What is the real version of a book? Is it an original manuscript, in the author’s own hand – or an edited and refined copy, reworked by others? The limitations of sources from bygone centuries make this a pressing question when studying the medieval world. Authorship and originality are often uncertain. What scholars or wider society agree on as the definitive version of a text depends on complicated layers of transmission. For many works of Greco-Roman antiquity, for example, there are no original documents. We rely on manuscript traditions of the medieval period which preserved these texts.
For the study of the medieval Persian-speaking world, we can sometimes trace books to manuscripts written during the author’s lifetime, or even by the author themselves. But in many cases, our oldest records are found in later manuscripts, sometimes written centuries after the original. These might be authenticated by other means, like references and quotations in older books, or a clear similarity of style with an author’s other work. Otherwise, the origins of many texts remain murky, and we are forced to question their authorship. The copying process also introduces changes which mean a text can take many shapes.
Let us focus on one short work, of uncertain authorship: a treatise called the Qalandar-nama or ‘Book of the Qalandar.’ There is no single satisfying translation of qalandar, a figure in Persian literature who flouts social conventions by such outrageous behaviors as drinking, gambling, and hanging around in ruins. The qalandar’s deliberate offense to mainstream morality is not hedonistic and careless, but represents a mystical ideology: a rejection of the world in search of a closer union with God. Starting in the thirteenth century AD, a cohesive religious movement took on the name.
The Qalandar-nama describes, in first person, the author meeting a qalandar as a young student. The encounter deeply affected the author, leading him to question his views of knowledge, wisdom, and morality. Within the text, the author identifies himself as the famous eleventh century AD religious teacher and Sufi, Abdullah Ansari of Herat. But whether it was actually written by Ansari is a contentious question, and there are significantly different versions of the text in circulation. Exploring the Qalandar-nama will show us how complicated it can be to trace the origins and afterlives of medieval Persian texts.
Abdullah Ansari and the contents of the Qalandar-nama
Tomb of Abdullah Ansari in Herat, Afghanistan – photo by Sven Dirks / Wikimedia Commons
Abdullah Ansari (1006-1089) was an accomplished and revered teacher and orator from the city of Herat. Today in western Afghanistan, Herat was a major regional urban center in the vast territory known historically as Khurasan, which also encompassed parts of Iran and Central Asia. Ansari was educated in the Arabic and Persian languages, in different religious sciences including the collection of hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), and in poetry. On the few journeys he took outside of Herat, he met prominent exponents of Sufism, Islamic mysticism, and himself became a theorist and teacher of Sufism.
While Sufism is often associated with free thinking and confrontation with normative religion, Ansari was a staunch conservative in his theology. He believed in a literalist approach to reading the Quran, and rejected rationalist thinkers as innovators deviating from Allah’s word. In this he followed the teachings of the scholar Ibn Hanbal (d. 855 AD). In the course of his life, he was often persecuted to the point of exile or imprisonment for being a Hanbali by followers of rival schools of thought. But, when the ruling powers favored Hanbali thinking, he used the opportunity to launch aggressive attacks on those rivals himself. Ansari’s conservatism in theology coexisted with a flexibility in matters of justice (he would apply a different school of thought than Hanbal’s in judicial questions), and with a devotion to mysticism. As the scholar Katherine Pratt Ewing puts it, he had a “simultaneous attachment to a particular form of orthodoxy as the […] basis and foundation of community while at the same time stressing the importance of a spiritual experience of God that is not limited by theology or the community.”
If the Qalandar-nama is Ansari’s work, it fits into the latter aspect of his thinking. In rhyming prose, the author sets the scene by describing himself sitting in school “with a thousand apprehensions,” when suddenly a qalandar walks in, red-faced and dressed in rags. The visitor begins a blistering speech directed at the initially inattentive students. He chides them for overestimation of their own knowledge and disdain towards the Sufis and the people in general, and exhorts them to respect elders. He uses the analogy of a pumpkin plant’s vines quickly climbing up an ancient tree: the pumpkin arrogantly announcing itself to the world is rebuked by the old tree, who knows the autumn winds will bring the young plant down. All the students become enraptured, and ask for prayers and wisdom, but the qalandar soon leaves.
