Chapter 4 discusses Iran’s religious diversity. It examines the two main sects of Islam (Sunnism and Shiism) and describes their expressions in Iran. Of the world’s many Muslim-majority nation-states, Iran is one of the few Shi‘i-dominant ones. Safavid rulers proclaimed Shi‘i Islam as the state religion in 1501. Shi‘i clergymen declared a Shi‘i Islamic republic in 1979, after the popular revolution that ousted the secular monarchy. Iran features multiple kinds of religious communities. They include a wide range of Shi‘is and Shi‘i-related peoples, ethnoreligious minorities, Sunni-dominant minorities, and non-Muslims who are Bahais, Christians (Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans), Jews, Zoroastrians, and Mandaeans. The chapter discusses the positioning of religious minorities within the fundamentalist Shi‘i Islamic republic and the changes that have occurred for them since 1978. Iranians who are not mainstream Twelver Shi‘is are not well integrated in Iranian society. Shi‘i Muslims since 1978 also underwent changes in doctrine and practice. Iran’s new “religious” minorities include growing numbers of secularists and others who reject the ruling Shi‘i regime and its restrictive politico-religious ideologies and programs. They threaten the regime’s stability and longevity.

The chapter is a preface to an Arabic translation of Henry Corbin’s History of Islamic Philosophy, offering a critical perspective on Corbin’s interpretation of Shiʿism. Musa Sadr appreciates Corbin’s dedication to Islamic philosophy, particularly his work on thinkers like Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra. However, Sadr expresses reservations about Corbin’s emphasis on the esoteric (batin) aspects of religious teachings and his understanding of walaya (guardianship), the Imamate and the Hidden Imam within Shiʿism.

Sadr argues that Corbin overgeneralizes the opinions of scholars and Sufis, cautioning against equating their views with core Shiʿi doctrine. He clarifies the Shiʿi perspective on Qur’anic interpretation. While the Qur’an has multiple layers of meaning, interpretation should remain within the bounds of the text and the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings. He also disagrees with Corbin’s view on the relationship between Shiʿism and Sufism, asserting that they are distinct and that Sufism lacks a foundation in Shiʿi thought. He reads Corbin’s walaya as a divine authority to enforce the law and build an Islamic society. He also addresses the concept of the Hidden Imam, stating that his role is to implement the message of the Prophet and maintain religious rules, not to reveal esoteric truths.

This chapter analyzes the classification of “Gulf literature,” arguing that this geographical categorization inaccurately limits the diverse cultural and global contexts found in novels by authors from the Gulf countries. It posits that such a demarcation fragments Arabic literature and often perpetuates Orientalist clichés. Using Mohammed Hasan Alwan’s Ibn Arabi‟s Small Death as a case study, the chapter points to the ways in which the novel transcends regional boundaries through its engagement with Sufism and universal philosophical questions, displacing a narrow Saudi Arabian identity. It challenges the tendency to reduce Gulf literature to sociocultural or nationalist critiques, advocating for a comparative reading approach that recognizes its sophisticated artistic and intellectual contributions and its ability to destabilize conventional literary classifications.

This chapter uses the twin rubrics of “state” and “sovereignty” to understand many of the most important or controversial aspects of ‘Alamgir’s forty-nine-year reign. What emerges is a portrait of a ruler who was, by turns, determined to restore law and order, protect social hierarchies, coopt or crush anyone who opposed his efforts, replenish the imperial treasury, and strengthen Mughal rule. Although ‘Alamgir mostly positioned himself as a typical Mughal emperor in terms of his sovereign self-expression, his style of renunciate sovereignty (at once Timurid and Islamic) radiated into the court and empire in distinctive ways. Ultimately, his decision to invade the Deccan in the early 1680s proved to be his and the Mughal Empire’s undoing. Against a backdrop of political and military failure, ‘Alamgir nonetheless held on to his throne. This chapter ends by arguing that his emergence as a living saint–emperor (Zinda Pir ‘Alamgir) was a key factor in his political survival.

Religion shapes Gulf politics in different ways depending on the country under consideration but also the shifting socio-historical circumstances at the domestic and the regional levels. Religion has been used as a tool of state-building by Saudi Arabia. Alternatively, it has also been used by Islamist movements for the contestation of established regimes. In societies that are diverse religiously, sectarian divides between various currents of Islam have been politicised more often than not. Religion has also been an important element of the international soft power of Gulf states. In the twenty-first century, Gulf states have promoted ‘moderate Islam’ as a way to counter Islamist movements and to consolidate their international standing.

Chapter 1 is a detailed guide to the multifaceted historical backdrop of the Safavids, charting their first transformation, from a Sufi order to a potent Shiʿi empire in Iran. In this exploration, Anatolia holds particular importance, illuminating the region’s significant impact on the Safavid journey and unveiling the movement’s origins within Ottoman territories. This chapter also contends that a rigid understanding of sects and sectarianism does not adequately capture the nuanced emergence of the early Safavid movement and its spread into neighboring regions. Instead, it posits that the Safavid order (and later the state) was the product of a syncretic and turbulent religious, cultural, and political landscape in Southwest Asia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This perspective is particularly pertinent when connecting Safavid history to recent scholarship that highlights the coexistence and long-term transformations of religious identities in regions such as Anatolia and the Iberian Peninsula, rather than reducing the narrative to one of perpetual tension and abrupt ruptures.

