Shahzad Bashir is professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and author of Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam (2003), Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (2005), and Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (2011). His current major project, for which he has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, is entitled Persianate Pasts: Memory, Narration, and Ideology in the Islamic East, 1400-1600.