Friday, February 9, 2018
2 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
Incoming Middle East Studies Director Shahzad Bashir presents this Center for Contemporary South Asia lecture on Hamid b. Fazlallah Jamali (d. 1535), among the earliest authors in Persian to describe India as a place inscribed by the lives of Sufis. Jamali’s work contains a vision of India as a Sufi timespace at a crucial juncture in the development of distinctly Indian Sufi-Muslim identities. Professor Bashir presents the details of Jamali's work and compares it to that of his contemporaries such as Babur, the first ruler of the Mughal dynasty. Ultimately, the spatiotemporal projections embedded in Jamali’s work help to understand Sufis’ complex place in cultural history, a matter that remains subject to live debate in contemporary South Asia.
Center for Contemporary South Asia