Our author follows, to a remote place in the mountains sometimes rendered as the “place of chains” (zanjirgah) but also given as “hunting-ground” (nakhjirgah). There the qalandar advises him on the difficulty of faith, the temporariness of the world, and mankind’s base nature. Quranic quotations are peppered throughout this speech, and in between prose passages are poems supposed to be written by Ansari, which cover similar themes as the qalandar’s speeches. An excerpt from one of these poems is as follows:
Many kings were put in the earth Though signs of them remain in the world Sin is a sharp poison which Is just like sugar to your ego’s palate This transient world is a place of crossings The wise man should not remain on them Since death is before you, O Ansari Watch the world on your travels [like a passing spectator]
The Qalandar-nama ends with an exhortation to worship with dedication and so avoid an eternity of suffering.
Though the text lampoons scholars and appears to favor the non-conformist piety of the qalandar, religious norms are still an important part of the text. The qalandar encourages the author to see the world as transitory and corrupting, and to focus on God and the hereafter – but this is meant to guide him to behave well in life, not to reject the boundaries of society. He is instructed to fulfill the promise of mankind’s high status as descendants of Adam and members of the Prophet’s community (ummat) by performing “submission” (taslim) and doing “justice” (inṣaf). In a poem found at the end of most versions of the text, we find a couplet which emphasizes the importance of scripture and the Islamic declaration of faith (the shahada), which proclaims that there is no god but God:
Yet, the Quran is my guide; its remembrance is my guidance I go to the light of there is no God but… and the mention of there is no God but…
In a poem found at the end of other versions, we even find an explicit rejection of some libertine behavior:
If you are a Muslim, do not drink red wine (sharb-i khumar) And if you are a virtuous person, stay even further from beer (buza)
This duality of the Qalandar-nama, containing both non-conformist and very conventional religious ideas, would appear to line up with Ansari’s dual approach to law and religion in life. The Dutch scholar J.T.P. de Bruijn argued, based on the thematic content of the text and the poems, that even if it was not written by Ansari it is “very likely […] the text was produced in an environment which kept his mystical tradition alive.” How much further does the debate over authorship go?
The Authorship Debate
Abdullah Ansari (holding a book) with Abu Ahmad. Folio from Kamal al-Din Gazurgahi’s Majalis al-ushshaq, created in Shiraz, Iran in the second half of the 16th century – Wikimedia Commons
It is not clear when the Qalandar-nama was first written. It appears that the oldest known manuscript copy (previously held in Istanbul at the Murad Molla Kütüphanesi, which is now incorporated into the larger Süleymaniye Library) dates to 852 AH (c. 1448 AD). For the Iranian scholar Mohammad-Reza Shafei Kadkani, the dating of the earliest manuscript is one of several reasons to reject the text’s authenticity as a work of Ansari. He asks how a text by such a well-known figure has not turned up any copies or references in the four hundred years that separate this manuscript from the sage of Herat’s lifetime.
He further argues that the style and language do not much resemble Ansari’s, that the use of a pen-name (takhalluṣ) at the end of the text’s poems is a later tradition, and that the use of qalandar to identify a person belongs to a later period as well. In the early eleventh century, the term would have been used to describe a meeting place for the unruly types, later called qalandars themselves. Kadkani states that anyone with the smallest knowledge of Persian prose and of Ansari’s oeuvre would know it to be a fake.
The Qalandar-nama has indeed been accepted as Ansari’s by other scholars – uncritically, Kadkani argues. Iranian scholar Abdolhossein Zarrinkoob (d. 1999) did not express any doubt as to its legitimacy, seeing it as the earliest clear use of the word qalandar. Tahsin Yazıcı similarly treats the Qalandar-nama as an exceptional early use of the term qalandar and does not doubt its authenticity. German Orientalist Helmut Ritter (d. 1971) also raises no apprehensions about the text when briefly covering it in the eighth of his “Philologika” articles covering different works of Persian literature.
According to Fabio Tiddia, who wrote an article and translation of the text in Italian, the Iranian literary scholar Mohammad-Taqi Bahar (d. 1951) also believed in the Qalandar-nama’s authenticity, while the scholar of Arabic Sa‘id al-Afghani (d. 1997) had doubts about the text’s attribution, as did the Iranian philosopher Nasrollah Pourjavady. Ahmet Karamustafa notes that the text is of “uncertain attribution” but still treats it as part of the early historical development of the qalandar figure. A.G. Ravan Farhadi categorizes the text as one among several treatises ascribed to Ansari which come from fifteenth-century and later manuscripts, and are not clearly authenticated by earlier ones.
