Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne‘matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India

Chair: Professor Scott Redford

Abstract

From the fifteenth century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne‘matullah Vali (d. 1431) navigated land and sea routes through Central Asia, Iran, and India. Along the way, they built shrines whose poetry, spatial configuration, and materiality created intimate religious spaces that engaged local audiences, invoked distant places, and brought together pilgrims, itinerant artists, merchants, and courtiers from many regions.

Moving between examples of monumental architecture and intimate spaces associated with the Ne‘matullahi Sufi network, this talk uses the concept of intimacy to highlight the shrines’ affective interconnections between people, objects, and ideas across Iran, the Deccan, and Mughal India. The aim is both to rethink methods of global art history, and to make sense of two seemingly contradictory sides of Sufi material culture: its tendency toward asceticism, and its investment in monuments and transregional connections.

Speaker

Peyvand Firouzeh (PhD, University of Cambridge) is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Sydney, Australia. She specializes in the art, architecture, and material cultures of the early modern Islamic world, particularly the material cultures of Sufism and artistic connections between Iran and India and in the broader Indian Ocean world.

Queries: rw51@soas.ac.uk

Image (banner): Interior view of the chelleh khaneh (retreat cell) at the Shrine of Shah Neʿmatullah Vali in Mahan, Iran. © Peyvand Firouzeh

Image (inset): Speaker © Peyvand Firouzeh