Tārīkh-i Sulṭān Muḥammad Quṭb Shāhī (1026/1617), anonymous author

In 1084ah/1673ce, Muḥammad Mufīd Bāfqī, a former comptroller of religious endowments (mustawfī) arrived in the Quṭb Shāhī capital of Hyderabad, in Telangana, after an arduous journey from his home city, Yazd, in the Safavid realm. He had been a member of the urban notable class in Yazd, and he was a master of the Persian literary arts, with a penchant for history. Despite his elevated position in Yazd, Mufīd had made a play at advancing his career at the court in Iṣfahān. After this had failed, he had chosen to abandon his homeland for the opportunities that the realms of Hind promised a man of his birth and talents, and so he made his way to the Deccan. He would remain in Hyderabad for only a little over three years, and, deriding it with the appellation “Kadūratābād”, the ‘Abode of Gloom’, he would head north in search of patronage. He travelled to Ujjain in 1088/1677, where he found favour at the court of the Mughal prince, Sulṭān Muḥammad Akbar, and then finally settled in the city of Multān. Two years later, in 1090/1679, he completed a three-volume, encyclopaedic history of Yazd, from primeval times to his own era, during the Safavids’ rule. Its title Jāmiʿ-i Mufīdī (hereafter JM) was meant to pun on the author's own cognomen, Mufīd, which means ‘useful’. Thus, it translates alternatively as ‘The Compendium of Mufīd’ or ‘The Useful Compendium’. He arranged the first two volumes in chronicle form. The lengthy third volume complemented the narrative of the first two books with biographies of the city's notable personages and disquisitions on its monumental places.Footnote ¹ In the last volume's conclusion, he inserted a first-person narrative of his life and journey from Yazd to Hind, which he composed in the highly ornamented style of Persian belles-lettres.Footnote ² This self-narrative served as a kind of coda, insinuating that the history of Yazd culminated in the story of his own transplantation to India.Footnote ³ In both works, the author regularly complained that during his sojourn in Hyderabad he was overwhelmed by anxiety, homesickness, and insomnia. There, he turned for relief to the one remedy that had always comforted him before—books.

Devouring one such volume, Mufīd encountered the triumphant couplets, quoted at the top of this article. This was an anonymous work of history, Tārīkh-i Sulṭān Muḥammad Quṭb Shāh (hereafter TQS),Footnote ⁴ which detailed the history of the Quṭb Shāhī dynasty (ruled 901/1496 to 1098/1687).Footnote ⁵ TQS was completed in 1026/1617, just under sixty years before Mufīd would happen upon it, and the verses referred to an event that had occurred two centuries previously. The poem comprised a prognosticatory proclamation that had supposedly predicted the Quṭb Shāhī dynasty's transplantation from Iran to India and imminent rise to power in that auspicious land. The Quṭb Shāhs were descended from the Turkoman Qarā Qūyunlū princes of western Iran, who, in 872/1467, had been defeated and hunted down by the rival Āq Qūyunlū dynasty; the versified prediction implied that by relocating to Hind, the fallen family would be redeemed of their ignominious defeat. Indeed, the fulfilment of that destiny is precisely what TQS goes on to recount. In the hundreds of folios that follow those verses, the youthful Qarā Qūyunlū prince and destined founder of the Quṭb Shāhī dynasty, Sulṭān Qulī (Quṭb al-Mulk), resettles in the Deccan, where he finds favour with the reigning Bahmanī emperor, and, after that ruler's demise, establishes his own powerful kingdom in the eastern Deccan region of Telangana.

Yet, for Mufīd, more poignant than the redemptive and prognosticatory resonances of these verses was the sense of hope they evoked— hope for material gain and the supposed destiny of conquest that the realms of Hind were thought to avail elite men of Iran, be they Turk or Tājīk. These jubilant sentiments must have vexed Mufīd, who had been compelled to cross the ocean by exactly this kind of promise, only to find himself lost in a gloomy abode of disappointment. In the following quatrain, penned outside of Hyderabad, he epitomised his feelings regret:

That sour taste must have seemed twice as acrid each time that Mufīd was reminded of the auspicious fate awaiting luckier newcomers to Hind. Nonetheless, when he read a few folios further into that book on the Quṭb Shāhs, he must have been consoled to discover that even the author of those irritatingly optimistic verses must not really have been so certain about Hind's beneficence. Comparing Hind to the land of Iran (Īrān-zamīn), the anonymous author described the latter as “the best land in the world”.Footnote ⁸ Like so many court historians in the Deccan, the anonymous author was almost certainly of an immigrant background as well, and Mufīd would likely have read the author's juxtaposition of these seemingly contradictory sentiments about the these two locations as exemplifying the perplexing experiences of émigrés who found themselves in a place that was at once so cosmopolitan and yet so alien. This tension, evident in the book found by Mufīd, highlights important questions that shaped migrants’ experiences in general. How did they conceptualise the relationship between the spaces of Iran and Hind? How did these migrants conceive of home? What did it mean to them? On this issue, Mufīd is less ambiguous than the author of TQS. He peppers JM with a popular ḥadīth, proclaiming homesickness a religious act (in Arabic): “Love of homeland (waṭan) is a part of faith (ḥubb^u al-waṭanⁱ min al-īmān)”. According to Mufīd, waṭan (vaṭan, in Persian pronunciation) clearly meant the city of Yazd and its surroundings, not the entire land of Iran or the political realm ruled by the Safavids. Even still, these meditations on the relationship between Hind and Iran that Mufīd chanced upon in this anonymous book on the Quṭb Shāhs undoubtedly resonated with him, even if his primary affinity was with the relatively limited region of Yazd. But the situation is more complicated still. Even though the author had eventually settled permanently in Mughal territory, where he was serving in the house of a Mughal prince, he dedicated his magnum opus (his ‘Useful Compendium’) on Yazd and his own exile in Hind to the reigning Safavid monarch, Shāh Sulaymān (r. 1077–1105/1666–1694), whose realm he had abandoned. Clearly, Mufīd understood his history of Yazd to have some import for the imperial realm, not just for Yazd. In other words, Yazd's history had some use beyond its boundaries.

But how? Mufīd's fascination with TQS offers some clues. It turns out that the work's evocation of immigrants’ troubled sense of belonging was only the beginning of Mufīd's concern with this book. TQS and the particular narrative that it contained became profoundly important for Mufīd as he attempted to compose his own meditation on homeland. The augural poem in TQS appears at a climactic moment in the work, in the midst of the foundation legend of the Quṭb Shāh dynasty, which, as it happens, took the form of the founder's migration to India. Therein, Sulṭān Qulī, the dynasty's first ruler, makes the journey to the Deccan from Īrān-zamīn, and fulfills the royal destiny that was predicted for him in the versified oracle. However, what really gripped Mufīd when he read this work was that while on his way to India, this future king of Telangana had stopped at an important shrine in Yazd in order to seek the blessing of one of the important Sufi saints of the age, Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī.Footnote ⁹

The fact that Mufīd's hometown appeared at the centre of this story prompted Mufīd to copy this section on Sulṭān Qulī’s migration and visit to Yazd directly into his own history of the city. This bit of borrowed text would play a pivotal role in Mufīd's work as a whole. Exploring why and how Mufīd put it to work helps to explain what he imagined the utility of his ‘useful compendium’ was meant to be for his faraway homeland. His work, and especially his explicit appropriation and re-contextualisation of this found-narrative from TQS, promises to have important implications for understanding the mentalities and social practices of the migrant communities from Iran in the early modern period. Toward this end, this article will explore the work that Mufīd imagined his literary project could perform. On the one hand, it explores how his writing could help him maintain a sense of belonging in both Hind and Iran. On the other hand, it considers how he presumed his book could influence real affairs in Yazd as well as in the Safavid court.

