The Correspondence of Khwaja Ahrar and His Associates

FAIN: RZ-20071-97

College of New Jersey (Ewing, NJ 08628-0718)
Jo-Ann Gross (Project Director: September 1996 to September 1999)

To support the translation and annotation of a corpus of 257 letters written toand from a fifteenth-century Central Asian Sufi master of the influential Naqshbandi order. The letters focus on royal conflict and patronage.

This project will produce an annotated English translation with the original Persian text of 257 letters of the Sufi master, Khwaja Ubayd Allah Ahrar, and his associates from fifteenth century Central Asia. There will be extensive introductory and background material intended to place the letters in context and to bring to the reader the historical and cultural environment in which they were produced. This will the first major English translation of Sufi correspondence from premodern Central Asia and the first joint-American-Uzbek scholarly publication. It will make available to students and scholars an important primary source for the social, religious, and economic history of the premodern eastern Islamic world.

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