Along the Shiite Lines of Sufi Authority: Revisiting Solṭānᶜalīshāh and the Valāyat-nāme

The oeuvre of the philosopher Leo Strauss (d.1973) pivots on the audacious thesis that political esoterism – the protective covering of truth through an exoteric shell – has been central to Islamic intellectual life. Strauss’s work focusses on philosophy, but this article argues that it can be productively extended – while not applied integrally - to Sufism, Islam’s similarly contested, primary esoteric tradition. It investigates the Straussian thesis in a Sufi discussion on valāyat, ‘spiritual authority’ or ‘Friendship with God,’ which idea is central both to Shiite Sufism and Shiism generally. The discussion concerns the Valāyat-nāme, an Iranian treatise of the early twentieth century by the Neᶜmatollāhī master Solṭānᶜalīshāh (d.1909), revealing the dilemmas that Shiite Sufis have faced in simultaneously retaining identity and acceptance to the juristically dominated canon. Four sub-topics are elaborated to assess the validity of Straussian analysis in rendering the treatise and its author: persecution as a context for esoterism; esoterism as a veil for dangerous knowledge; the drive for epistemic subordination; and the political nature of religious knowledge. It is proposed that rather than as ‘between the lines’ dissimulation, as per Strauss, the Neᶜmatollāhīs’ political esoterism ought to be read more subtly as accommodation ‘along the lines’ of Shiite orthodoxy.