Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia

Polymaths of Islam **analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth.** James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understanding of the world of Islamic scholarship unlocks a different way of thinking about transregional exchange networks. Pickett reveals a Persian-language cultural sphere that transcended state boundaries and integrated a spectacularly vibrant Eurasia that is invisible from published sources alone. Through a high cultural complex that he terms the “Persian cosmopolis” or “Persianate sphere,” Pickett argues that an intersection of diverse disciplines shaped geographical trajectories across and between political states. In *Polymaths of Islam* he paints a comprehensive, colorful, and often contradictory portrait of mosque and state in the age of empire.