Foreigners and Circulation Societies in Hind

How does this study of Mufīd's engagement with the work that he found in the Deccan contribute to a growing body of scholarship on the cultural and social history of migration between Iran and Hind in the early modern period? In the JM quatrain quoted above, Mufīd chose the word gharīb (foreigner) to describe himself. This was a common appellation for migrants that the native Muslim populations of the Deccan used for people like him, but it was also one that migrants self-applied, sometimes proudly, to distinguish themselves from the various native populations, Muslim and non-Muslim. The complex issues of identity and social formation that surrounded the term gharīb is central to Mufīd's work; it has also drawn the attention of historians who have wished to comprehend the role that foreignness played in structuring the activities of migrants and their interactions with other actors in Hind and Iran. The current section thus situates the present study in relation to this body of scholarship on migration.

Gharībān like Mufīd had travelled a well-worn path. The riches and fabled opportunities of Indian kingdoms had been luring migrants and merchants since Ghaznavid times. Immigration redoubled in the fourteenth century and accelerated into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, too, as the Safavids challenged and alienated many elites from their power bases, especially in the secondary cities around the realm.Footnote ¹⁰ A large proportion of the gharībs were Tājīks, who were highly literate people of standing and means, frequently from sayyid lineages, and with expertise in the religious and rational sciences.Footnote ¹¹ Their marketable skills as administrators, astrologers, and, relatedly, their expertise in Persian letters—especially in the genres of epistolary composition, historical writing, and panegyric poetry—had allowed for their mobility. Consequently, they traversed an expansive and cosmopolitan universe that was delimited by the utility of Persian language and Persian cultural idioms in urban centres and courtly environments, stretching from Anatolia to Transoxiana to the Deccan.Footnote ¹² But Mufīd's expression of agitation and rootlessness was representative of many gharībān who voiced similar feelings of exclusion, homesickness and chauvinism in spite of the opportunities for success and wealth that the realms of Hind afforded men of their station.

A good deal of scholarship has focused on the mentality of encounter between the gharībān and the native communities of Hind and has highlighted this chauvinism toward the native populations. Immigrants recognised differences between the many native populations and judged them accordingly. In their eyes, native-born Muslims occupied a higher position than the East African slaves or the various non-Muslim populations. But immigrants also considered themselves to be superior to all these groups; they were distinguished by an urbanity that could only have come from their home cities in Iran.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, Mufīd's characterisation of the peoples whom he encountered in India reproduces these sentiments.

This attitude accompanied a tendency for migrants to look back toward the cities of Iran for a sense of purpose and communal identity. Indeed, migrants returned home when they could or at least maintained contacts with people who remained behind. Some research has emphasised the circular nature of migration flows, which engendered transregional social networks that connected communities in Iran with immigrants in Hind.Footnote ¹⁴ Although the net movement of people was toward Hind, the traffic was multi-directional, featuring a significant retro-flow of gharībān toward western Asia as well. Such work gives a picture of the gharībān not as a diaspora community, characterised by the common experience of dislocation, dispersion and exclusion, but rather as what Sebouh Aslanian has termed a “Circulation Society” in his study of global New Julfan Armenian communities. By emphasising the tremendous mobility and agency of Armenians within their global networks, Aslanian demonstrates that far from being disempowered minorities, Armenians frequently served as key political brokers, empowered by their imbricated bundles of local and transregional connections. Of course, Armenian merchants’ experiences were different than those of the gharībs, but Aslanian's focus on mobility and connectivity helps to explain the complexity of gharīb networks as well.Footnote ¹⁵ Roy Fischel's work on gharībs in the Deccan has shown that even those migrants who permanently settled in India kept on eye on affairs back home and, to the extent that they could, tried to keep a foot in both places.Footnote ¹⁶ Theirs was a multipolar and cosmopolitan world, characterised by protracted circuits of connectivity and by the ever-present possibility of movement between the metropoles scattered across Persianate Asia.

At the same time, other work demonstrates that whether migrants actually returned to their cities of origin in Iran or not, places and personages within those cities remained cardinal points of orientation, even from across the sea. Such places in Iran stood at the centre of commemorative practices that were integral to social activity in Hind. Poets, sovereigns and Sufis in Hind not only traced their lineages to notable families and urban centres of North and Western Asia, but also actively worked to perpetuate the memory of their homelands’ history, prosopography and typography in their new homes. Illocutionary acts of commemoration served as integral strategies by which these elite figures brokered power and authority in their relatively new communities. In local competitions for prestige and patronage, claims of origins in the west engendered the mobilisation of a particular kind of social capital that was highly effective in such competitions for power. In his study of South Asian shrine complexes and hagiographies, Nile Green argues that this power was strongly mobilised in local Indian tomb-shrines and monumental mosques. He demonstrates that authority and power were effectively manifested through local rituals, storytelling practices and the dissemination of books, which invigorated those sites by means of commemoration of prestigious peoples, places and events in Iran. Migration narratives, which circulated around these places, were particularly effective for re-localising these distant, authoritative people and places and re-deploying them toward local ends.Footnote ¹⁷ While these sites and stories were essential for immigrants’ social formation, these were not exclusive spaces, and they performed a related social function for the non-immigrant communities, too, who revered these places as fonts of allochthonous sacredness.

Related kinds of commemorative practices and, in particular, migration narratives, were compelling, meaningful and functional for a variety of audiences, including for princely families of Turkic backgrounds—such as the Quṭb Shāhs—whose ancestors had been migrants themselves. In addition, such stories were useful as well for the Tājīk-émigré clients of princes, who composed them on behalf of their patrons. As a consequence, migration narratives became archetypal and were so loaded with significance and implication that gharībs could deploy them strategically as they navigated the highly competitive environments in which they competed for prestige and patronage in many localities simultaneously. Narratives connecting rulers and noble patrons to the elevated, saintly peoples and places in Iran play an important role in their historical writing, which circulated in royal courts. For example, in a recent article, Fischel studies foundation stories about the emergence of the ʿĀdil Shāhī dynasty, and its founder Yūsuf ʿĀdil Khān (d. 915/1510).Footnote ¹⁸ A full consideration of those findings will appear below; here it suffices to say that those accounts centred on the story of the founder's immigration to India, and Fischel demonstrates that the authors of these histories clearly linked the ʿĀdil Shāhs’ royal mandate to a fusion of both royal and sacred pedigrees, understood to have originated in the west. I term this variety of migration narratives ‘retrospective narratives’, i.e. those narratives in which immigrants glance backward and commemorate peoples, places and events back home, thereby transplanting the prestige that comes from there in order to build social capital in their new contexts.

