From the fifteenth century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Nematullah Vali 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.
Countering global art history approaches that have privileged east-west connections, Intimacies of Global Sufism centers relationships between the local and global across Iran, the Deccan, and Mughal India. Within this framework, the book sheds light on both the opportunities and challenges that Sufis encountered in developing a transregional network of material culture. Using the concept of intimacy to highlight the shrines' affective interconnections between people, objects, and ideas, author Peyvand Firouzeh invites readers to step inside these significant but understudied sacred spaces and rethink their wider religious and material significance. Looking closely at sites ranging across thousands of kilometers, this book combines a detailed analysis of architecture, objects of ritual, and manuscripts, with local and dynastic histories, Sufi poems, patronage documents, and a unique focus on the disciple-artists who created these spaces. The movement between small spaces and global perspectives allows us to make sense of two seemingly contradictory sides of Sufi material culture: its tendency toward asceticism, and its investment in monuments and transregional connections.
Richly illustrated with more than 140 images of these sites, their architecture, and their artifacts, Intimacies of Global Sufism offers readers a new vantage point on the early modern world and the making of transregional community through sacred spaces.
Intimacies of Global Sufism is the recipient of College Art Association's Millard Meiss Publication Fund, The Barakat Trust Publication Award, The New Foundation for Art History Publication Subvention Grant, and the Persian Heritage Foundation Publication Grant.
By:
Peyvand Firouzeh
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 279mm,
Width: 216mm,
ISBN: 9780253074133
ISBN 10: 0253074134
Pages: 394
Publication Date: 18 November 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Acknowledgments Note to the Reader Introduction Part One: Shrine Diplomacy between Kerman, Yazd, and the Deccan 1. Shrines, Thresholds, Palimpsests: The Portal at Mahan 2. Across the Arabian Sea: Gift Diplomacy in an Expanding Shrine Network 3. Shrines, Cosmos, Territory: The Making of the Taft Khanaqah Part Two: Distance, Intimacy, Substitution: Strategies of Self-Representation 4. Betwixt and Between: The Sacred and Material in Taft and Mahan 5. Inscribing as Belonging: Architecture, Textile, Ritual Part Three: Patronage and Authorship Inside-Out 6. The Architecture of Intimate Alliances and Competitions 7. Patronage Beyond the Court, Sufis Beyond the Shrine 8. Mahan's Chelleh-Khaneh and the Disciple-Artist: The Poetics and Politics of the Sufi Body Epilogue: The Fragility of Transregionality Appendices Bibliography Index
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.
Reviews for Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne'matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India
""Firouzeh, perhaps more effectively than any other scholar to date, has brought a divergent body of materials from multiple sites in Iran and India into rich, fluid dialogue. . . . Few scholars have managed to access all of these sites in India and Iran, let alone with the depth and critical eye that Firouzeh has brought to that endeavor.""—Yael Rice, author of The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court ""Employing architecture, epigraphy, hagiography, and art history, Peyvand Firouzeh's sumptuously illustrated study explores the many ways that a Sufi tradition based in 15th c. southern Iran became truly transregional, connecting Iran with India in the Timurid and Safavid/Mughal periods.""—Richard M. Eaton, author of India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765
