“And Forty-Two Thousand Gabrs Tore Off Their Zunnārs”: Non-Muslims in Early Sufi Hagiography (11th–13th Centuries)

Abstract

The article investigates the representation of non-Muslims and the narrative work they per­form in early Sufi hagiography (eleventh – thirteenth centuries), focusing on the ways in which hagiographic literature articulates and negotiates the boundary between the com­munity of believers and the religious “other” in the context of the institutional consolidation of Sufism and the emergence of saintly cults around charismatic shaykhs. It first sketches the principal Islamic idioms for conceptualizing religious alterity as grounded in the Qur’ān and the Sunna and then traces their reworking in the broader textual ecology of adab prose and Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ (“Stories of the Prophets”), where recurring scripts of repentance, mi­racle, and conversion are codified and circulated. Reading a corpus of Persian hagiographi­cal texts, the article maps a wide repertoire of motifs: individual and collective conversions prompted by the saint’s baraka and karāmāt; episodes of trial, dispute, and moral exempla­rity; intra-Muslim polemics in which the saint’s charisma implicitly contests competing claims; and narratives that stage the symbolic subordination of rulers to the spiritual autho­rity of Sufi master. Special attention is devoted to the zunnār – a conventional marker of confessional difference – and to its Sufi hermeneutic transposition: in hagiographical dis­course it becomes a figure for “inner unbelief,” that is, the persistence of pride, and self-sat­isfaction within the ostensibly orthodox believer. The article concludes that non-Muslim characters function predominantly as narrative catalysts within the hagiographical economy, serving pedagogical and legitimating ends.