there is no mention in either this capsule biography or
any of those of the shaykhs related to Aḥmad Yasavī and his companions of the
rivalry that come to define the relationship between the Yasaviyya and
Naqshbandiyya from the tenth/sixteenth century onward. Instead—as is evi-
dent in other hagiographical works from this period—the relationship
between the shaykhs of Mawarannahr (or Khurasan) and the shaykhs of
Turkestan is complementary and productive. Yet we still face a conundrum:
41 Ibid., 326–7.
42 Ibid., 199–200.
43 Ibid., 200.

where to place the Turkish shaykhs in the hierarchy and chronology of Central
Asian Sufism.
Although Aḥmad Yasavī is firmly recognized as the third successor of Yūsuf
Hamadānī—and before ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī in the order of succes-
sion—Navāʾī curiously places his entry after that of Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn
Yaḥyā Suhravardī Maqtūl (549–87/1154–91), the founder of the philosophical
school known as “the Philosophy of Illumination” (ḥikmat al-ishrāq).44 In
sources either pre-dating or post-dating Navāʾī, Aḥmad Yasavī is associated
with a shaykh who shares the same laqab and nisba, Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Abū
Ḥafṣ ʿUmar Suhravardī (539–632/1145–1234), eponym of the Suhravardiyya.45
Confusion aside, if we assume that there is a systemic logic underlying Navāʾī’s
organization of the Nasāʾim, as he implies in his introduction, then we may
assume that this placement reflects a belief that Aḥmad Yasavī was active in
the early seventh/thirteenth century. This is not unprecedented in Timurid lit-
erature of the time: see also the Majālis al-ʿushshāq (“Assembly of Lovers”) of
Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Gāzurgāhī, a contemporary of Navāʾī, whose work is a
mélange of Sufi biographies. In the entry for ʿAṭṭār, he describes how Chingīz
Khān went to pay his respects to Atā Yasavī, who instructed him to slay Najm
al-Dīn Kubrā and ʿAṭṭār. Atā Yasavī’s disciples (murīds) are appalled; he explains
that Najm al-Dīn Kubra was so promiscuous in his attentions that he kept
watch over a dog, and ʿAṭṭār had divulged mystical secrets. The author records
that both saints were martyred when the Mongol armies attacked Khorezm
and Nishapur.46 When considered alongside the account of Najm al-Dīn
Kubrā’s pupil Rażī al-Dīn ʿAlī Lālā al-Ghaznavī’s initial training under Aḥmad
Yasavī, these otherwise unrelated accounts place him in the milieu of early
seventh/thirteenth-century Central Asia, at the time of the Mongol conquests.
Hence, he inhabits a post-Mongol religious environment, rather than the
44 Ibid., 326; Hossein Ziai, “al-Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā,” in The Encyclopaedia of
Islam, New Edition (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1954–2004).
45 Devin DeWeese, “The Mashā’ikh-i Turk and the Khojagān: Rethinking the Links Between
the Yasavī and the Naqshbandī Sufi Traditions,” JIS 7.2 (1996): 189.
46 Ḥusain b. Ismāʿīl Gāzurgāhī, Majālis al-ʿushshāq-i bā taṣvīrāt, lithograph (Kanpur: Munshī
Naval Kishūr, 1896), 101. For a discussion of this account, see Devin DeWeese, “Dog Saints
and Dog Shrines in Kubravī Tradition: Notes on a Hagiographical Motif from Khwārazm,”
in Miracle et Karāma: Hagiographies Médiévales Comparées, ed. Denise Aigle, Bibliothèque
de L’école Des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses 109 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols,
2000), 464–5; and idem, “ ‘Stuck in the Throat of Chingiz Khan’: Envisioning the Mongol
Conquests in Some Sufi Accounts from the 14th to 17th Centuries,” in History and
Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E.
Woods, ed. Sholeh A. Quinn and Judith Pfeiffer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 36.

54 Walmsley
pre-Mongol environment implied by widely-accepted date for his death

(562/1166–7).47 Moreover, it places a greater distance between Yūsuf Hamadānī
and Aḥmad Yasavī than we are led to believe.
The curiousness of Navāʾī’s arrangement of the proto-Yasaviyya silsila is
apparent by comparison with the presentation of the same order in the
Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt, the early tenth/sixteenth-century hagiography dedi-
cated to Khoja Aḥrār, which delineates the Khojagani–Naqshbandi–Yasavi
constellation according to a strict chronological silsila based on initiatory or
hereditary sequences.48 Hence, Aḥmad Yasavī and the Yasaviyya appear after
the entry for Yūsuf Hamadānī and before that of ʿAbd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī.
This reflects the silsila-consciousness of the author, who is keen to construct a
systemic history of the Naqshbandiyya up to Khoja Aḥrār without gaps or
anomalies. The comparison with Navāʾī’s representation of many of the same
individuals in the Nasāʾim is stark, where the order of succession among the
successors of Aḥmad Yasavī is never enumerated, and the unifying theme of
the entries is that of hereditary succession. Indeed, if we were to enunciate a
guiding principal for Navāʾī’s representation of this particular clutch of Turkish
shaykhs, it seems to be that of a community based on shared descent. The ram-
ifications of such an approach is that it exposes an opportunity to construct a
chronological outline of the Yasaviyya, if we can trust the information we are
presented with. More importantly, it suggests options for exploring how the
community of Aḥmad Yasavī and his successors was maintained throughout
the generations, and it appears that a communal approach based on heredi-
tary descent was held to be more reliable than an initiatory approach. This still
leaves open question about why Navāʾī incorporated biographical notices of
members of the ʿIshqiyya, who traced their silsila back to the noble Sufi figure
Bāyazīd Bisṭāmī (d. ca. 261/874–5), into his survey of the “Turkish shaykhs.”49
Such an arrangement implies an association with the Yasaviyya, but none is
47 A date which appears only to have entered currency in the tenth/sixteenth–eleventh/

