The Shaykhs of Jam: A Case Study on Hereditary Power and Identity in the Era of Sufi Orders

In recent years, scholars have been challenging and deconstructing many of the dominant narratives of Sufism, such as the pioneering yet dated outline of Sufi history as constructed by Spencer Trimingham. My presentation, a case study in the Shaykhs of Jam, the hereditary descendants of the Khurasani Sufi Shaykh Ahmad-i Jam (d. c. 1139), supports and contributes to this trend. Utilizing a number of under-utilized sources, including a more complete manuscript of one of the most important hagiographies devoted to the family, I argue that the Shaykhs of Jam were never an “Order” or tariqa as some have argued. Rather, the family represents both the power and allure of the tariqat as well as the fact that tariqat were never the only face of Sufism. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, amidst the rise of several of these tariqat as well as the geo-political changes that rocked Iran and Central Asia in the early sixteenth century, a number of members of the family became affiliated with established tariqat, notably the Naqshbandiyya and Kubraviyya tariqat. Yet at the same time, the Shaykhs of Jam retained their allure as a family of prominent local notables, their power independent of the tariqat, owing instead to the hagiographic memory of their charismatic Sufi ancestor. By exploring how and why certain family members became involved in other groups and how the family and its supporters continued to assert its own separate identity, we can arrive at a better understanding of what Sufi Orders represented as well as what constituted Sufi Islam in the greater Persianate world in the Late Middle and Early Modern periods.