2025 CFSACK Research Awards Recipients

Echoes of Devotion: The Qaṣīdat Ṣalātu Rabbī and Its West African Sufi Afterlives

Abubakar Sadiq Abdulkadir’s research explores the Mauritanian Sufi scholar and poet Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al-Yadālī’s celebrated devotional ode Qaṣīdat Ṣalātu Rabbī maʿa al-salāmī and its influence across the Sahara and Muslim West Africa. Focusing on literary analysis and fieldwork, the project examines the poem’s distinctive prosody, its role in reshaping Arabic devotional poetics, and the intellectual, genealogical, and spiritual connections it generated through later Sufi praise traditions.

Between the Desert and the Divine: Turkmen Music’s Sufi Voice

Mohammad Geldi Geldi Nejad’s research explores the influence of Sufi poetry and teachings on the Turkmen bardic tradition and its position between nomadic and sedentary musical cultures. Combining archival research, fieldwork in Turkey, and performance experience, the project examines how Sufi sensibilities have shaped Turkmen musical forms, aesthetics, and artistic expression within broader conversations on Sufism and music.

Intersections of Belief and Practice between Islam, Sufism, and Indigenous African Bori Culture in Northern Nigeria (19th–21st Century)
 

Umar Farouq Haruna’s research explores how Islam, Sufism, and the indigenous Bori spirit-possession tradition have interacted in northern Nigeria from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on archival records, manuscripts, hagiographies, colonial documents, and oral traditions, the project traces both cooperation and tension among these traditions and examines how religious plurality has shaped resilience, adaptation, and cultural creativity in West Africa.

Securing the Qiṣṣah Sayyidnā Yūsuf Manuscript for a Paradigm Shift in Shahrastānī and Sufi Studies

Sedigheh Kardan’s research explores the thought of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī through the analysis of the unstudied manuscript Qiṣṣah Sayyidnā Yūsuf held at al-Azhar Library in Cairo. The project argues that Shahrastānī’s esoteric writings reveal deep conceptual links between Ismaʿili and Sufi traditions, challenging conventional scholarly assumptions and offering a more integrated understanding of medieval Islamic intellectual history.

Sufi Mobilities: Inter-Asian Networks and the Logistics of Religiosity

Harini Kumar’s research explores religious mobilities across South India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia through the legacy of the sixteenth-century Sufi saint Shahul Hamid. Using ethnographic methods and historical inquiry, the project traces how shrine networks, miracle narratives, festivals, trade, and migration continue to shape religious belonging across interconnected Indian Ocean worlds and will culminate in both a monograph and a public-facing digital archive.

Lovers, Assembled: Developing the Visual Lexicon of Mystics in the Sixteenth-Century Persianate World
 

Rebecca Selch’s research explores the development of Sufi portraiture through the study of Majālis al-ʿUshshāq (“Assemblies of Lovers”), a Persian biographical anthology widely illustrated in the sixteenth century. By reading text and image together, the project examines how the biographical history of Sufism moved from a textual tradition into a pictorial one and helped shape the visual language of mysticism in the Persianate arts of the book.

Rediscovering al-Kashnāwī: Arabic Logic, Text Mobility, and Knowledge Transmission in 18th C. Sub-Saharan Africa

Umar Sheikh Tahir’s research explores newly identified Arabic manuscripts by the Sufi African scholar al-Kashnāwī in order to illuminate scholarly training, logic, and textual circulation in postclassical West Africa. Through archival research across multiple repositories, the project examines how these works reveal an Arabo-African tradition of logic, scholarly mobility between West Africa, Egypt, and the Hijaz, and intellectual networks that challenge center-periphery models of Islamic knowledge transmission.

Reviving Early Sufi Hagiographies: The Islamic Hagiography Index Archive (IHIA)

Behzad Borhan’s research explores some of the earliest Sufi hagiographies through the Islamic Hagiography Index Archive (IHIA), a digital initiative dedicated to archival preservation, digitization, indexing, and thematic categorization. The project addresses the inaccessibility of key manuscripts and seeks to revive a vital but underexplored body of texts that illuminate saints’ lives, teachings, miracles, debates, and broader cultural and intellectual worlds.

Materiality of Spirituality: The Sufi Cosmology of Craft and the Vision of Matter in the Futuwwa Tradition

Fahimeh Ghorbani’s research explores how futuwwa, or javanmardī, was expressed through the material and visual culture of the Persianate world. By studying objects, garments, tools, images, and ritual implements in Iranian and Anatolian collections, the project investigates how Sufi-inflected ethical ideals were made visible, embodied, and socially lived among artisans, athletes, and devotional communities.

Making Process and Origin Story in Early Modern Persian Craft Guilds: Art, Meaning, Memory

Salimeh Hosseini’s research explores the intertwined histories of Sufism and craft production in the early modern Persianate world, especially in Safavid and Qajar Iran. Focusing on guild manuals, craft tools, and representations of craftspeople, the project examines how bodily, ethical, spiritual, and professional practices were shaped by Sufi ideas and institutions, and how making itself functioned as a form of moral and spiritual cultivation.

Trauma in Sufism: Pathways of Healing through Mystical Experience and Poetic Expression

Khulood Khan’s research explores how suffering, loss, and rupture are conceptualized and transformed within Sufi thought and practice. Through the lives and teachings of Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, and Ibn al-ʿArabī, the project examines how trauma can become a catalyst for spiritual growth, poetic creativity, and metaphysical integration, reframing it as a path toward healing and divine intimacy.

The Significance of Sufi (Un)Conventions: Reading the Haqiqat al-Fuqara

Rakshit Malik’s research explores how Sufi sources can reshape modern frameworks for understanding gender, sexuality, and embodiment in the premodern Muslim world. Centred on Haqiqat al-Fuqara and the companionship between Shah Husayn and Madho Lal, the project reconsiders categories such as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and biological sex through a historical study of shāhid-bāzī, literary convention, and early modern Islamic conceptions of the body.

A Millennium of Persian Sufism: Anthological Sayings as Core Ideas Shaping Polyphony and the Islamic Golden Age in Greater Khurāsān
 

Mojtaba Shahsavarialavijeh’s research explores how the voices of early Persian Sufi masters contributed to the intellectual life of Greater Khurāsān during the Islamic Golden Age. Focusing on three unpublished Persian anthologies from the tenth and eleventh centuries, the project recovers forgotten sayings, conversations, and ideas to show how early Persian Sufism cultivated intellectual dialogue, tolerance, and a rich polyphony of thought.

Defending the Sufi Beliefs and Practices in Colonial India

Muhammad Souman Elah’s research explores how debates over the Prophet Muhammad, articulated through theology, polemics, and fatwas, shaped Sufi thought and practice in colonial India. Drawing on Urdu and Arabic sources, the project examines how Sufi doctrines were defended alongside everyday religious practices within the Barelvi movement and presents Sufism as a dynamic, intellectually engaged tradition in modernity.