In the aggregate, the scholarly work surveyed above has begun to reconstruct a set of social networks along the Iranian-Indian corridor, similar to the ones that Engseng Ho famously assembled for the Hadramauti communities in the Indian Ocean and South East Asia.Footnote ¹⁹ As Ho demonstrated, the formation of connected networks and collective identities depended heavily on practices of commemoration (both oral and literary), which outlined the parameters in which memories of home could be imagined and embedded in prevalent narratives among these communities, and which simultaneously laid out the pathways along which people, objects, books and stories could physically travel back and forth.

This scholarship which focuses on connectivity has been immensely productive, but unlike Ho's work on the Yemeni communities, the bulk of work on Persianate migration concentrates on immigrants’ retrospective memories of homes in the west while living in India. But stories, just like people and their books, circulated in both directions. Along with travellers returning to Fārs or Khurāsān came stories about the Indian communities—and most importantly, stories about gharīb communities in India. Mufīd's story is one of those that returned home, even if its author never did.Footnote ²⁰ I propose that in order to understand the function of memory and commemorative practices in Persianate circulation societies, we must complete the circuit and also study the backflow of stories (about or from Iranian lands) told in India as they were transported back and retold in Iranian settings. I term these stories ‘retroflexive narratives’, that is, tales bent backward. Retroflexive narratives are distinct from retrospective narratives, or tales of glancing backward. Retroflexion is a complicated narrative operation, in which the author dialogues with ‘found’ stories abroad, repackages them in new narrative environments, albeit retaining elements of their local accretions, and then sends them back (bends them back) toward home to put them to use there in new local contexts.

Mufīd's engagement with the account that he found in the anonymous TQS in Hyderabad stands an example of a commemorative act of this retroflexive type. He inserted the retrospective narrative about Sulṭān Qulī’s migration that he had found there into the history of his hometown, bundled it with his own personal migration story, and returned the whole package to his native soil with the hope of engaging with affairs back home. Retroflexive endeavours were not always successful in effecting change, however. In the end, despite Mufīd's efforts, his writings appear to have failed to stir enough interest back in the Safavid realm in time to do the work that he intended for them. Nonetheless, as stated above, the ultimate objective in this article is to understand how Mufīd imagined his work could be useful, regardless of whether it actually was or not. Comprehending the world in which a retroflexive narrative was thought to have ‘worked’ with illocutionary force will help us better understand the mentalities and practices that shaped foreigners’ strategies for orientation and negotiation in a cosmopolitan and highly competitive space.

Two Texts and Two Cities

We left Mufīd in Hyderabad, pouring over the anonymous Tārīkh-i Sulṭān Muḥammad Quṭb Shāh and copying Sulṭān Qulī’s story of migration into his history of Yazd. What did he know of this book, its author, and its subject matter? Despite the fact that the author was anonymous,Footnote ²¹ Mufīd no doubt recognised that it was written in the style of a foreigner from one of the urban centres of Western Asia, who likely worked in the royal court in Hyderabad. As Mufīd perused this lengthy manuscript, he discovered that the anonymous author had explicitly based much of TQS on quotations from an earlier, lost account, Marghūb al-Qulūb (‘The Desire of the Hearts’), which had been composed by yet another gharīb, a sayyid by the name of Ṣadr-i Jahān Mullā Ḥusayn from Ṭabas in Khurasan.Footnote ²² That work was most likely composed in the mid-tenth/sixteenth century. TQS had been dedicated to Sulṭān Muḥammad Quṭb Shāh, the sixth ruler of the dynasty and the great-great-grandson of the dynasty's founder, and it was completed in 1026/1617, at the peak of the dynasty's power.Footnote ²³ As he read the work, Mufīd discovered that TQS rehearsed the history of the Quṭb Shāhs from their origins among the Qarā Qūyunlū Turkomans in ʿIrāq-i ʿAjam, until the long and important reign of Muḥammad Qulī (r. 988–1020/1580–1612), who had built the city of Hyderabad in 1000/1591 to celebrate the start of the new Hijrī millennium.Footnote ²⁴ Although the details of Sulṭān Qulī’s migration and rise to power in India might have been news to Mufīd, he would have been well aware that from the start the Quṭb Shāhs had claimed submission, at least symbolically, to the newly triumphant Safavids, who had vanquished their mutual rivals in Iran, the Āq Qūyunlūs; in fact the Quṭb Shāhs pronounced the khuṭbah in the name of the Safavid Shāhs. Likewise, Mufīd would not have been surprised to read the author's statement that upon his conquest of Telangana, Sulṭān Qulī ordered the invocation of the twelve Shiʿite Imāms during the khuṭbah, as the Safavids had done.Footnote ²⁵

At the time of Mufīd's sojourn, Telangana was still ruled by a Quṭb Shāhī monarch, Abū al-Ḥasan (r. 1082–1098/1672–1687), who would be the last of his line. In reality, the power of the reigning Quṭb Shāh had been eroding. In 1046/1636, the Mughal Emperor Shāh Jahān had forced Abū al-Ḥasan's predecessor, ʿAbd Allāh Quṭb Shāhī, to accept tributary status, compelling him to sign a formal Deed of Submission (inqiyād-nāmah), which made the Quṭb Shāhs vassals of the Mughals—at least on paper—and forbade them from pronouncing the name of the Safavid monarch or including elements Shiʿite rites in the khuṭbah. Twenty years later, in 1066/1656, the Mughals won a decisive military victory against the Quṭb Shāhs and temporarily occupied the city of Hyderabad. Notwithstanding these setbacks, the Quṭb Shāhs were not powerless, and while the Mughals had become embroiled in the war of succession in the late 1650s, they attempted to reconfirm ties with the Safavids.Footnote ²⁶ Although Mufīd was surely aware of these recent events, he could not have known that fourteen years after he turned up in Hyderabad, in 1098/1687, the Mughals would completely dissolve the Quṭb Shāhī dynasty. Still, he undoubtedly observed the contrast between the dynasty's current circumstances and the TQS’s jubilant account of affairs when the Quṭb Shāhs were still on the ascendant. Perhaps the most poignant change would have been the degradation of Safavid influence and the status of Shiʿism in Telangana. In any case, in the author of TQS’s telling, the mutually beneficial link between realms, which had allowed state-sponsorship of the Shiʿite rite to take hold in both polities, was forged in the exultant story of Sulṭān Qulī’s migration, which climaxed in Yazd. Let us look closely now at that miraculous story of the transplantation, redemption, and rise to glory, which piqued Mufīd's interest.

The anonymous author of TQS was determined to connect the narrative about Sulṭān Qulī’s immigration and rise to power to the glorious history of the Quṭb Shāh's ancestors in Iran, the Qarā Qūyunlūs, as earlier historians of the dynasty had done.Footnote ²⁷TQS opens with a full narrative of the Qarā Qūyunlū dynasty, and it dwells on the celebrated careers of its progenitors, Qarā Muḥammad (d. 1389), Qara Yūsuf (d. 1420), and Jahānshāh (d. 1467), remembered especially for their resistance to the Timurids in Iran, and their glorious feats of ghazā against the Christian communities of the Caucuses.Footnote ²⁸ Although Mufīd appears to have known nothing about Sulṭān Qulī’s migration story before his arrival in the Deccan, the dynastic history of the Qarā Qūyunlūs was well known to him before leaving home, and he had already touched upon their history in various parts of JM.