Ultimately, the authorship of the Qalandar-nama cannot be known for certain. Defining Ansari’s authorship of all his works is complicated by the fact that they were generally not written down by his hand, but spoken by him and recorded by his students. Still, arguments against the Qalandar-nama being the work of Ansari appear convincing. There are a few reasons it might have been falsely attributed, which Ravan Farhadi outlines in his biography of Ansari. The darker possibility is that the famed name of Ansari was attached as a deception, to increase the text’s value and gain someone money, fame, or both. The lighter possibility is that Ansari’s name was used as a mark of respect, as the author admired or wished to imitate the sage’s work. In a time and place when concepts of intellectual property and originality were not as rigid as they are (for the most part) today, this was not unusual.
What is the ‘right’ version?
Attribution aside, there remains the problem of how to define the Qalandar-nama, given that each version is different. Through secondary literature and my own searching, I have been able to identify ten manuscripts containing the text, ranging from 1448 to the late nineteenth century, in libraries in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, France, the United Kingdom, and India. One might be tempted to take the oldest copy as the most reliable, but it has some of the greatest differences compared to other versions. We also do not know whether there were earlier copies, and what they looked like. As is often the case with medieval texts, there is no single ‘right’ copy. However, several modern scholars have reproduced a single version in their edited volumes, while only citing a few variations in the text. To anyone looking to read the Qalandar-nama but not digging deep into its textual history, whichever version they encounter can then seem like the definitive one.
The approach taken by Mohammad Sarvar Molaei, in his two-volume edition of treatises by Ansari published in 2003, seems the safest for a modern scholar: to give a detailed explanation of the different manuscripts consulted, and to base the edited version on one manuscript while citing all variations, down to alternate spellings, in footnotes. That way, a reader can access different versions of the work in one place.
Tracing the background of this short treatise opens up a complex web of questions about the nature of medieval Persian texts, and their study. When reading any such historical work, it is worth asking how we define authorship and authenticity, and how people besides the author, from editors to researchers and translators, have shaped its existence.
Timur Khan is a PhD student based in Leiden, the Netherlands. His work focuses on the early modern and colonial history of Afghanistan and South Asia, particularly the 18th and 19th century Durrani empire. His work can be found on his Academia page.
Note: For sources in Persian, I have used the transliteration rubric of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) to make it easier for readers to search for each book accurately. In the body of this article I did not use detailed transliteration, and used the conventional English spellings of Persian names where possible, to avoid cluttering the text with diacritics.
Further Readings:
The five modern editions of the Qalandar-nama that I know of are found in the following:
Sulṭān-Huṣayn Tābinda Gunābādī’s Rasā’il-i Jāmi‘-i Khwāja ‘Abd Allāh Anṣārī (1319/1940-1) / Waḥīd Dastgardī’s Rasā’il-i jāmi‘-i Khwāja ‘Abd Allāh Anṣārī (third ed. 1349/1970). Note: while these books have different editors and publication histories, their versions of the Qalandar-nama are identical.
Muḥammad Amīn Sharī‘atī, Rasā’il-i Jāmi‘-i Khwāja ‘Abd Allāh Anṣārī, ed. (originally published 1976, edition used republished 1390 [2011-12])
Muḥammad Jawād Sharī‘at’s Sukhanān-i Pīr-i Hirāt (originally published 1979, edition used republished 1384 [2005-6])
A.G. Ravan Farhadi. Abdullah Ansari of Herat: An Early Sufi Master. Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996.
Minlib Dallh. The Sufi and the Friar: A Mystical Encounter of Two Men of God in the Abode of Islam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017.
S. de Laugier de Beaurecueil. Khwādja ‘Abdullāh Anṣārī (396-481 H. / 1006-1089): Mystique Hanbalite. Recherches publiées sous la direction de l’Institut de Lettres Orientales de Beyrouth, Tome XXVI. Beyrouth: Imprimerie Catholique, 1965.
Ahmet Karamustafa. God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups In The Islamic Later Middle Period 1200–1550. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994).
Fabio Tiddia. “Il qalandar-nāme di Khwāje ‘Abdallāh Anṣārī di Herat.” Quaderni di Meykhane: Rivista di studi iranici 6 (2016): 1-27.
Fritz Meier. Abū Sa’īd-i Abū l-Ḫayr (357-440/967-1049): Wirklichkeit und Legende. Acta Iranica, vol. I. Tehran: Bibliotheque Pahlavi, 1976.
Helmut Ritter. “Philologika VIII: Anṣārī Herewī. — Senā’ī Ġaznewī.” Der Islam 22 (1934): 89-105.
