Islamabad : Good news for literature buffs! The Asian Study Group has organized an interesting programme in its monthly activity on literature titled, “Beyond the Oxus and the Indus” on January 27, 2024.
Having conducted fieldwork across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, in a hundred and forty towns and villages, often living with religious communities in the Afghan/Pakistan border areas, Waleed Ziad - the winner of many prestigious awards - in his path breaking book, 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.
Fusing social history, religious studies and anthropology to offer a new vision of Islamic sovereignty, where a Hidden Caliphate of Sufis provided order in times of political upheaval and fragmentation, Ziad shows how Asia was knit together by networks of Sufis centred in Pakistan and Afghanistan’s chief cities like Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan and Bukhara as pivot points of Eurasia, where a host of knowledge systems, spiritual and scholastic networks and nationalities blended.