Essay: Historical Imagination

“Historical Imagination: Voicing Silences in Early Sufi Texts through Narrative”

When I started my life as an academic in the study of Sufism, I believed in “objective scholarship” as if it were a pure being that lived in an ivory tower away from the world. I gave my best historical takes on the material before me whether or not the analysis supported my Muslim faith, my Sufi path, and my experiences as a woman, and without a care for its effects beyond the scope of the field and my promotion file. When I diverged from that narrow path, I said so. It was only as I was working on gender in Sufism that I understood my academic writing arose out of my position in the world and objectivity was a fairy tale. I admitted I was telling stories about the past—however critically analyzed—and my writing had an impact beyond my professional life. Muslims, especially Muslim women, were reading my work on early pious, mystic, and Sufi women. It mattered to them and sometimes it disturbed them. I realized I was little different from the transmitters, editors, and authors of the works I studied. All of us were weaving narratives that might serve as credible resources of thought for our audiences. I just never grasped the breadth of my audience and, to the degree I was able, I needed to take responsibility for the impact of my work on the communities around me. I began to engage with non-academic readers and translate my findings in conversation with them. When I left the academy and turned to writing fiction, the responsibility to critically examine what I wanted to do with history in my stories was even more plain. I write detective novels set in the early 4th/10th-century Sufi communities in Baghdad that not only ask “whodunit,” but also how Muslim tradition arises from the social worlds and intentions of its authors, depicts the impact of the authors’ work then, and, by analogy, now, and considers the nature of historical writing in and out of the academy.

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Image is taken from: “Adji Baifall Minaret,”
Maïmouna Guerresi, 2006.