William E. B. Sherman
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
UNC-Charlotte
Articles and Reviews
Please e-mail me if you do not have access to the links below,
and I'd be happy to share PDFs of my work.
“Cheap Perfume?: Pseudo-ʿAttars at Margins and Centers of Persian Literature.” Accepted for a peer-reviewed special edition of Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists: ‘From the Margins, From Below: Theoretical and Analytical Interventions in Premodern Middle Eastern Studies.’
The Good Lord bestows this chalice
to those who give their heads.
Only the decapitated can sip its secrets!
Co-written with Ahoo Najafian, this article examines the shifting fortunes of the Pand-nāmah, once the most widely read work attributed to the twelfth-century Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, in order to challenge prevailing notions of literary center and margin in the study of Islamic literature. While today ʿAṭṭār is mainly celebrated as the author of The Conference of the Birds, a mystical allegory of a spiritual quest, the early modern Islamicate world had a different ʿAṭṭār in mind. As late as 1725, it was not the soaring tale of birds in search of their king that defined ʿAṭṭār’s literary presence, but rather the Pand-nāmah, a didactic text of moral instruction. Modern scholars have largely dismissed the Pand-nāmah due to its disputed authorship, viewing it as the work of a so-called pseudo-ʿAṭṭār and thus unworthy of sustained attention. Yet this article shifts the focus away from questions of authenticity to ask: who (or what) was “ʿAṭṭār” to a reader in 1725? What does the difference between their ʿAṭṭār and ours reveal about evolving understandings of authorship, authority, and tradition? And finally, how might the rise and fall of the Pand-nāmah help us make sense of the wandering centers and margins in the Islamic world?
“History and Apocalypse through Afghanistan.” A response to a forum on Singing with the Mountains in Afghanistan 7.2 (October 2024): 162-168. DOI: 10.3366/afg.2024.0135.
Out of the incredible intellectual generosity of some friends and colleagues, a forum was published in the journal Afghanistan about my Singing with the Mountains book. The essays by Tanvir Ahmed, Ali Mian, Ahoo Najafian, and Francesca Chubb-Confer are undoubtedly more interesting than my "History and Apocalypse" response, but you can find them all via the button below. I riff on Bruno Latour and Bayazid Ansari to ask what an apocalyptic history might look like rather than a history of apocalypse.
"Finding the Qur’an in Imitation: Critical Mimesis from Musaylima to Finnegans Wake" in ReOrient 9, no. 1 (2024): 50–69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48810913.
Certain formulations of Islamic theology place considerable weight on the doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān: the miraculous impossibility of imitating the Qur’an. The prevalence of iʿjāz al-Qur’ān doctrines, however, has not prevented many Muslims and non-Muslims from interpreting iʿjāz al-Qur’ān less as a concluded statement of mimetic impossibility and more as a dare to engage the Qur’an in ways that elude conventional academic habits of classifying the Qur’anic sciences. In short, there are dozens of Qur’anic imitations throughout Islamic history, and this article argues that they are not mere provocations but variously represent efforts to participate in the revelation of God, to embody the Qur’an while annihilating the self, and to re-open the messianic moment of God’s direct, linguistic communication with humankind. As a conclusion, this article follows the lead of examples of Qur’anic imitation to develop a literary hermeneutic of the Qur’an in which we can read the Qur’an into various literary texts and linguistic philosophies.
"Hailing and Hallowing: Persian Hagiographies, Interpellation, and Learning How to Read" Religions 14, no. 12 (2023):1534. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14121534
This essay discusses the pedagogical value of hagiology by examining how medieval Persian hagiographies can be used to explore the concept of “interpellation”: the process by which individuals are constituted as subjects in particular ideological systems. This essay uses an analysis of Rumi’s anecdote, “Moses and the Shepherd”, to demonstrate how hagiological approaches are valuable not just in understanding how a saint is constructed in a particular historical and cultural context but also how an audience is constructed and interpellated. The essay then introduces a pedagogical exercise that connects an analysis of Islamic hagiographies with an exploration of how students are interpellated with modern subjectivities in our contemporary ideological systems.
“In the Name of the Name of God: Key Rhetorical Gestures of Qur’anic Imitation.” In: The Qur’an: Literary Dimensions, edited by Shawkat Toorawa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2026.
