The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam pdf

What had started out for me as a very conventional study of one individualmystic in the rather unimaginative genre of “life, times, and works” beganto expand to a study of the social history of eleventh-and twelfth-centuryIslamdom. It had been natural enough for me to be interested in Sufis like’Ayn al-Qudأ¤t. The “zooming back” process started to include other com-munities that I had hitherto not thought much about: the communities ofthe Sufis’ disciples and hagiographers, the communities of competing tulamأ¥'(religious scholars), the court administrators, the ‘Abbasid caliphs and theircourt, the Saljأ¼q sultans and their court, poets and historians, soldiers andviziers. Somehow I found myself with copies of ‘Ayn al-Qudأ¤t’s wondroustexts along with remarkably dull Saliأ¼q chronicles side by side on my cluttereddesk. I would need a bigger desk and a much wider framework.The same theorist cited above, Bruce Lincoln, goes on to state that forthe “would-be student of ideology” it might be more fruitful to examine the”ideological products and operations of other societies. 4 The “other” societythat I would study was still Islamic Iran, but safely removed 900 years from