Paper abstract:

This paper considers the development and evolution of paradigms of female sainthood and spiritual leadership in Central Asia and neighboring regions, which is the subject of my book in-progress: Sufi Saints of the Afghan Empire: Bibi Sahiba and her Sacred Networks (Harvard, 2024).

This paper centers on the female scholar-saint Bibi Sahiba (d. 1803), who was designated as the khalifa and qayyum of the principal Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi order of Kabul and Qandahar, with branches from Bukhara and Xinjiang to Gujarat. Through written and oral sources on Bibi Sahiba, her female descendants, and twelve female deputies appointed to lead sizable spiritual communities from Tharparkar to Rajasthan, I explore the emergence of a new, malleable model of female sacred-scholastic-popular authority which was critical in enabling the expansion of Sufi orders throughout the Persianate world in the 18th and 19th centuries. I also examine the evolution of the practical offices of female inheritors of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi path in urban versus pastoral nomadic environments, and the development of the haram sarai or haveli, the female-centered and female-led portion of Sufi institutions.

Bibi Sahiba and her contemporaries engendered a new paradigm of Islamo-Persianate female religious leadership distinct from earlier models of women’s sainthood; it de-emphasized the ‘Rabia’ or ‘theology of servitude’ ideal, in favor of a novel interpretation of the ‘Fatima’ paradigm. This paradigm was a byproduct of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi cosmological framework and model of spiritual wayfaring. Like Fatima the Radiant, these saints were to be present in this world, as practical publicly engaged community leaders, scholars and spiritual guides, managers par excellence, and mothers to virtuous children, and sources of radiating divine light for creation – embedded within a patriarchal Sufi lineage. The case of Bibi Sahiba and her successors ultimately warrants a drastic reconceptualization of the implications of Sunni Naqshbandi orthodoxy on the role of women in knowledge transmission and popular leadership, and the emergence of alternative loci of religio-political sovereignty.