If we only knew the Qur’an by its imitators, what would we know? I do not pose this question as a matter of historical method, as if this chapter were attempting to reconstruct an absent source text for a later literature. Quite to the contrary: if anything, it is the very abundance of the Qur’an in our historical record that has limited the breadth of contemporary scholarly understandings of what the Qur’an is and has been, how the Qur’an has been approached as a model of divine language, how the mushaf or ʿUthmanic recension may not coincide with and exhaust the potential of ongoing, linguistic revelation as imagined, pursued, and practiced over time. This chapter focuses upon three works – the fifteenth-century Kalam al-Mahdi of Muhammad ibn Falah, the seventh-century fragments of Musaylima, and, to a lesser extent, Ayat Jim by the contemporary poet Hasan Tilib – to consider three stylistic features in Qur’anic imitation: a focus on names and
naming, the use of oaths, and the ‘address’ or ‘call’ from God to the believers.
“Romance on the Afghan Frontier: Desire in the Literature of the Church Missionary Society in Peshawar.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. Published online: 10 August 2021: 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2021.1950325.
In the 1880s, a missionary in Peshawar by the name of Thomas Patrick Hughes wrote a pseudonymous romance novel about an Afghan woman and a British soldier. What does this novel tell us about the Anglican mission in Peshawar? And how can literature serve as a model for our approach to the massive collection of letters, documents, and reports generated by the missionaries of British India?
“In the Garden of Language: Religion, Vernacularization, and the Pashto Poetry of Arzani in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Afghanistan 5.1 (April 2022): 122-147. DOI: 10.3366/afg.2022.0086.
This article presents translations and analyses of some of the earliest known Pashto literature: the poems of a figure known as Mullā Arzani. The Pashto ghazals of Arzani reflect a Sufi and messianic religio-cultural milieu in which Pashto is understood to be a divine language. As this article contends, an exploration of Arzani's poetry and Arzani's understanding of his own language use provides a strong challenge to the overly deterministic role that notions of “Pashtun identity” have played in Euro-American understandings of Pashto literature. Arzani's use of Pashto aimed not to express Pashtun ethnic identity nor to provide Pashto poems for Pashtun audiences. Rather, Arzani's ghazals position Pashto as an elite language that accords with the messianic and mystical logics of early modern Persianate cultures.
The image is a folio from the Divan-i Arzani held at the British Library.
"Apocalypse, Again: Language, Temporality, and Repetition in an Afghan Apocalypse" CrossCurrents vol. 68, no. 2 (June 2018): 260-282.
Can language bend our sense of time? This article explores the connections between temporality and rhetoric in the literature of the Roshaniyya.
1899 Photo of Gilgit Valley by Algernon Durand , available via the British Library
"The Lost Tribes of the Afghans: Religious Mobility and Entanglement in Narratives of Afghan Origins.” In American and Muslims Worlds before 1900, edited by John Ghazvinian and A. Mitchell Fraas. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
How has the story of Afghan descent from King Saul been told and retold by Afghan princes, British Christian missionaries, and Ahmadi reformers? This chapter tracks genealogies of the Afghans across religious debates from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
Image of an American apocalyptic diagram featuring an image of an "Afghaun." This image is found in Timothy Marr's The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism.
Reviews and Review Essays
"Finding Fīlmfārsī: Reevaluations of Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 23: Iss. 2 , Article 12.
(A review of Pedram Partovi's Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, and Golbar Rekabtalaei's Iranian Cosmopolitanism.)
"Race, Religion, and Reinscription: The Paradoxes and Potentials of the Study of Islam in America," Mashriq & Mahjar, Vol. 5 No. 2 (2018). (A review of Erik Love's Islamophobia and Racism in America, John O'Brien's Keeping it Halal, and Su'ad Abdul Khabeer's Muslim Cool).
Review of Claudia Yaghoobi's Subjectivity in 'Attar, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism for the AAR's Reading Religion forum.
Review of Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution in Marginalia, online edition, March 2018.
Review of Jamel A. Velji, An Apocalyptic History of the Early Fatimid Empire (Edinburgh University Press 2016) in Religion, vol. 48 #2, 2018, pp. 307-310.
Review of Francis R. Bradley, Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Da’ud bin ‘Abd Allah al-Fatani in Mecca and Southeast Asia (University of Hawai’i Press 2016) in Religion, vol. 47 #2, 2017, pp. 301-304.