J.T.P. de Bruijn. “The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry, from Sanā’ī onwards.” In Pearls of Meaning: Studies on Persian Art, Poetry, Ṣūfism and History of Iranian Studies in Europe, ed. Asghar Seyed Gohrab & Hans de Bruijn. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020.
Katherine Pratt Ewing. Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. See pp. 236-7 for the quotation cited above.
By Timur Khan
What is the real version of a book? Is it an original manuscript, in the author’s own hand – or an edited and refined copy, reworked by others? The limitations of sources from bygone centuries make this a pressing question when studying the medieval world. Authorship and originality are often uncertain. What scholars or wider society agree on as the definitive version of a text depends on complicated layers of transmission. For many works of Greco-Roman antiquity, for example, there are no original documents. We rely on manuscript traditions of the medieval period which preserved these texts.
For the study of the medieval Persian-speaking world, we can sometimes trace books to manuscripts written during the author’s lifetime, or even by the author themselves. But in many cases, our oldest records are found in later manuscripts, sometimes written centuries after the original. These might be authenticated by other means, like references and quotations in older books, or a clear similarity of style with an author’s other work. Otherwise, the origins of many texts remain murky, and we are forced to question their authorship. The copying process also introduces changes which mean a text can take many shapes.
Let us focus on one short work, of uncertain authorship: a treatise called the Qalandar-nama or ‘Book of the Qalandar.’ There is no single satisfying translation of qalandar, a figure in Persian literature who flouts social conventions by such outrageous behaviors as drinking, gambling, and hanging around in ruins. The qalandar’s deliberate offense to mainstream morality is not hedonistic and careless, but represents a mystical ideology: a rejection of the world in search of a closer union with God. Starting in the thirteenth century AD, a cohesive religious movement took on the name.
The Qalandar-nama describes, in first person, the author meeting a qalandar as a young student. The encounter deeply affected the author, leading him to question his views of knowledge, wisdom, and morality. Within the text, the author identifies himself as the famous eleventh century AD religious teacher and Sufi, Abdullah Ansari of Herat. But whether it was actually written by Ansari is a contentious question, and there are significantly different versions of the text in circulation. Exploring the Qalandar-nama will show us how complicated it can be to trace the origins and afterlives of medieval Persian texts.
Abdullah Ansari and the contents of the Qalandar-nama
Abdullah Ansari (1006-1089) was an accomplished and revered teacher and orator from the city of Herat. Today in western Afghanistan, Herat was a major regional urban center in the vast territory known historically as Khurasan, which also encompassed parts of Iran and Central Asia. Ansari was educated in the Arabic and Persian languages, in different religious sciences including the collection of hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), and in poetry. On the few journeys he took outside of Herat, he met prominent exponents of Sufism, Islamic mysticism, and himself became a theorist and teacher of Sufism.
While Sufism is often associated with free thinking and confrontation with normative religion, Ansari was a staunch conservative in his theology. He believed in a literalist approach to reading the Quran, and rejected rationalist thinkers as innovators deviating from Allah’s word. In this he followed the teachings of the scholar Ibn Hanbal (d. 855 AD). In the course of his life, he was often persecuted to the point of exile or imprisonment for being a Hanbali by followers of rival schools of thought. But, when the ruling powers favored Hanbali thinking, he used the opportunity to launch aggressive attacks on those rivals himself. Ansari’s conservatism in theology coexisted with a flexibility in matters of justice (he would apply a different school of thought than Hanbal’s in judicial questions), and with a devotion to mysticism. As the scholar Katherine Pratt Ewing puts it, he had a “simultaneous attachment to a particular form of orthodoxy as the […] basis and foundation of community while at the same time stressing the importance of a spiritual experience of God that is not limited by theology or the community.”
If the Qalandar-nama is Ansari’s work, it fits into the latter aspect of his thinking. In rhyming prose, the author sets the scene by describing himself sitting in school “with a thousand apprehensions,” when suddenly a qalandar walks in, red-faced and dressed in rags. The visitor begins a blistering speech directed at the initially inattentive students. He chides them for overestimation of their own knowledge and disdain towards the Sufis and the people in general, and exhorts them to respect elders. He uses the analogy of a pumpkin plant’s vines quickly climbing up an ancient tree: the pumpkin arrogantly announcing itself to the world is rebuked by the old tree, who knows the autumn winds will bring the young plant down. All the students become enraptured, and ask for prayers and wisdom, but the qalandar soon leaves.