seventeenth centuries. See e.g. Safīnat al-awlīyāʾ, completed in 1040/1631 by Dārā Shikūh
(lithograph [Agra: Munshī Naval Kishūr, 1853], 128).
48 Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt, ed. ʿAlī Aṣghar
Muʿīnīyān, 2 vols. (Tehran: Bunyād-i Nīkūkārī-yi Nūrīyānī 1356 sh. / 1977–8), 1:17–34.
49 From Shaykh Abū al-Ḥasan ʿIshqī to Shaykh Sulṭān Ṣūfī, in Navoiy, Nasoyimul muhabbat
min shamoyimil futuvvat, 329–31; For a discussion of the ʿIshqiyya and the problems aris-
ing from silsila-presentation and communal identity, see Devin DeWeese, “Spiritual
Practice and Corporate Identity in Medieval Sufi Communities of Iran, Central Asia, and
India: The Khalvatī/῾Ishqī/Shaṭṭārī Continuum,” in Religion and Identity in South Asia and
Beyond: Essays in Honor of Patrick Olivelle, ed. Steven E. Lindquist (London; New
York; and Delhi: Anthem, 2011), 268–76.

enunciated. We are left with the impression that while Navāʾī was keen to pro-
vide an overview of the “Turkish shaykhs” because they were little known, his
survey is necessarily limited due to lack of sources; however, members of the
Yasaviyya were increasingly prominent in the affairs of Turkestan, Khurasan
and Mawarannahr throughout the ninth/fifteenth century, and this is reflected
in the broader historiographical and hagiographical literature.
The Yasaviyya in the Age of Navāʾī
Navāʾī wrote about Turkish shaykhs who were alive during his own lifetime and
who can be cross-referenced with other historiographical and hagiographical
sources for the period. They populate a broad social spectrum: some achieve
position of power and influence; others remain lowly dervishes. Of those who
belong to the Yasaviyya constellation, several are identified by their descent
from Aḥmad Yasavī and his immediate followers. Confusion is added when
Navāʾī simply states in a few cases that they are related to an unspecified “Atā,”
without clarifying whether he means Aḥmad Yasavī or, for example, Ismāʿīl
Atā, who is described as the son of Aḥmad Yasavī’s younger brother Ibrāhīm
Atā.50 The relationships of Isḥāq Atā (son), Khoja Bahāʾ al-Dīn (grandson)51
and Ḥusayn Shaykh (“one of his sons”)52 to Ismāʿīl Atā are apparent; however,
the relationships of Khoja Bāyazīd (“a close descendant or relative of Atā”) and
Khvājam Khalīlullāh (“also a descendant of Atā”) are less clear,53 though some
clarification may be sought within the pages of the Taẕkira-yi Muḥammad
Bāqir, a tenth/sixteenth-century hagiographical compilation by Muḥammad
Bāqir b. Muḥammad ʿAlī, in which Khoja Bāyazīd is identified as “one of the
descendants of Ismāʿīl Atā.”54 This work, completed in 951/1544, belongs to the
same line of biographical dictionaries as the Nafaḥāt and Nasāʾim, for
Muḥammad Bāqir cites both works as sources—to the extent that some entries
appear to be direct translations from Chaghatay Turkic into Persian—and he

51 Ibid., 328.
52 Ibid., 332.
53 Ibid., 328.
54 Muḥammad Bāqir b. Muḥammad ʿAlī, Taẕkira-yi Muḥammad Bāqir, MS Oriental Institute,
Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan (Tashkent), Fond I, 1846/II, fol. 167a;
for a description of this work, see A.A. Semenov, ed., Sobranie Vostochnykh Rukopiseĭ
Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoĭ SSR, vol. 3 (Tashkent: Izd-vo Akademii nauk UzSSR, 1952),
no. 2578.

56 Walmsley
presents a highly-structured account of the Yasaviyya that also reflects the

influence of the Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt.55 Other familial relationships may be
identified between Kīshlīk Atā and ʿUmar Atā (brothers),56 and Yūsuf Shaykh
(“one of the descendants of Ṣadr Atā”) and Ḥājjī Shaykh (“son of Yūsuf Atā”).57
Navāʾī’s emphasis on hereditary links to either a relative or close follower of
Aḥmad Yasavī fulfills one of the basic tasks of the biographer, namely to pro-
vide account of origins, but it also alerts the reader to the importance of famil-
ial links among this particular clutch of Sufi shaykhs.
The main organizing principals for the Turkish shaykhs would therefore
appear to be hereditary: this certainly appears to be the case in the first of the
shaykhs whom Navāʾī describes as being alive in his own lifetime. This indi-
vidual, Khvājam Khalīlullāh, had risen through the ranks of the descendants of
Atā, to the extent that the “fathers and grandfathers” bestowed upon him the
cloak (khirqa) and prayer rug (sajjāda) of Atā, in effect designating him their
leader.58 He can also be identified with the figure of Shaykhzāda Khalīlullāh
Khvājagī, who was present in Samarqand during the time of Khoja Aḥrār.59
Muḥammad Bāqir notes: “He is extremely famous among the Turks. They
report that he said: ‘for many years longer than me, and many years after me,
what will there be in the world?’.”60 By contrast, there is the baser figure of
Ḥusayn Shaykh, another descendant of Ismāʿīl Atā, whom Navāʾī described as
“a person of fair dealings; the people were beguiled by his ways.” Furthermore,
“He has no inclination for worldly possessions; moreover, he appears to have
secluded himself so deeply within his poverty that the people cannot find a
way to pay their respects to him.”61 Navāʾī records that when Ḥusayn died, a
bird, so finely detailed and colorful, the likes of which the people had never
seen before, landed on his head, and they fled. Ḥusayn Shaykh is thus rendered
a rara avis. The question on the reader’s lips is: what this is supposed to signify?
Is there a mystical meaning to this event, or does it belong to the category of
folkloric tales long associated with Turkic holy figures from long before the
arrival of Islam, involving strange and wonderful interactions with wild
55 Muḥammad Bāqir, Taẕkira-yi Muḥammad Bāqir, fols. 162a–173a.

