A Dictionary of Saints, and What Compiling One Does

The Nafahat al-Uns is a biographical dictionary of Sufis, running to several hundred lives, built on an earlier collection in the Herat dialect associated with Abdallah Ansari and greatly extended. Works of this kind look like reference and function like doctrine. Deciding who receives an entry, whose teaching is quoted approvingly, which chains of transmission are traced and which are passed over, is a way of settling what the tradition consists of, and later hagiography in Persian, Turkish and Indian languages leaned on this book heavily enough that its judgements became the received ones.

Jami wrote it from a particular position. He was attached to the Naqshbandi order, in the circle of Ubaydallah Ahrar, whose influence at the Timurid court in Herat was considerable, and Herat in his lifetime was one of the richest centres of Persian letters, painting and manuscript production anywhere. The order he belonged to practised silent recollection rather than vocal, kept its members in ordinary occupations rather than in retreat, and took an active interest in political affairs, and a canon of saints assembled from inside that outlook naturally reflects it. The atlas notes the position rather than treating the book as a neutral register.