Our author follows, to a remote place in the mountains sometimes rendered as the “place of chains” (zanjirgah) but also given as “hunting-ground” (nakhjirgah). There the qalandar advises him on the difficulty of faith, the temporariness of the world, and mankind’s base nature. Quranic quotations are peppered throughout this speech, and in between prose passages are poems supposed to be written by Ansari, which cover similar themes as the qalandar’s speeches. An excerpt from one of these poems is as follows:
Many kings were put in the earth
Though signs of them remain in the world
Sin is a sharp poison which
Is just like sugar to your ego’s palate
This transient world is a place of crossings
The wise man should not remain on them
Since death is before you, O Ansari
Watch the world on your travels [like a passing spectator]
The Qalandar-nama ends with an exhortation to worship with dedication and so avoid an eternity of suffering.
Though the text lampoons scholars and appears to favor the non-conformist piety of the qalandar, religious norms are still an important part of the text. The qalandar encourages the author to see the world as transitory and corrupting, and to focus on God and the hereafter – but this is meant to guide him to behave well in life, not to reject the boundaries of society. He is instructed to fulfill the promise of mankind’s high status as descendants of Adam and members of the Prophet’s community (ummat) by performing “submission” (taslim) and doing “justice” (inṣaf). In a poem found at the end of most versions of the text, we find a couplet which emphasizes the importance of scripture and the Islamic declaration of faith (the shahada), which proclaims that there is no god but God:
Yet, the Quran is my guide; its remembrance is my guidance
I go to the light of there is no God but… and the mention of there is no God but…
In a poem found at the end of other versions, we even find an explicit rejection of some libertine behavior:
If you are a Muslim, do not drink red wine (sharb-i khumar)
And if you are a virtuous person, stay even further from beer (buza)
This duality of the Qalandar-nama, containing both non-conformist and very conventional religious ideas, would appear to line up with Ansari’s dual approach to law and religion in life. The Dutch scholar J.T.P. de Bruijn argued, based on the thematic content of the text and the poems, that even if it was not written by Ansari it is “very likely […] the text was produced in an environment which kept his mystical tradition alive.” How much further does the debate over authorship go?
The Authorship Debate
It is not clear when the Qalandar-nama was first written. It appears that the oldest known manuscript copy (previously held in Istanbul at the Murad Molla Kütüphanesi, which is now incorporated into the larger Süleymaniye Library) dates to 852 AH (c. 1448 AD). For the Iranian scholar Mohammad-Reza Shafei Kadkani, the dating of the earliest manuscript is one of several reasons to reject the text’s authenticity as a work of Ansari. He asks how a text by such a well-known figure has not turned up any copies or references in the four hundred years that separate this manuscript from the sage of Herat’s lifetime.
He further argues that the style and language do not much resemble Ansari’s, that the use of a pen-name (takhalluṣ) at the end of the text’s poems is a later tradition, and that the use of qalandar to identify a person belongs to a later period as well. In the early eleventh century, the term would have been used to describe a meeting place for the unruly types, later called qalandars themselves. Kadkani states that anyone with the smallest knowledge of Persian prose and of Ansari’s oeuvre would know it to be a fake.
The Qalandar-nama has indeed been accepted as Ansari’s by other scholars – uncritically, Kadkani argues. Iranian scholar Abdolhossein Zarrinkoob (d. 1999) did not express any doubt as to its legitimacy, seeing it as the earliest clear use of the word qalandar. Tahsin Yazıcı similarly treats the Qalandar-nama as an exceptional early use of the term qalandar and does not doubt its authenticity. German Orientalist Helmut Ritter (d. 1971) also raises no apprehensions about the text when briefly covering it in the eighth of his “Philologika” articles covering different works of Persian literature.
According to Fabio Tiddia, who wrote an article and translation of the text in Italian, the Iranian literary scholar Mohammad-Taqi Bahar (d. 1951) also believed in the Qalandar-nama’s authenticity, while the scholar of Arabic Sa‘id al-Afghani (d. 1997) had doubts about the text’s attribution, as did the Iranian philosopher Nasrollah Pourjavady. Ahmet Karamustafa notes that the text is of “uncertain attribution” but still treats it as part of the early historical development of the qalandar figure. A.G. Ravan Farhadi categorizes the text as one among several treatises ascribed to Ansari which come from fifteenth-century and later manuscripts, and are not clearly authenticated by earlier ones.
