Christian Blake Pye

Christian Blake Pye (PhD, Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin) studies how Islamic Neoplatonism provided a framework for both universal empire and policies of religious tolerance. His forthcoming monograph The Caliphate of Tahqiq: Ibn ‘Arabi, Islamic Empires, and the Problem of Religious Difference gives the history of how the Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi’s (d. 1240) epistemology of tahqiq or “realization” disrupted scriptural authority, helped give rise to Islamic sacred kingship, and prepared the way for the policy of “Total Peace” between religions in the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) of South Asia. His work on tahqiq’s role in the Mughals’ official 1587 Persian translation of the Mahabharata has been published in the journal Modern Asian Studies. Forthcoming articles show how advocates of tahqiq in the eastern Islamic world promoted the veneration of celestial bodies as elite paths to sacred authority and divinized the office of caliphate.