Team
Beyond Sharia: The role of Sufism in Shaping Islam is led by Prof. dr. Asghar Seyed-Gohrab. Asghar Seyed-Gohrab’s research covers fields such as Persian poetry as a living tradition, Islamic mysticism (Sufism), and the history of Shiism. Central to Seyed-Gohrab’s research is the study of medieval Persian poetry (both secular and religious) and its reception in the modern world, examining how medieval poetry, mystical concepts and philosophical notions are deployed in modern Iranian politics, in popular culture, in visual representations, and in social media. In his recent NWO-funded research, Seyed-Gohrab examined the use of classical Persian poetry and medieval mystical and philosophical concepts in three central episodes in twentieth-century Iran. At the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11), poetry became a vehicle for introducing Western social and political ideas. During the Iranian Revolution (1978-79), ayatollah Khomeini used poetry to express his mystical ideals; he also used mystical concepts in order to buttress his theory of Islamic government. During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), poetry became part of the state propaganda, supporting the cult of martyrdom, which in the crisis became an icon of national identity and a means to justify violence. Poetry was also used on an intensely personal level, to process the horrors and quandaries of revolution and war. All three episodes were marked by a paradox: the constitutionalists struggled for political and economic independence from the same nations that inspired social and political reforms during the Constitutional Revolution; the mystic-poet Khomeini would not hurt a fly but his political ideology was ruthless; and mystical ideals of peacefulness and everlasting life were used in the Iran-Iraq war to incite people to violence, or even give up their own lives.
Maarten Holtzapffel is a PhD researcher for the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam, concerned with the project Of Love and Wisdom: Rūmī’s Transgressive Ideas and the Rise of Humanism. After a bachelor’s degree in history and Middle Eastern Studies, he obtained his Research Master degree in Persian Studies from Leiden University in 2022. For his master thesis he conducted a study on the appropriation of Rumi’s mystic poetry in contemporary Iranian politics. In particular, he looked at how the political philosopher and theologian Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) appropriates Rumi’s poetry in his political theories. In addition to Sufism and its reception, Maarten is interested in Iran’s intellectual history and Iranian nationalism. In his PhD project, Maarten would like to extend his study of the appropriation of mystic poetry in Iran to the contemporary reception of Rumi in the West. What motivates him is the opportunity to study the multiple faces of Islam in times of a growing repugnance for religion, and Islam in particular, in the West. With a team of researchers from various backgrounds, he would like to investigate how the non-conformist ideas inherent to the Islamic mystic tradition have been central to the development of Islamic thought, and how these ideas have inspired people in various religious and cultural contexts.
Amin Ghodratzadeh is PhD candidate for the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam, focusing on the project Wise Fools and the Interrogation of God. He obtained his Research MA in Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University, specializing in the Persian-speaking world. In his thesis, he examined Mohammad-Taqi Bahār’s (1886-1951) poetry, addressing Great Britain’s occupation of Iran, Afghanistan, and India. From 2010 to 2014, Amin served as a student-assistant and library cataloger. From 2016 to 2018, he taught Persian at both Leiden University and Leiden University Campus in The Hague for students of International Studies. In addition to his academic career, Amin served as an intern at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Leiden municipality, exercising his other expertise which lies in International Relations. He has a special interest in Islamic mystical philosophy, Persian poetry, and philosophical treaties.
Within the ERC project, Amin will study the phenomenon of the “wise-fools” as a possible forerunner of qalandar mystics between the 9th and 12th century. In order to understand the development of the phenomenon of the “wise-fools”, Amin will study a wide genre of texts, ranging from literary sources to philosophical, ethical and religious books.
Alexandra Nieweg is a PhD candidate and will be doing research on ‘Literary Qalandars’ within the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam. After a bachelor’s degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies and Persian Language and Culture, she obtained her MA degree in Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2022. During a semester abroad, she attended Samarkand State University, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to study Persian and Uzbek languages and local history. Throughout her studies, Alexandra has had a keen interest in the way Islamic traditions feed into contemporary ideologies and their cultural expression in the Turco-Persian world in general. Her work focused on Shiism in Iran and Afghanistan, including the Karbala narrative, martyr iconography, and propaganda. She is especially interested in Sufi antinomianism, poetry, pilgrimages and holy sites.
