Abstract
This publication offers an edition and introduction to a remarkable Sufi text from sixteenth-century Central Asia. The work is remarkable not only on account of its subject, being the only known example from the region of a text dedicated to a female religious authority, but also for what the text reveals regarding the broader contours of religious discourse in early modern Central Asia. The subject of the text is known as Āghā-yi Buzurg, or ‘Great Lady’, whose shrine is located outside the city of Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, where she is popularly known as Qīz Bībī. The author of the text, Ḥāfiẓ-i Baṣīr, was a disciple of Āghā-yi Buzurg and is himself a figure of considerable interest for the history of Sufism in Central Asia. Aside from his discipleship under Āghā-yi Buzurg, he also represents a key link in a Naqshbandī silsila from the region of Khorezm, being the only known initiatic lineage within the Naqshbandī tradition that does not pass through the pivotal fifteenth-century Sufi master Khoja Aḥrār.1 While the work was composed in 973/1565, the text is predominantly concerned with the sayings and teachings of Āghā-yi Buzurg, as well as events that occurred shortly after her death in 929/1523. Thus, the text may be considered to relate primarily to the first quarter of the sixteenth century.