57 Ibid., 332.
58 Ibid., 328.
59 Mawlana Shaykh, Maqāmāt-i Khwāja Aḥrār, ed. Masamoto Kawamoto, Studia Culturae
Islamicae 78 (Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Africa and Asia,
2004), 37.
60 Muḥammad Bāqir, Taẕkira-yi Muḥammad Bāqir, fol. 167b.

animals? Navāʾī offers no explanation. It would seem, therefore, simply to be a

colorful flourish with which to conclude the entry, what James Wood would
refer to as the “telling detail.”62
The popular impact of Ḥusayn Shaykh is echoed in the accounts of other
Turkish shaykhs. Navāʾī counts ʿAlī Atā, a native of Kumushkent—north of
Samarqand, just beyond the well-known satellite town of Dahbid—among the
learned and enlightened dervishes: “it is well-known that for many years the
flame he lit has not gone out. The Turkish people give offerings and votives to
him.”63 The existence of a cult of veneration, presumably focused on
Kumushkent, again provides us with evidence of religiously-inspired commu-
nal identity. And, as with other shaykhs of the Yasaviyya, the presence of a fire
motif, which may be both literal and metaphorical, corresponds with a popu-
lar meme in accounts of the Yasaviyya, in which the shaykhs produce fire as a
way of inculcating companionship and enlightenment, physical and spiritual.
The best known of these stories (recounted by Navāʾī) explains how Ḥakīm Atā
came to be known by this name (he was originally known as Sulaymān) after
Aḥmad Yasavī praised him for his smart work (ḥakīmāna ish) in keeping fire-
wood dry under his cloak.64 The identification of ʿAlī Atā with Kumushkent
consolidates our impression of a strong Yasavi presence in the Samarqand
area, which is further emphasized by the activities of a father/son duo, Yūsuf
Shaykh and Ḥājjī Shaykh.
Yūsuf Shaykh was a descendant of Ṣadr Atā, lived for over 120 years, and
dwelled on the Kūh-i Ṣāf near Samarqand, where his tomb is located.65 In com-
mon with his descriptions of other Turkish shaykhs, Navāʾī ascribes many
“uncommon deeds and miracles” to Yūsuf Shaykh, but does not actually enu-
merate any of them. Muḥammad Bāqir’s account is no more than a direct
translation of Navāʾī, and thus provides us with no substantive detail on the
uncommon deeds and miracles of Yūsuf Shaykh. The location of his tomb may
be interpreted as evidence of some kind of shrine cult, a site of local venera-
tion, but aside from his longevity (the date of his birth would have fallen well
back into the eighth/fourteenth century) we are left with a mere specter of a
saint. Much more is known about his son, Ḥājjī Shaykh, who counted “the great
people of his time” among his followers and companions, including notables
of the Arlāt ulūs and Tarkhān tribe.66 The fire-miracle motif is present again:
62 Wood, How Fiction Works, 230.

64 Ibid., 327.
65 Ibid., 332.
66 Ibid., 332.

58 Walmsley
on this occasion, Ḥājjī Shaykh is out riding with his murīds, who dismount but
are unable to raise a fire. Ḥājjī Shaykh is able spark a flame, nurse an ember,
and raise a fire from a bundle of wood, with the effect that it “warmed their
companionship and opened their eyes.”67 While the initial desire for a fire was
simply that it would be “pleasant,” Ḥājjī Shaykh is able to use the miracle as an
opportunity to inculcate ṣuḥbat (companionship), the principle mode of
transmitting Sufi practices and training adepts. This duo of father and son con-
forms to the model of the exemplary shaykh, but “Turkish shaykhs” also pop up
in other areas of life.
One of the poets included in the Majālis al-nafāʾīs (“Assemblies of
Delicacies”), Navāʾī’s biographical dictionary of Timurid poets, is a certain
Mawlānā Atāʾī, a descendant of Ismāʿīl Atā who lived in Balkh.68 Navāʾī places
him in the second “assembly,” which consists of poets “whom I accompanied in
my childhood and some of whom I was blessed to associate with in my youth.”
Navāʾī describes him as a cheerful and affable dervish, and a speaker of Turkic.
“In his own time, his poetry was greatly renowned among the Turks.” By way of
illustration, Navāʾī provides the opening couplet (maṭlaʿ) from one of his
ghazals:
My beloved, who sits like a parī at the edge of the water,

can drink the water with extreme delicacy.69
However, somewhat typically, Navāʾī injects a negative note into proceedings,

