An illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the
revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth
century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only
desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted
to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language
intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous
revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya
attempted to make language do something that language should not
do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in
a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that
detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of
“Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B.
Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not
least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto
occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story
of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic
experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a
set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language
that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering
ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South
Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions:
How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters
grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways
of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that
the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective
moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered
these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were
eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into
the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early
modern Persianate worlds.
General
Imprint: |
Fordham University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
December 2023 |
Authors: |
William Sherman
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
320 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-5315-0568-4 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-5315-0568-6 |
Barcode: |
9781531505684 |
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