This chapter considers Doris Lessing’s engagement with utopia, from the Children of Violence series which is set in 1950s–60s London to her near-future ecocatastrophic Mara and Dann novels (1999, 2005). The necessity of utopian hope in Lessing’s novels is set against a seeming disavowal of the possibility of positive systemic change. Utopian possibility in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–83), for instance, is driven by cosmic patterns rather than human action. Similarly, her excoriating descriptions of colonial and capitalist life in the Children of Violence series (1952–69) possess an energy that can be considered utopian. However, the apocalyptic strain in many of Lessing’s works renders this utopianism highly ambivalent. In their critique of societal progress or political change at scale, Lessing’s novels often sit at odds with the literary utopian tradition. In Lessing’s works, read alongside American contemporaries such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, the prefigurative mode is less concretely utopian. Enclaves of survivors persist, but the texts indicate that political struggle will return with each generation and the same problems recur across history. The chapter concludes that Lessing’s late ecocatastrophic fictions exhibit a stronger utopian impulse, which resonates with twenty-first-century discussions of the climate emergency in the United Kingdom.

Before the twentieth century, to be literate in the Western Sahel meant to be literate in Arabic—or in other African languages written with the Arabic script. Yet works by West African Muslim scholars, composed largely in Arabic, are often overlooked in discussions of West African literature. This chapter highlights this gap by reconstructing the history of the region’s ‘Islamic literature’ and its relationship to print. Focusing on the literary production of two of the region’s major Sufi orders, the Tijaniyya and Muridiyya, it shows that printed works of Islamic erudition became increasingly important elements of public life across the twentieth century and continued to serve as one of the most frequent and readily available means of experiencing ‘literature’, even alongside the expansion of colonial and postcolonial educational institutions that employed European languages of instruction. Comprising some of the most common forms of reading material in West Africa today, they are the fruit of an encounter between a well-established Sufi literary tradition and newfound access to the affordances of print.

This chapter follows the trajectory of an early Cold War ideal of a pro-American Islam that could serve US foreign policy goals. It asks how and why Islamic mysticism generally, and Sufism specifically, came to be seen as the West-friendly “moderate Islam.” What role did transculturation and comparativism between Türkiye and Iran under America’s global hegemony play in forming this common perception?

This chapter offers an overview of the fascinating and complex world of Islamic Christology by using the Qur’an and Hadith, the primary sources of Islam, as a starting point. It condenses the wealth of literature that Muslim exegetes, philosophers, and mystics have produced on the Islamic representation of Jesus and Mary, examining what they consider to be authoritative Islamicized forms of Christian beliefs.

Zilka Spahić Šiljak utilizes the concept of ‘feminist religiosity’ to demonstrate how Islam plays a crucial role in shaping everyday struggles of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), enabling them to live in a more fulfilling way. The chapter highlights the influential role of Islamic spirituality, particularly Sufi traditions emphasizing love, care, and service, in empowering women to pursue feminist endeavours across various domains such as non-governmental organizations, media, and academia.

This chapter analyses the spiritual ideas on universal peace developed by Sri Lankan teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in terms of their South Asian and North American cultural syncretism and his development of classical Sufi ideas of the microcosmic ‘Perfect Man’ into a globalised but decidedly anti-modern ‘cosmopiety’.

The chapter discusses Abdolhossein Zarirnkoub’s Persian-language biography of Ghazālī, Farār az Madrasa (Escape from Madrasa), which argues that Ghazālī’s intellectual formation was significantly shaped by the Persian mystical tradition of his time as well as by a broader Islamic tradition of learnedness. An appreciation of the historical and cultural confluence of the Abbasid and Seljuq Empires is crucial to explaining Ghazālī’s reformist vision. Within Ghazālī’s lifetime, the ideals and promises of the Seljuq state gave way to sudden, chaotic collapse, revealing in the process the malfunctioning of a self-professed regime of salvation. Ghazālī was a child of the Niẓām al-Mulk revolution in administration and politics, with its hopes for unifying the Seljuq and Abbasid states under the banner of justice and governance. Yet Ghazālī witnessed the sudden and tragic collapse of the Seljuq state, after Niẓām al-Mulk and Sultan Malikshāh were assassinated in an explosive chain of events. Ghazālī was witness to a failed state-building project, who nevertheless clung to the ideals of that lost revolution while plotting to reinstate its normative mission by other means.

This chapter discusses Ghazali’s Writings in Persian and reception in Iran. Typical Ghazālī studies center his Arabic output. Yet one major work, The Alchemy of Happiness, was written originally in Persian. Ghazālī participated in a Khurasani cultural tradition. Zarrinkoub argues that Ghazālī’s mystical understanding of Islam, against prevailing literalism, influenced Islamicate civilization and culture. Zarrinkoub highlights the contribution of Persian-speaking philosophers, theologians, and scholars to the mystical and theological development of Sunni Islam. Although Iran is conventionally framed as the epicenter of Shi‘ism, Iran only became a majority Shi‘a country with the Safavid Empire in 1501. Through Persian resources we see a cosmopolitan Islam thriving where the Abbasid Empire intersected with multiple cultural revolutions, and where mysticism and established power clashed and reconciled in Ghazālī’s Sufi encounter. Ghazālī’s flight from the madrasa was a flight from orthodoxy in Islamic education, in his renunciation of the educational system. Ghazālī’s Sufism was partly a critique of the dogmatic understanding of Islam common among the ‘ulama.’