Intimacies of Global Sufism: Ne'matullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India

From the fifteenth-century onwards, followers of the Sufi poet Shah Ne'matullah Vali navigated land and sea routes through Central Asia, Iran, and India, acting as agents of power, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange.Along the way, they built shrines whose poetry, spatial configuration, and materiality created intimate religious spaces that engaged local audiences, invoked distant places, and brought together pilgrims, itinerant artists, merchants, and courtiers from many regions. Pushing back against global art history trajectories that have privileged east-west connections as well as studies of Islamic art in South Asia that have largely focused on the Mughal Empire, Intimacies of Global Sufism explores the opportunities and challenges that Sufis encountered in developing a transregional network of material culture.Using the concept of intimacy to highlight the shrines' affective interconnections between people, objects, and ideas, author Peyvand Firouzeh invites readers to step in