Preface

Summary

There has never been an intention to confine this monograph series to texts and interpretations in the Western esoteric tradition. The first number, devoted to the only surviving dialogue from Late Antiquity, between five gnostics and an orthodox Christian, has its likely provenance in southern Asia Minor (Turkey) or Syria. More recently, the study of the religion of the Yezidis by Garrik Asatrian and Victoria Arekalova takes us to the Kurdish region straddling the Near and Middle East. In this present volume we find concentrated study on a host of materials almost completely separated from the Western tradition, and it is both a pleasure and honour to celebrate it as the first among an emergent cluster of textual and interpretative studies intensely focused on Near and Middle Eastern Gnosis, and on a living tradition at that.

In undertaking a work such as this, on Persian Sufism and its long-term historical roots, daunting problems can put off even the most enthusiastic authors, because there are swathes of Iran's complex and extraordinary past left quite undocumented. This is not only because there have been significant pockets of purely oral culture in the Middle Eastern and Central Asian regions, but because of destructive invasions, those by Alexander (“the Terrible”, not the Great in Persian eyes!), by iconoclastic Moslem Arabs, by the Mongols and by the Turkish Tamerlaine, to name key agents.