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Join Rubina Salikkudin, Assistant Professor and Director of the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies Program on the Isabel Hamilton Benham Professorship in International Affairs, for an endowed lecture.

The fifteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet, Abd al-Rahman Jami, spoke laudingly of saintly Sufi women. He explained their spiritual feats as possible only because they had transcended the feminine and reached the ranks of men. This categorization opens up many more questions as to how gender norms, particularly amongst Sufi mystical groups, were constructed. This talk will explore the interesting and sometimes contradictory ways that emotional norms and ideas of gender intertwined in medieval Iran and Central Asia. This talk draws on Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities to offer insight on post-Mongol Sufi communities and the ways that they tried to discipline the emotional lives of not only themselves but of the lay communities amongst whom they lived and preached.

A reception will follow in the Old Library London Room.