Paper abstract:

In recent decades, the function and position of female saints (awliya) and sufis within the Islamic mystical tradition has attracted increasing scholarly notice. To date however, comparatively little attention has been directed to such traditions within Altisheher and other parts of Central Asia. The tazkira (memoir) of one such saint from Yarkand, Yut Bibi, provides a case study of how devotees of female saints negotiated the potentially transgressive nature of female sainthood in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Altisheher. The tazkira depicts Yut Bibi as an unmarried woman, of royal Qarakhanid and Hashemite ancestry, who leads pilgrimages to Mecca, feeds multitudes both with halva and milk from her own breast, acts as a surrogate mother, and manifests miracles at her grave after her death. Comparing the tazkira’s treatment of Yut Bibi with female saint’s lives drawn from elsewhere in the Islamic world, this paper argues that female sainthood in Altisheher shares many features with female sainthood elsewhere in the Islamic world. These include an attempt to combine recent royal and prophetic ancestry alongside a view of female sanctity as principally embedded in the saint’s body as a source of food and nourishment. Nonetheless, in contrast to several other regions in the Islamic world, female saints in Altisheher could be more easily embodied in their society’s normative social order, including alignment with the mainstream clergy (Ulamā) and an absence of association with madness, due to comparatively lower degrees of female physical and social confinement in Altisheher. Separately, the paper will also consider potential pre-Islamic Turkic and Buddhist influences on the tazkira. Finally, a close textual comparison of different nineteenth-century manuscript traditions for the text enables us to draw several broader conclusions about the transmission and development of tazkira during this period.