In the final episode leading up to the story of Sulṭān Qulī’s migration, TQS recounts how Ūzūn Ḥasan, the sovereign of the Turkoman Āq Qūyunlū tribal confederation, killed the illustrious Qarā Qūyunlū king, Jahānshāh, in 872/1467,Footnote ²⁹ and thereby brought the dawlah of the Qarā Qūyunlūs to an abrupt and violent end. This tragedy, and the persecution of the family by one of Ūzūn Ḥasan's successors, Yaʿqūb, precipitates Sulṭān Qulī’s flight to India.

Yaʿqūb, as Mufīd would have learned while reading TQS, dabbled in the art of geomancy and astrology himself and, consequently, had become anxious about the young Sulṭān Qulī.Footnote ³⁰ After tasking the realm's experts with drawing up the boy's horoscope (zāʾichah-i ṭāliʿ), the experts informed Yaʿqūb that Sulṭān Qulī’s star would rise in Hind rather than in ʿIrāq-i ʿAjam, implying that the boy posed no threat. Indeed, the verses from TQS quoted at the beginning of this article were meant to convey the essence of the court astrologers’ prediction:

TQS relates that even though Yaʿqūb should have been relieved by this astrological reading, the paranoid monarch decided to eliminate the Qarā Qūyunlū line anyway.Footnote ³⁴ Sulṭān Qulī’s uncle, Allāh Qulī, learned of Yaʿqūb's plan and fled to India with his nephew. The irony here is that the author of TQS is implying that the villainous Yaʿqūb was actually the agent of God's will: by chasing him to India, Yaʿqūb unwittingly caused Sulṭān Qulī to fulfil the destiny that he himself had divined. Divination plays an important role in the accounts of both TQS and JM, and we will witness more such oracular events as the story unfolds.

Next, Mufīd arrived at Sulṭān Qulī’s migration narrative itself. This is where he started copying. In TQS, this passage constitutes a transitional moment that bridges the section of history dealing with the family's past in Iran and the section dealing with their rise to power and empire building in the Deccan. I have chosen to present the text from Mufīd's quotation of the narrative that he found in TQS rather than from the TQS itself so that I am able to comment upon discrepancies between the two accounts as they arise. Mufīd's text itself is virtually the same as that in TQS, aside from a few minor variations where Mufīd finds his source text stylistically wanting, and, in a few places, where he makes some abridgments. The only variation of significance is that Mufīd smooths over some of the grammatical inconsistencies that he encountered in the original, where, occasionally, the narration switched from first-person to third-person—evidence that the author of that work was likely collating Ṣadr-i Jahān's Marghūb al-Qulūb with other sources.Footnote ³⁵ Mufīd deliberately sets the whole episode in first-person, erasing any ambiguity about the reliability and authenticity of the accounts’ originator, Sulṭān Qulī himself. Thus, Mufīd opens by introducing the chain of sources and recording where he found them:

Right away, it is worth noting that in the TQS-version, the author presented the entire opening section of the passage in the third person. In that rendition the author had Ṣadr-i Jahān, the author of Marghūb al-Qulūb, provide an objective account, with no pretence that he had heard the story from Sulṭān Qulī personally. In the later part of the account, the anonymous author switches to first-person narrative. However, in JM, Mufīd explicitly specifies that the initial speaker in the narrative is Ṣadr-i Jahān, who then frames his narrative as an eyewitness account of a tale that he has heard directly from Sulṭān Qulī. Sulṭān Qulī’s account follows (as transmitted by Saḍr-i Jahān):

At this point, the wording of Mufīd's version begins to correspond more precisely with TQS, which here makes the abrupt switch to first-person narration, in Sulṭān Qulī’s voice:

At this point, Mufīd switches to a summative paraphrase of TQS rather than verbatim transcription of it, but he continues to narrate as if he were quoting from TQS, and he persists in presenting that text as a recording of Ṣadr-i Jahān's personal audience with Sulṭān Qulī. He has Sulṭān Qulī explain how he arrived in Bīdar (Muḥammadābād), found favour with the Bahmanid sovereign, Sulṭān Maḥmūd Shāh, and eventually rose to power himself. Mufīd's narrative ends with the following sentence, which does not appear in TQS:

While this marks the conclusion of Sulṭān Qulī’s cameo appearance in Mufīd's text, in TQS it is only the beginning of the king's story. The anonymous author continues, recounting in detail how Sulṭān Qulī and his uncle came to have an audience with the Bahmanī sulṭān:

The narrative then explains that after some time in service to the Bahmanid sovereign, Sulṭān Qulī’s uncle, Allāh Qulī Bayk, asked for leave to return to his familiar homeland (vaṭan-i maʾlūf).Footnote ⁵¹ The pādishāh tried to convince him to stay, but

Sulṭān Qulī then professed his desire to stay, confident that he would revive the glory of his noble lineage there. The narrative then switches back to third person, relating that when the Pādishāh learned of Sulṭān Qulī’s decision to remain, “on that very day, he granted him permission to be among the intimates of his eminent grace (muqarribān-i ḥuūr-i ʿināyat)”.Footnote ⁵³ Sulṭān Qulī’s commitment to remaining in the Deccan would soon pay dividends. But the author credits not only the young prince's skill and confidence, but also his origins among Iran's princes for his subsequent rise to prominence in the Bahmanid ruler's esteem:

The work then details how Sulṭān Qulī was appointed ṭarafdār (viceroy) of Telangana. Following this final crescendo in Sulṭān Qulī’s migration narrative, the anonymous author relates how, after Sulṭān Maḥmūd Bahmanī’s deathFootnote ⁵⁷ and the dissolution of the Bahmanid sultanate, Sulṭān Qulī secured his independent sovereignty in Telangana by conquest and wise statesmanship against challengers from both Muslim and non-Muslim competitors. He established his new kingdom at Golconda fort and became a champion of Shīʿī Islam.Footnote ⁵⁸ Consequently, the reader is told that in the proper tradition of ghazā, he had the opponents of the true religion put to death.Footnote ⁵⁹ The author of TQS concludes his account of the founder's victories in 950/1543, with his assassination, under the orders of his own son, Jamshīd.Footnote ⁶⁰ He then continues for another 150 folia, narrating the history of the Quṭb Shāhs in the Deccan, from Jamshīd's short reign up to his own contemporary times.

