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Stories and anecdotes have been integral to sufi discourses, doctrinal expositions, and rhetorics. A large number of malfuz texts are comprised mostly of anecdotes, while even in others where the discussion is predominantly doctrinal, the exposition is interspersed with stories. Nizamuddin Auliya, Mir Hasan Sijzi reports in Fawā’id al-fu’ād, related stories from Baghdad, Bukhara, and other cities of the Islamic East in almost every gathering with his disciples and devotees. In some sufi tex...

Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of music, literature and dramatization. Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and storytelling.

This paper is concerned with the issues that had a bearing on the relationship between religion and Mughal politics. It forms part of a larger work on the process of state formation under the Mughals. Earlier in a similar paper I suggested that the Mughal state rather than being a structure perfected at a given point of time, could be seen as a process, which incorporated and adjusted to the traditions and customs of the peoples as well as to the regions that were integrated into the empire o...