About

Ali Karjoo-Ravary is an Assistant Professor of Islamic History in the Department of History at Columbia University. He works on the intellectual, social, and material history of Islam using Arabic, Persian, and Turkic language sources. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and is currently engaged in a book project titled 'The Alchemy of Kingship: Politics and Cosmology in Medieval Islam.' His research explores various aspects of Islamic history, including visual representation and iconography in medieval Sufism, the interplay between Sufism and economic history, science fiction and religion, and the relationship between architecture, print culture, and intellectual history within the Muslim world. Karjoo-Ravary’s scholarly work has been featured in both academic and popular venues, including Slate, AlJazeera English, BBC, and CBC. He is also involved in digital humanities projects, notably 'Mapping the Unseen,' which examines Ibn al-ʿArabī’s cosmographical diagrams in digital media.

Research topics

• Art
• Philosophy
• History
• Literature
• Computer Science
• Psychotherapist
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Linguistics
• Archaeology
• Art history
• Epistemology
• Theology

Selected publications

• Imaging the Cosmos: Adapting Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Cosmographical Diagrams to Digital Media

  Journal of digital Islamicate research. · 2025-08-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article spotlights an animated digital rendering of medieval illustrations of the cosmos by the Sufi scholar Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). It briefly explains the series of illustrations, the difficulties of their transmission history, and why they are well-suited for digital adaptation. It focuses on how the medieval author couched his images in an acknowledgment of the limits of his medium, remarking that he wished he could make it more clear. It then shows how an animated website offers new dimensions for reimagining the images while remaining faithful to the original intent of the author. It encourages further creative engagements with the visual traditions of the Islamicate world in order to furnish new perspectives on its past and present.

  PublisherDOI

• Illustrating the Forms: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) Images in al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya

  2022-12-23

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mirrors in the Dream of the Alone: A Glimpse at the Poetry of Bīdil

  BRILL eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adorning the King of Islam: Weaving and Unraveling History in Astarabadi’s Feasting and Fighting

  MAVCOR Journal · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • History
  • Archaeology