Let us pause for a moment and return to the earlier point about the role of divination and oracular speech in these works. Reading up to this moment in the text, Mufīd would have observed that the anonymous author of TQS had given three different characters the ability to divine Sulṭān Qulī’s auspicious destiny in Hind. As we have also already observed, before the central episode of the narrative, where the Niʿmatullāhī saint predicts Sulṭān Qulī’s destiny, Mufīd had already read in TQS about how Yaʿqūb had confirmed his clairvoyant instincts about Sulṭān Qulī’s rising fortune using the divinatory sciences of star- and earth-gazing. In TQS’s concluding passages of the account, quoted above, the reader will note that the anonymous author inserted one further augury into his account. Just after Sulṭān Qulī had arrived in Bīdar, the author gave the Bahmanid sovereign the power of prescience, comparing him with King Jamshīd, the Pīshdādī king of the primordial age. But where Jamshīd famously attained omniscience through the use of a scrying mirror, the Jām-i Jam, here no such implement was needed. The author simply moves the Bahmanid ruler's tongue to speak with divine inspiration (zabān-i ilhām), insisting that the boy remain in Hind, where his kingly destiny awaits him. Obviously, this last phrase was meant to echo the one the author chose earlier to describe the Niʿmatullāhī saint's divinatory utterance in Yazd, where he spoke “upon the tongue of divine revelation” (bar zabān-i vaḥī). What's more, the author of TQS framed this entire account of Sulṭān Qulī’s fortune at the Bahmanid court in the language of astrological augury: It was “in the hour when the sun—overseer of good fortune—and the planet Jupiter had surmounted the ill-omen of Saturn (naḥūsat-i zuḥal)”, that the young prince found himself in the Sulṭān's presence.Footnote ⁶¹ There the humilation of exile comes to an end and the story of his ascendancy begins. As we will see, in his appropriation of the story, Mufīd tinkered with these episodes of divine inspiration and prognostication that he found in TQS; he cast them in a decidedly different light and refracted the lessons they were meant to illuminate. Still, he managed to accomplish this feat of transfiguration while reproducing the text from TQS essentially as he found it, with only a few minor discrepancies. In other words, the difference between the two authors’ treatments of divination and saintly prognostication has to do with the ways in which they frame this passage, not with the text of the passage itself. The next section will be concerned with precisely this issue of context.

Retrospective and Retroflexive Narratives

The book that Mufīd found in Hyderabad told him that while the advent of Quṭb Shāhī rule was still fresh, the historians of the dynasty had mobilised memories of their ancestor's glorious rule in Western Iran, “the best land in the world” as the author of TQS had put it, in order to demonstrate that their success and nobility had originated there, with the blessing and guidance of a one of God's friends. The project that Mufīd encountered here was not unique, and is characteristic of other contemporary Persian histories of the Deccan. The schematic structure of TQS’s foundation narrative bears astonishing similarity to two slightly earlier accounts of the foundation of the ʿĀdil Shāhī dynasty, one of the Quṭb Shāhs’ rivals in the Deccan, which Fischel studied in his article mentioned above.Footnote ⁶² These accounts, which, like the Quṭb Shāh tale, both centre on a migration narrative, appear in Firishtah's Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī and Rafīʿ al-Dīn Shīrāzī’s Taẕkirat al-Mulūk, composed in the early-seventeenth century by two émigré servants of the ʿĀdil Shāhīs. These authors were writing roughly contemporaneously with the author of TQS. These two accounts about the founder of the ʿĀdil Shāhī dynasty, Yūsuf ʿĀdil Khān, and his passage to India are entirely different, but they follow an almost identical plot scheme. In Firishtah's version, Yūsuf ʿĀdil Khān was the brother of the Ottoman Sulṭān Mehmet II. The prince was forced to flee Ottoman territory and became a disciple of Shaykh Ṣafī al-Dīn, the founding saint of the Safavid Sufi order. He made his way to Shīrāz, where the Prophet Khir appeared to him in a dream and instructed him to seek his royal destiny in India. Once there, high ranking people recognised his noble qualities and enable his rise within the Bahmanid court at Bīdar.Footnote ⁶³ Shīrāzī, on the other hand claims that Yūsuf ʿĀdil Khān was an Āq Qūyunlū prince, from a rival cousin clan of Yaʿqūb Āq Qūyunlū. Fleeing the paranoid Yaʿqūb, Yūsuf stopped at mosque associated with Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in the city of Lār. There he was visited in a dream by a saintly being (probably the Imām), who predicted his successful career in the Deccan. Yūsuf embarked for Bīdar, where he became a favourite at the Bahmanid court. In both versions Yūsuf then finds himself well positioned to establish his own realm once the Bahmanid empire collapses.Footnote ⁶⁴ These two ʿĀdil Shāhī migration-foundation narratives share a narrative scheme with the Quṭb Shāhī one:

1. 1. A humiliated prince from some royal house flees oppression.

2. 2. The prince makes a visitation to a shrine associated with some saintly figure on his way across Iran.

3. 3. The saint (living or dead) miraculously predicts that the prince's redemption will manifest in Hind, thus precipitating his migration.

4. 4. Once in the Deccan the prince's noble traits become manifest and allow him to rise through the ranks at the Bahmanid court and then establish his own realm.

That these schemas form the structure of the foundation narratives of all three Deccani dynasties suggests that the narratives were generated in accordance with a certain template and drew on a shared stock of tropes common to the Deccani-Persian historiographical tradition. Taken together, they were designed to establish the dynasties’ royal and spiritual legitimacy through reference to the temporal and saintly lineages that originated in Īrān-Zamīn.

Even if the author of TQS was employing stock tropes, he was utilising these rhetorical figures to convey particular connections with Iran that were uniquely legitimating for the Quṭb Shāhs in their contingent circumstances. The anonymous author of TQS had placed Sulṭān Qulī’s arrival in the Deccan in the context of the brilliant careers of the Qarā Qūyunlū’s progenitors in Western Asia. Thus, the Quṭb Shāhs’ benevolent dawlah and legitimate rule in Telangana had deep roots in Iran, long before the family's noble deeds under the Bahmanids in the Deccan. By relating this pre-history, TQS explicitly made the tales of the Qarā Qūyunlūs’ gallant stands against the mighty Tīmūr and the tales of their ghazā against the infidels integral to the story of the Quṭb Shāhs’ own political and religious legitimacy in India; as discussed above, the author of TQS left no doubt that these descendants of Qarā Yūsuf continued their ancestor's legacy of ghazā and glory once they arrived in their new domains. Clearly, by positioning the dynasty's progenitors as formidable opponents of Tīmūr, the anonymous author meant to palliate the Quṭb Shāhs’ constant anxiety about the expansionist designs of that world-conqueror's own powerful descendants, the Mughals, who were menacing the Deccan kingdoms. The narrative of Sulṭān Qulī’s migration to the Deccan realised the transfer of the Qarā Qūyunlūs’ legitimacy, patrimony, and divinely sanctioned mission into the new land. Thus, in the anonymous author's rendering, Qarā Yūsuf's progeny had risen in Hind to defend it from the house of Tīmūr once again. And, it was the Niʿmatullāhī saint in Yazd that facilitated this transitive operation.

Here in TQS we have a classic example of a legitimating narrative of the “Retrospective” variety, paralleling Nile Green's findings on shrines, where the ability to demonstrate prestigious roots in Iran carried social and political capital in emergent communities of circulation in India. Just as in those ʿĀdil Shāhī narratives, in TQS and JM it is the saint who plays a pivotal role in transferring the dynasty's temporal and sacred patrimony to the Deccan. Shāh Niʿmatullāhī al-ānī does more than simply facilitate the prince's move. Charging this mundane act of migration with a charismatic glow, the saint succeeds in transmuting the royal house's history into destiny and transplanting it into new lands.