for although Atāʾī wrote a lot of poetry in Turkic meter, “he did not compose
carefully.” This is by no means unusual for Navāʾī: the Majālis al-nafāʾīs was a
cellar-book of poetry, in which he recorded all his opinions, good and bad, of
the poets he met or heard tell. He completes his entry on Atāʾī by mentioning
that he is buried in the vicinity of Balkh. Navāʾī makes a couple more, brief
references to Atāʾī in his work: one in a longer poem called the Sāqī-nāma (lit.
“The Cup-bearer’s Epistle”), a paean to poets, many of whom may be found in
the Majālis al-nafāʾīs;70 and the other in the Muḥākamat al-lughatayn (“The
Trial of the [Two] Languages”), where he expounds upon the disparity in qual-
ity between Persian and Turkic poets:
67 Ibid., 333.
68 Alisher Navoiy, Majolisun nafois: Ilmiy-tanqidiy tekst, ed. Suyima G’anieva (Tashkent:
O’zbekiston SSR Fanlar Akademiyasi nashriyoti, 1961), 74.
69 q.v. Atoyi, Jondan aziz janona: G’azallar, ed. Ergash Ochilov (Tashkent: Sharq, 2011), 122.
70 Alisher Navoiĭ, Khazoyin ul-maoniy, ed. A. Qayumov et al., 4 vols. (Tashkent: Tamaddun,
2011), 4:721–2.

From the time of Hūlāgū to the end of the reign of Tīmūr and his son and
successor Shāhrukh, many Turkish poets appeared, and from amongst
the sons and grandsons of these rulers came sultans of gentle tempera-
ment. The poets were al-Sakkākī and Ḥaydar Khwārazmī and Atāyī and
Muqīmī and Amīrī and Yaqīnī and Gadāyī. But none of them were com-
parable to the Persian poets I have named. There was only Mawlānā Luṭfī,
who wrote many couplets that can be read with pleasure by those who
understand poetry.71
Apart from these cursory comments, there is no further mention of Atāʾī in the
major historiographical or hagiographical works of the time. His poetic oeuvre
is also comparatively obscure, owing to the paucity of manuscript copies of his
dīvān.72 Nothing is known of either the dates of Atāʾī’s life, aside from a general
awareness that he lived into the first half of the ninth/fifteenth century, or of
the date of the composition of his divan. The earliest datable reference to Atāʾī
was made by Shaykh Aḥmad b. Khudāydād Ṭarāzī in his Funūn al‑balāghah, a
work on poetics, begun in 840/1436–7.73 Ṭarāzī utilizes examples from poets’
works to illustrate aspects of Turkic prosody; on two occasions, he cites Atāʾī.74
Only the first of the two examples appears to be drawn from Atāʾī’s dīvān. We
are left with a figure about whom we have very few concrete details, and con-
sequently very little of a socio-historical or religious background in front of
which we can situate and begin to understand his work.
Therefore, it is natural to try to interpret his poetry within the framework of
Sufism and, more particularly, the Yasaviyya. The problem is that his work
71 Mīr ʿAlī Shīr, Muḥākamat al-lughatain, trans. Robert Devereux (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965), 41;
see also the discussion in A.K. Borovkov, “Alisher Navoi kak osnovopolojnik uzbeksogo
literaturnogo yaz’ika,” in Alisher Navoi, ed. A.K. Borovkov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii
Nauk SSSR, 1946), 92–120.
72 One manuscript copy exists in St. Petersburg. For scholarship on Atāʾī, see H.M. Mallaev,
O’zbek adabiyoti tarikhi, 3 vols. (Tashkent: O’qituvchi, 1965), 1:343–57; A.N. Samoilovich,
“Chagatayskiy poet XV veka Atai,” Zapiski Kollegii Vostokovedov Pri Aziatskom Muzee
Rossiyskoy Akademii Nauk (Leningrad) 2.2 (1927): 257–74, reprinted in Tiurkskoe yazikoz-
nanie, filologiya, runika, ed. G.F. Blagova, D.M. Nasilov, and S.V. Vesnina (Moscow:
Vostochnaya Literatura, 2005), 839–853; and Sayfiddin Rafiddinov, Majoz va haqiqat
(Atoyining poetik mahorati) (Tashkent: Fan, 1995), 19.
73 On which, see Devin DeWeese, “The Predecessors of Navāʾī in the Funūn al-balāghah of
Shaykh Aḥmad b. Khudāydād Ṭarāzī: A Neglected Source on Central Asian Literary
Culture from the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of Turkish Studies 29.1 (2005): 73–164.
74 Shaykh Aḥmad b. Khudāydād Ṭarāzī, Funūn al‑balāgha, MS Bodleian Library (Oxford),
Elliott 127, fols. 48a, 53b.

60 Walmsley
draws upon a very common range of tropes, so as to make it more or less indis-
tinguishable from the greater mass of Persian and Turkic poetry composed in
the ninth/fifteenth century that also affected Sufi influences. There are refer-
ences to Ḥusayn and Ḥasan, and the martyrdom of the former at Karbala.75
There are calls to “don the khirqa,” the traditional robe of Sufis.76 There is an
affirmation that ecstatic states and divine love are the “true path.”77 And,
finally, an injunction to “forsake the madrasa and the khānaqāh!”78 At best, we
can categorize Atāʾī as simply a poet whose work was richly imbued with Sufi
tropes, an example of the way in which poets operated at the nexus of literary
and mystical practice.79 Apart from the distinction of writing in Turkic, he is a
generic poet, and as a star in the Yasavi constellation, he is an outlier. By con-
trast, we can find other “Turkish shaykhs” for whom the written record is more
revealing.
This is the case for Sayyid Aḥmad Bashīrī (769–868/1367–8–1463–4), a Sufi
shaykh of the middle Zarafshan river region, who claimed to have both a
“dream” sanction from Sayyid Atā and the approval of the descendants of Ṣadr
Atā. One of his followers, a certain Nāṣir b. Qāsim b. Ḥājjī Muḥammad
Turkistānī Farghānaʾī, recorded in the work Hasht ḥadīqa or Ḥadāʾiq al-jinān
that in Sayyid Aḥmad Bashīrī’s home village of Kāsah-tarāshān there were 200
households claiming descent from Ismāʿīl Atā, who all attacked him as bī-pīr
(“masterless”).80 Their reason seems to be that as a community organized on
the hereditary principle, a shaykh who claims authority on an initiatory basis
is inimical to their custom. At the core of the dispute lie the issues of Sufi com-
munal organization and the validity of modes of transmission of religious
authority; the descendants of Ismāʿīl Atā in Kāsah-tarāshān attack Sayyid
Aḥmad Bashīrī because in their view the hereditary principle is the sine qua
non of Yasavi shaykh-hood. It is the paramount method for transmitting the
esoteric sciences. By claiming shaykh-hood he challenges the community’s
fundamental organizational principle, and thus opens up membership of the
order to individuals not descended from Aḥmad Yasavī or his followers. The
75 Atoyi, Jondan aziz janona, 52.

