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A Life Scholarship Reads as Composite

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A Life Scholarship Reads as Composite

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Unlike many founding figures whose lives scholarship treats as ordinary biography with some legendary accretion, Sultan Sahak's surviving record is read by scholarship as a composite of historical memory and theological narrative from the start, a reading this atlas records under a historicity of composite rather than attested.

That distinction matters because Yarsani tradition itself does not draw a sharp line between the historical figure and the cosmological one: Sultan Sahak is remembered simultaneously as a teacher at a specific place, Perdiwar, in a period scholarship places provisionally in the fifteenth century CE, and as a manifestation of the Divine Essence numbered among the Haftan. The tradition's own account does not separate these two registers, so scholarship's composite reading is consistent with, rather than opposed to, how Yarsanism understands him.

The practical consequence is that the Perdiwari kalams, the oldest layer of the Kalam-e Saranjam associated with his circle, are approached as devotional and theological literature first, with historical detail about Sultan Sahak's own life recoverable only through what that literature and later tradition preserve about him, rather than through independent biographical sources of the kind available for many other religious founders.

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Sources
The Religious Textual Heritage of the Yarsan (Ahl-e Haqq)
Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Oral Tradition, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 331-340, 2022View the Source
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