Abstract
The study of women and female leadership within Sufi traditions has seen important developments in recent years, particularly pertaining to South Asia. For Central Asia, on the other hand, as with so many aspects of its religious history, this topic has scarcely been broached. For this and other reasons, Shanazarova’s study marks a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on the history of Islam in Central Asia and, more broadly, on gender relations in pre-modern Islamic societies. The book is focused on the early sixteenth-century career of a woman known as Āghā-yi Buzurg, or ‘Great Lady’, whose shrine is located outside the city of Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan. Āghā-yi Buzurg’s career is remarkable not only on account of her being the only documented example of a female Sufi leader from pre-modern Central Asia. She is also noteworthy for the distinctive orientation of her teachings towards ʿAlid veneration, which came at a pivotal moment in the political and religious history of the region when such practices had become decidedly more problematic and controversial than only a few decades earlier. Gender and confessional identity thus constitute the two primary themes of Female Religiosity in Central Asia. The book is based on a series of mostly unpublished manuscript works from the region, foremost among them Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib, composed by one of Āghā-yi Buzurg’s chief disciples, Ḥāfiẓ Baṣīr, approximately four decades after her death, and of which Shanazarova has recently published a critical text edition.1