Ultimately, the authorship of the Qalandar-nama cannot be known for certain. Defining Ansari’s authorship of all his works is complicated by the fact that they were generally not written down by his hand, but spoken by him and recorded by his students. Still, arguments against the Qalandar-nama being the work of Ansari appear convincing. There are a few reasons it might have been falsely attributed, which Ravan Farhadi outlines in his biography of Ansari. The darker possibility is that the famed name of Ansari was attached as a deception, to increase the text’s value and gain someone money, fame, or both. The lighter possibility is that Ansari’s name was used as a mark of respect, as the author admired or wished to imitate the sage’s work. In a time and place when concepts of intellectual property and originality were not as rigid as they are (for the most part) today, this was not unusual.
What is the ‘right’ version?
Attribution aside, there remains the problem of how to define the Qalandar-nama, given that each version is different. Through secondary literature and my own searching, I have been able to identify ten manuscripts containing the text, ranging from 1448 to the late nineteenth century, in libraries in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, France, the United Kingdom, and India. One might be tempted to take the oldest copy as the most reliable, but it has some of the greatest differences compared to other versions. We also do not know whether there were earlier copies, and what they looked like. As is often the case with medieval texts, there is no single ‘right’ copy. However, several modern scholars have reproduced a single version in their edited volumes, while only citing a few variations in the text. To anyone looking to read the Qalandar-nama but not digging deep into its textual history, whichever version they encounter can then seem like the definitive one.
The approach taken by Mohammad Sarvar Molaei, in his two-volume edition of treatises by Ansari published in 2003, seems the safest for a modern scholar: to give a detailed explanation of the different manuscripts consulted, and to base the edited version on one manuscript while citing all variations, down to alternate spellings, in footnotes. That way, a reader can access different versions of the work in one place.
Tracing the background of this short treatise opens up a complex web of questions about the nature of medieval Persian texts, and their study. When reading any such historical work, it is worth asking how we define authorship and authenticity, and how people besides the author, from editors to researchers and translators, have shaped its existence.
Timur Khan is a PhD student based in Leiden, the Netherlands. His work focuses on the early modern and colonial history of Afghanistan and South Asia, particularly the 18th and 19th century Durrani empire. His work can be found on his Academia page.
Note: For sources in Persian, I have used the transliteration rubric of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) to make it easier for readers to search for each book accurately. In the body of this article I did not use detailed transliteration, and used the conventional English spellings of Persian names where possible, to avoid cluttering the text with diacritics.
Further Readings:
The five modern editions of the Qalandar-nama that I know of are found in the following:
For biographies of Ansari, see:
A.G. Ravan Farhadi. Abdullah Ansari of Herat: An Early Sufi Master. Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996.
Minlib Dallh. The Sufi and the Friar: A Mystical Encounter of Two Men of God in the Abode of Islam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017.
S. de Laugier de Beaurecueil. Khwādja ‘Abdullāh Anṣārī (396-481 H. / 1006-1089): Mystique Hanbalite. Recherches publiées sous la direction de l’Institut de Lettres Orientales de Beyrouth, Tome XXVI. Beyrouth: Imprimerie Catholique, 1965.
For other works referenced in this article, see:
‘Abd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb. Justujū dar taṣawwuf-i Īrān. Tihrān: Amīr-i Kabīr, 1379).
Ahmet Karamustafa. God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups In The Islamic Later Middle Period 1200–1550. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994).
Fabio Tiddia. “Il qalandar-nāme di Khwāje ‘Abdallāh Anṣārī di Herat.” Quaderni di Meykhane: Rivista di studi iranici 6 (2016): 1-27.
Fritz Meier. Abū Sa’īd-i Abū l-Ḫayr (357-440/967-1049): Wirklichkeit und Legende. Acta Iranica, vol. I. Tehran: Bibliotheque Pahlavi, 1976.
Helmut Ritter. “Philologika VIII: Anṣārī Herewī. — Senā’ī Ġaznewī.” Der Islam 22 (1934): 89-105.
J.T.P. de Bruijn. “The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry, from Sanā’ī onwards.” In Pearls of Meaning: Studies on Persian Art, Poetry, Ṣūfism and History of Iranian Studies in Europe, ed. Asghar Seyed Gohrab & Hans de Bruijn. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020.
Katherine Pratt Ewing. Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. See pp. 236-7 for the quotation cited above.
Muḥammad Riżā Shafī‘ī Kadkanī. Qalandariyya dar tārīkh: digardīsī-yi yak īdi’ūlūzhī. Fourth edition. Tihrān: Intishārāt-i Sukhan, 1387 [2008-9].
Tahsin Yazici. “Ḳalandariyya.” In P. Bearman (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition Online (EI-2 English). Brill, 2012
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