To get the measure of Sufi hagiography (saintly biography), it is necessary to attend to both the genre’s social underpinnings and the specificity of its representations. For the social side, hagiographies are created by disciples seeking to bolster the saintly credentials of people whom they regard as legitimizing their own practice.

The day is sometimes associated with the moment when the biblical figure Noah landed his ark after the great flood and fasted together with all the animals as an act of thanksgiving.

He indicates, at the very beginning of the account, that he wrote in an age where apostates and doubters of religious truths were inexplicably ascendant.

One feels that Islam is ripe for wholesale dismantling, to be replaced by either a better reconstructed version or an altogether different sociointellectual system.

meaning his birth occurred under the shadow of a celestial alignment that predetermined his political ascendancy.

The beginning of the Zafarnama makes the point that when he was born, “a world came forth into the world in a human form” (Yazdi, Zafarnama, 1:235)

Fixed in placid and parsimonious habits on the outside, Silva’s inner life has a vivacity that transforms with the genre of work he is contracted to proofread. He is given a manuscript to proofread that is a historical work on an event with a deep connection to the city and the quarter in which he lives. The event is the siege of Lisbon in 1147 by Dom Afonso Henriques (d. 1185), ruler of the county of Portugal. Afonso’s capture of Lisbon greatly enlarged his territory, as he found the kingdom of Portugal that has continued to exist as a state, in one form or another, from the twelfth century to the present. As Silva reads the historian’s account of the city’s siege in the twelfth century, his active imagination starts to plot the presence of the army outside the walls of the quarter in which he lives in the twentieth century.

It can be argued that the primary significance of Jerusalem beyond its immediate environs rests not on the physical city in the Middle East but in the way it has been imagined by Muslims, Jews, and Christians the world over in the manner we see in the case of Kudus. The Middle Eastern city is the subject of a large literature concerned with what is found in its space. But this literature has little to do with the way Jerusalem has been the object of religious attention by those living far away.

hough written in a different mode than the pseudo-autobiography, Mernissi’s more directly academic works also deploy the tactic of rethinking the past for present ends. Her intentions are stated directly in a book highlighting premodern Muslim women who held political authority: It is time to begin to rewrite the history of the Muslims, to go beyond the Islam of the imam-caliph-president, of the palace and its ‘ulama; to move beyond the Islam of the masters, and doing that means going into the swampy, dark areas of the marginal and the exceptional.…Islam, a civilization of 15 centuries, which embraces the lives of millions of individuals of different sex, class, and ethnicity, cannot but be the history of complexities, tensions, and rejections. To say today that ‘Islam forbids women access to the field of politics’ is certainly to speak the truth. But we understand our history a little better if we admit that that is one truth among many others (Mernissi, Forgotten Queens of Islam, 84–85). Mernissi’s strategy for rewriting history included positing that Islam’s original doctrines and social prescriptions had been egalitarian but were corrupted into hierarchical forms in the imperial setup that became dominant from the late eighth century onward. This argument hinged on two interrelated words—hijab and hajib—that signify separation and the creation of a barrier. She maintained that in the original Islamic polity presided over by the Prophet, the governors and the governed, and men and women, were treated the same with respect to the ability to access and occupy authority. The political transparency involved here was marked by the lack of a hijab, the veil or barrier, as a structural device meant to denote separation. In this view, women’s veiling as a practice with wide social and even ontological implications became an aspect of Islamic self-understandings only in the postprophetic, imperial stage.