Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne’matullahi Shrines and Material Culture between Iran and India

Abstract:

In the fifteenth century a network of Sufi shrines emerged across southern Iran and Deccan India, mobilized by connections through sea routes and monsoon winds. Built by or for Ne’matullahi Sufis—a politically influential network made up of followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne’matullah Vali—these early modern sacred spaces were a meeting point of itinerant Sufis, local and peripatetic artists, merchants, courtiers, and kings. Their collaborations and competitions developed the shrines into rich palimpsests of artistic innovation, devotion, and transoceanic dialogues between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering monumental shrine complexes, small retreat cells, devotional wall paintings, and ritual carpets, I use the notion of “intimacy” in this talk—which is based on my forthcoming book—to rethink the significance of small places, and their multi sensorial inner workings, for writing global histories of art. I delve into some of the most intimate spaces of these shrines, and their close dialogue with the devotional objects and epigraphic programs contained within them, to make sense of two seemingly contradictory sides of Sufi material culture: its tendency toward asceticism, and its investment in monuments and trans regional connectedness.

Bio:

Peyvand Firouzeh is Lecturer in Islamic Art History at the University of Sydney, and an Australian Research Council DECRA fellow. She is a trained architect and art historian specializing in medieval and early modern art and architecture from the Islamic world, with research interests in arts of Sufism, the interaction of image, space, and text, Indian Ocean Studies, and the mobility of artistic and intellectual networks within and beyond the Persianate world. Her forthcoming monograph, “Intimacies of Global Sufism” (Indiana University Press, 2025), addresses the relationship between mysticism, materiality, and mobility. Focusing on a series of hitherto understudied sacred sites in Iran and India, the book uses the concept of “intimacy” to redraw the boundaries between small devotional spaces and monumental structures, as well as between local and global histories of faith and art making. Peyvand’s research has been supported by grants from the Australian Research Council, Getty Research Institute, American Council of Learned Societies, the Max Planck Society, the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, the Willison Foundation Trust, the British Institute of Persian Studies, and the Iran Society, among others.