Skip to Main Content

Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands

Online ISBN:
9781531507756
Print ISBN:
9781531505677
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands

William E. B. Sherman
William E. B. Sherman
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Find on
Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
5 December 2023
Online ISBN:
9781531507756
Print ISBN:
9781531505677
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands argues that a Sufi Muslim movement of sixteenth-century Afghanistan—known as the Roshaniyya or “illuminated people”—offers us arich understanding of how Muslims throughout Central and South Asia in the late medieval period theorized language use, conceptualized relationships to the prophetic past, imagined the nature of the apocalypse, and, consequently, formed new social identities that persist today. The book asks questions relevant to the study of religion in early modern Asia: When does language become revelation? What does the voice of God sound like? And how does the presence of “new” revelation transform the emergence of categories such as belonging, ethnicity, vernacular language, and race? Against colonial epistemologies and historiographies that have long invoked notions of tribe and ethnicity as central to the history of Afghans and Afghanistan, Singing with the Mountains explores the imaginative architecture of the Roshaniyya and their messianic leader, Bayazid Ansari, and the book argues on behalf of the importance of religion, linguistic, and literary developments in shaping the quotidian experiences, political imaginations, and habits of belonging in the region. This book considers not only Arabic theological treatises, Persian dream narratives, and Urdu stories of saints, but it also studies some of the first sources to have used Pashto as a language of writing.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close