76 Ibid., 189.
77 Ibid., 281.
78 E.R. Rustamov, Uzbekskaya poeziya v pervoy plovine XV veka (Moscow: Izd-vo Vostochnoy
Literatury, 1963), 116; and Atoyi, Jondan aziz janona, 145.
79 On the prevalence of Sufi influences in Persian poetry, see Dick Davis, “On Not Translating
Hafez,” New England Review (1990–) 25.1/2 (2004): 311; for a specific discussion of Sufism
and Timurid poetry, see Chad Kia, “Sufi Orthopraxis: Visual Language and Verbal Imagery
in Medieval Afghanistan,” Word & Image 28.1 (2012): 1–18.
80 DeWeese, An “Uvaysī” Sufi in Timurid Mawarannahr, 22–4.

question appears to be whether or not the Yasaviyya should be an open or a

closed order. On an additional note, here is a case of the de facto Yasaviyya
objecting to an outsider, but increasingly in hagiographical literature after this
period it is the Yasaviyya who are the victims of sectarian infighting, notably at
the hands of the Naqshbandiyya.
In the Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī recounts that even
though his master Jāmī had sought the teaching and guidance of Khoja Nāṣir
al-Dīn ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār, he still kept a special place in his learning for the
exulted shaykhs of Turkestan.81 Later, when describing the conspiracy of the
children of Sulṭān Abū Saʿīd regarding the conquest of Khurasan, Bākharzī
records the remarks of one shaykh that that “we are not like the shaykhs of
Khurasan, whose powers of influences and control are apparent. On the con-
trary, we are the hermits of Turkestan, who oust and enthrone sultans of the
kingdom by means of our power and authority.” Khoja Aḥrār is not impressed:
“we have also encountered the shaykhs of Turkestan, and we have surpassed
every one of them!”82 The encounters and experiences of Khoja Aḥrār with the
Yasaviyya are richly detailed in three hagiographical works principally dedi-
cated to him, the Maqāmāt-i Khwāja Aḥrār of Mawlānā Shaykh, the Rashaḥāt-i
ʿayn al-ḥayāt of Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Vāʿīz Kāshifī, and the Silsilat
al-ʿārifīn-u taẕkirat al-ṣiddiqīn of Muḥammad b. Burhān al-Dīn Samarqandī.
There is, though, a curious dichotomy between the fractious relationship of
Khoja Aḥrār and the Yasaviyya, and the reverence within which he seems to
hold several of its leading preceptors. On the one hand, he countermands the
influence of a certain called Shaykhzāda Khalīf, a descendant of Ismāʿīl Atā,
who has entranced Amir Tarkhān and the amirs of Mīrzā Sulṭān Aḥmad
[Samarqand, r. 873–99/1469–94].83 On the other, though, he is fond of recount-
ing the words and deeds of Ismāʿīl Atā. One example:
It is said of Ismāʿīl Atā that after the initiation of a murīd, he used to say:
‘we have become brothers on the road. Heed my advice: imagine this
world as a blue dome, with you and God beneath it. Recite the ẕikr with
such might and power that God remains and you depart’.84
81 ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī Bākharzī, Maqāmāt-i Jāmī, ed. Najīb Māyil Haravī (Tehran: Nashr-i
Nay, 1383 sh. / 2004–5), 114.
82 Ibid., 198.
83 Shaykh, Maqāmāt-i Khwāja Aḥrār, 35.
84 Muḥammad b. Burhān al-Dīn Samarqandī, Silsilat al-ʿārifīn-u taẕkirat al-ṣiddiqīn (dar
sharḥ-i aḥvāl-i Khvāja ʿUbaydullāh Aḥrār), ed. Iḥsānullāh Shukrallāhī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna,
Mūzih va Markaz-i Asnād-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 1388 sh. / 2009–10), 74.

