The Extraordinary, Enchanted Lives of the Female Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire

You are cordially invited to the upcoming lecture in the Nafi Baba Sufism Talks Series titled "The Extraordinary, Enchanted Lives of the Female Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire" by Waleed Ziad. Please find attached the announcement poster.

The talk is scheduled to take place in Nafi Baba Building 103 on March 7, 2025, at 16:00. Additionally, the lecture will be live-streamed via the following link: bit.ly/SufismTalks

Abstract: At the turn of the 19th century, Bibi Sahiba Kalan (d. 1804), Kabul’s female Sufi master and scholar, was recognized as the most exalted saint of the age. Her network of thousands of disciples spanned the Arabian Sea to Central Asia. She was the spiritual guide of scholars, poets, and nobles, invited to Bukhara by the khan himself. She led a caravan to Mecca, and built colleges and shrines at Kandahar, Yemen, and Sindh. Bibi Sahiba’s progeny defended Afghanistan in the Anglo-Afghan Wars and expanded her spiritual network towards the Thar desert and Rajasthan, appointing at least 15 female saints as their successors - each with Muslim and Hindu disciples in the thousands. These female saints are the subject of Ziad’s forthcoming book The Extraordinary, Enchanted Lives of the Female Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire (Harvard, exp. 2025), based on fieldwork in several dozen locales from the India-Pakistan to Uzbek-Afghan borders. Dr. Ziad’s research indicates that Bibi Sahiba was one of many female religious leaders in Central Asia from the 18th century onwards and provides a radically novel paradigm for conceptualizing female religious authority before colonialism.

Speaker’s biography

Dr. Waleed Ziad is Associate Professor in History at Georgetown University (Qatar campus). Prior to this, he was an Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School. He completed his BA, MA/MPhil, and PhD in History at Yale, where his dissertation won the university-wide Field Prize. In the last decade, Ziad has conducted fieldwork on historical and contemporary religious revivalism and Sufism in over 140 towns across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. He has studied Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi, French, Uzbek / Chaghatai and Romanian.

His books include Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus (Harvard, 2021, winner of the Hourani prize, the most prestigious award in Middle Eastern studies, and the American Institute of Pakistan studies book prize), In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandharan Shrines (American Numismatic Society, 2022), The Extraordinary, Enchanted Lives of the Female Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire (Harvard, exp. 2025), and Beyond the Khutba and Sikka: Sovereignty and Coinage in Sindh (in progress). His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and major dailies internationally.