SUMIDA Tetsuro

Positions, degrees

Research Associate; JSPS Research Fellowship

Research Keywords

Iranian History; mysticism; messianism

Email

t.sumida-1394[at]aa.tufs.ac.jp

Persian mystical-messianic movements

In the Persianate world, “saints” (awliyāʾ) who proclaimed themselves to be the awaited messiah appeared intermittently and sought to establish temporal authority in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. During the same period, dynastic rulers also appropriated these currents, presenting themselves as saintly figures and attempting to incorporate messianic notions into their own kingship. This period may thus be characterized as an age in which saints strove to become rulers and rulers to become saints, drawing on shared intellectual resources such as scriptural tradition, occult sciences, and mysticism.
My research focuses on messianic saints and their doctrinal writings composed in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Arabic, with particular attention to the logical frameworks by which these mystics justified their claims to messianic status and by which their disciples recognized them as such. This, in turn, enables a reconsideration of the nature of authority in the post-Mongol period. In this context, I am also interested in the development and use of occult sciences—such as lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) and dream interpretation (taʾbīr al-ruʾyā)—which constituted important fields of inquiry among the intellectual elites of the time.