Polymaths of Islam analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth.
James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understanding of the world of Islamic scholarship unlocks a different way of thinking about transregional exchange networks. Pickett reveals a Persian-language cultural sphere that transcended state boundaries and integrated a spectacularly vibrant Eurasia that is invisible from published sources alone.
Through a high cultural complex that he terms the "Persian cosmopolis" or "Persianate sphere," Pickett argues that an intersection of diverse disciplines shaped geographical trajectories across and between political states. In Polymaths of Islam he paints a comprehensive, colorful, and often contradictory portrait of mosque and state in the age of empire.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Islamic Scholars and the Central Asian Backdrop
1. Defamiliarizing the Familiar: Conceptualizing Religion and Culture in Turko-Persia
2. Centering Bukhara: The Reconstruction and Mythologization of an Abode of Knowledge
3. Bukhara Center: Islamic Scholars as a Network of Human Exchange
4. Patricians of Bukhara: Turkic Nobility, Persianate Pedagogy, and Islamic Society
5. High Persianate Intellectuals: The Many, Many Guises of the Ulama
6. Between Sharia and the Beloved: Culture and Contradiction in Persianate Sunnism
7. Opportunity from Upheaval: Scholarly Dynasties between Nadir Shah and the Bolshevik Revolution
8. The Sovereign and the Sage: The Precarious, Paradoxical Relationship between the Ulama and Temporal Power
Conclusion: United in Eclecticism
Epilogue: Efflorescence before the Eclipse
About the Author :
James Pickett is Assistant Professor of Eurasian History at the University of Pittsburgh.
Review :
Anyone interested in the implications of the Russian absorption of a cosmopolitan civilization undergoing significant structural change in its political, intellectual, and social life should keep a copy of Polymaths of Islam by their bedside. This work sets the agenda for the study of Central Asia's intellectual and social history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and will remain the reference text on the subject for a long time.
(Russian Review) [The book is] a masterwork of scholarship. Pickett's book is a tour de force of history and cultural sensitivity.
(New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences) Pickett provides an important foundation for a future study of the gradations of prestige among less elite Islamic scholars, and their interactions with more popular religious figures.
(Canadian-American Slavic Studies) James Pickett's Polymaths of Islam is another great contribution in line with recent works of scholars on the history of Bukhara and its role in Eurasian history. The book is a great contribution to Central Asian history and will serve the needs of a diverse readership.
(Ab Imperio)
