Mountains and messiahs : the Roshaniyya, revelation, and Afghan becoming
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation analyzes a sixteenth-century Sufi messianic movement known as the Roshaniyya ("the illuminated ones") popular among the Afghan communities of the northwestern regions of the Mughal Empire. While the Roshaniyya under the leadership of Bayazid Ansari and his family clashed with Mughal armies, there was a more profound contest over the nature of language and divine revelation. How does a "vernacular" language become the language of God? By telling a history of the "practice of revelation" amid the Afghan highlands, this project rejects the over-reliance upon tribe and ethnicity as explanatory categories that isolate the Roshaniyya movement. Rather, through an immanent reading of Roshani texts and the text of their critics, this project traces rival ideologies of language and temporality, demonstrating the significance of these contests in the emergence of new imaginings of Afghan identity and the role of Pashto. The Roshaniyya experimentation with language reveals a community that engaged the Qur'an and the concept of revelation as an open, continuous phenomenon that could be grasped through dhikr practice, narratives of dreams and saints, and literary techniques such as repetition, imitation, and rhyme. The Roshaniyya thus offer both a demonstration of the participation of Afghans in larger, Persianate religio-cultural trends as well as a striking example of the diverse ways premodern Muslims engaged the Qur'an and prophetic history. This dissertation also analyzes sources from a wide range of contexts that engage, critique, and remember the Roshaniyya in diverse ways for multiple ideological purposes. Among the sources considered are Mughal courtly chronicles, Persian biographical dictionaries, the reports of nineteenth-century British scholars and soldiers, and various works by a popular seventeeth-century heresiographer and Sunni scholar by the name of Akhund Darweza.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Sherman, William Edward Brown |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Religious Studies. |
| Primary advisor | Bashir, Shahzad, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Bashir, Shahzad, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva |
| Thesis advisor | Gin Lum, Kathryn |
| Advisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Advisor | Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva |
| Advisor | Gin Lum, Kathryn |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | William Edward Brown Sherman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Religious Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by William Edward Brown Sherman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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