  I've adorned a garden of delight from which friends can pick flowers whose fresh blossoms, with every breath, perfume the lovers' senses.Neither freeze nor hail will cause it to wilt; nor the winds of autumn bring its leaves to fall.With this poem, the fourteenth-century historiographer ʿAzīz ibn Ardashīr al-Astarābādī concluded a nearly eight-hundred-page history of his patron's reign. 1 While the literary adornment of such a text has a measure of timelessness, its visual adornment and illumination, including the painted rosettes surrounding the poem above, are the first things lost and changed in its copying.The visual and material features of a book, even when seemingly arbitrary, play an important role in how its text is approached and experienced.While faithfulness to an original is typically important in the transmission of a book's text, the choices that shape its appearance are where the contextual specificity of the act of transmission is most palpable.These choices, despite their material constraints, always suggest a particular framing that refigures and repurposes a text so that it performs a new meaning for a new audience.In what follows, this article traces Astarabadi's text, Bazm wa Razm (Feasting and Fighting), from fourteenth-century Anatolia through its various Ottoman-era recensions down to the modern period, examining how each era visually refigures this textual manifestation of his patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad (r.783-800 AH/1381-1398 CE), for a new purpose.Starting from its first instantiation as a "garment" for a living "shadow of God" in the illuminated manuscript that was produced while he was still alive, the choices that undergird its visuality are intimately tied to the Sufi-inspired ideal of Islamic monarchy imbued in its text.As a book that embodies the presence of a living "king of Islam," it was made to be seen, heard, and experienced in court so as to convince others that Burhan al-Din was a locus for the manifestation of the entirety of God's attributes, the equilibrium in which all opposites are gathered.This latent power is clear in the afterlife of the manuscript: after its patron's death, it remained in elite hands but was not circulated despite its influence on Timurid and later Ottoman historiography.Much later, from the seventeenth century onward, recensions of the text transcribed for Ottoman elites, based on a manuscript tradition that I argue is rooted in Astarabadi's draft, reveal how routine visual and material changes cancel the power of that initial performance, thereby reframing a once-powerful figure into a contemplative lesson on time, power, and bygone generations.Lastly, seemingly arbitrary visual choices made in two editions of the text printed in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries embed and encapsulate the worldview of nation-states, casting Burhan al-Din as a step in the progress of either Turkish or Iranian-Islamic nationalism.With every twist of this story, the visuality of the book and the choices that produce it frame how it is seen, read, recited, and approached, distilling for its audiences the norms and expectations of Islamic power, past and present. Burhan al-Din's Life and ContextBurhan al-Din, remembered in Turkey today as Kadı Burhaneddin, has long been considered a minor king.He ruled for almost eighteen years over a part of eastern Anatolia during the political fragmentation of the post-Mongol age. 2 From Astarabadi's history we learn that he was born in 745/1345 to a line of judges in Kayseri and that he received a standard scholar's education in Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz during his youth.After returning to Anatolia and serving as a judge for some years, he became, in 780/1378, chief minster to the last Eretnid sovereign, ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad (d.782/1380), whose dynasty ruled eastern Anatolia after the breakup of the Ilkhanate in the early fourteenth century. 3Upon the latter's death, Burhan al-Din maneuvered against several rivals and ultimately took the throne in 782/1381.During his rule, Burhan al-Din faced multiple insurrections from urban and nomadic elites, and he likely commissioned this chronicle in an attempt to refashion his image for the former group at his court in Sivas.Yet soon after its completion, in the summer of 800/1398, he died at the hands of a former vassal, ʿUthmān of the White Sheep (Āq Qūyūnlū) Turkmen.His capital, Sivas, was destroyed by Timur four years later.Burhan al-Din is exceptional as one of the first kings who verifiably studied and directly engaged with the work of the Sufi theoretician Muḥyī al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn al-ʿArabī (d.638/1240).According to Astarabadi's narrative, sometime during 791-792/1389-1390, likely in response to his legitimacy problem, Burhan al-Din sent a gift of two precious carpets to the shrine of Ibn al-ʿArabi's son-in-law, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d.673/1274), in Konya.The caretakers of the shrine, in turn, sent a copy of one of Ibn al-ʿArabi's main works, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (Ringstones of Wisdom), written in Sadr al-Din's hand, to Burhan al-Din. 4While they sent it with the intention of Burhan al-Din deriving blessing (baraka) from simply seeing Sadr al-Din's handwriting, Burhan al-Din not only studied it, but "sincerely sought to acquire and master this craft." 5This mastery is corroborated by other sources, such as a series of letters preserved by his companion and teacher, Yār ʿAlī Shīrāzī (d.814/1411), which show his deep engagement with Ibn al-ʿArabi's metaphysics and cosmology. 6Yar ʿAli himself was an important Sufi theoretician of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, embedded in larger networks that spanned from Anatolia to other centers of Islamic power. 7 He was also a key member of Burhan al-Din's retinue and served as his ambassador multiple times, including when the aforementioned carpets were sent to Konya.In these letters, Burhan al-Din capably debates the finer points of Ibn al-ʿArabi's thought with Yar-ʿAli, displaying a knowledge of its main texts and themes as developed after Ibn al-ʿArabi's death.This move to master Ibn al-ʿArabi's work coincided with a period of military and diplomatic confrontation with the Ottoman Bayezid I (r.791-805/1389-1403) and Timur (r.771-801/1370-1405), as well as a larger turn toward literary production from 796/1393 to his death in 800/1398.This turn culminated in Burhan al-Din's own authorship of three works, including an Arabic treatise wherein he demonstrates his

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mapping the Unseen: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Maps in Chapter 371 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya

  Journal of Sufi Studies · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Philosophy
  • Literature

  Abstract This paper examines a series of sequential cosmological and eschatological maps drawn by Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) in his second recension of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi 1845+). These images, drawn from the visual language of the rational sciences, map the images of revelation into the cosmology of the day so as to show the vastness of God’s cosmos and the limits of the intellect. Ibn al-ʿArabī, aware of the limits of his medium, explicitly states that these should be a “single composition.” He uses visual cues to mark shifts of perspective, helping the reader visualize the interconnections that bind together this multidimensional representation of the cosmos. By considering their placement and their relation to the narrative, I also argue that the final two maps are a representation of two eyes, identifying the cosmos and the reader as reflections of God, a contemplative use that is lost in their transmission history.