Unlike the saintly figures in the ʿĀdil Shāhī narratives, however, the Niʿmatullāhīs were not mere oneiric phantoms with miraculous powers. At the time of Sulṭān Qulī’s immigration, they were living, human agents. Indeed, they were major power players, heading a longstanding, transregional Sufi institution, with three main centres of activity, in Yazd, in Kirman and in Bīdar. In reality, Shāh Niʿmatullāhī al-ānī may have made a more concrete (though admittedly less sensational) contribution to the young prince's career than the narrative lets on. It may have been through the intercession of the Niʿmatullāhī sufis of Bīdar, Shāh Niʿmtullāhī al-ānī’s cousins, that Sulṭān Qulī found access at the Bahmanid court in the first place. For at least three generations, the Bahmanids had been partnering with the progeny of the order's founder, Shāh Niʿmatullāhī Valī, marrying their princesses to the saint's descendants.Footnote ⁶⁵ It seems likely that, as exiles, Sulṭān Qulī and his uncle's stopover in Yazd to visit their relatives may have been a practical one, designed to procure a letter of introduction from the Yazdī Sufi or something of that sort, which they could take to his Niʿmatullāhī cousins in Bīdar, who might then intercede with the Bahmanid monarch on their behalf. In reality, Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī’s role in facilitating Sulṭān Qulī’s relocation to Hind was probably as a well-connected social intermediary along a transregional network of kinsmen and devotees. Of course, neither Mufīd nor the author of TQS would have found much benefit in narrating such a mundane story, no matter how interesting it might be for historians today. Both authors report this encounter in an entirely hagiographical register and portray the Niʿmatullāhī saint as the agent of divine will, one who plays a key role in the unfolding of sacred history. Channelling the heavens, the saint transforms the Qarā Qūyunlūs of ʿIrāq-i ʿAjam into the Quṭb Shāhs of Telangana, enabling these ghāzī-kings and champions of Twelver Shiʿism to continue their erstwhile battle against the Tīmūrid house and other enemies along new frontiers in Hind. By stressing that this Qarā Qūyunlū legacy and religious mission was destined to replay itself in Hind, TQS transfers the lesson from the distant past and space of Iran to imminent future horizons within the space of Hind, where it will continue to play out. The Quṭb Shāhs are legitimate rulers, implies the text, not just because of what they have done, but, more urgently, because of what they are destined to do as inheritors of an earlier legacy. The success of the Quṭb Shāhs in the Deccan was evidence that the Niʿmatullāhī saint's prediction had come true, but readers would have understood the Quṭb Shāhs’ growing need to resist Mughal expansion in Hind as a new manifestation of the family's old opposition to tyrants like Tīmūr in Iran. Indeed, this particular spin on the narrative would have appealed to agents of the Quṭb Shāhī court, who were witnessing increasingly grave Mughal incursions into the Deccan.

But Mufīd's purpose for appropriating the tale had less to do with an interest in the Quṭb Shāhs’ sacred or political mission in Hind than with its rhetorical utility for his own project. In his eyes, the Quṭb Shāhs’ mission, and the Niʿmatullāhī saint's role in realising that mission, was important only in so far as it addressed concerns that were immediately relevant to Yazdīs and to the Safavid Shāh, to whom JM was dedicated. Clearly Mufīd wished to portray Yazd as the centre of the sacred universe and the Niʿmatullāhī family as uniquely capable of sustaining sacred kings in their mission. But was this what the author of TQS was attempting to demonstrate? Would he have expected his audiences have read the story in this way? I contend that he did not; Mufīd was actually distorting the original author's intended objective for the story. However, proving this requires that we consider the degree to which the Niʿmatullāhīs were actually involved in Quṭb Shāhī affairs at the time the TQS was written. It also demands that we examine how the author treated the Niʿmatullāhīs elsewhere in the text. Doing so will allow us to better discern how Mufīd managed to twist the story about the saints’ encounter with Sulṭān Qulī and make it speak in the service of his own project.

What role did the anonymous author of TQS envision for Niʿmatullāhīs and Yazd? Divine ordination in the mouths of Sufi saints was a standard motif in Islamic narratives of kingship in South Asia as well as in the rest of the Islamicate world. As already mentioned, the Quṭb Shāhs’ predecessors, the Bahmanids, had built their empire upon a public partnership with Sufis, first with the Chishtīs, and after the death of Gaysū Darāz, with the Niʿmatullāhīs. Even so, there are clues that by the time the TQS was penned, the Yazdī pīr's blessing of Sulṭān Qulī would not have struck readers as uniquely significant. This is partly because once the Quṭb Shāhs had consolidated their power in Telangana, they refrained from cultivating the special relationship of patronage and spiritual discipleship with the Niʿmatullāhī family that both their Qarā Qūyunlū ancestors and their Bahmanid patrons had actively cultivated. An enduring popularity of the Chishtī lineages among non-Shīʿī Deccani Muslims no doubt precipitated this shift.Footnote ⁶⁶ By the reign of Sulṭān Ibrahim Quṭb Shah (d. 988/1580), royal patronage had already begun to favour a descendant of the Chishtī saint, Gaysū Darāz, called Ḥusayn Shāh Walī. The king married his daughter, Pīr Mān Ṣaḥībah, to him.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, after an episode during Muḥammad Qulī’s reign, when some descendants of the Niʿmatullāhīs in Bīdar abetted the rebellion of a pretender to the Quṭb Shāhs’ throne, the Quṭb Shāhs were probably beginning to feel ambivalent about their earlier ties to the Niʿmatullāhīs.Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, ties with the Chishtīs solidified even further after the TQS was written, so much so that by the time of Mufīd's visit, the last Quṭb Shāh, Abū al-Ḥasan Quṭb Shāh, had been living as an ascetic in the khānqāh of the Sufi, Shāh Rājū, a descendent of the Chishtī saint, Gaysū Darāz, until immediately before he was made king.Footnote ⁶⁹ In any case, by the height of Quṭb Shāhī power, while the author of TQS was penning his history, a retrospective narrative that concerned Sulṭān Qulī’s encounter with Niʿmatullāh al-ānī in Yazd would have afforded the kind of allochthonous claim that might have been indispensible for demonstrating genealogical and spiritual legitimacy in the gharīb constituents’ eyes. Nevertheless, while such a claim of legitimacy was still necessary at this time, it would not have been a sufficient one. Ultimately, asserting a historical link with the Niʿmatullāhīs in Iran, or with Yazd in particular, constituted just one brick in the ramparts of the dynasty's highly accretive claims of legitimacy, and definitely not a unique one. Besides this, the Quṭb Shāhs also needed to demonstrate their legitimacy in the eyes of gharībs from other cities in Iran, who might have been devotees of other lineages. These efforts complemented appeals to Hindu Telegu and native Muslim Deccani elites that were disseminated through imperial policies of patronage and architectural programmes that utilised a variety of local and vernacular symbols of religious and cultural authority.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the end, the figure of Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī and the locus of Yazd formed probably a small part of the eclectic tapestry of signs pointing to the royal house's sacred legitimacy, and one that was overshadowed by the popularity of the long established local Chishtī lineage.

