Stories of Saints and Sultans: Re-membering History at the Sufi Shrines of Aurangabad

Extract

Encounters between Sufi saints and Muslim rulers have played a long and important role in the textual historical traditions of Muslim South Asia. Historians of the sultanates of Delhi and the Deccan writing in Persian such as Ziya al-din Barani and Abu'l Qasim Firishtah peppered their accounts with such narratives, much to the distaste of their nineteenth century British translators who frequently excised such episodes wholesale. Some of the earliest Sufi literature composed in South Asia, such as the ‘recorded conversations’ (malfuzat) written in the circle of Nizam al-din Awliya of Delhi (d.725/1325), make clear the importance of this topos of the interview between the saint and king. The actual historical nature of such encounters is sometimes difficult to ascertain in view of the didactic and moralizing dimensions to both medieval historiography and Sufi literature in Persian.