Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus by Waleed Ziad

2022, Winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award, the most prestigious award in “Middle East Studies through the Middle East Studies Association”
2023, Winner of the AIPS (American Institute of Pakistan Studies) Book Prize
2023, Shortlisted for British Association for South Asian Studies Book Prize
2022, Shortlisted for Bloomsbury Pakistan Book Prize

In a pathbreaking book, Waleed Ziad tells the story of Central and South Asia through the lens of transnational Sufi networks from the 18th century onwards, offering a vital new perspective on a region long understood only through European imperial histories. Having conducted fieldwork across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, in 140 towns and villages, often living with religious communities in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas, Ziad shows how Asia was knit together by networks of Sufis centered in the region’s chief cities, notably Peshawar and Bukhara. These Sufis, known as the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidis, fused Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indian literary traditions, mystical virtuosity, popular religious practices, and urban scholasticism in a unified yet flexible expression of Islam. They brought cohesion to diverse Muslim communities from Punjab to the Central Asian steppes and Siberia. Always misrepresented by colonial actors, these Sufis were the major force of military, social, and ideological resistance against the British and Soviet invasions through the 19th and 20^th centuries and their influence is still felt today across the Muslim world.