62 Walmsley
Khoja Aḥrār then remarked that upon uttering these words, the air would turn
fragrant. After the Nasāʾim, the Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt was the next work to
provide an in-depth survey of the Turkish shaykhs. In doing so, it provides a
fascinating contrast with Navāʾī, who outlined a somewhat loose-knit succes-
sion of shaykhs in roughly chronological order, based mostly on genealogy.
Fakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī provides a more structured overview of the Yasaviyya,
incorporating both initiatory and hereditary lineages, and presents them in a
strictly chronological order with very clear lines of succession. It is interesting
to note whom he includes and whom Navāʾī had apparently overlooked. Of
immediate note is Khādim Shaykh, who “at the beginning of the emergence of
His Excellency [Khoja Aḥrār] in Mawarannahr and the province of Shāsh had
an innumerable throng of murshids and followers, and they conversed with
His Excellency [Khoja Aḥrār].”85 On this evidence, it is clear that the Yasaviyya
existed in large numbers, either as communities of shared descent or factions
gathered around prominent shaykhs. Our author explains: “the majority of the
Turkish shaykhs in the Sufi stages are related to [Aḥmad Yasavī]. In the family
of [Aḥmad Yasavī] there are many grandees and saints, a complete account of
whom would require a separate book.”86 It is to be over a century before such a
book is written, but clearly by this time the Yasaviyya were beginning to be
recognized by Naqshbandi hagiographers as a distinct community (or network
of communities), and contacts between the two silsilas were unavoidable.
One murīd of Khādim Shaykh who appears to enjoy peaceful relations with
his Naqshbandi peers is Shaykh Jamāl al-Dīn Bukhārī [or Kāshgharī]. Sometime
around the beginning of the tenth/end of the fifteenth century, he arrived in
Herat and resided at the mazār of Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī with numerous others
of his murīds. He died and was buried there.87 There then follows an insight
into how information about the Yasaviyya was propagated and recorded:
Kāshifī notes, “There was this faqīr in attendance on Makhdūmī [i.e. Jāmī],
Ustād Mawlānā Rażī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Ghafūr [Lārī, author of a commentary on
the Nafaḥāt],88 and al-Ghafūr was in his company from time to time and he
recorded stories about the shaykh and he related notices [of him].”89 Kāshifī
85 Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:31.

86 Ibid., 1:18.
87 Ibid., 1:31; Shaykh Muḥammad ʿĀlam Ṣiddīqī, Lamaḥāt min nafaḥāt al-quds, ed.
Muḥammad Naẕīr Rānjhā (Islamabad: Markaz-i Taḥqīqāt-i Fārsī-i Īrān va Pākistān, 1986),
196; and Muḥammad Bāqir b. Muḥammad ʿAlī, Taẕkira-yi Muḥammad Bāqir, fol. 166b.
88 Rażī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī, Takmila-yi ḥawāshī-i Nafaḥāt al-uns: Sharḥ-i ḥāl-i
Mawlānā-i Jāmī, ed. ʿAlī Aṣghar Bashīr Haravī (Kabul: Anjuman-i Tamī, 1343 sh. / 1964–5).
89 Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:31.

then recounts five of these notices. While Shaykh Jamāl al-Dīn appears to have
enjoyed prestige in Herat and tended to a not insubstantial flock of followers,
his legacy was limited, to the extent that Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad Qazvīnī, a
Naqshbandi genealogist of the tenth/sixteenth century, wrote of Shaykh Jamāl
al-Dīn: “he is last of the Yasavi shaykhs in this humble silsila-nāma.”90 Shaykh
Jamāl al-Dīn had come to Herat following a contretemps with Muḥammad
Shïbānī Khān, the Chinggisid leader of the Uzbeks.91 The story of this flight is
told by Shaykh Muḥammad ʿĀlam Ṣiddīqī in Lamaḥāt min nafaḥāt al-quds,
completed in 1035/1626, the work which contained a “complete account” of the
Yasaviyya. Two things reveal themselves: one, there was no natural alliance
between the Yasaviyya and the Shibanids;92 and two, Herat was a welcome ref-
uge for Sufis of all stripes, where Yasavis and Naqshbandis could peacefully
co-exist. This is in stark contrast with the ultra-competitive atmosphere that
began to emerge in Samarqand and Bukhara toward the end of the ninth/
fifteenth century. Shaykh Jamāl al-Dīn, however, arrived too late for inclusion
in the Nasāʾim, and is overlooked by several of the other major sources for the
study of Herat in this period. The diarist Vāṣifī, that otherwise beady-eyed
observer of the age, does not mention him, and his only reference to the
Yasaviyya of any kind is a short note on the mazār of Aḥmad Yasavī in the con-
text of Shibanid politicking.93 The lacunae in the major sources from Khurasan
for the study of Islamic Central Asia in the ninth/fifteenth century regarding
the Turkish shaykhs or Yasaviyya may be further contrasted with the Muẕakkir-i
aḥbāb, which was written by Khoja Bahāʾ al-Dīn Ḥasan Nithārī Bukhārī in
974/1566–7 in partial imitation of the Majālis al-nafāʾīs of Navāʾī, albeit in
Persian. (He regarded his work as “the third taẕkira,” the others being the
90 Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad Qazvīnī, Silsila-nāma-yi Khvājāgān-i Naqshband, MS Bibliothèque

nationale de France (Paris), Supplément persan no. 1418, fol. 10a.
91 See the discussion in Devin DeWeese, “The Yasavī Order and the Uzbeks in the Early 16th
Century: The Story of Shaykh Jamāl ad‑Dīn and Muḥammad Shïbānī Khān,” in
Tsentral’naia Aziia: Istochniki, Istoriia, Kul’tura. Materialy Mezhdunarodnoi Nauchnoi
Konferentsii, Posviashchennoi 80‑letiiu Doktora Istoricheskikh Nauk E.A. Davidovicha i
Deistvitel’nogo Chlena Akademii Nauk Tadzhikistana, Akademika RAEN, Doktora
Istoricheskikh Nauk B.A. Litvinskogo, Moskva, 3–5 Aprelia 2003 G., ed. E.V. Antonova and
T. K. Mkrtychev (Moscow: Izdatel’skaia Firma “Vostochnaia Literatura” Rossiiskoi
Akademii Nauk, 2005), 297–310.
92 An argument for the existence of such an alliance may be found in Andras Bodrogligeti,
“Yasavı Ideology in Muḥammad Shaybanı Khan’s Vision of an Uzbek Islamic Empire,”
Journal of Turkish Studies 18 (1994): 41–56.
93 Zayn al-Dīn Maḥmūd Vāṣifī, Badāʾīʿ al-vaqāʾīʿ, ed. A.N. Boldyrev, 2 vols. (Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo vostochnoy literatury, 1961), 1:377.