  PublisherDOI

• From the Remainder of Adam’s Clay

  Journal of Sufi Studies · 2021-12-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article presents an introduction to and a complete English translation of the eighth chapter of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) magnum opus al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya . The chapter, entitled, “On the earth that was made from the remainder of Adam’s leaven clay, which is the Earth of Reality, and on some of the strange and wondrous things contained therein,” contains a description of a world wholly separate from our own. An underlying argument in this chapter is that the human intellect, constrained as it is by the categories of possibilities which pertain to our earthly configuration, is incapable of grasping the vast expanse of this “Earth of Reality.” Ibn al-ʿArabī also aims to show how many of the Qur’anic and Prophetic traditions which the intellect struggles to comprehend exist in this other world without any contradiction. In this sense, the chapter in question seeks to inculcate a sense of wonder and bewilderment in readers, reminding them that there will always be worlds, beyond our immediate sensory world, that remain to be seen and known.

  PublisherDOI

• Becoming A King Of Islam: The Imperial Project Of Qadi Burhan Al-Din Of Sivas (1345-1398 Ce)

  ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2018-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This dissertation analyzes the conjunction of Islamic (especially Sufi) cosmology, metaphysics, political ideology, aesthetic production, and religious law in the life of of Burhan al-Din of Sivas (1345-1398), a Sufi, scholar, poet, and warrior king in late medieval Anatolia. I argue that Burhan al-Din intended for the production and circulation of specific texts in order to establish himself as a “King of Islam,” a king who succeeds Muhammad by embodying the opposite but complementary attributes of beauty and majesty through feasting and fighting (bazm va razm). By uncovering the framework of his religious and imperial project, I show how he and his court used complex processes to articulate their power in multiple languages and ideological frameworks. Despite their diverse means of expression, these processes were considered thoroughly Islamic. Through a close study of the Persian, Arabic, and Turkish sources produced at his court, I engage with intellectual and material histories in order to recover his legitimizing and image-building exercises, arguing that these practices were already widespread earlier than is commonly accepted by scholars of Islamic thought and history. The dissertation is split into two parts. The first half of the dissertation presents a history of Burhan al-Din’s life as presented in Astarabadi’s Bazm va Razm. Chapter 1 examines his childhood, youth, and road to power, and Chapter 2 investigates his actions as a scholar-king. The second half of the dissertation is concerned with the ideological underpinnings of Burhan al-Din’s kingship and the material production of the court. Chapter 3 demonstrates how kingship was viewed as directly linked to Muhammad. Chapter 4 delves into the balancing act of feasting and fighting in establishing legitimate rule. By developing a framework for the role of Islam in premodern Persianate and Turkic monarchy, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on Islamic political thought by highlighting the discursive and dynamic nature of Islam’s political history.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Shannab Enjamin

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  1 shared

• Yossef Rapoport

  1 shared

• Yan Rittenberg

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  1 shared

• Nicholas Harris

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  1 shared

• Abū Al-Ḥājj

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  1 shared

• Jeffery Arsenault

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  1 shared

• Raha Rafii

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  1 shared

• Tilman Neuschild

  Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Religious Studies

  University of Pennsylvania

  2018

• M.A., Religious Studies

  University of Pennsylvania

  2017

• B.A., Religious Studies and Philosophy

  Stony Brook University

  2011

Awards & honors

• Bard Graduate Center, Visiting Fellow, Fall 2020
• Wolf Humanities Center, Graduate Research Fellow, 2016-2017