Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams

Tazim R. Kassam's Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance, Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams, published by the State University of New York Press in 1995 in the McGill Studies in the History of Religions series, is a scholarly critical translation and study of an anthology of ginans, devotional hymns attributed to the thirteenth century Satpanth Ismaili saint Pir Shams, with an extended scholarly introduction to the wider ginan tradition. Its strength is that it is a peer reviewed critical translation grounded in the Ismaili Khoja community's own devotional corpus, treating a body of vernacular scripture that receives comparatively little scholarly attention outside specialist circles. Its limit is that authorship attribution within the ginan tradition is itself often uncertain, with hymns attributed to Pir Shams across a long oral and manuscript transmission, a limit Kassam's own introduction addresses directly rather than glossing over.