Words of Power: Ḥurūfī Teachings between Shi‘ism and Sufism in Medieval Islam

The study of Islamic intellectual history, while existing in pockets of scholarshipbefore, has increasingly become a dominant aspect of the study of Islam.We have moved from some piecemeal approaches to the classical period to amore carefully nuanced and thick understanding of the middle period, thatcritical time from the wane of the Abbasids to the rise of the Gunpowder Empires.In particular, the “Chicago school” has expended a great deal of effortin making sense of the critical messianic moment from around the time ofTimur (1336-1405), the “lord of the junction,” to the “messianic sovereigns”of the Timurid and later Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.The book under review concerns one of the key intellectual developmentsof that period, namely, esoteric political theology and lettrism (‘ilm al-ḥurūf),which later informed similar developments in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. It gives us one, albeit marginal and rather antinomian, glimpse intothe importance of the esoteric and occult learning that was a critical elementof the scholarly underground even among elites throughout the middle andearly modern periods in the world of Islam. Mir-Kasimov’s magisterial andhighly textual study of Fazlallah Astarabadi (d. 1394) and his Hurufiyyahmovement, neither mainstream Shi‘i nor Alid-loyalist Sufis nor even completeesotericists beyond the pale of Islam, contributes to the processes by whichelite discourses on hermeneutics of reading the word and the world filteredinto more subaltern and vernacular understandings of the cosmos and thehuman within and the divine both within and without ...