This assertion is evident at the level of the text of TQS as well. Even though the author did set the clairvoyant saint of Yazd at the crossroads of Sulṭān Qulī’s life story, his intention appears not to have been to underline the royal family's connection with the Niʿmatullāhīs or with Yazd in particular, but simply to demonstrate, in a general way, that the Quṭb Shāhs could simply display the requisite links to both a noble and a spiritual patrimony in the west. This becomes clear when we recall that, aside from the brief statement that Sulṭān Qulī and his uncle visited Yazd because of discipleship and kinship, the author did not mention the royal family's connections to the Niʿmatullāhīs or Yazd elsewhere in the text. Further, the Niʿmatullāhīs play virtually no part in the rest of the book, either as political actors or as thaumaturges.Footnote ⁷¹ More important still, despite the fact that the Niʿmatullāhī pīr does perform the crucial function of divinatory king-making in TQS, he serves as only one of a handful of characters that God had blessed with foreknowledge of Sulṭān Qulī’s sovereignty. The author of TQS scattered Sulṭān Qulī’s biography with a handful of other incidents of divinely inspired prognostications. As was noted earlier, the anonymous author sandwiched Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī’s revelatory utterance in Yazd between similar oracular pronouncements from other figures: Yaʿqūb Āq Qūyunlū, his astrologers, and Maḥmūd Bahmanī. Therefore, the author of TQS clearly did not intend Yazd to be the epicentre of divine revelation or the metropole of sacred kingship, as Mufīd would later imagine it to be. In TQS, such power could bubble up in any place, in the mouths of anyone with the knowledge of the unseen world, be it in Yazd, Tabrīz or Bīdar, in Iran or in Hind. Yazd serves as just one important centre in this commemoration, but not the only one.

Considering the fact that Mufīd was composing a history of Yazd, his particular emphasis on the story is predictably slanted toward the exceptional position of Yazd and its saintly figures in the narrative. In Mufīd's rendition, the kinship between Sulṭān Qulī’s family and the Niʿmatullāhīs was essential, and he was careful to specify those relations. But even more crucially, Mufīd gave the power to speak with “tongue of divine revelation” to Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī, alone. He systematically jettisoned from the narrative all the other divinatory incidents found in TQS.Footnote ⁷² Only the Niʿmatullāhī saint could see the prince's destiny in JM. Mufīd managed to twist the import of the narrative so that the story became about Yazd's unique and divinely sanctioned role as the maker of kings. He accomplished this feat not by altering the text, which he reproduced nearly verbatim, but by strategically positioning it in his own work so that it would resonate in a different way.

Where in the text did Mufīd insert the story? He did not situate it where one might expect it. He placed it neither in his account of his experiences in Hyderabad (in the conclusion of the third volume) nor in his chronology of the Qarā Qūyunlūs’ affairs in Yazd (first volume). Rather, he inserted it into his long hagiographical section on Yazd's saintly figures toward the beginning of the third volume. There, he injected the passage inside an extraordinarily lengthy section that concerns the lives of the saintly pīrs of the powerful Niʿmatullāhī family and their shrine complex in the village of Taft, on the outskirts of Yazd. To be precise, Sulṭān Qulī’s story appears there, as one of the key episodes in the life of Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī.

The section on the Niʿmatullāhīs opens with a protracted notice on the founding saint of the Sufi order, the famous Shāh Niʿmatullāh Valī (great-great grandfather of Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī), whose piety and miracle-working had become renowned all over the eastern Islamic world during his own lifetime. Paramount among the founder's many miracles recounted here was the saint's famous prognostication, in 826/1421, wherein he employed his expertise in the sciences of conjunction-astrology and letterism to predict that in 909 ah (1503 ce) the Sufi-king, Shāh Ismāʿīl I, would establish the Safavid Empire.Footnote ⁷³ Shāh Niʿmatullāh Valī’s celebrity as a prognosticator and a kingmaker continues to be a principal theme in Mufīd's chapters on his descendants, too. Indeed, this well-known episode of the founding saint's life parallels and even foreshadows the story of Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī’s act of prescience generations later.

What is critical is that by the time Mufīd arrives at the section on the life of Shāh Niʿmatullāh Valī’s descendant, Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī, the narrative emphasises the Sufi family's special political partnerships with ruling houses. In fact, Mufīd precedes Sulṭān Qulī’s story with a focused discussion of the saint's alliance with Sulṭān Qulī’s triumphant ancestors, explaining that Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī was married to Sulṭān Qulī’s maternal aunt, Khānum Sulṭān, who was the granddaughter of Jahānshāh Qarā Qūyunlū.Footnote ⁷⁴ The reader should recall that the author of TQS did not provide such details in his account of the Qarā Qūyunlū’s affairs or anywhere else in the text; this is one of Mufīd's augmentations. What follows the treatment of Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī’s fated encounter with Sulṭān Qulī, which has already been examined in detail, is a full account of the peak of Niʿmatullāhī family's political achievements during the tenth century ah (sixteenth century ce), when, the early Safavids married their daughters to the current Niʿmatullāhīs of Yazd and placed them in the highest offices of the realm.Footnote ⁷⁵ The point here is that Mufīd carefully entangled the miraculous migration story of Sulṭān Qulī with details about the Niʿmatullāhīs’ ties of kinship with the Qarā Qūyunlū/Quṭb Shāhī and Safavid houses.

In addition to this, Mufīd's positioning of the story makes it clear that he intended Niʿmatullāh al-ānī’s prognostication about Sulṭān Qulī, which came to him “on the tongue of divine revelation” to echo his own account of Shāh Niʿmatullāh Valī’s famous prognosticatory act of king making, in which that saint had predicted the messianic rise of Shāh Ismāʿīl Ṣafavī 62 years before it occurred. Mufīd opened the chapter on the Niʿmatullāhīs with that inaugural episode of king making. But in this subsequent scene, where the founder's descendant, Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī, anoints Sulṭān Qulī as king of the Deccan, Mufīd succeeds in expanding the scope of the Niʿmatullāhīs’ authority beyond the Safavid realm, into Hind. The implication is that the Niʿmatullāhīs of Yazd not only shared the credit for bringing the Safavids to power in Iran, but they were also instrumental in establishing the Quṭb Shāhs as the Safavids’ Shiʿite agents in the Deccan. For, as has already been related, until the Deed of Submission to the Mughals in 1046/1636, the Quṭb Shāhs, pronounced the names of the twelve Imāms during the Friday sermon (khuṭbah) and even delivered the sermon in the name of the Safavid Shāh. Yazd and its blessed shrines, then, linked the realms of Iran and the Deccan, and thereby facilitated their alliance for the next two centuries.Footnote ⁷⁶ As a result, Mufīd implies, both royal houses, the Safavids and Quṭb Shāhs, had the Niʿmatullāhīs of Yazd to thank for their fortune. Mufīd's bending of the Sulṭān Qulī story had the effect of pushing the influence of Yazd's holy men and the city's boundaries beyond its immediate domains. Yazd became more of a metropole than even the imperial capitals of Iṣfahān or Hyderabad.

