See also abbasid caliphate; ahl al-bayt; allah;
caliph; imam; shiism.
Further reading: Arthur F. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the
Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the
Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1998); Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds,
God’s Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of
Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996);
Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston:
Shambhala, 1997); Ann K. S. Lambton, State and Gov-
ernment in Medieval Islam: An Introduction to the Study
of Islamic Political Theory: The Jurists (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1981); Max Weber, The Theory of
Social and Economic Organization (New York: Macmil-
lan Company, 1964).
autobiography
Autobiography is a kind of literature in which
authors write primarily about their own lives and
about the people, places, ideas, and events that
affected them. It is sometimes also called self-
narrative. In the 20th century, most European
and American scholars held that autobiography
was a product of individual self-consciousness
that originated uniquely in “Western civilization”
inspired by a Christian outlook and that it rarely
occurred anywhere else in the world or in other
religious communities before the modern period.
This view has been seriously questioned in recent
years as the literature of other civilizations has
been further studied and translated. Scholars are
now finding significant evidence for traditions of
premodern autobiographical writing in non-West-
ern cultures, especially in Islamicate ones.
Islamic autobiographical literature before
the 20th century was written mainly in Arabic,
Persian, and Turkish, the three leading literary
languages of Muslims during the Middle Ages.
The first Muslim autobiographies that we know
anything about were written by ninth-century his-
torians, mystics, and officials. In later centuries,
this list grew to include religious scholars, jurists,
philosophers, poets, physicians, scientists, rulers,
politicians, soldiers, and converts. Pre-Islamic
autobiographies that had been translated from
Persian and Greek may have influenced some of
these authors, but many were more inspired by
the biographies of mUhammad (d. 632) and the
first Muslims, who were regarded as ideal role
models. Later writers, in their turn, wanted to set
examples of themselves for their readers. Oth-
ers wanted to use their life stories to show how
God had blessed them. In Sufi literature, auto-
biographical narratives recounted the spiritual
journeys of the authors, including their dreams
and visions. Among the most famous Sufi auto-
biographical writings are those of abU hamid
al-ghazali (d. 1111), rUzbihan baqli (d. 1209),
ibn al-arabi (d. 1240), and Shah Wali Allah (d.
1762). Other prominent Muslims who have left
autobiographies are the physician and philoso-
pher ibn sina (d. 1036), the Syrian warrior-poet
Usama ibn Munqidh (d. 1188), the historian ibn
khaldUn (d. 1406), and Babur (d. 1530), the
founder of the mUghal dynasty in india. Much
later, several West Africans brought to the United
states as slaves in the 19th century wrote short
autobiographies in Arabic, much to the surprise
of the American public.
When authors in Islamicate lands fell under
the influence of European literary traditions dur-
ing the 19th and 20th centuries, indigenous
autobiographical traditions underwent significant
changes. The number of autobiographies pub-
lished in Muslim countries increased with the
introduction of the printing press, they were writ-
ten in many different modern languages (includ-
ing English), and they included new secular
and national perspectives, as well as more tradi-
tional ones. Egyptian author and educator Taha
Husayn’s (d. 1973) autobiography, which recalls
his village childhood and his student days at al-
Azhar University in cairo, embodies the fusion
of the traditional with the modern, and it is stillautobiography 75 J