For the ERC project, Alexandra will explore antinomian motifs, metaphors, imagery, and stories (which are meant to challenge the religious hierarchy and orthodox Islam) in Persian poetry from the 12th century onward. To this day, this poetry has had a great appeal to Muslims in the Persian world and far beyond. She also analyses how qalandari (Sufi saints at a high level of spirituality) themes in this poetry impacted social, political, and religious developments in subsequent centuries. In Alexandra’s view, the special value for contemporary society of studies on antinomian and qalandari Sufism, as expressed in classical Persian poetry, lies in their potential to help counter today’s common misconception of Islam as exclusively orthodox and Sharia-centred. By showing that Islam for many centuries in the past included entirely different ways to be a pious Muslim, thus emphasizing its pluriformity, this dissertation aims to contribute to a more complete and accurate understanding of Islam.
Fatemeh Naghshvarian is a PhD candidate for the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: the Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam, related to the project Qalandars in the ‘Divine Religion’ in India. She is an enthusiastic admirer of literature and interested in the intersection of humanities with the new technological developments and their applied implications. She did her graduate studies in Cultural Studies (MA) and Digital Humanities (MS) at the University of Leuven (K.U. Leuven), Belgium, and has previously studied English Language and Literature (BA) at Shiraz University, Iran. Fatemeh graduated magna cum laude from the University of Leuven. For her Cultural Studies master thesis, Fatemeh focused on the formal questions of aesthetic experimentations in conjunction with the sociocultural inquiries within the independent cinema of Ramin Bahrani. For her Digital Humanities master thesis, Fatemeh concentrated on exploring the role of structured data for performing arts by conducting a critical analysis of open data and audience engagement. After her graduation, Fatemeh did an Erasmus internship at Ofoundation in Utrecht. The project she was working on involved the promotion and online publication of Saleha Waheb Wassel’s art and poetry that entail elements of Sufism.
By and large, Fatemeh is passionate about the reciprocated authority of literature and society in shaping one another, identity formation, culture and politics, ideologies and the construction of knowledge. Fatemeh decided to join the Beyond Sharia project since she is particularly interested in the mutual influences of the historical evolvement of Islam and various receptions of the aesthetics and doctrines of Islamic mysticism. In this respect, within the ERC project, she will study the works of the poet laureate Feyzi (1547-1595) in conjunction with other contemporaries of the laureate to examine the formation of “Divine Religion” (din-e elahi) at the Indian Mughal court of Emperor Akbar. Her research will closely follow the chronological line of evolution embedded in the arch project, starting from the ‘wise fool’ ideas of the 9th and 10th centuries to antinomian movements in later centuries. By seeking to understand the pertinent influences of antinomian thoughts and heterodox religious thinking within Islam, she aims to navigate the impact of Islamic critical thinking on shaping the political implications of Divine Religion and “Universal Peace” in 16th-century Mughal India.
Dr. Arash Ghajarjazi is a post-doctorate fellow for the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam. He received his PhD from the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He is interested in understanding the relations between Iranian media, Islam and sciences from the 19th century onward. More broadly, trained both as a cultural analyst as well as a historian, he explores the ways in which Islamic traditions have evolved in and as media. He approaches histories of Muslim material cultures as well as of Islamic thoughts together, understanding them as inseparable events. His research seeks balance between thick historical contextualizations and radical philosophical conceptualizations. Positioned mainly in the field of Iranian and Islamic Studies, he tends to push histories of Islam to their under-examined limits and to make concepts that can reshape understandings of the Islamic past and present. Arash joined the team of Beyond Sharia ERC project because he found its themes and questions timely and urgent. In his own contribution to the project, he is interested in examining how Islamic Sharia has been resisted, challenged, and transgressed in the Iranian intellectual context both in the past and the presence, particularly through the lens of Khayyāmic quatrains. He will examine the relationship between medieval antinomian ideas and the rise of secularism in the Iranian world, i.e., Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia., focussing on the poet Khayyam, his antinomian antecedents and the modern reception of his work.