64 Walmsley
aforementioned work of Navāʾī and the Taẕkira-yi Dawlatshāh of Dawlatshāh

Samarqandī, completed in 892/1487). The author was a descendant of Zangī
Atā and some of the biographical notices are for shaykhs of the Yasaviyya, who
are accorded detailed silsilas, which place some of their predecessors in the
same places and timeframes covered by Navāʾī and other writers. We can
extract from the Muẕakkir-i aḥbāb examples of both initiatory and hereditary
transmission. As an example of the former, we read:
His Excellency Qāsim was a murīd of His Excellency Khoja Mullā-yi Nūrī,
and after that [Qāsim] received penitence from Mawlānā Walī, who was
a murīd of His Excellency Khādim Shaykh, who was a murīd of His
Excellency Shaykh Mawdūd, who was a murīd of His Excellency Shaykh
ʿAlī, who was a murīd of His Excellency El-Imān Atā, who was a murīd of
His Excellency Ṣadr Atā, who was a murīd of His Excellency Zangī Atā,
who was a murīd of His Excellency Ḥakīm Atā, who was a murīd of His
Excellency Khoja Aḥmad Yasavī, and he was a murīd of His Excellency
Khoja Yūsuf Hamadānī. This is the lineage of the vocal ẕikr (silsila-yi
jahriyya).94
And as an example of the hereditary silsila:
Khoja ʿAbd al-Vahhāb is an excellent son of His Excellency Sulaymān

Khoja and he was educated in the esoteric way by his father, and he was a
murīd of his father Yaḥyā Khoja, and he was a murīd of his father Hārūn
Khoja, and he was a murīd of his father Shaykh Muḥammad Khoja, and
he was a murīd of his father Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn Khoja, and he was a murīd
of his blessed father Zangī Atā. After the death of Ḥakīm Atā, Zangī Atā
went to Khwārezm and married by agreement the revered wife of Ḥakīm
Atā known as ʿAnbar Atā, who is the daughter of Bughrā Khān.95
Within the Yasaviyya there existed communities tied by both blood and fictive
kinship, yet these ties are only revealed to us in hagiographical literature pro-
duced after the time of Navāʾī. Moreover, the survey of the Turkish shaykhs
provided by Navāʾī appears anomalous when compared with the highly struc-
tured compositions provided by later hagiographers. The Nasāʾim may be
viewed as an outlier within both Navāʾī’s own oeuvre and the corpus of hagio-
94 Khvāja Bahāʾ al-Dīn Ḥasan Nithārī Bukhārī, Muẕakkir-i aḥbāb, ed. Sayyid Muḥammad
Fażlallāh (Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya, 1389/1969–70), 56.
95 Ibid., 493–4.

graphical literature and, apart from the work of Muḥammad Bāqir, does not
appear to have been utilized as a source by later hagiographers. The scarcity of
copies of the Nasāʾim, and the absence of references to it, suggest that it failed
to draw much of an audience beyond the knowledgeable litterateurs who were
aware of the scope of Navāʾī’s work, but who themselves may not have been
especially interested in this particular composition. Therefore, it has not been
subjected to great scholarly scrutiny, hence the need to reiterate its unique-
ness, with emphasis (as a case in point) on the treatment of the Yasaviyya.
Conclusion
The Nasāʾim al-maḥabba is a fascinating example of the processes of inspira-

tion and imitation that fueled the genre of biographical dictionaries, whether
they dealt with rulers, poets, or Sufis. Although Navāʾī began the work as a
translation of the Nafaḥāt, his editions and additions transformed it into a
unique work of art, as different from its sources as, say, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is
from previous plays of the same name. But because the Nasāʾim has been bur-
dened with the descriptor “translation,” the originality of Navāʾī’s additions has
been overlooked. The effect has been amplified by its composition in Chaghatay
Turkic, which, while a noble aim, limited its audience and subsequently
affected its survival in manuscript form. And even where it has survived, it has
sometimes done so in redacted form: the section on the Turkish shaykhs is
missing entirely from one undated manuscript.96
The differences in style and content between the Nafaḥāt and the Nasāʾim
alone make the latter worth reading, purely from a literary sense. It was Navāʾī’s
longest work of prose, both original and translated, and so may be read as a
snapshot of literary Turkic at the every end of the ninth/fifteenth century.
From a historiographical perspective, the material on the Turkish and Indian
saints is valuable for historians of medieval Islam and, in particular, Sufism, for
it hints at the inter-connected nature of Sufi communities in the eastern
Muslim world at this time. This is evident in the accounts of shaykhs who trav-
eled between regions, either to search for new teachers or to establish new
communities. Most importantly for our purposes, it expands the range of Sufi
activities in Central Asia outside the usual areas of Khurasan and Mawarannahr,
and into Turkestan. It even provides fresh material on a region, India, where
Sufi activity was well documented. On the face of it, Navāʾī’s material on the
Turkish shaykhs is thin and lacking in nourishment, but this may simply reflect
96
M S British Library (London), Or. 402.

