Across the Indian subcontinent, Sufi shrines serve as gathering spaces for a diverse set of communities: pilgrims, religious disciples dancing and praying, and tourists interested in the rich historical stories and the striking aesthetics of these sacred locales. This lecture explores Sufi shrines and funerary sites in South Asia and the processes by which these landscapes are reimagined and remade over time.

Fatima Quraishi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, at the University of California, Riverside. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of devotional practices with material culture in Islamic South Asia. She was the lead curator of the exhibition, Paradise on Earth: Manuscripts, Miniatures, and Mendicants from Kashmir at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi in 2017. Her most recent publications are an entry on Multan Art and Architecture in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2021) and a chapter entitled, "This is Makkah for Me! Devotion in Architecture at the Makli Necropolis,” in Saintly Spheres & Islamic Landscapes: Emplacements of Spiritual Power across Time and Place (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

Please join us at 9:30 am for coffee, music, and a guided Sufi breathing meditation before the lecture begins at 10 am.