Zhinia Noorian is a post-doctorate fellow for the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam. She developed a fascination for the pivotal role of feminine voices in literature while starting her academic career as a Bachelor student of English Language and Literature in Iran. She actively participated in giving lectures on female literary figures such as Virginia Woolf who started schools of thought that reshaped women’s lives. Intrigued by languages, Zhinia continued her academic experience with a MA degree in General Linguistics at Shahid Beheshti University. To pursue her passion for Iranian culture, she followed a MA programme in Iranian Studies at the same university. She continued her academic career with a MA programme of Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University. In her specialisation Persian and Iranian Studies, Zhinia chose to focus on Parvin Eᶜtesami (1907–1941), a female Persian poet. She studied how she used classical poetry to voice the oppressed and marginalized in the early decades of the twentieth century when fundamental socio-political transformations started to reshape Iran. Zhinia explored this intellectual woman’s mastery in utilising various features of Persian mystical tradition, including its Bacchic themes to convey her socio-political criticism. Aiming to further develop her academic career, Zhinia started her PhD project at Leiden University in 2020. She continued her exploration of Eᶜtesami’s poetry to show how she transgressed the boundaries set for women in the male-dominated arena of mysticism, literary expression, and political thought. She studied the lasting impact that Eᶜtesami’s transgression of Iranian-Muslim gender norms left on her literary identity, career, and reception as a woman poet in a Muslim society.
The concept of gender transgression and how it translates into non-conformist piety fueled Zhinia’s interest in the ERC postdoc project of Beyond Sharia that investigates “the femininity and the feminisation of the masculine in Islamic mysticism”. In her postdoc research, Zhinia will focus on the non-normative gender acts of Sufi saints known as qalandars. Her aim is to pursue untouched questions about the homosexual aspect of these mystics’ practices and their gender transmutations, which transgressed Muslim gender norms. These practices are the qalandars’ engagement in homosexual activities, assuming a feminine voice or dressing like women, going about naked, shaving all bodily and facial hair, and having (genital) piercing. By investigating such transgressive acts in the medieval Muslim culture, Zhinia aims at contextualising them as instances of the qalandars’ attempts to cultivate their piety through bodily heresy. The outcome of this project explains the bodily aspect of the qalandari antinomian movement.
Vacancy Postdoc: Practise before you Preach
This postdoc will investigate the spread of Islamic antinomianism in Anatolia and the Balkans. The antinomian movements play an essential role in shaping our understanding of piety in Anatolia, which influenced Ottoman literary and religious culture. There has been little research on popular Islam in Anatolia, especially Islamic mysticism. Karamustafa observes that “the archaeology of the religious lives of Turkish speakers in late medieval and early modern Anatolia is in many ways still in its infancy” (Karamustafa, 2014: 329). Mystical literature in Anatolia is commonly associated with the renowned mystical poet Rūmī, a traditional theologian whose life changed forever on meeting the charismatic qalandar dervish, Shams. Rūmī employed qalandari themes in his poetry but he did not become a qalandar. This project examines how the literary and religious works and legacy of one influential dervish, Kaygusuz Abdāl (lit. ‘Carefree dervish’ 15th century), contributed to the spread of qalandari notions of piety in Anatolia. Kaygusuz Abdāl is a towering figure, one of the chief antinomian mystics and a prolific author, writing in many genres in both prose and poetry in the vernacular Turkish, ranging from visionary monologues to sermons criticizing the institutionalized Sufis and legalistic divines in the big cities from the standpoint of a provincial dervish. His life is shrouded in obscurity but his own works and the hagiographies shed light on his life and religious views.
The researcher will contextualize wandering dervishes such as Kaygusuz Abdāl in Anatolia, including their relationships with ordinary people, their reactions to institutionalized Sufi orders, and their responses to urban Muslim scholars. The research will then focus on Kaygusuz Abdāl’s literary works, analysing how Kaygusuz creates a transgressive worldview, which is attractive for his followers and challenging for his adversaries. The project will examine the impact and reception of Kaygusuz, relating this to Alevism, a Shiite community now widespread in Turkey, and especially to the majority Alevi-Bektaşi tradition.
Dr. Diede Farhosh-van Loon is project coordinator and research assistant for the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam. She obtained her master degree in Persian Studies from Leiden University in 2008, followed by a doctor’s title in 2016 for her study on the mystical poetry of Ayatollah Khomeini for the NWO research project Of Poetry and Politics: Classical Poetic Concepts in New Politics of Twentieth Century Iran. Diede is in particular interested in Sufism and in Persian language and culture.