How does this fit in with the JM’s general purpose? The entire history of Yazd that Mufīd presents, is festooned with tales demonstrating how the city's holy men had been king makers, serving reigning sovereigns and benefitting the realm at large with their expertise in esoteric sciences and their thaumaturgic power. The regular recurrence of such episodes gives the work its structure and rhythm. However, the deeds of the Niʿmatullāhī saints constitute probably the most important of these in the work, for it was they who had paved the way for the Safavids’ reign.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, their accomplishments also mark a turning point in the narrative. After describing the achievements of the Yazdī Niʿmatullāhīs in the first century of Safavid rule, Mufīd brings the story of the family up to his contemporary times. Space does not allow a full treatment here, but I have shown elsewhere that in the course of this narrative, Mufīd depicts the erosion of the order's status during Shāh ʿAbbās I's reign, after he and his successors had refrained from patronising the Niʿmatullāhīs and their shrine, and had deliberately disempowered the heads of the order, along with other local sayyid families.Footnote ⁷⁸ The consequence, he implies, was the decay that he observed in Yazd, and the gradual degradation of Safavid power that had ultimately compelled him make his way to Hind in the first place. Thus, Mufīd asserts that by denying Yazd, its shrines and its notable figures the imperial favour that they long enjoyed under previous kings in Iran, the Safavids had destroyed the very families and institutions that could have sustained the magnificence of the realm. But, from Mufīd's perspective, because Yazd was in fact a centre of the Quṭb Shāhī realm too, this neglect also had implications beyond the boundaries of the Safavid dominion, in the Deccan, where the Safavids had lost any symbolic claims of authority over the Quṭb Shāhs by the mid seventeenth century. The author's insertion of the Sulṭān Qulī story into this implicit critique of the Safavids’ treatment of the Niʿmatullāhīs had the effect of redoubling the tragedy of their failures.

Mufīd was writing from within an Islamo-Persianate historiographical tradition, paralleling ‘mirrors for princes’ literature that typically understood history to have a didactic objective. History was composed of edifying lessons from the past, meant to serve as a guide for the moral behaviour and statecraft of elites in positions of power. The recounting of past periods of glory were meant not only to provide a model for wise action, but more often, to offer a tacit critique of current circumstances by casting into relief signs of contemporary decline.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mufīd's Jāmiʿ-i Mufīdī, his ‘Useful Compendium’, was clearly written in this vein. While the author probably never imagined the monarch would actually read his compendium, he likely hoped that the ministers of the court who might read it could advise him in accordance with the lessons it contained.

The episode of Sulṭān Qulī’s anointing in Yazd portrays one of the last of many recurring tales of glorious sovereigns in JM, whose rule in Īrān-zamīn had been enabled by Yazd's great men. However, the particular positioning of that narrative empowered it to evoke Yazd's former role as a womb of sovereigns beyond the frontiers of Iran. By retrofitting this story about Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī and Sulṭān Qulī into his work on Yazd, he demonstrated precisely the power through which Yazdīs had formerly projected their influence, power and authority into faraway lands. That master narrative, dedicated to the reigning Shāh Sulaymān, ends with Mufīd's own miserable exodus to India, a move, which the author tells us resulted from the lack of opportunity in the Safavid realm, and, he implies, from the Safavid rulers’ squandering of Yazd's sacred patrimony. The dynasty's impotence had even negatively affected the author's employment prospects in faraway Hyderabad, forcing him to seek employment in the north of India, among the progeny of Tīmūr.

Having said this, it is critical to recall that Mufīd explicitly acknowledged that this was a narrative that he had unearthed in the Deccan. For him the story alone was not enough to do this work. Indeed, on its own, the history of the Quṭb Shāhs was not of much interest to readers in Iran.Footnote ⁸⁰ Mufīd's discovery and transcription of it was more efficacious than the actual story itself. In order to render the polemical effect of the narrative fully operational within his history, Mufīd needed to conspicuously mark it as a found Deccani story about Yazd. Thus, he loaded his retelling of that tale with the narrative of his own discovery of it while he was living in exile. It was precisely by leaving the story's lineage of transmission exposed and by performing the actual transcription of the story into his work, right before his readers’ eyes that Mufīd empowered the text to speak of the long-term and long-distance effects of the Safavid rulers’ misguided actions. These were actions that had hastened the migration of the best members of their realm to Indian sultanates. Ultimately, by repatriating this story of exile and transplantation, which he juxtaposed with his own parallel one, and by making the triumphant exile of the Quṭb Shāhs indigenous to both places, Mufīd positioned it to articulate the Safavids’ lack of vision that had so weakened the empire and his home city along with it. By bending Sulṭān Qulī’s narrative backward toward Iran, Mufīd aimed to challenge the Safavids to reflect on their policies in Yazd, which had once been the centre of the world.

Did Mufīd's literary project actually improve the lot of Yazdīs? Did it succeed in effecting change inside the Safavid realm? The short answer is obviously not, or at least, not in the way Mufīd had hoped. It was only a few decades after Mufīd's death that the confederation of Afghan tribes invaded the realm and, sacking Iṣfahān in 1135/1722, brought the Safavids’ two centuries of rule to an end and ushered in period of violence and instability that devastated Yazd and the rest of the region in the subsequent decades.Footnote ⁸¹ In reality, it is unlikely that Mufīd could have imagined his work could have saved the realm from such a fate; so, what might Mufīd have realistically expected his book to accomplish? And how did JM actually benefit the realm? Did manuscripts containing it even make it back to the land of Iran, and if they did, who read them? Where and when were they copied, and how were they read?

Because the work was dedicated to Shāh Sulaymān, one might assume that a very early copy should have reached the Safavid court. No such copy or any mention of it has come to light. JM clearly did make it back to Iran eventually, and has become an important part of the patrimony of Yazd—Mufīd would say a ‘useful’ part of that patrimony. JM is one of the key sources a number of modern local histories of the city.Footnote ⁸² However, interest in Mufīd's work in Iran appears not to have emerged until the nineteenth century ce, and even then, only in quite limited circles. While early copies of the work produced in the seventeenth century (including the holograph copy) do exist, these were all produced in Hind, and remained in circulation there. There are ten pre-twentieth-century manuscripts in Iranian collections that contain portions of JM, and all are of nineteenth-century provenance.Footnote ⁸³ Aside from two copies that contain the full third volume, the bulk of them preserve only portions of the chapter on the Niʿmatullāhīs, many including the story of Sulṭān Qulī and Shāh Niʿmatullāh al-ānī.Footnote ⁸⁴ Moreover, the colophons indicate that a number of these were copied by scribes with connections to either Yazd or Kirmān, and, specifically, with a connection to the Niʿmatullāhī shrines of either region. Thus, Mufīd's work appears to have first found favour, not with the royal household or with imperial provincial governors, but with the devotees of the Niʿmatullāhī sufi order, which was newly re-emerging during the nineteenth century, two hundred years after the Safavids had all but eliminated them from the realm.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, there are no extant copies of the first or second volumes of JM in Iran at all. Clearly, interest in the work (or in its third volume) developed fairly late, and then mostly among people with a Niʿmatullāhī affiliation in Yazd or Kirman.

Having said this, it appears that at least one copy containing some portions of the first volumes must have circulated back to Yazd during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, i.e., some decades earlier than the extant manuscripts reveal. In 1245/1829–30, a few years after the production of the earliest Iranian copies, Muḥammad Jaʿfar Munshī Naʾīnī composed a new local history of Yazd called Jāmiʿ-i Jaʿfarī,Footnote ⁸⁶ which he claims to have written in explicit imitation and continuation of Mufīd's Jāmiʿ-i Mufīd.Footnote ⁸⁷ Still, until evidence of seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century ce copies materialise in Iran, we can provisionally conclude that copies of Mufīd's history did not ride the ebb-flow of people and objects to Iran in any significant quantity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ce, and further, that any copy that did make it there did not stimulate much interest until the early nineteenth century ce or later. In the end, the author's great compendium of useful lessons had come to be used in ways that he had not intended. It had been broken up into fragments, and its comprehensive message had been mostly scattered to the wind.