66 Walmsley
the paucity of written sources, and may incorporate oral traditions. The pre-
sentation of these shaykhs in terms of principally hereditary lineages, and the
presence in Mawarannahr of major communities based on shared descent
from Aḥmad Yasavī and his followers, sets them apart from the Naqshbandiyya,
who adhere largely to initiatory lineages, though this will change during the
course of the tenth/sixteenth century, with the emergence of familial groups
such as the Juybari shaykhs.
Navāʾī never explicitly refers to the Yasaviyya, but instead to the mashāʾīkh-i
turk (“Turkish shaykhs”) or mashāʾīkh-i turkestān (“shaykhs of Turkestan”).
While there has been a critical reaction (albeit, limited) to the classical taxon-
omy of Sufi orders along ethno-linguistic lines, nevertheless we must not
ignore the implications of Navāʾī’s (and others) references to the mashāʾīkh-i
turk. Partly this is a geographical distinction: the location of Aḥmad Yasavī’s
tomb, and the stories which situate him and his followers in Turkestan under-
score a particularly Central Asian conception of the division of the region into
provinces along not just political but also ethno-linguistic lines. We must
respect and understand Jāmī and Navāʾī’s use of the terms, not as a way of
“Othering” the Turks, but as a way of understanding the communal organiza-
tion of the “Turkish shaykhs,” and the way it reflected their belief in shared
ancestry. In most instances where there is a reference to the mashāʾīkh-i turk,
there is a reference also to an ancestral figurehead, either Aḥmad Yasavī or one
of his principal successors. Finally, Navāʾī pays very little attention to issues of
doctrine or praxis, by which Sufi orders are often defined. He does not mention
which of the styles of vocal incantation (silent or vocal) the “Turkish shaykhs”
practiced, nor does he mention any of their precepts. This conclusively affirms
the view that the Turkish shaykhs were not an institutionalized order, but
inter-related cells of Sufi shaykhs with common genealogies.


(22105956 - Journal of Sufi Studies) The Yasaviyya in The Nasā Im Al-Ma Abba of Alī Shīr Navā Ī - A Case Study in Central Asian Hagiography

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

(22105956 - Journal of Sufi Studies) The Yasaviyya in The Nasā Im Al-Ma Abba of Alī Shīr Navā Ī - A Case Study in Central Asian Hagiography

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

The Yasaviyya in the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/22105956-12341261

première présentation substantielle sur ces saints dans la littérature hagiographique.

Aḥmad Yasavī – ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī – biography – genealogy – hagiography – Nasāʾim

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

In re-asserting the importance of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba as a source for

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

and later hagiographers was the absence of a hierarchical structure, a sustain-

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

The Composition of the Nasāʾim al-maḥabba

Navāʾī began working on Nasāʾim al-maḥabba in 901/1495–6, initially by trans-

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

twelfth centuries—the Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya of Khoja ʿAbdallāh Anṣarī,8 the

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

13 Hamidkhon Islomiy, “‘Nasoyimul muhabat’ning o’rganilishi, tarkibi va uning manba

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

(taqvā sajjāda-sī ustī-dā mutamakkin īrdī). Many people were pupils of

Threaded throughout the Nasāʾim is a narrative about the peripatetic nature of

17 Ibid., fol. 295a–b.

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

generation.20 Rather, his presentation of the Turkish shaykhs, interlaced with

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

Navāʾī’s Presentation of the Turkish Shaykhs

In contrast with Navāʾī, Jāmī’s account of the Turkish shaykhs is perfunctory; at

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

had initiated the construction of a monumental shrine complex for Aḥmad

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

pre-Mongol environment implied by widely-accepted date for his death

47 A date which appears only to have entered currency in the tenth/sixteenth–eleventh/

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

The Yasaviyya in the Age of Navāʾī

50 Navoiy, Nasoyimul muhabbat, 328.

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

presents a highly-structured account of the Yasaviyya that also reflects the

55 Muḥammad Bāqir, Taẕkira-yi Muḥammad Bāqir, fols. 162a–173a.

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

animals? Navāʾī offers no explanation. It would seem, therefore, simply to be a

62 Wood, How Fiction Works, 230.

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

My beloved, who sits like a parī at the edge of the water,

However, somewhat typically, Navāʾī injects a negative note into proceedings,

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

75 Atoyi, Jondan aziz janona, 52.

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

question appears to be whether or not the Yasaviyya should be an open or a

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

85 Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:31.

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

90 Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad Qazvīnī, Silsila-nāma-yi Khvājāgān-i Naqshband, MS Bibliothèque

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

aforementioned work of Navāʾī and the Taẕkira-yi Dawlatshāh of Dawlatshāh

And as an example of the hereditary silsila:

Khoja ʿAbd al-Vahhāb is an excellent son of His Excellency Sulaymān

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66

The Nasāʾim al-maḥabba is a fascinating example of the processes of inspira-

journal of Sufi studies 3 (2014) 38–66 Downloaded from Brill.com06/03/2022 11:57:33AM

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi 10.1163/22105956-12341261

13 Hamidkhon Islomiy, “‘Nasoyimul muhabat’ning o’rganilishi, tarkibi va uning manba

17 Ibid., fol. 295a–b.

47 A date which appears only to have entered currency in the tenth/sixteenth–eleventh/

50 Navoiy, Nasoyimul muhabbat, 328.

55 Muḥammad Bāqir, Taẕkira-yi Muḥammad Bāqir, fols. 162a–173a.

62 Wood, How Fiction Works, 230.

75 Atoyi, Jondan aziz janona, 52.

85 Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt, 1:31.

90 Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad Qazvīnī, Silsila-nāma-yi Khvājāgān-i Naqshband, MS Bibliothèque